Suzuki Roshi grew up, can you hear me in the back? Suzuki Roshi grew up in the remnants of Buddhism after the Meiji period. Government had gotten through it. At that time, Buddhist priests and temples were extremely poor, poorer than poor farmers. Many, many temples were changed into Shinto shrines, and the gates would be torn down,

[01:02]

statues, guardian figures, burned for Ufuro, for the bat. As a small boy, Tsukiyoshi didn't understand exactly why he became rather angry at the layman when he was young, very young, five or six years old, because people treated Buddhism so badly, and treated his father and his temple so badly. And in Japan

[02:08]

When you're poor, you don't use a bowl to cut your hair like poor people used to in America. I don't think anyone's that poor. When I was a kid, many people in my school had their hair cut by putting a bowl and just cut around it. But in Japan, when you're poor, even if you're not a priest's son, they just shave your head. So Suzuki Roshi's head was shaved, not because he was a priest's son, but because they were too poor to buy the clippers which his father could use. And when he went to school, everyone made fun of him because he had a shaved head. And also, on special occasions in school, everyone would wear a hakama

[03:09]

Hakama is a kind of skirt you put over your kimono. So Suzuki Yoshi didn't like to go to school on days when there was some special event, because he was the only one without a hakama. All the other families, the farmers' kids, all had hakamas. So his father saved his money and finally bought a Hakama for Suzuki Yoshi and then explained, taught him how to tie it very carefully, very formal way, how you're supposed to wear a Hakama. And Suzuki Yoshi was embarrassed because it was too formal. The other kids didn't wear it that way. So he got outside the gate of the temple

[04:20]

and untied it and retied it the way the other kids tied it. And he looked around and his father was running from the temple carrying something. And Sugriva said, I didn't wait, I of course was running. And his father was very angry with him. And he didn't understand at first about how hard it was for his father to get this hakama for him. And if he was going to wear it, he should wear it the correct way. And as a priest, probably he knew how to wear it the correct way, while the other people in the neighborhood didn't know how to wear it the correct way. So it took time for Suzuki Roshi to appreciate how important, how difficult it was for his father to get him even that hakama. That's why he was so angry, he said. But when he was quite young,

[05:59]

he felt Buddha's way has been lost and someone must help these laymen. Of course, at that time the government was against Buddhism, so everybody but Buddhist priests was rather talking against Buddhism. So because of that difficulty, Suzuki Yoshi decided to be a priest when he was quite young. And one of the priests who came to his temple, he liked very much, and it was a disciple of his father, and he asked him if he could go and join him. he said yes, and his father said yes. So he went and lived with his teacher, Gyokujin Son, Roshi, who was, as you may know, a very powerful, huge physical man who was an archer, and has a bow I've seen which I couldn't bend.

[07:26]

Anyway, he went to this temple when he was twelve or thirteen, fourteen, twelve or thirteen, and he was too young to participate in much of the schedule, and often he didn't get up, and he heard the chanting from his bed, and he learned the Heart Sutra from bed. He could hear it going on, the other monks had gotten up. But he also saw many good teachers, because at a time like that, Buddhism is maybe its strongest period. And one teacher who came often impressed him very much, named Oka Sotan. And Oka Sotan, Suzuki Ueshi said he didn't know he was a very famous teacher, just some man, some priest who came to his teacher's temple. And he saw, so both

[08:59]

corruptibility of Buddhism, you could say, or how Buddhism lost its power. And as he grew up, he concluded it was Buddhism's own fault, not the Meiji government's fault. Buddhism itself had lost its way, and at the same time he saw people like Oka Sotan, who impressed him very much. Oka Sotan was maybe, at least in Soto lineage, was maybe the most important priest of the Meiji period. And many powerful Zen masters were produced by Oka Sotan. I don't know exactly the lineage because it's so how they speak about who is their teacher varies, but I believe Oka Sotan is Yasutani Roshi's grand teacher, and also Gyokojin Soan's teacher, too. I don't exactly remember how it works, because Gyokojin Soan is his father's disciple, too.

[10:28]

Anyway, he had this feeling that Buddhism needed some fresh opportunity, some place where people's minds weren't made up about Buddhism. So he asked his teacher when he finished his first stages of training, could he go to America? And his teacher said, no. So he said, can I go to Hokkaido? Which is rather like the Japanese West. Hokkaido was only settled a hundred years ago or so, I think, with many people.

[11:43]

at his teacher when he said, can I go to Hokkaido then? His teacher got very angry with him and he had to stay. But he never gave up his idea to come to America. And when he came here He regretted that, he said, I regret that I didn't study more. Actually, he was pretty prepared for us, because of his early experiences when he was a boy, and his opportunities to have contact with Oka Sotan, and Gyokuji and so on, and his own father, and life at Eheji. and other teachers with whom he studied Buddhism thoroughly for many years. But still, he had many other responsibilities, and he felt he had not studied widely enough for us. And he came to America, he said, too late. He was too old.

[13:17]

But he was convinced his successors would do it, that we would find a way to study Buddhism more widely, more freely. So he instructed us to do this, how to do this. So first of all, Srila Kriyoshi emphasized our posture, our yogic posture, because Zen is the school of Buddhism which emphasizes, which is almost based on yoga, the body itself. We don't use many aids, many rituals.

[14:41]

Our own body is our bhajra. So Zen, because of this emphasis, has to start with the body. Because it doesn't use anything else, you have to start with what you have. experience some divided nature from childhood, some suffering, divided nature. We have two parents and various ways of looking at things, so you have to begin your practice with your various parts agreeing on something. So you have to get your mind and body to come to some agreement, and that agreement we call sasana. Let's sit down and see what happens. So Buddhism projects or

[16:08]

creates, invents various provisional ways of practice. We could say body only, which is yoga or posture, and mind only, which is Yogacara school, Alankavatara Sutra, and emptiness or Majamaka school, which is Nagarjuna, Prajnaparamita literature. much of it. And then the attempts to put that all together in Kagan philosophy or Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, Huayen and Zen Buddhism, are ways to try to use these various aids So now we're doing a session here at Green Galaxy and Bhutanto, our Reb, yesterday talked about our Zazen practice, breathing, etc.

[17:35]

So if you're going to practice with your body you of course have to trust it You have to give up your ideas of it as separate from you, as I said, as your foot being way down there. And there are many images of our body which we have, which are mistaken, which we have to find out what they are. The vehicle of the Tathagata is characterized by many things.

[19:11]

But the ones I'm emphasizing now are no perception of a separate reality behind what you see. This has two aspects. One is there's no ultimate reality, everything is illusion. And also that reality is not repeatable, there's no way to imitate There's no semblance of it. And second, that we have an immediate perception of truth in ourself. This means Buddha's own will. or Buddha's will body. Why this means this is, you know, I'll try to, during this Sashin, try to make clearer. And third is infinite worlds, you know. It extends everywhere. It's not graspable.

[20:36]

But many of our Western ideas emphasize, you know, our body is something dead, you know, some mechanical thing. We can cut chunks of it off and it doesn't affect us. Or it can be synthesized. And there's a deep interest in living forever, freezing your body in some vault somewhere until they have a cure for your local disease. Or living forever in heaven, or some idea like that. And we have this idea in our own perceptions, which has a lot to do with craziness. because we don't trust our perceptions. What most of us are doing is you don't trust just what you hear. Actually, you try to correlate and corroborate what you hear with what you see, smell, taste, touch, feel, etc. So you try to average your senses. And then you further try to average it, which we call science, by self.

[22:15]

Experimental effort over time. I saw that a minute ago, but I don't see it now, so it must have been delusion. Or, I see this now, and it's still there in my desk tomorrow, and the next day, so it must be real. We have that kind of, almost all of you. If you saw it on your desk one minute, and the next minute you didn't, you'd be convinced it wasn't real, wouldn't you? And it wouldn't be. But it might be. In other words, I'm talking about the fact that you do have that view that reality is repeatable, and suffering in Buddhism means reality is not repeatable. And it's our effort to make it repeatable which is suffering. So the result of this is that we don't trust our senses. We're always trying to corroborate, correlate one sense's perception with another sense's perception. But actually hearing alone can cover everything. Seeing alone can cover everything.

[23:40]

just by your feeling you can cover everything. So, immediate perception of truth in your consciousness, not while you monitor it and review it and correlate it and corroborate it, just some immediate perception of truth. That you trust, which means you can't have an You can't create an outside, inside, over here, over there, which is threatening. If you have some outside thing that you create which is threatening, you can't really practice yoga. You can't trust that stream of vision and sensation which actually is the past. Buddhism is not some philosophy or practice derived from the body, derived from the mind, but it's the mind and body itself. Without any image, identity, review of it, this is pretty hard to do. If you have an idea of an outside which is fraught with danger, or which you're competing with, or some attitude

[25:08]

about it, then your senses may be off base. So one of the aids to penetration, to entering Buddha's way, Buddha's body, is to see everything as your own mind. to understand everything that comes to you as you, as your karma, not as some hostile thing. You no longer see any ill will. You develop an even mind toward everyone, which means you know how you feel, in every circumstance.

[26:09]

So in this session I would like to emphasize an even mind, an even effort. Not strong effort one period and relaxing the next, but some attempt to have some even steady awareness throughout your sitting and kīngin and meals and work and sleeping and as you know to bow, I think so, to bow to Buddha three times and then to your bed three times before you go to sleep and then if you want some short or long sitting where you sleep What we call a craziness, what we fear in our own consciousness, often are our perceptions which we can't correlate with anything else. But zazen, emphasis in zazen, is to make you strong enough. So problem with craziness is usually not that the perception is wrong, but that we're not strong enough to sustain

[28:23]

uncorrelated perceptions. So by our practice of zazen, without any other aids, you just become strong enough to accept anything. And more and more, you know, giving up any idea, images of your body, and of outside or inside, more and more you just accept what comes to you. Accept some hearing, you know, completely, without reviewing it, without thinking, what is it? What can it be? Could I see it? Could I touch it? What kind of shape has it? Just hearing. Your hearing can take you, you know, open you up to many things if you just trust your hearing. What you hear just then is enough. You don't have to average it and see if it's going to occur again. In Buddhism our feeling is only once we'll hear that.

[29:46]

Only once we'll see that. By the time you go get your camera, it's different. By the time you try to base your life on it, it's different. By the time you try to base your life on it, it's different. Provisional way to make us recognize that Our life, our Buddhism is the body itself, the mind itself. Everything at once. So, two recognitions that you will come to if you're able to face things as they are without wishing they were something some other way. and zazen should make you strong enough to accept things as they are. One is, we can say, death. By death I don't mean just that someone's going to die, though on death we usually realize finality, some sense of finality. Dogen watching his mother die,

[31:23]

to twin trail. Have you noticed that from the incense stick it's usually a twin trail comes up with smoke. Noticing the twin trail of smoke rising from the incense. But it's not the finality I'm talking about is you may recognize when someone goes crazy. When you can't reach someone or when you can't reach yourself. when there's almost nothing you can do about yourself, and less about a friend, and less about the suffering in this world. You can't do anything about each moment even. Each thing just happens.

[32:25]

hopefully you can participate in it and by zazen we're trying to develop our strength and ability to participate in our activity anyway you notice the finality of each thing that it happens only once and is not repeatable or graspable or regainable or redoable. If you're not there, it's too late. That recognition, you know, gives our life some seriousness. And I can say, not taking it too seriously too, because you can't do anything about it, you know, it's already too late. Anyway, it's just some illusory, even we ourselves, so not to take it too seriously, not to take

[33:54]

You take it seriously when you think the outside world is there saving up everything to get you eventually. And the other recognition is that we are corruptible. All of us are corruptible. All of us, when pushed, almost all of us have a price. We'll sell our mother if we have to. I'm sorry to say so, but it's true. So, you know, governments use this to force people to do things, and many people use it, you know, to make the most of our corruptibility for profit or some, you know. Much of our way of thinking is based on the idea that everything is repeatable.

[35:24]

and make the best of corruptibility. So, recognizing this suffering or this corruptibility, the bodhisattva recognizes in himself, herself, this event, this eventuality. creates the conditions for good, shall we say. So the most basic suggestion in Buddhism from everyone is practice good, avoid evil. Now, good and evil in Buddhism are pretty close to the roots of the word good and evil. Good means to, and God, mean to unite something, to put something together.

[36:25]

to recognize the larger body. And evil means to extend over, or like the eaves of a house, to be off the mark, or to set something up. It actually comes from the word upo, which means up, or to set up, to try to be up. So the bodhisattva doesn't set up anything. You don't try to create something, to make something that lasts. You don't try to possess anything. But you do try to create, this is a rather subtle point, the conditions for people to exist beneficially. So, first of all, for yourself you try to create the conditions

[37:30]

by which you can exist beneficially. And our way to do this is to practice zazen. I think maybe that's enough. Does anyone have something they'd like to talk about? Yes? I have difficulty when someone makes a suggestion that you should be interested in straight men, in actuality I think you need to actually accept them. You can't do it.

[38:56]

So you don't want anybody to point it out to you that you can't? You mean, since it's supposed to be some other way, you can't accept the way it is? Well, first, of course, we have to accept the way it is, and second, we can try to do something. But some advice like that is only a try-to. There's no zazen, as I said yesterday. There's no such thing as zazen. There's only trying to do zazen. In your bed, or sitting, or whatever.

[40:02]

You have no choice but to accept what's there. But if you can really accept what's there in the sense of returning to the place where you don't need to do anything, not just there, that returning eventually is the same as relaxing, sitting straight, Yeah. When we kind of like the spirit, and we have to bow, we catch up. When we bow after the... I'm just wondering about how you feel about it. You know, you've got a chance. So when we bow, when we come in, we catch up.

[41:19]

No, that just depends on how you look at it. Bowing is because with the entrance into the Buddha hall, when it's a service, we bow when we enter. It doesn't matter when you enter, you bow when you enter. You're not actually catching up, you're just doing it at a different time. But you don't chant the beginning of the sutra real fast and catch up and then join everyone. That would be good to do though. Yes? Yeah, you're too scientific or you're trying to average your senses. Sometimes it's no purpose, sometimes it's some purpose. This is actually very, this problem appears in

[42:51]

every aspect of practice. I think one clue is to much of Buddhism you have to just take as an aid. Until we have some perception, one reason it's difficult for us to practice, say, no perception of ill-will, is because of the kind of beings we conceive each other to be. No perception of ill-will doesn't mean you're repressing ill-will. It means eventually you see another kind of being which you couldn't possibly perceive ill-will about. So many of the things are based on Buddhism, are based on a whole new recognition of what we're actually doing.

[44:19]

but a kind of clue to this purpose and purposelessness is we may be practicing zazen actually because we want to get healthy or attain superpowers or be less crazy or not have people mad at us all the time or some gross mismanagement of our life We want to correct by doing zazen every morning and organizing ourselves or something. This may be what has prompted us to do it, but as a practice we don't review these as the reasons. And we try not to practice to attain these purposes. It's just a kind of effort. when you sit, and you will find out by experience, although some such thing led you to sitting, if you sit with that idea, your sitting is quite dull and lifeless. Just to sit, and Suzuki Roshi's feeling in Japan was, we must practice Buddhism just for Buddhism. Why Buddhism went wrong in Meiji is because it became powerful. Buddhism is very powerful.

[45:51]

It's such an ancient way of life that so many people have practiced, and it moved so many people, that you can, recognizing this, use it for gain or fame or something like that. But his emphasis to us was just to practice with each other, for Buddhism alone. And he said in five or ten years, America and Zen Center will have many friends. But we don't practice for some, even for society. Just to practice for Buddhism. So you just sit for sitting. But the other reasons you have, you just don't review them. If you find yourself thinking of them, you stop thinking of them. It's a kind of practice. It may seem rather artificial, but that only means you should go further and recognize how artificial it all is anyway. That there's something going on there, that some attitude already there, that you might as well counteract with another one, until you can drop all attitudes.

[47:11]

So, please, in this session and those of you who are not in the session, too, become very friendly with your body and your life situations as you yourself not discriminating this one or that one is really me when you're doing zazen just some painful stale feeling sometimes some painful ecstatic feeling sometimes and without trying to identify or review just find out, just note or observe what's there with detachment. It's necessary to develop concentration and detachment is so important. Without detachment none of it works. Detachment and observation, just noting what it is. What is this body that's doing zazen? What is this mind which is doing zazen?

[48:58]

what is this space which is doing zazen and as you stop averaging your life at each moment and over time you will find out many you will notice many mental phenomena, many subtle things, as I said yesterday, how wonderful your skin feels after zazen, during a sashin, how the organ of your skin is teaching you, how cool the surface of your eyes feels, how your stomach feels,

[50:05]

how when attitudes drop out of your breathing and mind and shoulders, hips, how refreshed you feel. Beginning to trust these perceptions, letting these perceptions, the acts of Buddha are Buddha, the acts of you are you, these acts, these tiny acts which you're participating in. By your vow or participation the color is bright and things are shining and you perceive things with full dimensions or sometimes when you your vow is weak your will body is weak

[51:08]

you see things very flat and thin and colorless so you begin to notice subtle manifestations of the path of the way of our existence of Buddhism And then you slowly recede from noting them. One part doesn't have to observe it. Just let go. Just give it away. First paramita, just give it away. until nothing but space is sitting Zazen, nothing but space is living your life, nothing but space is sitting this Sashin. Which you create something in the midst of, to eat, to get up,

[52:37]

in this way in this session you may realize what you actually are if there's a who or even without a who how you exist all together please let's do it, let's find out how Suzuki Yoshi wanted us to practice some fresh new way from our own intimate and immediate experience, freely studying everything, freely realizing our way up, as Suzuki Raichi wanted us to, Oka Sotan wanted us to, etc.

[53:57]

They just are telling us it's possible.

[54:15]

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