It came partly because, you know, we had a visit a day or two ago, 16 Japanese priests who are abbots of temples that are sub-temples of Rinzō-in, which is Suzuki Roshi's home temple in Japan, our founder, and his son was here, his son is now the abbot of Rinzō-in. this head temple for 15 sub-temples, so there were 16 abbots here. And it turns out, Galen pointed out to me that nobody would sit next to him, either at the dining room table or up at the Zenda because he's too important. And see, this is the sort of thing that, as Americans, like we don't get it, so we just go and sit down. Hey, how you doing? And it reminded me somehow of, I guess I'll wait a moment.

[01:12]

Is that a chair? So this has reminded me of a time at Tassara when Suzuki Roshi was here and one of the students said to him one day, we were having some kind of tea or event, and one of the students said to him, Suzuki Roshi, why haven't you enlightened me yet? I mean, they won't even sit next to the person, let alone sort of like ask him a kind of insulting kind of question.

[02:14]

But that's sort of the way we think often with teachers. You know, like, what have you done for me lately? Or why don't you do more for me? And it's part of our relationship of looking for somebody to rescue us, somebody to save us, and then when they haven't, or they stop doing the rescuing, then we get upset and angry and resentful. And this is true not just with teachers, you know, but in relationships where, you know, your partner can save you for a while, but then the honeymoon is over, about three months, is it? Ninety days, and then, you know, at some point anyway, the partner can't save you anymore. And this is the cause for kind of resentment. Anyway, Suzuki Roshi said, I'm making my best effort. It was so, you know, simple and sweet. And that's about all any of us can do.

[03:27]

It's just to make our best effort, even though from other people's point of view, we're not doing enough. You know, it's not good enough. And interestingly enough, of course, we get a lot of that sort of not good enough in our lives from other people, and then often we get into the habit of telling ourselves not good enough, what you just did, or what you just said, or how you're living your life. So the other night when I talked, I talked about Zen in terms of re-inhabiting your life, or re-inhabiting your body, re-inhabiting your being. And I think it's a little hard to... I don't know whether this is a useful kind of metaphor or terminology for you,

[04:35]

but I know for myself, I notice how easy it is to become involved in thinking and plans and the future, the past. And at various times, you know, there's nobody home. There's actually a saying in Zen which I appreciate very much in this regard. It's very simple. Take off the blinders and unpack the saddlebags. So this gives you the idea, in a similar sense to what it is to re-inhabit your body, re-inhabit your being. It's like, why don't we practice arriving? Instead of always going somewhere, heading to somewhere that might be better than here. And then we're trying to get there. We're trying to get somewhere else other than here.

[05:40]

And so we get quite focused in on a whole agenda and a plan, what we're trying to accomplish or bring about or make happen, the person we might become. And we forget about arriving in the present moment. The blinders, you know, are what the horses have on so that they just look straight ahead. And they will just go straight ahead, following the proverbial carrot, you know, which is held just out of their reach. But when we've arrived, we can take off the blinders and we can actually sit down or walk or stand or eat or sit or talk. And we're exactly where we are. We're just here. And it's pretty simple. And like Suzuki Roshi is saying,

[06:48]

I'm making my best effort. It's kind of simple, kind of sweet. And the saddlebags, we have a lot, of course, in our saddlebags. Have you noticed? And some of it doesn't seem like it would be very useful, and we think maybe we'd better keep it hidden away someplace. And other things seem like maybe we could offer them to others or share them with others. But if you carry that stuff around with you all your life, it gets really heavy and burdensome. And we need to find some way to unpack what we've got stored in our saddlebags. This is also similar, this notion of re-inhabiting your body, re-inhabiting your being.

[08:06]

You know, actually being able to be at home in your being. It's not so easy. We have a home, sometimes in the world, we have a place to live. But often, as soon as we bring our awareness into our body, into our being, we find something uncomfortable. And it's not so easy to be at home there. You know, a body has aches and pains and gets hot and cold, and we get cuts, sores. What kind of a home is that? It's not very safe to be in a body, to be embodied, you know, and to be incarnate in this life. And yet, you know, the alternatives are kind of these imaginary places,

[09:10]

trance states, you know, a nice samadhi, kind of live in a god realm someplace for a while. Or, but because it's so, you know, uncertain and painful and, you know, at times distressing to be in our body, we tend to, our spirit or mind or awareness tends to wander around and look for some other place we might be. So we keep traveling and journeying instead of arriving and settling, making ourself at home in our body. So I wanted to tell you another poem, you know, as best I can remember it, a poem by Kabir. Kabir, I think most of you know, was an Indian mystic who was raised, I forget, you know, anyway, he had some background both in Hinduism and Islam. And then was kind of,

[10:19]

went his own way, as it were, because he, and he kind of made fun of the fact that people kind of get attached to the form of religion without worrying so much about the spirit. And he was quite interested in the true spirit of religion, as it were. Anyway, the poem goes something like this. I said to the wanting preacher inside me, well, what is that river you want to cross? There's no one on the river road. Do you see anyone wandering on that bank? There's no one on the river road. There's no river. There's no boat. There's no boat, man. No tow rope, no one to pull it. There's no earth, no sky, no bank, no board, no time, and no body and no mind.

[11:24]

Enter into your own body then. There you'll find a solid place to put your feet. Think about it carefully. Don't go off somewhere else. Kabir says this, just throw away all imaginary things and stand firm in that which you are. I really like that line. Enter into your own body then. There you'll find a solid place to put your feet. Think about it carefully. Don't go off somewhere else. There's a lot of imaginary somewhere else's that we tend to go off to. This is a simple best effort that we can make, is to be in our own being and to have our feet in our feet, in our hands, in our hands.

[12:34]

This is part of the reason why we have forms, as in Zen practice and yoga. This week we're having a yoga Zen workshop, so some of us are doing a couple periods of yoga each day. There's a particular form. There's a particular way to do it. One of the things it does is, in order to do the form, you have to have your awareness of the form. In your body, otherwise you can't do it. It's as simple as that. You can't have your awareness somewhere else and do yoga. Not this style of yoga, where you have to turn your right thigh 90 degrees out of your body, press down the ball of the big toe of the right foot, you know, press down the outside of the left heel, extend through the right fingertip, and if you start doing all that stuff, I mean, you've got to be home.

[13:41]

Those kind of things don't happen when your awareness is somewhere else. It's just impossible. And sitting Zazen is the same way. You can't sit up straight when you're not there. And this is one of the usefulness, very basic simple usefulness of having the kind of emphasis there is in Zen, of sitting up straight. Because Suzuki Roshi said, just to take this posture is to have the right state of mind. And it's not like something better or something happens. But when you slump or slouch, you're not home anymore. Your awareness is wandering off in some kind of thinking. And by bringing your awareness back to your body, you sit up straight, you straighten up again, and you're at home again, you're back. So this right state of mind is just to be, have your body in your body, your awareness in your

[14:54]

being. And many things we do, of course, are like that. When we cook for others, for ourselves or others, we have to actually be there. We have to notice how things are going. I often say that if something in the kitchen is outside of your awareness too long, it usually reappears. When it reappears, it will have some complaint. It's likely it will be burned or there'll be some problem with it. And this is the way it is with our own bodies or with our own beings. When we ignore or go away for too long from our own body, being,

[16:00]

mind, feelings, when things come back, they complain. You know, our body complains. If you haven't done yoga for a while, your body will complain. If you haven't done sasana for a while or if you've never done sasana in your life and you sit down on your cushion and you have to try to inhabit your body, it will hurt. It's very simple. So there's something to making a basic commitment to inhabit one's being. This is very important. And whether you actually do it or not, moment after moment, none of us are, you know, that developed that we're going to be able to do this moment after moment. But in fact, because we make the commitment, we can keep coming back

[17:03]

into our being and acknowledge what's going on in our being. And we'll, in this way, you know, be in a certain sense much more realistic and we'll actually be able to make food and take care of things because we're present. When we go away too long or too much, then things inside get stale and stagnant and mixed up and confused and then it's much more difficult. Of course, we're all in this position of having to sort things out later on. But most of us, at some point in our lives, have had very difficult and painful experiences. And as soon as you really go into your body, into your being, they'll be there. But there's no alternative to re-inhabiting your own being and re-owning the experiences that we've had, unpacking them.

[18:11]

And this is how we grow and how we, you know, in a sense, become beautiful. Not that it's so important to be beautiful, but someone, who was it, Camus or somebody who said, by the time you're 50, you're responsible for your face? I wanted to also tell you, offer you one of the koans from what's called the Blue Cliff Record. When I first heard about the Blue Cliff Record, I thought it was some kind of LP, but it turns out it's a collection of stories with commentary. So I'm going to read you the story. I think it's nice to know about this story,

[19:15]

because when you go down to the baths and you go across the bridge, there's an altar there, and on the altar there's a picture, it's a little painting, and there's 16 arhats there, and they're in the process of scrubbing themselves in various ways, and they're in various kinds of parts of the, you know, the plunge, and some of them are, and they're sitting there, and then some of them have towels, and others are sort of, you know, washing themselves. Anyway, this is the story that goes with the 16 arhats that are pictured down there, when you go to the baths. So when you go to the baths, you can think of, you know, this story, and the 16 bodhisattvas there, or arhats, will remind you, 16 bodhisattvas. So this is the 16 bodhisattvas go in to bathe. In olden times, there were 16 bodhisattvas. When it was time for monks to wash, the bodhisattvas filed in to bathe. Suddenly, they awakened to the basis of water.

[20:17]

All of you, Chan-worthies, how will you understand their saying, subtle feeling reveals illumination, and we become children of Buddha. To realize this, you too must be extremely piercing and penetrating. So that's the story. Of course, one of the questions raised in the commentary is, well, a lot of people go into the baths and bathe, and they don't get awakened. Why not? 16 bodhisattvas went into the baths and awakened to the basis of water. What is water? How is it here? And then they said, subtle feeling reveals illumination. We become children of Buddha.

[21:24]

So this part of the commentary I started to tell you about, people these days also go in to bathe. They also wash in water, and they feel it this way. Why then don't they awaken? They're confused and obstructed by the objects of senses. They stick to their skins and cling to their bones. That's why they can't wake up immediately, then and there. Here, if there's nothing attained in washing or feeling or in the basis of water, if there's nothing attained, then tell me, is this subtle feeling reveals illumination or not? At this point, if you see directly, then this also is subtle feeling reveals illumination, and we become children of Buddha. People these days feel too, but do they perceive its subtlety? Subtle feeling is not ordinary feeling and feeler,

[22:31]

where contact is considered feeling and separation is not. It also says, since they didn't wash off the dirt and they didn't wash their bodies, what did they wash? And then it says, absence of attainment is true wisdom. So we're hoping at this point that none of you understand. I think this is another kind of a sweet story, don't you? And I also like that when you go to bathe and if you don't have any special feeling about bathing and it doesn't seem to be awakening,

[23:33]

here it says that if you're careful about that, you'll realize that that's also awakening. To awaken is to be in your body, in your experience, to experience it closely and carefully, to know it, to bring it to light, to bring it out of the darkness, to make your experience awake. And not every awake experience is some big deal. Most of our awake experiences are rather simple, rather ordinary experiences. But because we look for something more profound and better and wonder, is this as good as it gets, not good enough? Why haven't you? And we say to our experience, well, why haven't you enlightened me yet? And our experience, the feeling of the water on our body, the taste of tea in our mouth, is saying, I'm making my best effort.

[24:38]

And all the time we are having an experience which is making its best effort and we're saying, excuse me, not good enough. Why haven't you done more for me? And then sometimes because our experience is not doing enough for us, you know, we get stoned or we have alcohol or we try to, you know, have a love affair or do something to produce a more powerful experience, which is going to do more for us. This doesn't help us to come home very well and to stop overlooking our moment after moment, our experience, which is simple and ordinary and doing the best it can. So I want to give you a personal kind of story about this, like this, number of years ago when I was still the Tenzo here, so it must have been around 1968 or nine,

[25:45]

perhaps. And I was cooking for the Sesshin and in Sesshin we eat all of our meals in the meditation hall. And in those days, there's a certain period of time in Zen Center's history when a number of people here were serious about macrobiotics, so-called Zen macrobiotics. If you're familiar with Zen macrobiotics, you know that the top of the line Zen macrobiotic diet is 100% brown rice. And then, you know, it's not quite as good if you have 10% vegetables and 90% rice and so on, you know, and then you can, but you have to have your brown rice every day or, you know, you're going to have problems, especially if you're a Zen macrobiotic and a believer in this diet. So we ate a lot of brown rice to try to placate.

[26:48]

This group. Anyway, I won't tell you too much about macrobiotics, it's okay. It's basically what you need to know about this story is that we were eating a lot of brown rice and then every fifth day or so, every fifth day we would have white rice, which was a little hard on our... This is what happened with the white rice, right? You get a little white rice and... Anyway, for the last dinner of Sashina, I decided, why don't we have some potatoes? So... Marianne.

[28:06]

Do we want to light a lamp or two? There's one right behind you, Ed. Okay. I guess it's going to go back on in a minute anyway, right? Well, this reminds me of a story.

[29:24]

There is actually a rather famous Zen story about the lights going out and there was a Zen teacher named Tokusan who was a great scholar of the Diamond Sutra and he carried around all the commentaries on his back, big pack. And he was traveling around China and he thought he was kind of poo-pooed the Zen teachers who didn't seem to understand things from his point of view as well as he did. And one day he stopped at a little roadside stand, as it were, a little tea shop. And he asked if he could have some rice cakes, some tea cakes and some tea and there was a woman there. Every so often these wise women show up in Zen stories. And the word for, in Chinese, for tea cake apparently is mind refresher. Mind refresher is the word for tea cake. So the lady

[30:32]

said, Oh, and by the way, what are those? What is that you have on your back? And he said, It's my commentaries on the Diamond Sutra. And she said, Oh, really? The Diamond Sutra? I've heard it said in the Diamond Sutra that the past no longer exists. The future isn't here yet. The present can't be grasped. What mind are you going to refresh? Past mind is gone. Future mind hasn't arrived. Present mind can't be grasped. What mind will you refresh? And he was stumped. So he didn't get any tea cake. And instead of saying, would it be possible for me to study with you? He said, Is there a Zen teacher nearby? And she said, There is indeed. And I think his name was something like

[31:33]

Dragon Pond. Anyway, so he went to the monastery and ended up meeting the Zen teacher there and they had a talk late into the night. And then when he was about to go back to his room, the teacher gave him a lantern and said, Oh, you'll need a lantern to see where you're going. And then as he went out the door, the teacher blew out the lantern so he was in the dark, just as he was about to leave. And then he was awakened when the light went out. So I decided to make some potatoes. And of course, I hadn't had any experience in cooking potatoes. Just rice. Yeah, just rice. Meal after meal. We were kind of more predictable in those days,

[32:36]

you know, and kind of, well, whatever the word you want to use. The one that came to my mind is sort of anal. We thought we were doing sort of pure practice, like keep things simple and, you know, do the same thing day after day. Anyway, it has its advantages. I don't know. It simplifies menu planning. So I decided to make potatoes and I thought, well, let's have baked potatoes. And then I thought, because then we have our meals in these little bowls, so we could have baked potatoes in the first bowl and then we could have like some peas or something in one of the other bowls. And somewhere we get some sour cream and green onions and butter. Anyway, so we're going to have like a real baked potato and the whole deal. And then you have to pass the condiments

[33:41]

down. But I had it all worked out, you know. So we got all these potatoes and we scrubbed them and washed them and then we baked them. Or we tried to bake them. Because these are big ovens and we put lots of potatoes in there and, you know, an hour went by and they weren't getting done. And then an hour and a half had gone by and, you know, and then in our tradition, of course, when the bell rings, the food is served. And at some point I had noticed these are not getting done. And I turned the heat up and, you know, and it's getting closer and closer to time and they're still not getting done. So it came time for the meal and we served them anyway. And you can kind of tell, you know, somehow people in the Zen Do somehow have a certain kind of radar. They know like, this is good. I don't know, they smell the potato or something, you know, but somehow there's some subtle feeling that people are getting eliminated with whatever it is.

[34:45]

And so there was a kind of excitement. And especially people start to see potato being served. Wow. So, and everybody was very eager to eat. You know, we make people wait, you know, because everybody has to be served. And then, well, at dinner we just then we finally we bow and we can eat. Most of the meals we have to go through a whole chant. And then this is actually so that you salivate properly before you eat. There's really no religious significance. Anyway, finally it's time to eat. And I was in the back and I was kind of dreading this whole thing. I was watching Suzuki Roshi. And you know what you have to eat with is a spoon and chopsticks. This works really well with rice, but with a half-baked potato. It has its limitations. And he took his spoon, you know, and went to eat the potato and nothing

[35:58]

happened. The spoon kind of bounced off. And his expression became rather puzzled. But not too puzzled. Suzuki Roshi was someone who did a lot of rock work. So he took out his chopsticks. And what you do with rock work is you make a hole. Then you make a whole sort of series of holes. And then you can kind of, you know, chip it. Yeah, chip a piece off along those series of holes. So he actually managed to eat a fair amount of this. Anyway, obviously I hadn't realized that, if you haven't, I mean, first of all, what I've found

[37:11]

out since then is that the ovens here, the propane does not burn as hot as natural gas. So the ovens don't get as hot as a regular oven. And then secondly, if you fill it up, the more stuff you put in there, you know, the more heat it takes. Because it just takes all that heat just to, you know, the more stuff, you just have one potato in there. Okay, all the heat can go into that one potato. But if there's 50 or 80 potatoes in there, then it takes more heat. Much more heat to get into all those potatoes than just a couple of potatoes. So it's a completely different scale than if you do potatoes at home. It's a completely different timing. And you can't follow the recipe. So anyway, I didn't know that, you know, and I was just trying to make a nice meal for people at the end of Sashim. And then, of course, at the end of the meal, we serve hot water so that people can clean their bowls.

[38:15]

And then we come around with little buckets and collect the hot water. So there was a lot of little pieces of potato in this water. Maybe we could have made potato soup. But anyway, I didn't, I felt kind of badly. But I didn't feel too badly because I actually had this kind of feeling like, well, I made my best effort. I tried, I wanted to, you know, give people something delightful to eat. And it just didn't work out. So the next Sashim, I decided to serve mashed potatoes. And there's a simple fact about mashed potatoes that I didn't realize. Not having made mashed potatoes before, I thought there won't be any problem about getting this

[39:24]

cooked. Cook it well ahead of time. But what I didn't understand about mashed potatoes is, if you notice this, like with eggs, people will eat one hard-boiled egg, but they'll eat like four or five scrambled eggs. Eggs, if they're scrambled. It's the same thing with mashed potatoes. If it's one big baked potato, people will eat one potato. But if it's mashed, somehow that potato just doesn't look like mine. And so you need two or three potatoes per person instead of just one potato per person. These mashed potatoes were really good, but, you know, the people at the front of the row wanted a lot. They wanted their bowls filled up. So by the time the servers got to the back of the row, they didn't have much left to put in the bowls. So it was another fiasco.

[40:25]

So perhaps this is a little bit like... I heard there was somebody now... Who was that? There was someone who now writes about the Holocaust, and he was in the concentration camps, and he decided that this would make good material for his lectures after the war. And it's what kept him going, because he sort of was studying, you know, and accumulating material to use in his books and talks later. So my potato fiascos are really funny now. At the time, it was kind of painful. But I know I was making, you know, I made, again, I was making a sincere effort. So I didn't worry about it too much. And, you know, people thought it was pretty funny. Not right away, but... A little bit later. And so just because, you know, things don't work out so well, there's not any reason not to.

[42:15]

You know, the important point won't be whether things work out so well, or you are recognized for your great achievement, but just the fact that you made a good effort to take care of your life or your responsibilities. Suzuki Rush used to say the same thing, of course, about relationship. He said, you know, somebody who thinks I'm a good husband, you know, may not be such a good husband. But somebody who says, who keeps trying to be a good husband, even though they have difficulties and limitations. This is a good husband, or a good wife, somebody who keeps making this effort. Which is different than whether, you know, somebody else appreciates it, or even recognizes it, or respects it.

[43:18]

But that's, again, what else are we going to do? And this is a simple basis of our life. Today, once again, I was reminded, we're up in the meditation hall around noon, our yoga group, when Gay Lin or someone comes in to offer the Buddha tray, we make up a little red lacquer tray and there's little bowls of food in it. And during the drum that sounds, we offer it to the Buddha. And nowadays at lunch, after the drum stops, we come in and take it away from the Buddha. I mean, that's that. He doesn't have much time to enjoy it. We offer it and then we take it away. And I used to think, you know, I used to just, for years, I just thought this was the stupidest thing. Like, what are we doing? I mean, aren't we Americans? Or, I mean,

[44:22]

what's the point? I mean, doesn't that sound strange to you? I mean, put some food on some altar in front of some statue? And more recently, I think, isn't this lovely? I mean, isn't this what happens to our effort? We cook something and we sort of put it out there in the world and it disappears. And, you know, we did something, or like this, you put it in front of the Buddha and then you take it away. And that's most of where our effort goes. It's not like anything, you know, like that much comes back. And that's our life, is just to make this offering. To make an offering of what we do. And that's that. You make the offering and you bow. This is what I have to offer. The potatoes are kind of hard. There's not enough mashed potatoes. And we make our best effort. And it doesn't always look so good and the Buddha doesn't say,

[45:28]

oh, thank you. Other people most of the time won't say, you know, so much, thank you, or I appreciate your effort or anything. So it seems to me a pretty nice kind of metaphor, the offering of food and bowing. I don't know the real reason why that thing is done, or if there is a real reason, but this is my feeling about it now. About subtle feeling reveals illumination. And we become children of Buddha. And it's clearly about someone who is no longer sane to their experience. A very simple experience perhaps, not good enough, but somebody entering into their experience fully so that a very simple experience of eating becomes something that is awake.

[46:34]

So this is the way the sonnet goes. Round apple, smooth banana, melon, gooseberry, peach. How all this affluence speaks, death and life in the mouth. I sense, observe it in a child's transparent features. While she tastes, this comes from far away. What miracle is happening in your mouth? Instead of words, discoveries flow out, astonished to be free. Dare to say what apple truly is. This sweetness that feels thick, dark, dense at first, is exquisitely lifted in your taste, goes clarified, awake, luminous, double-meaning, sunny, earthy, real. Oh, knowledge, pleasure, joy, inexhaustible.

[47:47]

And so this is the kind of experience that's possible when we come into our being, when we come into our experience, and allow our experience to, we receive our experience closely, intimately, and allow it to awaken us. And even if nothing, if we don't awaken, this not awakening is something that we can be awake to. Even if it's not subtle feeling reveals illumination, this also is subtle feeling, reveals illumination. So thank you very much for being here, appreciate your company.

[49:15]

It's late in the evening, so we try to keep the area right outside the dining room quiet this time, and also we move the chairs here, we try to move the chairs quietly, carefully so that not to disturb people upstairs who may be sleeping already. Okay, thank you. Thank you.

[49:44]

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