I hope everybody is feeling good this morning, the sun's come out, it's nice. Well, as I'm sure everyone in the room knows, we have had many years of enjoyment of Suzuki Roshi's book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, which was edited by Trudy Dixon a long time ago, maybe 1971 it came out or so, and I'm sure you've all read it or know about it at least. But maybe you didn't know that even though Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind has never, as far as I know, appeared on a best-seller list, it is the best-selling book on Buddhism in

[01:06]

the history of the West, because every single year it sells thousands and thousands of copies, just steadily, over all these years, and it's been translated into I don't know how many languages, many, many languages, and I don't know how many editions of it there have been, many, many editions. Probably, like the Bible, it will never go out of print. And somehow, despite all the many changes that have taken place in the world since the time when Suzuki Roshi gave those talks, and all the different changes in fashion in Western Dharma, it seems as if Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind still holds up pretty well. And I think this is because there is something about Suzuki Roshi's way, something about

[02:07]

Suzuki Roshi's Zen spirit that strikes many, many people as just true and also warm. Even when we read Suzuki Roshi's words and don't really understand exactly what he's at, we usually feel the truth and the sincerity and even in some way the necessity of what he's saying. And yet, Suzuki Roshi's words, like his practice and life, are not particularly spectacular or exciting or brilliant or poetic. They're really, his talks, his words are really fairly simple and down to earth, and yet they have this appeal somehow. They sound somehow right.

[03:08]

And it's also interesting that almost all of the Buddhist lineages in the West, not only the Zen lineages, but other lineages, Tibetan Buddhist lineages and Theravada lineages now that we have in the West, almost all of them in one way or another recognize the beauty and truth of Suzuki Roshi's teaching. And even though he was not a famous, eminent master in Japan, or even a noteworthy master in any way, somehow his practice and his teaching, as they met the Western mind, created something strong enough to transcend Soto Zen, Japanese Zen, Zen, even Buddhism. Suzuki Roshi doesn't even just belong to Buddhism, I think.

[04:12]

For many years I've thought to myself, how come with all these Suzuki Roshi archives we can't produce more than one little skinny book? Did you ever think of that? Why isn't there more than one little book for all the talks that he gave that were recorded over many years? And we often said we were going to do it, but we never quite got around to it all this time. Maybe we were too busy, or maybe we were a little intimidated by success and the beauty of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, thinking the next book might be a dud. Everybody will say, oh, what a dummy that Suzuki Roshi was. Maybe we were scared of that. Or maybe we thought there was something wonderful, that the whole life and teachings of this great man could come down to 124 pages, and that was it, nothing more.

[05:16]

And there's something kind of nice about that. But also, it would also be nice, don't you think, if there were more of his teachings available to us. So now this is happening. Now it's starting to happen, and many new projects are out there. Now you can get tapes of Suzuki Roshi's talks, and pretty soon you'll be able to read his lectures on the Sandokai, a fundamental Soto Zen text, which is going to be published sometime within a year by the University of California Press. And just recently came out a new book called Crooked Cucumber, which is David Chadwick's wonderful biography of Suzuki Roshi, and we're going to get David to come over in the spring, I think, and give a lecture and present the book to you.

[06:22]

That book puts down on paper for the first time so many, many stories that we've shared just in our little Dharma family about Suzuki Roshi. Now everyone can hear and appreciate these stories. And best of all, we finally found the right person, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, in Ed Brown, to do a sequel to Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, and he's been working on this, taking from transcripts of Suzuki Roshi's lectures, and it's wonderful, wonderful material. I think maybe even more wonderful than what you find in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. He's been giving me the manuscript, and I've been really enjoying it. And David Chadwick is a wonderful, obsessive lunatic, and that's what you need sometimes, because we were kind of sitting on all the Suzuki Roshi material, and David was screaming,

[07:24]

saying, this is all going to rot in the basement, and what are you doing? So he kind of single-handedly, against the crushing weight of our, you know, tremendously benign bureaucracy, managed to get us to realize that we have to do something about this. And so we are now happily raising $108,000—it's odd that it would be $108,000, but $108,000 to preserve Suzuki Roshi's archive for all time, or until the world burns up, whichever comes first. So, if you have any extra money, you know exactly what to do with it. Anyway, the point is that all this stuff is going on, and we now are having new teachings from Suzuki Roshi available for us to study and contemplate, look at, cherish.

[08:28]

And so this is a great thing, I think, and a renaissance in our appreciation of Suzuki Roshi. Of course, for those of us at Zen Center who live here and come here, Suzuki Roshi's teaching is not books or tapes or ideas, it's more a concrete way of life in everyday matter, a kind of a deeply felt, deeply held attitude or spirit about life. And I think that for those students who study with Suzuki Roshi, this attitude, this feeling for life is very, very strong, and for them, very much connected in a wonderful emotional way with their affection, experience of Suzuki Roshi as a living, breathing person.

[09:30]

But somehow, as with all important teachers, it also seems as if this attitude, this feeling for life is also being passed on to those of us who have come later and did not know Suzuki Roshi. And in our own way, we are having the chance to meet Suzuki Roshi face to face, tangling eyebrows together, as it says in the old text, even though not in the flesh, tangling eyebrows with him face to face in the reality of our own lives, in our own practice, and in the relationships with our own teachers. So in short, Suzuki Roshi is alive and well at Zen Center and in many places around the world. Buddhism, I think, is one teaching. And although, as everyone knows, there are many, many forms of Buddhism,

[10:34]

many ways of speaking about the teaching, many ways of putting it into practice, really all the forms of Buddhism are just different ways of getting people to see and to realize personally the basic truths about human life that the Buddha himself saw and tried to teach. For each era, for each culture, and also for each person, there must be a unique way of presenting Buddhism. Because although the truth may always be the same, there is no truth that is independent of a form of expression. And because people are always different, there must always be different forms of expression of the one Buddhist truth. And in every country that Buddhism has visited, there are always people who eventually, probably without trying to do it,

[11:37]

will find an expression of Buddhism that speaks to the particular cultural condition that formed those people. And these people don't create a new Buddhism, they just find a different way to make clear what Buddhism has been saying all along. In Japan, there is Dogen Zenji, a great figure who created a unique way of understanding Soto Zen, a way that's very deeply Japanese, deeply profound. And Suzuki Roshi was a great student of Dogen, and he based his understanding on that of Dogen. So I was thinking that with all this new material that we're having now about Suzuki Roshi coming to light into the world, maybe as time goes on, just as in Japan we see Dogen Zenji as being a new source for Buddhism,

[12:45]

maybe people will see Suzuki Roshi as a source for American or Western Buddhism. His way of Zen is in many ways the same and in some ways different from other styles of Chinese and Japanese Zen, and in many ways the same and in many ways different from Dogen's style of Zen. So I think it's going to be an interesting discussion now as people begin to think about what is the nature of Suzuki Roshi's style of Zen. And maybe scholars will write about this just as over the generations they've written about Dogen Zenji. So I was thinking this, talking to somebody and it came into my mind. So what I want to do today, although it is definitely contrary exactly to the spirit of Zen,

[13:46]

and especially contrary to the spirit of Suzuki Roshi's way to characterize anything at all, still I thought I would make a contribution to this great conversation that will probably go on for a while and try to think about what are the basic points, the basic characteristic insights of Suzuki Roshi's way. Now those of you who know me know that I frequently make great characteristics of this and characteristics of that and the five this's and the eight that's and so on. That's one of my favorite things to do because you can think these things up. And sometimes there can be some usefulness to it, although in the end definitely not. So you know, this is what it is to be human is make things up.

[14:55]

We make our whole lives up in a way and we take that pretty seriously. And then problems come from that. So why not in the spirit of conversation, which is an endless gift of life, I'm going to now launch into telling you the eight characteristics of Suzuki Roshi's way. And there are eight, there are not seven. There are not nine or five, there are eight characteristics of Suzuki Roshi's way. And I feel sure that since it's taken me all this time to tell you that that's what I'm going to talk about, that I probably won't be able to talk about all eight of these characteristics. But maybe next time I'll talk about the ones that I don't talk about today. So here, I know you've been thinking about this for a long time and waiting for this.

[15:58]

I'm now going to tell you the eight characteristics of Suzuki Roshi's way. Probably I'm going to tell you that in the next sentence. So the first characteristic is no expectations. That's the first characteristic of Suzuki Roshi's way, no expectations. The second one is faithful daily practice is enlightenment. Faithful daily practice is enlightenment. The third one is no sticking to any teaching. There's nothing special to do or understand. The fourth one is zazen, meditation, is the most important thing in our practice. And real meditation is our whole life. And the fifth characteristic of Suzuki Roshi's teaching is kindness and toughness are not two different things.

[17:08]

And the sixth characteristic of Suzuki Roshi's teaching is a close and loving relationship with the teacher. The seventh characteristic of Suzuki Roshi's teaching is wholeheartedness in all our activities. Wholeheartedness in all our activities. And the last, the eighth characteristic is pay close attention to the details of form, because that's where you find freedom. So I think, you know, I thought about this. I think these are the characteristics of his teaching. So the first one, no expectations. I think that most of us, most Western people, come to Buddhist practice with, like Dickens said, great expectations.

[18:13]

Somehow we don't go to Christianity or Judaism or Islam with these kinds of expectations. And I think that by and large, people in Asia, especially modern forward-looking people in Asia, don't go to Buddhism with these kind of great expectations. So what do we expect, after all? I suppose we expect enlightenment or peace of mind or some kind of happiness or relief or some kind of profundity in our living. Maybe some of us expect some kind of sensational experience or some serenity of deep wisdom. Maybe, mostly, we don't really know what we expect, actually. It's kind of vague. The only thing, we're sure that we're expecting something. Maybe this is the exciting part, that we're expecting something that will happen and we don't know what it is.

[19:20]

I think the reason we have these expectations is because Buddhism, especially Buddhist meditation, is completely new to us. So it seems like a great possibility. And it is a great possibility. Of course, every moment is a great possibility, except we don't think about that. We become jaded to every moment. So we think Zen Buddhism or Zazen is going to somehow be something special. We're getting around here at Zen Center, we've been doing this for so long, that we're getting around to being jaded even about Zen Buddhism. Some of the old-timers here, this is our practice, not to be jaded, to be fresh, even though we're quite familiar with the practice and the teaching. So these expectations are actually quite good, because they give us an energy and a freshness. And I think that Suzuki Roshi really appreciated that. He called it beginner's mind.

[20:27]

A mind full of great expectations, but without really any preconceptions, or at least preconceptions founded on experience. Since we have no idea what we're doing in Buddhism, we're free to expect the impossible. All our preconceptions, whatever preconceptions we have, are fantastic and imaginary. So this is good, right? This is a very fresh, energetic mind for practice. And I think that this is why Suzuki Roshi came here, because he wanted to meet that kind of fresh, energetic, impossible, dreaming mind for practice. So of course, what did he teach? No expectations. When you have a mind full of expectations, the best teaching is no expectations. So if we can use the energy and the enthusiasm of our expectations for practice, and transmute that energy into the power of non-expectation,

[21:34]

then we can practice in a very strong way. So that, as I'm saying, the strong point about having so many expectations is that it produces energy and enthusiasm. But the weak point, of course, is that it leads to grasping, attachment, disappointment, distraction, which are, of course, quite counterproductive. If we expect something, we must be completely mistaken about the nature of experience, the nature of self, and especially the nature of time. We think, if we're expecting something, that we need something, and that later on we'll get it. Or we think that we have a problem now, and later on we might be able to get rid of that problem. Or we think that Buddha lived a long time ago, and we live now.

[22:39]

But actually, none of these things are true. These things are all persuasive, no doubt, these ideas, but they're only projections of our mind. What is actually true is that this moment, right now, arises in our lives, independent of everything, and yet including everything. Buddha is here, self is here, problem is here, no problem is here. Past, present, future is all here. If we persist in having the expectation that things will change, and that somehow our activity is going to cause things to change, then we're really missing the boat on what is activity. And also, what is change. When we can give ourselves completely to this moment of our lives,

[23:46]

and then to this moment, and this moment, and this moment, and this moment, without any expectation, which is giving ourselves completely, then real happiness is possible. It's not necessary to get mad at ourselves because we have expectations, because, like I said, it's good to have expectations. But we have to use expectation to go beyond expectation. Maybe we can say that having no expectations means that we always have a strong expectation, but what we're expecting is nothing. One of my favorite sayings of Sukhya Roshi is something that he once apparently shocked people with in a lecture, I think it was in response to a question. He said, the problems that you have now, you will always have. He also said, I think it says this in Zen, My Beginner's Mind,

[24:53]

I have found it necessary to believe in absolutely nothing. So that's a little bit about the first characteristic, no expectations. The second characteristic of Sukhya Roshi's teaching, the famous second characteristic, is faithful daily practice, is enlightenment. Maybe you all realize that historically, in China, the Zen school was founded based on the experience of a sudden personal insight into Buddha's mind. And the reason for this is because in China there had been many, many schools of Buddhism, many, many practices that had come into China, and it was very complicated. And religion has a way of becoming refined and complicated, and becomes a very beautiful jewel of human culture.

[26:00]

But sometimes in that process it removes itself from the simple and profound truth that it was based on in the first place. So something like this happened in China. So the first Zen ancestors emphasized cutting through complexity. To an actual experience of enlightenment that was transformative. This kind of emphasis is good and bad. It's good because it does cut through all scholasticism and ideas and notions and gets us to the heart of the matter, which is our life. But it's bad because it tends to make you think that there's a particular kind of experience you're aiming at, and you would expect such an experience, long for such an experience. And should such an experience come to you, you would immediately become arrogant and confused, thinking that it was something. So it makes you think that the purpose of practice is to have this particular kind of experience or insight, and then you don't need to practice anymore, you can forget about it,

[27:04]

because you got what you came for. But for Dogen, and especially for Suzuki Roshi, the practice itself, the daily practice and the experience of enlightenment are one and the same. When we do practice, it's because we're expressing our enlightenment and our faith in our enlightenment. And when we really find enlightenment, then naturally we want to practice. And we do practice. Suzuki Roshi came to San Francisco in 1959 to be the priest for the local Japanese-American community at Sokoji Temple. He did not take San Francisco by storm. He showed up, one or two people met him at the airport. There were no posters, no banners, no news articles, no high-profile retreats or lectures. He just started sitting, zazen, in the morning and in the evening at Sokoji Temple.

[28:06]

And if somebody stumbled in for some reason, heard about him, and asked about zen, he would say, well, I sit here, please come join if you like. His practice was essentially the practice of a simple priest, a practice of faithfulness and sincerity. He often spoke about how stupid he was, and how poor was his understanding of Buddhism. He told a story which David retells in his book, that when he was a small boy, he had a very tough teacher. And in the teacher's temple, all the other young monks ran away, because the teacher was so impossible. And he said, you know, I was the last disciple and then I became the first disciple because everybody else ran away. And he said, I didn't run away, not because I was good or strong or determined, but I was the only one who didn't realize that I could run away.

[29:09]

That's what he said. So he just, you know, went on every day, whatever the conditions were, just practicing. And that's what he did until he died. And he emphasized in his teaching that kind of steadfastness, constancy, faithfulness. Not faithfulness to an ideal, or a belief, or a philosophy, or even a particular group, but faithfulness to a simple life of daily practice. He emphasized routine and repetition. He taught that just doing the practice over and over again, without any expectation of result, but being as present as you possibly can with the practice, something subtle would happen. Unlike other teachers of his time and now,

[30:15]

he didn't travel all over the place giving sessions and talks. He just stayed around the temple where he lived, taking care of things, taking care of his practice. You may think he wasn't a very ambitious person, and in a way he wasn't, but actually I think he must have been very ambitious. He would not have, at the age of 55, started a new life in America if he didn't have a great dream and a great ambition. But I think his ambition was not to do great things himself, but just to have a great hope and a great faithfulness, and to bring that great hope and that great faithfulness to his practice every day with confidence that whatever needed to happen would unfold naturally, without forcing anything or expecting anything.

[31:18]

He once said very famously that practice is like going for a walk in a slight mist. You might walk and walk and walk for hours and never feel like you're getting wet, but when you arrive at where you are going, you will notice that your robe is soaked through. He also said one time, if we walk in the mist together and you get impatient with me and want to go ahead, that is all right, please go ahead. The longer I practice, the more it seems to me that our enlightenment, our insight, our freedom is in our faithfulness, our confidence in our Buddha nature, which is the real nature of our body and mind, beyond the appearance we take on in this fleeting, short life.

[32:20]

And we are not looking for some experience or some knowledge, but only hoping for a growing faith that life is life, and death is death, and that we are always, moment after moment, in connection with this. And when this is true for us, very naturally, we are going to want to do practice. We are going to want to bow to Buddha. We are going to want to make offerings. We are going to want to chant. We are going to want to meditate. We are going to want to be kind to others and to ourselves and to everything, without making any big deal out of it. Just that's what we want to do. That's natural. Our enlightenment is not a state of mind. It's not an accomplishment. It is just this moment-by-moment experience of faithfulness.

[33:23]

I'm interested in all kinds of Buddhism, and I'm like a little kid in the store when I see, oh, a new book about Tibetan this and Theravada that. I get all these books and I read them and I'm thrilled. And I think that it's probably true that other teachings and other teachers are much better than ours. It's probably true. More colorful, more wise, more deep, more beautiful. But that's not what matters, because we're not trying to be wise, deep, beautiful, wonderful. We're only trying to practice our whole life through, day by day, with this faithfulness. And that's all the enlightenment we need. And in a simple daily activity of practice, whatever that may be in our lives, we find enlightenment everywhere.

[34:28]

Last month we had our month-long retreat, and at the end of the month we decided to do something we'd never done before here, a silent session, a silent retreat. That means no Dharma talks, no chanting, only a few interviews. And if we had anything at all to say, practical, we would write it down, we wouldn't use our voice. Very quiet. So we just sat, we ate our meals in silence, we cleaned up in silence, we took a rest in silence, and at night we peacefully slept. Instead of watching over the practice of others, as we usually do, the teachers also turned around and sat facing the wall, just taking care of their own practice. And it was a very beautiful retreat session.

[35:31]

And we found that we didn't need any teaching, any special inspiration. Just to be alive, on a moment-by-moment basis, was all the inspiration that we needed. And one afternoon during that session, I was walking from the Zen Dojo here over to my room, and the weather was a bit like right now, and a shaft of sunlight came on my shoulder. And it was such a wonderful sunlight. It was so warm. It warmed me right up to the quick, you know. It was such a tender, beautiful shaft of light. Delicious. And it was such a beautiful moment of sunlight

[36:35]

that it almost made me cry. It was so beautiful and so wonderful. And I all of a sudden understood, for the first time, a Jewish prayer that I used to say as a child. It's often said, and I forget exactly what the prayer says, but it's something like, it's a prayer that is said on many occasions of joy, where you say something like, Blessed are you, O Lord, who creates a whole universe of time that brings me to this one moment of time that's so precious. So spontaneously that prayer came up in my mind. So this is our enlightenment. This is Suzuki Roshi's way of enlightenment. And I don't think it's just about Zen or even just about Buddhism. It's really only about life. Real life. Not imaginary life.

[37:35]

Life as it actually is, in a simple way. Now we're up to the third step. The third characteristic of Suzuki Roshi's teaching, which is not sticking to any teaching. Now I think sometimes if you read Suzuki Roshi's words and think about what he's saying, reflect on it, you know, he might seem a little wishy-washy. He often doesn't take a definite kind of position about things. Or if he does, usually in the next breath he'll take the opposite position. So the opposite is also true. He often used the phrase, the other side. And I can remember in my early days of practice my own teacher, Sojin Roshi, always saying that phrase, the other side. He would say something and I'd say, well the other side is. Which meant, well, you know,

[38:37]

this is one way of looking at it and then there's this way of looking at it. You can look at it that way and you can look at it this way. And both ways are true and therefore both ways are also not true. Sometimes people refer to this kind of viewpoint as the non-dual viewpoint. But I have never liked this term, non-dual. It seems so philosophical and dualistic. Non-dual. Non-dual, the term is very dualistic, you know, because it implies non-dual is very good and dualistic is very bad, which is very dualistic point of view. So dualistic is part of non-dualistic. So the real non-dualistic is dualistic and non-dualistic. That's why it's non-dualistic. These are the kinds of things you think when you have a term like non-dualistic, which is why I don't like this term so much because this is what you get into.

[39:37]

But Suzuki Roshi understood the idea of non-dualistic not as a philosophical concept but as a way of being alive. He understood it as a freedom, not being caught by anything, not being limited by one's views, even Buddhist views, even Zen views, even the most correct views are limiting if you're caught by them. Practice is really beyond all views, includes all views, honors all views, but doesn't stick to any of them. So he was always interested in pointing out to people their sticky views, you know, when they were sticking to them and trying in gentle ways to get them unstuck. There's another famous story that I'm sure many of you have heard about one time when Suzuki Roshi was driving up to the city from Tassajara with a student and the student was an ardent vegetarian.

[40:44]

In those days, and I suppose it's still the case, people had some very definite ideas about what was ethical and unethical to be eaten, what was good for you, what was bad for you, and so on. So when Suzuki Roshi and the student stopped at a restaurant for lunch, the student was very surprised and challenged by the fact that Suzuki Roshi ordered a very large hamburger, probably, you know, rare and dripping with blood. So the student ordered, you know, a salad, no doubt. And he was even more surprised and shocked when the food came. He put the hamburger in front of him and took the salad for himself. Didn't say a word, just switched the plates.

[41:49]

Now, I don't think that this means that Suzuki Roshi was disapproving of vegetarianism. I don't think it was any particular view that he was against or for. But rather, how do you hold the view that you hold? This was the question. To practice the way is to be present in each moment. And to be present in each moment, you really are beyond time, which, after all, is a concept as Kant taught us. Suzuki Roshi spoke of this over and over and over again. And when you hold on to views, any kind of a view, you are stopping time and creating a fixed world, a world of a linear time, which is a world of suffering and opposition and trouble. Not sticking to views

[42:52]

is not wishy-washy. If you're not sticking to views truly comes from the heart of your practice. When your practice is faithful, when you stand firmly in the middle of your own life, which is not separate from all of life and which is fresh each moment, standing in that place, truth is very clear, truth is not confusing. But the way to express truth will change according to circumstances. When your practice is faithful in this way, you will not get mixed up between the truth, which is clear, and the expression of the truth, which is always changing. You will know the difference and you will stand firm with truth, but very flexible with expression. You will know what is important

[43:54]

and what is trivial, what is helpful and what is not helpful. And even if you don't know, you will have the patience and the confidence to go forward in the best way that you can without getting confused or caught or pushed off center. So this kind of practice is a very subtle thing. It's hard to define, hard to know how to do it. It's more about a feeling, as I said before, a feeling, an attitude about life than it is about rules or doctrines. Over and over again, Suzuki Roshi talked about rules. He was very meticulous about rules and he said, there are no rules. There are no definite procedures. And even when there are definite procedures, one should understand that these are completely contingent. Probably my favorite phrase

[44:57]

of all time of Suzuki Roshi's, which I'm sure you've heard me quote before, is his three-word response to the question, what is the essence of Zen? He said, not necessarily so. Well, I got through the three characteristics out of the eight, so next week I have five characteristics I have to do. But I want to end with, at the risk of going on too long, a passage, a long passage from Ed's manuscript, Precious Words of Suzuki Roshi. And this is a very interesting passage. In a way it's a little bit hard to understand. It's a little kind of confused or confusing. Sometimes I think Suzuki Roshi said, then you could get some feeling

[45:57]

for what he's saying. So I want to read this interesting passage for you and then we'll all go away. This is in the middle of a lecture. I'm not beginning at the beginning. Dogen Zenji, he says, talks about practice, not in terms of something special, but something continuous, something which is mixed up with everything. As he said, if you fall on the ground, you should get up by the ground. Does that make sense? If you fall on the ground, you stand up again by using the support of the ground in that place. But he also says, Dogen also says, if you fall on the ground, you should get up by emptiness, by nothing. Without discussing why this is so, we cannot have a complete understanding of our teaching. Actually, we do get up

[46:58]

with the help of the ground. That's the way to get up. But he says, we shouldn't get up with the help of the ground. What does he mean? If you always rely on the ground and so don't mind falling, you will fall quite easily. You will think, it is all right I can get up by the ground. To practice our way with this kind of prejudice or easy idea is wrong. This point is important. It is like enlightenment. If you rely on enlightenment to practice zazen, you will be someone who easily makes mistakes or falls on the ground relying on the help of the ground. Do you understand? It's a very subtle point. This is the only way to get up. But if we stick to the idea of the security of the ground

[47:59]

all the time, we will lose the true meaning of falling. In other words, we should not make the same mistake many, many times. Falling again and again, relying on the ground to always save us. Reality is not like that. Things do not happen in the same way, not even twice in the same way. The ground is never the same ground. It can be a stick sometimes or it can be a stone. It can even be water sometimes. Ground is it, you know. It is everything, not just ground. It means that you should practice without imagining you can ever have the same experience twice, like the experience of me. Me is never the same, twice. So there is nothing

[49:01]

to rely on in our practice. But on the other hand, there is always something provided for you, always. According to the circumstances, you will have some aid. The pain is it. It is everything. But at that time, it is some definite experience or particular trouble. It can be drowsiness. It can be hunger. It can be hot weather. So hot weather or nice cool weather or hunger or mosquitoes or pain in your legs or all of our human suffering can be an aid to your practice with which you can stand up and establish your practice. So not only Buddha's teaching but everything can be an aid to us. So we have this term, which means it, something, somebody doing something,

[50:03]

some discontinuous particular being which has form and color. But as Dogen Zenji says, Zen practice is also something continuous, mixed up with everything. If this is so, then someone doing Zazen already includes everything. Someone cannot be separate from this world. Some action cannot exist without the background of the whole world and something cannot be apart from other things. So someone doing and something doing are all the same thing, you know. If they are the same thing then we could just as easily say something, something, something. Then what is that? That is complete realization. Got that? Everything happens in this way.

[51:05]

So if you stick to the idea of help or enlightenment, that is already a mistake. You have already separated yourself from everything. Someone may say, oh, he is Soto Zen, he denies the enlightenment experience. It is not so. We Soto students do not stick to anything. We always try to have complete freedom of practice, complete freedom of expression. Our practice is the living expression of our true nature of reality. For us, it is not possible to stick to anything. One moment after another we have to practice our way in quite a renewed, quite a refreshed way. Our practice should be independent from past practice and future practice. We cannot sacrifice our present practice for some future attainment. This is the way all the Buddhas attain enlightenment and the way all the Buddhas attain enlightenment

[52:08]

is not any particular way. Sometimes it may be Soto way, sometimes Rinzai. According to circumstances, it may be the way of another school. The way people attain enlightenment is always different. Someone will attain enlightenment when seeing a flower or hearing a sound. Someone may attain enlightenment when taking a hot bath or going to the restroom. Rich and poor may attain enlightenment in various ways. But actually, there is not a Soto way or a Rinzai way. This discussion may be abstract, but in short, what it means is whatever it is, we should accept it. By means of various things, moment after moment, we practice. This is the only way to attain enlightenment. So, that's all.

[53:10]

Thank you very much for your attention. So now we get to discuss something, whatever is on your mind. Hopefully it has to do with the teachings. Yes? Could you explain the difference between hope and expectation? The difference between hope and expectation. Well, it's interesting that you bring that up. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and my thoughts are still unclear to me, so I don't really have an answer to your question, but I can give you some idea of what I've been thinking about. Certainly, as I was saying in my talk,

[54:10]

in meditation practice, the thing is to be present and not to be looking for something in the future. And there's something, you could almost say, I mean my view would be that to be profoundly present in one's life is the essential religious activity, no matter what the tradition is, that it really comes down to that. And being present is, like I say, it's not hedonistic present, it's a profound present that takes into account past, present and future, birth and death, it's all there in the present. That's my expectation, as I was saying this morning. And so meditation teachers often say, give up hope, that's what, over the gates of hell,

[55:11]

in Dante's Inferno, it says, abandon hope, ye who enter here, and I often thought of putting that in meditation hall. So that's one side of it. But then, in recent years, I've been thinking about this and I've been thinking that on the other hand, so there's all of that, and I think all of that is very true, but on the other hand, you notice I also said I thought that Suzuki Roshi had a great hope, which I said that very advisedly, because I think there's something that's important about having a sense of hope and vision, but not that something would happen, but just a sense of hope

[56:12]

and vision, because otherwise, if you accept too much, conditions as they are, you have to accept conditions as they are, and if you stop there, then what about injustice? What about this broken world? I think it's a human thing to want to feel that the world can be repaired and that somehow our activity can be beneficial in repairing it. So it actually may be a weak point of Buddhism to emphasize no hope in that way and almost make it into a doctrine. So I'm feeling, like I said, I haven't worked this out in my mind, but I see that they have a hope, and I'm also influenced by my Christian and Jewish friends who, it's the whole thing in those religions, it's about the hope, the messianic era, the time when you go to

[57:14]

a Jewish service and it's about hope. Now, we know that this can be pernicious idea if understood in the wrong way, but also there's something to it, so I'm trying to figure that out. But I think there is something to the idea of having a great hope but not hoping for something, that something should happen, and then being disappointed, angry and frustrated when it doesn't. We were having a retreat during the Gulf War some years ago, and a couple of the people in the retreat actually had relatives on the ground, American troops, and of course, as it turned out, hardly any American troops

[58:15]

were killed, but they didn't know that at the time. Of course, it was never mentioned, huge numbers. Anyway, that aside, so there was a lot of grief and sorrow in the middle of our retreat, and I remember saying to people, you have to accept this, just accept it. You can't deny it or be angry about it, you have to accept it, and it is absolutely unacceptable. That's how I found myself thinking of it. So it's like this, there's no hope, you have to just accept what comes now, there's no hope, and at the same time you have to have a great hope, but not for something. But the spirit has to be rising, and I think that's a very natural human thing. I think we need that feeling. And then if you study the Mahayana Sutras,

[59:16]

they're kind of wonderful because they envision an endless time frame. We practice lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, and definitely we're all going toward enlightenment, and the whole world is going toward peacefulness and perfection over there, and we're definitely going that way, even though there's ups and downs. It looks to us like there are deep ups and downs, but actually, in the big picture, it's a steady going in that. So that's nice if you look at it in that big time frame, and then of course that big time frame is always right now. So it's a deep issue, and these are not finished thoughts, but just mumbling a little bit in the direction of your question. Thank you for the question. Yes? Can you talk a little bit about finding the balance between no teaching and routine practice? It seems so easy. If one adopts a routine practice, be it Buddhism or Judaism, there's always the worry of losing

[60:17]

the beginner's mind and losing the patience. And if one strictly adheres to no teaching, there's the possible extreme of having no guidance. What's the balance between those two? Well, I think definitely and certainly in Buddhism and in all traditions, there is the idea of teaching and that we need teaching, we need teachers, we need input. In Zen, the idea is not that the teaching is something that you need to know that you don't know, but more the idea is that teaching is encouragement. This is the idea because we will definitely forget. Sometimes, once I've said that if you say to yourself, I will keep my practice in my mind from the time that I walk in this door on this end of the room to the time that I walk out the door on the other end of the room. Try to do that. You won't be able to do it. From the time

[61:18]

that you walk in one door until you go out the other door, you'll forget about it for a second. That's how the mind is. Left to our own devices, even though we're Buddha, we forget that. So that's why we need teaching and all the different things. Religion is full of all sorts of reminders, techniques to remind us what's going on and who we are. So we need that. But we receive the teachings not that we're lacking something that we need to get from these teachings, but rather that the teachings are just reminding us of what we already have. And we do need that, practically speaking. Any of us, if left to our own devices, become lazy and confused and selfish and everything. We need to do something to counteract that tendency. Because according to traditional Buddhist thought, we have, in past lives, accumulated so much habit energy in that direction that we really have to do something

[62:18]

to counteract it. And if we don't, that habit energy will come to the fore. So we have the capacity and the potential to be awakened as fundamentally who we are, but we have all this habit energy in the other direction. So we have to make some effort to return to our real nature, which we have so deeply forgotten. Yeah. So I always find teaching very encouraging. And I like to study teachings and do practices. It just encourages me. Mm-hmm. Oh, thank you. Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes.

[63:20]

Right. Right. Right. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Right. Mm-hmm. Yes, yes. Yeah. Maybe one good way to look at it, what you're saying this makes me think that maybe we could say that expectations are always expectations for something, and then we're always disappointed. But maybe hope is not, is just a, is a rising feeling in us, not attached to some result, but just the feeling

[64:28]

of hopefulness about life, you know, and then not expecting something. Maybe we could make that kind of distinction between those two terms. Anyway, we can do that today and then tomorrow, maybe something else. Yeah, Raja. It feels like something tying those two questions together is, is a notion of, or an understanding of impermanence. Yes. I mean, to me, that, that feeling of having a feeling of hope that you could even see it in a positive way is, I know that because things are impermanence, the universe is going to be continually presenting me with something fresh and new. Yes. I don't want to say that it's going to be something better because my idea of what's better or worse or anything is my idea. Yes, yes. Or even our collective idea. But I, but I know that it's always going to be something fresh and new. So there's hope in that you're saying. That's, I think, that's what hope is. Yeah. Hope is a recognition of impermanence and also has to do with the thing about daily practice

[65:29]

that, that you don't, it doesn't become stale as long as you know that you're doing a practice in a moment that is unlike the moment that you did it last time. Yes, yes. And that you have to, you have to be constantly, you have to be so attentive to it because if you think that if you get into a habit, then you're not doing it in this moment. Yes, yes, yes. That's great. Yeah, the, the connection between impermanence and hope. Yeah, that's very good. Thank you very much. Yeah. That's a good idea. Now, do other people have comments? We're kind of into something here. Maybe other people have comments on this issue of expectation and hope. So I'll just start here and we'll go and all of you can. Yeah, go ahead. It's like impermanence is a good transition or a good way to look at hope. I was thinking that, and I've been thinking that, and asking myself the same question, that, well, in Pali, Sada, and faith, which you also talked about.

[66:30]

Yeah. Confidence or faith. And the way faith, simple faith, moves toward confidence in the Buddha, in the Abhidharma understanding of it. So it's always different according to your own capacity for faith, for Sada. So that's one way of understanding hope in the way that it shifts from a simple hope to a more hope without an object or attachment to a result. But in the same way, right aim or right intention could also be seen as hope. Whereas aim, at a certain point, becomes not a concrete idea of where you want to go, but a direction you're aiming the mind. Right. Or aiming your being like hope. Yeah, aspiration. Yeah, aspiration. And if it's like daily practice, it keeps shifting your idea as your idea shifts Yeah, yeah.

[67:32]

And Sada. Yeah, if you, on the other hand, if you, like in the example you were giving, if you, even if you expect something particular, it's different from what you're saying. In other words, if you expect something in particular and it happens, what happens is not what you expected. Even though, you know what I mean? There's a lot of people you're thinking, oh, I'm going to go to this place and it's going to be wonderful. And then you go there and it's wonderful in a way, but it's not what you had in your mind. What you had in your mind was the essence of it is that it never was going to arrive. So you're always disappointed even if you, even if everything works out perfectly, you're still disappointed, you know, because expectation never, whereas on the other hand, if you're just present with impermanence, you're never disappointed. Even rotten things are, wow, that's amazing. Yeah, I just was going to say that we were, as we were walking, we were speaking about our experience of India,

[68:33]

and everywhere we went, it seemed that what people were hoping for was to have that, those moments when they would forget themselves. I mean, really. Yeah. We went to this temple more than 2,000 years old, the Madurai, and every, you know, 10,000 devotees, all mostly from rural villages go there every day. And when they do prostrations, when they offer incense, anything that they do, it's then with that feeling of just letting everything disappear, full-heartedly. And I think that's the hope that tends to be missing from life in America and in Europe, where people hope for, they always take on a little tiny footnote of something. Yeah. I didn't feel that. Yeah, yeah. Big hope. Yeah. This thing about expectations and being attached to the results, I've been trying to deal with this my whole life. How's it going? Well,

[69:38]

I still get sucked into it. And I notice that when I have high expectations, that I want something, I have a desire to have something in my life that's not there right now, and when I don't get it, I mean, I could get depressed. Well, you know, it's... It really... And I notice that, and I'm aware of it, and I still get sucked into it. I forget. Yeah. I just forget. You know, expectations in my mind, like in other voices, expectations kill. Yeah. Because it's hurt, because you're expecting something more different than what it is right now. To be present in this moment and just accepting everything as it is, that's a life's work. Yeah. Definitely. That's right. So people, how many millions of people over the generations

[70:39]

have devoted themselves to spiritual practice, just basically, you could say, working on that point. It is a life's work, yeah. I find myself, when people say to me, oh, you're going to have such a wonderful time, I kind of look at it and what comes out of my mouth is, well, time will tell. I always feel like, gee, I'm kind of putting them down even though I'm being negative. But when I don't do that, then I'm disappointed because I expected something to happen. I don't know. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. But you could also, you don't have to say that, you could just say, oh, yes, I will have a wonderful time. Knowing that the whole thing is just a nice way to be with this other person who's wishing you well, but has nothing to do with time or will or should or must or anything. It has to do with mystery. Yeah, not knowing what's going to happen. Not necessarily a good time. Yeah, yeah. A wonder means not knowing.

[71:41]

Right. That's right. Yes. Well, that's just another kind of expectation, right? Expecting, fearing that something bad will happen. Since it's unknown, it could be bad. So, you know, let's not go forward. Yeah. So all of this, when you really appreciate impermanence and the nature of our experience and recognize that, you know, what happens in reality is that our whole life arises and then passes away and there comes another one. And self, desire, everything comes and goes. And if you can be patient with that and be attentive enough to live it that way, then there's never anything to fear. There's never anything to accept.

[72:43]

Expect, I mean. Expect. Never anything to hope for. Although I think Raja's nice formulation that to live that way is already hope. There's already a hopefulness in living that way. And I think this is the experience of great practitioners, enlightened people who live in that way. They have a lot of joy because, you know, wow, what will life bring now? Even the worst case scenario, which is the definitely arriving scenario of our leaving this world can be a beautiful culminating experience. And one hears stories of the deaths of great people that are that way, you know. So this is the fruits of our practice, that we would see things that way and live that way more and more. Yes? It still seems a little artificial to distinguish between hope and expectation, to me.

[73:45]

Maybe it's five points of semantics, but, you know, saying, well, we just won't hope for anything. My understanding of the word hope still has a very strong, at least implicit, if not explicit, object to it. Whereas if you talk about permanence and presence, and I'm certainly not one who can do this at this point, but if I try to think of what it would be like to be a being who can be just fully realized in the present moment, it seems like hope is an artifice that really has no meaning. Hope is still projecting forward. If you see people who are full of hope, well, they're hoping for something better. They're hoping for a budget. They're hoping for peace. They're hoping for happiness. Yeah. But it's something that's not here right now. Yeah. No, that's very true, but as you were saying that,

[74:47]

I was thinking to myself the other day, you know, Jack Kornfield was sick. Did you know this? He was very sick, and he's better now. Don't worry. He's better. But I was worried. He's a good friend of mine, and I was worried. So we chanted a service for him, and when we chanted the service, I was thinking in my heart, you know, I hope that the positive energy of this chanting will benefit Jack. Yeah, it did. Although, you know, I don't... So in other words, there was hope in that gesture, and I was glad to be able to do that, although I didn't believe in some mechanistic way that we were going to shoot out a ray of something that was going to, like, get inside of Jack and cure him somehow, you know? And I certainly, if Jack had become ill, I certainly would have been sad and upset about it, but I also would have accepted it,

[75:48]

you know, because that's what happens to people. So what I'm trying to say is if I had an ideology of non-hope, I might have said, well, what's the point of chanting like that? You know, I mean, what's going to happen is going to happen, which is true. Jack's karma is going to produce Jack's result, and nothing that I can do about it will change that, and there's no use, you know, which is all true, which is all true. But at the same time, I was glad to be able to do that, you know, and have that kind of... So to me, that kind of thing is an example of hoping, and that's why I'm interested in practicing hope in that way. But I see what you're saying. That's also so... No point. Oh. Yeah. Uh-huh.

[76:52]

Uh-huh. [...] Yeah. Well, it sounds like for you, the language of hope is not good. So, yeah, I can understand. Yeah. Yeah. No, because it's true. It's true. The word hope, as you say, has been conditioned in our language to mean hope for something, like pie in the sky. We'll get pie in the sky later on, you know. So I understand what you're saying, yeah. Yes. Uh-huh. [...] Not having attachment, yeah.

[77:54]

Yes. Uh-huh. [...] and people then become very isolated in their practice and very personalized

[78:57]

and forget about their connection to a collective public world and that actions by human beings create many of the injustices we have and how do you stand and have actions that are for justice? And so I struggle with that and I wonder if you have thoughts or if others have thoughts about what is that balance of your practice doesn't push you into the personal realm but also gives you sustenance for your public work? So don't become complacent. Yeah, well of course you're bringing up a very important issue that is much discussed, we've discussed before and I'm sure we will continue to discuss for a long time and I know many people have thoughts about it but it seems several things in what you say seem clear. One thing that seems clear is that spiritual practice, if it's really true practice,

[80:00]

does involve a strong commitment to benefit others. That spiritual practice is just about my comfort, my happiness, my, my, my is really limited. I mean we all come with those issues so it's not that we should beat ourselves up if we feel that way but we should understand that we're trying to go in the direction of benefiting others, that when we can go in that direction then we ourselves find a real lasting fulfillment. And therefore if we see injustice, suffering, trouble, our effort is to try to do something about that and not be self-centered. On the other hand, it also seems clear to me that being enraged to the point of, I don't know what, violence or incapacity, you know, by something that happens or even brought to despair, which is a very big problem for people nowadays. People who are concerned about the world easily can fall into despair at the overwhelming

[81:04]

nature of the kind of problems that we're dealing with. So clearly that is not a workable plan either. So somehow we have to have a way of having strong energy to benefit others and, like you say, passion to do so. And at the same time a kind of faith that no matter what the results may be in this particular instance or this instance or this instance, we will keep going and that going along with these struggles makes our lives meaningful. No matter how long it takes. We don't even expect in our lifetime to even see so much change, but we know that this positive action has a positive result. So that's the kind of spirit that one needs. And I think one finds this spirit in all the different religious traditions. You know, you see some of the most, some of the toughest people who do this kind of work are the Catholics. I know more Catholic monastics who just, there's this unbelievable, you know, Sister Bernie over in the city. You know, Sister Bernie is this woman about, I don't know how old she is,

[82:07]

she must be like in her late 60s, really skinny nun, who is the toughest customer I've ever seen. She's fighting to get this homeless, so the housing won't be, worry housing won't be torn down. And once I was in a protest with her, you know, and they had this like secret plan, you know, which I didn't know about. Maybe some of the other people knew. The secret, we were going to go on this nice little march and everything, but really what we were doing, well I didn't know, was we were breaking into this thing, building, you know. So we're all marching along and all of a sudden Sister Bernie takes off and she's banging on this door and the soldiers are trying to, you know, all this. And she's fighting with them and all, I mean, unbelievable. And she's been doing this her whole life. All of her life. If not in San Francisco, some other city, some other cause, she's been doing it her whole life with total passion and willing to continue it until the day she drops dead, you know. And I saw in India, you know, a number of people doing unbelievable work

[83:09]

for lepers, for children, so on. You know, living on nothing, you know, for 25 years doing this work. So there are people out there who do this kind of stuff and very, very admirable and quite wonderful. And so it can be done. It can be done. But one has to have a lot of faith and be an extraordinary person. So we start from where we are, right, and just try our best to go in that direction. Yeah, but Sister Bernie actually was successful in, I never thought in a million years that it would happen, but she did manage to get them to not tear down the housing. Now she's starting a hunger strike. She's got I don't know how many people doing a fast, 21-day fast, yeah, because of course, as you can imagine, they're not tearing down the housing, but they're also not going to let homeless people live in it either. So she is insisting that, and you know, she'll probably be successful.

[84:16]

So, anyway. Yes, what other? Maybe somebody else has some comments on that question. Yes? I was wondering how someone can apply the idea of impermanence to a committed loving relationship or a marriage, because in some ways to me the idea of marriage isn't impermanent. So do you have any thoughts on that? I'm sure I do. Well, I'm married myself, and even if I wasn't married, I'm committed to, you know, Buddhadharma. So how could I be committed? You might think, you know, if everything's impermanent, how could you be committed to anything? Why don't you just like, the wind blows this way, you're over there, you know, you're over here. So impermanence means that things change moment after moment.

[85:20]

Commitment is a vow that we make, that in the midst of things changing moment after moment, we will be true to this vow, to this aspiration. So for my money, you know, if I believe that things are permanent, let's say, take the example that you gave of a committed relationship, if I believe that things are permanent, suppose my wife decides that she's going to change, or even if she doesn't decide, suppose she does change. She will change. She is changing. She has changed. Well, suppose I think, well, wait a minute, you know, I didn't marry this person, I married that person over there. How come now I got this person? Well, I forget about it, you know, right? So I think that this is what happens in marriages that don't last, is that we have expectations, right? Okay, we're getting married, we're committed to each other, I'm expecting this from you, and you're going to be this way, and I'm going to be that way, and so on and so forth, and it's permanent, it's going to last, and then all of a sudden it's all different from what we thought. Well, to heck with it. Whereas if we have a vow, and we understand impermanence,

[86:23]

then we say, well, my vow is to be together and for each other, and I know that we're going to both change. Can love include that? Could it include my willingness to let you change and to encourage you to change in the way that you want to change and to keep stretching my idea of what this is all about, what this marriage is, to enable that to happen? And so I think that this is kind of a paradox in a way, but in reality there can't really be vow without impermanence. And in an impermanent world we don't really understand impermanence unless we have vow. So the life of vow, they say, like in Buddhism, they say basically, they say, the mind of vowing is off the charts, in effect. Like it says in the Diamond Sutra, you should give rise to a thought which is not produced by anything. All of our thoughts, all of what happens in our life

[87:26]

is produced by causes and effects, right? When the causes change, the results change. Things are always changing based on cause and effect, but the mind of vowing is off the charts. It's not produced. It's a non-produced thought. Where does it come from? It comes from our Buddha nature. And I think that's true certainly of our commitment to practice, but it's also true of the commitment to love someone. I feel if it's really true, it's that same kind of commitment. It's off the charts. If you love someone, it means I'm not going to be selfish in this relationship. I'm really going to be for the other person. Well, that non-selfishness doesn't come from ego. It doesn't come from conditions. It comes from our best nature. So you see, our best nature acknowledges impermanence. So actually, although logically they seem quite opposite, in reality impermanence and vow actually need each other. They're mutually supportive. We can't really have one without the other. And this is one of the great things. And I think that these kinds of friendships,

[88:28]

whether it's a marriage friendship or two people practicing together side by side with a deep friendship over a long period of time, is one of the most wonderful things about human life, that possibility. And when you don't take into account impermanence, it turns sour. And then, goodness knows, there's no suffering worse than that kind of a commitment that doesn't work out because one doesn't allow unselfishness to take the lead. So I assume that you asked that question for personal reasons. Good luck with it. Yes? I was curious if you could talk to what you mentioned before about expectation versus injustice as when it does concern only ourselves. Like for me, I am seeing a therapist and I'm not sure I'm really getting what I want out of our sessions. And I'm curious if I, and I've worked hard, I thought I could try to do what she needs to do. So in that kind of situation, how would you approach that?

[89:32]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I was thinking, you know, just come to the Sunday lecture and you can find ten great therapists. We have the greatest therapists on earth. Come to the lectures up at Spirit Rock. Many good therapists. Anyway, therapists, I don't know. But no, your question is really about... How do you approach it? Yeah, or anything. Anything that you're doing something, you know, on a practical level to achieve a result and it doesn't work. Give up if it's appropriate, you know. I mean, you have to, of course, there's one thing. One thing is that anything worthwhile takes effort and it doesn't always seem to be working. You know what I mean? Sometimes, like I say, a relationship in a marriage, sometimes the marriage is destabilized. It doesn't work that well. If we give up on it every time it doesn't work that well, then we get divorced constantly. Because a lot of times it's not working. But you stay with it because of the vow.

[90:36]

So to some extent that operates in that kind of relationship as well. But also there's such a thing as this... I've given this really a good try. I've searched my soul. I'm not just running away from something. And it really isn't the right thing to do. Even that's true sometimes in a marriage too, right? So then you say, well, I'm sticking with it. I'm trying. I'm trying my best. And it really isn't working. So we have to change the situation even though it may be painful. This is not the right therapist for me. This is not the right marriage. This is not the right job. So I think that we have some faith that if we do our practice and cultivate a mind of patience. These things can be cultivated. Things like patience. Things like accurate vision. Things like unselfishness. These are not things that fall out of the sky. We can cultivate these things through our practice. And if we make our best effort to cultivate those things and we have some stability in our lives,

[91:37]

then we say, okay, well, I'm practicing patience. I'm practicing clarity. I'm practicing energy and all these things. And it looks to me like I've tried my best and this is really not good. Then you trust yourself and you make a change. So definitely. And at the same time, you also have to be fundamentally, I think all healing of any kind comes from the acceptance of the present condition. So our physical or our psychological conditions, even though we're taking steps to heal them in some way or another, we also have to say, like Suzuki Roshi says, the problem that you have now, you will always have. And it's an opportunity. And I have to look at it that way also. And when you look at it that way, that gives you some calmness. You say, well, maybe this isn't the right situation, but maybe I should change it. But if I do or I don't, it's all right.

[92:39]

And then from that calmer place, it's easier. When we're calmer, our mind is more apt to come up with solutions and decisions that we really need to make. And practicing helps us to be calmer and see things more clearly. So good luck with that. But I think it must be very hard to... How do you know how to choose a therapist? How do you know whether it's working out or not working? I'm very innocent in these matters. It seems to me a very tough proposition, a difficult thing, because I'm sure there are good therapists, and I'm sure there's plenty of ones that aren't so good. But I guarantee you, after question and answer, six people that you can talk to who know a lot more about this than I do, they'll give you their card, too, probably. Yes? One of the things that you didn't get to in the talk was

[93:39]

kindness is topless. Yes. And I'm wondering if you'd be willing to spend a little time on that now. It's something I'd like to know. Well, you know, the way I did this talk was I sort of sat down and I made a list of those eight things, and then I started thinking about each one in turn. I got as far as I got, so I haven't gotten that far. But off the top of my head, I would say that... I would say that Suzuki Roshi, you know, had a very tough teacher. I mean, we would call his teacher, in today's understanding of life, an abusive person. You know, I mean, really, really bad. And believe it or not, according to Hoitsu Suzuki, Suzuki Roshi's son, Suzuki Roshi himself, as a father, had a little bit of that in him, although he wasn't that way with us. But he always talked about the compassion of his teacher,

[94:44]

and he talked about... And he talked about... He talked about...

[94:47]

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