Well, it was not supposed to rain today. I know. It's not supposed to rain today. The papers said that we'd have a hiatus in the rain today. This weekend would be nice and sunny. But then there would be more bad weather. Is it bad weather? I think it's great weather. Good for something. May not be good for some purpose, but what's good and what's bad. What's good for one is bad for another. And what's bad for one is good for another. Today, we're celebrating, or not celebrating, commemorating, I'm not sure which it is, but maybe both.

[01:18]

Celebrating and commemorating Shakyamuni Buddha's parinirvana. Parinirvana means the great ongoing disease. Buddha's passing, or depending on how you want to look at it, there's so many different viewpoints in Buddhism about Shakyamuni's Parinirvana. Parinirvana means the great, total, I should say, total decease. Like Parigathe, Parigathe, at the end of the Heart Sutra, the mantra, gone, totally, completely gone. Right? So, I think it's good to understand what nirvana is, even though we don't, and then what par-nirvana is, even more nirvana.

[02:34]

There are what's called the three Dharma seals. Impermanence, no self, and Nirvana. But the way people usually hear it is impermanence, no self, and suffering. Those are two different views. of the three Dharma Seals. Because the first noble truth is life is suffering, so to speak, and a very crude, actually, a very crude description of our life. Suffering is part of our life, but it's not the whole of our life. Whereas Nirvana is totally inclusive. The truth of our life is Nirvana.

[03:45]

The basic truth of our life is Nirvana. And if you want to be even more specific, it's Nirvana within suffering. within the truth of suffering is Nirvana. Nirvana, you see, Buddha taught, he said, I only teach suffering and how to deal with it. That's all I teach, is suffering and how to deal with it. And it's often you know, suffering and getting rid of suffering. So, in the old days, there were people who, monks, who wanted to separate nirvana from suffering.

[04:50]

But you can't separate nirvana from suffering, or suffering from nirvana. and we only find our release through suffering. Suffering is like the crucible with which we find our salvation. People say, well, how come we're born into this world of suffering? Well, suffering is our test. Suffering is the test of how we come up to it and how we deal with it and how we find our release. So you could say nirvana is our basic

[05:54]

Dhammakaya maybe. It's the essence of life. Suffering or, you know, difficulties, we all have difficulties. But suffering happens when we don't want to accept our difficulties. When it's difficult to accept our difficulties, we suffer. Zazen is nirvana. People think because nirvana is lifted up, is exalted on this altar of impossibility except for certain stages, we think it's something inaccessible. This is the way exaltation of things puts them out of reach but actually nirvana should be experienced in our daily life as our ordinary life ordinary life is nirvana not some great, distant, huge

[07:32]

impossible thing to reach. Joshua asked Nonsense, what is the way? Nonsense said, ordinary life is the way. How can I reach it? How can I go for it? Should I go for it? And Nonsense said, if you go after it, you stumble past. And if you don't go after it, you fall into vacuity. Ignorance. So, this is the koan of our life. If we go after it, we stumble past, because it's right where we are. And if we don't, we never have a realization. The Dharma seal of no-self is very important because self-consciousness is what blocks out the full view.

[08:52]

Nirvana is like realizing our place in the universe as the universe. Our true human body is the whole universe. This is enlightenment. So a true human body is the whole universe. But when we create a self-consciousness called egocentricity, we block out the universe. So, if I look at this room, I can see the whole room and everybody in it. But if I put my hand in front of my face, all I see is my hand. When I take my hand away, I can see the whole thing. So self-centeredness, self-consciousness is what blocks our view. The more ego we build, the more of a false self we create, the more we block out the full view.

[09:59]

People come to practice and they want something. I've been practicing for 10 years and I still didn't get anything. The purpose of practice is to let go so that you can see. That's why Nirvana, Zazen is Nirvana. Because Zazen is letting go. People think of meditation as getting something. But it's not getting something. We all know this. It's not getting something, it's letting go. Dropping everything. Dawkins' body-mind dropped. Let everything let go. Just let go. And let trust the universe. Without faith, we can't sit Zazen completely.

[11:05]

Because we have to have, to let go, we have to have some security. Even though we don't know what that is. So you might say nirvana is trusting the universe, entrusting yourself to big mind, entrusting yourself to emptiness. Suzuki Roshi talked about nirvana in a well-known talk when he went to Yosemite and he saw the waterfall and he said the water is falling when you look at the water you can see it's falling from a great height and it looks very slow but if you really follow and travel the water down the

[12:18]

the waterfall. It's flowing very, very slowly and the waterfall expands and it has rivulets on each side, but at the bottom it all comes together. So our life is like that, the life of separation, and the more separate our life feels from the universe, from each other, from our surroundings, the more insecure we feel. And then the more we fear, And the more we need greed, the more we need ill-will, and the more delusion we have.

[13:22]

When we just let go of greed, let go of ill-will, and trust ourselves to Buddha, so to speak, this is called security. The security of insecurity. Every time you posit something, the opposite has to be included. The way that you solve a colon is to include its opposite. So the hard part of life is to walk that narrow line between yes and no, is and isn't, right and wrong, good and bad, and not fall into one side or another without bringing the other side along with it.

[14:32]

It's a balancing act because nothing, anything that we think is right is also wrong. And everything that we think is wrong is also right. Good and bad, right and wrong. Is the rain good for me? Is the rain good for you? Not so good. But it's neither good nor bad. It's neither right or wrong. The power of nirvana is like the final release. Nirvana is like the release. That's what it says, letting go of our burden. All I teach is letting go of our burden. Just put the burden down, put the sack down that you're carrying around and free yourself.

[15:36]

So he lived, Buddha Shakyamuni came from the palace. He had everything and lived in a environment of greed, actually. So you can see that radical, he needed to find a radical way of freedom from this radical way of greed. to balance his life out, to understand his life. He looked for it for six years. He got to a point where he would eat one grain of rice a day. He became an ascetic. And he became an ascetic's ascetic. Of course, he did everything. When he did something, he did it to the extreme. So he thoroughly became an ascetic and realized that the middle way was the way to go, not the way of extremes.

[16:50]

Middle way is not describable. Middle way between birth and death. middle way between am I alive or am I dead? Well, within death is life and within life is death. Even though it looks like you can separate them, but you can't. Birth is death and death is birth. Each moment It's a moment of birth and death. You know, we say, past and future. Where is the present? If past and future come up together like this, where's the present?

[18:01]

We say, now. But now is already gone. Now, now, now is already gone. That future is where did it go? But at the same time, there's just now, which is always just now. And it's independent of past and future. Independent of conditions. Even though all conditions are happening on the face of the present. Sometimes, Shakyamuni's par-nirvana is described as extinguished.

[19:15]

No more karma. So, because karmic activity creates itself, keeps recreating itself, Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha is, you know, says, stop creating this karmic activity in order to find your freedom from suffering. Because our suffering is constantly recreating itself. One action creates another, and creates a result, which creates an action, which creates a result, which creates an action. So Shakyamuni is no longer creating karmic activity, and that's called his great release. parinirvana, it finally stops doing that and returns to the great ocean of true reality. So there are two, in Buddhadharma, there are two aspects of nirvana.

[20:31]

One is nirvana while still practicing the world, and nirvana of final extinction. And we say the Bodhisattva doesn't go for that nirvana of extinction, but stays in the world to help beings. And this can be construed in various ways, which I don't want to go into. I don't want to really theorize too much because I'm theorizing about it. But if you just think about it reasonably, you know, unselfconscious activity, simply working for the benefit of others,

[21:35]

as well as not thinking that we're working for the benefit of others is actual nirvana. Because we say a person who has a big ego should work for the benefit of others in order to find their freedom from their own self. without thinking I'm working for the benefit of others. If you think I'm working for the benefit of you, that's still statistical. Just do the work. That's all. You know, it's like the fall from the Garden of Eden. The fall from the Garden of Eden is to fall. It's interesting you call it fall. Here we are. Self-conscious.

[22:41]

Finally, oh my god, you know, I have a penis. You know, she has something else down there. And we have to cover all that up. But before that, there was no self-consciousness. They were just doing. Just being. Just enjoying life. Enjoying nirvana. But the fall from nirvana made everybody feel guilty. So how do we get back to nirvana by being unsubconscious? How do we lose that In other words, sense of separation. Ego means, actually, sense of separation. But, you know, losing that sense of separation because society is so based on guilt and greed and ill will.

[24:01]

Anybody that actually finds their freedom is considered an idiot. I think the mental institutions are full of people who actually have gone that way, but because they're not accepted in society, they go crazy. We're all a little bit crazy because of the way we have to, the fears that we have to deal with in our society. It drives us all a little bit crazy. So this is why practice is called refuge. Refuge from the insanity of society.

[25:06]

And this is what Shakyamuni discovered. He said, this is the reality I have found. You don't have to believe me, but try it out for yourself. So when Shakti Muni was 80 years old, he had been practicing for 40 years or something, who knows, a long time, but he was 80 and he was kind of old. So he was traveling near Kushinagar. Someone offered him a meal. Kunta, I think his name was, offered him a meal. The meal, you know, we don't know what it was exactly. Some people think it was pork and some people think it was a mushroom.

[26:13]

I think that the vegetarians think it was a mushroom. I think that Shakti was, you know, in India, people didn't eat much meat, really, until recently. Most of it was Chinese, anyway. But whatever it was, he knew, apparently, what it was. He said, don't you eat this, I'll eat it. He kind of predicted. He predicted, according to this legend, right? It's all pretty legendary. So, the myth. The myth was truth. So he ate this, and then he told the person that served him, he said, bury it, don't treat it to anybody else. Because he felt that his life, he taught everything he had to teach.

[27:15]

And if you read the Lotus Sutra, the meaning of the Lotus Sutra is why a Buddha appears in the world. Buddha appears in the world with only one purpose, and that's to offer way out for people. And so, then he got sick. And he laid down, it was pretty painful and all that. So Ananda asked him several questions. He said, who will follow you? And Buddha said, there's no need for anybody else to take my place. If you follow the Dharma, and use the Dharma to test your understanding, That would be enough. So the Dharma should be your leader.

[28:18]

I think that was a good choice, which doesn't mean that there aren't teachers. There are teachers, but the teachers should be teaching the Dharma, not teaching themselves. Some people say, well, there shouldn't be any teachers, because Shakyamuni said there should only be the Dharma. But teachers teach the Dharma. So he put the Dharma as the highest, rather than the teachers. Which I think is right. Because often, as you may have observed, teachers put themselves above the Dharma. So, he didn't mean that there shouldn't be teachers of the Dharma, but that the Dharma should be above the teachers. That's why we put the robe above our head when we do the rope chant. When we do the rope chant in the morning, we put the Dharma above our head, even when we shave the hair off.

[29:25]

So the Dharma comes first, and the teacher should be subservient to the Dharma. So, he said, his last words were all compounded things. are subject to dissolution. Everything that is... All formations are conditioned to dissolution and change. So impermanence... People ask Suzuki, what is your... How do you describe the dharma in two words? And he said everything changes. That's the whole of Buddhism. Everything changes. That's called impermanence. Which includes self. So, no self. And being able to flow with this understanding is called Nirvana.

[30:34]

Do you have a question? So today we're celebrating Shakyamuni's power nirvana. I like celebrating. We think of death as something bad, often. But death is just the result of life. Just the final result of life. It's not even final. It's just a next step. I refuse to say what comes after that. Because Shakyamuni said, the question, what happens to the Tathagata after death and what happens, he said, this is not a useful question. But we keep questioning it all the time. Anyway. It's not a useful question.

[31:34]

The useful question is, what do we do now? That's why in Zen, we don't say, why? We say, how? It's okay to say why. But the question, how? What do I do now? Not, how did this happen? How did I get here? It's not a useful question. A useful question is, now that I'm here, what do I do? And we have to ask that question moment after moment after moment. Because every moment is a different moment. Every moment is a different lifetime. This is why Siddhartha used to say practice is just living your life one moment at a time. And if you can live your life completely one moment at a time, that's nirvana.

[32:39]

It has nothing to do with like and dislike or right or wrong or what happens to me. This is how we can feel our freedom in any situation. We're not caught by any situation. It doesn't mean that there isn't good and bad and right and wrong. There is good and bad and right and wrong. That's one level. But fundamentally, Everything is as it is. We're having Sistine today so I'm going to stop on time and I'm not going to ask any questions.

[33:34]

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