Mrs. Fisk, um, Reb thought I was going to sit there, but so if you can't hear, please move. I can hear you. Okay. But I can't see you. I've been getting some feedback lately that what I've been saying has been rather discouraging. few weeks. Several weeks ago I talked about Zen being, Buddhism being just an empty picture frame with nothing in it. And I've talked about how boring Buddhism is. And some people are believing me. I mean what I say, but anyway I have people coming to me saying,

[01:26]

This is, you know, I really think it is nothing at all and I'm about to quit. On the one hand, I think that's a good idea actually. One of the things I'm trying to do is give you some terminology. I'm trying to work with you to develop a language in which we can talk about Buddhism, we can practice Buddhism together. To use just a simple example, which I've mentioned before, when I was first practicing with Suzuki Roshi, well, let me say that part of this is that for many years I've had the feeling and talked with Suzuki Roshi about the fact that most of you, actually,

[02:52]

don't know much about Buddhism, though your practice is pretty good. And it's a problem a great deal of how you talk about Buddhism in English. And so Suzuki Roshi and I worked together for a long time trying to figure out how to say things in English that English just doesn't express. And the book Beginner's Mind is actually the fruit of that effort and all the lectures in the Windbell leading up to that book. And that book is perhaps comprised of the simplest lectures Roshi's ever given. Beginner's Mind doesn't mean for beginners, but in fact those lectures were given to a group of women, mostly women in Los Altos, who knew very little about Buddhism. some of the simplest lectures he's ever given. So it's how to develop a language in which we can talk about Buddhism. And to give you an example, when I first came to Zen Center, Roshi and I talked about the problem of guilt.

[04:15]

couldn't figure out why the students had this guilt thing and what to do about it. And both of us sort of spent some time looking in, me looking in him, in his own experience of Buddhism, study of Buddhism. Does Buddhism offer any way to expiate guilt? And there isn't almost any way. Well, it turns out that guilt just is a Western phenomena. You know, the Japanese and Chinese people just don't have guilt, you know. And Dr. Kunze recently has pointed this out very clearly by distinguishing between the sense of shame and a sense of guilt. So, Oriental cultures have a sense of shame, which I've talked about to some extent. Sense of shame is just very different from a sense of guilt. And so, Roshi approached the problem. from the general way of Buddhism, that when you do something, you should be free from it. Even if you do something wrong, you should do it completely. And then, just next time you try again, that's all, you know. You just forget about it, it's disappeared. But this clinging of guilt, he just... So, that's just a very simple example. Actually, there are many, many, many things about Buddhism that you have difficulty with.

[05:44]

because our language has not been subjected to the need to express Buddhism for centuries, which Japanese and Chinese language has been, and has found a way to express the inexpressible-ness of Buddhism. So I've been, for instance, yesterday I tried to talk about the difference between persona and person, another big difference between Oriental cultures and our culture. And I think that the idea of persona is a pretty difficult one for you to grasp because you really do have the idea of a real you. And you just have to really practice a long time with mindfulness to see that this real you can't be identified. So if I say to you, well, okay, you just imitate Buddha, it seems maybe ridiculous to you, the idea of taking on a personality like that.

[07:11]

that we think we have our own nature, you know, that we want to express. Well, for the most part, what we're practicing here is what we could call mercy Buddhism, in that it's a kind of therapy. So, most of you come because you have some difficulty that Zazen helps you with. But if you're a person who doesn't have so much difficulty with his life, and again,

[08:14]

to have some difficulty is an advantage because it awakens you to the suffering, to the nature of our life. But if you don't have much difficulty and you can do your life with some confidence and say you come and talk to me and you obviously understand how to practice pretty well and you're making pretty good sense of your life, and if you keep at it for 10 years or 20 years, you'll have a very deeply moving and expressive nature, maybe quite free from selfishness. But this still is on your terms, you know, and it's limited by being on your terms. And there isn't much I can say beyond that to you. Because the idea of basing your life on vows or something like that is just not something you can talk to somebody about.

[09:36]

Vows, yeah. And for the most part, Roshi never talked to us about it. Most of us, like when I became ordained, he said, I said, it was all in Japanese, of course. I said, what's all this stuff mean? He said, just swear to it. He said, you're going to do it anyway whether you know it or not. So I said, all right. I trusted him completely, so if he told me to say it, I'd say it. But what it means to base your life on vows means that you have to have a very deep and positive idea of what we mean by persona rather than person. That actually the only opportunity for us to express ourselves is through persona, not through person, that's just a big drag.

[11:09]

So if you are a person who doesn't have the kind of difficulty that leads you to come to Zazen, to practice, then if you're going to practice Buddhism, it will have to come from some deep mind-bending insight into the nature of this life of ours which causes you to give up completely your own idea of working out your own life and see that the only way you can really meet the problems of this life and the suffering in this world is to take on the life of Buddha. And that's beyond being a student of Zen Center or liking Suzuki Roshi as a teacher or liking myself as a teacher.

[12:45]

And I mean, you have to realize I'm not a very good teacher and I'm just trying to help as I can. So when we take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, the teacher really isn't mentioned. Buddha isn't the teacher actually. So the teacher maybe in that sense is just something very close to yourself. So you have to take on the role of a Bodhisattva and the life of the Sangha. whether the Sangha is good or bad, it doesn't make any difference. I mean, you don't come to Zen Center or to some Buddhist community and say, well, this particular group isn't good enough for me, you know, or something like that. It's not important, because when you are at this point, all you see is that this is the only way to work in this world, so you work in this world, whatever the conditions are.

[14:09]

I remember Suzuki Roshi in a session years ago, 1963, about this month. talked about giving up our desires, to be free from our desires. Now you could practice Seshin and how to have little desires or few desires, which means to give up your desires. And he said, if you want to be free, actually free, not just free in a limited sense, but actually free, it means you take on the sufferings of others. It doesn't mean you're actually looking for some end to your own suffering, it means you're ready to take on the sufferings of others. That's real freedom, actually, and that's actual real joy.

[15:32]

So to accept the pain that you have in zazen, to accept the suffering you have in zazen, is the only way we can practice to accept the sufferings of others. If you can accept your own suffering, you can accept the sufferings of others. And if you can't accept your own suffering, you can't accept the sufferings of others. You won't even know what the sufferings of others are. So, when Buddhism is based on the four holy truths, the first one being the reality of suffering, it doesn't mean superficial suffering like, you can't say superficial, but it doesn't mean suffering like mental illness or physical pain or car accidents or disease. means something much more fundamental. It's in the nature of every breath, you know. So, Roshi said at that time,

[17:04]

that if you can accept that suffering, in sasheen, of yourself, that's not your power. And when you accept the sufferings of others, that's not your power. That's Buddha's power. It's something that's greater than you yourself. It's the power of Buddha. So real practice means to give yourself up to city life or worldly life or each person's suffering. You know, Japan and China are very aesthetic countries and they One of the great beauties of Zen Buddhism is that they have taken the sutras and expressed them again in very beautiful, simple language. But when we look at it on the surface, it looks like just like nice talk about poetry or mountains or something, but actually it's very like

[18:36]

the statement that first you see a mountain, and then after you practice you see a mountain is not a mountain, and then later you see that a mountain is a mountain. This is, you know, this is not sort of just as simple as it sounds. It relates to the Avanthamsaka Sutra and relates to koans. But one haiku I've always liked is, which is very clearly Buddhist and very simple, which is, sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, grass grows by itself. But to talk in this way requires some, again, common language. And if I just use nice, you know, I can, for instance, you know, instead of saying Buddhism is boring, you know, I can talk about how extraordinary it is just to see one leaf, you know. But if I talk about the beauty of something, you may think, oh, that's the same as what I experienced under acid. Or you may think about it in terms of

[20:04]

what satisfies you from an ego point of view, what's beautiful from that point of view. Nothing wrong with that kind of beauty, but that's not exactly what I'm talking about. So it's rather difficult for me to talk about the positive side of Buddhism. It's much more easily misunderstood than if I say it's boring. If I say it's boring, you're more willing to understand what I mean, I think, than if I say it's beautiful, you know. But when we look at the ten stages of enlightenment, which I talked about yesterday, which are after enlightenment, you saw that the first one was joy. So the first one was joy. But Mahayana Buddhism isn't really concerned with that. It's really concerned with the seventh stage on. The seventh stage on is the stage of entering into all beings, entering into their suffering. So for a Buddhist,

[21:34]

There's no, you know, if your life requires you to be, gives you the opportunity to be calm, live in a beautiful, live in a beautiful place, and etc., you know, some really beautiful thing. some far-reaching, calm feeling, then that's, you know, wonderful. But if it requires you to be busy all the time and give up your practice, and maybe never have your practice develop very much, it's exactly the same. I mean, maybe you give up what you always thought was the thing you most wanted to do, and it's, from the point of view of Buddhism, You know, it's only from the point of view of small you it makes a big difference. And you're not giving it up because it's, you know, painful or something like that. There's some satisfaction that transcends whether you feel good or bad, or whether you feel joy or pain.

[23:03]

In that same lecture, Suzuki Roshi told the story that was told him in a session when he was at Eheji as a young man. So I think we're going rather far back. And the story was about a woman, girl, who loved birds. She was friendly with birds. Birds were always friendly with her. And for some reason, which I don't remember in the story, I don't think it was stated, the girl committed suicide by throwing herself into the ocean. So all the birds, one by one, carried grains of sand one grain of sand at a time in their beak, to the ocean and dropped it in. Because they wanted to bury the sea in order to find her body. They wanted to make a beautiful land for her.

[24:18]

Anyway, they made a beautiful land where the sea was, and they never found her body. At the point of view of Mahayana Buddhism, it's not the beautiful land, but the grain of sand. For us, the joy is in carrying the grain of sand, not in the beautiful land. And if we make a beautiful land through, what, science or something? Where we can all sleep, it won't solve anybody's problems. So just the opportunity to carry the grain of sand was the point of the story that the teacher told Suzuki Roshi when he was a boy at Eheiji. So anyway, we don't in Buddhism talk about the beautiful land much. We're always talking about the grain of sand.

[25:33]

That story is very, very, that's probably a Chinese story, maybe Indian. The next story that Dogen told in response, perhaps, or similar to that, it's very Japanese, but relates to our practice, though. He talks about the archer, that every time you hit the target, requires 100 practices. So every time you hit the mark, it requires 100 times of practice in which you miss. So Dogen said, each practice is hitting the mark. So your practice, each time you do zazen, sometimes thin zazen or uninteresting zazen, sometimes very satisfying zazen, each time is hitting the mark. So, in your zazen practice, in a sashin, you have a real opportunity, actually. The suffering is a great nuisance, you know? It's a great problem, and you think, I could be out doing something else.

[27:56]

And life doesn't have to be like this, and it doesn't have to be, but if you want to meet the problems of your life and the life of the people that you'll be in contact with, then you must accept that suffering. To sit through that pain is extremely important. I can say that once you do, and I have to every Sashin over again, it just becomes a little vibration, you know, just some information that doesn't flood you. Most people, the Sashins get easier though, so. Don't lose heart. And to help others, you know, it's a big, many of you want to help other people. And to help other people is, you know, it's best not to do anything.

[29:31]

that the way to help other people is just to live with them anonymously and without doing anything but participating in their life. But if you're a person who can accept the kind of suffering you have in sasheen and accept the neutrality of your life, then just living with other people you'll find something extraordinary about each person you are with that you never would have known otherwise. That some level of the person opens up to you that they didn't even know themselves was there. So you don't have to seek people to help. If you can accept your own suffering really and thoroughly, then everywhere you go, no matter what you do, Everything you do is helping people. Thank you very much.

[30:55]

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