While the five precepts, the last one will be today, are about, on one hand, how to be free, and on the other hand, they're about how you accumulate the most gross forms of karma. The first one, if you know actually what life is, you know, you're free. The other side is if you know so little that you take life, that's about as big an accumulation of karma as you can get, a negative trip. The last one is mostly about karma. And it says, do not cloud or alter your mind or body in any way. And this relates directly to what many of us know quite a bit about is psychedelics. And the trouble with psychedelics, I've talked to a number of you about it,

[01:31]

is that it cuts a path, opens a path for you. Or a groove, almost. And into unexplored territory. The trouble is, is that such a groove, such a path, From then on, your experience, your practice tends to follow that path. It's very difficult to not have that happen. So, people who've used psychedelics a lot, or some, their practice often, they're not disoriented just because they have a weak personality structure or whatever. Their practice usually goes faster the first couple years. They progress rather rapidly. And after that, their practice tends to go into this kind of path that the psychedelics created. But there's a lot of people nowadays who are, this is related, it's not exactly the same, who are working on bio-auto-feedback.

[03:03]

And I know of a group of people here who persist in thinking that if they can, you know, attach, you know, some wires to your head and find out exactly what the brainwave pattern of a person who's pretty good at Zen or yoga or something, exactly what the brainwave patterns are, then they can teach an individual by to have the same state by creating the same brainwave patterns. It makes very good sense. The problem with it is that any good teacher of, say, Zazen can teach you how to have Zazen, pretty deep Zazen, pretty good Zazen, to produce any kind of brainwave pattern you want within a matter of, I don't know, one day or one month. You could give somebody very specific instructions and work with them very carefully and produce almost anything you want with them, if you know what you're doing. But you specifically do not do it. Because the process of finding out how to practice is really what counts. If one spends a lifetime finding out, always looking on your own

[04:33]

A little bit, that's much better than having some brainwave pattern completely. And that's similar with psychedelics. You make a kind of path, which not only is a groove, but it also contrasts with your ordinary life. And Zen practice should penetrate completely. There should be no path. No contrast with your ordinary life. Big mind and small mind should be exactly the same. And when I've talked about conditioned and unconditioned relationships, that's not, you know, two opposite things. Unconditioned relationships include conditioned relationships. And of course there are conditions, you know. if you try to limit your relationships with people in some way, you know, by having to carry such a stick or something like that. So anyway, the last of the five precepts is that the attempt to alter yourself in any way is a

[06:04]

is not only the alteration is an accumulation of karma, but the wish to do so hinders your Zen practice. Just what you are is what practice is. If you just keep accepting what you are each moment, then your practice will penetrate everywhere. Buddhism is a a kind of thinking, you know. It's a rather ecological way of looking at things. Everything is interdependent and everything changes. I didn't really finish the story last night about the guy hitting me with a stick, because I had the same feeling you did often, particularly after hitting the high school boy 80 times. He used to come, and I sat at the corner of the Zendo. The Zendo was set up so there's four places in two long tans with people sitting facing each other.

[07:30]

And I was at one corner. So he would come, and this zendo, they carried the stick this way, or actually on this shoulder. They walked like this. And when they stood, they stood this way. So he would stand like this, and I'd be right, you know, beside him, like right where you are. And so then he'd start to walk, and he'd go like this, and I almost would reach him. But of course I didn't, if only for the practical reason that this was the way they wanted to do it. This was their sort of tribal way, you know. I wouldn't interfere any more than I would in a Hopi Indian rain dance, you know. It's their way of doing it, you know. So here, you know, this is our way of doing it, and to the extent to which each of you is a member of the community, we can talk about, you know, what way should our practice be? But it does raise, there's a much larger question there. So as an instance, as an event, you know, if you feel that way about the stick, you can

[08:46]

I could give two answers. One would be, at that point, ask for the stick, ask to be hit. Or, I can say, neither ask to be hit nor take the stick away. Anyway, So, Buddhist thinking is a kind of ecological thinking, or even super-ecological thinking, because we want to accept not only the usual idea of ecological idea, but we also want to accept the DDT. If not, maybe not the DDT, but we want to accept the mind of the man who makes the DDT. He also is Buddha. So, there's the real problem of suffering, you know. Not this pain we have in our legs during zazen. That's, I know, pretty annoying. So, what to do about the suffering of the woman who beats the dog, and what to do about the suffering of the dog, is the whole of Buddhism.

[10:14]

You know, what do you do about, you know, the suffering of the woman who beats the dog, and about the suffering of the dog? You know, we have koans like, to answer that, does a dog have a Buddha nature, even though there's not a dog to be found anywhere? So in a practical way, you know, practical level, if you, if some woman is beating a dog, you know, you don't know her very well, and you happen to be nearby, if you have enough nerve, you know, the kind of nerve which you'll pick up somebody's cigarette package which they've thrown down the street and you hand it back to them or put it in your own pocket, you know, if you have that kind of foolish nerve,

[11:19]

You go up to the dog and start petting it while the woman's beating it, you know? I don't know. Maybe you can communicate something to her about, you know, the dog or herself. No one has enough nerve to go up and start petting her. I don't think. But most of the time, most of what we call suffering, you can't do anything about. You can neither, you know, ask for the stick nor take the stick away. What to do about that's the biggest problem of our lives actually. The other question that came up yesterday, which a number of people have asked me about, was Pratyekabuddhas. And actually, I don't know, you know, I haven't really studied exactly what in the tradition a Pratyekabuddha is in contrast to other kinds of ideas of Buddhas, but basically, a Pratyekabuddha is

[12:50]

enlightened from conditions while a fully enlightened Buddha on the path of Bodhisattva is enlightened in the way of the Buddhas and patriarchs. And Buddhist tradition says that if thorough enlightenment comes from the way of the Buddhas and patriarchs and Also, more specifically, that transmission Buddhism, Buddhism you can transmit, more than just pointing at conditions, comes from the line of the Buddhas and Patriarchs. Buddhism is a... I mean, if we just take language You can't even think thoughts, you know, or very primitive. You could only think very primitively if you were not given a language. And no matter how much you spent during your lifetime trying to work out a language for yourself, your results would be slim. So society, culture, people,

[14:18]

millions of people have given us a language. And with that language we can even go one step further and add to the language, have some new kind of thought. So there's some development, but it's very small in comparison to the gift we have of language. And it's even more true of Buddhism. Something to do with that is why sound or mantra or word is so important. In the beginning there was the word in religions. But how important this accumulation of wisdom is, so if you're interested in practicing Buddhism, you know, If you're a tree in a garden, you just take water from where it comes. You don't say, I only want rain, or I only want water from the hose. You take whatever you get. Likewise, if you're practicing Buddhism, it makes sense. The special thing about doing it by yourself, just take whatever you can get that helps you.

[15:39]

Even if I practice Buddhism all my life, as well as I can, and study as much as makes sense, and had many teachers as good as Suzuki Roshi, still I could, though I might have some understanding of Buddhism, you know, some understanding of practice, still actually I would know very little about Buddhism. It's a vast, deep thing which you can spend your whole life. But, you know, I spent the last year, in many ways, fighting with Suzuki Roshi because I felt it would be better for me, perhaps I had some idea, you know, of my own maybe, to go somewhere and just practice Buddhism. And eventually I guessed, I assumed that there would be three or four or five people who'd practice with me, and Zen Center would be best to be taken care of in some other way.

[17:15]

Anyway, I lost the argument, but I had this idea because I felt I could be more open in practice and less and try things that might work in the United States. In any case, when you go and you're various of you live somewhere more or less by yourself or in a small group of people, far from any specific group. The problem is, once you start practicing pretty soon, and you're actually practicing regularly, pretty soon there will be a group. I mean, somebody will join you, and somebody will join you, and then whether you like it or not, unless you drive them out regularly, and if you drive them out, they'll come again, you know, through the window or something. So, pretty soon you'll have people practicing with you, and you'll have the problems of what it is to practice with a group. And I've tried to look at three different kinds of practice.

[18:36]

One is when you practice more or less for yourself, wherever you are. You make the opportunity to sit and to find ways to bring practice regularly to your attention. You live wherever, you know. That's not too difficult. particularly if you had a start with a teacher or with a group, you know, you can practice pretty easily. There's specific difficulties, but it's not so difficult. And the second way, anyway, that's practicing mostly for yourself without trying to include the people around you. The second way I've tried is to practice for people, not just for myself, but for people, and just being open to them. Of course, what happens when you're just open to people is everybody wants you to do things.

[19:58]

If you're actually open to people, soon you have several people coming to see you and visiting you and saying, hey, do this or do that. If you're willing, easily say, okay, I'll do that. I'll plow your field for you or whatever it is. If you practice in this kind of situation, it's much more difficult because it's hard to find time to practice in the traditional sense of just doing zazen. Your practice is all the time reading letters or seeing that the field is plowed or something, you know. So in this kind of practice I had to use a lot of skillful means to try to figure out how to practice within a situation which required all kinds of things. My daughter going off to school

[21:01]

people coming to see me, etc. And I worked out ways to try to bring myself to practice. You know, Suzuki Roshi, a week or so ago, I'd go in and see him in the morning, and he said, my wife opens the door when the service is going down here. And I do my own service. I wash my face and I drink my orange juice. And we sort of laughed about that. I've often said that basically ritual is just like shaving your face in the morning. You actually have some ritual of doing it. You don't, you know, You don't think about it, you just sort of have some way, this side first, then that side, you know, etc. And if you connected this ritual of shaving in the morning with, ah, the sun is coming up and, you know, etc., well then you'd have a ritual of starting the day, which is actually what you have. Many people must have their cup of coffee before they get to work, you know. That's just a ritual, you know.

[22:30]

So I tried to build into my day, with the people I was with, some ritual that led me to practice. Because, you know, many things lead us to having breakfast, or going to bed, or lovemaking, or whatever. There are things in our day which lead us to do that. But there's not much that leads us to doing zazen, you know. So you always have to decide, oh, now I'll do zazen, and you have to break off what you're doing, you know? So, actually, if you were a very serious-minded religious hero, you would always be aware of that inner nature, and you'd always be wanting to do zazen, or have no problem casting off your wife, or whatever, you know? But I don't know, that's not so easy, actually.

[23:32]

I used to try to trick myself with these, you know, if I get up in the morning and start washing my face, then the next step is this, the next step is that, and before I know it I have a stick of incense in my hand. So I tried to find various ways to practice in this kind of situation. And what was interesting is I found ritual helped me practice. And finally I found that if I was going to practice there, in this little house I had in Japan, and if without asking anybody around me to practice, you know, I feel if your practice is good, people around you will say, what's going on with him, you know, and maybe they will start practicing. But if you say, hey, please do zazen, no one does zazen. This is wonderful practice, you say to somebody. Anyway, I found that ritual helped, but to extend the practice to the people around me and to myself so that it wasn't my ritual of washing my face in the morning and drinking my orange juice like Suzuki Roshi, leading me into zazen. I began to feel that the place itself had to have a practice.

[24:58]

though I thought about it, felt about it. And so I rang, I started out, I have a quite nice little bell, and I started out each morning when I woke up I would ring the bell three times for Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. And every night before I went to bed, I would ring the bell four times for the fourfold path, for the four holy truths. So whatever time I went to bed, maybe two in the morning if there were visitors, or ten at night, eleven at night if it was a usual night, I'd go to the bell and sit down and take the time, even though sometimes I, or in the morning, Sometimes I had to go to the airport, I had to meet somebody or something. I tried to take the time to actually sit, light some incense, light the candle, put the incense in and hit the bell. It's a wonderful space, actually. Some different space, immediately a different space. Buddha's space, maybe. A different space than getting ready to go to the airport. I put the incense. And you have to wait for the bell. Actually, the bell rings itself.

[26:22]

And you have to wait, you can't go, bong, bong, bong, you know. You go, bong, you know, and then it goes, mmm, so you have to, you know. And then you hit it again, bong, you know. So there's some interesting space there, you know. So then, you know, I'm not very much interested in ritual, but pretty soon I found I had a little 20 minutes of ritual in the morning, wow. I chanted for Suzuki Roshi and the lineage up to Roshi and a few other things, and I tried chanting some things in Sanskrit. Anyway, I came to the point of giving the place a practice, and it made a big difference. At that point, actually, my wife started sitting with me more. The third kind of practice is to be rather completely by yourself, I mean really by yourself. And what do you do all day long with your time? Here in the sasheen we have a schedule for us. But what do you do if, like I would like to, what I try to do is limit myself to two tatamis.

[27:51]

I had an altar at the end of one, and a place for bedding at the end of the other, and in between a place just big enough to lie down, and, when I stood up, to sit. So I limited myself to two tatamis, and I would try to see all day long I'd spend there. What do I do, you know? I could sleep all day long, you know. I didn't make any rules at all. I could do anything I wanted all day long, you know? I could stack some Playboy, I could sleep, I could make coffee, you know? But I got bored sleeping, you know? And I don't actually like Playboy. And I had books, I could read them, but you get tired of reading. And if you also, your time is very, I don't know, I don't like high and low, but there's no high feeling, you know. So I began to find, how can I make this time a sense of when I'm fully alive in this time? What do I do? And again, slowly, I found that ritual helped.

[29:24]

And if I had a time, I woke up in the morning, I slept in a way in which the sun would come hit and I'd wake up, unless I woke up earlier, but just at the first little rays of light I would usually wake up. And then I found if I did a service and did zazen, and then had time to, specific time about, and had some way of eating, and then time when I, each day I tried to do a certain amount of zazen, and a certain amount of study, and I found it useful to do zazen at three times a day, noon, evening, and at least noon, sunset, and sunrise, and chant a little. Anyway. So it's around experience like this of people over many years that the idea of a Sangha developed. So the three treasures are Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, the three refuges. They're not different from each other but we can call a Sangha the people you practice with or all beings or

[30:50]

the tradition. When I gave the building I lived in a practice that was recognizing something beyond me, you know, in a way. I wasn't practicing. The Sangha actually exists. Zen Center actually exists. It's not just a bunch of people here together. It's something more than just a bunch of people. So, how to make use of this Sangha tradition is particularly important for us when we have a culture which has no history of Sangha. I'd like to talk somehow about Suzuki Roshi, but I can't. Certainly there's no need to. One thing in Zen is that Suzuki Roshi was not Yogananda.

[33:15]

What I mean is that in Zen we don't emphasize ESP or special powers or seeing the future. And if you have such remarkable abilities, in Zen you do your best to minimize them, not only for yourself, but you probably wouldn't even act on them. If you found you could read the minds of people around you, you know, you'd try to limit your communication with them to the more ordinary. Because the idea for a teacher is not to stand out like some super being. Because Zen is to teach each of you to be your own teacher. Suki Roshi only didn't want to be the teacher. He only wanted to help each of us be our own teacher. Each of you are equally Buddha. He didn't want to be some special person. Each of you are equally Buddha. Equally can be your own teacher.

[34:36]

So my wish would be that a sasheen like this helps each of you to become your own teacher, to have some experience of what your life is. to have some experience of what Buddha's life was 2,500 or so years ago and what it means when we say he entered nirvana on some day. Today we say December 8th is nirvana day. Thank you very much for the good feeling and the effort in this session. It's not over yet, but anyway, this is the last day. Thank you very much.

[36:17]

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