This morning, I'm going to comment on case number 17 in the Blue Cliff Record. This case is called Kyorin's Sitting Long and Getting Tired. Sitting for a long time is a lot of hard work. Master Engo introduces the subject and he says, cutting through nails and breaking through steel.

[01:02]

For the first time, one can be called master of the first principle. If you keep away from arrows and avoid swords, you will be a failure in Zen. As for the subtle point where no probe can be inserted, that may be set aside for a while. But when the foaming waves wash the sky, what will you do with yourself then? See the following. This is the main subject. A monk asked Kyorin, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming to the West? Kyorin said, sitting long, getting tired. Sitting for a long time makes these hard work.

[02:05]

And then Setsuo, the compiler of this booklet record, says in his verse, one, two, tens of hundreds of thousands. Take off the muzzle and set down the load. If you turn left and right, following another's lead, I would strike you as Shiko struck Ryutetsuma to explain that poem. Kyorin was a disciple of Master Uman in China, in the Tang Dynasty. Master Uman was one of the most famous Zen masters. It's said that Kyorin stayed with Master Uman for 18 years.

[03:14]

And every day, Master Uman would say, Kyorin, and Kyorin would turn around and Uman would say, This went on every day for 18 years. Finally, one day, Kyoren said, Master Uman, I think I have it. And Uman said, well, give me something without talking about it. How can you demonstrate your understanding without explaining it? And so Master Kyorin stayed for three more years, maturing his understanding.

[04:27]

Later, He taught for 40 years after that. And it was said that his samadhi was unshakable. Samadhi literally means a kind of concentration. But here it means moment, no separation. Undivided mind. Mind which is undivided and at one with all things. This is Samadhi. When we sit Zazen, This is Samadhi.

[05:36]

And a good Zen student should have this kind of concentration all the time, like Master Kyo Rin for 40 years. Sometimes our concentration is good, sometimes it's not so good. But our effort should be to whatever we're engaged in. Not leaking and not falling into dualistic ways of thinking and acting. Not falling into discrimination. So, Introducing the subject, Master Engo says, cutting through nails and breaking steel.

[06:48]

Nails and steel, you know, are like our attachments and they are fixed ideas. our opinions and fixed ideas and our resistances. So he says, cutting through nails and breaking steel, if you can cut through your fixed ideas, your opinions, your resistances, for the first time, one can be called master of the first principle. First principle means reality as it is. Second principle means to understand things through thinking.

[07:54]

It's called second principle because thinking is about Doing is the first principle. Being one with things is the first principle. And rationalizing, which is called thinking, is the second principle, because it's about something. When you sit in meditation, what are you doing? What is your mind doing? What is your thoughts? Well, when you sit in meditation, in zazen, the thought is the same as the activity. There's no difference between what one thinks and what one does. But when you start thinking about it, that's the second principle.

[08:54]

It's not the thing itself. It's once removed. So consciousness keeps removing one in stages from the actual fact of things. When we do something, the first level of consciousness is just aware, just there, awareness. In the second level of consciousness, one is aware that one is doing something and thinking about what that means and how to do it. That's the once removed. And the third level is to think about what the meaning of all this is, and past, present, and future, and what's for dinner. So there are various levels of consciousness.

[09:58]

Each of one takes us further away from the actual fact of this action now. Our life at this moment. So most of the time we spend thinking about things instead of being one with them. Samadhi is to be completely one with things, which also includes thinking about. But if most of our life is spent just thinking about, then we really miss the life of being one with things, being one with ourself and being one with our activity. So being one with our activity is called the first principle. and learning about something, thinking about it, is called the second principle.

[10:58]

Thinking is important. And thinking, when thinking is not separate from the first principle, And so he says, cutting through nails and breaking steel, for the first time, one can be called master of the first principle. Breaking through our resistance and our fixed ideas and our opinions and our discursive thinking. That's the hardest thing. We don't realize what that is, really, until

[12:02]

we engage in practice. As soon as you sit Zazen for a little while, you begin to see what your resistances are, what your fixed ideas are, what your upside down views are, and what your opinions are. which you may have some inkling of, but this puts it right in your face. So then he says, if you keep away from arrows and avoid swords, you will be a failure in Zen. When you begin to engage in practice, or Zazen or practice, all these things come right at you like arrows and swords. Your whole life comes in front of your face and you go through many difficulties.

[13:14]

This is where, when you come to big difficulties, you have the choice, well, shall I continue or shall I do something else? And we always come to this place. And one must make the choice to continue, otherwise you can't practice. One has to go through the wall, so to speak. So when we start to practice, At some point we meet a wall. I can't get through this wall. That's too big. This is impossible. But this is where one's persistence puts one through the wall. Otherwise, we find that we're always taking aside a detour.

[14:18]

You try everything you can to get through it, and then you see how many excuses you have for avoiding something. It's amazing how many excuses we have, we can come up with for avoiding something. Oh, I forgot to turn off the stove. What a sunny, why waste my time when it's such a sunny day? Those are just little excuses. We have really big ones. My legs hurt too much. I can't stand all this pain. Life is very painful. Life is very painful anyway. But we manage to buoy ourselves through life with the painfulness of it.

[15:28]

And when we practice meditation, we find some painfulness. But this pain is very direct and unavoidable. And there's no way that you can get around it. You can only be with it. So dealing with the pain and the problems that come up, which is very direct, you learn how to deal with difficulty and you learn how to deal with the painfulness of your life. So this is what he's talking about. He says, if you keep away from the arrows and avoid the swords, You can't get anywhere. You just fall back into your old way of dealing with things. If you want to have realization or enlightenment, you have to deal with swords and arrows.

[16:40]

There's no easy way. But actually, this is the easy way. But we think that the easy way is the hard way, and we think that the hard way is the easy way. It's literally true. Because in our life, we want to make things comfortable. And if you look around you, you can see that everything that people do is to make themselves comfortable. But no matter how much you want to make yourself comfortable, you can only do it for a little while. Can't do it for very long. And then your comfortable position starts to get uncomfortable. Then you have to find another position.

[17:45]

So, or you find some way to make yourself comfortable, some way to make yourself happy for a little while, and then keep looking for another way to make yourself happy for a little while, and on and on. So, this is avoiding the real problem. When we meet the real problem, it's, we meet our pain, our difficulty, and who we are head on. And we practice with that for a long time. And we begin to realize that the barrier is ourself. The swords and arrows is ourself. And when we accept who we are completely and accept both the pleasure and pain of life equally, without discriminating, then we can be comfortable.

[18:51]

Because we're comfortable with our pleasure and we're comfortable with our pain. But as long as we're trying to escape the difficulties of our life, We always have painfulness, which is called suffering. So how do you deal with suffering? Pain and suffering are not the same thing. Suffering is associated with painfulness, but painfulness is not necessarily suffering. Painfulness is just our life. Pleasure and pain, we just call them. It's the same thing, but we call them by different names. And when we don't like it, we call it suffering. So how to

[20:00]

get beyond our discriminating mind, is what we call practice. So when we sit tzazen, it looks like, we may look like people are escaping the real world, but actually we're entering the real world, entering the world of reality, where we're not discriminating between pleasure and pain. Not choosing to escape. This is entering into the place where you cannot escape. You have to face who you are and what you're doing. And so that's painful. More painful than most people want to engage in. And even old times and students.

[21:08]

So then he says, as for the subtle point where no probe can be inserted, that may be set aside for a while. The place where no probe can be inserted means the place where there's no gap. This is Samadhi. Samadhi is the place where there is no gap. You can't put a needle in between you and reality. You can't even put a needle in there. As for the subtle point where no probe can be inserted, that may be set aside for a while, but when the foaming waves launch the sky, What will you do with yourself then? Foaming waves means, even though you may have very good practice when you get out into the world of the foaming waves, where you might get washed away by things, where emotions are high,

[22:39]

Thousands of people are getting slaughtered every day. The world is in complete turmoil. What will you do then? How will your samadhi hold up in the world? Even though you may be very good at this, how will your samadhi hold up in the world? How will your imperturbability hold up in the world when you really face all the things that are happening. So this is the test of a student. One must be able to be in that place all the time. Meditation or zazen is like sitting very still and whatever happens, that stillness is not disturbed.

[23:59]

It's like a candle or a flame, the flame of a candle. And even though the wind blows, it doesn't go out. It may flicker. but it always comes back to stillness. And when we sit, there's that feeling, that feeling of a flame which is, no matter what's going on around it, it stays very still. So our inner light is not put out or disturbed. Our stillness is not disturbed by all the activity that's going on around, and one is able to operate calmly in all circumstances. There's a saying,

[25:11]

Samadhi and Prajna. Prajna is wisdom, which is innate wisdom, not just mental knowledge, but universal wisdom, which is beyond our consciousness, our ability to think. Wisdom is brought forth through samadhi. Samadhi is brought forth through stillness. And in that stillness, prajna, or this innate wisdom, rises. So we say samadhi is like the lamp. Prajna is its light.

[26:13]

And one doesn't exist without the other. And there's a saying that without the stability of meditation, the flame of wisdom is blown around by the wind of passion. So the main subject. That's the introduction. The main subject. Amok asked Kyorin, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West? Bodhidharma, you know, was the Indian monk who brought Zen When he came to China, he sat in a cave for five years, for nine years.

[27:19]

Sat Zazen in a cave for nine years. All kinds of things about him, sayings about him. And one of the kind of stereotype questions in China during the Tang Dynasty and later was, Why did Bodhidharma come to the West? Why did he come to China from India? That was a kind of question that people used to ask and they would get all kinds of answers. And the question means something like, what is the meaning of Buddhism? What's the meaning of Zen, basically? Why did Bodhidharma come to the West? What is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming to the West? And Kyorin said, sitting long, getting tired, didn't give him the answer that he wanted. If you give somebody some intellectual answer, you're not doing them a favor.

[28:20]

A teacher always points a student to the cushion. You should find out for yourself, because you are voting Dharmas. So, sitting long and getting tired. Zazen has no particular meaning. We shouldn't attach some kind of meaning to zazen. Zazen, it doesn't have some particular What Bodhidharma brought was Zazen.

[29:28]

Zazen is like the sun. The sun just goes around all day and continually goes around all day and doesn't think about why it's going around. or what it's doing. It just does it. It knows, Sun knows what it's doing. But it doesn't have a stated purpose or give reasons for what it's doing or need a reason. It knows this is right activity. This is correct activity. It just does it over and over and over. So it's called the work of no reward and a thankless task.

[30:41]

So then Master Setjo, who is a commentator, has this verse and he says, one, two, tens of thousands, tens of hundreds of thousands, this means people, take off the muzzle and set down the load. What this means is something like, Kyorin is helping tens of thousands of people, Through his activity, he's helping tens of thousands of people to take off the muzzle and lay down the load. Take off the saddlebags. Take off your burdens. Take off your weight. Let go of your discursive thinking and the problems that you keep creating for yourself continually through desire. and through lack of understanding.

[31:54]

Just lay it all down and make yourself an offering. Just offer yourself to the universe. You know, One of the biggest problems that people have is the problem of wanting. If you look around and people see everybody's wanting something. Everybody seems to lack something. And very few people are actually free of lack and are offering themselves. When you can lay down the burden of neediness, then you are very light and free to offer yourself to the universe.

[33:11]

To merge with the universe. The universe actually gives us everything we need. And we already have everything we need, but we feel that we need something. And every person is something lacking. What's lacking? It's a good question. I think that's a good question. What do I really need? You know, we all feel that we need something, but what do I really need? get to the bottom of what I really need. That's a good project. When we are free of that, then we can freely offer ourself to the universe. This is meditation. Satsazen is to let go of everything and freely offer ourself

[34:23]

And the problem we have in Zazen is that we still want something. And you see, I'm having this problem, but I don't know why. The problem is that we still want something. And we can practice Zazen for 20 years and we still want something, but we don't know that that's the problem. I've been doing this for 20 years and I still haven't gotten anything out of it. I still want something. All you need to do is just turn that corner. Stop wanting and just enjoy yourself. Enjoy what's there. Just be with whatever's there. It's very hard.

[35:26]

So then, the rest of his poem, he says, if you turn left and right following another's lead, I would strike you as Shiko struck Yutetsuma. Turning left and right, following another's lead, means being too dependent. We want to know something, and we keep asking, and we're never satisfied with a response. You know those people, like you and me? We keep asking these questions, and we're never quite satisfied with a response. And so we want more and more. And we're not looking for the response in ourself. We're looking for something from outside. And we keep thinking, if we only get the right response, we'll understand.

[36:37]

So we keep studying and studying and asking questions. But we're not looking in here. We're looking out there for something. So that's what he means. He says, If you turn right and left following another's lead, I will strike you. I'll hit you. Like Shiko struck Ryutetsuma. Okay. Shiko and Ryutetsuma was a very famous nun, jaina, zen nun. She had a little hut somewhere and the monks would come up and she and Nobody could match her. She was a very tough lady. And Ryutetsuma means old iron grinder. So one day Shiko went up to see her, and they had this dialogue.

[38:02]

So Shiko was a disciple of Nansen and a Dharma brother of Joshu. He was a master with a sharp Zen spirit. Ryu Tetsuma was a nun and a disciple of Isan. She was famous for her shrewdness in Dharma battle. Many monks had mortifying experiences with her, and Ryu was her family name. So Tetsuma means iron mill, and was a nickname implying that she pounded her opponents in Dharma battle like an iron millstone grinding wheat into flour. One day, Ryutetsuma appeared unexpectedly before Shiko, who said, are you not Ryutetsuma? And she said, you are warm. And he said, do you turn right or left? Meaning, you know, since you are a mill, you turn to the right, you turn to the left.

[39:16]

Do you turn your mill to the right or to the left? And she said, you can't turn it over. It's a good answer. And her result was not bad. But he says, but a Dharma contest is an exacting matter. Before she had finished speaking, she was hit by Shiko. Now, this is not a sexist thing. There were equals, and this is kind of the way, when you say hit, it doesn't mean some kind of real hard blow or something, but I don't know exactly what this hit was, but it was kind of play, actually, serious play. Sometimes somebody overturned somebody's chair or table.

[40:25]

Common practice in those days. So before she had finished speaking, she was hit by Shiko. It is said that she should have dealt the blow to Shiko herself when he asked, do you turn right or left? She was a little too late. So he did it instead of her. So that's what this story is about. It refers to this line, if you turn left and right following another's lead, I would strike you as Shikko struck your Tetsuna. So what was the meaning of Bodhidharma? What's the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West, to the West? What's the meaning of Buddhism?

[41:29]

What's the meaning of myself? If you want to get the tiger's cubs, you have to enter the tiger's cave. at some risk. So listening to dharma is very good. Practicing dharma is even better. Why did Bodhidharma come to the West, to China. And why are we still talking about him?

[42:34]

Pretty good. He came a long time ago and he's still alive. And he's telling us something. He's saying, do it. If you want to know about it, you have to do it. If you really want to know what it is, You have to do it. And if you want to do it, you have to take the consequences. I always say that if you want the highest thing, you have to pay the highest price. Right? So it has nothing to do with money. So if you want something real, you have to give yourself to it completely.

[43:41]

Do you have a question? Well, that's not the highest price. Die completely? No, the highest price is you have to live completely. And when you live completely, there's no difference between dying completely and living completely. So, sometimes people say you have to die the great death. But the way to die the great death is to live completely, totally.

[44:59]

What does that mean? So we have to be careful on how we talk because we fall into one side or the other. True, we're living completely and we just don't know it. Well, you may not know that you're not living completely. Let life live itself. We may not have to do so much, you know, but let life live itself and experience life living itself.

[46:23]

We say, I am living, which is a little bit of an arrogance. And we say, I am breathing, which is a total misunderstanding. Breathing breathes itself. I have nothing to do with it. Life lives itself. But I do have something to do with that. I can let that be, or I can create obstacles, but even so, that's also life. So it's a matter of suffering, being aware of this, and being free from suffering that we inflict on ourselves and on others.

[47:27]

Suffering comes in many ways, but The suffering that we inflict on others and on ourself, we can do something about. That can be taken care of. But we have to be continually aware and practicing with it. Yes? When you say, offer yourself to the universe, It's just letting go or penetration. Yes, it means not standing in the way. Not separating. Not creating something that cuts us off. You know, greed, ill will and delusion cut us off.

[48:29]

Those are ego builders and they cause separation. So, you know, we go through world after world of separation caused by our anger and our Yes. Does love cause separation? Not true love. What do you mean by love? Loving something so much that maybe it takes away from yourself. Takes away from yourself? Maybe you just lose the concentration of yourself. You're letting something else distract you like that. Yeah, I would call that infatuation. There are a lot of counterfeits for love, of which infatuation is definitely one.

[49:42]

There may be some basis of love, but most of what we call love is attachment and infatuation. And love is selfless. Real love, true love is selfless. where we have concern for whatever the object is over and above our own needs. So most of what we call love comes out of our own neediness. So we have to be very careful. And we're always getting caught by seduction. We seduce ourselves all the time. their aspects of love, which are loving kindness, and looking out for other people's welfare, and sympathy with other people, and compassion, and equanimity, actually.

[51:08]

I'm not falling into you know, keeping a level head. But love is more like something that's always constant and it's given freely without any idea of return or wanting some reward. And it's a state of being which is not turned over by anger and desire, actually. Although it is associated with desire, you know, so it becomes very tricky. And there can be love within desire, but desire is so strong that it overpowers the love, usually.

[52:13]

So, love is like a fire, you know? Desire is like a fire. And to be able to control it and keep, you know, like a flame in a kerosene lamp and you turn it up too high and everything gets black and starts smoking and So you have to adjust it just right so you have the light without too much problem. Things can get out of hand really fast with fire. So love is great. It holds everything together. It's really what holds everything together. And we need to know how to use it and keep it adjusted so that it's beneficial and not harmful and so we don't get caught by it.

[53:39]

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