I am allowed to taste the truth of the Titan's words. I want to continue our talk on how to create practice using the forms that are at hand, using the forms that we encounter moment by moment to create a vehicle for a Buddha mind

[01:31]

Dogen Zenji says we should be able to create a 16-foot high Buddha out of a piece of grass. In other words, we can use anything that's at hand. We don't have to go searching around for the form of Buddha. We can just use anything that's at hand. And for everybody, it's the same. But in our particular situation, a layperson's life, which doesn't have the label Zen practice on it.

[02:39]

The great challenge is how you use all the forms that are at hand to reveal a Buddha mind. Last week I was at Tassajara, I went for a few days, and Kadagiri Roshi is leading the training period at Tassajara, and he's doing very well. You know, in the last couple of years there's been some laxity in the expectation of students.

[03:52]

And it used to be that there were some rules of how to practice. and everybody just followed the rules. If they couldn't follow the rules, then they had a problem. And the problem that they had was a vehicle for them to work on practice. But in the last few years, since the leadership at Zen Center was rather vague, people started to create a more lax expectation of themselves, little by little. And instead of following the rule or the outline of practice,

[05:04]

people started saying to each other, well, what would you like to do? How would you like to see it? And little by little the practice started falling apart because nobody could bring anyone else up to a line. There was no measure, no standard of measure for the practice. I'm not saying that there's no standard of measure, but it got shaky, got a little bit loose. And instead of everybody coming to some activity when it's time, he said, well, if they want to come, okay, if not, okay. In certain activities. Which is very loose for Tazara. So, Kardegiri Roshi has been He's not been too demanding, but he's been trying to set a good example for practice.

[06:16]

And he posed a question to the students when I was there. He has Choson. Choson is a kind of formal tea with the abbot or with the officers. It used to be the officers and the abbot would have choson every morning. But now he has choson every other morning in a zendo for everyone and they can ask questions. So in the choson he said, I have a question for you. He said, and I'd like you to think about this and answer. He said, do you think it's easier to walk uphill up the mountain or easier to walk down the mountain? Up the mountain or easier to walk down the mountain?

[07:23]

And everybody started saying, well, I think it's easier to walk up the mountain. I think it's easier, and they started thinking about what the difficulties were in walking up the mountain and what the difficulties were in walking down the mountain. And most people agreed that it was harder to walk down the mountain than to walk up the mountain. Although walking up the mountain took more effort in a certain way. When you get to the top of the mountain, you have great satisfaction. If you walk up the top of Mount Everest, you have wonderful satisfaction of having done something. But going down, very difficult. And when you walk down a mountain, the difficulty of walking down a mountain is that you keep accelerating.

[08:25]

As you go down, you keep accelerating and it's hard to stop going down. So you have to make this effort. to control yourself so that you don't start accelerating as you go down the mountain. So at the end he said, walking up the mountain is difficult, but it's satisfying. When you get to the top of the mountain you have great satisfaction, but walking down the mountain it's continuously picking up momentum, and you have to constantly work. If you don't work, then you fall like a stone, and that's like our practice. If you don't keep working, if you keep getting more lax and putting in less effort, you start to go down, and going down just creates more momentum for going down.

[09:35]

And he said, Satori is when you're sitting on top of the mountain with satisfaction through your effort. When you have great satisfaction through your effort, sitting on top of the mountain with Satori is Satori. It was kind of a wonderful encounter. In China, in the 8th century, there was a famous layman called Layman Pang, who practiced with most of the six patriarchs' disciples. and he encountered Sekito Kisen and Yakusan Higen and Matsu and most of the famous Zen masters of his time he traveled and lived with them and studied with them but he never became a monk himself

[11:22]

And he had a family. He had a wife and two children. And he was a poet, not in the classical style, but a kind of homemade poet. And his poems are very famous. And his life is very famous. And everyone respected him very much. One day he took all of his possessions and dumped them into the ocean and just wandered around with his family. His family overall enlightened as well as himself. And I want to read you one of his poems. You probably already heard this poem, but I'll read to you anyway.

[12:51]

In one encounter that he had, had a great enlightenment experience when he had this encounter with Sekito, he said. And Sekito asked him, who is the man who doesn't accompany the 10,000 dharmas? And Sekito put his hand over his mouth. And Lin and Pong had a great enlightenment experience. Who is the man who doesn't accompany the 10,000 dharmas, or who is the person who is free of everything? Put his hand where it's not. I can't explain this to you. But here's the poem. One day, Sekito said to the layman, since seeing me, what have your daily activities been?

[13:53]

And the layman said, when you ask me about my daily activities, I can't open my mouth. That's kind of in response to his former experience. Just because I know you are like this, I now ask you, said Sekhato. Just because of that, I'm asking you. And the layman offered this verse. My daily activities are not unusual. I'm just naturally in harmony with them, grasping nothing, discarding nothing. In every place there's no hindrance, no conflict. Who assigns the ranks of vermilion and purple? That means ranks in the Chinese system. The hills and mountains Last speck of dust is extinguished.

[14:57]

My supernatural power and marvelous activity, drawing water and carrying firewood. So for us, what is our marvelous activity? How do we manifest marvelous activity? In moment after moment, how do we manifest? What is marvelous activity anyway? What do you do with your junk mail?

[16:05]

How do you handle your junk mail? We were, when I was at Green Gulch yesterday, I have a class with the monastic practice group. And they were talking about, we were talking about going over the wall. They were being invited to a party. The monastic group was being invited to a party. And they were talking about... In the map, there's a map to where to get to the party. In the map it said, over the wall.

[17:30]

And I said, what's that over the wall? And they said, well, that's where you go outside the monastery. That's the limit of the monastery. And then we started talking about what do you do when you go outside the monastery? Do you drink beer? What do you do? What do you think you're allowed to do? Or what's consistent and inconsistent with monastic practice? So they were discussing that. The point was, do you change when you go out over the wall?

[18:36]

What changes? If you drink a beer, what does that mean? Who are you being beholden to? What are you being responsible to? What kind of character is your character? Do you have a certain character because you're in a certain place? Or does your character change wherever you go? Or can you change, can you do different activities and still maintain your correct character? That's kind of the problem. When you go over the wall, when you're inside the monastery, you relate to in a certain way with people and you don't do certain things. But when you go over the wall, how do you handle yourself?

[19:42]

And what is our genuine character? It's a kind of test to go over the wall. And it's a kind of test to When you come to Zazen, every time you come to Zazen, you actually enter the monastery. In this particular room, this is the monastery. It's not very big, and we don't live here necessarily, but we act in a certain way. And then when we leave, we enter into different activities. Does our character change? I think this is an important point. How do we relate to everything we meet? What is our marvelous activity? How do we carry water and firewood as marvelous activity?

[20:48]

How can we drink a beer? That's marvelous activity. How do we enter in with people and create a harmonious feeling if we don't do what they do? This is a big challenge. How can you participate and yet not participate and yet be okay? How do you always remain yourself in any situation? Now, it seems that when we practice inside the wall, the space grows us into practice, so it strengthens our attention to practice.

[21:54]

once we leave, there isn't that external structure. So in that case, I mean, inside the monastery it's also important to be self-motivated, but outside that becomes sort of crucial. Because otherwise there isn't something outside that's, not outside, but there isn't the environment sort of strengthening your intention to practice. So it's very easy to sort of go astray. is important to discern every moment or be able to tell whether you're, no matter what you're doing, whether you are actually walking squarely on the path or whether you're actually going astray and your mind is leaking. Outside is a kind of key word. Inside and outside. Wall is just a term, you know, but where is the wall? It's just another line, but there are all kinds of lines and they keep going further and further, you know, extending further and further.

[23:04]

So, in a sense, the lines are just ... the walls are just in our own mind. And so, when we go outside of the zindo, If we're in the zendo practicing, when we walk outside the zendo to do something, it looks like we left the zendo, but the zendo, the wall of the zendo is just extended. And as far as we go, that's as far as the wall is extended. So the wall of the zendo can extend as far as you can move. But the activity gets stranger, gets more, you know. So it's really all one place. It's not, we can divide it up into little places, but in another sense it's all one place.

[24:06]

And we find ourselves in various situations in our zindo. It's like the world is like the forms. We have established forms here. Right? So what is, you know, who is maintaining the form? Eric. That's what you say is the essence of this practice.

[25:20]

But not even trying is a little bit different. Exaggeration. Oh, OK. Don't exaggerate. Without expecting. Without expecting. It's like walking in the rain is a little different than walking in the fog. When you walk in the fog, without noticing, when you reach down you see your clothes are wet. But... It's true. But... Walking is important. How do we walk? Well, I like Raoul's response.

[26:22]

I mean, there are ideal ways of carrying yourself through outside or on the outer limits. But there are situations where sometimes I find nothing to do but kind of give up just as one gives up certain times towards the end of sashimi. You just get very tired and it's the seventh period of the day and there's not much to do except... And for me the worst situation these days is dinner parties. You're expected to go to and you're expected I guess to stay at least until 10.30 at least. And those situations where, for the beginning, you know, one can be alert, but then the conversation, I just can't stay engaged with it, and I get very sleepy, and I can't leave, and I certainly don't feel as if I'm in the staff of any kind of practice. And so you just have to give up.

[27:27]

Give up. Just stay and be sleepy. unless you want to do something which is not in harmony with the situation and say, well, at 9.30 at night I get sleepy so I'm going to leave. Well, how is it to be in harmony with the situation? What does that mean? Harmony with situation can mean, and moved by the situation, or I move the situation, or both. So, if we're just moved by the situation, then we feel a bit helpless. But there's a way also to move the situation. In other words, you also have some influence

[28:32]

But the thing to do maybe would just be to crash. You know, I remember hearing a story about some famous Zen master who went to a party, and he walked into the party, he just went in there and just drank all of it, and he went into the punch bowl and just crashed into the stage. It was a great statement. You just do what he wants. I don't recommend that you do that, but you can do something. How do you respond to a situation positively? That's the kind of challenge. And we get very timid, you know. I just wanted to get back to a couple of others that I talked to at a certain point. You said that we had to be sort of, what, stable in a situation, we had to know who we were in a situation, and I guess I just wanted to emphasize that point.

[29:47]

Do we know who we are? Yeah. Well, you can always refer to your koan at that point. Do you know what your koan is? Who am I? That's everybody's koan, without exception. Who am I? And what that does, if you say, who am I? It relieves your mind of thinking about who you are. In other words, you dump everything that you thought about yourself. This is your saving grace. When in doubt, who am I? And just chuck your idea, your opinions, everything. And you become yourself at that moment. You have the possibility of acting out of your not knowing, which will always come to your rescue. Somebody asks you a question, and you just don't know what to do.

[30:54]

You say, I don't know. And then pretty soon you know. Something comes up. And you may not know, but you know what to do. Buddha nature knows what to do. Yeah? Maybe taking a little bit different path, but we're talking about how we carry our practice out of the Zen dome into real life. When we find, what I'm going to say is... I say a different tactic because I'm going to speak in a different way. And that is when you sit down, when you sit, you do exhaustion, and during that 40 minutes, you're watching how you are. I can't help it, I would say. You become intensely aware of how you are in your mind, your thoughts. You're watching all this, and there's no apparent effort other than just keeping yourself still.

[31:58]

And during that period of time, things come and go for a while, and you see them. You're aware of them. I think the connection that we fail to make sometimes is that we get up off the cushion, go outside, go into our job, go home and whatnot, we forget to watch how we open it. I mean, there was no real effort to begin with, but we connected it seemed to me with some sort of effort. We have to be sitting down to do this. We have to be in a formal sitting situation. And when you speak of going to a party and things are going this way and that way, never really left the cushion. And that's, I think, a hard for most of us to make that connection between sitting on the cushion and being outside. And the energy of the rivers accommodate.

[33:20]

And they push it around and all of a sudden you get a whirlpool and you get the energy flowing without the situation of the structure of the river, of the riverbed. The situation of the whirlpool could not exist. There is a combination to say that we are not are different. Is there a difference? Yes. I didn't understand the analogy with the riverbeds, but in what way would you say you're different? I mean, you're in the situation and you're aware of it, but you're not. Awareness is different than the substance of the situation. When you are in it, your awareness doesn't change. The situation might. Maybe your awareness That's exactly what I'm saying. That we make a distinction between sitting here and being in a different situation.

[34:24]

Is it the same or different? Is it the same or different? Is your mind moving or is the flag moving? And all of a sudden it was like being outside there. Well, but it is hard to practice formal zazen if you don't practice formal zazen. Yes. Right. So, combination of formal zazen and informal zazen. Right. But the form is, I like to say, formal is just one kind of form. And informal is another kind of form. But what we call informal is forms that we don't name as formal. But everything is formal, having some form. But there is no form of practice that's any more the form of practice than anything else, than any other form of practice.

[35:32]

But in order to recognize practice, in order to recognize emptiness, we create some form to focus our attention on it. That's called practice. But you can apply that to everything. And then all the informality becomes formal, a form of practice. How we wash the dishes is the same way that we sit in the zendo. And if we go to a party, it's a great challenge. How we sit Zazen in a chicken coop, you know. Without being down in the mouth, you know. How do you enter into? How can you enter into that without losing yourself?

[36:35]

You may get lost. We do get lost. You know, we get lost all the time. But don't we get lost while we're sitting in zazen? Constantly getting lost. And then we sit down and one minute later we're lost. And then we bring ourself back. And then we get lost and then we bring ourself back. So practice is constantly bringing ourself back to it. Go ahead. When you have a form of death, like walking, fishes, or anything, then you have a thought that you come back to. But when your form is the thought itself, when you have to think about something, I find it difficult to be mindful of my process of thinking. You don't have to worry about your process of thinking. How do you think mindfully? Cut off the process of thinking.

[37:36]

You always have to think. How do you think not thinking? Or turn around, how do you not think thinking? How do you not think thinking? In other words, don't let thinking get in the way. Why do you want to watch your thought process? As I'm watching Jesus and reading Matthew, because sometimes I'm kind of regressing my thinking process, but actually I have to think about it. Why do you have to repress your thinking process? You're deluged by thoughts.

[38:51]

We're all deluged by thoughts. No matter what we're doing, we're really deluged by them. But at the same time, you wash your dishes. And it's like saying, whenever I wash the dishes, I get this itch under my armpit. So what are you going to do about it? You can't stop itching. You just take care of that. Or you forget it. Or it becomes part of the process. Thinking becomes part of the process of... I'm thinking and washing dishes. Or not, I am thinking, but there's washing dishes and there's also thinking. What is the point? We have to be careful about what is the point of mindfulness? Is it to be able to do things better? Or some kind of self-improvement? What is the point of mindfulness?

[39:58]

The point of mindfulness is to realize No self. Okay? Anatta. The point of mindfulness is, when you read the Mindfulness Sutra, this is the purpose of this sutra, the purpose of this mindfulness practice is to have freedom and nirvana and so forth. And at the end, after it says what you do, it says, and you establish mindfulness just enough so that you have self-awareness and just enough to establish awareness and to not be clinging to anything in the world. In other words, to establish freedom from ego or freedom from

[41:04]

idea of self, which means to be completely interdependent with all things. When we lose self, it means that we disappear into the interdependence that we actually are, that awareness of interdependence that we are. Ego means the idea that we stand all by ourself and we're not aware of our true nature, which interdependent, depends on its existence, depends on everything else for its existence. So, when we lose ourself, it just means that we recognize everything else. We begin to trust everything else. We begin to trust our bigger self. The purpose of mindfulness is, that's the purpose of mindfulness.

[42:07]

Not just to improve our ego. That's the wrong, that's the opposite direction. That's why we keep our mouth shut. And just do what we do, you know. Somebody said, well, you know, when I eat, I feel, if I just keep my attention on eating, then I don't feel so much separation between myself and what I'm eating. They're the same. And when you keep your attention on just dishes, then your ego, or your separate self, you kind of lose that. When you stop thinking, your mind gets bigger because it's not so full, empty, and you begin to recognize everything around you and move with everything around you.

[43:17]

It's hard to do, but if you practice it, little by little, you'll feel the dampness on your clothes. If you continue to practice, without expecting something. And thoughts are part of that, you know, your thinking mind. Don't let yourself be bothered by your thinking mind. Your thinking mind is always grinding away, you know, protecting yourself, or thinking up something. That's okay, you know. Our mind has a place, it's like breathing. It's always going. Even if you're not trying. No, but it's stopping one's thinking mind different than the foundation of mindfulness that says awareness of thoughts. And also it seems like there are two kinds of thinking. One is intentional, that you need to do something, you have to prepare it by thinking about it in advance.

[44:24]

And then the other thinking is fantasy, daydreaming. Right. Those are two kinds of thinking. And, you know, it's really hard to say to somebody, stop fantasizing. Because we love to fantasize, you know, and it's a big part of our life. But there's a point where if you want to really look clearly, you have to stop fantasizing. Or at least make the effort. to not fantasize. And even then you'll fantasize. And, you know, no matter how hard you try, in your daily life you will be fantasizing. But just to make the effort to be mindful, it helps you to do that.

[45:25]

The more you put in that effort, the more that will happen. The other is always concerned with the future or the past. Yes. I mean, you never write, and it seems to be mindfulness, the whole point too, is when you do lose yourself, it's because you're right here in the moment, not in the past or the future. If you do, when you do lose yourself? I say when you're being mindful. Yes. You actually are practicing The past and the future belong to the present, but it's hard to grasp all three. All three are hard to grasp. So that's the big koan. Staying in the present is a big koan. How do you stay in the present? Past mind can't be grasped, future mind can't be grasped, and present mind can't be grasped.

[46:31]

How do you stay in the moment? That's our omnipresent koan. And we have to answer it moment by moment. Tension. [...] And this is walking uphill practice, which will produce some satisfaction. But if you're loose, if you don't do that, if you don't practice hard that way, then it doesn't mean much. So, anyway... I would like us to encourage each other to practice hard

[47:39]

Continuous practice.

[47:42]

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