I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Morning. Is it okay? No, it's okay. Yeah, I want to make sure it's recording. Okay. Okay. Well, sometimes when I give a talk I'll say something like, religion is a necessary evil. And that can be upsetting to people. But I have to explain a little bit what I mean when I say that. It doesn't mean that religion is necessarily evil. But it means that it's as evil as it is good, because people are as evil as they are good, and religion is nothing but people.

[01:10]

Religious practice is the practice of people, and reflects all of our wisdom, it reflects all of our ignorance, It reflects all of our good qualities and it reflects all of our bad qualities. So, although religion has stabilized the world and created civilization in many ways, it's also destabilized the world and ruined civilizations in many ways. And sometimes when I say that, people say, well, is it really necessary to have religion? And I say, yes, it's absolutely necessary to have religion, otherwise it wouldn't be here. Religion is like our need to

[02:15]

find our place, our need to find our place in the world, in the universe. There's no direction in the universe. If you were to parachute into the deep mountains in a place you've never been to before, far away from any civilization, where would you go? There's no path. You have to find your way. So, over every group of people creates a kind of religious practice, which is to find their way, to find their place in the universe. There's a koan about hanging a nail in empty space. We are an empty space.

[03:19]

But we hang a nail, and we say, that's a focal point. And then we relate everything to that focal point. We relate our lives and our direction to that focal point. So, human beings create various kinds of gods in order to relate to the various powers in themselves and in the world. So, although religion creates a lot of answers, it also creates a lot of problems. And one of the problems with religion, as I see it, is holding on to old beliefs, which are superstitions.

[04:38]

The founder of a religion usually is not the founder. The founder of a religion is usually just a person. who has found a way, and then the followers create the religion. Dogen did not create the Soto school in Japan. He simply practiced his way with bringing the Soto lineage, and his later generations created the Soto school, but we attribute that to Dogen. Buddha did not create Buddhism. Jesus did not create Christianity. So when we say, these are the Buddha's words, well, yes, they're the Buddha's words, but they're not the Buddha's words. But if they are the Buddha's words, which Buddha's words are they?

[05:43]

When the Buddhists were practicing and speaking, they only had oral traditions at the time. Nothing was written down. None of the sutras were written down until three or four hundred years later. But the traditions were all carried on. by memory. And memory is good, but memory is also faulty and inexact. Although, in those days, memorizing was an educational tool. And people really spend a lot of time memorizing. I mean, people would memorize the whole, everything that could be memorized. And they could just recite it. You still do that to this day in certain places.

[06:50]

But at the same time, the religion builds up around what we think Buddha said. And as the sutras become more expanded, it becomes more of what other Buddhas think Buddha said, which is not necessarily wrong, but it's not necessarily right either. So when the sutras came into China from India, the Chinese thought all these sutras are very sacred because they're Buddha's words. They're all the words of Buddha. But then more and more sutras started coming into China. And some of them were contradicting each other. and presenting things in a different way and having a different voice and so forth.

[07:59]

And then pretty soon there were sutras that were coming out of China that had never really been to India or that had not come from India. So Who wrote the sutras? How does that happen? And what do we really believe and believe in? This is, the reason for Zen practice is one of the reasons that Zen arose was the realization that you can't rely on the word.

[09:06]

You have to rely on your own understanding, your own experience, your own deep penetration into reality. The sutras are an aid and they are a stimulation, and they focus your mind on the Dharma. They're very valuable. But even Buddha said, the Dharma, the practice of the Dharma itself is your teacher. And even if I say something, you should investigate it for your own understanding and not just rely on what I said. So faith, we say, what do we have faith in? One time I was talking to someone who was talking about the Koran.

[10:16]

And there was a woman being stoned. You know, the way they stone an adulteress in the Middle East sometimes is they bury you up to your neck in the sand and then they throw stones at your head. And they do that. I mean, it's common. As a matter of fact, it's happening right now. There are big protests against it at the moment, but they're still doing it. And this person said, But it's written in the Quran that that's the correct way to deal with it. I said, the Quran is wrong. Wrong? How can it be wrong? Because it's the word. Is it maybe the word of Allah? I don't think so. This is one of the problems with religion is that if you have a system of belief that everything in your holy book is right, then you easily make the mistake of creating big problems

[11:42]

out of ignorance. This is one of the big mistakes of religion, and this is what keeps people fighting each other forever, and there can never be any reconciliation, because it's fueled by these mistaken views. Basically, I think most world religions anyway, those are religions which are not tribal, but have transcended the tribalism and become universal, basically are for peaceful solutions. and are reasonable, but they become perverted and used for our own ends.

[12:52]

Religion and state, you know, when state and religion are totally interfused, then the state can use the religion as a tool for its own purposes. And then religion becomes totally corrupt. This happens in all the religions. Happens in Islam, happens in Christianity, happens in Buddhism. So how to keep it pure and clean and correct is something that has to be always, we have to be always aware of. When, you know, Buddhism has migrated from one country to another, from India to China to Tibet to Southeast Asia to Japan and to some of the islands in the Pacific.

[14:03]

And it takes hold and it flowers and then becomes corrupt and then becomes a kind of shell of what it was. And then the essence moves on to someplace else. Now it's come to America. And we have the responsibility to keep it pure, not let it get corrupt. But even in its early stages, it gets corrupt. And I think the major religions have many things in common, but they don't always meet, there's a place where they don't all meet.

[15:21]

And that's what makes them each unique. And those places where they meet and agree and overlap, those should be nurtured. Those places should be nurtured so that we can, all those disciplines can relate to each other. and not only relate to each other, but religion is not something that's stuck. I mean, it shouldn't be something, it should be continuously evolving. One of the problems is that religious people, or certain people, often people,

[16:23]

proponents of religion feel that nothing can change because it's the divine word, and the divine word cannot change. It's a big mistake. Everything changes. You know, an ancestor is in our lineage, is someone who makes the teaching available for the generation that they're present in. Because if we only rely on the understanding, the old understanding, it doesn't work. The understanding has to be made clear for today, for so that people can relate to it and realize that a lot of the stuff that gets put into the religious envelope or portfolio is just mistaken views.

[17:45]

You know, the sutras, originally start out as very small teachings, and then over time they expand, and they keep being added to, like the Prajnaparamita Sutra, 600 volumes, not big volumes, but parts. And the scholars used to think that the largest one, this one in 100,000 lines, was the original sutra. But actually, that's the expanded sutra. The original sutra is very small, but people keep adding to it. That's not bad, but a lot of the stuff that gets added to it is not accurate, and it's a lot of superstitious stuff. So, you know, like there's this sutra of, there's this one Buddha sutra that talks about karma and the effects of karma.

[18:56]

If you do this in this life, in the next life, this will happen to you. And it just goes on and on, telling you the retributions, the exact retribution that will happen to you for a certain karmic act in your next life. And it's just outrageous. No one can know anything like that. But it's a kind of folk, it's something to keep the folks in line. Draconian measures to keep the folks in line. And stoning someone to death is a draconian measure to keep the folks in line. Jesus said, the one who is without karma should throw the first stone. This was a practice in Judaism years ago. So that kind of nipped that one in the bud for Christianity and for Judaism. The ancient Jews, during the temple times, used to sacrifice animals.

[20:06]

But, you know, they don't do that anymore. Only the scientists do it now. Yeah, we have animal sacrifice for our health. But we don't see it as that, but we do sacrifice them for that. We don't ask them if they want to do that. I can't say that it's completely wrong, but it's not completely right. There's something difficult about it. So also in Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh brings up the question of life is suffering.

[21:19]

And a lot of Buddhists think that everything in life is suffering, which is a kind of pessimistic idea, and promote that understanding, but actually, Yes, life is subject to suffering, and there is suffering in life, but not everything in life is suffering. And then they bring up the point that even your joyfulness is suffering, because it will end. But Blake says, catch the joy as it flies by. So there has to be reasonableness. But on the other hand, reason is not the ultimate criterion. Reason has its place, but there's something beyond reason that we understand or need to understand.

[22:28]

And superstition also has its place. I think that superstition actually has its place. We say, oh, this is superstitious, and superstition's actually, you know, not a good thing to base your life on. But superstition, in a way, has a kind of intuitive quality about it. And it can be an entrance to your intuition. in a way, does it matter what you believe in? If what you believe in is simply just a doorway to your intuition. Some people believe in God, this God. Some people believe in that God.

[23:30]

Some people believe in chickens. Some people believe in foxes. But You know, each one of those is a kind of doorway to intuition. It's not that you believe in the fox, exactly. It's that that opens, somehow that connection opens a doorway to intuition. You know, in Japan, there's the fox worship, the Inari Kitsune. Inari is the spirits. that are all around, or some kind of spirit world. And the kitsune, or the foxes, are the intermediaries. And this is very big in Japan. More and more I realize that Buddhism is kind of formal and a little bit cold. little bit impersonal and so ritualistic and so forth.

[24:40]

But the fox worship is individual and personal and So a lot of, many, many people, they have these little fox cults, groups, cults, but each person's relationship to the Inari through the fox is a kind of channel for their own personal spiritual connection. So it's a kind of complement to the kind of ritualistic Buddhist culture. It's interesting, kind of animistic. And surprisingly enough, the Soto school and the Inari kind of have a kind of symbiotic relationship.

[25:58]

If you go to a lot of Soto temples in Japan, you find these fox shrines on the temple grounds. I remember going to, in Kyoto, to Sosenji, which is the only Soto temple in Kyoto. All the rest is Rinzai. And there was this wonderful fox shrine. And the foxes, the foxes are beautiful. The way they carved these foxes is just, you just see all the qualities of the fox. and the qualities that are also imbued to the fox from whoever carves them. And when I started getting interested in this, the last time I saw Hoitsu, who is Suzuki Roshi's son, who was at Suzuki Roshi's temple, I said,

[27:09]

started talking to him about the Inari and the kitsune, and he said, oh yeah, we have one of those shrines on our, don't you remember seeing it? It was kind of over there on the corner. People come and they make their offerings of, well, kitsune tofu. Kitsune is a kind of tofu, you know, it's sweet, and of course the foxes don't eat it, you know, not fox food, but they always leave it out for the foxes. It's very traditional to leave it out for the foxes. But I think it's very sweet, you know, it's very sweet. Not the kitsune, not the tofu, but their feeling for that, you know, their kind of sincerity, and there's all kinds of fox stories.

[28:12]

There's a whole culture for years and years of fox stories and how foxes appear as different people and people appear as foxes and stuff like that. So in a way, I think there's something nice about superstition. It's not altogether bad, but it's not altogether good because it can be very misleading and be something to rely on that's not reliable. So basically, what do we rely on that's reliable? Suzuki Roshi said, what we believe in is nothing.

[29:17]

Nothing is the most reliable thing there is to rely on. But nothing is everything. Everything is nothing and nothing is everything. So there's no way to get lost. You know, we have Dharmakaya, Viruchana Buddha, Sambhogakaya, Lochana Buddha, Nirmanakaya, Shakyamuni Buddha. Those are the three Buddhas that are one Buddha. There's an old saying, three persons lying down in one bed. Dharmakaya Buddha is our nature. Dharmakaya Buddha, the nature which supports everything.

[30:23]

Buddha nature, it supports everything. And everything is an aspect of Buddha nature. If we want to know what emptiness is, we just study form. because form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. It's hard to study emptiness as emptiness. It's easier to study form as form because here it is, you know? How do you eat your cereal? How do you walk down the street? Everything is dharmakaya, Buddha nature. Sambhogakaya is the wisdom, Buddha's wisdom. And nirmanakaya is Buddha's body manifested.

[31:26]

We used to say in the meal chant, all the numerous Shakyamuni Buddhas all over the world, meaning bodhisattvas, meaning people who practice, are all Shakyamuni Buddhas. Shakyamuni Buddha appears as all these people who are practicing the Dharma. And Sambhogakaya is in between Dharmakaya and Nirmanakaya. Sambhogakaya is Buddha's wisdom. manifested through sutras, manifested through the practice. So the Lotus Sutra was written by Sambhogakaya, Lochana Buddha.

[32:34]

Lochana Buddha is actually Amida Buddha. the pure land practitioners worship Amida Buddha. And Amida Buddha has in his diadem, his crown, as he's personified, Avalokiteshvara. Avalokiteshvara sits there in the diadem, in the crown. And so this is people, Buddhists, most Buddhists worship Buddha, even though Buddha is not a deity. But they worship something, you know. Buddha gets turned into a kind of deity, actually. But strictly speaking, it's not. But the Dharmakaya represents whatever it is that most people would call God.

[33:41]

And Lochana Buddha is compassionate, and Avalokiteshvara is the compassionate aspect. So, I will locate as well as Kuan Yin in China, and Kanan in Japan. And this is the aspect that most people commonly pray to, is Kuan Yin or Kanan. That's the devotional aspect, or the devotional object in Buddhism. So, you know, in the Heart Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha is asked by Shariputra, who is an arhat, what is the way to course in the Prajnaparamita, perfection of wisdom?

[34:52]

And Shakyamuni asks Avalokiteshvara to explain it to him. And so, the sutra says, kan-ji-zai-bo-satsu. Kan-ji-zai is another name for Avalokiteshvara, or Kuan Yin. Kan-ji-zai-bo-satsu. Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, when practicing Bodhiparamita, perceived that all the five skandhas are empty. So this is Buddha's compassionate response given through Avalokiteshvara to Shariputra to explain it to him. And then people say, well, how come it's not Manjushri who is the personification of wisdom? That's a good question, but. It's Avalokiteshvara who's doing something through compassion.

[35:53]

So Sambhogakaya is wisdom and compassion. It's the active wisdom which is expressed as compassion. So the inspiration Buddha's inspiration is drawn in through whoever it is that writes the sutras, many people, and it's expressed in the sutras based on what people know or think they know. So we have to be able to discern what's really right and what's not so right, and what's expressed well, what's not so expressed well. And then when you begin to put it all together, you see how it all fits, and you get a picture of what's correct.

[36:58]

That's why study is important. Studying the Dharma from various points of view, you begin to see what's correct, what really makes sense. And you get a picture of what, if you study the koans, it's always good to study four different translations. because each translation will be different and give you a different picture. And each one gives you a little bit of the picture that's different from the others. And then you get a sense of what was maybe being expressed. And everything loses something through translation. Sometimes it gains, but mostly it loses. And going through two or three translations in different languages, it comes out being something else often. So, main thing is to sit Zazen. So to let the wisdom come through, that's what it's all about anyway.

[38:01]

I was going to read you something from the Sixth Patriarch's Platform Sutra, but I don't have time. But, you know, the Sixth Patriarch's Platform Sutra is considered a sutra that was the only sutra that's recognized as a sutra from China. A lot of the sutras came from China, but they're not recognized as that. And because the sixth ancestor was considered a Buddha, the Buddha that flowered from Chinese soil as a kind of genius, religious genius. So the Dharma generated from him. So they call the Platform Sutra a sutra. But the Platform Sutra, there's an autobiography, and then there are his answers to questions and so forth.

[39:12]

It's a wonderful sutra to read. Got a lot of wisdom. But you know, the original sutra was very small. and gradually became more and more expanded, people started putting stuff in. And some of the ancestors' students were competing with another teacher, and so a lot of it is about antipathy toward the other teacher and discrediting him and so forth. So there's a lot of junk in the sutra. And you have to be able to winnow out what's important in the sutra and what's junk. But it's a great sutra. But I think we have to do that with most of our stuff. And that way you gain some discernment and you learn how to, it sharpens your discriminating perception.

[40:16]

And it helps in bringing stuff up to date. As the tree gets older, it grows more and more branches which get tangled up with each other and you have to prune. And the tree is not going to survive unless it's pruned. So you have to know how to prune it. You have to be a good pruner to make it thrive. free of all the unnecessary stuff, but maintaining the essence. Do you have a question? I don't have a question, but I heard that Yeah, that's what I said. I thought.

[41:22]

That's what I said. I intimated. That's okay. I appreciate your... Yeah. What translation do you like? I like Wang Mulan's translation, which is the oldest one. And the reason I like it is because he's not criticizing anything. He's presenting it as something that he really enjoys. So he's not holding back something. You think, well, maybe this isn't quite right. He's just putting it out there. And so you just get this feeling that he totally believes everything that's being said there. someone else, well, most scholars always have their doubts. And so you can feel their doubts in the translation.

[42:27]

So it's not as much fun to read. I've been reading a little about early Buddhism development of the teachings, that there was a mood at the time, almost, I mean, Buddha had a kind of drive, a sort of scientific drive, and the notion was that actually this was knowledge. I mean, this was an advancement of knowledge, not, you know, another religious practice, but an actual I mean, it was a kind of an enormous discovery. I mean, in a period when people, you know, were consolidating their wisdom. And it all comes out kind of very well. That during the period after Buddhism came into China, the Chinese had a hard time understanding the Sanskrit, because Chinese is in character, Sanskrit is an alphabet, and they couldn't, the sutras, they expressed the sutras in Taoist terms.

[44:10]

because Taoism was the closest thing to Buddhism. And then they recruited Kumarajiva to come to China to translate all the sutras. And he set up a school. And it was like, proportionately, with the same intensity as the atomic bomb during the war, project during the war. That's the way it's kind of described, yeah. But what, I mean, what happens? I mean, we don't, you know, there's this knowledge and they, you know, Buddha had a sense that this was it. Oh, okay, we finally got this figured out. And, you know, this is the way life is. Buddha is very simple, but it's also very complex. Buddha is the touchstone and all the complexity goes out of the touchstone, which is great.

[45:19]

We have all this wonderful Buddhist philosophy and psychology and it's great, but all you really need is come down to the basic thing. So that's good. Both is good. But problem is we get lost in the expanse. So it's always good to stay. In our practice, we stay. It's simple. Can you say what the basic thing is? In Buddhism? Yeah. Whatever you think the basic thing is. Just this. If you want to know more about that, there's the whole Tripitaka to explain it, but none of them can do it.

[46:25]

I've been explaining it to you. intellectual, comfortable discussion of something. And I think, you know, that's nice, but it doesn't really, it only goes so far. So I guess what I meant in asking that question was, well, what is it when you're not looking at it, but when it's just like coming from within? That's what that question meant. You don't have to say anything else. Just quietly. Yeah. You've been doing it all the past couple of days. Back to religion. It seems like, I mean, religion is insidious.

[47:30]

We grow up, even if a person's not religious, they're likely anti-religious. And so we all grow up being affected by religion. And, you know, what's right, this is right, that's wrong. you know, this is good, that's bad, and there's two things. One, I'm wondering if it's human nature to make something right or to make something wrong, or is it human nature to create Well, it's human nature to create that, yeah. And it's important and right to do that. It's only a problem when we get stuck in it, when it doesn't move, when it gets, you know, civilizations go on the wrong track and disappear, you know, and create all kinds of problems.

[48:41]

And religions do the same thing. What's the right track? It's really important to keep it pure. Is the right track always something to do with religion? No, but religion must stay on the right track. Well, you know, every individual has to find their way, but, you know, it's like religion is a teacher, people are students. And when you get down to personalities, there's a teacher and a student. And the teacher doesn't have anything to teach the student.

[49:45]

because the student has everything that they need already. But because the student doesn't know that they have everything they need already, they come to the teacher, and the teacher shows them that they already have what they need, but that it's not stimulated. So yes, everyone has to find their own way, absolutely, but they have to find their own way, but there's a direction. Within the direction, each person finds their own way. Wait a minute, disagreement and consolidation?

[50:56]

Two different things. I think everyone, you know, it's like Buddha. When Buddha was giving a sermon, everyone heard it according to their understanding. That's why they said many different citrus. And the same with Suzuki Roshi. Everybody heard what he said or what his teaching was according to their own understanding. And many things that everybody agrees on, some things that some people didn't hear, some things that some people didn't understand. I hear a lot of that from some of the disciples. Gee, there were things that I didn't understand what he was talking about at the time. I understand now, you know, stuff like that. Yes, but even so, you know, and there's a lot of things that people still don't understand. But I think pretty much these disciples pretty much agree with each other.

[52:04]

They don't have a lot of controversy with each other. Rebecca? When you're reading all the stuff that he There was... They kept, you know... When you look at that, there are all these places where there are these marks written off. They just have no idea what he said. Oh, I see. Gaps, you mean. Yeah. So, even with that, you know... Well, you know, I... There are things that he said, but if you understand what he was saying, you can fill in the gaps. That's what I had to do a lot when we were editing the branching streams, fill in a lot of the gaps. But I knew what he was saying most of the time. I could make the leap.

[53:05]

Well, I had to confirm everything for myself. I had to confirm. what it meant to let go and just have faith in the Dharma. There's an initial faith and then there's a fundamental faith. The initial faith is that you go ahead and you do something because you're trying it out to see if it works.

[54:13]

That's initial faith. And you take it on faith, so to speak. But there still could be some doubt. And then when you have some realization, then you have complete faith. So faith is actually, complete faith, total faith is actually enlightenment. But I never really had any doubt, to tell you the truth. I don't know about the moment, but just as I started practicing, I never had any doubt. I think many people in this room agree or empathize with that feeling. Yeah. A lot of doubt. Yeah. There are people whose practice comes from doubt and there are people whose practice comes from faith. And I've always been a faith type.

[55:14]

Doubt types tend to go toward Rinzai Zen. Faith types tend to go toward Soto Zen, but not necessarily. Sometimes doubt types find themselves stuck in Soto Zen. Sorry. I've always been kind of a sucker, you know. But, no, I've always had a lot of faith in the Dharma.

[55:49]

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