Now, to make this practice work requires kind of mad intention, concentration. It results literally in a physical and mental fusion. Maybe we could describe it, since I've been talking about shamanism as a very civilized, sophisticated form of shamanism. Instead of doing it by out in some wilderness, we do it with others, the emphasis on bodhisattva practice. Maybe Buddha discovered this method, emphasized this method of doing it with others. But the emphasis still is on your isolated experience. The dharmas are deep because they are isolated. And in the Prajnaparamita literature this word isolated is used quite a bit.

[01:24]

is you find you don't, you give up hope. You don't really, you really don't care what happens. Somehow you have to come to that point. This nonsense story is a rebirth story too. If you don't come to that point, it's a kind of therapy, this practice. Maybe helpful, maybe you get in too deep. too, though. Can't hear? Okay. Maybe you shouldn't hear. Tsukiyoshi used to talk, pretty low voice, and it was Bush so the traffic would come in waves. He never would raise his voice or stop talking when the traffic came. And I was sitting in the front row always and I couldn't hear what he was talking about every time the light changed. And then they'd fade and he'd come back into focus. But he wouldn't stop, he just went on.

[03:00]

As if he was talking to himself. And maybe today I'm talking to myself. Because I always hesitate to lay a trip on you guys. It's bad enough as it is. So it doesn't matter, eventually, whether you're with people or not. You're always alone. But that experience doesn't, in the end, separate you from things, because you find everything is alone in the same way. But it starts out without hope, without any desire. I mean, really. Not some little desire you save over.

[04:05]

Well, people do that and it doesn't work. The chemistry of it doesn't work. So this practice in the midst of desire is pretty difficult. So Koan practice and Zazen practice are essential. Whether we call it Koan practice or not, it's the same thing. some kind of Durrani door, some kind of koan is necessary. Anyway, I think so. And to sit, as Suzukiyoshi says, on crossroads of time and space, you must really be sitting wholeheartedly or completely without reservation. So you're not just fulfilling the schedule. You're not coming here and going through the period. But it may sound strange, but really, before you come to the period, you're already, days before or weeks before or years before, you're already encouraging yourself.

[05:36]

reminding yourself, looking forward to sitting. You can hardly wait. And you'll find, if you try that, by the time you're sitting, your sitting is much more concentrated right away. So that kind of effort is necessary. And half-hearted effort, usually it's okay, but sometimes it's not so good. It stirs up people and they don't have the intention to... the fire or vow of intention necessary to fuse it. And you need something in your daily life. It can be the thought of Buddha or something, but then we emphasize that thought of Buddha in the form of a koan. So, again, you don't half-heartedly do a koan or turn a question. You take it and literally fuse your mind to it.

[07:00]

So you have the same kind of concentration, whether we call it great doubt or whatever, same kind of concentration that you have sometimes in zazen. You get in your daily mind through a koan or dharani. So you fix on something that does not leave you easy opening, some gate. But no matter how much you plummet, you don't reach the bottom of it. So you need that kind of intense curiosity or I don't know what makes us do it. but also not to get too attached to it. I found out Elizabeth is still mad as ever, sleeping, standing up. Well, they had to practically tie her down and piled, stacked things around her to hold her in place. And then she screamed for hours.

[08:31]

because she didn't want to be held, but she... Sally learned to stand up when she was... no, learned to roll over when she was only three months old, and walk when she was nine months, but Elizabeth never learned to roll over until a few days ago. So she's learned to roll over and stand up all at once. And she can now stand up anywhere without support until she realizes she's standing up without support and then she abruptly sits down again. She realizes she's up there all by herself. But she can stand there pretty indefinitely until suddenly she looks around and sees. And if she can get hold of anybody, of hand, she makes them run through the house. She grabs them and pulls them and runs. She can only take it for an hour or two and then she collapses. You know, she's so exhausted, but she won't sleep. So she can't. And she's very delicate, I'm told, because she's so exhausted, everything disturbs her. But the only thing people can describe is a kind of ecstatic state with this uprising. She's quite attached to this ecstasy of suddenly being up there. And she can't let go of it. That's not so good.

[09:54]

I want just a normal, average child. Without any... I just want, you know, some... marry a banker or a school teacher. None of this fancy stuff. I don't know about a banker, maybe a school teacher is all right. I have my prejudices. Anyway, we can, this practice can teach you a kind of standing up where you get a view of which it's ecstatic making. Please don't get attached to it. Somehow it requires maybe the fanaticism of Elizabeth's attempting to stand up and walk, and the relaxed quality

[11:23]

at ease quality of Ryokan. You know, several of his poems are, he has just enough rice in the house and it's storming outside in the, you know, he's been begging all day and he's glad to get back and reads a few of Hanshan's poems and he stretches his legs out and says, who the hell cares about Satori? And the poems end with him stretching his legs out. What does it matter? That at ease is required too, but that is an at ease which knows the consequential. It isn't living casually, not knowing consequences of his actions. How to live really so you don't harm anything? At least as much as possible. people start out with pretty good intention. If we go back to beginnings of scientific and industrial revolution, they were motivated, you know, if you read about Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon, they were motivated by wanting to help people, wanting to

[12:57]

make the lot of people easier, so they especially emphasize inventions. An iron plow was invented, I believe Jethro Tull's seed drill, and it changed Holland and England particularly, changed their agriculture tremendously. France and Germany and Russia, the peasant moved more into kind of slavery. But the peasants became the, you know, lords. A few of the lords were quite good at organization, but not so good at farming. And as soon as the peasants' situation was better, they produced tremendously more food. And in Holland, where so much capital was put into producing, you know, getting land back from the sea with dikes, they figured out

[14:02]

you know, crop rotation, so they could use the land all the time in the winter and so forth. So pretty soon, instead of having, you know, 80% of the people on farms and producing only 10 or 20% more than their own needs, you had about a third of the people living on farms producing 60 or 70% more than they needed. which allowed industrial revolution to happen. So there were people to wander about and think about things, go off in ships, work in factories, and so forth. And they'd been through a period of so many religious revolutions and political creation of European state. famine and plague and terrible wars, but they, when Bacon founded his first society, it's met at, believe it or not, a place called the Bullhead Tavern in Cheapside, London, and they thought they were doing something wonderful. And they decided they would discuss everything but metaphysics and politics and religion

[15:31]

and morality, all the things that had got everybody in trouble, and they would stick to the facts. So they never looked at their own metaphysical basis. And they discussed how to improve things, and amazingly, thoughtfully, they extrapolated telephones and flying and everything, their ideas. But also, they were interested in power. They saw it as to increase your power, and power meant power over first, to increase your own power within your country, then to increase your country's power, like colonial empire. But most benign and honorable was to increase your power over the environment, over nature, which has led to our problem right now.

[16:34]

And no one even examined that until very recently. And power. Did I talk about balloons and baby carriages and power here? No? No. Yes? No. Well, all right. Well, it's like I can remember Tillich saying in a lecture I went to once, the urge... didn't I talk about that? The urge to power? Anyway, he talked about the urge to power and how it was okay. It has sat with me as a kind of koan ever since. I just didn't get it, you know? I didn't... and I don't... now I'm quite clear that I don't think the urge to power is so great. But the power itself is a fact, you know. I talked about it at the meeting, the council meeting, but not here, huh? Yeah, I talked about it. But power is a fact, like a horse has four legs and a heart, so it has power. Or if you're walking down a dark street and five young men are walking along toward you,

[17:58]

You feel some power. You may be quite nervous. But if they're pushing baby carriages and holding balloons, you know, you'll feel, oh, it may be all right, you know. And, you know, but Bacon's idea was that those five people with that power should exercise it. But I don't see why. They have power just by the fact that they could do something together. If there's a house burning, they could go in and try to rescue the people. But there's no need to exercise it unless it's necessary. But Zen Center makes people nervous, you know, in America, in the Bay Area. Some people we make nervous because... And this is an aspect of the restaurant which concerns me. our visibility. I think it's unavoidable, our visibility. But it does concern me, because our society is wary of any, you know, loitering on street corners, more than two or three people having a conversation, anything that smacks of revolution or groups. And what people see in Zen Center is two or three hundred people walking down the street

[19:27]

You know? And not with balloons and baby carriages, but with shaved heads, black robes. It makes people rather nervous. They can't figure out what we're going to do. Like if you can't read the person walking down the street at night, you may be nervous. But if you can read them, they give you some signal, it's okay, like hearing balloons. So we have to As long as people can't read us, they'll get nervous. So maybe bakery is like a balloon, a restaurant is like a balloon. Don't worry, we're just a harmless bunch of Buddhists, he says. But whenever of people do things together, it is actually some power. And we're not now a group of people meeting at the Bullhead Tavern in Cheapside, London, you know, not talking about metaphysics and morals and so forth, but we are meeting to talk about morals and metaphysics and so forth.

[20:49]

And the way a politician nowadays is credible is to indicate that he's religious or goes to church or even hangs out with Zen Buddhists. It's amazingly become a kind of credibility. So we've gone from, you know, the Bullhead Tavern to Harrisburg. And their intention was quite good, you know. And I don't know about our intention. Some of you think it's pretty good. I don't know, you know. Long-range effect. But emphasis in Buddhism is so much to leave things alone.

[22:06]

knowledge or wisdom is freedom, you know, is emptiness, is to know non-existence of things, not to know how to control them. It's quite different, you know. I hope it doesn't pile up so many troubles as fast as industrial revolution did. So to know what's consequential and what's inconsequential is necessary to really be at ease. Or your casual way of life leads to even good intentions, you know, leads to Harrisburg. Or killing a cat. I was thinking,

[23:15]

The three or four or ten cats, you know, in the springtime, whenever there's one time of year when there's more than ever. I guess it's late spring. Every time that happened, instead of drowning the cats, Roshi went down Teramachi Street, which is a rather busy street with movie theaters in an area called Piccadilly Square, believe it or not. which has a very beautiful Buddha in it, a great Buddha in a cement building in Piccadilly Square. It's one of those buildings they built so it's fireproof. There's some porno movies and a frequented urinal and a lot of stalls and things. And then right in the middle is this cement building and you open it and it's this gigantic black Buddha, with great white eyes, looks down on you. Thoughts sink. Maybe, did I give you that postcard? I gave it to you. It's so good. I often go in there. The contrast is wonderful. And it feels you're about the knee. The knee isn't that big, but it feels very big. It's quite big, actually.

[24:35]

I don't know, maybe it's... I can't remember, but its legs might be as wide as between these two posts. Its knees. Anyway, it's quite big. Maybe not that big, but quite big. Is it that big? It's at least as big as the door right there. Yeah. I think it's bigger than that. It's quite big anyway. Way bigger. It's not as big as the one in Nara, which is like a skyscraper. Anyway, to go down Piccadilly Square and Teramachi Street. Teramachi means the street of temples, but it's really a street of shops, mostly now, where the temple's hidden, the ones that are left behind, the shops. You can hold up a cat saying, look what you're doing, and cutting it in half. Look what all you're doing. You'd probably be arrested. But if you kill the cats casually,

[26:01]

at the Temple No One Mocks. I don't think he should walk down the street and do it, but, you know, it's interesting, there's such a difference. Maybe you can only do it to an initiated audience, like the monks of the West Hall and East Hall, who might understand. Please know consequences of your existence. I'm sure suicide kills many, many more people than anything else. And we can't let ourselves be, so many of us, so many people. Quite a number of times in Zen Center we've had to try to stop someone from committing suicide. Try to let them make their own decision. But we find out how fragile we are

[27:28]

this amazing life we value so too much, we suddenly realize how dramatic it is, how simple it is to end it, and yet how dramatic it is for everyone, but meaningless. So let us ourselves be. So Sazen practice is involved, realisation is involved in this, as many of you who see the effort that goes into concentration and then no concentration except at some point where you give up. How this practice is a mixture of tremendous effort, effort of fusion and acceptance and giving up at the same time.

[28:34]

Just as it is, is okay. How are we going to find a way to live? How are we going to find a way to live with others? How is anyone going to find a way to live? So many people find it so difficult. And there's so little we can do. Occasionally, when we have a chance to do something, without the basis. So the only support, really, that son or daughter of good family needs is the Dharma, unsupported anywhere.

[29:47]

And this can't be found out with anyone's help, not with my help or your friend's help. We can defend you and protect you and support you, each other, but realization of our existence, of our Dharma nature, Buddha nature, is up to your complete intention. until that intention penetrates. Not by some big effort, but like, as Sukhirshi says, maybe fine rain. Walking, he used to say, walking in the mist. Mist penetrates more than just rain, which would wash off until you're soaked through and through. You have no other intention but to practice

[30:56]

The practice becomes your word for being alive. At ease, stretching your legs out in your cabin, you know freedom of consequential and inconsequential activity. I should say something about Buddha, the thought of Buddha. I often say Buddhism doesn't exist, or Buddha, there's no Buddha, no Dharma, no Bodhisattva. And yet I'm very grateful that we have Buddha and altars. I used to be skeptical about them, but I like them still.

[32:13]

No, just black. And I can say Buddha does not exist, but really Buddha exists for me. I can't say, not as God, but I can't say exactly how. But I feel very deep respect for this Buddha, this real possibility of life that has been given to us. This mountain, you know, Lucky Mountain, Flag Rock, I sometimes call it Mount Shogaku for Tsukuroshi, Lucky Mountain, Tsukuroshi's name, Mount Shogaku. From here, it's so beautiful mountain from down here, quite wonderful, unphotographable. I tried to photograph it, but very beautiful. And today, strips of dark and bright across it.

[33:39]

and so many textural shades of green. Anyway, it's a very beautiful, protective mountain. But from other places it's inconsequential, a little hill, the lower end of a rather long ridge, and it doesn't look like a mountain at all. And Buddhism to me is like that, Buddha is like that. From one point of view, there's no Buddha, just people. From another point of view, people understand there is this Buddha. And we can relate to it just as we see this mountain. And from one point of view, Sukhiyasi was a rather ordinary fellow. long line, part of a long ridge of people. And yet if we know him, we see him as a mountain, a great lucky mountain for us.

[35:02]

and I and you, we're just ordinary people, too. But we've been... we've had gift, you know, of this glimpse of Suzukiyoshin, of this mountain. So I think we know something about ourselves and how to live. Not much, but Somehow we're clearer than we were. And I hope we're not so attached. And this, you know, gap in the clouds, even though very small, it's very difficult to have it in your culture, because usually you are... Any change, you know, this koan starts out

[36:17]

with road of ideas is impossible to break. But if you see some gap where ideas don't reach, turn your attention there immediately. And if you see where explanations don't reach, Set your sights on that immediately, quickly. If you can see where explanation doesn't reach and you can see where a road of ideas don't reach, set your attention and sight on that immediately. That's very difficult even though France and Germany see England and Holland become so productive. It still takes hundreds of years right next door for them to change their agriculture or change what they plant and so forth, change the relationship of people to each other. Very difficult to make any change. And only recently are we beginning to have our diet affected by many

[37:49]

crops, of ways of eating, of the Orient, even though we've had contact with China and Japan for a long time now, centuries. But their diet was too strange. Marco Polo could bring back stringy flour and call it spaghetti. It starts out as udon or noodles. But that's not much. That's just shapes. It takes a long time to change, and because we had brief warm light of Suzuki Roshi, of seeing this mountain, separate mountain, for a moment, I think maybe we're a little clearer than we were. For a moment we've escaped from our culture.

[38:53]

This is, to me, a great treasure that we can make use of. And this is Buddha too. Buddha is that being which gives us some chance to escape from bonds of ideas and explanations. and chain of suffering. And Buddha, historical person, somehow we keep carrying him, not as a burden but as a relief. So stature of Buddha reaches many millions of people. and is great relief in Piccadilly Square, and great relief at Tassajara, may be great relief to America. It's very real, this Buddha. And you can take refuge in Buddha, and Dharma, and Sun. And we know Buddha by your taking refuge in Buddha.

[40:25]

Buddha is real and yet depends on you. Your recognition of Buddha and taking refuge in Buddha continues Buddha, makes Buddha visible for others. So someone in this long line of tag has tapped you and said, you're it. I don't know why you're it, you know. I don't know what got you here, why you deserve to be it. But somehow you're it. Center of universe. isolated on top of Mount Shogak, standing in middle, sitting in middle of twentieth century, but part of known stream of many centuries.

[42:00]

This is to be ordinary fellow too, but ordinary at any time. And please find out how to live this way, this way of life.

[42:31]

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