But it's also another opportunity to continue Suzuki Roshi's way. Dogen Zenji said, flowers fall with our attachment, weeds grow with our detachment. Last Christmas day was also Saturday, and on Christmas I talked about time also, because we say Christmas comes but once a year, and now it's New Year's Day.

[01:09]

In that idea of, our usual idea of time is some idea of progress, you know, things getting better. So there's various kinds of time. There's growth time and there's decay time. If you look at it from the point of view of Oriental culture, they emphasize decay time. You know, flowers falling, you know. Maybe we emphasize the weeds growing. Christ marks some measuring point in time. Christ came and since then, or the idea of original sin is a kind of measuring point. I mean, if you have the idea of original sin, things can only get better. So there's some kind of progress from that, you know? But I think most of Christians have forgotten that original sin emphasizes suffering.

[02:19]

We're completely into the idea of progress and the pursuit of happiness. As I said last week, I can't imagine what was in the minds of the founders of our nation when they founded our country on the pursuit of happiness. Anyway, so it's Happy New Year. But in all of In everything in society, there's some idea of time, actually. You come into this building, it's quite permanent, you know. Someone made this building with an idea of it's going to last a long time. And it's pretty well built. But you go into a Japanese house and it doesn't look like it's going to last a long time at all. Although, in fact, it's probably maybe 500 years older. some building. It's surprising when you go to Japan because you expect, since you know you're going to see temples that are 1,000 years old, you expect to see very old buildings, like super old New England towns.

[03:31]

But actually, the buildings look newer than New England. And the reason is, is because buildings in Japan are built on the concept of time, or rather than permanence. So, you can go to a village and there's been a farmhouse, say, on that site for maybe several centuries, but they always are changing the columns and the boards. It's made so it comes apart completely. I know when we first came to Japan, we decided to have, well, the floors bounced. You'd walk across the floor and you had to prop all the furniture up, because if this was a bureau or something, you know, one of those tonsils, it would sat like this, and everything would fall off it, you know, so you had to put lots of sticks of wood under it to prop it up. So we knew we were going to have foreigners visiting us too, so we had a hole cut in the floor for their legs, but actually it's a traditional way of keeping warm.

[04:40]

In Japan they have a completely different idea of a house. Here we say, don't you heat your house? A Japanese person would say, heat your house? Is the house cold? The house doesn't care whether it's hot or cold. But the person living in it cares, you know? So they heat the person. It's quite a different idea. So you create, particularly in colder parts of Japan, you take half a tatami and you make a hole underneath it. And you put a table over it. Actually, you put a wooden frame over it. And then you put a blanket over the frame. And then you put a tabletop on top of it. And then everybody like petals of a flower or something, sticks their feet down in the center.

[05:46]

And you have a little red light bulb now, but usually in previous times you had a hibachi underneath. And you just heat that little space for your legs. And if you heat that space for your legs, your heart, you know, doesn't have to heat your legs, so it can heat the upper part of your body quite easily. So you can be in quite cold place, And these long legs, you know, which are hard to heat, are kept warm. All through the winter your breath is on the air, you can always see your breath steaming, and it seems quite comfortable. But you have to keep your legs in the air quite a bit of the time, you know. And, of course, you also take hot baths. And they tried to conserve wood in Japan, so instead of building a fireplace, also which would heat the house, they don't heat the house or the space, they heat water which you can put your body into. So that's why baths in Japan are so important, because they don't try to heat the room, they heat some water with a little bit of wood and the whole family can get in.

[06:57]

And you're quite warm afterwards for a long time. Then you have a little tiny hibachi, about so big, and the rim of it gets quite warm, you can put your hands on it, so it keeps your fingers limber so you can work. So I'm finding this great big Victorian apartment building, apartment I have next door. much colder than our house in Japan. In Japan, there would be snow outside, you know, and just paper walls, but I was always quite comfortable. But here in this building next door, which has ceilings so high you need an airplane to change a light bulb, I'm freezing all the time. Anyway, we had this hole built in the floor. So, we had a carpenter come to build it, and he He took up the floor, he said, we're going to have to replace the floors. I mean, they're completely, you know, the beams are a hundred years old and the termites have eaten them. They call them white ants there.

[07:59]

The white ants have eaten. So I said, all right. I said, I imagine some tremendous job. Can you imagine taking up the floors in a house? It's like taking up the floor in this room, right? So I said, well, all right. And I left thinking, God knows, how am I going to ask Zen Center for the money to replace these floors? And I took a walk up through a beautiful cemetery and came back down about, I don't know, maybe 45 minutes later and I opened the door and both rooms was just dirt, you know. Everything was gone. And there these carpenters were standing on the dirt, you know, and they were also, they didn't do all of our measuring, you know, the way we measure everything. It's also part of our culture to take They look, you know, they sort of look, and then they cut the board, and you know, it doesn't fit exactly, unless, if it's important to fit exactly, they'll make it fit, but then they just, so they just have some stones, and they literally prop a log about this big on a stone, and they prop several of them around, and then they take another longer log, and they just lay it across, two of them across, and then they take little tiny thin boards, and you know, really thin, a little thicker than they use on the outside, which, of the house, which is about

[09:19]

I don't know, you can't believe how thin it is. It's maybe three, about that thick, you know, three layers of cloth or four layers of cloth. The outside boards, after about maybe 10 to 15 years, look completely like the house has been on fire. They completely wet, wither and turn black. And at some point, you know, they just come and they pull them off and they tack up some more. And likewise with the floor. They just put these little thin boards you wouldn't think would support your weight, but then with the tatamis over it, and all the logs balancing on their stones, we had a very firm floor on which we could practice Indian dance or American dance or whatever. So the house just comes apart. So most of these buildings, sometimes you'll find one column which is very old. Anyway, they have a different, so time is present in their buildings in an entirely different way.

[10:29]

But permanence is in their buildings in another rather interesting way. There was a huge, let's see now, 800 years ago, there was a huge tree that started to grow in Daito-koji compound. And the gardeners normally trim the trees and shape them. Everything in Japan is shaped. There's really no idea of natural or wild. Natural means after years of discipline you do it without effort. Something like that. Wild, the idea of wild, there's almost no place in Japan where in the remotest mountains there's anything wild. Everything is grown for use somewhere.

[11:36]

I was amazed to find walking in the forest near our house, we live, Kyoto is in a great big circle of mountains, a horseshoe of mountains, and our house was up in the northern part right next to these mountains. And walking in them, I noticed these trees were completely bound with wires. Every tree has every branch removed from it that's not needed for photosynthesis. So there's a little tuft of branches at the top, just enough to keep it growing. And then the whole trunk is bound with wires, particularly the lower part. So I thought, I asked several people and nobody knows. A lumberman's job is a lumberman's job and he knows his work, but a carpenter doesn't know maybe what a lumberman's work is. In fact, the woman who lived in our house got quite angry with me once because I suggested to the plumber where the faucet should go and the bath we had put in.

[12:45]

She said, that's the plumber's job. Are you a plumber? Well, I had to admit I wasn't. She said, why are you telling the plumber what to do? And I thought I was being pretty nice because I said, you know, I said, here's this little room and there are three possible places to put the spigots. There's this one, and I described it, and that one. I said, you choose, you know. I thought I was being very generous. You choose, you know. But actually, Nakamura-san got very angry with me. So I couldn't find out why the trees were bound, but I figured out that probably it was to inhibit the growth of the lower part of the tree, so the upper part wouldn't be nearly the same size. As far as I know, later I've checked up with people that that seems to be the reason. But then they put little pieces of wood underneath it, about chopsticks to, hashi is called, better word than chopstick, but the length of a hashi, underneath the wires.

[13:49]

And I thought, well that's to keep the wires from cutting into the bark, which is also true. But then I went home and I looked at our tokonoma pole. In every house you have, again, in Japanese houses you don't hang art permanently, like this scroll that was here. No scroll should be out for maybe more than one week, a year or every few months or something. It's meant to be rolled up, that's why it rolls up. put it away. So, but every house has one area where you put paintings, like if this was a Japanese house, though that's in the wrong place, it would probably be here or there. You have an alcove like that, a little deeper, of course not as big, and then you have one main pole which comes down, which is, in the magic of a Japanese house, and it's kind of mandala-like foundation, that pole is the center pole, the magic pole in the house.

[14:52]

And if you're the master of the house, you sit with your back toward it. But if you have guests in the house, you put the guest with his back toward it. I think that's right. And I looked at that pole, and it has all this wonderful, you know, they pull the bark off it. And the surface is this wonderful mottled surface, so natural-looking. And I looked at it carefully and every one of the little grooves was the shape of those chopstick-like sticks that had been pressed into it by the wires. So, a Western architect comes to Japan and he says, ah, they use natural wood, you know. So, he comes here and he builds a house with these, he has some guy cut the tree and they just sand it or wipe it or something, but it's just not the same. It looks primitive. I don't know, it looks very unsophisticated compared to a Japanese house. But of course you don't have a many, many century old lumber industry which is taking care of every tree in the woods this way.

[16:00]

So there's no area almost where there's anything wild. So I went to, anyway, in Daito-kichi there's this tree. which some 800 years ago, they decided not to trim. See, everything in general is trimmed. The dogs must behave a certain way, the trees must behave a certain way, everything has rules for it. But they let this tree grow very tall and straight. And after, I guess about 500 years, it's a kind of like a redwood tree, they cut it down and they made it into one of the main posts of the gate. So for 300 years it was in the gate. Anyway, it's different and it's changeable, but there's some idea of time there. That tree grew here for 500 years and now it's the gatepost. And then last year, they took the gate apart and rebuilt it.

[17:03]

Actually, it took to rebuild the gate alone of Daito-kichi. I guess it had been in progress two years before I arrived. And I was there three years. So at five years, they were working on the gate on which three National Treasure carpenters died by falling off it, who lived there in old ragged clothes. And could you imagine these intricate beams they cut, you know, like that, and then two big beams fit together and they lock in, and then you peg them. My brother-in-law, who studied with this one national treasure carpenter who fell about six months ago off, he was sick and they got him to go up. He leaves his wife on an island in Shikoku and all year round, except for one time a year, I guess New Year's, he visits his family. He lives on the site in a sort of tar paper shack in these old clothes. He's the top national treasure carpenter in Japan. And he could cut one of these big logs by sight in something like three or four minutes.

[18:05]

with people hoisted up and they'd peg it right in and lock right in. It's amazing craftsmanship, it's unbelievable. Anyway, they took the log out and they cut away all of the decay, bad part on the outside and got a center part that was good. Then they've cut it into boards, which they're aging now, and Kabori Roshi will build a tea house from it. Kabori Roshi can say, oh that's my tea house out there, you know, but again there's something about that tea house which, you know, is some other idea of time than in our buildings. Anyway, so also of course in Our government, you know, institutions are all formed on ideas of time.

[19:09]

You know, you read John Locke or somebody and they say, originally man was primitive or originally man is pure or originally man is not pure. These are ideas about time on which you base institutions. So in Christianity, their idea of time may be based on original sin. So you spend your life dealing with that problem and maybe you'll go to heaven. But in Buddhism we don't have the idea of created time, we have uncreated time, maybe God's time. Nobody created God, you can't say who created God, that's not a permissible equation. So maybe Buddhism has God's time and Buddhism says, And here's where, in a way, faith comes in in Buddhism. We say that you are already enlightened or you already have Buddha nature.

[20:10]

That's in a way comparable to saying there's original sin. Do you already have Buddha nature? I mean, do you really believe you already have Buddha nature? If you really believe you already have Buddha nature, you're probably enlightened. If you can really accept you're already enlightened. Actually, it's rather difficult to accept. I know I'm not enlightened. Or some people go around saying, I'm enlightened. Suzuki Roshi told me to. I met him for five minutes. And we have a number of people who, they visit Suzuki Roshi and they say, am I enlightened or not? And he says, maybe, you know. So they come out of his office. Suzuki Roshi just told me, you know. But if someone has to tell you, you know, maybe you're not. So in a society like ours we have an idea of new or progress or a new year and in a society like Japan they barely have a future tense.

[21:28]

You can't say the future in Japan is a continuation of the present. So you just use the present tense and say it'll be the same tomorrow, it'll be the same a hundred years from now maybe. So you have quite a different idea of what new is. Anyway, these kinds of ideas are important because one is they're built into you, actually. They're built into the buildings you live in, they're built into the institutions you are governed by, and they're built into your thinking about why you practice Buddhism, why you want to be enlightened, etc. And in comparison with Japan, we have a Sangha here which is based on, has built into it, Japanese ideas of time, of decay.

[22:38]

Time is essentially a kind of decay. So anyway, Dogen said, flowers fall with our attachment and weeds grow with our detachment. And this is, you know, just a question. It makes you ask, what is attachment? What is detachment? And what is time? It's a question about what is time. There's no idea of new in that statement. So, we create here a sangha based, we say, on the

[23:50]

life of the Buddhas and patriarchs, which should be the fullest expression of our life, a place in which you can rather safely give up your personal time. I mean, you know, if you say, we're always saying, I don't have time to do that, you know, but actually you can't say, I don't have, how can you have time? or I, you know, that kind of idea. Actually, you are time. Each activity is time. So practice is to find your own time, find your own pace at which you're not hurried or not slowing yourself down. So first your body has to come alive, you know, because your body is your clock.

[24:52]

So we sit in zazen and our clock, you know, goes tick, tick, you know, our breathing goes, and our heart goes. So in the end maybe your heart goes very slowly and your breathing goes very slowly. There's some thing that So, if you do zazen in this way, you'll find out what time is, actually. But usually we have, our head is full of ideas of time, progress or I have to do such-and-such in my lifetime and if I do such-and-such I must do such-and-such now and I'm now 25 years old and I'm not yet famous." Or, he's 25 and he's done such-and-such.

[26:00]

So, to get rid of all these ideas of time that our parents have given us and And a lot of us have, in the past anyway, tried to alter our sense of time with marijuana or various kinds of ingredients we can take, which alter our time. I mean, it's actually a kind of drug time, which is very contagious, you know. Sort of everything stops in some way. It frees you from your ego time, in a way. And we're also trying to free you from your ego time. So we create a situation, like here in this building, or at Tassajara, where you can give up to the schedule of the building. As I always say, it's not perfect here, because one, it can't be perfect, of course, but also because we don't yet know exactly how Sangha should be in our country, in the Western world, but yet it's pretty good, you know.

[27:10]

It's pretty hard to give up completely in other situations, because you have some problem, maybe the effects are not good, but here it's pretty harmless to give up, you know? You just have to chant maybe more than you want to or something. Anyway, if you give up to a situation like this completely, so you no longer have your own time, in that way you find your own time. As in Zazen, you find your own time, and the activities of the building don't push you around then, eventually like two arrows meeting, you know? Or God's time is like the Sistine Chapel, you know? So the idea is to make the activity to come into your time and the time of everything else should be in harmony.

[28:15]

Not an idea, it's actually a practice here in this building or at Tassajara. But if you only have this freedom of always being in that very harmonious time, if you only have that freedom in this building, you know, or at Tassajara, then you're just temple priest, you know. You're not able to have that in any situation. Peter Schneider, the other night, Tuesday night, talked about the lineage. And in Buddhism, Buddhism talks about not original sin, but your original face, you know, not even your parents, but who you were before your parents.

[29:18]

That is kind of You know, that's not an idea of time even. That's neither time nor not time. It's rather some unthinkable idea of time. Who were you before your parents? So, the lineage is like this. The lineage is like some backbone. Each patriarch is like one section of the backbone. that transcends time. It's not like your parents, where you have original sin from your parents, say, or karma from your parents, or karma from your situations. The lineage is something that transcends time or culture. It's very non-competitive. There's no competition between teacher and disciple. If anything, there's imitation, even imitating faults. So we have a great deal transmitted to us, our culture and our language and our blood, but Buddhism emphasizes cutting all those off and your only line being the lineage.

[30:55]

And so we chanted each morning, It's neither impermanent nor permanent. A kind of permanent looks like permanent. Throughout many cultures it remains almost exactly the same, but it's also impermanent. Any questions? Yeah.

[31:58]

Well, there's many senses. Of course, there's a relative sense of, you know, you made a mistake or something, you know. You turned over in bed after turning the alarm off because you were quite sure you were awake, you know. And half an hour later, So, maybe that's a kind of mistake. Next time you'll say, I won't turn over for one, you know. But, more basically, the idea of pure, say. We talk about pure practice. Pure practice is not in contrast to impure. Pure practice means, well again, Roshi's favorite phrase was about the snow and a silver bull. Pure means it's completely itself, without anything added.

[33:30]

Or you can say, cause seals cause, which means that in every activity you do, you do it completely, and then the next activity. Dogen said, there's firewood and there's, or there's charcoal and there's ash, but ash is ash and charcoal is charcoal. No cause and effect, just ashes and just charcoal. Each thing has its independent life, you know. Maybe again I could say God's time. So that's purity, ash is ash. But still, you know, there's some... Suzuki Roshi had one finger that was a little bit like this. So maybe that's some fault, right? You're supposed to have your fingers like this.

[34:31]

But all of us have some, you know, I don't know, our nose is too big or, you know, our nature is some, anyway, has some difficult streak that never disappears, you know, or we get angry easily, some, you know, or we never really treat our wife as carefully as other people. So, Suzuki Roshi's finger was like that, right? So, I find myself without, you know, realizing it, bowing like this. And my finger bends quite easily, you know, so. And my daughter, I noticed too, she didn't. She does it too, you know. And she didn't know it was wrong or right. And we even have it in the door of the dining hall.

[35:34]

If you've looked, there's two hands. One is Karagiri Roshi's, you know, and which is like that, and one is Suzuki Roshi's, which is like that. So, that's some transmission, you know. That's the transmitted mind of Suzuki Daiyosho. Of course, you can carry this kind of thing I mean, everything isn't applicable on every level. So, there is still, even though pure has no idea of impure in it, still there's, you know, you can't make, in the ordinary level, there can be something like a mistake, you know, that you wish you didn't do or it would have been better if you hadn't done. So, we can say false, you know. You can imitate your teacher's false, even. or at least you overlook your teacher's faults. In Japan, one thing that surprised me is the length to which Japan has taken this idea of doing it exactly like your teacher.

[36:55]

to a level which maybe encourages decay, but it certainly keeps things alive, too, in a way which no other culture has kept alive. Anyway, a friend of mine named Michael Kaur was a woodblock artist, and he was studying carving woodblocks. And, of course, it's one way of carving in cherry wood and one way of carving in some other kind of wood. And he particularly made little wooden seals, Buddha seals, and there's a practice as if as when you chant mantras, you repeat them over and over again. One of the practices used to be these Buddha seals, a little kind of Buddha, various kinds of Buddhas, and you would stamp them, stamp, [...] and then the ink gets faint and you re-ink it, stamp, [...] stamp. So he was carving these, and his teacher gave him some examples to copy, and he copied them beautifully, you know, and he's very skillful. And he copied them beautifully, and he brought them to his teacher, and his teacher said, terrible.

[38:01]

And Michael couldn't understand what was wrong, and he said, it's not exactly like this one. And Michael said, but it's almost exactly like, look. And he said, but you didn't copy the worn out places. Well, that was an entirely new idea to Michael. So, maybe this is copying Suzuki Roshi's worn-out places. But in that sense, maybe copying the worn-out places, the tradition gets more and more worn out. I don't know. Anyway. Any other questions? Yeah? Oh, he said, flowers fall with your attachment.

[39:12]

You could say it either way. You could say, flowers grow with your attachment or flowers grow with your detachment. You could say it any way you want, you know. I know, that's your problem. Anyway, if you explain such things, it doesn't make any sense. It's rather interesting, why did he say it that way? For many years now I've been saying, why did he say it that way? Actually, you know, I could tell you everything I've thought for ten years, you know. But now I look at you and I see flowers falling there and weeds growing. I can see it right in your face. It's rather interesting, you know. We think flowers are good and weeds are bad or something.

[40:19]

Yeah? You said that giving ourselves up to the schedule, Well, there's certain things that we like to do and certain things we don't like to do, certain things that are painful to do. And according to our personality, you know, certain things we like to do. But how is this finding ourself, how is that, how does that fit in with I mean, it seems like maybe it's on a different level or something. I shouldn't ask why, anyway.

[41:45]

We're rather too concerned with what we like to do and what we don't like to do. When you practice, one of the things that happens is you question why you like and why you don't like. And of course, practice in a building like this is based on something other than what you like or don't like to do. And as long as you reserve even a tiny area that's based on your liking or not liking, the practice actually doesn't work. But I think almost no one can do that. Actually, for most of us, Zen is a kind of therapy. We feel better afterwards, you know, or we practice.

[42:47]

But to actually, actually not care, whether you live or die, or whether you get a milkshake or don't get a milkshake, is nearly impossible. So it's a different idea of personality, maybe Buddha's personality. So if you have that experience, you know, that's why we have this practice or sesshin, if you have that experience, then of course you also have your ordinary personality. In fact, everyone wants you to have an ordinary personality. It makes people very nervous if you have some unusual personality, you know. They want you to have, everybody wants you to want to have milkshakes or ice cream. So everyone will try to get you, if you start to get free, you know, of wanting this or wanting that, all your friends immediately will try to help you want some more, you know.

[43:57]

Like when you're trying to stop smoking, people offer you cigarettes, you know. But actually, in very subtle ways, everyone tries to keep you attached to your ego. So even if you have some experience of being free, it's like using drugs. If you try to stop, your friends who use drugs try to get you back involved with drugs. So all your friends who are drugged by their ego are always trying to get you back involved with your ego. So even after you've had some experience of being free from caring whether it hurts in zazen or doesn't hurt in zazen, as long as you're using willpower in your practice, your practice doesn't work, you know, really. But when you don't care whether it hurts or doesn't hurt, or whether Buddha's tiger, the tiger that ate Buddha, eats him or not, you know. To have that experience and to be at home in that kind of experience, not experience but actually freedom from usual idea of time, is easily lost as soon as you go back into ordinary life.

[45:19]

So usually you have to stay in a practice situation for many years. But if you have that background, that kind of background, It doesn't make any difference then if your ordinary personality sometimes does this or sometimes does that. It's natural. As I say, when you go into a supermarket, you can't pay with Buddhism. You have to use money. So, when you're talking with friends in ordinary situations, you have to have some ego. Otherwise, you can't communicate with anybody. So, of course, you know, what I'm trying to do is reassure you that you don't lose your personality completely if you practice Buddhism. Quite nice for everybody, but there's some difference. Actually, we're quite afraid, you know, to really practice Buddhism because

[46:31]

I mean, you know, anyway, one of the biggest problems is on many levels we have a fear of actually practicing Buddhism, actually giving up our ordinary personality. But maybe it's some reassurance to realize that you actually still will be just who you are, you know? One way is to care completely. Most of us hide from ourselves how much we care, you know, we care that somebody else is quite beautiful and we're not, but we say, oh I don't care that he's so beautiful or she's so beautiful, it's okay, but

[47:32]

or you say you don't care that you're not so successful at what you want to do. But if you can enter completely into how much you care, whether you're a success or failure, or enter completely into how much you care about what other people think about you, If you can really know that, of course, it's a kind of madness, you know. It's completely crazy, you know. So when you see how completely crazy it is, you realize, I have to be free of this. So then, to save your life, you know, you start taking some steps to practice, you know.

[48:39]

Well, the most dangerous form of practice is to indulge yourself, you know, to have as many milkshakes as you want indiscriminately, you know. But even if you do that, you know, you'll vomit probably. So if you indulge yourself, I remember a girl came to see us in Japan who was a model, extremely pretty girl, and she'd been on the cover of Harper's and things. And to be a model you have to not eat, you know, and you have to take all these pills to keep yourself thin, which also puts you on an incredible trip. So she was trying to get free of all that and she came to Japan and talked with us about Buddhism and such like. At some point she got a little frightened about her life and what was happening to her and she said, I've been eating too much, she started to eat. So I'm going to go and I'm going to fast for so many days, five days I think.

[49:44]

And she asked me for some books on Buddhism and so we got her some books on Buddhism and she wanted some English mystery novels, so she had English mystery novels. And she was going to fast and she'd several times before fasted in this way and cut through. So I'd found her a place to stay in a small inn which is rather inexpensive and pleasant in Kyoto and it happens to be near a French restaurant and pastry shop. Well, after five days, you know, she didn't come to see us, you know, so we wondered how she was, you know, so we went over to see her and she was ashamed to see us because she'd spent the entire five days eating pastries.

[50:50]

Literally, you know, 20 or 30 or 40 pastries in one day. She just, cream. Her room is littered with all these little doilies. And she just, she felt terrible. So it was, actually, eating pastries is not so harmful. It was almost as good as, or probably better than if she'd not eaten at all. But of course, if your indulgences are more, you know, drugs or orgies or I don't know what, you know, maybe there's more karma involved than just French pastries. So, it's quite, indulging yourself is rather difficult to practice, you know. So, in Zen, we indulge ourselves but don't take action on the indulgence.

[51:57]

Anyway, we know completely how much we care, you know, completely how much we desire such and such, some person or something, you know, but we don't go out chasing. We just know it completely, how afraid we are or how much desire we have, but we don't take action on it. No matter what you do, you know, no matter how you live your life, if you actually are awake to yourself, you know, Buddha means to be awake, if you're actually awake to yourself, no matter how you live, there's some gap. You can't completely satisfy yourself. And when you see that through your ego you can't completely satisfy yourself, no matter what you do, then you can practice Buddhism.

[53:01]

Actually, if you do that, you're practicing with Suzuki Roshi's personality. Maybe not his limited personality, but you're practicing with his true personality each day of this year. That's actually a fact, you know. Your nature and his nature are not in the least bit different. Thank you very much.

[54:06]

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