Excuse me for not being present with you the last couple of days, but shortly before I left Tassajara, I took a hike and went through the stream several times, which was quite icy. And then I got a little cold, and then the English flu germ arrived. I felt him enter. He traveled around a bit. And I thought I could fool him and make him think I was just a station he might pass on if I laid still enough. So I laid really still for about 24 hours and he was just lying in wait. And then I came to the city and was rather cautious because the ordination ceremonies I was more cautious than usual when I have a germ. lurking in me, and it's rather uncomfortable. Many of you had the English flu. It's a rather uncomfortable feeling. I don't get sick very often, and when it's some feeling like that, I say, what is this terrible feeling? And I couldn't make it go away.

[01:26]

And I discovered something rather interesting though, very clearly, is the difference between, you know, there are various practices you can do when you go to sleep, but mostly you just lie down and you let your various parts relax, and then there are practices you can do within that, but zazen's rather different. And the feeling, I couldn't get any position which was comfortable. In one position I'd be nauseous. Another position my head would be flashing orange lights and my eyes would be... And it would travel, I could watch it travel around. First it'd be in this side, then it'd be in that side. So finally I had to sit up and do zazen. I sat up and I pulled all the blankets around myself. And I did zazen and it all went away. And then I slowly... went over keeping zazen, you know. And that's rather interesting because zazen, you sort of suspend yourself. Like when you play a game and somebody says freeze, you freeze, you know. Zazen's sort of like that. And then you pour your consciousness throughout yourself, you know. And in sleeping it's rather different. So anyway, once I did that it was much better and since then I've been fine.

[02:53]

I'm still a little weak, but anyway, I'm strong enough to talk with you, I think. Last time I talked about, last time in the city, I talked about how we practice a koan or how we practice our breathing. And Suzuki Roshi said that the world of light or brightness is the world of our activity, the daily life we live in and the world of relative values, the world we can see. And yet, beyond our thinking mind is a world of darkness, or an, and how to practice in that world of darkness is the important point. It's rather like

[04:22]

You know, we have various kinds of food which we can look at and they're prepared, but when we can look at them, they're not so useful. It's only when we eat them that they're useful. And after we eat them, we don't know what's happening. They're in darkness, just our stomach is going. And maybe we practice as if we were in Buddha's stomach, some great big dark stomach, you know, it's going. how to know the limits of our thinking and go beyond the limits of our thinking is pretty difficult. Most of us practice within the realm of some kind of understanding. And last time I talked about how when we follow our We start out being able to count our breathing, and later we can't count our breathing. And sometimes we think we've stopped counting our breathing. But our practice is, you know, even if you haven't counted your breathing for two years, you have some sense of a two-year-long breath. You know, okay, oh, this is two. And then maybe next year it's three. But there's that kind of effort. I know Suzuki Roshi talked at one time about

[05:50]

when he practiced the koan Mu, and how he did everything possible. He came and he barked Mu, and he hollered Mu, and he whispered Mu, and he tried everything he could, throwing himself at his teacher, you know. And nothing worked. Finally something took over, took him over. and drove him, you know, something. He didn't know what was taking over, but something drove him just to do things. He had no idea what he was doing. At that point, his teacher gave him something else to do. Something, some kind of sincerity, but some, we don't know. Sincerity is a funny word for us, so what kind of word to use? So how to trust yourself or not trust or not care beyond what you can understand is essential for our practice. Some things have to be taken seriously.

[07:33]

in Buddhism. I mean, what you read in Buddhism is, I think your first reaction should be to it, not that it's some anecdote or some easy example, but that what they're saying is literally true, or maybe not literally true, but true anyway. So if they say, the progeny of a barren woman practices like the progeny of a barren woman, It doesn't mean some emptiness. It means actually the progeny of a barren woman. Or if we say practices like Manjushri says, what in the Vimalakirti Sutra, he asks him, Manjushri asks, how should we view living beings? And Vimalakirti answers, we should view living beings as an illusionist views an illusion. And that's not some, you know, it's not exactly, it's to be taken seriously. I don't, I can't explain to you exactly how to understand it, but it's to be taken seriously. So if such statements don't fit your categories, it means you have to change your categories.

[08:59]

It doesn't mean you try to adjust Buddhism to fit your categories, it means you give up your categories of how to think about your life. So the important point with zazen is not just that doing zazen is so important itself, but that you should do something beyond your understanding, beyond why you do it, beyond any reason for doing it. So like when we start counting our breathing, at first we can count one to ten. The more flat our world is, the easier it is to do things in it, and the more multi-dimensional it gets, the harder it gets to do things. So the more multi-dimensional your experience of yourself gets, the harder it is to count from one to ten. And at first, when you start doing zazen, you have many reasons, pretty good rational reasons why to do zazen. But after a while, one or two or three years, you don't know why you're doing zazen. There doesn't seem to be any good reason for it anymore. But at that point,

[10:20]

Maybe that's from starting, that's another kind of starting which is equally important and your practice either stops there or it continues. And so you just do it. as you keep counting your breaths even though you can't count your breaths. Or as you keep working on a koan or some problem in your life even though it slips away or everything else that happens slips away. But everything that happens is your koan. Everything that happens is your counting your breath. Everything that happens is your zazen. But still we have to do something, have to have some experience of ourself.

[11:28]

in this wider realm. A very interesting question came up at Tassajara with Dr. Abe. Someone asked Dr. Abe, did Dogen believe in ... well, first he quoted Dogen. saying, you monks, if you don't shape up, you're going to end up in the six worlds and you're going to be with the devils and you're going to be reborn in various hells and etc. So this student asked, did Dogen really believe this? Doesn't what he says elsewhere about

[12:29]

ashes are ashes and firewood is firewood, etc. mean there's no reincarnation. Dr. Abe said, hmm, he didn't believe in reincarnation, or he said, from what Dogen, the main statements that Dogen made, he didn't believe in reincarnation. And then the student wanted to know, well, why would he say this? Is he just admonishing his students with scaring them because they believe in reincarnation, so he's scaring them with this? And then the implication arose that maybe Dogen was dishonest. Is it kind of dishonest to do this? So we talk about skillful means. But what was interesting in that conversation between the student and Dr. Abe, and they weren't meeting quite, and they weren't meeting quite partly just because the difference between a Japanese temperament and our temperament. And the student wanted, he said, what evidence is there for reincarnation? Show me some evidence for reincarnation.

[14:00]

So I can believe in reincarnation or not believe in reincarnation. Well one problem here is that we as Westerners have a much more fixed rigid reality than other people. Most other people in the world I would say probably. we want things to match up and make sense. If they don't match up and make sense, we want to know why and what the evidence is for it. This is a very two-dimensional view of the world, you know, but we want it pretty badly. And it's very fragile and it gets us into a lot of trouble, this idea that we have. For instance, we think that if we describe something with words, the words should match what we describe. No Japanese person thinks this. I mean, having nothing to do with Buddhism, a Japanese person doesn't think that the words he uses to describe something should coincide with what's described. Do you understand that? Why that is? Does that? Well, the thing exists.

[15:27]

you know, in itself. Words are considered a substitute for it, so the thing exists in itself. There it is. Why do you have to say anything about it? If you say something about it, maybe you should say something interesting about it, but it's different. And if you can't perceive that the thing there, you know, you know, if I say that's not a window and you think it's not a window, then you're crazy. know? But why am I saying it's not a window? And how do we cooperate in making it a window? So I mean two things, one is I'm adding something to it and one I'm saying it's also not a window. So there was some difficulty there because One, Dogen of course can say different things at different times in his life and believe different things, and Dogen can believe different things for different situations, and Dr. Abe can too. I mean, just because Dr. Abe said, Dogen doesn't and I don't, doesn't mean Dr. Abe doesn't. He may believe in reincarnation even though he says he doesn't. But there's no sense of dishonesty or something like that.

[16:49]

It's that the world is so complex that you can't point and say this or this or that. So the need to be exact in the way we need to be exact isn't necessary. So in Japanese culture and Chinese culture a great deal more vagueness exists and the way you describe things and the way things are You know, it's amazingly vague and you can't find out things because no one quite knows even though they were just told or they just heard the weather report on television and no one knows quite what the guy actually said, you know. But it's not so necessary to know exactly, you know. They don't have that necessity to know so exactly. But then there's a further step, not just the difference between Japanese culture and Buddhism, but Buddhism is Well, let's say, we talk about wisdom and we talk about upaya. On our ordinary two-dimensional world of perceiving things, by two-dimensional I mean that your mind is flat. Actually, you experience things on a plane, sort of. Partly because you're self-conscious.

[18:12]

So the possibility of other dimensions of your experience are taken up by watching yourself. Anyway, so in the usual way, upaya, you know, is described as skillful means. So practically speaking, it means skillful means, maybe. But actually, upaya is means a non-repeating universe. And in a non-repeating universe you can't relate one thing to another, this is this and we believe that and there's evidence for this, etc. So, I remember Sudhikara, she gave a lecture once about our confusion of the big self with universal self. And he talked, we always talk in Buddhism about the big self or something like that.

[19:12]

And he found the students were thinking in some scientific terms about Time Magazine or something like that, in which you can ascertain something and it repeats, so that what you know, everyone knows. Your enlightenment is everyone's enlightenment. Your experience can be verified with other people's experience. Ten people can get together and decide on whether reincarnation is real or not. But this isn't the self that practices Buddhism. Maybe big self isn't so good, we should use true self or something. What practices Buddhism is some intimate, moment-by-moment, very private, we can say, at least in that we notice it as an experience. But any experience you have in zazen, any experience you have in your life, is never repeated, actually. If you are actually alert to what's happening to you, it never repeats. So you have some experience in zazen, you say, well that's wonderful, I hope to get that back again. You're in the wrong ballgame, you know, it's just not there. Something similar may happen again.

[20:34]

Or you wonder, has anybody else had this experience? And in the beginning of zazen, many of your experiences, someone else has. But the actual realm of your experience is absolutely unique. No one else has it. There's no way to get reassurance from other people. Oh, I'm okay because you've felt that too. You're on your own, you know, in a terrible world. At least it seems as you go in the door that it's terrible because it's absolutely alone. But once you're there it seems rather nice actually. It's a relief even to be there a little. So upaya means maybe a non-repeatable universe. So what you do on each moment, it doesn't make any, the consideration of what you do, whether it's true or false or good or bad or accurate or inaccurate or

[22:04]

It doesn't have any relevance to anything, you know. It doesn't mean that you can, this isn't, since I'm using the two-dimensional thing, it doesn't mean that on the two-dimensional framework you can do anything. In the same sutra, Manjushri asks, where does good and evil come from? And the answer he is given is, it comes from the body. And what is the root of the body, he's asked? The root of the body is craving. And what is the root of craving? It's baseless discrimination. and what is the root of baseless discrimination? Non-abiding. So if we go back through those steps your five senses or your body and

[23:36]

craving. Where does craving come from? From discrimination. So we practice with our body. We try to put our body in a situation beyond, outside of, free from craving. And we try to, with our mind, stop discriminating. Maybe the most single important practice you can do is learn to stop discriminating. You may discriminate, but you should be free of the discrimination. I mean, I don't know what to tell you to do, but maybe some simple thing that you like a lot, like you like salt and a particular thing, and you can't eat that particular thing without salt. or sugar or milk, just eat it some other way until it doesn't make any difference to you which way you eat it. Then you can eat it as much salt as you like. Though it's okay to put salt in your food or discriminate any way you want, but if you're not free from the discrimination you can't enter anything but a two-dimensional world.

[24:56]

And in a two-dimensional world, you're caught completely by the categories that everyone makes for you. And you have to just, you're just stuck there following the rules. Which is okay, but it's rather boring. So at the base of the root of baseless discrimination, Vimalakirti says is non-abiding. And so this is where our practice starts because we learn to abide, to stay with our experience, to stay with our feeling. And if you go back to the Pali Canon, to Theravada texts, which are pretty early, they say, you know, that this thing goes something like, oh monks, how does a monk practice mind, contemplation of the mind? And the answer Sariputra gives is something like,

[26:32]

how a monk practices mind contemplation on the mind is he knows a mind with lust is with lust, he knows a mind without lust is without lust, he knows a mind with anger is with anger, he knows a mind without anger is without anger. He knows a mind with indolence is indolence. He knows a mind without indolence is without indolence. He knows a mind with concentration is concentrated. He knows a mind without concentration is without concentration, etc. And that means exactly what it says. There's not a single word in it that you should not have a mind that's indolent. or you should not have a mind without lust. It just says if your mind is with lust, you know it's with lust. If your mind is with anger, you know it's with anger. If it's without anger, you know it's without anger. There's no statement like you should get out of anger.

[27:37]

by trying to get out of anger, but just stay with what you are. In a similar way, again in the Vimalakirti Sutra, a goddess appears to Manjushri and sets him straight. And this sutra is rather interesting because the layman is made to look great and the goddesses and Manjushri who's the bodhisattva of wisdom is made to look sort of slow-witted. Anyway, she lists all these things and then says, all things point to enlightenment. or deliberation. And Manjushri says, do you mean that I shouldn't keep from carnality and anger and greed? And the goddess says, well you know that when the Buddha gave a lecture before proud

[29:01]

Disciples who thought they'd attained something or before somebody who was proud or had limited understanding He said you should be free of carnality greed anger, etc But when they were gone and there was a different group of people who weren't proud He then said Oh carnality anger and greed are the same as liberation What anger greed Carnality are that's also liberation But again, we don't have a Machiavellian thing here of Buddha or Dr. Abe or Dogen saying one thing for one group of people and one thing for another group of people. It's because upaya means a non-repeatable universe, and that may not make sense to you exactly, but it's not skillful means in some Machiavellian sense. So we do zazen, as I said in the beginning, on the one hand to do something beyond our ordinary thinking. On the other hand, we do it because it's the easiest way for us to have some experience of

[30:55]

staying with what we are. You know, Newton has this, I guess it's Newton, isn't it, who made the law, apple falls, and he says, oh, gravity causes the apple to fall. And we have some idea in our idea of a universal, repeatable universe, that the apple falls because of the law of gravity. But the apple is gravity. Without the apple there's no gravity. And if you externalize your world too much you get the kind of apples they sell at the supermarkets. They look beautiful, and they're big, and they're red, and they taste lousy. And it's just pulp. And a good apple often nowadays you find looks funny, and it's got some stuff on it, and odd colored spots. It tastes fantastic. And the more you look at that apple, you know that that apple is a non-repeatable apple.

[32:18]

It must come from farmer so-and-so's farm, which is in Northern California, and it couldn't come from any other place. And your experience has to be in this realm. So you have to give up these categories of, you know, Is it true or is it false and is there evidence for reincarnation? If reincarnation exists, it's up to you to find out and to know. You can't ask anyone else. And maybe sometime reincarnation exists for you. Maybe some other time it doesn't exist for you. You don't have to then come to a generalized statement it exists all the time. Just find out, moment after moment, what exists for you. So, our concentrated... You know, as we practice, we develop some ability to concentrate. And as we develop some ability to concentrate, we can stay with things.

[33:44]

and you can walk along and you can be right there where you're walking along and if you lose your concentration you have some sensation of leaking of your energy something distracted happens that's one of the main ways you can sense something if we distinguish practice from just being alive because it's true anything you do is being alive is being practiced but if I say that usually don't understand what I mean because see from my point of view the way we're usually alive isn't really being alive it's some two-dimensional experience of things which we try to make everything safe or we get angry if things don't go our way as if it mattered the least bit Anyway, you develop some kind of constant ability to stay with things, with some concentration, and you don't have the experience of leaking anymore. The first quality of a ... one of the highest qualities in Theravadan Buddhism, of our heart, is that he stopped outflows or influxes, asvara. So how to stop outflows is a big part of our practice.

[35:12]

And when you discriminate you stop outflows, you allow outflows to exist. So whether priest or layman, a person who begins to sense what we mean by outflows begins to be quite careful about the way he dresses. discriminate so much about what he has on. It doesn't make so much difference. Either he wears exactly what's appropriate for the place he's going, or he just wears almost robes. You just put something on. So robes comes out of this attempt to practice with your space, to stop outflows. I remember when I had to wear a suit to the university, when I worked for the university. I couldn't. If I had to choose, I got involved, you know? So what I did was I had my daughter choose what I wore every day. She'd get rather good at it. She'd pick my ties out in shirts, and she was really teeny, you know? She'd grab one, and sometimes the combinations were a little funny, but whatever it was, I wore it. Just, okay, Sally, thank you, and I'd put it on.

[36:35]

But how to take care of our space and how to do certain kinds of practices, whether you want to or not, are related to learning how to stop outflows. If you can stop outflows, and if you can have some concentration, you then have an enormous amount of energy, which you usually are dissipating. an enormous amount of it is taken up in self-consciousness. At this point, you begin to have what Suzuki Roshi called a soft mind. And it's a little confusing because it sounds like you're soft-headed, but he didn't know how to describe it any other way. But it's like a three-dimensional, a third or fourth dimension is added to your perception of things. Your whole, it's not concentration anymore, it's some profound relaxation. and there's some way of perceiving things which you can only describe as soft. Well this is very close to a non-repeating what we mean by when you give up trying to make things correlate with other things. So in our practice, you know, on the one hand you can't

[38:07]

be trying to attain anything. And you can't, very important in your practice too, you can't want to take credit for helping other people or practicing. Very subtly I think we want credit, I've been practicing very hard and doing so much work and I want some credit for it. That undercuts your practice. You just practice. No matter what kind of person you are or what your situation is, you don't compare it to other people, whether you're unwell or well or moon-faced or sun-faced or schizophrenic or healthy or whatever it is, whatever imperfection or perfection, that's what you are willing to be forever. I'm genuinely willing to be forever. That's an important side. That has to be your whole practice. but also what has to be your whole practice is being ready. This world is more, as Suzuki Roshi said, than we can usually see. There's a whole world we call the Absolute beyond our thinking mind. But you can't seek something like that. It's here. You are it. But as our practice is to be awake for others,

[39:40]

The more you can be awake for others, the more you create space for other people. The more your just existence, body and mind, without saying anything, creates space for other people. So if you want to be more awake to help others, you have to be ready for the full experience of our life. And again you tend to, we all tend to, brush off experiences which give us some wider sense of life because suddenly it doesn't fit into our repeatable universe. Whoops, that's never happened to me before. I must be irritable today. Or today I'm very tired and I had this funny feeling that the world was a toy. No, it can't be, it can't be, you know. I saw everything very small or something. So you say, you know, I was just tired and you forget about it, you know. And it's true, sometimes when you're angry or irritable or tired or sick, you're more likely to notice our wider world. And those are just the times you're likely to say, oh, I'm irritable.

[41:01]

And also it makes you profoundly nervous because it doesn't make sense. But as long as you're trying to make sense of your world, your practice remains two-dimensional. So please stop trying to make sense of everything and just do one thing after another what you happen to be doing now and see where that leads you. Do you, should we ask, should we talk about anything? Do you have any questions? What's non-abiding? Peter asked, what is non-abiding? You mean, is there something that non-abides? There's nothing which non-abides or abides. The root, the next step in that sequence is the root of non-abiding is rootless.

[42:29]

and out of the rootless root everything rises. What is non-abiding is not abiding. Not staying with your actual experience because you discriminate it, oh this isn't good enough or next moment is better or I don't like this one or oh it's not nice to be angry I'll stop being angry as fast as possible. Yeah. We haven't been talking about studying, so what do you mean exactly?

[44:34]

And the idea of a non-repeatable universe, it also kind of raises doubts about the value of any kind of systematic systems. But within a non-repeatable universe, a repeatable universe exists, which is useful to have some skill in if you expect to be employed and liked and things like that. Is there a way to study without studying systems? Is Buddhist study not systematic? Well, Buddhist study is sort of, you know, through the looking glass and it doesn't lead you toward more and more, it leads you toward less and less. So it's like the various stages that are described are the stages in which you more and more notice some wider non-systematic, the more you notice that you don't need frameworks, that's second stage. Third stage, you know, you thoroughly understand it, that's third stage. That kind of. Yeah. Study, I mean, you know, you can't, it's another discrimination to say, oh well, there's the absolute, so we don't even need words like reincarnation or we don't even need words like liberation.

[46:03]

But in a non-repeatable universe, if we use that, a non-dual, non-duality means beyond our sense organs. In a world beyond our sense organs, you can't discriminate between words and non-words. You can't say non-words are better than words. So to discuss liberation, you need the word liberation. But the best way to study, your experience of study is, I mean, if you want to become a scholar of Buddhism, it's some difficulty because to be accepted by the community of scholars and to participate in it, they want you to do certain things in a certain way and to reinforce their view of the world, which, unless you're an extraordinary scholar, is usually rather limiting. So if you're practicing Zen, you study Buddhism to the extent to which it helps your practice, and it very definitely does help your practice. I mean, because we have so many subtle categories that you can't even see until they're contrasted with some antidote. And if you just go and bake bread all your life, it's true if you can really bake bread and not do anything else and not be so concerned about your life.

[47:27]

It's all right, but generally you have some ideas about it. And the ideas you have are very subtle about something exists and that things are true or false, etc. Some things are better than others. So if we really want to practice Buddhism, and particularly if you want to teach Buddhism, you have to have some way of expressing yourself. And all Buddhist literature is about how to say what you can't say. How to say what isn't true already. So the best way to study Buddhism is when you have the feeling that, oh, Sariputra is saying, oh, so-and-so. Oh, Tom. Oh, Bill. Oh, Nancy. Oh, yes, thank you, Buddha. And you can read it. Or as Suzuki Roshi used to say, wave following wave and wave leading wave. When you're reading some sutra or some commentary and it seems to be very close to your practice, opening up your practice, and your practice opens up the reading, that kind of reading is quite useful. And Suzuki Roshi spent and considers his second teacher, Kichizawa Roshi, his main teacher, and he's the teacher he studied with, a man who was both a scholar and a Roshi.

[48:53]

and Sukhirishi encouraged us to, after we have a base in Zazen, then we should study. Some. Yeah, I think you know. You may not know for sure, but your teacher may know. Maybe in our practice it The kind of knowing that's useful is, it must be so, but I'm not sure. If you know for sure something's wrong, but if you, well it's probably so, I'll act as if it's so, but I'm not sure. Then you can act with real decision and firmness.

[50:19]

Well, all these things are interesting. We start out in Buddhism with some attempt to practice with some rational, oh, zazen makes sense, Buddhism makes sense, more than any other religion rationally. And you practice with doubt. Doubt is very important in our practice. But in the end you come down to, at base, faith is needed. But the process that you get to faith, and it sounds then just like Christianity, and it sounds like any religion, yes, you end up saying faith, or you end up saying, you know, in another way, skillful means. But faith is, you need some confidence, beyond confidence, to practice Buddhism. The kind of confidence in which someone said,

[51:26]

Well, even if this isn't true, what is true I'll call Buddhism. Anyway, you need some pretty profound confidence. Actually, I think the literal meaning of the word sadhā, I believe, which is translated as faith, the literal meaning of it is confidence based on knowledge. Anyway, at some point, you know, it's not some idea of, well, the world is good and basically it's good and there's no evil, even though Buddhism doesn't really have the idea of evil so much as ignorance, some covering up of our wisdom, but at base The ordinary idea of faith is ascertainable only in a repeatable universe. In a non-repeatable universe, when you see you can't verify anything, it's amazing, the ground stays there to hold you up. Oh, so you have faith in the ground, it's going to continue to stay there, but if it disappears it's all right.

[52:57]

That kind of feeling you have to have. And so you step forward, even if the ground's going to disappear, you step forward with the certainty it's going to be there, even if it's not going to be there. That's what we mean by faith. I may have said the more you can help others or the more you can give others space. Buddha means, you know, the one who's awake maybe.

[54:00]

And, but you can't be awake for yourself. You can only be awake for others. Which is being awake for yourself, because you're one of the others. Okay. Anyway, you don't want to experience the world from only one point of view.

[54:35]

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