To see worth literally means to see something worthy. But it's come to mean a special worthiness. So you can say, when we bow, we bow to ourself. That's the koan of bowing. When we bow, we bow to ourself. So when we bow, we bow away from this person. And to bow away from this person is to bow to ourself. That's a very good koan. How do you take care of yourself? And also, it's sometimes called just a great act.

[01:14]

So maybe this is the best way to think about bowing, is it's just a great act. Not like on a stage, but in the sense of a great activity. Just something wonderful that you do has no special meaning. But if you need some special meaning, you can say, I'm just bowing to myself. Away from this person, bowing away from this person, but I'm bowing to myself. So bowing is big koan. koan is, who is myself?

[02:16]

So you can use that, you can say, who am I bowing to? So The feeling of bowing is an offering. This is because we bow with our hands. This way. This is our offering. And so the way you feel when you use your hands is very important. The way you express your bow with your hands is very important. If you're just kind of going, I see people bowing like this. literally. I mean, what are we doing? So, in our forms,

[03:45]

The various forms which we have don't mean anything unless you fill them completely. If you completely fulfill, or if you completely fill the form, then you will be fulfilled. But if you miss it, Or if you just kind of go through the motions, it's the most meaningless activity that you can possibly think of. So when we have this kind of form, if we don't breathe life into it, then it becomes a travesty on form. I can't think of anything worse I'd rather be doing than doing these forms without breathing life into them.

[04:52]

But when the form is completely filled, when I completely bring that form to life without any hesitation and do it with great detail, paying attention to detail, then the form, I feel completely fulfilled. Because there's nothing utilitarian in the forms at all. It's not... There's nothing materialistic in the forms at all.

[06:04]

Usually when we do something, there's a materialistic benefit. So most of our work is done for a materialistic reward. But this activity, there's no materialistic reward. You're not going to get anything for doing it. All you get is to realize yourself. It's the only thing you get, but nothing tangible comes from it. You don't get money, or you get a little food. We do get fed, but actually, you know, we pay for it. So it's the only thing that it's useful for is fulfilling yourself.

[07:22]

And if you don't use it that way, if you don't do it, then it just becomes the worst drag in the world. I can think of 10 billion things I'd rather be doing. I'm the kind of person that's always had something to do. I remember when I was growing up as a kid, I was always interested in something. And there's always plenty to do, you know, plenty of interesting things to do. And I always wonder, because sometimes I talk to people and I say, well, what do you really want to do with your life? They say, I don't know. because sometimes people come to practice and they don't practice. They don't do anything. And I say, you don't have to do this.

[08:24]

Why don't you do something that, find the thing to do that you really want to do and do it. I would really encourage you to do that because I don't want to see you moping around and wondering what life is about, and all this. Find something to do and do it. You know? I'll do everything I can to help you do it. They say, well, I've never had anything that I really wanted to do in my whole life. There's never anything that's really drawn me to do. And that stumps me. Really stumps me. I can see that you do something enthusiastic and you get tired of it and you go on to something else. Interesting. But there's nothing interesting in life. I mean, it boggles my mind.

[09:25]

But people are like that. It may not be so bad in a way, because maybe it means that the person who has never found any interest in life has already seen through the superficiality of things. If that's so, then someone should be happy to meet with this practice. But I think mostly, as human beings, we want something.

[10:41]

We want life to give us something. And a lot of people are waiting around for life to give them something. And you know, in this little part in the meal chant where it says, does our virtue and practice deserve it? I've had many, many people say, I resent that. It's true. I resent that. Why shouldn't I be fed? Why do I have to think in this way? I'm a human being. The world should feed me. I mean, I didn't ask to come into the world. In a sense, it's true. In a sense, it's very true. Because we're born, we should be fed. I mean, so what? It's true, but it's something missing.

[11:42]

because it leans on the passive side of life. So if you look at life from the passive point of view, you say, yes, I was born into this world, and this world should support me. I didn't ask. It wasn't my idea. And then we expect a lot of people and things in the world. And we expect, you know, so the passive, that's passive aggressive, I guess. Passively berating the world for not taking care of us. But actually, because human beings and everything is moving around,

[12:52]

We have the active side. And the active side is how this collection of skandhas meets life. We have to meet life halfway. So that's the active side. And unless we do something, nothing happens. And this is what Dogon is always talking about. Unless we use a fan, know how to use a fan, we don't get fed. And we sit around and complain about life. So half of it is to actively engage. And the other side, the other half is to passively accept. So some of us are passive types and some of us are active types.

[14:01]

The passive types are the victims and the active ones are the aggressors. And Our practice is to balance both the active and passive sides of our nature so that we have some wholeness. I don't say that we can change our nature. Each one of us has a certain basic tendency of our nature, but whatever that tendency is, Our effort is to work in the other direction, to stimulate the other side, to balance with the other side. If we are a very passive type, then we have to learn how to stand up for ourself and how to seek and how to be involved in an active way.

[15:16]

And if we're overly active, then we have to learn how to step back, let other people do things and harmonize with the situation without always trying to control it. And at Tassajara, we have a little microcosm of the world This is our whole world for this period of time. And all the elements in the world are right here. Everything that you find out there is also here in some way. But through the limitation of our practice, we are all involved, knowing what we're doing together. Out in the world, there's no agreement.

[16:18]

So we come together here and have an agreement about how we're going to spend our time and what we're going to work with, how we're going to live together. And through that agreement, that agreement and our understanding of the practice, really allows us to keep some orderly life so that we can see into our nature in a very subtle way. So it's like magnifies our personality and our tendencies. When you're out in the world,

[17:21]

your personality becomes absorbed. It's like if you have a light, a flashlight, and you're in the closet with the flashlight, the flashlight lights up the whole closet. But when you walk out in the daylight with your flashlight, the light just becomes absorbed. And it's just this teeny little thing, you don't even know if it's on. You have to look closely. So coming to Tassajara is like putting a flashlight in the closet. This is what Dogen means when he says, take the step backward that illuminates your nature. And everything becomes magnified. All of our tendencies become magnified. And when we make a little mistake, it becomes a big mistake.

[18:29]

When we do something, every small thing that we do becomes very big because we really see it. And everybody sees it. Not everybody, but you know, because we're so connected, our activity is so interrelated and interconnected that when one person deviates, everybody's affected. But because of the nature of our practice, we can always absorb the deviations. So no model practice is perfect, runs perfectly. It's always running kind of eccentrically, a little bit eccentrically. which is normal, should be a little eccentric. If everything was just running like a machine, perfectly like a machine, it wouldn't be human. So it's natural that there's some eccentricity in our machine, in our Tathagata machine.

[19:43]

It shouldn't just run like a machine. Because we have to, it's a kind of divine plan that we invent for how to live. But it's influenced by the individual tendencies of all of us. And so that makes it quite wonderful. So there's a lot of restraint in this practice. We really practice a lot of restraint. But something comes through. Because we have this treadmill and a lot of restraint, something else that we don't ordinarily experience in our life permeates the atmosphere.

[20:46]

And we can't always speak about what that is. But our communication, and when I say communication, we usually think about communicating in words. But when I'm talking about communication, I'm not talking about communication in words. I'm talking about something else that you can't really express, but you know it. So there's a way that we know each other through this practice that's beyond verbal communication, words, and thinking. It's beyond our words and beyond our thinking. And we all know it. and we all experience it.

[21:51]

And this is the thing that underlies this practice. So really the only thing to do within this limitation is to do it completely and wholeheartedly. That's really all there is to do. And anything short of that is uncomfortable or miserable, makes us miserable. When we're right completely in it, doing everything our best, even though things may not be going always perfectly, still we feel We know who and where we are. Well, a lot of times, or most of the time, or whatever, I feel like, say for example, in the city of Zazen, there would be a time when

[23:17]

really prepared already to really sit with some hard thoughts in. But then there's a previous time of course where maybe I'm sort of meandering about, or maybe not really totally 100% there. And just many other activities in life at the time when I'm not concentrating. It may not be avoidable, but you should make the effort. Our life here is exemplified by zazen. So when we sit cross-legged on the cushion, that's the microcosm of the life here.

[24:21]

And the life here is the macrocosm of zazen. So whatever it is that's happening in zazen, that's the way our life in an expanded way is when we're not sitting. In other words, when you sit in zazen, your mind is always wandering and you keep bringing it back. And that's exactly the same in your daily life. Your mind is always wandering. And you have to keep bringing it back. And that's exactly what you're saying. You're saying, sometimes I do it this way, and sometimes I do it well, and sometimes I forget. Sometimes I don't know what I'm doing. and sometimes I try hard and sometimes I don't try so hard, but you just keep coming back to this thing.

[25:28]

What am I doing? That's the main thing is, what am I doing? I'm complaining, I'm thinking, I'm suffering, I'm all these things, feeling sorry for myself, you hurt me, you don't like me, you love me, but the point is to keep coming back to, what is this? What am I doing? So, in the Zendo, we We sit Zazen, we bow, we eat. What else do we do?

[26:30]

We chant. We sit Zazen, we offer incense, we bow, we eat, and we chant. We don't think about something else, right? That's our activity. And when we go out of the zindo, we all go to work and we interact with each other and we rest and we study and we, you know, make the thing work together. Each one of us has some piece of the mechanism that makes the whole thing work. So what our intention is, is how do I make this whole thing work by doing my piece?

[27:33]

How do I make this whole thing work by doing my piece? If you just do your piece completely, then the whole thing will work. If you don't do your whole thing completely, something's not working for everybody. So actually, each one of us, on this horizontal level, each one of us is controlling the whole thing. There's no one who stands out, either above or below anybody else. We're just all doing this. We're all, it's like a house. You have the walls, and the windows, and the studs, and the floorboards, and the ridge pole. And any place you point, you say, this is the house. But then you can point out also all the individual parts. And you can say, this is the window, this is the floorboard, these are the joists, these are blah, blah. But it's all one house.

[28:39]

And if something's falling down, then the whole house is affected. So our one thing is how we make this thing work for everybody. But all you have to do is pay attention to your own part. And in a bigger way, how do you bring yourself to making the world work? How do you play your part? So anyway, but we're all human beings and we have, each one of us has some personal problems. We all have some personal problems. Those who have less can do more in some ways.

[29:42]

Those who have more need to be taken care of in some way. So we always think of how great it is to be well-developed and mature. That's a great model. The other side is how do we take care of the side that's not developed, that's not mature, that's crying and complaining and suffering. So, on the one hand, each one of us should be very strict with ourselves about how we do our own practice. And on the other hand, we should be very compassionate to everyone else

[30:44]

not expecting something more than what's there, and having some empathy for each one's difficulties. You know, there's some expectation that we have about others' difficulties. He said, you shouldn't be like that. Someone in your position shouldn't act like this. But unfortunately or fortunately, things are as they are. And what we tend to do is become authoritarian because we expect a lot of ourselves. And when we expect a lot of ourselves or don't accept ourselves so easily, you know, we don't accept our shortcomings so easily.

[31:49]

And then we see our shortcomings in someone else and we say, you shouldn't be like that. But actually it's a kind of projection because the stuff that's so difficult that we see in other people is usually something that we see in ourself. Even though we cannot see that, it's just really hard for us to see that. Someone who is more objective can see this is the good side, or this is the positive side, and this is the negative side of someone's personality, and is not so affected by it. But if you're really affected by somebody's stuff, you know, to where it really gets you, then you should look at yourself and say, Where is it in me that that's getting? What is it that upsets me so much? Why am I so upset by this thing, of this person?

[32:55]

Because if we start criticizing somebody for their problems, that should be a big warning signal. It's not, you know, we should recognize someone's shortcomings. If we don't, then we're kind of blind. But what we do about that is very important. How do we help somebody, not how do we complain about somebody? The easiest thing to do is to fall into critical judgment and spend our time complaining. But the point is, how do we help somebody? If you see someone has a problem, how do you help them? That should be our thinking.

[33:57]

Whether or not we can actually help somebody, nobody knows. One of the most difficult things to do in this world is to help somebody. So helping may not be helping. But how can we help someone to help themselves? Because ultimately, we have to do it ourselves. Whatever it is that is our problem, we have to deal with ourselves. But how can you help someone to help themselves? That's what we should be thinking about. So, when you think about our activity in the Zen Dojo, it's all offerings.

[35:08]

Everything, and when we're working outside of the zindo, it's all offerings. So our whole life is an offering. On the passive side, we're receiving. And on the active side, we're offering. So it just goes round and round. And when we bow, we bow away from ourself. And what returns to us is our self. So to be open to what comes to us and to indiscriminately make offerings. Even if someone takes advantage of you. The one thing about people that make offerings is that they will invariably be taken advantage of.

[36:16]

So we always protect ourselves so that we won't be taken advantage of. That's good, but it shouldn't stop us from making offerings. So little by little we have to be able to get over our fears that if we're open something will snatch us away. So how do we find our ground on each moment without being snatched away and at the same time be completely open? I'll leave us with this question.

[37:23]

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