This morning I'm going to continue with Enmei Juku Kanagyo, and I'll bring us up a little review, give us a little review of what I did yesterday. Kanzeon, we say, let's see, Enmei Juku Kanagyo. Infinite life, actually infinite life and death. Or continuous life, eternal life, whatever. Ten phrase, kanon, sutra. And we talked about kanzeon. Kanzeon, kind of like the opening statement. Kanzeon, like an exclamation, actually. Namubutsu means homage to Buddha or one with Buddha.

[01:06]

And Yobutsu-in, it means with Buddha as a direct cause. And Yobutsu-in means with Buddha as an indirect cause. And bu-po-so-en means Buddha, Dharma, Sangha as indirect cause. This word indirect, this translation indirect, there's got to be a better word. I haven't found it. I'm trying to find the character for in. Because there must be other ways of saying... There are no synonyms for indirect that sound good in a translation. So... A lot of words, but they're all big, intellectual words.

[02:18]

I'm thinking of some word, some simple word that That's very direct. Minor. Weak. No, that's not correct, because indirect is obtuse. Side. What? Side. Side? Side. Yeah, but you wouldn't say side. Side effects? Indirect is better. But they don't mean the same. It doesn't give me the meaning. The meaning is a contributing cause, an indirect cause. So there's a direct cause, and then there's an indirect cause. So the synonym for that indirect cause is very hard to find that makes sense. I mean, that makes it an easy, translatable word for chanting.

[03:23]

That's what I mean. Could you give an example of a direct and indirect cause? Well, directly Buddha means that intrinsically we're one with Buddha. Buddha is the direct cause for our realization. But indirectly there are all these other causes. and Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is an indirect cause. But our Buddha nature is the direct cause. It's like the seed is the direct cause and the water and the earth and the sun are indirect causes. That's the best example. So directly Buddha and also indirectly you know, supporting, I don't know, some way, somehow it'll all work out, but right now it's hard to find a substitute for indirect.

[04:40]

Yes? You know, another chant we do, Yeah, that's interesting. Those two lines together are translated as one with Buddha in cause and effect. Yeah, cause and effect, right? Indirect means cause and effect. But that's also a clumsy way to say something if you want to make it succinct. If you want to just use a word, you know, a simple word. Yeah, that's one way to translate it, in cause and effect. But it's intellectual. It's, you know, still an intellectual feeling. So anyway, so yesterday we got to Bupo So'en, which means

[05:46]

Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. So it's Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. N is indirectly that word again. Also a supporting cause for realization, for Buddhahood. And then the text goes on to say, Jo is eternal, Raku is joyful or tranquil, Ga is being, and Jo is purity. So something like eternal, joyful, being, purity. But we don't usually arrange the words in that order. So we would arrange the words in the order of joyful, pure, eternal being.

[06:56]

Makes more sense to us. But we should remember that joyful, pure, eternal being is also dualistic. So we have to remember when we say joyful that life is also suffering. And when we say pure, there are also defilements. And when we say eternal, there's also impermanence. And when we say self, there's also, or being, there's also no self. So when we say, when the sutra says eternal, joyful, joyful, pure, eternal being, it means in the non-dualistic sense. which includes suffering, impermanence, defilement, and no self.

[08:01]

Whenever we say, myself, we also have to realize that there is no myself, as well as there is. So when you say myself, what do you mean by that? So this is very good koan for us. This is really genjo koan because all during the day, we're relating to everything to myself. Everything we do, we relate to myself. I am doing this, I am doing that. This is for myself, this is for you. And we don't give it a second thought, usually. So there's this self-centered activity going on all the time, and we don't give it a second thought.

[09:12]

So Kenjo Koan comes up right here. What do we mean by myself? Whenever we do something, whenever we perform an action, or whenever we think or feel, we're always relating to myself. So this is how we study Genjokan, actually, or practice with it. What do we mean by me, myself, and I? Three people. That's what we used to say when we were kids. I'm three people. Me, myself, and I. So here, being, or self, includes no self. And purity includes all the defilements. And joy includes all the suffering.

[10:18]

And eternal includes the impermanence and vice versa. Impermanence includes the continuous life. And suffering includes joy. And no self includes self. and defilement includes purity. This is what we call nirvana, the state of nirvana, the state of non-duality or non-division. Then the sutra says, cho nen kanze yan, bo nen kanze yan.

[11:25]

Those two lines actually are related because cho means morning and bo means evening and cho nen means morning mind and kanze yan is kanze yan. Chonen kanzean means morning mind kanzean. And bonen kanzean means evening mind kanzean. So I want to talk about this word nen, which has arisen and continues throughout the sutra. Nen literally means I am a thought It means a thought impulse, but it has many other connotations. So it means here, literally, thought after thought.

[12:31]

In the morning, the morning thought is kanzeon. Evening thought is kanzeon. It can have the meaning of in the morning, If you put the lines together, it's kind of like morning and evening. My thoughts are the thoughts of kanzeon. My mind is expressing, or my body is expressing kanzeon, morning and evening. That's why I take these two lines together, even though they're separate. Morning mind, kanzeon. Evening mind, kanzeon. A nen, though it has psychologically various meanings, and Sikhita describes the three nens as the first nen is first

[13:41]

Conscious thought is the thought without reflection. When a thought arises, it arises first without reflection, even though our thinking process is so fast that we don't necessarily cognize the difference between non-reflective thought and reflective thought and super-reflective thought. First, it arises a non-reflective NIN, which is just the awareness, just the cognition, bare cognition of something. When you hear the airplane, you don't say, oh, that's an airplane. It's just there's a sound, and the sound is cognized. but it's not recognized.

[14:46]

It's just the bare sound of whatever. And also it's like when you sit in zazen, if you are an adept at zazen, when a feeling arises in your legs, There's just a bare awareness of a feeling. The second level of consciousness, or nin, says, oh, this is painful feeling. But the first one is just bare attention. It's just this, oh, this feeling. It doesn't go beyond. There is a feeling. doesn't say it's good or bad or make a judgment or discrimination. So this is a non-discriminating consciousness that just accepts everything as it is without giving it a name or judging it or editorializing on it.

[16:07]

Then the second level of consciousness, the second Nana arises and says, that's an airplane. I think he's having trouble or something like that, you know, he's passing overhead. Well, there goes a car, noisy car, or those people out in the street are quarreling. There goes a car. But if it's only the first then, it's just... That's all. You don't know what it is. Or you may know what it is, but you don't need to describe it. There is a way of knowing. The first level of consciousness will recognize what something is without describing it. So if you are busily engaged in something and you're moving from, without thinking, so to speak, that first level is in operation and you move from one thing to the next, without the thinking process, without the discriminating process, you just move automatically.

[17:35]

or in sync with things, because there's no separation between the thinking mind and the activity. There's no pause. The thing that, what gives us a sense of time is pause. As soon as we have a pause, then we have a time. We have continuous time, which is just now. Now is continuous as time. And when you don't go beyond the first level of consciousness in cognition, then there's only just now. There's no yesterday or tomorrow. But as soon as you make a pause and start to think, then time arises. And you say, oh yeah, that happened in the past, or just a moment ago, or something like that. So that's discontinuous time because of the discontinuousness of this moment.

[18:42]

But even though time does go on, even though you did move, say, within an hour, a period of an hour, you weren't conscious of that period of time. But later you look at the clock and you cognize discontinuous time. So the third level of consciousness is the one that steps back even further and analyzes the situation. That's the mind of analysis. And all three are necessary in our life. But if we don't have the first level, if we don't give space to the first level, then our life is fairly abstract. We're not experiencing our life directly. We're only experiencing our life through analysis or through thinking about it.

[19:47]

So in Zazen we have the opportunity to let go of the analytical mind and the discontinuous mind and just sit with bare attention and allowing the first Nen, pure cognition, to operate freely without discrimination. So when we're doing Zazen, just let everything be and you just, oh, this is a feeling. You don't have to say what kind it is. If you say, what kind is it, then you think, oh, jeez, I better take care of this. My legs are hurting. But if you're not worried about it, it really doesn't matter. The thing that causes you a big problem is that you worry about it.

[20:55]

You create your own suffering. You know, there's this man named Jack, I can't remember his last name, Schwartz or something like that. He was popular several years ago. He used to put needles through his arm. Remember him? Jack Schwartz. Jack Schwartz, yeah. And people were amazed, you know, and just put the needle through his arm. It'd come all the way out the other side. It didn't bleed or anything, you know. And he said, well, all you have to do is just not worry about it. When people go to get their blood drawn out, I see them sometimes. But it really doesn't hurt. There's really nothing to it.

[21:59]

And a lot of things in our life are like that, but we give them a lot of credence. We create. a lot of suffering around our imagination. I'm not saying that life doesn't hurt. Of course, you can show me many examples, and I can show you many examples, but it's possible to allow yourself the freedom of existing, of having pure existence, within both pleasure and pain, and to accept them equally. So, chonen transean, morning mind,

[23:05]

morning then, when you wake up in the morning without a thought, right? Just the thought, the mind of Kahn Zeon. No thinking. Or not bothered by thinking. You know, not pulled down by thinking. If you think about all the tragedy in the world, you may be pulled down by it. It's an enormous tragedy in the world. But this enormous tragedy in the world has been going on forever, since the beginning of time. It's been going on. It just didn't just start now. Life is very tragic. That's one side of life. The other side of life is that there is some joy. So we should allow ourselves both.

[24:06]

Even while people are suffering in the world, someone else is joyous. And then it's your turn. And while you're suffering, someone else will be joyous. Which doesn't mean we should ignore people suffering. If you're a doctor and you're performing operations on people, you still have to eat your dinner. If you're a psychiatrist working with people's psychological problems, you still have to go home to your family. There's some place where you have to let go of things. Otherwise, you can't exist.

[25:10]

So within the suffering and joy of the world, from morning to evening, we should be able to bring forth the mind of kanze-on. I think that's what this is saying. We should be expressing kanze-on, mind of kanze-on. Suzuki Roshi used to say, in your practice, as your practice, you should be always coming from big mind. Whatever you say should be coming from Big Mind. Whatever your actions are should be coming forth from Big Mind. And this is where you should live, even though you can't do it perfectly. But we should be turned to Big Mind for our expression. Let Big Mind express itself through our actions.

[26:27]

So, moment to moment, expressing the mind of Kansayan. And then, the sutra says, nen nen ju shin ki. Nen nen is a kind of putting two nens together, means the mind of this moment. The emphatic nen nen means now mind. So, now mind is samadhi mind, mind of this continuous moment of now. So, now mind and ju is follow and shin is also mind. But shin is like big mind or heart mind, the heart of prajna.

[27:45]

So it's like this shin, nen nen, now mind arises from big mind. In other words, small mind arises from big mind. And it's, and is an expression of big mind. We talk about our individual small mind, and we talk about Buddha mind, but small mind is not different from Buddha mind. And if we put our attention Buddha mind and small mind, individual mind, will be expressing Buddha mind. If we let go, the more we let go, the more Buddha mind is expressed.

[28:52]

This is called enlightenment. And then the sutra says, nen nen fu ri shin, and the same nen nen, the now mind, mind of this moment. Fu ri is not separate, and shin, of course, is big mind. So these two, this sutra seems to be in couplets, you know, morning mind, evening mind, the mind arising from, small mind arising from big mind, and small mind not being separate from big mind. That's what this nin nin fu ri shin means. Small mind or the mind of this moment, this now mind,

[30:00]

It's not different from Big Mind of Buddha, Prajna Mind. So this sutra is saying something like actualize, realize, or to realize our intrinsic Buddha nature and bring forth the mind of Kanzayon in our daily life. Buddha mind is our own mind and Kanzayon is its expression, you know. Buddha mind is the mind of prajna, and its expression is compassion, or the mind of kanzeon.

[31:02]

So we say wisdom and compassion go together, are the two sides of prajna. Wisdom is the basis, and prajna, I mean, yeah, prajna or wisdom is the basis. compassion or kanzeon, avalokitesvara, is its expression. So our Buddha mind finds its expression in our compassionate actions. That's how we can tell if someone has realization. not if they're smart or if they say something clever, but how they act. We always judge or discern a person's ability through their, how they act.

[32:09]

Do you have any questions? Yes. Well, big mind is the mind of non-duality, which is indescribable. Big mind is the indescribable source

[33:17]

That's why Bodhidharma said, I don't know, because it's indescribable. So I answered both of your questions at once. I'll come up with another question. When you say that Suzuki Roshi He also used to say that, or at least he said in one of his videos, that 95% of our thoughts, for me it's 98% or 99% are self-centered thoughts. Are what? Self-centered thoughts. So, I guess I'm worried about setting up standards. Well, we don't live in big mind.

[34:33]

We don't? No, yesterday you said we live in two levels. Yeah, what are the two levels? Well, one of them is big mind, and one of them is this 99% of our thoughts. Right. And so that's how we have the mind of compassion. If we only have the mind of wisdom, we'll commit suicide. That's why we should have much compassion for ourselves. 99% of my thoughts are self-centered, but 1% is not. That's optimism. Optimism. That's compassion. And even though 100% of my thoughts are self-centered, I'm still Buddha. It's OK. It's very important to have compassion for the least person, so to speak.

[36:01]

This is a great test of your practice. We should have great compassion for Hitler. I guess, actually, my question is more like the least person for a lot of us is ourselves. Of course. We should have great compassion for ourselves. If you don't have compassion for yourself, how can you have compassion for anyone else? This is the problem. This is why people mutilate each other, because they don't have compassion for themselves, and they have to work it out. They have to work out their aggression on somebody else. They can't forgive themselves. They can't have sympathy for themselves. And so they put on a... I don't know how I can describe it.

[37:06]

Well, you know this. So you take it out on somebody else, because since you can't have compassion for yourself, you can't have it for anybody else. So it's very important to not be so hard on yourself. You know, people are criticizing themselves all the time. So how do we, getting back to where I think I started, how do we work in improving our expression of Big Mind without doing it in a self-critical or self-destructive way. How do we know when we're doing this, and if we're doing it, and how do we take comfort when we do it, and how do we console ourselves when we don't? Well, first place, you can't think, now I'm in Big Mind.

[38:11]

Otherwise you become self-conscious. But first way is to have indiscriminate love for the universe. And have that be your abiding mode. It has to be the abiding mode. And there will be many challenges to that. But each one of those challenges makes it even stronger. And you may fail. And you will fail.

[39:15]

But you keep coming back. So it's the most difficult practice there is. Well, I was just thinking in response to that, that if you... My experience is, if I give it enough space over a long enough period of time, the gentler mind takes care of me. And this morning, the example that happened 36 years ago when my daughter was born, a colicky premature baby, I was not a good mother. I was really impatient and I let her cry a great deal. And last week she said that she'd just been having some therapy and suddenly a lot of crying had come up for her.

[40:16]

And she just began to cry and cry. Because even when I sit here and I hear babies crying, a lot of the time it has an edge for me that is really difficult and painful and unpleasant. And so that just kind of works it, but she sits us in and it keeps coming back. It's something you can do. It keeps coming back. So there was a lot of crying this morning. in the next house. And I just realized that it was all right with that crying. And 36 years ago, am I doing the best I could? And it kind of tipped the Zazen that I was having from a somewhat sleepy experience to a very focused and bright

[41:23]

I was really, I was here. And that old pain was sort of just taking care of itself. Because otherwise there was space. Could you read just in one more or less uninterrupted with questions or possibilities the way it sounds in English and the way it means in English, even though it's imperfect? Well, the problem is that there are different ways that it sounds in English. Everybody has a little different translation. None of them are satisfactory to me, but I made a little translation just in case you asked.

[42:34]

But it stretches the imagination. It makes sense to me, but it may not make sense So, this is tentatively what I wrote, even though it's not right and I forgive myself for my transgressions. Kanzeon, one with Buddha. Stillness is Buddha. Actions are Buddha. As with Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. Joyful, pure, eternal being. morning mind kanze on evening mind kanze on this very moment arises from mind this very moment not separate from mind so i use the words stillness is buddha and actions is buddha instead of um directly buddha and indirectly buddha because directly buddha means uh

[43:45]

From stillness, in stillness everything is one with Buddha. And in action, everything is one. In other words, one expresses the unity and the other expresses the diversity. And the diversity is the indirect causes. The unity is the direct cause. And the diversity includes all the indirect causes. So I'm not saying this is perfect, it's just what I thought of. And people argue with it. But anyway, that's as far as I've come with it. I think it was really beautiful and maybe when you're done with it we can chant it in English sometimes. Yeah, well that's, it'd be nice to have it to chant. So, I'll check it out and see if other people think, what they think of it.

[45:07]

So it eliminates the words direct cause and indirect cause and makes it a little more poetic or something. But then if someone wanted to trace it back to its origin, the direct cause and indirect cause wouldn't be there. But anyway. With translations, you know, you have to stretch sometimes in order to make things sound right. So... Can we do it again, once more? Do it? The chant. Me? Say this again? No, no. Oh, shall we chant the sutra? May we?

[46:14]

That's why you're a hater, actually. Chanting of the Buddha's name

[46:48]

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