In the lineage, we don't chant Sozon's name. We chant the name Ungo-Doyo. Ungo-Doyo was the deshi of Tozon who continued the line, continued the school. Whereas Sozan, his line died out right away, but Sozan was maybe too, you know, it's interesting, some students will, go one way and some students will go another way. Probably Ungo was a very practical kind of person and knew how to teach other people and knew how to organize and a good student.

[01:15]

Whereas Sozon was very bright, very brilliant, and he continued to elucidate or obscure, however you want to see it, Tarzan's teachings of the five ranks. So he's actually quite famous, but I don't think he was the kind of person who could continue the school. He was not concerned with that, he was concerned with other things, so different personality. But we think of Tozan and Sozan, the names To and So, as being the name of the school, except that the characters are reversed because it's easier to say Soto than Toso. Sounds better. Or in Asian language, the sound has a lot to do with the way you put the words together.

[02:20]

characters. So Soto in Japanese sounds better than Toso, Cao Dong, Dong Cao, would probably sound funny in Chinese. So they put the name of the disciple before them. But the other, there's also speculation that there was a... So is also comes from the sixth ancestor, one of his names, Soke, the name of his monastery. So anyway, Sozan is far more famous than Ungo Doyo, but Ungo Doyo is the one in the lineage that we chant. So he says, the Dharma of just this, or as it is, has been intimately entrusted from Buddhas and ancestors.

[03:27]

Now you have that. Now that you have it, take good care of it. Keep it well. This is exactly what we say in our Dharma transmission ceremony. Not exactly like that, but you have it, please take care of it. Don't let it get lost. So, Dan, he says, filling a silver bowl with snow, let's see, here's what he says, filling a silver bowl with snow, hiding a heron in the moonlight. Taken as similar, they're not the same. When you mix them, you know where they are. Their uniqueness is known. So I remember when Suzuki Roshi did the first lay ordination in Zen Center, 1970 actually, he gave a little talk which I have, I didn't bring it with me, but he says,

[04:49]

You should be like a white bird in the snow. You should be like a white bird in the snow, meaning not to be conspicuous, not to stand out in some way, but to fulfill your place where you are. to fulfill your function completely where you are without standing out in some way or without ego. You said to be ordained means to help people. We don't do it for your own satisfaction or to make you some special person or to make you stand out in some way raksu or a buddhist robe, but he said, I'm doing this to just to encourage everyone to practice and that your ordination will encourage other people.

[05:58]

So you shouldn't try to stand out in some way as an accomplished person. And at the end of the Hokyo-Samae It says just practice like an idiot, right? Just don't try to be something special, just completely do the work, just totally immerse yourself in the practice like an idiot. We say in, I remember Kadagiri Roshi used to say, priest you have to be a little bit stupid. In order to be a good practitioner you should be a little bit stupid, not too bright, no showing off. So, snow in a silver bowl. Snow, but this has various meanings.

[07:03]

You can draw various meanings from what he's saying here. There's the intellectual meaning or the meaning of which is showing the structure of things, and then there's the meaning for yourself. The silver bowl is like something that's used over and over again. The snow is ephemeral. The snow comes and goes. clouds, right? But the bowl is used over and over again. So the bowl is like your true nature, and the snow is your activity. So I like to think of the bowl as essence, essence of mind. The sixth ancestor always talks about essence of mind. You should never stray from your essence of mind.

[08:05]

In all of your activity, never stray from your essence of mind. So essence of mind like the bowl and snow is like your activity, your ephemeral moment-to-moment activity. And so the bowl contains the snow. The bowl of essence of mind is the container for all of our activity. You should always do all of your activity within big mind. Big mind includes everything. Your big mind should include everything. Small mind is... We tend to think of small mind and big mind. Bowl and snow. Or moonlight and harem. Moonlight is the same thing. The moon is... usually a symbol of enlightenment.

[09:12]

And enlightenment means big mind. And the heron is white, so this is just two metaphors for the same thing. The moon is always the moon, but the heron just flies through it, flies back and forth. The background is big mind, and the foreground is our activity. So we never stray from our big mind. Small mind is not bad. Small mind is an expression of big mind. Big mind expresses itself through small mind. So our small mind is very valuable. We say, get rid of ego. You can't get rid of ego. You can't cut off ego.

[10:13]

Even though the book will say, cut it off at the root and never let it grow again, blah, blah, blah. But you can't do that. You can't cut off ego. Ego is an expression of the jewel mirror. Ego is an expression of our big mind, of big mind, which is beyond ego. But we have to have a sense of self. There's ego and there's self. We're two people, ego and self. Self is Buddha. Ego is what's added on. Ego is our acquired persona. and self is our big mind or is our natural persona.

[11:18]

So when ego and persona, ego and person or myself, my ordinary self and Buddha It's only when ego is trying to find its own satisfaction and strays from essence of mind that we talk of ego. But ego is always there. Self is always there. We have to have a self, otherwise we can't eat, we can't walk, we can't think, we can't do anything. So desire is important. In Buddhism they say, get rid of desire. You can't get rid of desire. Desire is the energy that turns things. So we take desire and channel it.

[12:24]

And when we channel it in practice, it's called way-seeking mind. We give our way-seeking mind talk. When you listen to our way-seeking mind talk, everyone is totally beautiful, because We tell the story of how we've taken desire and channel it into big mind, or channel it into way-seeking mind, even though we have trouble doing that. We all have trouble taking our desire and channeling it into a way-seeking mind. But the more trouble we have, the more benefit we have when we can do that, because big ego, big desire is big Buddha. That's why we love troublemakers.

[13:29]

Suzuki Roshi used to say, you should be a little bit mischievous. A good student is usually a little bit mischievous because a good student has big desire and it's hard to control, really hard to control all that desire. But when you channel it and make that effort, that's practice, that's enlightenment. That's practice enlightenment. You take your big desire and turn it toward way-seeking mind. And then it's not called desire anymore. It's called way-seeking mind. So desire gets absorbed into the path. And so you have full control of it. and you let it go. So it's not inhibiting desire, it's using it, rather than letting it use you, even though from time to time it gets out of hand.

[14:57]

So we have something called forgiveness. So, snow contained in a silver bowl, a heron concealed in the moonlight. They are similar but not the same, because big mind and small mind, when you array them, we say, well this is just small mind and that's big mind, but when you put them together you can't tell the difference. They're really one thing. They're one and two. Somebody asked me a question about one and two. Not one, not two. That's a very famous statement, right? In Zen, it's a very famous statement. Not one, not two. That's what this means. It's not one, and it's not two.

[16:02]

And it's one, and it's two. Not one, not two means both one and two. But if you say it's one, that's not right because it's also two. If you say it's two, that's not right because it's one. So this is one of those things that you don't monkey with. You just let it be. We want to figure things out. We want everything to land in our explanation box. But it's good to just leave certain things unexplained, because you know it, you know what it means. As soon as you hear it, you know what it means. Or if you don't know what it means, just let it be there, and it'll reveal its meaning. But if you try to explain it, you say, oh, I know what that is.

[17:07]

And then you lose it. So the kitchen has to go and do something, right? Okay. And when am I supposed to stop? 10.30. 10.30. Okay. So then, it goes on to say, Its meaning does not abide in the words. The meaning is not in the words. Yet it responds to the inquiring impulse. If you're excited, it becomes a pitfall. And if you miss it, you fall into retrospective hesitation. The Hokyo Zama is composed in couplets. And apparently, it was composed in a kind of folk style of poetry.

[18:18]

And the end of one couplet would lead into the next couplet. So if you do this in Chinese, probably the flow of one couplet into the next enhances the meaning. but translating it into English becomes very clumsy. In our translation, we said, its meaning does not abide in the words, yet it meets the inquiring student. Hasty action creates a pitfall. To miss is to linger in consideration. There are two ways of translating things. One is the impersonal way and the other is the personal way. If you translate something impersonally, it looks like out there was in some way the misunderstanding. But if you translate it personally, it's more like it meets you.

[19:24]

It's about you. It's not about some doctrine. It's about you. So we put it into a more personal context. So its meaning does not abide in the words, yet it meets the inquiring student, which is you. And hasty action creates a pitfall. When you're excited, it becomes a pitfall. It's okay, but something about hasty action, wanting something too much, I think this applies to wanting enlightenment. The thought of enlightenment or the desire for enlightenment is good, very good. There's a goal called enlightenment.

[20:29]

When we practice to seek enlightenment, it becomes egotistical, because we want something. And when we really want something, then the means becomes different than the goal. We don't think about the means. Well, okay, in order to get enlightenment, I have to practice. So, okay, I'll practice until I get enlightenment. And then we just think practice is just a means to enlightenment. In five years, I'll do this for five years and then, you know, if I don't get enlightened, I don't know what I'll do, but I've been doing this for 10 years and I haven't gotten enlightened yet. I hear people say that. I've been doing this for 20 years and I haven't gotten enlightened yet. The reason they haven't gotten enlightened is because they don't realize that the practice itself is the enlightenment. They're looking for something out there that's called enlightenment.

[21:34]

And you can't find that because there's nothing that exists out there that's called enlightenment. Enlightenment is where you are doing what you're doing right now. It's not out there someplace. There's not an end product called enlightenment. There's Kensho, opening up, the curtain opens and you get a glimpse of something and then the curtain closes again. You say, wait a minute, what? You get your nose caught in the curtain. But those are glimpses of something, you know, reality. But you're already in reality. Reality is always there. And so this is one of the ways that this document is talking about, that the jewel mirror, which is enlightenment, another term for enlightenment, is always there.

[22:45]

It's always there. The only thing that obscures it is the clouds, the cloudy way of perception, cloudy way of thinking. There's a term called the hazy moon of enlightenment. The moon, of course, is enlightenment, stands for enlightenment. But the clouds are always going, drifting by, you know, and so it's a hazy moon. We kind of see it, you know, but... And then every once in a while, you know, the clouds part and then you see the moon, you know, and you say, I got it. And then the clouds come back again. It's like that. So we should be having Kensho experiences all the time. And you do. But the problem is, when we have these Kensho experiences, we think that it's supposed to be something dramatic.

[23:52]

So you don't realize necessarily that that wonderful feeling or insight that you had when you were in the kitchen cutting tomatoes was a wonderful opening experience, but it was subtle. So our enlightenment experiences mostly are very subtle, and we don't even recognize them necessarily. It's like little earthquakes going on all the time. You know, we don't know they're going on, but they're going on all the time. So, the place to get to in our practice is here. The hardest place to be is here, right now, where you are. Because in a moment, you're going to move. Matter of fact, you're moving right now, even though you're sitting still.

[24:59]

We're sitting still, but everything is moving. The hardest place to be is right here, right now. And of course, that's in Zazen, you know. The trick is, how do you sit still within all that movement called Zazen? Zazen is great dynamic movement called sitting still. How do you be there? Just be there with whatever's happening. That's called integration of the real and the seeming or of the essence and function. That's why we sit Zazen. This is a document about Zazen. but it's also a document about our daily life, which is called Zazen. So, its meaning does not abide in words, yet it meets the inquiring student.

[26:13]

In other words, We can talk as much as we ... Suzuki Roshi said, we make a mistake on purpose. The teacher makes a mistake on purpose because the teacher gives talks. But we know that even though it's not in the talk, it's not in the words, the words are important because the words help you. But we shouldn't be attached to the words. At the end of every lecture he would say, there's no need to remember what I said. No need to remember what I said, just be there. And we think we're sitting there listening to a lecture, but actually what we're doing is just being there. hasty action creates a pitfall. So looking for something, and then he said, to miss is to linger in consideration.

[27:26]

So these are, you have to do something. If you don't do something, if you do too much, that's a pitfall. If you don't do anything, then you just fall into depression or whatever. You have to do something, but you have to do something in the right way. How do you find the balance between using all your energy and relaxing? This is what we should be thinking about all the time as practice. We think about it in zazen and in our daily life.

[28:29]

It's called equanimity. or balance of energy, conservation of energy, conservation of energy, how you use just the right amount of effort to do the most amount of work. When we sit Zazen, it's called great dynamic activity. And you're using all of your effort to sit up straight and keep your posture. And at the same time, there's no tenseness present. Totally loose and relaxed at the same time that you're using all this effort. Total effort. Total effort and total ease at the same time.

[29:33]

So there's no imbalance of effort. That's the secret of Zazen. Yes. Dr. Jerome O'Connor, the founder of Judo, said to use the minimum amount of energy for the maximum amount of efficiency. Yeah, exactly. So in our work, it's the same thing. When you're walking, standing, lying down, working in the kitchen, So Zazen, Jinjo Koan means your activity as it is extended from Zazen. It's not like you lose something that you did in Zazen. It's that the same attitude, the same effort that is in Zazen is what you

[30:37]

expressed in all of your activity. That's practice realization. As you proceed from the zendo, you maintain the same attitude and effort in everything else that you do. Its meaning does not abide in the words, yet it meets the inquiring student. Hasty action creates a pitfall, and to miss is to linger in consideration. That's my understanding. Other people will have a different understanding, but my understanding is oriented toward practice. Would you repeat what you just said at the last sentence? On the last part? The very last sentence?

[31:40]

I said, my orientation is toward practice, whereas someone else's commentary may be oriented in some other way. So I think this is a good time to stop. Yes? I also wanted to say, which I didn't, that any time during the class you can ask questions, but you should pick a time that's appropriate. Don't interrupt me in the middle of a sentence or something like that. But yeah, you can ask questions any time, because I don't want it to be a monologue, although I enjoy that. Let's see.

[32:48]

Although the meaning is not in the words, there are a lot of books here. I have to say, the meaning is in the words. If you understand that the meaning is not in the words, then you will understand the meaning is in the words. And I didn't get a chance to use the blackboard. I'm sorry that you set it up for me and all that, and I didn't use it. I just want to say two things, three things before we stop. Sutra, or the poem, has got three major sections. One is the first section, down to where it starts talking about the hexagram, ching lu, hexagram. And then, that's just a little section, and then there's the rest of the poem.

[34:01]

But this part in the middle is the meat, is like where all the study is, because that's where, that's talking about the five ranks, the five positions. So that's why I have the blackboard, but I didn't get around to that. I wanted to just show those three sections, give you a little more orientation. But there are I think most people kind of know about this already, right? So there are some people who know a lot about this and some people who don't know anything. So I'm talking to people who don't know anything and people that do know something can know that. ♪ I'm ginger ♪

[35:06]

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