I just feel like this is kind of a funny room because there's only a few people right in front of me and the rest of you are way out. Tonight my subject of the talk tonight is what I call trusting your own sensibilities and one of the stories that I've thought a lot about and worked with some, I got this book of, the Black Oak Bookstore. This is, this book has been out for a long time, The Iron Flute, it's a book of Zen koans and commentary, with commentary by Nyogen Senzaki.

[01:01]

Nyogen Senzaki was a rather unusual man, grew up in Japan and studied Zen there, first Soto teachers and then Rinzai teachers and he said at one point that he admired and respected and loved Soen Shaku the best, but that he didn't want to wear all his teachers' names on his back like a sandwich board and he thought that would be rather demeaning so he's not going to tell you who all of his teachers were. And he came to this country in 1905, I think in the East Bay, you know around Hayward and there was a few Japanese living there and they did farming for a while there and eventually later on he moved to San Francisco and he said, I used to work odd jobs and whenever I had enough money I'd rent a hall and give a talk about Buddhism. And he had a little zendo at times, he started a zendo sometime in the, I don't know, in the

[02:04]

late 20s or early 30s in San Francisco and he later moved to Los Angeles and he had a little zendo in his house and he used to say that this is my floating zendo because I carry it on my, I can carry it on my back like a snail with a shell. And he never wanted really to have a, you know, to start a big group of people, he used to say, what do we want a lot of people for if we lose the spirit of Buddhism? You know, let's be careful what we do. And why would we want to improve this place and make it nicer? You know, if people who are interested in Buddhism want comfort, then they're missing the point. So let's not worry about making it too comfortable for them. And he was rather straight-spoken it seems and anyway, this book, and I got this book because, I mean, I had seen this book often and it was one of my favorite books from when

[03:10]

I started studying Zen. This book was $3.95, so you know it's a while ago that it came out. But a woman used to work here when I was the tensor working the head cook here and we had our little shack back over here before this kitchen was built, the kitchen. There was a woman in her, at that time point, I guess in her early 60s who worked in the kitchen with us, her name was Lucille Harris, otherwise known as Lulu, and she kept working in the kitchen each practice period over and over again because she was old enough and slightly asthmatic that she couldn't really work outside in the wintertime when it was so cold. So she also got to be nicknamed Kitchen Karma, KK, because she worked in the kitchen over and over again whereas other people, aside from myself, tended to come and go. So over that period of time we got to be quite good friends.

[04:13]

She would come oftentimes into the kitchen kind of huffing and puffing out of breath because she lived down in the barn and she would make her way up here and she'd be slightly asthmatic and arrive in the kitchen, what can I do? So she was also an artist and she happens to have a show this month at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. It's a show, it's a retrospective show, it's also kind of a memorial show because she died a few years ago in the ocean off of Hawaii. She had a drowning accident, scuba diving at the age of 70. Oh yeah, and there's some cards that she, Catherine's reminding me that there are cards that she is the artist for the picture of the barn in the Four Seasons that are in the office. She did those cards. She did that drawing that was made into cards. Anyway, the last time I saw her I was over at her house in San Francisco before she moved

[05:20]

to Hawaii and she had quite a library there and she said, would you like any of my books? And I picked out this book. So that's where this comes from. And she signs it, Love from Lulu, and it says, you're a cool-headed, hot-footed friend. And this is in accord with one of Nyogen Senzaki's sayings, which I'm going to give you now. Nyogen Senzaki, it says, died on May the 5th, 1958. And these were his last words to his students. He said, friends in the Dharma, please don't put any false heads above your own. Please don't put any false heads above your own. Then moment after moment, watch your steps closely. These are my last words to you. There are some other places where it says, that he said, friends in the Dharma, please

[06:22]

don't put any false heads above your own. Then moment after moment, watch your steps closely. Keep your head cool and your feet warm. These are my last words to you. So Lulu signed her book, the book, Your Cool-Headed, Hot-Footed Friend. And that, you know, I thought about that for a while, and first I thought, you know, he just meant that you shouldn't have hats on your head and you should, you know, put warm big socks on your feet. But I think it was a little more, you know, allegorical than that, or metaphorical or whatever that word is, you know, that it's better to bring your awareness and your energy down into your body and particularly then into your feet. It's actually a traditional kind of practice sometimes to put your awareness into your feet. And in this way, you avoid getting so much energy up in your head and involved with thinking

[07:27]

and strategies and planning and trying to get everything worked out the way you might tend to do. So you just put your energy back down into your breath, into your body, into your feet. So anyway, this for me is a useful kind of story in terms of trusting your own sensibilities, the subject I have for tonight. When we wrote the Greene's Cookbook, just to give you a little idea about how we put heads above our own, and again, you know, it's interesting because this sort of thing is very subtle and it, you know, it's obviously something that now we can talk about it tonight and then you may find, you know, over, you know, years to come, you may find once in a while a head above your own and sort of go, oh, here's another one that he was talking about. Anyway, when we wrote the Greene's Cookbook, we said, cook the onions until they're translucent and then, you know, add this and do that.

[08:29]

And our editor, when we got the book manuscript back, when we first got it back, it said, how long? Over and over again. You know, cook the onions until they're translucent. And there's this little press-applied label and it says, how long? And there was one of these on almost every page. We thought, this is pretty clear, we thought. And partly this is the difference between being in California and being in New York. You know, our editor is in New York. And it seems like from the New York point of view, which is also the American point of view, you, you know, there is such a thing as a going to the authority who can tell you how to do it and then you can do it the way it should be done and it will come out all right and you won't have to worry about it or have any anxiety and it will work the way it should. And cook the onions three minutes, you know, and this is going to work. And then finally it got to into the pasta section, you know, which is after the salads

[09:34]

and the soups and the pizzas and then the pasta section and somewhere in the pasta section the recipe says, cook the vegetables until they're as tender as you like. It said, it said, not only how long, but how do we know? It did. I thought, what am I going to do? I'm going to write to this woman and say, you know, you established a standardized bite. And, you know, I didn't know how to explain this to this woman, you know. So I finally wrote for the Green Script book this little section called Trusting Your Own Sensibilities. This was in fact what we were trying to teach. To teach you to trust your, you the reader, you know, to trust your own sensibilities,

[10:34]

to learn to trust your own eyes, your own nose, your ears, your taste, your smell. And that you could actually develop some trust in that. So this is the tendency though that we keep thinking there is some way and so we put together a recipe and then we taste it and we think, I used to think like this. Is this the way it's supposed to be? Is this the way it should taste? Instead of tasting something and saying, well, how is this? What's it like? And so we tend to have this idea, this is this head above our own, that is supposed to tell us how it's supposed to be. Is this the way it's supposed to be? And then we've got this other head up here that's going to say, yes or no. But we tend to think that there's this head up there even though, you know,

[11:37]

it may or may not really actually answer us like that. But, you know, we're kind of asking as though there's this head above our own head. Is this the way it's supposed to be? And then we practice meditation like that too. You know, going to the meditation hall and then we talk about our meditation experience and we go to the teacher and say, is this the way it's supposed to be? I'm having lots of thinking, I'm having lots of, my legs hurt. You know, or all these different, you know, I'm getting kind of angry or, you know, I'm sitting there and having lots of sexual fantasies. Is this really meditation? Is this the way it's supposed to be? You know, instead of going like, well, watching your steps, what about watching your steps closely? What's going on there? What's happening? What's that about? You know, what is your, what is your experience about? Instead of that, we go to somebody else and we say, is this what's supposed to happen? I mean, or can you give me the recipe for what to do in this situation? Can you tell me, you know, I'm getting angry. Now, what do I do?

[12:38]

What do I do? Do you think there's ever going to be enough recipes, you know, to cover all the circumstances? We kind of think there's somebody who's going to have this recipe and tell us. Yeah, here's what you do. Could you repeat the last words? The last words. These friends in the Dharma, please don't put any false heads above your own. Then moment after moment, watch your steps closely. So even when I talk tonight, you better be careful not to put my head above yours. Yes. So there's this little shift in whether it's cooking or in meditation. What about, you know, just looking, well, how does it taste? What is happening in my meditation? What's going on? Instead of going to somebody else or trying to ask the head above yours,

[13:40]

you know, is this the way it's supposed to be? I've told some of you this story, but a friend of mine went to ask. This is a woman who's a storyteller and, you know, somewhat older, maybe in her 60s, somewhat older than me anyway. Maybe she's in her 50s, I don't know. But anyway, she's a storyteller, and she's written some children's books and various things, and she's worked in libraries. And she just moved recently to Los Angeles from San Francisco so she could study, take some PhD programs. Anyway, at one point she said that she was at an EST training course. And she said, now, you know, I really don't know much about EST, and I don't know about it as an organization, but, you know, I had this wonderful experience one day at EST. And there was this wonderful, young, energetic Irishman who was going on about this and that. And this was after the days, you know, when EST was, you know, originally EST was promising enlightenment in a weekend, you know.

[14:43]

And it was, and they kept you in the room, you know, for 12 or 15 hours or something, didn't let you out to go to the bathroom or anything, you know. And you were going to get enlightened. I don't know, maybe it worked. Maybe some people got bladder infections, I don't know. But she said, so I don't know about EST, you know. I don't know about EST as an organization or all the things they do or Werner Erhard, but I had a great time. And there was this Irishman, and he went on. He was funny and enjoyable and energetic. And late in the afternoon, he said to all of us, don't you get it? It's not supposed to work. And all the time we have this thing, you know, we're asking for the recipe. How do I get it to work? How do I get it to be the way it's supposed to be? And he said, don't you get it? And he used, you know, a little kind of insulting phrase there, you know, you blankety blanks. It's not supposed to work. And she said, she suddenly got it. And she said, this tremendous weight dropped off her.

[15:47]

And she went home, and she was so energized and so full of vitality, and she couldn't sleep. And she stayed up late. She stayed up all night. She was so thrilled and excited, you know, that not to have this head above her own head anymore, this tremendous weight suddenly, boom, gone. How wonderful, huh? And so she felt great. And then now she said, you know, this is later, now she started doing, you know, some meditation, and she was living at the city center on Page Street for a while before she went to study at UCLA. But that's, you know, a wonderful example, again, in this story. Not having this other head. It's going to tell you how it's supposed to be, how it's supposed to work. Give you the recipe. So we tend to do this. We tend to look for recipes. How to live, how to, you know, people want to know, how do I cope with anger? What do I do about this instead of actually, you know,

[16:49]

and it's kind of like saying, would you please tell me what to do with anger so that I don't have to relate to it at all? That's the impression I get sometimes as a teacher, right? Would you please tell me what to do with grief so that I don't have to have anything to do with it? You know, I'd somehow like to say, you know, well, you know, I think if you kind of spend some time with it and kind of related to it to yourself and kind of watched your step closely, you know, and didn't have some idea about how it was supposed to work, some head above your own, I think you could figure it out. And if you'd have that much confidence and that much trust in yourself, I think you could do it. And if you didn't assume or believe or this other head above your head that's saying, I think there must be some simple way to deal with this, I see these other people, they don't seem to have the problems I do, there must be some key, you know, there's some recipe, there's some, you know, I'll get it,

[17:52]

you know, I'll look around for it. So this doesn't mean, you know, that we shouldn't ever ask anybody, you know, or shouldn't study with anybody else. You know, we say in Buddhism, everything is preaching the Dharma, everything is speaking, is a teaching for us, each moment of our experience. Everybody we meet, there's something we can learn. And one of the things that Nyogen Senzaki's teacher said about him was he learned from everybody. He studied with everybody without any discrimination about, you know, who was in Zen they can say host and guest, you know, without any discrimination about whether they were supposedly, you know, higher or lower than him, or supposedly better or worse than him. I have this other story about, you know, I tell sometimes about,

[18:52]

all these years I've been practicing meditation and everything, and I thought, you know, this is going to make my life better. I noticed when I left Zen Center that I had trouble making decisions. I mean, I moved out of Zen Center about five years ago, after living at Zen Center for 20 years, and I found that I have a real trouble making decisions. Where am I going to live? Who am I going to live with? What am I going to do for livelihood? Should I go to the store now? What am I going to buy? And if you've been, you know, across the heart for a while, you go out in the stores, I mean, they have 30 feet of soaps, you know, and then I go like, well, what kind of soap should I get? And somebody at Green Goats one time said, Ed, you don't watch television enough. I mean, you have to find out somehow what, you know, it's kind of overwhelming sometimes, you know, for somebody like me. So I thought, well, I'm just out of practice

[19:54]

of making decisions. This will get better as I live out here, you know, and then I thought, well, how do you buy a car? You know, I have to buy a car. Am I really going to buy a car? So it's all pretty, you know, overwhelming and lots of decisions to be made. And now it's been five years and I still have trouble making decisions. And then somebody recently said, who teaches the Enneagram, said, well, Ed, you're a nine and I realized at that point that yes, it's not just that I got out of practice at Zen Center, but actually I've had this trouble all along. You know, when I was living here at Tassajara, the hardest part of the schedule was the day off. You know, I could do the rest of the schedule fine. I loved, you know, the bell rings and you get up and then the next bell rings and you go to the meditation hall. And I could do all that fine. I didn't have to decide anything. So I'd just go along with everything until I'd collapse and then I'd be in bed for a couple of days

[20:55]

and then I'd get up and go back and do it some more. Except for the days off. Right? And then you have to figure out for yourself what to do. And I'd have to try to think, you know, well, what do I want? So nines don't know what they want. You know? Because they're busy, you know, doing what other people have asked them to do. And would you please follow the schedule? Fine. And would you work in the kitchen? Okay. And would you go do some stonework? Okay. And, you know, so I just do the next thing that comes along and people ask me. And this is very interesting because, I mean, it's interesting to me. I don't know. But, you know, I spent all those years at Zen Center and then what I naturally, I'm naturally not very good at making decisions and then I got in with this group, you know, conveniently enough that asked me not to make any decisions. And then they said, you know, not to make decisions. So this is, I must have thought, you know, unconsciously, this is great. I have trouble making decisions

[21:56]

and this group says it's a spiritual virtue. What could be better? Here I am. You know? So, and there's a lot of things like this. You know, I've had other, you know, noticed other things like this. It doesn't seem like necessarily spiritual practice, so-called spiritual practice per se is going to necessarily be good for you. You know, I mean, maybe it's just not good or bad at, you know, anyway. So I kept practicing, you know, and doing what I was supposed to do, right? Following the schedule. I did everything I was supposed to do and then, you know, I thought, well, my life is going to be better. You know, my life is going to get better if I just do what I'm supposed to do. It's all going to work out fine somewhere in the distant future or the not so distant future hopefully or maybe, you know, this moment, you know, it's all going to get better. Now, do you suppose that's another kind of spiritual practice? No. So it's taken a number of experiences since I left Zen Center

[22:57]

to convince me that it's not, you know, necessarily getting better. In fact, you know, it doesn't, having done this practice is not like, you know, last night I mentioned the person who had all that money and he, you know, he thought, well, what's the point if it doesn't give you immunity from little things like your car breaking down, you know, and your car won't start. So a few months ago, I was on my way with my daughter to go river rafting in Idaho, in Salmon, Idaho. We were going to start from Salmon, Idaho and it was one of the few times in my life we were on time, you know, we were ahead of time and we'd just stopped and gotten gas. We didn't have to get gas and I had a little cup of coffee there and my daughter was eating a little chocolate bar which dripped on her yellow shorts and was a little problem for a while, like how do I get it off because that's what we had in the car. And then I was thinking what a wonderful day

[23:57]

and I was commenting to my daughter how for one of the few times in my life I'm ahead of schedule, we're ahead of schedule, you know, it's 45 minutes and it's 6.15 and it's only half an hour to Salmon. How nice, right? And then I thought what a wonderful day it is and it's this beautiful blue sky and going along the Salmon River and the roads and the trees it's kind of like here at Tessa High where it's so wonderful the line of the blue along the hilltop there and the blue looks so sapphire and so brilliant and so I'm driving along and I'm looking at the hills just momentarily how wonderful these hills are and then I look down and there were these rubble the rocks and boulders in the road and my daughter had been of course looking at the trumpet on her yellow shirt so neither of us

[24:58]

were aware of the impending future you know it was quickly arriving and my spiritual practice somehow had not prepared me for this you know, all the all the effort that I'd gone to it didn't help me in the slightest and I thought momentarily of swerving into the other lane around the rocks but I was going about 65 miles an hour and I was a little bit worried about maybe swerving too far into the other lane or that maybe somebody would be coming even though with a quick glance there wasn't anybody coming it was a bit of a you know, mistaken decision but nobody tells you well what do you do when the rocks are coming up on the road and then I didn't have any recipe for it

[26:00]

I didn't know what I was supposed to do our life is like this folks it's actually like this so we hit these rocks and the worst was a rock that was about this high that was kind of square shaped and so we smooshed into it and managed to get over it and past it and there was a huge you know, crunk and then we were and then another kind of slightly less of a crunk I think as the back wheel went over it and I don't know how the back wheel survived because the front wheel sure didn't the front tire didn't at first I thought you know, everything was fine we were still on the road and then it was whap, whap, whap, whap this was when my car was fairly new

[27:04]

I had this Honda, right so they explained to me when I bought the car you know, they went through all the little details here's where this is and here's where this is and they showed me in the trunk how the tire is underneath the floor of the trunk this means that all of our luggage was of course in the trunk all of our stuff for our camping trip is in the trunk so this was extremely not only was the tire deflated I was extremely deflated and not only was I deflated but immediately following the deflation I was intensely angry that the universe would do this to me after all I'd done that the universe would still do this sort of thing to me and pull this kind of stunt on me I took it very personally and I personalized the universe so I was intensely angry

[28:04]

and I was throwing stuff out of the trunk well, getting it out there anyway onto the dirt by the side of the road and I finally got down everything out of the trunk and I opened the thing up and then is there a spare tire on these cars well, in a sort but it's this little sort of it's this little tiny thing this little inflated balloon thing it's like a little bicycle tire I didn't know that I thought cars still had spare tires it's this little funny little thing so I get it out and then we go through the whole thing of changing the tire and I think oh my god is this thing going to work and then I look in the book and it says from now on with your little tire on there you should not go over 45 miles an hour so I was so angry

[29:12]

we finally got the tire back on and we stuffed everything back in the trunk back in the backseat the other tire back in the backseat of the car someplace it's this dirty tire it's back there so anyway we weren't going to make it on time so we're driving along we start up I pull out and I'm still so angry fuck the universe and finally I stuck my hand out the window with this gesture of fuck the universe and it just so happens this pickup truck with three young men were passing us I hadn't noticed I was going along at 40 miles an hour they were coming up very fast

[30:13]

65 or 70 and I started thinking what if they try to pull us off the road what am I going to say to them oh excuse me it was just my flat tire I just mentioned the universe there was nothing personal to you so there's no recipe there's no way you can get through unscathed you do the right practice I had done all this spiritual practice I was so disappointed that things like this could still happen to me and then I told this to people a few of my friends when I got home they said Ed you don't understand your spiritual practice is what saved you you'd be dead now if you hadn't done all that spiritual practice think what would have happened if you hadn't done that spiritual practice your car probably would have gone off the road so who knows who the heck knows

[31:14]

but anyway there wasn't any recipe for that and life is like that and we keep thinking would you please tell me what to do so it all comes out ok or tell me what to do so I don't have to relate to these difficult things that are happening in my life like this anger or this grief or this sorrow and tell me what to do so I don't really have to relate to it myself please so I don't actually have to have the anxiety and so on and figuring it out and working with it and struggling with it and living with it and sitting with it and breathing it and eating it and sometimes I called up some friends of mine I met these people actually at this retreat two or three years ago this cooking and spiritual practice retreat he's a doctor she's a financial consultant and Patty and I got to be friends with them so we went to visit them in Boulder Creek where they live

[32:15]

and it turns out they know somebody who's a friend of his named Psychic Bob actually not his name he's a homeopath so he's becoming a homeopathic doctor and he's been going to classes up in Berkeley but sometimes when he has trouble figuring out what is the homeopathic remedy he'd call up Psychic Bob and say is it this or this and Psychic Bob would sometimes tell him well after a while Psychic Bob started saying to him I think you know the answer why don't you figure it out so I thought well I'll give Psychic Bob a try what am I going to do with my life and he has this apparently he used to do a pendulum also you know my friend the doctor said that on occasion you know he telepathized the homeopathic remedy to the patient you know this kind of thing I forget how they do that

[33:17]

but there's some way that you can telepathize the homeopathic remedy and they did it to this baby and the baby got well right away after he had telepathized so he used to use some kind of pendulum you know where you have something and it swings you know yes or no or it goes in a circle this way or that way or you know this is yes and that's no or whatever but now he has he just his hand vibrates and he has this little pointer in his hand he has this little chart in front of him and it goes from one to twelve and there's you know this is one there's a little section that's the one and two so he can go like this and you know sort of like well everything well that would be good well that would be good well that would be good and they say well Bob if it's all going to be good how do I decide and he says well you just decide now that's not putting another head above your own

[34:21]

here I am going to this other head you know and I'm thinking that there's some way you actually do these things and there's some basis on which you actually do it you know there's some you know that you would decide what would be better for you or the way it's going to come out better or the way it's going to work and you would decide that rather than the thing that's not going to work wouldn't you do that and wouldn't that make sense as a way to decide things well so I didn't have enough of psychic Bob so I was going to take a trip to the east coast I call him up on the phone good trip for you okay what about if I stay home well that would be a 12 out of 12 too so it's the same thing you know you just decide you just decide you just do it and there's no way to figure out what's going to be best

[35:21]

or what's in store right and what's going to be good for you you know I mean sometimes it's a little more obvious than this but for me you know having trouble making decisions you know it's really hard and so I think it's the recipes it's the same thing you know if we had a recipe and we just could follow at least when somebody said well that didn't come out very good you could say well I followed the recipe isn't that like this yeah so this is it you know it's very simple words and yet you know over and over again you may find some place in your life where you'll notice you know are you looking for another head are you asking another head for your advice are you and then there's this other head too

[36:22]

that's going to give you advice gratuitously you know like didn't I tell you not to do that I told you you should have kept your mouth shut you didn't listen to my advice and you know you have to be careful with those voices that you know each of us have it's better to be careful with those voices the ones that don't identify themselves as who's talking you know but they talk to you as though they're the ultimate authority you know in your life right yeah the ultimate authority you know as to whether you're a good person bad person how you're doing you know you're doing good you're not doing so good and it's the ultimate authority voice but it never says you know this is your ultimate authority voice talking you know it's just a voice that comes on in your head and then tells you where it's at and then you go right

[37:23]

I mean who else are you talking to so it's better like when you start hearing these voices in some way I don't know there's different approaches to this you know one is to you know every so often it might be useful to say look I'll give you three minutes of my time and then I don't want to hear about it anymore because I'm busy you know I'm meditating or I'm cooking or I've got to get to work now I'll take one minute or two minutes tell it to me straight and let's get it over and I'll give you my full attention now and that's that sometimes some strategy might help you but basically there again different recipes are going to work for different people and you're going to have to probably figure out for yourself but in some way we're working to to trust our own sensibilities and your own sensibilities

[38:23]

and your own reactions like in my story of being in Idaho you know we're not always on top of it and somehow you know we have to forgive ourselves and the universe so this process is to re-own our body re-own our mind re-own our thoughts and our feelings you know because in a certain way with this head above our head we've been colonized you know and we let various things colonize us and tell us where it's at tell us what to do tell us the way it's supposed to be and then we go yes that's right you're right it's the way it's supposed to be but the fact that we don't do that you know the second part of this thing has also been very important

[39:23]

it doesn't mean that you can you know trusting yourself doesn't mean that you go along blithely you know the second part is moment after moment watch your steps closely, carefully moment after moment watch closely, watch carefully watch carefully well I'll read you another sort of classic story here this is called Yaku-san's lecture and after it there's a little commentary by Nyogen Senzaki so I'll read a bit of this the chief monk followed him

[40:49]

so Nyogen Senzaki says about this story if one can live as Buddha taught sutras and shastras mean nothing to him Yaku-san gave lectures for beginners a finger pointing to the moon but from morning to night and from night to morning his living was a constant lecture to the monks this lecture was the real one if some monks overlook this wordless teaching they're not fit to study Zen the chief monk deserves 30 blows when Teishan gained an insight into the truth of Zen he immediately took up all his commentaries on the Diamond Sutra which he'd once considered invaluable and indispensable and he threw them into a big fire when they were reduced to ashes he said however deep your knowledge of absolute philosophy it's like a piece of hair placed in the vastness of space

[42:09]

and however important your experience in things worldly it's like a drop of water thrown into an unfathomable abyss the same with any recipes all of our knowledge and knowing what to do little hair in big space Kosen Imakita teacher of Son Shoku said from a million volumes of scriptures are the light of it even a million volumes of scriptures are the light of a candle compared to the sun when you compare them to the actual experience of enlightenment I don't mean to discourage your study of Buddhism through books the West needs scholars of sutras and shastras these days but it also urgently needs scholars of Buddhism

[43:22]

so please friends in the Dharma please don't put any falseheads above your arm and moment after moment watch your steps closely okay thank you very much

[43:36]

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