I'm so relieved to be back here with you that I don't really want to have anything to say. I just want to be here. especially in the sense that Buddhism is something that someone, maybe I, carry around and can tell you about. I think in yesterday's discussion some people expressed it very

[01:05]

but there was a feeling throughout the discussion of us versus the Heart Sutra. I thought Dan's talk and how he brought that out in the discussion was wonderful. as if there's us here and there's the Lotus Sutra or Heart Sutra, some teaching over there which we have to study to make sense of. And if we do, it will change us or make us become something it is, but maybe not necessarily that we are. Anytime we speak about Buddhism we have that concern. Actually, I think this summer some of you

[02:32]

I felt it especially when the guests asked you, why do you practice something? There's some feeling of telling them something they should be doing, which you don't feel they necessarily should be, but there's no other way to say it since you're doing it. Or there's a feeling of some disrespect to Buddhism by explaining it or talking about it as something, as some kind of merchandise. Anyway, the feeling is like leaning out over the edge of something, not being sure you can regain your balance. But there are an awful lot of questions before us, and there's our own life situation, our karma confronting us. Sometimes there is, out of a willingness to

[04:23]

cut loose from our karma, or willingness to be free of our karma, or see our karma as not us, but as some acquired habit. Particularly if you have some intimation of some wider feeling, then you're willing to give up your acquired habit, and sometimes at that point you want some practice. I want some practice which will show me how to get rid of my acquired habits, tell me exactly what kind of practice to do. That attitude is not our practice. That's trying to add some formula which we can apply and it will result in something. Some other times we feel, I don't want

[06:00]

any kind of teaching which tells me what to do, which adds something, which explains what my experience should be. But often that's based on an unwillingness to be free of our own karma, an unwillingness to look at the habits we already have, to look at the fact that you already have some formula which you're following, So to protect your formula, we say, I don't want any formula. I don't want any teaching which confronts me. If you could reverse that and have the willingness to see your life as an acquired habit, and the willingness to have a teaching which leads nowhere, then you have good practice, we can say. And if you're willing to confront your karma, willing to be free of your own formula,

[07:23]

then the best practice is a practice without formulas, as the Lotus Sutra is. I mean, the Heart Sutra is an attack on all formulas. So there are these kinds of questions before us that you can't easily avoid. All of you can talk about practicing or not practicing, as if you had any choice, but actually you don't have any choice. You may fool yourself the rest of your lifetime that you have a choice and you made a choice, but you have no choice, actually. Wherever you go,

[08:24]

Whatever you do, you can't escape from practicing. So knowing that, you make some decision and you come to Tassajara as a way of acclimatizing yourself to yourself and to our society. But what I've been talking about recently is that the questions that lead us to come here to practice, are becoming bigger questions, or different questions, that new questions are being put before us by the condition of our society, which are leading us not to just ask ourselves, is this a good practice, but is this a good way of life?

[09:55]

In other words, I see the question coming for all of us in various ways. Not just is this a good practice for the time being, but is this a good way of life for the rest of our life or for society? I don't think necessarily it is. but it's certainly a participant in the response to such a question. Most of us grow up with some illusion that everything will be all right somehow. And that being a particular person named such and such is to be something. Even our government is based on the idea that you are something and have certain inalienable rights.

[11:23]

And soon you find out, if you didn't find out already, you wouldn't be here, that you aren't necessarily something that has certain inalienable rights. You don't even know quite what you are at all. So, to either find out or to be willing to live with not knowing what you are, you start to practice. But although you may have known that that also applies to society at large, or civilization even, the rest of our society is just now realizing that the Constitution of the United States, or our government, is not God-given. Many governments in the past have come apart when it became clear that they were able to be exploited by some few. And in fact, of course, our own country was founded here in this geography.

[12:54]

by people who were tired of European governments which were exploitable. But now, really, for the first time, I think, a large portion of our population in this country realizes that our own form of government is exploitable. out of this some tremendous change is going to come. And as I have said before in various ways, the question is going to be asked of Maharajji and Scientology and Kirche and Christianity all the Buddhist groups, Hindu groups, do you have some answer? Someone's going to ask you whether you realize it or not. Do you have some answer?

[14:17]

how we should live. After I spoke here last time, we talked about, I believe I talked about how we are using up all our resources and how our technology and the rhythm of life based on technology, which we, of course, are trying to have some counterbalanced rhythm of life, which is both referring to that rhythm of technological life of automobiles and telephones, and also referring to the pace of doing things in their own time, Anyway, right after I spoke, I went to the city and the radio said, by the end of this year, December, next month, gasoline will be a dollar a gallon. Can you imagine what gasoline at a dollar a gallon will do to bus fares?

[16:11]

my trips to San Francisco. And that's only in December. Who knows whether it'll be two dollars a gallon. And then there's the other side. I was speaking with a friend of mine who was in Texas only two weeks ago. And he was at the house of multimillionaire in oil, and his friends were all multimillionaires in oil, and they were all whining. He said they were whining and saying, oh, the price is still not high enough. I haven't sold a barrel of oil in two months. And the other one said, there were three or four, but another one said, yes, and I haven't sold a barrel of oil in four or five months, and I won't sell any until the price goes up. So, our gasoline shortage is partly fake. But we can be angry with those people.

[17:31]

selfish they are on such a big scale. But they aren't really much different from us, who wait in various ways for our own advantage. But we just don't own an oil company. If you owned an oil company, you might be the same way. So it's just another example of how our system can be exploited by just being human, maybe. by doing things in their own time. I mean various things by that, but one way of expressing one side of it or one aspect of it is... We were talking in Choson yesterday with the Doans about making tea.

[19:09]

And if your point is to get a cup of tea into your stomach as fast as possible, you can use a great big teapot and a teabag and a well-designed teapot made of plastic, synthetic metal. you can have a cup of tea very quickly and neatly. But if you give each thing its own time, the teapot and the tea leaves and the water and the pouring, it's rather different. Putting the water on and letting the water... It's just maybe equally Equal to having the tea in your stomach is to have the tea in the teapot on the leaves. You have no goal in your activity, exactly. There's just a series of changes. So you put the water on the tea leaves, and when the water seems happy with being on the leaves, you pour it.

[20:33]

If you do that, the pouring itself is some experience. So, for people who do that... When I talk about Japan, mostly, unless I say otherwise, I'm talking about that part of Japan which is very influenced by Buddhist culture. Or as an example of Buddhism, maybe. But if you have... Well, in Japan, then, they are not so interested in, as we talked about the other day, a painting, like on the wall. It's all right to look at, but if it's there forever, it's rather boring. It should change, so their paintings roll up, so you can move them. But even paintings are not so interesting as a teacup or a teapot. because it's just as beautiful as a painting, and it's three-dimensional, it has inside and outside, and you can pick it up, and it's warm sometimes if there's tea in it, and cold if there isn't tea in it. So Japanese people will pay as much for a tea bowl, or tea cup, or teapot, as Western people will pay for a Picasso, and for quite similar reasons, except they want the experience.

[22:11]

of handling it, so you can pick your teapot up. If you have a bunch of leaves in the teapot, not a teabag, but leaves, and there are many kinds of tea leaves, so you have to be, it's not a matter of smart or refined or anything but just for long enough having given things their own space or time to know what different tea leaves are. So you can taste the difference and see the difference and smell the difference. So you put water of a slightly different temperature on one kind of leaf than another kind of leaf. And if you have been doing it for years, You make tea just like anyone else makes tea, but your tea always tastes quite good. Someone else's always tastes funny and different, while your tea may always taste the same even though you use different leaves. By same I mean quite appropriate for that tea. Mostly we make every cup of tea similar because we don't see the difference in the leaves.

[23:38]

Anyway, if you have this big bunch of leaves, naturally the spout will get stopped up. So the tea will come out the top instead of the spout. So it will make a mess. But if the potter is good, he knows that A good spout should work for tea to come through the inside and along the outside. So a good potter makes a teapot which the tea, when it comes out the top, runs around the surface of the teapot and then down the outside of the spout. We don't think of that kind of thing. We just think it should go through the inside. But a good teapot you dump it quickly, and the tea runs out all over the place, but it comes down the outside of the spout and through the inside of the spout, and it only makes a small mess, which you have some pleasant cloth that you like, that you use to wipe it up. So it's more interesting than smoking a cigarette. And so if you're working, it gives you something to do, you know.

[24:59]

bringing in water and mopping up. Anyway, in that way, the teapot has its own space and the tea leaves and the water and the cleaning up. That kind of rhythm is very different from a technological rhythm which removes us from our own biological rhythms. And some people can learn to survive in it quite well, some skillful people, but for most of us it causes certain tensions, to say the least. So anyway, a large questioning about the validity of our particular government, which we until recently have given some godlike inviolability, and some big questioning about if technology even deserves to exist

[26:25]

how it should exist. And as you know, many of you, because you don't like to live in cities, there's a big questioning about cities, city life. Cities are rather interesting. because they... maybe they come together for two reasons. One, the love of association with each other. And the other, fear, to protect ourselves. A citadel, a fortress, to band together to make a protected situation. And to protect our

[27:34]

property, our separate property and our common property sometimes. But now we see the city which is based on security, built to create security, is what most of us fear. What the Daily Downer, the newspaper, every day tells us about is how dreadful life in the city is and how you can't walk in the streets, how in our own neighborhood there have been three murders in the last two or three weeks in Pays Lagoon. Someone murdered in a car while driving right up one block, shot in the head by someone driving with and how another person was murdered down the street, coming up the hill toward our building. That was quite unusual. I can't remember how they did it. That was in all the newspapers, because it was quite dramatic. And there had been two others.

[29:02]

And not even, they don't relate to the neighborhood, they're just at random, kind of. It's by chance they occurred in our neighborhood. So the city, you know, the fear is inside the city now, not outside. So most of the suffering and ugliness we see in the world is pretty clearly created by ourselves out of the desire to avoid fear. We create cities and it turns back on us. We're in the process now of making a park in the city, which the most important

[30:09]

to bring the country into the park, into the city. But the most important consideration, then, is the park becomes a hideout for more violence, more fear. So, to design a park in the city now, you have to design it so it can't be a hideout. Anyway, this kind of state of affairs people won't put up with forever. for much longer. I think our present incredibly corrupt government is actually some fearful response to this fear, to a disorganized society and hence a repressive, self-destructive Justifying. A group of people have tried to contain or think they contain what is good and any means are okay. Some way they're... They think of themselves as honorable men.

[31:40]

Certainly it's hard to find a tree ugly. what we find cities and what people do to each other ugly. And what we see down here among ourselves is... What's ugly here, if there's something ugly, is how we sometimes treat each other. If so, if you can really see how what's ugly and what we don't like is our common creation, cities and governments are our creation, then why be ugly to another person?

[32:52]

We complain about ugliness and unpleasant people and things, but I don't think we really see that we're engaged in the production of it by that. But on the other hand, what's most beautiful is also each other. we who live and practice here together. Mostly more beautiful than ugly. So our practice isn't to get rid of the ugly, but to find out a way to live in this situation which is which we find ourselves the source of the ugly and the beautiful. So when these kinds of questions are put to us, questions that arise from our own karma,

[34:39]

pasted together as we find it, and questions that arise from our own society, surprisingly enough, also pasted together. We don't have an answer, or if you look for an answer, you have to look, first of all, you know, at the state of your own being, at your own thoughts. questioning what is it that you yourself are. There's not much difference between your state of being and state of mind and the state of our society or a national state or governmental state. Not only is the mood of

[35:45]

or quality of one dependent on the other, interdependent on the other, but they are both as fragile and as constructive and as changeable. So again, whatever the question is, whether it's a big, seemingly big question relating to 200 million people, and what, in 30 years, when you're 50, will be 400 million people, twice as many people trying to cause trouble in this country, or pursue happiness. These next 200 million who are on the way, I'm glad some of them that are on the way are in your care. Most of the 200 million on the way won't have any idea of how to live or what to do,

[37:20]

Culture, as I often say, has a critical mass, and it won't extend indefinitely to cover an ever-increasing population. And it obviously won't cover even 100 million people, or 200 million people. It worked for New England, maybe. It doesn't work very well anymore. It's going to work less well, rapidly. So, whatever the question, whether it's this seemingly big question, which concerns two hundred million people, but actually we're not concerned with the past, but with the future, maybe four hundred million people, whether it's that question or a question of your own individual, seemingly individual karma, The response is the same. What at least is real? What can we say is real? What can we look to for some guidance, some fixed mark? Now, if you're practicing Buddhism,

[38:55]

Say, you find out pretty quickly there's no fixed mark, nothing exactly to plot your course by, social course or society's course or your own course. So what is there? Well, you seem to have thoughts, you seem to have feelings, you seem to need to eat and sleep. That much you can have some Those things seem to repeat themselves. For a while. So we sit in stillness to see what moves, as the sutra says, what courses, what's happening. We try to find out what our own most basic needs are. What can we do without and what can we not do without?

[40:24]

How simple can our food be, or how much do we need? At what point is it unnecessary to simplify further? What do we really want from other people? What do other people really want from us? What will other people really accept from us? How well can we actually know some other person, other people? And how well can we let ourselves be known? Or how well are we already known?

[41:39]

And if so, why don't we want to know it? Although we don't know what we are, we can at least see how we arise. And if we don't know, are willing not to know, then this practice, our practice is... Just to say, we can't know

[43:05]

isn't practice, but to say, I don't know, or we can't know, in a way that allows us to know how we don't know, if that makes any sense. Letting fall away that... Constantly forming, icing over, thought coverings that constantly forming

[44:11]

assurance or fearful security that we know something. Giving up the simple need to explain or find meaning. She may not understand what I'm talking about, but she likes to be in here with us, I think. There are three ways we practice them. One is just to find out how we live, how we survive, how we exist on this moment, as Suzuki Roshi said.

[46:07]

And our guide for that are the precepts, is the precepts. But we should find out the precepts internally, not some rule to follow. Why the precepts are actually what we come to when we find out how to survive. It's a survival program. So one practice is just to find out how to survive, how to live in various situations, wandering about. And our second way of practice is jnana, samadhi. knowing how we arise, being free of conflicting emotions, conflicting emotions, what would be conflicting emotions existing in such a wide, collective state of mind that they're not conflicting anymore.

[47:42]

Things conflict only when you see them simply. So, samadhi is our attempt to come as close as possible to answering that feeling we have to know what reality is. It's not just survival. to have some assurance that you know or don't know what we are, actually. If we're in the dark, at least you know it. You don't need to know it. This is a very subtle point, because our mind goes back and forth, trying to make some shiny surface of it. And third is service, willing to put yourself in the place of others, willing to give up your own personal identity. Or third is our vow to save all beings, or our vow to be with all beings, which is helped by being.

[49:14]

free of suffering and distress, as the sutra says. But it means, actually, suffering and distress don't make any difference anymore. So, to save, or to be with all beings, our vow, our practice of service, actually, is the beginning and end. So maybe we can count four. Service or our vow. survival or how to live, precepts, and third, samadhi or jnana, and fourth, again, service and our vow to save all, to be with all, being animate and inanimate. And strangely enough, this conviction that you come to is this conviction, as you see this more and more clearly, that there isn't any alternative. As you see this more and more clearly, it's almost like falling in love. Practising Buddhism is very much like falling in love.

[50:39]

without the attachment. When you fall in love, you... First of all, you can't believe it. You don't want to believe it. You keep thinking, this can't be happening to me. If you're looking around to fall in love, it's not so... so much to be trusted but if you don't want to fall in love because it's so painful and dreadful and tremendous and overwhelming and scary and it puts you in such a vulnerable position and you know from experience how much suffering can come of it and how spoilable it is, and fragile it is. So usually you don't notice it and it creeps up on you. Now it first takes the form of anger, or irritation, or dislike, or something annoying, something troublesome.

[52:04]

Anyway, you put it off, and then one day, one morning, or some moment, you think, I can't avoid it any longer, oh my God, I must be in love. So, you give up. Okay, I must I give in. I must be in love.' You have to make a decision, actually, a recognition, a kind of permission, a decision, a recognition, that, okay, I'm in love. And from that moment we can say, maybe, we're in love. Before that, you're not exactly in love, it's some creeping when there's still maybe some hope of escaping. But once you've made the decision and the recognition, then we can say you're in love. And Buddhism is a lot like that. You know, you resist it and you think you're just here for a practice period or two, and the chanting is pretty annoying, and you know this is pretty foolish, but it's interesting.

[53:42]

And anyway, you keep resisting, and you think you're just doing it for some reason, and you still have your chips somewhere else, which you're going to cash in later. You're keeping them there in the back of your room, or in the city, or with some friend, or your parents. And then one day you realize, oh my God, I must be a Buddhist. I'm a Buddhist. I'm a Zen Buddhist. What am I doing this for? I was never going to be religious. And then it's too late for you. So, you start practicing Buddhism differently from then on, and the world is different from then on. Just as when you fall in love, the world is different. It's the same maybe to everyone else, but the mountains look different. The sky looks good. The air is quite fresh for some reason. Everything smells good. People look happy. They looked miserable a few days before, but they look happy now.

[55:06]

It's an illusion, you know, but it's pleasant. It's quite pleasant. You can't understand why everyone else isn't in on the game. And again, Buddhism is sort of like that. Everything looks different. Everything seems to have some purpose or meaning or clarity or ease or well-being. coming into some relationship to others' well-being. And it's also some kind of burden. It's like you're carrying something around. but it makes all your other burdens seem lighter. Everything that was worrying you before seems insignificant by comparison to this enormous but very light burden you now are carrying. The awareness that you're in love or the awareness that you're a Buddhist

[56:34]

Maybe we want to give up this awareness eventually, but for a while you have this feeling of no burdens and yet carrying something, some sense of practice or mantra or something. And love also has its observances. its carefulnesses. You must be fairly quite careful of the other person's feeling and of your own feeling and that you're not trying to, out of fear, make use of your feeling or fool the other person into loving you. If you do that even a tiny bit, it will all spoil pretty quickly. or that you don't pretend too much to be in love when you're not yet know what your feeling is. And there are certain, you have certain appointments to keep or time you must spend or things you must do together to have that feeling, that new awakeness or illusion continue

[58:03]

And likewise in Buddhist practice there are some observances, some offering of incense. The way we do things, the way we put our robes on, the way we get up in the morning, the way we do service or how we sit down in zazen, some observances are necessary. So, the answer to these kinds of questions could start out with the dissolution of our own karma and maybe the dissolution of our own society.

[59:08]

our body is found not maybe in love, you know, or knowing what we are, but at least in entering into some wide feeling, so wide we don't have any form or name for it, or some wide responsiveness.

[59:58]

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