I'm surprised so many of you are here, because there's a Sashin at San Francisco, a seven-day Sashin, and a one-day sitting at Berkeley. I'd like to continue some of the things I talked about yesterday, the first day of the Sashin, where some of you were there yesterday. Sashin is a pretty important, if not almost absolutely necessary practice, sometimes, for getting a taste of real Sazen. And as you know, zazen is not the point of our practice but an imperturbable mind and being which can't have any object is our practice.

[01:35]

And practice means, you know, there's not even such a thing as practice, but practice means our way of reminding ourselves of our deeper life or true life, connected with, at one with everything. As Nansen killed the cat trying to get the monks of his monastery, who were squabbling over a cat, to not kill their Buddha nature. A Buddhist precept like... The first precept is don't kill. And in the one level of meaning, it means don't kill anything. And maybe another meaning is don't harm anything. And a third meaning is don't assert yourself. Don't argue. This is something I had quite a lot of trouble with

[03:09]

because I thought it was necessary to try to make things clear. But at that time I didn't realize how we are all arguing with ourselves and making things clear for ourselves. And if we are doing that, for ourself too, each one of us resonates with that. Anyway, fourth meaning maybe, don't kill your Buddha nature, which then means kill your small nature. Kill even the Buddhas if that's some object of attachment. And then there's positive. meaning which is encourage your practice or your realization of your true life. Sometimes

[04:39]

We hear nowadays the phrase, we are all one, and this kind of statement is, I think, pleasant to hear. not say that in Buddhism, we are all one, because perhaps it's even misleading. Dogen tries to express the same thing by saying something like, when the Dharma is not fully present in a man's mind and body, he thinks it's sufficient. But when the dharma is fully present in a man's mind and body, he thinks it's insufficient. This is the same meaning, almost, as we are all one, but it's a way of stating it which

[06:03]

which expresses our own experience of it, or our way of trying to practice. For to realize, actually realize and act on the reality of our interconnectedness, which we perceive as interconnectedness, but is more than just interconnectedness, is nearly impossible. It's easy to say, but quite So, Dogen, first of all the word dharma, when the dharma is fully present or not fully present. Dharma means, for now we can take it to mean, that which we perceive When we perceive from no self, when we're not organizing our perceptions to create a self, and when we don't perceive things with a self or own being, translated sometimes, then we can speak about dharma. But dharma also just means for a Buddhist any perception.

[07:34]

For to call it anything else, you'd have to call it delusion, something which ends... So, when the dharma is not fully present, he thinks it's sufficient, and here it points out that thinking, where our body can't contain the one, the big mind. So to achieve wholeness, if we want to achieve some whole sense of wholeness, for Zen that's therapeutic, that's therapeutic. level, but to practice with the unknowable, that which is beyond our whole. Bodhidharma, as I don't know, is the aim of Zen.

[09:05]

So it requires certain things we can talk about, you know. We can say it requires detachment. But detachment is, again, you know, a word. How do you actually have detachment? Or detachment can't be had, so how can you exist not getting caught by one thing after another, not identifying with one thing after another, not giving anything any substantial reality, even your own past or being. Anyway, as Dogen points out, you have to stop thinking about it or attempting to contain the experience, your experience. He says, you know, in that same passage in the Gangeo Koan,

[10:43]

taking a boat out onto the ocean, you perceive the ocean as a great circle. But the ocean isn't a circle or four-cornered. To a dragon it's one thing, to you it's something else. You might as well call it a necklace of jewels or a palatial residence, he says. for whatever we see is already our own. And you only know that with assurance when you know how much we don't know, yet acts with us. And he points that out by saying, next, the remaining virtue, though you see a mountain as mountain, the remaining virtue of the mountain, which you don't see, is great, inexhaustible. And as you know, we talk about karma. Karma is the fruit of your actions, good or bad, while you are

[12:19]

a possessive being, a being which is maybe even whole, but accumulates the effect of your action. But when you are no longer some particular thing, when you're no longer bringing your past to each moment but allowing the present not even being different from the present in any way then the effects of your actions we call merit because the effects of your action don't belong to you anymore There's no one there to accumulate them. One of the most pernicious effects of Western psychology is it's given us the idea that the meaning of our life is locked up in our past, and we have to search around in the past to find the key. This is very interesting,

[13:48]

For Buddhism, the key is just this right now and no other. And by this you give meaning to your past, each moment. And it may have a different meaning even. One thousand acts of weakness may become at this moment, strength. As Dogen's shooting, one hundred arrows missing ninety-nine, but the hundred hits. Each one then is hitting the target. But at this moment, if the hundred misses, then you have just misses. So this moment, your actions articulate your existence. The Lotus Sutra defines a bodhisattva as one who finds no laws. That's hard, again, to express what that means, but it's rather like Newton's law of gravity. There's some law there and the apple falls according to that law.

[15:33]

We wouldn't express it that way, you know, in Buddhism. The apple itself is gravity. There's nothing outside the apple. The apple itself is gravity. And you find gravity by examining the apple. You yourself are Buddha. There's no way to find Buddha outside yourself. And as I was saying yesterday, If you practice zazen you find there is such a thing as being in proportion or out of proportion and you experience yourself as disparate parts, you know, or as something that you can't describe because everything is in proportion and it's greater than the whole. You find your own gravity, actually. Your own, what can I say, apple. Own up and down. As Dogen said, eyes are horizontal and nose vertical. Each thing actually has its place. This isn't so important, but it's interesting that

[17:01]

the root of gravity and grave is g-w-e-r, which also means guru in Sanskrit. So that which is grave or serious or our subsidiary, our basis is guru or grave. And how to find in ourselves our own So in addition to detachment, this practice requires alertness. When Bodhidharma and the emperor met, Bodhidharma was completely alert each moment, attempting to teach the emperor, finally leaving. And when Bodhidharma said, I don't know, when he asked, who are you? Later on in the story,

[18:17]

The minister asked the emperor, did you know who he was? And the emperor said, I don't know. Same words, but meaning is completely different on one end of it. Another way of looking at it, both are the same. But even though Bodhidharma sat for nine years saying don't look to wisteria, actually, words and sutras for those entanglements outside the scriptures. But he meant in each act, when the apple is gravity itself, when this present moment is everything, your past, present and future. And when you know the extension, not... You know the statement. Dogen was... I mentioned yesterday that I also had difficulty with when I was first practicing. Dogen said, you should not offer incense with the hand you wipe yourself with.

[19:48]

As you know, my feeling was both must be equally sacred, and one is more necessary. But what Dogen is talking about is how you can't separate out this act from some other act. That at this moment you realize all your actions. And this moment itself can't be a moment that you're thinking about, because you're already 90% not present then. So it means you have to give up fear and hostility and unsureness so that you aren't always comparing and thinking and worrying about the consequences or meaning of a particular activity.

[21:15]

As Dogen says, when you meet one dharma or when you meet one practice, you achieve one practice or achieve one dharma. And there may be one thousand dharmas this moment if you're alert enough and not out to lunch. And if you can't get rid of your fears and comparing. You have to do something like Sashin or Zazen until your ordinary thinking mind disappears into first some kind of smooth thinking that we hardly notice and then something that flows completely at one with our activity. And one way is to begin to trust our body. You know, our body is steadier than our mind. One thing that seems... we're rather... Sometimes I think we're rather like those early record players, when they hadn't worked them out and they played three speeds,

[22:45]

They would sometimes drop three records at once, two, and play them at 45 instead of 33. We somehow... One of our biggest problems seems to be our deepest urges, our most fundamental desires, are mixed up with our most petty desires. So our... urge to know the absolute or that which we know if we are completely, if we are actively detached. But our most ordinary thought, casual thought, we attribute some absoluteness to it, some permanence to it. And it's simply a mistake. Or we do the opposite. From everything we get a sense of, some insight, we build a program. We find some practice that works, so we make a generalization.

[24:13]

And we carry around many generalizations, since our mind can generalize, and we keep acting on these generalizations. It's equally to be out of touch or untrustworthy. So, one way to practice with this is to try to begin to trust your body. As you know, we do nine bows every morning in the service. And you must have noticed that your body knows when nine bows are up. But your body doesn't know when seven are up, or six. If you ask yourself, is this the sixth bow or seventh bow, you won't know. But at nine bows, you'll know. This is, oh, this is, I know not, this must be last bow. So if you want to know at any particular moment what your situation is,

[25:14]

you need to have your tracking mind constantly comparing, now this is six, now it's seven. So if you have that kind of fear that you want to know each moment, you have to have that kind of tracking mind. But you shouldn't base your life on that kind of tracking mind. So first maybe is to try to Trust your body. If you wanted to run 1,000 steps, again, with your mind you could tell whether you're at 599 or 700. But especially if you've run a few times 1,000 steps, you know, somewhere 1,000 back, your mind will know when 1,000 is up. Just as I think most of you must have had the experience your mind knows when it's time to get up in the morning. Whatever time it is, you can say, particularly if you're not full of fears, you can say, I want to get up at 10 o'clock, or 6 o'clock, or 5 o'clock, and just at that time, your mind will come awake. If you're more brutish side,

[26:46]

the overextension of G-W-E-R, which means gravity, means brutish. If your brutish side comes out, you'll ignore the signal and go back to sleep, as we're always ignoring these signals, this knowledge, this deep knowledge we have, which is the most powerful thing in the universe, if we want to describe it that way, and yet the most weak thing too, for it's so easy for us to ignore it. But it's actually, in its fineness, everything that is. And the particular, when you try to perceive it, from the point of the particular as a particular, you lose it. You know that phrase I like so much, although you do not hear it, do not hinder that which hears it. Or the Lotus Sutra has wonder sound bodhisattva.

[28:08]

So you can start by trying to trust your body and you will make various mistakes and you need some period maybe of seclusion or monastic life when you can trust your body, you know. If you try to live that way, at first you may, an ordinary job, you may get fired because you bumble about. But you should try more and more to just trust those signals which we... At first, they're like signals. What time to get up in the morning. And when it appears, you have to act on it. That moment, you can't hesitate. Should I get up or should I not get up? But you begin to trust that kind of signal. this trust will free yourself from your thinking, tracking, discursive mind. But this is only still what I meant by therapeutic Buddhism. For as Dogen says, and every patriarch says, you have to trust that which is bigger than that.

[30:07]

we practice, how does he say, we practice with the ultimate culmination of Buddha's way. So Buddha means not you, but you who are able to practice with the ultimate culmination, not knowing it but acting with it. So it's like we know various parts and we become familiar with our various parts and then we find ourself as one whole integrated being. So again, in each act you must make, you know, mostly even in simple acts we are afraid and so we sabotage ourselves. doing things incompletely, for fear of some kind of death, for fear of completing things as if it will leave us empty, without any strings to go to the next thing. But even if you then can make that activity so that you complete everything in each moment with no wake, no wake like a boat,

[31:43]

you can see the insufficiency greater than the whole how your completeness is has to be given up then Anyway, this kind of trust is again expressed by Joseph where he says, the remaining virtue is inexhaustible. Beyond what we see, the virtue of that, the remaining virtue is inexhaustible.

[33:00]

So it requires, you know, for each of you coming to know your world as your world, what you see as familiar. Even if a Martian appears, someone asked me about it. Someone telephoned me and said, a Martian has come and wishes to be my teacher and will meet me only at 3 a.m. Quite a hugely coherent person asked me. So, maybe so. I don't know. Recently, I haven't been asked. But at 3 a.m., I don't know if I would agree, but maybe at 5 a.m. would be all right. He happens also to be Japanese, which I didn't know Japan was another planet, but sometimes it seems so. Anyway, even if a Martian comes, it's not unfamiliar, actually. No, it's unfamiliar because you act from generalizations. You know, if you don't act from generalizations, what you see before you is your own mind. And as you become familiar

[34:36]

with how you are actually already familiar because you know how your mind and body and perceptions work and the limitations of that and how much you are acting in accord with something beyond any ability of yours to perceive it in ordinary ways more and more you can quit distressing yourselves trusting the revelation of this moment. Do you have some questions? Something we should talk about? Well, I didn't understand when you said that actually we're all arguing with ourselves and that reverberates.

[36:50]

What do you mean by that? Are you arguing with ourselves that that's something we should stop doing? I think this is rather... I think it's rather difficult to point out with words what I mean. to argue with yourself is okay, maybe. I always started saying, don't argue. One meaning of the precept, don't kill, is don't assert something which denies something else. You assert one thing, you deny something else. And how

[38:06]

because we feel such a moral obligation to assert some things as real or true, because we see so much that's false, it's, I think, a pretty difficult problem in practice to not argue or not assert. Now, this is again so difficult to describe, because I don't mean you should be passive or meek or something like that. But it has to do with this trust that everything is asserting it, is simultaneously asserting itself. Or as we can say, as I was saying yesterday, everything is what we actually feel is an urge. toward nirvana, almost sweep toward nirvana, toward knowing the whole, whether it's found as death in the dissolution of the parts or whether it's found right now in your acting beyond the sum of the parts.

[39:38]

And though it's sometimes hard to see it in ourself, or we forget about it, forget about our deeper life, or even practicing, we forget about the reminding ourselves of how to enter this stream. In others we can see it. If you see someone who is suffering, they it's hugely clear the problem is they are stuck, you know, that they can't give up to this sweep toward nirvana. And you can't do anything about it by arguing with them or trying to point out Buddhism. All you can do actually is do it yourself. And this maybe we

[40:49]

This effort resonates with somebody else. If you hit one bell, another bell will ring. That kind of action. So our effort, our action is more in that realm. Again, the Lotus Sutra says, a Bodhisattva sees no rules, and this is his sphere of action. So his sphere of action is when the apple is gravity, when there's no arguing or discriminated thinking, just being in accord with that which is, and that tends to make everything in accord, that kind of thing. So anybody practicing, but almost anybody is actually in that process, They're arguing with themselves about it. Should I practice or should I not practice? Most of American life, as I said yesterday, is like a funeral parlor. Soft music, rugs, everything is... anything disturbing is tried to remove. But actually we are arguing with ourselves about it, drinking about it.

[42:24]

various ways we argue. And to enter the argument with a person doesn't help. Just you acknowledge that you acknowledge they're a Buddha-nature, or you acknowledge that they're argument without argument, and everyone knows. Do you understand what I mean? Even if you don't do anything, people may still want to send you away. Oh no, he makes me nervous when he's around. That kind of feeling people may have. Something else?

[43:28]

or not, in this analogy, the remaining virtue? Maybe this isn't so understandable to someone who's not pretty familiar with Buddhism, most of you practicing quite a lot, but what I'm talking to, why does Dogen say the remaining virtue of the mountain is inexhaustible? We read that in Buddhism and you go right over it. But if you stop, why does he say the remaining virtue of the mountain is inexhaustible? It's almost impossible to understand But it means, you know, so I'm trying to suggest how its meaning is practiced, its meaning is a hint at how to practice. Maybe it's not just at first you see a mountain as a mountain, and then you see mountains are not mountains, and then you see mountain is mountain again, but then you see mountain as a necklace of jewels,

[45:04]

or a fellatio residence or some treasure, inexhaustible treasure, and you actually trust it. The activity of trusting it is practice. Virtue, by virtue he means trusting. The remaining what of the mountain, you could say, scientifically. But he says virtue, which means you are one with it, and you should trust it as your own being. So in Buddhism we try to hint to you and find those acts in our ceremonies and in our practice and in our everyday actions which are the path itself, ways to hint or express the remaining virtue that we trust and that we act in accord with.

[46:30]

because we found our own proportion, our own ease and comfort in this moment, without any historical perspective. And when you find yourself taking historical perspective, you let it go. You'll feel your mind tighten up, look at you, Let it go. But to let it go requires some trust because it's that which gives us a feeling of safety. We tend to view the present as something we try to accumulate in or be safe in. We try to make this present safe. So no Martians, burglars, strange things, unaccustomed things, enter it. But the reverse direction is needed for practice. One who is practicing, the present is our infinite extension. When you hold up one, you know three. When you offer incense with your hand, you know every act of your hand.

[48:05]

Transmission outside the scriptures means this present and no other, which you don't need sutra books or buddhas or anything. They are just some building blocks or excrement. Just this shining And the more you give up your brutish overextension, the more you find how light everything is, how quick everything is, how glowing everything is. But we are so attached to the cause of our suffering,

[49:33]

so attached to our desires so attached to our comparisons it may be the only way of suffering only when you suffer enough you decide it's a waste of time

[49:59]

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