Is that different? What's the difference? You have to count to know how many people there are. You have to count, that's right. What's that do to you? It pushes you out of immediate consciousness into borrowed consciousness. So this is a... This is the point I was making earlier. The thing I've taught so often is the distinction between immediate consciousness, borrowed consciousness and secondary consciousness. So what does Yangshan do when he gets this question?

[01:05]

He refuses to count. He goes to ground, literally. And of course, Guishan and Yangshan know exactly what's going on. I mean Guishan is just trying to have a conversation with him and to see playing mischievously and seeing where the conversation goes. How will Yang Jian answer? It's not so much a test as a fooling around. A kind of playing between these two men. And in the playing, they're trying to also develop what's right in the introduction, a silent discourse before speech.

[02:24]

Like all these things, they have to be practiced. They have to be practiced to let them have their own power. So let me tell, I don't know, just a little anecdote that I just thought up. Is a friend of mine, Michael Murphy, And his wife, Dulcy, had a dog. And that dog had this remarkable consciousness. And when I'd be sitting, talking with Michael, and the dog would get up and go over and lie down by the door.

[03:45]

And Michael would say, oh, Galsi's on the Golden Gate Bridge. And I got used to it. After a while, I just said, oh, yeah, fine. But when he first told me, I said, come on. And then pretty soon the dog would stand up. About 10 minutes or 15 minutes later, Michael would say, well, Dulcy's down, just coming into Mill Valley. They lived way up a hill, which had about 108, let's hope, steps up to the house. On the bottom of the hill? coming up the hill from where they parked the car.

[04:49]

They had to walk up all these stairs. I couldn't drive to the house. And then the dog would stand up and literally point like a hunter, you know. And she'd say, oh, five minutes, she'll be up the stairs. Boy, she'd walk right in just like that every time. Now, if you take that as real, no scientist probably would take that as real. But the dog seemed to take it as real. But for Michael and myself, We could assume this information was somehow available, but not available to us. Does a dog have a Buddha nature? In this case, maybe better than ours. In any case, the information, if we assume that this story or something like this story is correct, then there's information available to the sense fields or the sensitivities of the dog which is not available to us.

[06:20]

Or it is available to us. But we don't know how to make it accessible to us. Now, I'm using this sort of strange example because That basic idea is here in the koan. There's a great deal of what we generalize as intuition available, but we don't know how to access it. Now, what Yangshan and Guishan are doing are attempting playfully to develop a silent discourse that accesses more information than is there in our usual way of thinking.

[07:33]

So this koan is a kind of study. And you have in the beginning very clearly points it out. Knowing before speech is called silent discourse. And spontaneous revelation without... Clarification is called hidden activity. And hidden activity means something like things are... It's often in koans called great function. Is that things are functioning in a very deep way And you can allow that to happen in a kind of hidden way.

[08:36]

And you don't have to clarify it or know about it. And if you do, you interfere with it. But already here you have a thing, knowing, but without clarification. So then it adds a few more things saluting in front of the gate walking down the hallway and then adding unusual things dancing in the garden And my favorite is wagging the head out the back door. So, anybody want to say something? So in a koan like this, part of what's happening is the koan is presenting you, as Cristina said, with a possible way that things are that we don't notice.

[10:22]

And that's part of what we're doing by coming here to this seminar. Is to open ourselves by practicing and studying together to... to ways we exist but don't notice. And to see if with the koan, which is the point of the koan, to not only point this out, but to give you some suggestion of how to practice with it. Okay. So as I gave a little example this morning in the Teisho, the leaf exercise.

[11:27]

of watching the leaf move this way and that way. And then to see that we only can notice the leaf moving this way and that way because the mind has a certain stillness. And we could say that the stillness of the mind is what makes the movement of the leaf, noticing the movement of the leaf, possible. Now we normally, usually, only notice the movement of the leaf And we don't notice the stillness because it's more invisible. It's the condition of noticing the movement. So practice is to not only notice the movement, but also to notice the stillness.

[12:51]

And to deepen that stillness. And that's what Yangshan is doing by putting the hoe in the ground. So he's not only refusing to count or enter borrowed consciousness, That would be one level of answer or one way to play is not to count or to do something else or say, well, Molly's out there. And Molly could be his grandmother or something. So that would be another way of playing with it, but instead he not only refuses to count, but then he deepens the silence. And he moves the consciousness from one's own immediate consciousness to a consciousness that's of the immediate situation.

[14:33]

The consciousness is not just your own consciousness, It's also the whole situation, the whole environment. Just as the Alaya Vijnana, many of our memories arise from, you know, the smell of the flower and so forth. There's a sense that the immediate environment is not just an associative, memory-laden environment. It's also a kind of consciousness itself mixed with our own consciousness.

[15:42]

So he plants his hoe, and now you have people again, but a different kind of people. So the structure of the case has a different kind of people on either side of the whole. Now we can ask ourselves, what is the different kind of people? These are my people. Okay. Why did it feel so unpolite on both sides to do English? Well, is it really impolite? It felt like in this situation, both sides, we tried. Four people fell, so there must be some kind of feeling

[16:44]

He blocked something. He blocked something with his behavior. He steps out. Isn't that the question of impolite, the question of convention? And I think he is breaking the convention. But also in the text, some other person says He was old. He did not like this also. I would have kicked over the hoe? Yes. So I think there is something in the Koan text itself of what is unpoliteness.

[18:01]

Well, I have to look to see to you. I think I agree with you about it. All right, so what is that? That's an alternative to Guishan's response on South Mountain. That's another kind of playfulness. Now, what would be the difference between Quansha's response and Guishan's response? What is being pointed out here these two guys is exactly the way you're supposed to look at the koan.

[19:09]

And if you do act it out again, you could act it out with... different alternatives for Guishan's response or Yangshan's response because the fact that Shonsha has a different response means you can have a different response. This isn't tied to some. Can we have a light on maybe? Okay, that's good. Pardon me? I don't know. We have to figure it out. They would both be, since they're in koans, would both be pedagogical. I mean, they're saved because they're meant to show something. Of that they share. For me, they're a big problem. but they did very well and probably are different.

[20:31]

So already we're here and we wandered into this room and we're already like Yangshan facing a question, where are we coming from? Where is each of us coming from? So the way this koan is and are doing the seminar is asking us this question, where are we coming from? And in a way, we're being asked another question. How many people are there? And I think that the feeling here of politeness and so forth is makes sense because this question of how many people are there in the fields is not just a shift to borrowed consciousness.

[21:59]

A shift of our consciousness. But it's also a shift to our usual way of speaking about things. Yeah, I mean, we spend a great deal of our time asking questions like this of people. And we lose touch with the person we're talking to and ourselves. And we find ourselves routinely asking somebody some questions about where they're from and what they do and we don't really care and we know they don't care and yet we're involved in this sort of dance. So here we are and in a way part of us and part of me is trying to stay in the framework of our usual way of defining ourselves.

[23:24]

How many people are there back there at home? And what kind of people are we, etc.? And are we safe in our usual way of defining ourselves with each other? And again, the sense of politeness and impoliteness is of course our culture. But it's more specifically a kind of invisible architecture around us. And we feel a sense of violation when things are outside that architecture.

[24:32]

So I would say that, a kind of invisible architecture, I would say that this koan is meant to violate your invisible architecture. But it's not violating Yangshan and Guishan. They're not being impolite to each other. They're really just fooling around. But they've been hanging out together for years. So they have a sense of sharing something which they're playing with.

[25:43]

You know, as good friends do. Okay. But I think it's really great how the koan actually really picks us up where we actually are, so in the sense where you act it out, so you can't really fool yourself, even if you... I mean, from an intellectual point of view this is all very clear, But in acting it out, you bump into kind of really what's there. That's how he's employed. Yeah. Anybody else? Yeah, we could go on with this goal because we are just a needle with the case.

[26:51]

Yeah. And I'm wondering about this whole business myth on South Mountain. There are a lot of people cutting fetch. Yes. I mean, I don't have the cultural context to know what it's all about. I mean, eskitoch is an author of which means somehow to talk nonsense or to talk useless things. To beat the straw or something. Okay, yeah, but this is such a crucial point here. I want to leave it a little bit. Yeah, okay. But I don't mind pressing on it. I cannot sleep. All night long in your dreams on South Mountain. That's good for you. Thanks. And again, characteristic of this is that they throw themselves into it.

[28:05]

He says, where are you coming from? He doesn't sort of like dig his hoe in right away, you know, or refuse to talk. He says, oh, from the fields. The style of this dialogue is also, and the style of Zen is, whatever it is, if the vocabulary, if what's going on is A, you do A. If what's going on is B, you do B. And sometimes you shift to C. If somebody disturbs the anthill, we all bite everything in sight. So, I mean, I'd like to... All I'm asking you to do is start biting me, say something.

[29:16]

I haven't said anything. Because I hope we're disturbing our mutual anthill here. Huh? The way these two people communicate, And coming, obviously, from different positions, is there a kind of like step-by-step approach, or is it necessary to sort of leap? Is that the only way to communicate?

[30:19]

Both. Right. Every communication really, when it's possible, is a kind of leap. Maybe a mixture of leaps and affirmations. So you say something, I affirm it. But I may affirm it in various ways. I may affirm it by saying the same thing. It looks different, but I'm just mirroring what you've said. I may affirm it by changing the level. And I may change it. One of the things I've been talking about recently is noticing separateness and connectedness.

[31:45]

And separateness is like knowing I'm separate and that's Ulrike's voice and this is my voice. And your immune system knows what belongs to you and what doesn't belong to you. So that's one of the functions of self, is to know what belongs to you and what doesn't belong to you. But another function of self is to make connectedness all the time. And they're very similar, how we notice separateness and establish separateness and how we establish connectedness.

[32:51]

And you have something like that going on in the conversation here of connectedness and separateness between Yangshan and Guishan. Yes. What makes this feeling of being connected? What makes... What is this feeling of being connected? Because in one situation I have a feeling of magnetism, in another situation I have a feeling of being isolated. Sometimes it changes, but not more so than that. Yes. Can you say it in German? Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying anything more, then we should notice that and study it and notice when we feel connected and when we feel separate.

[34:23]

And eventually become very clear, as clear as we can, about the integrity of our separateness. And also another kind of body, because both are bodies. Bodies means a self-organizing, an own organizing system. So you have a body of separateness that is an own organizing system. And you also have a body of connectedness which is also an own organizing system. Which we are all participating in. And how to notice that and to allow participation in it is again part of what this koan is trying to talk about, which is a discourse before speech.

[35:42]

And looking at things this way is just a basic study of the experiential nature of self. But what you can't really do very well unless you also know the stillness of mind. And the stillness of mind is discovered partly through mindfulness practice, but mostly through meditation practice. The more you can get a physical, mental feel for this stillness, so you feel lodged in this stillness. And we have five periods of meditation a day to see if you can feel that stillness and lodge yourself in that stillness.

[37:05]

And if you deeply lodge yourself in that stillness so you're not disturbed from it, this is called enlightenment. But just getting a taste of this stillness allows us to more and more study things like and feel things like connectedness and separateness without getting caught up and mixed up in experience. So being able to see, feel connectedness is not different really from being able to see the movement of the leaves and feel the stillness of the mind that makes that possible. Here you might have an insight into the idea of emptiness, because while it's stillness of the mind that makes it possible for you to see movement,

[38:23]

Emptiness is a word for what makes it possible for everything to change. And that's why emptiness is often identified with space, because it's space which allows everything to flow, change, etc. And just as it's difficult to see the silence of the mind when you see the movement of the leaves, it's difficult to know the emptiness of everything when we see the specifics of things.

[39:41]

But it can be done just as it is possible and a little easier to see the stillness of the mind through the movement it believes. So here we have Yangshan saying, where are you coming from? Which is a way saying, show me the stillness of your mind. Maybe this shouldn't be called the book of serenity, but the book of disturbance. So, He disturbs him and he answers really mirroring him.

[40:46]

He just mirrors the question by giving a very simple answer from the field. And he stirs the movement of the mind a little more. How many people are there? And he doesn't care how many people are there. He knows. He sent them all down there anywhere. So he's disturbing more in Yangshan. And I'm sure these two men have a feeling of almost liquid that's connecting them. And so Yangshan says, quit splashing around. Your mind needs to be stilled a little bit. Your mind needs to be stilled a little bit. So I'll still your mind by stilling mine. So he says, So there.

[42:03]

Okay. Teacher and apprentice join ways. That's us. I mean, just those of us who practice together. Mother and daughter complement each other. This is the family style of the Dharma Sangha. Not yet a guide for a thousand ages. But we're working on it. And obviously, if it's a guide for a thousand ages, it's really outside of culture, politeness, etc., Walking down the hallway, this has a reason. Do you really feel when you're walking down the hallway, you're walking in your own consciousness? That you're exactly where you are and nowhere else.

[43:22]

That in the midst of your walking, there's no place to go. And in the midst of your walking, you're always arriving. Hmm? That's what, in the midst of your walking, you're always arriving. Just that there's a sheer pleasure in the walking, which goes nowhere. Because, yes, there's somewhere to go, but another level, there's no place to go. And Yangshan and Guishan are playing with this. Where are you coming from? Always arriving. So, I think that's enough for now. Our intention needily penetrate every being in place with the true merit of Buddha's way.

[44:51]

Should all the lands say, God, no. I want to save them. Desires are inexhaustible. I'd well just put an end to them. The Lord of Mark was a sour poutless. I'd well put to mass to them. The Lord would have a straighter sunset possible. Satsang with Mooji Satsang with Mooji

[46:25]

Wārei hānken hōnjī Jūjīsugu koto etāri Nēgāwā kuwā nyōrai An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. Having it to see and listen to, I'd like to share with you what's on my mind. I find I'm constantly and yet sometimes more than others examining what we're doing together practicing Buddhism.

[48:12]

And yesterday I tried to emphasize, I did emphasize the initial practice really is about noticing the difference between stillness of mind and the movement of mind. And through various ways, your own intention primarily, settling more and more in the stillness of mind, even in the midst of activity. But bringing a koan, you know, I have, since there's so many new people here, I have really trying to see how does bringing a koan into a situation help us practice.

[49:59]

I've had quite a lot of experience practicing myself and with people, and yet we still don't know for us Westerners how exactly to work with these things. For example, yesterday Christina pointed out that the koan itself, you know, where are you coming from, from the fields, in a sense is a model of what we're doing coming from our various lives to here.

[51:03]

Where have we come from? What are we doing? And a koan, because it's quite a powerful kind of Rorschach story, catches us up in it often quite quickly. And there's no institutional background in Buddhism for telling others your troubles. Like in the Catholic Church where there's confession, this is an institution of telling others about your state of mind and so forth.

[52:06]

And psychotherapy is a way of telling others about your problems. So how do we work through things in practice when it's a little different tradition than in the West? I think this is something some of us can try to find out how to do and Ulrike knows in work she's doing independently is trying to feel this out. Like yesterday, also the group that Eric was in brought up this feeling of being impolite, the story.

[53:44]

Now, I think, although I tried to stay with that feeling yesterday, during our meeting, I also... Because when something comes up that has some emotional content, it's useful to try to stay with it. But exactly how to work with such a thing, I mean, in the small groups we meet in the afternoon, you can follow through and see where something leads. Dogen has a phrase, the genjo koan, which means that every situation, and in particular a koan, interacts with your own personal daily koan. But we're not here meeting exactly in a psychotherapeutic process, except that things do come up that we can feel together.

[55:05]

Now, I can say the general way to practice with your personal experience in zazen As you sit, just basically you sit in the middle of it. Now the custom in Buddhism, and I don't know exactly how it works for all Westerners, but I do know what I did. As you, in sitting, you create a quite open atmosphere, letting anything come up. And you do that more and more You're able to do that more and more as you're able to sit still.

[56:44]

And then a kind of recapitulation of your life starts. And you explore that through your breathing. And through continuously returning to the stillness in your body and in your mind. And it's almost like, particularly as you let go through practice of the image of your body, It's almost like all of your molecules, all of your cells become independent.

[57:48]

They're independent and yet they stay in place. Maybe like in boiling water, the molecules move around. So there's a feeling in Buddhist practice that the more you can rest in stillness of mind, if you can bring your life into that stillness, that opens up your experience. And I think you'll find it, even though we're Westerners, we're not that different. And if you practice, you'll find this to be true. And it's not just a matter of analysis or understanding.

[59:05]

I think Yangshan was asked about his understanding and he said, if you mean my active understanding, I don't know. But if you mean my perceptual understanding, that's like pouring a pitcher of water into a pitcher of water. And so when we're sitting, it's maybe like that, pouring our life, the water of our life into water. It's not so much a matter of, again, understanding, but of pouring your life into your life. Es ist weniger eine Frage des Verstehens, als einfach sein Leben ins Leben zu gießen.

[60:17]

But pouring it now into the stillness of this mind. Und es jetzt in die Stille dieses Mindes zu gießen. And part of that process is breathing. Und Teil dieses Prozesses ist Atmen. So breathing is a kind of stirring of the pot that you're cooking. So although we say, you know, don't think in zazen, Actually, particularly in the first few years of practice, it's a matter of just sitting in the midst of your stuff and letting it be. Because the wind that's moving the leaves, and you see the stillness of the mind and the moving leaves, that wind is found in the recapitulation of your life.

[61:23]

At the same time you try to explore your physical body. Get used to your stomach, your heart, your lungs. The muscles of your arm, the feeling of the inside of your arm and hands and so forth. And in various ways you're bringing a kind of acceptance, I don't know, acceptance and consciousness into your body. Now, one of the things studying koans is supposed to do is be a kind of net to help you capture your enlightenment.

[62:46]

In the sense that enlightenment is not something so special, but something that we know but don't know how to stay with, that we keep slipping out of. So looking at a koan together is a way of beginning to get affirmation with each other of distinctions that don't fall easily into language. So it's a way of affirming with each other an understanding and an experience that language that we share doesn't usually affirm. And in meditation, if you get the habit of doing it half an hour, an hour a day, you begin, it's a process like sleeping, but different from sleeping.

[64:14]

When you go to sleep, you just let whatever happens by necessity happen. And sometimes you wake up and you interfere and you can't go back to sleep. But when you can go to sleep, you just relax into the sleep and trust sleeping. And Zazen is an act of trust like that. You let yourself just trust Zazen. But it's a conscious decision, not exactly like sleep.

[65:41]

And I used to say that the pattern was to acknowledge, to accept, to amplify and to let go. So whatever you discover, you keep acknowledging it. And one of the things one works with, there are certain patterns, one of them is the five hindrances. A desire, ill will, sloth, torpor, restlessness, and doubt. And the advantage of lists like that is that you accept that to some extent all of these things are you. Because one of the first things you notice is this, if you do notice the stillness of mind in such a simple exercise as watching the leaves,

[66:58]

Feeling the mind that allows the leaves to move. When you really taste this mind, it's very delicious. When you know why you're alive, if you need to know why. But many things interfere. There are many hindrances. There's the kleshas, the hindrances, and so forth, different kinds of lists. Kleshas? Kleshas is a word for hindrances or obstructions. And it's useful actually to take them and say, okay, how slothful am I after all?

[68:12]

And you examine your energy and your tiredness and your laziness and your inability to do certain kinds of things when you have an ability to do other kinds of things. And you take it as an object of meditation and effect. You slothful old pig, you can say. So you amplify it a bit. Then maybe you take ill will. And you think of all the things that you think to yourself that you don't tell other people about. And you notice how this ill will affects your state of mind.

[69:19]

Now the sense of it here is that until you really see the patterns of sloth, ill will and so forth, you can't be free to really look at your own personal knots. And then perhaps you look at desire. What you desire, how much you desire, how it affects your perceptions of others and so forth. This kind of practice too, it is taking a pattern like this and seeing your own patterns is a way of feeling connected with others.

[70:32]

And when you do zazen and you let go of your body image and you just feel everything at once independently present. Maybe a cooking process. As I say, you either cook your karma or your karma cooks you. And so your karma keeps your associations, your patterns keep coming up and your in not trying to understand them, but notice them or let them be in the atmosphere of zazen mind.

[71:36]

No, I'm not saying this is the best way to work on yourself. I'm pointing out that it's the traditional Buddhist way. No, we don't know. There's no way really, even if you're part of a culture, to know what the means, to use Dawkins' phrase, of cultural means like cultural genes are. Now, there is no way to feel completely independent of this culture if you are part of a culture. And Richard Dawkins has shaped an expression for this. These are the cultural genes.

[72:41]

He called them memes. We can transport, not translate, but transport Buddhism into the West, but it's pretty hard to transport the cultural memes that go with Buddhism in Asia. We have our own cultural memes that are swimming in our Zazen mind. So there are, I'm sure, processes different or in addition to what I'm describing in Asia, but also Western psychology is probably something quite new in the world. So how are we going to bring, is the question I'm asking, Western psychological practices into Buddhism and how will Buddhism affect them and etc. ?

[73:43]

Because when we meet together, we start working on something unseen together. So what I'm pointing out here is going back to how zazen can allow you to work on yourself. Again, it's what I call the practice of counting to one. You might be trying to count to ten, but you seldom get past one or two. Now the practice of one-pointedness develops through more and more being able to count to ten and then finally to stay with something.

[75:05]

But there's another way to develop a kind of one-pointedness or a deep one-pointedness, which is to not make the effort to count. Or not always to make the effort to come. But allow whatever appears to activate a background mind. To allow seeing the movement of the leaves to awaken the stillness of mind. So to allow the distractions that keep you from counting to ten to awaken a background mind. Now if you do in your zazen allow a background mind to be awakened,

[76:30]

The example I came up with when I first began to notice this back in 1961 or 2 was it was like looking at a highway and seeing the billboards. And the billboards are many thoughts and feelings and so forth. And you begin to be able to identify them through practice. And then suddenly you see that there's a landscape behind the billboards. From which the billboards are made.

[78:01]

The billboards are still real and they take over your mind sometimes, but sometimes you can just see between the billboards and you can just see this big landscape. First the landscape of your karma swimming about. Not yet having taken form. Not yet made into the skandhas, into the billboards. But then you can even look past the swimming, unformed karma into emptiness. And that's the same movement of moving leaf to still mind. And here you have the movement of thoughts and emotions and so forth, and a deeper, clearer mind or wider mind behind that.

[79:22]

And working with that difference and bringing and recapitulating your life in that movement to this background mind and foreground mind is the basic psychological process of Zen practice. Well, now we've looked at, in these five hindrances, we've looked at sloth. I like the word sloth and desire and ill will. I guess one reason I like the word sloth is because when I first started practicing this I thought, well, I may be these other things but I'm not sloth. And I thought, well, if I say I'm not, I probably am now, so let's amplify it.

[80:42]

And I still find I'm actually at my advanced age trying to recover from the torpor of not really doing what I could be doing or should be doing. And could effortlessly be doing if I didn't have this torpor. Here I'm confessing to you, I'm sorry. So another one which was quite useful to look at is restlessness. And you can see that when everything is just fine, suddenly there's restlessness.

[82:05]

You want to turn on the radio or do this or go there. Or even at the most basic kind of ease, easing into mind, stillness of mind in the deepest sense. There's a kind of restlessness for no reason. It's not just natural movement. It's a kind of something. So you can study in a very basic way that before you even have psychological problems, there's things like restlessness. Now, the last of these five hindrances, which are traditionally seen as categories of our five tendencies, which prevent us from being at ease in the silence of mind, is doubt.

[83:30]

And does a dog doubt being a dog? Maybe it does, you know. I don't really want to be a dog. I mean, I want to be a different kind of dog or something. Or you can look at the tree or the mountain and say, does the mountain doubt being a mountain? And really, with that kind of looking, you can actually come to the point where at the root of you, there's no doubt. There may be doubt as a kind of force and whatness, not being able to grasp things conceptually.

[84:46]

What is it that Luther said when he was confronted? I stand and can do no other. Well, it's sort of like that. At some point through practice you come, here I sit and can do no other. Here I am with each of you and I can't be anything else. I'm sorry. So a deep kind of doubtless, fearless quality comes into your practice. And then you, again, from this, from beginning to explore these five hindrances and seeing your own patterns, you become freer to allow active understanding, which Yangshan says he doesn't, he can't say what it is.

[85:59]

What did Yangshan say? That perceptual understanding was pouring a pitcher of water into a pitcher of water. And he said active understanding was, I don't know. So both are there, and we're pouring our perceptual understanding into our understanding, into ourself. And our deeper understanding is, I don't know based on no doubt. You keep trying to create a process, a situation where this can happen, and that is called zazen.

[87:05]

And if it really takes for you, it's as much a dynamic of your life as is sleeping. So that's enough, I think. In the study of the koan, in the practice of the koan, see if you can bring into the reading of it and hearing of it a stillness of mind.

[88:18]

A mind that doesn't have much doubt or much restlessness. And imagine these two, Yangshan and Guishan, as friends or relatives. Or imagine this is a strange story you've heard about your father or a friend. Or imagine, this is a very strange story that you heard about your father or a friend. intention equally. They agree being in place with the true merit of Buddha's way.

[89:38]

Shudra, om, muhen, se, tan, go. Om Om Jai Jain Sai Ga Daan Om Om Jai Jain Sai Ga Daan Om Om Jai Jain Sai Ga Daan He said to me in silent humbleness, I am not able to save them. He said to me in silent humbleness, I am not able to save them. Now that we've all looked into this story, I thought I might tell some stories about the guys in the story.

[90:58]

I remember when I first began working with koans with Roshi, he made a point that stuck with me. He said something like, We should invite Yangshan to live with us for a while. Maybe Guishan too, but maybe we wouldn't like Guishan as much as we liked Yangshan.

[92:08]

Or vice versa. The point was, as I understood, that these are real people. They have a historical identity. And they are also real people now. So let me say something about Guishan first. He was about 15 when he got tired of mowing lawns and delivering newspapers. And he determined that he would be a monk.

[93:22]

So he did. He announced to his parents that he was leaving home and going to become a monk. And he became a student of one of the most famous Zen masters of all time. And there's a well-known story. It's his awakening story, Guishan's awakening story. Might you wonder what will be your awakening story? We were sitting in the dining room. Bajang said, are there any coals in the fire?

[94:47]

And Guishan said, he sort of poked around and, nope, it's cold. Bajang said, reached over, I don't know, maybe he had some chopsticks or something, and he pulled out a live ember, a piece of glowing coal of wood. And you said something like, well, what do you call this? You said something like, what do you call that? How do you call that? Pin.

[95:40]

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