Good morning, everyone. This was a wonderful occasion. This was the first day of the first multi-day session we've been able to have since December 2019. It's three and a half years ago. So I think we're all a little rusty on how to do this. I will speak for everyone, maybe not everyone, but some of us are anyway. But it's a great show. And we've been having this practice commitment period, which actually technically will go through this next week, but we're celebrating it with the Sashim.

[01:06]

And some of you are a big part of that, some of you haven't, but we've been talking about the Vimalakirti Sutra. But I don't want to do a text-based talk during this session, though it's possible I'll open the book and refer to it at times, but maybe not. I want to talk about how the teachings we've been looking at and the teaching themes we've been looking at and practice themes relate to our practice. My practice in the world, my practice in Chicago, it's different. Anyway, we've conjoined various parts of the country.

[02:09]

So, One of the main themes of the sutra is practice in the world, right in the middle of the world. Practice realization is not a matter of escaping from the difficulties of the world to some high forgotten place, somewhere high up in the mountains, somewhere in Japan or California or Japan or whatever. Here is the place. Here is the way it unfolds. Just this is it. How do we use these holy self teachings to help support our lives?

[03:10]

How to help support our practice of helping all the beings in this difficult world helping all the beings, including ourselves, to see beyond, not to escape from, to see beyond the problems that beset us in our own lives and in the world, to see something deeper that actually helps inform how we practice in the world today. So this is sometimes called traditional doing the Buddha work. We're part of the family of Buddha, particularly of Shakyamuni Buddha, although his sutras serve us.

[04:15]

There are Buddha fields in many places. How do we support this life, this world, this city, this time, this strange time, to be a group with you, to be a field of awakening, now that we help the great beings, including ourselves, of course. So, this is challenging. This Saha world, the world of endurance, is difficult. And so. It's difficult and it's also that we are privileged to be. So as I've said.

[05:19]

Well, he started showing all those many world systems. Described functions of the molecule to suture suture suture. And modern scientists who are going deeper into what this reality actually is. How do we support all of that to be in the field? How do we support that? How do we do the Buddha work to help beings who suffer to help ourselves from our suffering. So, the Vimalakirti Sutra talks about inconceivable liberative practice.

[06:26]

So this is also one of the prior skillful movements. And this is very much the question for us. How do we effectively support things in this challenging world and not challenge us? So, This skillful means has to do, first of all, with patience. And we learn patience as some practitioners sitting upright for a day or two or three or whatever, ringing to the bell or just enjoying being upright and present and inhaling and exhaling. paying attention.

[07:33]

So even when you feel sleepy, how do you pay attention to that? Even when you have some pain in your knee or shoulder or wherever, how do you pay attention to that? And then when we're paying attention, when we're paying attention to also to all the cruelty, in our society now. How do we find ways to be helpful? Of course, this is not easy. If it were easy, then all the money supplements lined up to be born here now, you know, it's bothering. And pure Buddha feels everything is beautiful. And even here, everything is beautiful in its own light, but how can we not ignore the cause and effect of the difficulties in our own lives, the difficulties in the world around us?

[08:54]

And at the same time, Through sashing, through settling in, through tzazen, for some of us through Dharma study, we can find whatever I call it, isn't it? A sense of wholeness, a sense of Ultimate reality that supports us can't just be helpful in the world. And then by trial and error, you know, we try to be helpful. We try to support beings to awaken. We don't, all the misguided beings who are actively promoting hate through cruelty, it doesn't help to hate them personally.

[09:57]

But how do we try and work for kindness, for helpfulness? So part of this, as the Malachite Siddhartha also teaches us, is the reality, the conceivable reality, to go beyond what the thinking is happening, to go beyond Our ideas, conceptualizations of who we are and what the world is. Well, beyond our limited perceptions. As you were talking about the other day, some of us, I guess it was Monday night, you know, dogs spell the world around them.

[11:02]

We must use our eyes. But we have limited perceptual faculties. We also have limited intellectual faculties. And it's not that we should not use our sight and our smell, our smell and our sounds and enjoy hearing the birds calling. But we can hear and know that this is teaching of considerable liberation. that the world is not what we think it is. It's not limited to that. Both in space and in time, the world is much more complicated and deeper than our ideas about it. So this is actually a great help

[12:13]

Hearing this, understanding this, as we start to realize this more and more, this is a great help in terms of skillful liberative technique. The more we see that which is not just the surface conventions, what is proclaimed by the pundits on cable television or whatever, The reality of the world is deeper than that. It's more than that. So we are here in this Saha world, this world of endurance, that is Shakyamuni's Buddha field. So one of the ways to help liberate beings is to support And all of us are children, just by virtue of you being here in the center of our lives.

[13:27]

So there's the practice of Sangha as well as part of doing the Buddha work. And so Sangha is a wonderful jewel. It can help us. So by sitting together, whether we're in the room or together online, we support each other to do the Buddha work, to see the possibility of skillful liberative techniques. to help each other, to cooperate, to see the world as it feels. So it's our chakra, ancient Jain and Zen gate, and some of the other chakras as well. That's fine. But our particular chakra is just one of many as they've been called islands of sanity in this world. And how things change is not

[14:45]

what's written in history books often, certainly not what's promoted in the mass media, how things change is much more organic, much more conceivable than that. So how do we support kindness and cooperation, working together? This is possible. And this is part of how we help the world awaken. And it's possible to feel these days quite daunted with all the difficulties. Climate destruction, natural destruction. Cruelty espoused by politicians in my books.

[15:49]

prevent people from getting health care and so forth and so on. How do we present something that is other than that in the world? It may not be obvious to the mass media, but that actually does power from beneath. It's like we've learned relatively recently that forests are living sentient beings, to put it that way, that there's this mycorrhizal network of forests, mycorrhizal-related mushrooms, that through which different trees in the forest, even of different species, even trees that are from different religions, or from different ethnicity, or different colors, cooperate with each other.

[16:53]

They send warnings about danger. They send nutrition. They send help. So sangha is like that. Sangha is like underneath the... Actually, the word for monastery in southern Japan is sorin, forest of monks. underneath the conventional world, in this inconceivable, in the virtual field, that the volatility seeker was talking about 2,000 more years ago. The science is just confirming. There is this possibility of change, of growth, and of promise. And I've mentioned this phrase that's prominent in the Volatility Sutra, which is the patience and tolerance of the inconceivability, the ungraspability, the unknowability, the birthlessness of things, of reality.

[18:15]

It's very important. Zazen and Dharma study can give us agency to this. And in our practice we can seek further into this, to this sense of deep connection that we can't control things. Things have to batch to our food or work. Positive things. But it's not about controlling the world or controlling other people or even controlling ourselves sometimes. To know that the world is much more, inconceivable is one word, much more strange and wonderful than our usual sense of it.

[19:29]

Just to hear that, just to have some sense of that reality is powerful. When we have some sense, some taste, some sense of the possibility of ultimate reality, of the wholeness of that all. This is a great support for our work in the world. so it's important not to surrender to hopelessness you're feeling like there's nothing to do with that you know it's well it's obviously difficult on another level something's happening and you don't know what it is and yet we can we can support to find this cooperation to listening to others

[21:20]

So, for Bodhisattvas who work with difficult beings, we have to have great compassion. So, all of this is about great compassion. How do we express care and kindness in the world? And even people who are promoting harm and cruelty of all the systems our politics or our society. We don't have to hate or despise them personally. We can promote Buddha works, an alternative. So this has a lot to do with the precepts.

[22:31]

Well, we could say that the Bodhisattva precepts are ethical guidance. They are in some way. But more deeply, they are a way of confirming and connecting with something very deep. in our Buddha lineage. So we'll be chanting right here the lineage of Buddhas and ancestors, the official lineage that leads up to us. And so we're going to do a Jinkai, a precept ceremony here in mid-June for three people, all of them are participating in this session. And Something happens to this kind of ceremony. So, you know, a lot of people would come to Zen and talk about ritual stuff.

[23:41]

You know, for people on their first convent, it does feel strange. It's not part of our culture. Some of our religions have more rituals than others, but this kind of ceremony is about verifying It confirms the presence of Buddha for the people receiving the precepts, receiving the newspapers. But it's also for all of us who do this, when we do these ceremonies, to confirm Sama, to confirm Dhamma, to confirm Buddha, which are already here. So they're kind of celebrations, and some said celebrations. It's very somber and serious. But there's a laughing Buddha who's coming to watch all of it.

[24:43]

So please enjoy this also during the session. Please. Enjoy your inhale and exhale. Please settle into being present on your seat. As long as you are here, but also then. So I said it was not and the ceremonies are not separate from the rest of our lives. Just going for a walk and enjoy. The. Fluidity of our muscles moving. Just enjoy and. the trees, or the houses, or these days, the flowers. He's sitting in front of the world. This is all part of the work. So there's a lot of work to do.

[25:55]

There is so much suffering in this world, and this world and this planet is so fragile. And our practice can make a difference. And there's not one right way to do spiritual means. Each of us has our own special gifts. Each of us has our own particular way of expressing Buddha, Each of us has our own way of encouraging kindness and cooperation. So please appreciate that about yourself and each other and we support ensemble. So that's what I really wanted to say today. I might say more than that tomorrow or the next day.

[26:57]

Maybe not. But we have discussion time this afternoon with tea. But if there's anybody who has something you really want to say now, I can't wait for this afternoon's discussion. including the folks online. Okay. Well, let's do the four body shots with Thanos. And we'll have both of them.

[27:42]

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