Now is it? That's different, yeah. So I pulled a ligament in my back a week ago. So I'm sitting in a chair. It's just a wonderful experience to do this. I've talked to a number of you, I'm sure, about how hard it is, you know, when you have some problem, to take care of it and to set aside that kind of pride that comes up, you know, like I should be able to sit cross-legged or what will people think if I sit in a chair or whatever. So I went through that this morning. I sat Sazen this morning in Vallejo, and I tried sitting cross-legged, and I did for about, oh, 20 minutes or so, but it wasn't comfortable, and I think it wasn't smart.

[01:02]

And then, of course, I could just get up or move or something, but I figured if I got up on this tan, with a table in front of me and so on, I'd really be a big production to move. Also, I told Malcolm, I think it's good for my practice. So I'm confessing, I confess. The sin of pride. However, that's not what I'm going to talk about. And maybe it is, actually. Last Saturday, Shohaku Okamura spoke in Vallejo. I'm sure a lot of you know who he is. He's a Japanese, I think he's a Zen master, and he's the head of the Soto Zen Education Center in San Francisco now, but his main work in life is translating both Dogen and Dogen's interpreter, a man named Kosho Uchiyama,

[02:14]

into English. Uchiyama would translate, Dogen is the Japanese founder of our school. He was born in 1200. Uchiyama would translate Dogen into modern Japanese and then write commentaries. And then Okamura translates both of those together into English. And he's done a lot of it. And he's a fine teacher. He gave a marvelous lecture. I think he lectured here not so very long ago. At any rate, he talked about something he had learned when he was at the Valley Zendo in Massachusetts years ago. was talking about blueberries and said, this farmer was saying, there were other berries, he was saying, don't pick those. And he said, don't pick those good for nothing blueberries. And he thought, that's it, zazen is good for nothing. So that's what he talked about. And I told him I was going to steal his idea.

[03:18]

He said, that was just wonderful, it's fine with him. And what he was talking from the text was this book, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo. I don't know if you're familiar with it. I'm sure it's here in the library. Uchiyama's teacher was a man named Sawaki Kodo. And he was known as Homeless Kodo because for a very long time he did not have a temple. And he taught at Komazawa University and he went around the country teaching and leading Sashins. And then eventually he established on Taiji a monastery in Kyoto. And it's now out in the country, but it's a monastery where they don't have a lot of bells and whistles and they don't have a lot of ornate hangings above the altar. I don't know if you've ever been in a Japanese temple, but in the Buddha hall it's quite, there's gold lacquer dripping from like this sort of chandelier thing above the altar.

[04:21]

and they just mostly sit Sazen and work and once a month they have a five day Sashin and they don't have Dharma talks and they don't have Doksan and they don't have work. They just sit 50 minutes, do Kinhin, sit, do Kinhin, that's it. And I guess they have meals and they must have short breaks after the meals but that's all. Blanche Hartman at City Center calls it a sasheen without toys. And they're wonderful. We've done some there, and I was terrified. We did 40-minute periods, so I guess we did the baby version. But it was very powerful. You know, of course, if you need to see somebody, you can, but mostly there's nothing. And we would do bowing practice at the time of morning service so that the servers could go and get the food and all. And it was quite wonderful.

[05:24]

I don't know what it would be like to do it once a month. One week out of four, you're sitting. At any rate, that's the kind of bare-bones practice that they had, and Uchiyama took over the monastery and maintained that, and that monastery still exists, and they're still practicing that way there. It's not a big monastery, but you can go there if you want. I don't know if there's anybody there right now that speaks English. So, Uchiyama in this book takes sayings and short short lectures, he calls them Dharma words, so he would take notes when Sawaki Kodo would lecture and he then puts what Sawaki Kodo said and then he has his commentary on it.

[06:25]

So they're mostly pretty short little pithy essays, they're often maybe a page and a half long. So this one that Okamura was talking about, or speaking from, was called a crook slips into a vacant house. And Sawaki Roshi said, once a monk asked the priest Ryuge, what did a man of old get that put an end to his activity? Ryuge replied, it's as if a brigand steals into an empty room. Since the crook slips into an empty room, he cannot steal anything. There's no need to escape. Nobody is chasing him. Nothing to it. This is Sawaki talking here. Know well this nothing to it. Satori is like a crook slips into a vacant house. There's nothing to steal.

[07:28]

He does not need to escape. Nobody chases her. She finds no satisfaction in the vacant house. I say, nothing to get and nothing to get her. So that's what I want to talk about, about this notion of zazen. as good for nothing, and us as thieves who think we're going to get something. But also, I want to come to how that relates to something that came up on Monday morning, this last Monday morning, and comes up often, I think, in our practice, which is, what's the point of this? How do we understand zazen in relation to living in a troubled world and having some sense of how to be a bodhisattva in this world, how to be useful in this troubled world?

[08:39]

What has zazen got to do with it? Is Zazen helpful? And I think that we have to start in the empty room. We have to let go of all of our ideas of Zazen. We have to not even ask if Zazen is helpful. We have to drop everything and accept that we're just sitting in an empty room And then once we completely forget everything else, then yeah, it's helpful. But it's not helpful as long as you think you're going to get something. As long as you're still a thief, forget about it. So I want to go into this story a little bit more. Ryuge lived from 835 to 923, and he was one of Dongshan's disciples.

[09:52]

Dongshan, sometimes known as Tozan, is the founder, really, I think, of the Soto school. He's the To of Soto, but he's really the main founder. Ryogei was not the disciple that is in our lineage, but he was a disciple of Dongshan. And his name is, Ryo means dragon and gei means fang, so he was dragon fang. And he's known. He features in a koan in the Blue Cliff Record and in the Book of Serenity and it's really basically the same koan just told a little differently. But his question is a common one, which is, you know, what's the significance of the ancestor coming from the West? What does it mean that Bodhidharma came and brought Zen to China? And one thing you have to remember when you see that question, you've heard it so many times, we kind of sort of blow it off and think, oh, that's just one of those in-your-face questions.

[11:03]

But when people ask it in these stories, in these koans, they're really asking and you have to put yourself there. Those times when you really get down to the bedrock in your practice and you have some question and sometimes you're even, you're kind of embarrassed to ask it because in some way, in your head, you know the answer already or you know that that's such a common question, it's a cliche question. But when it really comes alive for you, that's a different experience. And then when you ask that question, you're really asking it. And you're open to a response that goes deeper than whatever it is that you've got in your head. And so that's the place from which this kind of a question comes. They say in these stories he was showing off a little bit, which maybe I don't know. But he was asking the question, but he was also coming back at the teacher and saying, but in the end it doesn't have any meaning.

[12:09]

Bodhidharma's coming from the West doesn't have any meaning. So he was already in this place of insisting on emptiness. See, it's good for nothing. Bodhidharma's coming from the West. Doesn't matter because nothing matters. There's only the absolute. And he continued the stories that he just, that was kind of his teaching. He continued like that for years. Coming back to there was no, ultimately there wasn't any meaning to it. So the story again, Once a monk asked the priest Ryuge, what did a man of old get that put an end to his activity? Ryuge replied, it's as if a brigand steals into an empty room. Since the crook slips into an empty room, he cannot steal anything.

[13:14]

There's no need to escape. Nobody's chasing him, nothing to it. No well is nothing to it. Satori is like a crook slips into a vacant house. There's nothing to steal. She doesn't need to escape. Nobody chases her. She finds no satisfaction in that vacant house. The man of old here is a reference to Buddha. So what did Buddha see that put an end to his activity? You could say that put an end to his striving, that put an end to his trying to get somewhere. In a sense, when he left home, he was trying to get something. And then finally, when he gave up trying so very hard and gave up the ascetic practices and simply sat down,

[14:16]

after having eaten moderately and taken care of himself and just sat down, then answers arose after he stopped insisting so hard. So he put an end to his activity. And then Ryuge replies, well, it's as if a brigand steals into an empty room or a crook slips into a vacant house. So we have to first, I think, admit that we are thieves, that we do want to get something, that we do have some idea of getting some kind of satisfaction, and then we can let that let that go. But we have to start with acknowledging that we are, that we are thieves.

[15:23]

And that when we sit Sazen, We want something often from it. We want peace. We want some kind of ease in our lives. People often say, you know, I sit Zazen because my life works better when I sit Zazen. I'm calmer when I sit Zazen. I don't blow up so much when I sit Zazen. Or I have a friend who was not to name anybody, but who was the president of San Francisco Zen Center. And she said the only time she got to think was when she sat Zazen. She said not during Sashin's, but other times that was kind of it. Because everything was too busy for her. But when she said that, she was confessing, you know, she knew that that wasn't

[16:37]

In a way, that's not zazen. And anytime we think that there's something to get, then I started to say that's not Zazen, which I suppose is strictly true, and in these terms, that's true. The thing is, as usual, there's always the... I don't like to say there's the other side, I like to say there's another facet, because there's more than two sides, usually. So there's another facet, which is that Zazen has to include everything. So it has to include those times when you're thinking or when you sit down thinking, oh, thank goodness, I'm quiet. and I can find some peace or I can calm down or I can work through this thing that's been difficult for me. I can sit with it and solve this problem, something like that. In some sense, those times have to be Zazen too, because we live in a diluted world.

[17:45]

We are diluted, so we have to include that. But these terms that Sawaki and Uchiyama are using here, and that Okamura is using when he talks about, when he says it's good for nothing. Sazen is when we let all of that go, when there's no point to it at all. The point is that there isn't a point. The question I think we need to be asking ourselves, you know, in a way, maybe the question, you know, we don't usually say, why did the ancestor or why did the barbarian come from the West or whatever, the classic questions about Bodhidharma. We might be more likely to say, what's the point? What in the world are we doing here? at Green Gulch, I guess it was a session or a one-day sitting or something, Norman Fisher, everybody's sitting quietly facing the wall, minding their own business, and all of a sudden out of the blue comes this voice and Norman Fisher says, I think he said, what in the hell are you doing sitting here?

[19:01]

Somebody got up and left. Maybe that's why I remember it. At any rate, I think it's a good question. You know, we need to keep this question alive for ourselves. What in the world are we doing? And why are we doing this? And in some sense, the answer is for no reason at all. Because as soon as we think there's some point to it or we have some idea, oh, now I understand, Zazen. Well, not. One of Blanche Hartman's favorite stories is... relatively early on in her practice, she felt like she was learning how to really settle into Zazen and she could sit a period and she would get to that place where it's just breathing and it's not I'm breathing or whatever.

[20:08]

She would really settle. So she went to Suzuki Roshi and she sat down in the Doksan room and she said, she wasn't laughing, but she said, I think I'm beginning to get this. Zazen. And he looked at her and he said, never think that you understand Zazen. Never think that you do Zazen. Zazen does Zazen. She bowed. But that really stayed with her and she tells that story often and it certainly stayed with me and I think it stayed with a lot of people. It's very powerful. And what does that mean, Zazen does Zazen? There's a koan for you, zazen does zazen. But I like Okamura's, zazen is good for nothing. He told that, by the way, to Uchiyama when he went back to Japan and Uchiyama loved it also.

[21:09]

What happened was that when they started this little zendo in Massachusetts, in western Massachusetts, they had to find some work And they got work picking blueberries along with the high school kids, I guess, in the summer. And the farmer would tell the kids constantly not to pick these, they were called dog berries. Don't pick the dog berries. Those are the good-for-nothing berries." And that was the first time he had ever heard that phrase. And he was quite taken with it, of course. And he immediately thought of this crook stealing into an empty room and, you know, nothing to it. He also pointed out that it's an interesting question What would you rather be? These blueberries that ripen and get really sweet and wonderful and then you get eaten? Or the dog berries that kind of get left alone?

[22:14]

So maybe zazen is like dog berries. It's certainly this empty house, it is Empty. You could say that zazen is emptiness. It's just sitting down in the middle of emptiness. It's expressing it, it's being it. It's being change and interconnection. It's being part of some organic activity of the universe. and allowing yourself to sink into that and let go of all of your preconceptions. Kind of set your ego aside for 40 minutes. Or I should say, that's our effort and then we fail.

[23:22]

Sometimes it happens. Sort of by grace, and sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes a period of zazen feels like just slogging through mud, just time after time after time, coming back and coming back and coming back. Doesn't matter. Mel once said, like it, don't like it, doesn't matter a damn, just sit down. When we can sit down, acknowledging to ourselves that we are thieves, we can let go and settle into that empty house and really understand that there isn't anything to steal. There's nothing to get.

[24:25]

There isn't any real satisfaction, but there's also nothing to get us. This is a safe place. And if we can let go of our ego-based activity, then there's a great joy there. But we can't go looking for it, because you can't get it. And you certainly can't hold on to it. There's no well, there's nothing to it. So then the question arises, what does this have to do with saving all beings? How is this helpful to people in Palestine or Afghanistan or who used to work for Enron? Or who are homeless in Salt Lake City because of the Olympics?

[25:32]

Not to mention Oakland and Berkeley. Is there some relationship between this empty zazen, this nothing to it, and being of use and compassion? I think so. I think so, at least for many of us who feel the need to do something. But the irony is, maybe the wonder is, that it's only useful if we give up all ideas of its being useful. All ideas of its being anything. And then from that good-for-nothing place, then we can open our hands and they can be gift bestowing hands, they can be helpful hands.

[26:38]

But only when we first do the homework of finding the emptiness in that house, this house. And I don't just mean the Zendo, I mean this house. When we sit without any expectation, without trying to get something, then my experience is that compassion arises naturally, an appropriate response arises naturally. You've probably heard that's one of the definitions of enlightenment, an appropriate response. I think that when we're in that Zazen mind of no idea, no expectation, no holding on to some kind of self-protection, then an appropriate response can arise because there's room for it.

[27:49]

And then we find our loving-kindness. Paul Heller was telling me the other day that in reading the Vasudhimagga, the path of purification, which is kind of like a distillation of the Buddha's teachings, the sections on loving kindness are all about setting aside hatred and anger and jealousy and so on. And then it says you do all these exercises to let go of hatred and anger and then practice loving kindness. But not so much in the way of direction. And I was looking at it yesterday and that There is a lot. I'm not a scholar of it, so I don't want to characterize it particularly, but it looks like that, and it makes sense to me. That is, seems to me that, you know, we sometimes, people say we don't talk about love very much, but my experience is that it arises organically and naturally when I

[29:03]

really sit down in this empty room when I deal with what I need to deal with in order to settle into the emptiness, when I acknowledge my greed, hate and delusion and I'm willing to sit with it and let it be there and then hopefully let it go, that compassion naturally arises. I just have, I want to just share one example that happened with me. I was having a difficult time with somebody who also lived at the San Francisco Zen Center and, you know, for whatever reasons, we just really hooked each other. and we had a very hard time. We were often finding ourselves in meetings together and it was difficult.

[30:09]

If she said something, I was going to take it wrong. And if I said something, she was going to take it wrong. You can always do that with people. It's very easy if you want to see somebody as a jerk, you can. And what's really magic is they start acting like a jerk. Or if somebody sees you as a jerk, you find yourself acting like a jerk. It's really something. Anyway, and we wound up having kind of a mediation where we talked to each other with somebody else. So we did that a couple of times. And a lot of stuff came up. But it certainly didn't feel like anything got resolved, but we were both working with this. And then one day, I guess I was the head of the kitchen at the time at City Center. Anyway, she came through the kitchen and my experience was that she smiled at me and I smiled at her.

[31:10]

And then she said to me something very sweet. I didn't mean to hurt you, I don't want to hurt you. And I said something similar and it was over, it dissolved. And then when we talked about it later, she said that I had started it because I smiled at her. I said, no, no. And it just seems so wonderful. We were just ready to allow it to happen. And we had both really been practicing with this, and we shared the intention to be compassionate to all beings, whether they got on our nerves or not. And it was just time to let it go, and we did. And that was a great example to me, a great teaching for me, about just allowing something to arise. The last thing I want to say about this, and I don't know exactly how to talk about it, so I'm going to talk about it anyway.

[32:28]

It's kind of self-evident. but I'd like to hear your thoughts about it too. The other thing about Zazen in this context is that to offer peace to other people you must know peace yourself. You must really know it because otherwise you're much more likely to meet hatred with hatred which only of course makes things worse, both interpersonally and globally. So knowing peace yourself, and that's, again, once you let go of any idea of Zazen as a way to know peace, then that can happen as you sit, you sit with the pain that you know you personally and you know in the world as you sit with the hatred that you know personally and that you know in the world.

[33:35]

If you really sit in the middle of what's going on and completely allow it to arise, without holding on, without obsessing about it, without going looking for it, but completely allow it to arise and then know the emptiness of it, know that things change. When you know that in your body, then I think you have a better chance of offering that, then I think you can offer that to other people. If you know that kind of peace that comes from not denying, not averting, being willing to sit in the empty room. that of course is full of everything and Thich Nhat Hanh's way of thinking about or talking about emptiness you know he talks about a cup it may be empty of water but it's full of the clay and the person that made it and the people that fed that person and the people that made the glaze and the wood for the kiln and you can go on and on and pretty soon it's full of the whole universe and that's a way of thinking about emptiness it's empty of its

[34:46]

some kind of separate existence, but it's full of this organic dynamic working of the universe. So that empty room is completely full. And can we sit down in the middle of it, knowing that it's good for nothing, knowing that there's nothing to it, but we still have to sit down right in the middle of it and stay there when it hurts. And I think that's helpful. And I think from that place, we can take that zazen out into the world. It'd be helpful. Thank you. So do you have any thoughts on this or questions?

[35:48]

Anne? I've actually been thinking a lot about emptiness. And I think that you were touching on this at the end, but it seems to me there are two senses of emptiness. There's emptiness when we talk about no form, no feeling, no perceptions, no formations, no consciousness, all of the mental stuff and perceptions and so on that we throw up. That's empty of meaning. There's nothing. That's nothing. That's empty. But the universe is not empty. It's not empty of essence. There is a room. There is a universe out there. At least I think there is. And what the emptiness refers to is that all the mental constructs and all of that are devoid of meaning, but the universe itself is not devoid of meaning.

[37:01]

The only way to connect with that is to be as empty as the room, so that one is receptive The notion is really receptivity, and that's what I like, the receptacle idea. And so then there's no separation between the sitter and the empty room. But there is a room. And the only way to be a part of the room is to be empty. Is that kind of... I don't know. I'd say keep sitting with it. Nothing means no thing. So no, there's not a room. Vast emptiness. Vast emptiness is what the guy said.

[38:04]

You know what I'm talking about? Emperor Wu Bodhidharma said. So as soon as we start talking about a room, then it's become a thing. But you have to talk about this stuff. So then as soon as you open your mouth, you know, you forget it. So... No thing is not the same. I don't know what the word is. Well, I'm not sure about meaningfulness. I think we... attribute meaningfulness, and I don't know that the universe... I mean, we use the term, but it's not a thing. Really, there is nothing to hold on to, nothing at all. Nothing. I'm sorry. But I wouldn't stop. I mean, I think that, you know, in some way what you're thinking, the way you're thinking about it is useful.

[39:07]

I would continue. It isn't that that's wrong, but I think keep following it, keep following it. And a receptacle in a way, I mean, sometimes I think of zazen as simply willingness. You know, that's our effort is to be willing to just stay with the next breath. That's all. to be open to the next breath, and to be open to whatever our physical experience is at the moment. A receiver. In a way, but the thing of the receiver, it sort of implies that there's something to get, you know? That you're going to receive something, which you may or may not. Charlie, did you have your hand up? Well, thanks very much, Mary. It's a great delight to hear you speak. Oh, sure. I've never tried being a hermit, so I don't know how it would be, but most of us do this practice, this zazen, with other people.

[40:24]

Please. No, I mean, please don't. Those are the times I think... You know, I'm the sort of person who needs architecture. I never, never studied at home or, you know, in my room in college. I always did everything at the library with other people studying. It's that sort of experience here, that you come and you have this parallel effort. We call it Sangha, we think about it as community, but I think it's more like a parallel. I'm trying to think of some way to summarize it for whoever's listening to the tape, because I don't know that it's picking up what you're saying, because you're talking kind of softly, but this notion that sitting with Sangha matters, and I think it's still an empty room, but

[42:07]

one of the, full of the universe, and one of the things that this room is full of is other people, and it does make a difference to Zazen, I think. It changes the container. Yeah, that's right. Well, there's the simple thing that there's a social pressure that you don't, you know, you're not going to get up and walk out, probably. But I think, too, that there's something about our sitting together. There's something about this space having contained so much Zazen. You can feel it. And I think that that does operate. And the, Doan is sitting here with the striker up. So there was one, can I take one more? There was one hand back there that was up before, yeah. I really like this concept of the thief and I have worked a lot with this notion of intentionality and versus the intention that brings me to Zazen and that helps me straighten my back and that, you know, helps me do the practice versus the kind of gold-setting, I've got to get something that I associate with the world, you know, with what I do when I don't come here.

[43:17]

And when I think of that thief slipping into the empty room and then discovering that, A, she's safe there, and B, she's still, she can stop, she can rest from that gold-driven whatever, and can reach a state of goldlessness, which Krishnamurti Well, once she discovers that and discovers that being there and letting go of goals, she is likely to have more appropriate responses in the world, which I agree happens, then she's going to choose to do that again. Well, then she's going to want more. So I'm going to go to practice because I understand that that's what I'm seeking. And I think it becomes not a good semantic trick to say somehow that going to Zazen because you are trying to prove yourself or practice being in an empty room

[44:22]

is going like a thief. I mean, at that point, are we still thieves or are we, what, what? We're still thieves. Whenever we want to get something, I mean, our effort is just to let that go. And I think maturing in practice is when we start to have some experiences of emptiness and some insights and some really great fruit of practice or something. And then wanting more and then letting go of that wanting more of that good stuff. You know, you're beginning to be around the perimeters of practice and you have formed the intention to escalate the very sky and then that's the beginning of practice because then what you have to do is let go of that. And you don't come anymore? No. Sit more zazen. Beings are...

[45:27]

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