leave as often as possible for a cigarette or to wander around outside and Suzuki Roshi never said anything, but it was an overriding feeling in those sesshins was one of pain. And near the end, he also used to have a habit which we've never done as we've gotten bigger and I think some of you know this, of leaving us and forgetting to ring the bell. It's really quite a good practice, but it's pretty hard. He'd wait till the hardest day and every year he did it in the big sesshin. He'd wait till the hardest day and usually it was somewhere like the third or fourth day he'd do it, but he might do it two or three times in a sesshin,

[01:04]

so he might do it the last day too. And he would, it would be afternoon and you have all these period after period after period, you know, and there's no lecture in the afternoon then. And he would sit there for a while and about the time the period was nearly about to end, he'd get up and leave. And you could hear him walk across the room, you know. So you'd sort of think, well, he'll be back in a minute, of course. And five or ten minutes would go by. Fifteen, you know, and five minutes seems like a very long time, you know, right? Twenty. And then he'd come back in and you'd hear him come downstairs, boom, boom, boom,

[02:06]

boom, you know, everybody would be hoping it was him anyway. And then the door would open to the, you know, I don't know if you know what Sokoji was like, but anyway, different set up than this. The door would open and we'd all wait, you know. And people would be sweating, you know, really. And it's just incredible what people went through. And he'd shut the door again and you'd hear him go back upstairs, boom, [...] boom. Everybody would be cursing him, you know. And then pretty soon you'd hear him come back down, boom, boom, boom. He'd stay in his office for a while and then he'd go back upstairs and come back down. And then he'd open the door and you'd, by this time you'd given up

[03:06]

hope, right? And so, he'd come across his endo, all the way across his endo. And you think, well, maybe he's not going to fool us this time. And we didn't know, he's so absent-minded, you know, that he might just have forgotten. He might have thought the bell had been rung, right? No, I don't know. We never were sure and you'd ask him about it and he would never say anything. And mostly we didn't dare ask because he was so formidable, you know, and distant. And he'd go up and he'd pick up the schedule and you could hear, it was always on onion skin, you know, so you could hear it rattle, you know, rattle, rattle. And you'd think, well, this is, now he's going to look at the schedule, he's going to see that it's been 45 minutes or one hour, you know. And he'd look at it and put it down and go back out again. Anyway, the worst he ever did was he kept us once two and a half hours sitting mid-afternoon. Only two people didn't move during that time. It was incredible.

[04:12]

But we're too well-organized to do that now, so we're safe. Anyway, at times like that, after a period where he'd kept us for an extra hour or an extra hour and a half or at one time, an extra two and a half hours, later in the evening he would say, okay, this is the last day of the Sashin. And the whole rest of the time, I don't want you to move at all. And everyone would be absolutely wiped out and think it was impossible. And somehow, it would be possible. Everyone would sit there absolutely still. It would be the stillest time in the Zenda, in the whole Sashin. Anyway, I think in the questions of King Melinda,

[05:22]

such sitting is compared to an oak tree in which the wind may come and blow all the branches off and all the leaves off and whatever that is, your ego, etc., etc. But the trunk remains. And that steadfastness is maybe what we actually are. But you have to be careful not to get caught by your strengths. One of the points of a Sashin is to know our weaknesses. And all of us seem to have an enormous desire for ascendancy of some kind. And if we don't manifest

[06:25]

it ourselves, we get our best friend or wife or someone to manifest it for us. And it comes out in all of us in little ways, where we sit in a room and how we speak about others. Humility is sort of a bad word, but it's also a sign of health. And if Buddhism is not a set of beliefs but a set of practices, then impermanence is not really a philosophical idea in Buddhism but the practice of humility. So interdependence is another way of saying

[07:25]

humility, because when we realize the interdependent nature of all of us, there's humility. And when somebody comes and talks to me, who has sometimes an enormous amount of insight into the world, into Buddhism, but without humility, it's usually not only that they're sick but they're heading for a breakdown. That interest in power, whether it's the power of understanding, without some realization of impermanence and interdependency is a sign of sickness, actually. So a great deal of Zen practice, particularly later part

[08:44]

of Zen practice, is how not to be destroyed by yourself, by Buddhism, by being a teacher or by being a priest, you know, the archetype of poet or priest who can destroy you. So we should know what our weaknesses are, not to just improve them, but just as they are a way which gives us an opportunity to practice. And we should know our strengths. We should know how our strengths can help people. We should also know how our strengths make other people feel weak. And that's a pretty, you take on a pretty, when your strengths are, the price of your strengths is to make another person feel weak, you take on a big karmic load.

[09:47]

So how to be strong in a way that helps people is, anyway, is a sashin, too. Because you don't want to just, you know, you don't want to be strong and play weak, because people want you to be strong, your strength is theirs. But also, you don't help people if you think of strength as being more important than somebody else, or having more, or being able to do things better or more carefully than other people. Anyway, all of this comes under in Buddhism, under the cultivation of friendliness to yourself, first of all. Anyway, you should be able to put

[10:57]

yourselves in the shoes of everyone else and every other thing. Part of the difficulty of freeing yourself from becoming, the desire to become, to create, is just that

[12:15]

you're young. And when you're young, you have much more desire to create things. And when you're older, you're much more aware of the transiency of things. And the desire to become, well, and if we took a version of it in psychology, it would be related to the life instinct and the pleasure principle and libido and sex instinct and such like. So,

[13:27]

that whole realm is very interested in the beautiful land I talked about yesterday. We want to make, and we have to be careful in Zen Center, that we aren't involved in creating something that's a monument to Buddhism here, and not Buddhism at all. So, we have to be careful in Zen Center of being too successful. This building is a little too much, you know, actually. So, if we put our energy into Zen Center, without some limitation, we'll make Zen Center very successful, and there'll be many students and pretty good priests, and we'll have, you know. But in the end, it'll just be a monument, you know, not anything real.

[14:30]

So, when you practice a sashin, there's a desire to move, you know, and there's also a desire to get out and do something else other than be here, work in the world or something. Part of our practice is just to see that, to see that urge to do something in the next moment. And that very, really powerful desire in us to create life, to build something, to make something out of nothing, blinds us to nothingness, makes it extremely difficult to see how transient

[15:45]

everything actually is. But when you finally let go of becoming, still of course you exist each moment, fresh and new. But when you break that link that ties you up with all the past moments and directs you into the future moments, and you begin to know what Buddhists mean by transiency, it's quite a different world. Everything seems to just be receding away from you. Everything seems so, you know, quite ephemeral actually. So, you can ask yourself, that point you can talk about, I talked about some of these

[16:57]

things I've been mentioning to you, or Dr. Konze has been talking about recently, so I've been trying to bring a few of the things he's been saying to Zen Center. And one of the things he talked about today, which I didn't, I wasn't there, but he was talking about an absolute in Buddhism some last quarter, and I mentioned to him that for Dogen, even Buddha nature was impermanent. So, he sort of grumped and said something about Zen masters, so I brought him an article, a recent article about Dogen's concept of Buddha nature, and

[18:06]

he gave a lecture on it today. And one of the things he pointed out, well, one thing he said was, of course, Dogen was completely right, and that one of the few Zen masters is any good, he thinks. He said, Dogen had it up here. Anyway, Dogen was pretty smart, that's true. So, is that in the Indian tradition, there's no such thing as Buddha nature, there's only Buddha-ness. And the Chinese, which have difficulty, the Chinese language, because of each kanji, you know, each character being a specific object. In our language, the reality of our language is in the sound, not in the specific words. In Japanese and Chinese, the reality of the language isn't in the sound at all, the sound's irrelevant, practically irrelevant. It's in the actual little pictograph, the original pictograph. So, they make, it's

[19:15]

interesting that they make things into a thing-ness, but also there's an enormous amount of vagueness in Japanese and Chinese, which they like, I mean, they don't want everything explained. Anyway, they turned Buddha-ness into a thing-ness of Buddha nature. So, anyway, the fourth anxiety he talked about, I mentioned three of the fears yesterday, the fourth fear or anxiety is, yesterday I talked about spiritual anxiety, the fourth he mentioned is existential anxiety. And I remember I was very, one reason I've liked Dr. Konsei is because years ago, when I picked up in a bookstore, the way I choose a book is, I just go to a bookstore and I

[20:19]

open books, right? And if the man can write one real sentence, you know, but if it's just sort of, you know, if each sentence doesn't have some, you know, there isn't a person there, you know, if there's just a sort of grammatical thing that leads to the next sentence, then I'd put the book back. And so, Konsei's, one of Konsei's book types picked up, and obviously there's somebody happening in the book. And one of the things, I think it's on about page 25 of the Introduction of Buddhism's Essence and Development, starts at the bottom of the page, and it's about Jaspers and Heidegger, etc., and he says, they talked about existential anxiety, and he said, you wake up in the morning, or you've been asleep or napping, and suddenly you wake up and there you are, it's dark out. You find yourself caught against a kind of

[21:21]

background of nothing. You wonder why you're there. Of course, that really struck home when I read that years ago, and again, that's another thing he talked about today, is existential anxiety. Why are we here? Here we are. So, when you break that link that ties you to the world of becoming, and you see the transiency of everything. So, Gute held up one finger. When you see the transiency of everything, you wonder, why are we here at all? Why am I appearing before you right now? So, when you

[22:42]

are bowing, you know, why are you, why do we bring our hands together? You should know, you know, you're just bringing your hands together, that's all. Maybe because you have two hands. So, we can bring our hands together, you know, that's all. So, Buddhist ritual has something, a great deal, to do with this.

[23:56]

So, I would like very much to get more of the ritual we do in English, so that you could reject it for reasons other than it being Japanese, or dislike it for reasons other than it being Japanese. But, in some sense, when you see the transiency, you know, then everything you do is a kind of ritual. Not a ritual in a dead sense, but you have to do something. So, we present ourselves to Buddha or to each other. We present our hands to each other. So, we want to express something that's beyond doing or

[25:20]

becoming, that just expresses our being here. I'd like to say, you know, thank you very much for being in this session and the effort you've made in the session, but it's hard to thank you because you should be thanking

[26:21]

yourself, you know, and English doesn't have a word for it. In Japan, there's a word for how you thank somebody for what they're supposed to be doing, which is gokuro-samadesu, gokuro-samadesu, which means thank you for what you're supposed to be doing. In a monastery in Japan, that becomes the greeting. Every time you see somebody, you don't say, how are you? You say, gokuro-samadesu. It becomes, rather, just a thing you say. Anyway, thank you very much.

[27:25]

May Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva be with you.

[27:35]

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