There was, you know, 130 or 140 people there who practiced at Tushara over the years, including 40 or 50 people who are there practicing now. So this kind of put me in mind of some of the old things that happened in the old days. And because I tell certain stories so often, I'm not going to tell you those stories, and I'm going to tell you some other stories that I tell less often, but some of you have already heard them. And so it's all right. You can still come up to me after the talk and say, can't you get some new material? Someone at Tushara after my last round of storytelling said, you've told those stories four times now, since I've been here. Anyway it seems like we have to do something to entertain ourselves.

[01:02]

You know, of all the lectures in those days when I was at Tushara that teachers gave, I can't remember any of them, barely. I mean, you know, maybe one or two sort of thoughts, and maybe it sort of sank in to where I understood, but it's not something like I carry around the words that somebody said at some point. So I'm not sure it did any good to go to lectures, but Suzuki Roshi would say, well, you need some food for your brain. Even though meditation is, zazen is the heart of zen practice, you should have some food for your brain. So anyway, I'm here to give you something, you know, a little food and then you digest it and something happens to it and we don't know, you know, after that. So, what becomes of it? I do think in a large sense, you know, that everything we do is practice.

[02:15]

You don't have to be in a meditation hall or a sanctuary like this or meditating or bowing, but certainly in the large sense, all of our life is practice because practice is just another word for being alive. And zen people, you know, so zen people get to do a lot of practicing. That's all they do, you know. They never get to actually perform or, you know, to where they practice enough to actually be doing something other than practicing, you know, like actually doing it. They're just endlessly practicing, you know. So, I seem to be stuck in that boat. You know, supposedly it helps to practice, you know. We have these meditation centers and we have these practices and it's supposed to help, but sometimes it's hard to tell what would be a help and how you would know whether you've been helped or whether, you know, you've gotten better now, or, you know, anyway, if

[03:29]

you've practiced, you probably understand this. It's frustrating, you know, because you practice and then, you know, still you can get angry and greedy and, you know, afraid and you can get cancer. I mean, Suzuki Roshi practiced for 50 years and he got cancer. I mean, what good is that, you know, all that practice then? But anyway, I'm going to tell you some stories, you know, where I actually, you know, I feel like this was a gift, you know, something, and at least at the time it felt like it was a help, okay? Maybe in the long run, you know, who knows, but at the time anyway, it felt like a help. So the first story is, you know, when I was at Tassara, I went, first of all, the last

[04:38]

year it was a resort. I went to Tassara and I ended up, I worked as a dishwasher and then I was, one of the cooks quit in the middle of the summer and so they offered me the job and I said, okay, I'll do it. And until then, I'd been planning to leave and so that probably was the biggest help, you know, that changed everything in my life, that that cook quit, you know. I've never seen him since, so I haven't been able to thank him. But then I got a job as a cook and then Zen Center came in, Zen Center said, well, you've already been cooking here, why don't you go on cooking here? I was already a Zen student too, so that was convenient. So I worked a lot in the kitchen for two and a half years and we have a tradition at Zen Center that when the bell rings, the food is served. This puts a lot of stress on the kitchen, you know. You have to have the food ready at the time that it says on the schedule.

[05:39]

The bell rings and if the food doesn't come, I mean, it's a big deal. Or you know, theoretically, it's a big deal because it's never happened where the food wasn't ready then, so we don't know, but we assume that if the food's not ready when the bell's rung, something terrible is going to happen, you know, and it would be humiliating for the head cook and all of the people working in the kitchen. We don't know what form that humiliation will take, but we're sure it would be bad. So since then I found out that there are other spiritual traditions, that I was at a center in Vermont where when the food is ready, the bell is rung. You know, there's spiritual and then there's spiritual. This is Japanese spiritual the way we do it, you know, you have to perform up to expectation

[06:50]

and other traditions, sort of like, why do you expect so much, you know, and if the food is late, is there some problem about that? Why are you so uptight about food being always at a certain time? Can't you relax? Does everything always have to be a certain way, you know, according to the clock? So it all depends on your orientation, you know, what is spiritual virtue sometimes, which tradition you're in. So in that tradition you try to, you know, this means you don't have to have any stress, you don't have to get uptight, just work at your own pace and if you want to talk and chat fine and so on, when the food's ready then that'll be fine, great, thank you very much. But in our tradition anyway, there's a lot of, at least when I was starting out, I felt a lot of pressure and a lot of stress and tension trying to make sure the food is ready. This is the background to the story.

[07:51]

You have to understand the kind of, you know, anxiety I had about this, not knowing that there were other alternative spiritual practices. It was important to me to get the food ready, so, and somehow the people I was working with didn't always seem to understand that this was a priority. So, I felt sometimes, you know, it's a big animal and I'm trying to, you know, somehow control it or get it to do what I want but it doesn't speak my language, you know, it's like a big horse or an ox or something. Someone tries various means, you know, to get attention and anyway, I used to get angry a lot and under these circumstances and just feel very tight and anxious. So, I was doing this one morning, it was before lunch and it was getting, you know, within about half hour of lunch and it had been another morning where just everything, you know, anyway,

[08:59]

it's very unpredictable somehow what's going to happen in the kitchen, I don't know why but it's sort of like life, I guess, you know. You have these nice plans and it's all carefully arranged and then other stuff happens. I mean, you can turn on the water faucet and no water comes out, I mean, you know, weird things, strange. I don't think anything really bad happened that morning but still somehow it's very difficult and I was quite involved and then I also felt really kind of upset with myself that I was so upset, right? I mean, and kind of really entangled with all these strong emotions and feeling upset about being entangled with the powerful emotions. So, while I was standing at the table and working on something and worrying about whether

[10:01]

everything was going to be ready on time, I heard my name being called but I wasn't sure, you know, how long my name had been called because even though my name was being called Ed, it didn't sound like anybody that I knew. I mean, here I was quite involved with getting everything done and being rather anxious and angry and tight and the person being called was a really nice person, a very sweet person. You know, one of the most wonderful people you could ever hope to meet or to know. So, even though the word was Ed, it wasn't someone that I thought of as me. So, it was confusing, you know, for a little bit and I looked around and there was Suzuki Roshi standing in the doorway of the kitchen and he called my name.

[11:04]

And then all of the strong feelings I'd had just dropped away and I realized, I mean, and I had this sense that it was, I think it's, you know, what you hear this sort of thing in Buddhism, you're not your emotions and you hear it in psychotherapy too, you're not your emotions, but I'd never had an experience of not being my emotions. And then I found out that I was this other person as well as the person who had all those emotions and I felt very light and clear like, you know, storm clouds going away and there being blue sky and sunlight and it was such a relief, you know, physically letting go of all that stuff. And then, and I felt a little shaky and then we talked about something, you know, something

[12:12]

sort of practical like, you know, a picnic we were going to have the next day or a couple days away or something. And I don't think, you know, I don't think that teachers plan that sort of thing. But it's nice when somebody, you know, if you ever have this kind of feeling, you know, sometimes your friend, I told this story to some people the other night and someone afterwards said, I had a friend one time called my name when I was very angry and that same kind of thing happened. Somebody who could see, you know, that the person in front of them is more than just what they happen to be feeling. Anyway, I wish, you know, that I could call your name in that way and see you in that way. And I make that kind of, you know, effort, but, you know, mostly I don't think it happens

[13:16]

like that. So, I apologize. Anyway, it also reminds me, you know, this is a story about who are you? You know, who is Ed? Who is what you call Ed? And, you know, who do we think, any of us think that we are? And do we actually identify with our experience? Oh, that's me. That anger is me. I am that anger. This is in Buddhism, this is known as unskillful. You know, what does a Bodhisattva who is skilled in means does not do this? You know, say, I am the anger, the anger is me. You know, a Bodhisattva will say, I am not the anger, the anger is not me. I am not my thoughts, my feelings, my perceptions. You know, I am not my body, the body is not me. Because when we identify with all this stuff, thoughts, forms, sights, sounds, smells, emotions, perceptions,

[14:26]

you know, our self is always then, you know, very vulnerable and fragile. Because all that stuff is changing. And it's hard to then, you know, we can't really say, of course, who are you? The sixth patriarch asked Nangaku when he came to study, who are you? He didn't say, who are you? That's, you know, modern. He said, what is it that thus comes? And depending on the story, in one story he answered right away, but in the other story actually he didn't know what to say and it took him about seven or eight years. Maybe he kept trying to say things and the teacher said, no, you're not your body, you're not your mind, you're not your thoughts, you're not your feelings, you're not your emotions,

[15:29]

you're not anger, you're not fear, you're not vulnerable, you're not scared, you're not loving, you're not kind, you're not any of those things. Anyway, finally Nangaku said, as soon as you call it something, it misses the mark. To call it anything, misses, will be a mistake. Anyway, this experience was a little bit the flavor of that kind of story. Anyway, I don't know if practice helps one to have that kind of thing happen or not. But it's very nice to be around other people who might see you that way and not feed into your story. It's not clear whether at Zen centers there's always those kind of people around or not.

[16:36]

We hope there are. It was after that, in those days the people who worked in the kitchen, we also served in the meditation hall. We would put on a clean apron and go and serve. Now we have the people who are in the meditation hall come out in their robes and a group comes out and the people who are actually sitting and meditating take turns doing the serving and the people in the kitchen get to relax. Makes sense, right? Well, in those days we hadn't figured that out. We'd do all the cooking and then we'd go and serve it all too. You just take half a minute and change your apron in order to pull yourself together and make yourself theoretically presentable and calm. Serve the food graciously, even though it's been such a turmoil to get it all ready on time.

[17:43]

I had a practice for a long time. I had heard that in Zen you're supposed to be fast and do things energetically. I had watched Katagiri Roshi. It was one of the most impressive things. When I was first at Zen Center on Bush Street in the 60s and Katagiri Roshi, every Saturday morning we did meditation, then we had breakfast and then there was a work period. First of all, it was interesting that in the work period nobody told you what to do. Everybody just started doing stuff. Then it was like, well, what do I do? Nobody tells you. At first I was put off by that, that nobody tells you what to do and you're kind of lost. Then later I got to appreciate it. It's not like somebody knows better what to do than you do. I mean, can't you figure stuff out? People are washing and waxing the floor and they're cleaning up in the kitchen and they're cleaning the bathrooms.

[18:51]

Well, find something to do, why don't you? So I would find something to do. After a while you get better at it because then you go and do something that you know to do before the other people do. But Katagiri Roshi used to wax the floor, wash and wax the floor. He would do it quite energetically, even though he had on these work robes and stuff. We had this paste wax that we used and after we washed the floor he'd take the paste wax and he'd put it on there. Then when that was all done, what was really impressive was he'd take this block of wood and a towel and he would run the length of the zendo buffing the floor like he was a little waxing machine. And he'd just run from one end to the other and it all bent over with the towel on the floor.

[19:52]

If you've ever tried this sometime, this is not easy to do. And to do it with that amount of energy and seeming enthusiasm was very inspiring. So I thought, this is Zen. Even though to call it something misses the mark. This is Zen, this is really what it's about. So I always thought the thing you should try to work very quickly. So when I was serving people in the meditation hall, I used to race the person on the other side. See if I could get through serving my side before the other person got through serving the other side. Because that would show that I was more Zen than the other side, the person on the other side. It all depends on your definition of spiritual, right?

[20:55]

So most of the time I won. And when I didn't win, I always said there was some reason for it. Because when you're serving some people, they're really spaced out and they don't put their bowl out very quickly. They're sort of sitting there. And then finally, when I won, I always said, there was some reason for it. And then finally they bow. Somehow to get their bowl over, it takes about five minutes. And then there were people who wanted, oh no, just a little. Or they wanted more, more. And then I've been told in Zen, you just fill up the bowl to the top. Actually, 80% of the top.

[22:04]

Because it's really kind of gross to have a bowl, and then the food is this big mountain there. This is not aesthetic in our tradition. So I always wanted to try to keep the food to the right height. And then people were like, they want more. Then you have this little argument. It's all happening kind of silently. There's this little tension. And so I would serve funnily. You have to give them a little more, and a little more, and a little more. So that can take a while, those kind of negotiations. It's interesting. In that kind of silence, to serve somebody food, or to be served food, is quite intimate.

[23:12]

It's very intimate. In some ways, I think it may be the most intimate thing I've ever done. It's just to serve somebody food, or to be served food. Somehow in that silence, it feels like you really know the other person. Or there's something that happens there where you're quite exposed. And you know each other in some way, right away. Anyway, there was a lot of tension around my little transactions. And not everybody wanted to help me get down the row in a hurry. Because they had their own agenda. They wanted more food, or less food. Anyway, there were a lot of things that happened around that. I'm not going to go into all of them today. So maybe I'll try to remember this, so I'll remember the stories I didn't tell you. Anyway, we'll see. So one day, I don't know how this happened, but you see, one day I thought,

[24:14]

you know, and then Suzuki Roshi, we used to serve Suzuki Roshi first. And with Suzuki Roshi, I at least thought I was making the effort to be very careful. Very considerate. And very loving. I wanted to make sure that I did it, I served him the way he would really like to be served. And it was after that that I sort of started being in a hurry to get down the row. Later, you know, at one of the Shosan ceremonies where all the students asked a question of the abbot, one of the students said, ask Suzuki Roshi, what do you feel when I serve you? And he said, I feel like you're offering me your entire being. You know, your most perfect love.

[25:17]

And I felt like something like that, you know, when I was serving him, or I thought I was doing that, I don't know. We like to think these things. And so one day, though, I was, you know, about to serve and I thought, you know, I got to thinking about it. Why do I, you know, who really is Suzuki Roshi? And why do I serve him one way and everybody else another way? How come I make this distinction? Is there a real difference in these people? Why don't I serve everybody as though they were Suzuki Roshi? Because it seems like at some level we're all Suzuki Roshi. We're all Buddha. And, you know, all the emotions and the stuff we can say about ourself, you know, at some level drops away. So I tried to serve and it took a while.

[26:26]

My habit was pretty strong, you know, so I'd serve Suzuki Roshi and then the next person I'd still be pretty careful and the next person a little less careful. And by the third person, I'd forget about it and try to get down the road. But after a while, I, you know, I started trying to just maintaining that sort of feeling of offering, trying to make this same offering to each person of a careful effort and moving with the other person and moving at the other person's speed and trying to understand what the other person wants and offering them what they want, you know, in the meal. So I think that's a kind of example, you know,

[27:33]

any of us can make that kind of effort with one another to make that kind of offering and to try to and to remember to see our family and our friends and even ourself as Suzuki Roshi or as Buddha, you know, as a... precious, someone precious. Someone who at the most deepest level, you know, has a pure heart which is in some sense, you know, confused or obscured and so forth. But this is very powerful when we can do this to treat ourself or family or friends

[28:34]

and at this level of having a pure heart and so on. And it's easy to forget and get caught up in identifying oneself or the other person with the feelings or the thoughts they seem to be expressing or having or, you know, their actions and so on and forget that more fundamentally this is a precious person. Life is valuable. I need to practice respect or appreciation and see this in others. Not that I need to, I think probably a better word is I'd like to.

[29:40]

You know, so when I think about it, sometimes, you know, if you think I need to or I have to, it's not quite right because then you'll feel like you're martyring yourself whereas other people aren't treating you that way, why should you treat them that way? So the question is, do you want to, what I find myself, when I thought about it, do I want to withhold that from other people, you know, as one of my negotiating tools? And when they start to get it together and treat me better, I'll treat them better? Is that, you know, do I want to be involved in this kind of negotiation for the rest of my life? And I finally decided, no, I'd just like to be, I'd like to express my generosity and my love without these kind of strings, you know, without this kind of negotiation going on all the time because if you're going through all that negotiation all the time, you never, you know, other people never treat you well enough so that you feel like now at last you can treat them better.

[30:45]

You know, they never seem to do that. Somehow they're always a little short of the mark. This is what I've noticed anyway. So I find I have to be forgiving, you know, over and over again and see people's effort and intention and pure heartedness even though it doesn't seem to be fully expressed in their life, fully, you know, manifest. It's interesting, it's easier, you know, sometimes when people are sitting, you know, quietly and meditating, it's really much easier to see the pure heartedness. It's wonderful. You know, there's various kinds of practices in a certain sense.

[32:15]

I was reminded recently of, you know, in some ways Zen practice can be thought of or sometimes is described as though a person wakes up in the morning and has a piece of shit on their nose and then no matter where they go during the day, you know, they say to other people, gee, you know, they're thinking, you really stink. And, you know, working in the kitchen really stinks and going to school really stinks and whatever you do, you know, it's a problem. And other people are a problem. And, you know, and then you change your clothes. Maybe it's the clothes you're wearing, you know. If you got some other clothes, things would be better. So you're always looking for something to change and improve and it's outside of yourself. And then at some point, somehow, you know, there's a mirror that's enough to see that the shit is on your nose, you know. And you can wash your face. So I've done a lot of face washing over the years.

[33:19]

And I think Zen practice and life, you know, life seems to be this, not just, you don't have to do Zen practice to, you know, have your nose rubbed in a little bit of, you know, shit. And then at some point, you can see that, oh, it's on my face, you know. And it's embarrassing. But then you can, you know, wash and acknowledge your own, you know, withholding of, you know, kind of, you know, effort like I'm describing. And how you would, you know, how we tend to criticize others and so forth. But it's curious to me that sometimes the part of practice I think that's most powerful is not necessarily, you know, the part where we think we're getting somewhere and we're accomplishing something and we're improving. And the kind of gift of seeing yourself or seeing someone else

[34:24]

as being independent of the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, the sensations and not blaming others, not blaming oneself for the kind of experiences one has. This is a gift and it seems to be rather, you know, gratuitous. I mean, you don't, it's not like, in a way you can practice it. But also, you know, on the other hand, it's something that, you know, when we're fortunate, it's given to us. Well, anyway, I want to tell you one more story. Suzuki Roshi sometimes had a way of, when you would talk with him, you'd be about ready to go and you'd bow and you'd go to leave and then he'd say, Oh, by the way, like you'd think you were done and then there'd be this little surprise. So one day, the background for this story is that outside of the office at Tassara now

[35:33]

there's four or five large stones. If you've been at Tassara you know they're sort of in a row and people, you can sit on them and, you know, so on. In those days there was one stone outside the office and it was a long, kind of oval-shaped stone, it was about yay tall. It was a very handsome stone and people, we used to get our mail in the office in those days and then after you got your mail you could go outside and sit on the rock and read your mail. Or you could get a cup of coffee and sit on the rock and read a book. So this rock was in some ways, you know, a real focal point of the community at Tassara. And one day after I'd been talking with Suzuki Roshi he said, and I was leaving, and he said, Oh, by the way, Ed, do you know that pile of stones that's outside the door of your house? Because the door of my house had been, it was about two foot off the ground and I had piled up some rocks to try to make a step. You know, you step on the rocks and they kind of teeter a little bit

[36:36]

and you're never quite sure whether you're going to make it up to the door. And sometimes he would look over at the pile of rocks outside my door and he'd say, because from the bridge at Tassara you could see 1B, my room, and he'd say, Do you know that pile of rocks there? You know, in Japan when people die sometimes we put rocks like that on the grave. We pile up the rocks. Anyway, I hadn't, so I didn't know what to do particularly about it. I hadn't done any rock work at that point, but then, so this one day he said, as I was leaving, By the way, do you know that rock outside of the office? I asked Paul Disko to move that over to your house this afternoon for your doorstep. Is that okay? I said, But that rock is kind of an important part of the community.

[37:38]

You know, people read their mail there and things. He said, That's all right, we'll get another one. So that afternoon I was sitting in my cabin and I hear this horrible sound. You know the nails on the chalkboard thing? This was the rock in a metal sled coming across the wooden bridge. Very loud. So I got up and I went to the door of my cabin. Here was this rock coming over to my house. There was three or four people moving it. From the rock sled, this metal sled, they put down some little two-by-fours or tracks and then some little pieces of pipe to roll it on. So they rolled it over to my house and tossed the other rocks there over the side and put this rock in place for my doorstep.

[38:40]

And then we all stood back and admired it. And everybody went away. Then after that, every time I would walk in and out of my cabin, I stepped on this rock. It's very solid. It doesn't wiggle. It's very stable. And every time I walk in and out of my house, I think of Suzuki Rishi and the fact that he would put a rock like that outside my door to step on. In some ways, this is a very simple gesture, but there's something very deep about it.

[39:58]

I wish that all of us could receive a gift like this. And again, in some ways, we can receive it, and in some ways, we can't. In some ways, we actually can practice it. We can practice having stability, something to step on and not be confused by our various thoughts, various emotions, getting identified with them, getting turned around by them, becoming upset by them. We can have stability when we don't identify with all the changing phenomena. And I also tend to feel we give this kind of gift to each other every day.

[41:08]

In fact, we cook food for one another. We make offerings to one another in various ways. They're not all as big or heavy as a rock like that. But even to call someone's name can be this kind of gift. So we're doing this all the time, calling each other's names, saying hello, saying goodbye. And in various ways, as I mentioned at the beginning, we give each other the gift of the sanctuary because we all come here and treat it as a sanctuary, and treat it as my sanctuary and our sanctuary. So this is a kind of gift we give to each other. And we let go of other actions, other activities.

[42:09]

We're not acting out everything that comes into our heads as though it was the most important thing. And we can sit here and appreciate the silence and the wonder of our life. And then we can go out and forget all about it. So we seem to need to come back regularly. If it's one thing I think I understand about practice now after all these years is that we don't really... I don't feel like I've gotten anywhere. Some people say, well, why would you practice if you don't get anywhere? But, you know, I think in life we don't get anywhere. So if I don't practice, then I feel like it's a problem not getting anywhere. And when I practice, you know, serving people food carefully and sitting with people

[43:18]

and chanting with people and bowing with people and talking with people, when I practice doing that, then I don't mind not getting anywhere. It's quite enough to be involved in this life with others. If anybody has any, if you have any questions or comments or anything of the sort, I will, at least in some instances, respond. Yes? I kind of have a burning question. When I was walking up the path of Zen Center, I was walking up the path of Zen Center. I took off my button that said Clinton Gore because I thought it's not really very Zen to wear buttons and look political when you're going to Zen Center. But then if I feel strongly, you know, outside of attending a Zen Center, that we need more enlightened government,

[44:20]

and so yesterday I was walking the precinct, I actually, you know, took political action. How do you reconcile these two, you know, conflicting attitudes? Well, anyway, I'm not sure that they're conflicting. I wouldn't think so, particularly. We have to try to, I mean, we're all, you know, kind of muddling along trying to find some way to work and, you know, express our life, you know, in our personal life and in the public life and in the world. So, in terms of the, you know, when you come to the sanctuary, you're trying to, you know, allow, in a certain way, you know, you're trying to create space in a sanctuary where everybody can be there in peace and harmony.

[45:26]

So, within the particular context of the sanctuary, you're trying not to exclude or offend other people, to some extent, and there are particular, you know, guidelines about that for, you know, that we use, and then, like, generally, for a meditation retreat, for instance, like, you know, you're often asked not to wear perfume or deodorants, you know, that somebody else might be sensitive to. But we need, it's nice to have a kind of space, but even, you know, political action in that sense often is not necessarily excluding anybody. It's different, you know, when you're at war with somebody else, where you're trying to eliminate the other side. And the effort in meditation is largely an effort to include various aspects of yourself that, you know, might otherwise be at war and that haven't talked to each other for a long time. And you're not, and, you know, in that sense, there was a, I read a review in the paper recently of some plays by someone who,

[46:32]

who described the political, the real political struggle in America is between the people who can tolerate ambiguities and the people who can't. People who can't tolerate ambiguities say, this is the way it should be for me and for everybody, and then there's other people who can tolerate some ambiguity and that, you know, you can have both sides. And when you practice meditation, there's somebody who wants to sit still, there's also somebody who wants to move. So you, when you practice meditation, you have to allow both people to be there. And if you try to eliminate the person who wants to move, you don't feel very good after a while. But actually they can live in some kind of, you know, in a kind of harmony and appreciate each other. So when your activity is in the context of living in harmony and appreciating the opposition, appreciating the other side, even though it's not what you feel or you believe, then it seems fine to express, you know, your own belief and so on. And this is similar also to Dogen Zenji said that when you're in an argument, don't try to win.

[47:38]

Don't try to defeat the other person. Not trying to defeat the other person doesn't mean that you shouldn't express yourself. But when you express yourself, you're not trying to kill or defeat the other person. You're trying to express yourself in a way that, you know, honors everybody in the situation. And that's possible to do. It takes a little more effort. You know, because our tendency is to attack the other side somehow rather than valuing or appreciating the other side. Anyway, so when your effort is in that kind of context with that kind of spirit, then it seems quite appropriate, you know, to make that kind of effort in a variety of contexts, whether it's the meditation hall or the precinct. And when you come to the meditation hall or the sanctuary, as long as you're, you know, you have that kind of spirit or effort, then it shouldn't be so much of a problem whether you have a button or not.

[48:40]

What was your question? Her question was that she had, she was wondering, she had a political button, Clinton Gore, when she came here today and she took it off before coming into the meditation hall. And she feels, but it's something that she feels strongly about and in fact she did some precinct work recently and so is this a contradiction or are they different things or what? Yeah. So that's what I was trying to address. So my feeling is anyway the important thing is that basic spirit of being, you know, cultivating your capacity to tolerate ambiguities and differences is quite important at the same time that you have, and in some ways that's the basic, you know, thing to keep trying to express, which is also in our, you know, democracy theoretically. I heard a wonderful comedian on the radio the other day, just a part of it was on KQED radio,

[49:47]

and it was a comedian who said, if I'm elected we will all live together in a mythical village that never existed with all just beautiful families and all white kids. And they said, I know my opponent has said that he gets down on his knees and prays, but I know that when he does that he's lying. And he's not really praying. I don't know. So, you know, anyway, theoretically and, you know, at some level in America we do have that kind of, you know, tolerance and capacity to appreciate differences. And unfortunately in the political system as it is, it seems like everybody wants to attack the other side somehow and not actually, and that becomes more important than actually addressing anything, you know, substantive, which is unfortunate. But you understand that kind of difference? I mean, when I started meditation I thought

[51:02]

that you just sat still, you should just sit still. So when the thought to move would occur, I would say, shut up. You know, I'm sitting in meditation, I don't want to hear from you. I don't want to hear about moving. You know, keep it to yourself. This is a simple kind of basic example of this, you know, because my idea is to sit still. And, you know, that doesn't, it just doesn't work, you know. Then the voice comes back and says, you know, excuse me, but I really want to move. I don't care if you're meditating or what you're doing, you know, I don't like it. And, you know, the idea in meditation is not that you can eliminate that voice or that feeling. You know, that has, you know, it's much better, you know, just to acknowledge it, actually, and appreciate it. That it's actually, you know, has its place.

[52:07]

So, you know, when I, often times when I have my one day retreats, I tell people, you can move, if you want to move, you should move. And then sometimes people say later, because you gave me permission to move, it was much easier to sit still. That's the same kind of thing, actually, you know. Because people are sitting still because they want to sit still, and then they're willing to be. Also, there's a part that doesn't want to sit still, and, but then you can be with that too, and you're sitting still. Rather than just, you know, it's a heavy, rather than a heavy hand that just says no. So, all of us are in some ways, you know, we tend to set up our own little totalitarian state. You know, how our mind and how our body is going to be. Thank you very much. And we're all kind of, you know, part of, you know, meditation practices is to have a real democracy, in a sense. You know, but it's actually practical because, you know, you can theoretically talk to yourself.

[53:10]

I mean, the various voices, you can, you know, hear the various voices. And there's, so you can hear a person who wants to sit still, and there's, that's real. I don't want to be, you know, moved by, and have to do everything that occurs to me. I want some peace and quiet. I don't want to be tossed around by all my feelings. And then there's the voice that wants to move, and that something hurts and it's painful. And then you have to, there's acknowledging that, and then there's the time when you really need to act on that. You know, the moving. Hi. Dina Metzger has a wonderful exercise where you try and figure out what country you are. And whether you have a king or a council or other prisons. I mean, there's some wonderful ways to extend that. Yeah.

[54:11]

Did you hear? She said Dina Metzger has an exercise where you can try to figure out what country you are. Whether you have a king or a queen, or what kind of prisons you have, and who you keep there. Yes. You talked this morning about our feelings and our thoughts and our emotions, and how we're not those things. Things. We're something beneath that. It seems to me that people in my life, what attracts me to them, or propels me from them, or what makes them special to me, are their feelings and their thoughts, and their emotions, and how they express themselves, and various qualities they have.

[55:14]

And I'm wondering, if we're not those things, what we are, is it something that's still distinctly personal, or is it like a Buddha nature that is essentially duplicated from person to person, without all the trappings to give it a certain standard or something like that. I'm just curious. Well, both are true. See, because on one hand, anyway, so we also are our feelings and thoughts and emotions and so on. But partly it's a matter of teaching.

[56:15]

And the Buddha nature, as far as the Buddha nature, Buddha nature is not a thing. Buddha consciousness is not a thing. So whatever the form is, Buddha nature is appearing in each form, but Buddha nature is not something you can put your hand on, it's not an object. So we can't separate Buddha nature from actually apparent phenomena, and the feelings, the thoughts, the emotions. And it's actually part of the problem that we try to eliminate the thoughts and feelings and emotions, especially the ones that we don't like, in order to have the Buddha nature, in order to have the purity or the preciousness or the inherent virtue of our mind, our consciousness. We're trying to eliminate these other things, without realizing that that's it. We're trying to throw out all the emotions, the thoughts, to get to the Buddha nature.

[57:22]

And this becomes a problem then, because we can't see the Buddha nature and things as they are. So we better improve and perfect things until we can see it. You can use the teaching either way. You can say, I am not this feeling, this feeling is not me, as a way to disidentify or to detach yourself or your identity. And to have your identity at stake in every thought that happens to come along, can be quite a problem. That would be a problem, to identify yourself with everything that comes along, because it's all changing and it has a life of its own and you don't have much control over it. And at the same time, in a very real sense, we are all those things.

[58:24]

It's not as though we're separate from all those things. All those things are our life. I just want to add, because if I love somebody because of his or her qualities or emotions or beliefs or feelings, it seems like if that person really isn't that, there's something beneath that, in a way it seems to question the validity of that love. It's like I'm not loving the real person, I'm loving something that's dragons. And I wonder, I mean, that's kind of what's going on in my mind when I talk about this. It's a question that's been in my mind for a while. Well, you know, Suzuki Roshi said that somebody asked him at one of these question and answer ceremonies,

[59:29]

who are you? And, you know, traditionally in Buddhism there's various answers. One of the famous ones is, I don't know. But in this particular case, he said, I'm somebody you can see and hear and experience, and I'm also somebody who can't be known. So we're all like that. We're the person who can be seen and heard and has thoughts and expressions and appearances. And we're also somebody that is not any of those things. So both are true. So in that sense, again, if you stick to one side of it, one side or the other, then you can get lost and confused. If you say about somebody, I like the way they think, I like the way they express themselves,

[60:30]

then there comes a day when they don't think like that anymore. They don't express themselves like that anymore. And then you say, well, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. You're not expressing yourself. You're not having the feelings you used to have. So at the same time, if you're just trying to relate to what can't be related to, what are you going to do? So we're working in both worlds at the same time, with both understandings in a sense. It's not appropriate to be caught up in thoughts and feelings and emotions and so forth, and it's also not appropriate to ignore them. And the person we love is all the things that we actually see, and then it's things that we don't see. And at some point, we also have to actually...

[61:35]

It's a matter of... Life has its various sides, and we love life, finally. And a person who's there with us is life, and we find it somehow possible with that person to somehow say yes, or be willing to be in our body and in our mind and in our life, and to have some sense of gratitude or appreciation, and to see that... An example of this, for instance, the Tibetans talk about a practice of treating each person as your mother. Well, some of us have a hard time like that. My mother? Are you kidding? So they have this whole thing, though, about how all beings could have been your mother in some lifetime, and they have a whole rationale about how your mother took care of you and nourished you, and suffered on your behalf, etc., and wanted the best for you, and so forth.

[62:36]

So from a certain point of view, that's great. And if it works, it's especially good. But it's very similar to my effort to treat each person serving as Suzuki Roshi. Why not treat them as though they're Suzuki Roshi? Why am I put off by the appearance of their... wanting more? Because that's something that they're the victim of. That's not their real identity, at some point. And so, when we were at this retreat a few years ago here with Tarotoku, somebody said, well, everybody could have been your mother in some past life, but everybody could have been your murderer in a past life, too. So why would you treat everybody as your mother, rather than as your murderer? So let's be paranoid about everybody. Let's be paranoid about everybody. So who is it?

[63:42]

Who is it that is there? And each of us tends to... We have some tendency to think about people in a certain way, or the world in a certain way, and it's in our body, and it becomes embedded in our mind such that this is just natural. So we're trying to cultivate some space around this. Anyway, Tarotoku's answer to this was that when people kill somebody, then they are the victim of afflictive emotions. They're suffering these afflictive emotions, which are also what you call opportunistic. When they can, they get you. And so that's not, in a certain sense... In this sense, then, the Buddhist sense is, well, this is not really you. These afflictive, opportunistic emotions are getting the better of you.

[64:43]

But the mother's love, at least in a kind of ideal sense, or our own pure heart, or our own inherent being, is something that values others and nurtures others. And this is our, so to speak, natural or real... The nature of mind is compassionate. But when the other emotions get involved, when these other emotions get involved, we forget our original nature, so to speak. So we're kind of playing in both those worlds. We have to relate to the actual momentary expression of things. So it's also said, to know about Buddha nature, understand time and season, study circumstance and occasions.

[65:45]

It's very specific. The ethics of the moment is also the preciousness, and what's of value, and what's inherent. So they're not intended to be, in Buddhism, different, actually. And so in that sense, when you see somebody you like, and there's the emotions and so forth, you're able to see, to like that person through that stuff. It's not necessarily different. At the same time, we shouldn't be... It doesn't help when we're artificially put off by that stuff. I mean, we're put off by the... We can be also put off by the emotions and things, and we need to kind of see, can we actually be with that? Or what kind of space do we need? When we do meditation, we have kind of rules. Which allows everybody to exist, to be there in peace and harmony.

[66:53]

When you go to a different kind of group, then you have other kind of rules. Someone I know is here today, who teaches improvisational theatre. So it's wonderful, because in that, what she teaches some of the time is, you know, to be mud. You know, like, would you try being mud now, and then you can be lightning, and various things. But also what she teaches is to feel what you're feeling, and to act that. That's pretty good. And then, you know, but what would happen if we all did that? Wouldn't that be crazy? Well, in that kind of theatre, you know, you get to act all that. But you act it. You know, so you can act killing somebody, you don't actually kill them. Which is another level of acting out. But anyway, see, that's very liberating too. In its own way, to express everything, or to act everything, as opposed to act nothing.

[67:57]

So there are these, you know, various vehicles. I don't know, let's talk about... I don't know if I've helped you or not, you know, but, so I can't, I don't know what else to say, so... Yes? Are there good emotions and bad emotions? Well, we... You know, the usual distinction in Buddhism is wholesome and unwholesome. And that doesn't mean... But unwholesome emotions doesn't mean that you shouldn't have them, it just means that you have to be a little more careful working with them. But in that sense, you know, the wholesome emotions are... The unwholesome emotions are the basic ones in Buddhism, are greed, hate and delusion. The basic delusion is... Well, anyway, I don't know if I want to talk about all that, but... But the basic wholesome emotions then are the opposites.

[69:08]

You know, love, kindness and, you know, generosity and wisdom. Non-delusion. And then... But the fact that you, you know, a wholesome emotion, if you decide when you have, you know, a wholesome feeling, oh, this is really good, I really like this, I'm going to keep this. You've already shifted over to unwholesome. Oh, boy, I feel good now. Because then you get greedy, you know. Or if you have an unwholesome emotion and then you have, you know, then you hate your unwholesome emotions, now it's more unwholesome emotion. So it doesn't, you know, you can wake up, you can be awakened with either wholesome emotions or unwholesome emotions. That's not, you know, that's okay. You were talking about improvisational theater. What if, I mean, a profession that works in the emotions, some in the theater or literature or the arts,

[70:11]

I mean, essentially you're trying to evoke emotion, and Buddhism is passionate. Is that a contradiction? I disagree. Go for it, sir. That actually persists. You can see the emotions, you can sort of have a clearer perception or expression of them. Well, I'd be careful about, you know, calling Buddhism anything, you know. You know, because I wouldn't call, I don't know, you know, all these things like, dispassionate, I don't know, about Buddhism being dispassionate. I kind of figure, I don't know, to me that theater improvisation, the way we were studying, you know, looks a lot like Buddhism. You know, another example of this,

[71:14]

I mean, because I would, my own idea about Zen and Buddhism, you know, at some point I have to, I think Buddhism is knowing your heart's desire. It's about finding your own heart, and expressing your heart as much as you can in your life, and finding out how to express that. And sometimes you express yourself, and people go, excuse me, you're in love with a 19 year old? You know, who's your ex-wife's step-daughter? And then you have a lot of explaining to do. That really is your heart, you know. Or you go, well, wait a minute, is it my heart or not? I mean, theoretically, you know, we're all kind of trying to plumb ourself to find our heart, you know, the heart. And then how to express that in the world, you know. And partly we find that through that kind of question, you know.

[72:16]

And sometimes then we, you know, it helps us purify our heart or know our heart and challenge our struggles that we have in our life and the falls that we take. And so to me, that's one way of, you know, talking about it anyway. I think there are other ways. And for myself, I found that useful. You know, if I'm confused, I can look, you know, do I know my heart and what I want? You know, in terms of my you know, in terms of my heart, what do I want? You know, like this morning, I was talking about, well, I want to be generous. I want to see the Buddha nature in people. I want to appreciate others. I don't want to be, you know, just on a race to get down to the end of the row. I want to actually offer my love to each person, you know. And,

[73:19]

and I want to be able to do this as a negotiated thing. I just, I want to just offer this. This is my heart's wish. This is an example of it, you know. Well, recently I was, you know, you can, you can make a lot of distinctions between therapy and Zen. Recently I was talking to a therapist who had studied with Lacan, a French psychotherapist who's very abstruse. But apparently Lacan in a lot of ways was kind of a Zen teacher. So this person said when you walk in the doors by train, subway to Lacan's office, when you got there, there were all these people in the waiting room and then Lacan would come to the door, look around and then say, you. So you never knew how long you were going to wait. You could be there, you could have just walked in or you could have been there for hours. Okay. And then he said one time when he went in to see Lacan he said, you know, I don't really have anything because he didn't have a set length of time

[74:25]

for his visits. So then, this person, you know, who was visiting was getting kind of confused. So he starts to leave. But, you know, he's come all the way from Brussels and is this all it's going to be, you know, after coming from Brussels? And so then when he got to the door Lacan said, something else? Now, when I've talked to this person he says his idea of therapy is that you should know your own desire. That is a little similar to what I just said, right, about my idea about Zen or Buddhism. He said you should know your own desire. This is Lacan's idea too. You should know your own desire and acknowledge your own desire. But he's not talking about your heart's desire. You should know your own desire I talk about it a little bit differently. You should know your desire but then that doesn't mean you need to do that. You should know the things you want

[75:28]

and the things you wish for but that means also because you know them you can also let go of them. Some of them you do, some of them you don't. But you don't keep them in the dark. Like that's a secret that I wanted. And sometimes we, anyway, we have various problems, you know. But I don't think about, you know, if dispassion is a goal or an object, that's fine. But the way you have dispassion is to have all the emotions in the world with dispassion. Not that you have none of the emotions. And that's very similar to improvisational theater. You can have all the emotions and you kind of act them and play them and in sitting you have them and they're all, you know, bubbling up and bubbling away. While you sit. And some people, that's too much. They don't want to sit still with all that stuff bubbling and churning around. But that's a kind of dispassion. But the other is equally dispassionate. But instead of sitting with them all

[76:31]

in a big kind of space and letting them play inside, you're playing with them outside in this room. So this, I don't know, from my point of view anyway, there's different ways to do it and it's partly just your nature. Do you like improvisational theater? Or do you like sitting still? Or do you like dancing or painting? I mean, we have lots of things to do in life, fortunately. We don't all have to be Zen students. But for those of us who like it, it's fun. I really like meditating, you know. I have a friend back east who teaches kundalini yoga and those people are so nice. I really like all the people in that group. It's such a wonderful group and it's even more like Zen Center than Zen Center. It's even better than Zen Center from my point of view, you know. The people are actually really friendly. But his idea of a meditation retreat is

[77:32]

we get up in the morning, we do a little yoga, we have a period of sitting. Oh, why don't we have breakfast then? And let's clean up a little bit and then I'll do a little talk. And about noon, let's take a break. Let's relax while a few people cook lunch. Why don't we take the afternoon off after lunch? How about if we all go biking and swimming? You want to play a little tennis or boating? That would be great. I never see any people in the afternoons sitting around meditating or reading. No, get some exercise. Get some sun. Walk, enjoy yourself. Do something a little physical. Let's get together maybe around 6. Let's have another period of meditation around 6. We'll eat around 7. Maybe we can talk and visit a little bit afterwards. This is their meditation intensive. So when I go to visit, sometimes people say,

[78:38]

you know, like I went to visit, when I went to the three-month retreat in Berry, sit and walk all day long, you know, and eat and walk, and note everything, you know, walking, walking, reaching, opening, closing. Chewing, chewing, chewing, swallowing. And so when I go to this group, then people sort of look at me and then they say to their teacher, shouldn't we meditate a little bit more? I mean, look at what Ed, Ed is meditating, you know, he's doing this whole retreat for three months and they just meditate all day long and wouldn't that be really good if we did something more like that? And he says, well, you know, it's not really necessary. Ed just does that because he likes to do it. But anyway, it's,

[79:41]

to be dispassionate, you have all the emotions and then it's, you know, and somehow to be able to have the emotions without it being a problem. This is dispassion, this is equanimity and the usual strategy for having the dispassion though is to, you know, somehow, just like we were talking about before with the person, the usual strategy for dispassion or equanimity is I won't have any of that stuff. And this is a very shaky kind of, you know, equanimity or dispassion. It's very shaky because it's not, it doesn't have a real foundation. It's, you know, there's this lid on all this other stuff that would otherwise be disturbing. Why is that stuff so disturbing? You know? Well, it's disturbing because I don't like it. And well, you know, but actually we have this tremendous capacity to be able to have painful experiences without, you know, losing it.

[80:42]

And we don't always get to know that. And there's part of us that says, I don't like that, but there's another part of us that actually has, you know, the capacity, you know, with concentration and, you know, being with things very directly, very immediately to actually, you know, be with difficulty and pain and suffering. This is, and it's, you know, and it's our compassion. And it's in us and we need to, you know, at times when, you know, we're upset or somebody else is upset, you know, at times it will come up, this kind of capacity to be with it and not think it's the end of the world when, you know, we're feeling that way. And over time, this can be, you know, become a kind of equanimity or, you know, a more stable equanimity than our dispassion. And, you know, we used to joke about this at Zen Center. I don't really know how it is anymore,

[81:44]

but, you know, for a while this got so bad, you know, that nobody can say what they want, right? You go to a meeting and then nobody can say, well, I'd like us to do this because, oh, are you expressing a preference? You know, Zen people don't have preferences. And we needed to have, you know, a little communication therapy, you know, skills workshop. And so we went through this whole thing with, well, if you can't have preferences, maybe you could have a slight preference and just not be attached to it, you know, like you could express your slight preference. I have a slight preference that we don't have any. But if you all think something else, OK. Yeah. I have a question about being present.

[82:46]

First, a preliminary question. What's the address of the Kundalini Yoga place? It's the Nityananda Institute. It's in Boston. It's in Cambridge. Speaking of being present, we're all trying to practice and try to be with the good and the bad moment to moment. And one sort of dilemma, like this lady brought up in the first question that I've had, is when I go to the dentist, I have to go to the dentist and my best way to handle that is to not be present. In other words, when I'm in the dentist chair and working on a crown, you know, really drilling deep and this sort of stuff, and I find the best thing to do is pretend I'm not there, just that I'm off in a very pleasant space. But I'm now trying to backtrack to see if there's some way

[83:47]

that I can be present and be able to cope with, you know, the immediate physical pain that happens in that kind of simple situation. This is a very pleasant place, if it wasn't for this. We have some dentists here, you know, we can... Yeah, should I have a Buddhist dentist? It's okay not to be present sometimes, basically. Have you tried asking for your gas? All right, here's somebody, she would like to say something. Before we get to the big answer, I want to tell you something. You want to give a little answer. This is just my experience. I, you know, have been going to this dentist for like 25 years and the first thing people make

[84:51]

about dentists, what's the big deal, you know? But I always felt that after I left the dentist's office and I thought, it must be something in the air, it must be all those chemicals that they use, you know? But I switched to a new dentist who is actually a Buddhist dentist. And it's not because she's a Buddhist dentist necessarily, but it's because it's a new experience for me. It was like all the feelings that I had rationally suppressed all my life, now I was acting just like normal people. I was so embarrassed. I kept saying, I'm so embarrassed. I really was embarrassed, but you know what felt wonderful? It felt like being a real person. And I didn't feel bad afterwards. You went from being a Zen student to improvisational theater. Well, I don't know, you know,

[86:09]

people have different imaginary places. I'm not really into those. That's part of the reason I'm a Zen student. People say, well, imagine yourself walking down the street across a beautiful green meadow and you're like, excuse me? So I like the Zen approach, you know? Be there with it, you know? No, it's not tough it out. I found long ago that doesn't work, the toughing it out. No, it's much easier to soften it out. I mean, it's much more practical, you know? And one of the things the pain does in that sense is it encourages you to soften. Because part of what happens in sitting, one of the things that happens in sitting, I don't know if this is analogous to the dentist chair, but because you're not moving,

[87:11]

you're not acting, you're not talking, you're in places that it can't move very well, that's called pain. But over time, all those places where it can't move so well open up and then there's more energy flowing. And also that energy, when it gets to a place where it can't move, that's also called emotion. And it's old emotion sometimes, you know? It's the stuff that's been in the pipes and the energy comes in there and you have more energy. But anyway, what I was going to say is sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to be imagining other things. I mean, to the extent I've studied with Thich Nhat Hanh, I really appreciate his teaching. And he's also a Zen teacher.

[88:12]

But you find out that actually being a Zen teacher doesn't mean being Japanese, where you tough it out. And you have no outward display of emotion. And I found out this last fall at Tassajara, you know, a year ago actually, we had this special workshop and all these priests from Japan came and then all these people with brown robes came and I couldn't go to any of the meetings because I don't have a brown robe. But we did have some talks, you know, in the Zendo and the big speaker, the big, the big speaker came and we asked him, you know, when would you like to do your talk? He said, two in the afternoon. We're having a heat wave. It's 110 degrees at two o'clock in the afternoon and we're going to go sit in the Zendo with, you know, one, two, three, four layers of robes, right? And he said, well, couldn't we have the talk in the evening? You know, it's a heat wave and let's have the talk at two in the afternoon. And it turns out

[89:13]

Japanese people don't sweat and they just sit there in all their robes and they don't sweat and it's no problem. I don't understand this, you see. So, because the rest of us, the sweat is just pouring down our faces and even though you have three robes, it's soaking through, you know, three layers of cloth onto the Zabatan, you know, the sweat off of your knees and that's called American Indian sweat lodge practice. You know, nobody tells you this before you start doing Zen that it's actually, you know, it's actually this kind of, you know, new age American Indian practice. But anyway, Tikhnath Hanu...

[90:00]

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