As we know, we don't know. No one knows what will happen to us. And yet, this perception or cognition is not known thoroughly, actually. Even though, if someone says, we don't know what will happen to us, you know, you will agree to that. But actually, you spend most of your time, we all spend most of our time, trying to figure out what will happen to us. And although that desire or effort to know ourselves or our situation shouldn't be ignored,

[01:18]

also, the fact that we don't know, how thoroughly we don't know what's happening, why, any real question you ask, you come up with, we don't know. And that don't-know shouldn't be ignored either. And the question then is how to practice with the don't-know, you know, as well as the knowing.

[02:19]

One way, for example, is if whenever you find yourself thinking, you know, I have such and such a destiny, you know, or I must do such and such, you can immediately ask yourself, what am I lacking now? What am I lacking now that makes me think in the future I need such and such? If you think in this way, you'll look more closely at this moment, you know, what's there right now? As long as you have that idea of destiny or something like that, you are separated from yourself.

[03:30]

So, for practice, you can always, when you have such an idea, you can counteract it immediately. Or, maybe not counteract, but remind yourself of the other side immediately. Still, it's just habit, you know, to do so. Ah, but why not right now? You should bring everything to this moment, everything you need you bring to this moment. And so, one side is to bring everything you need to this moment. The other side is to trust this moment to go wherever your life needs to go. As I have often said, you know, this moment isn't, you know, the ever-present now or some idea of now is enough,

[05:02]

but rather this moment contains past, present, and future. So, when you really know that, you'll trust this moment. You'll put your hand, put yourself in the hands of this moment. You know, when I was in Jamesburg going into Tassajara this week, someone, the Hartmans, had a newspaper, and it quoted Picasso, saying, Cézanne was my only teacher. And he said, I've spent many hours studying, sitting in front of his paintings.

[06:05]

And he said, when Cézanne had a leaf or saw something, he stalked it like a hunter. You know, same attitude, Castaneda, Don Juan has. You need that, maybe a hunter's spirit to practice Buddhism. Anyway, Cézanne stalked it like a hunter, you know, stalks prey. And if Cézanne had one leaf, you know, then he had the branch, and then he had the tree. So, as I said a few weeks ago, you know, one leaf, you don't have to look around for some other leaf. Not even for the branch, just one leaf, one practice, one body. That's the actual meaning of the three refuges.

[07:09]

I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha. It means you bring everything to this practice. Your practice is where you bring everything. If you have some other practice, bring everything to that practice. But if you're practicing Buddhism, bring everything to Buddhism. Don't leave something out to be answered by something else. Only in this way can you bring your practice to life, your Zazen to life. So, at Green Gorge last week I told a story about Dai Bai, a Chinese Zen teacher. And he was doing Zazen with everyone.

[08:14]

And suddenly he said, in the midst of Zazen, No suppressing arrival, no following departure. No suppressing arrival, no following departure. And just then, some wild animal outside the Zen Do made a loud cry. And Dai Bai then said, Just this, uphold it firmly, and I can breathe my last. What's interesting there is, uphold it firmly. That this moment isn't just here for us. It's here for us, if we're here for it.

[09:20]

In Buddhism, there's always the idea of effort. In the Eightfold Path, right views and right intentions, right speech and right livelihood, and right action and right effort, and right mindfulness and right concentration or samadhi. Anyway, right effort comes after all these. Effort is actually pretty hard for us to understand. And as you know, effort is closely connected with karma. The fact that your karma always causes you to linger or be too late.

[10:24]

If you're going to be enlightened in this lifetime, or practice fully in this lifetime, you have to bring everything to this body, to this moment, to this practice, you know. Without question, you know. Trusting, you have to trust completely the practice. No one will teach you until you do, actually. There's no way to teach you until you do. And there's no way to give a practice life until you do so. Especially Zen, which gives you so little help. When we are talking with words, we're talking about words. When we're practicing with our body, we're communicating with our body.

[11:48]

We don't talk so much about our practice, our body practice. If I talk about how you practice with your body, you won't actually understand the signals from your body. Most of us are. You know, we only receive rather gross messages. So we get addicted to strong thoughts or strong feelings or drugs or something like that because it produces something, or to sunsets, you know. But that beauty of a sunset doesn't come from the sunset. It comes from you. And the fact that you only feel it when you see a sunset or some deep mountains like at Tassajara is because your perceptions are rather gross. If you know beauty comes from you, not from the sunset, you'll stop looking for sunsets.

[12:53]

Right here, right now, you have every sunset. The sun's always rising and setting. We don't need time or space even. Without time or space, sun is always rising and setting. So no suppressing arrival. No following departure. How you apply Buddhism, where you apply Buddhism, is our practice.

[14:09]

Not some precept or some advice. Most of our advice is rather, any advice or any recommendations are rather simple-minded. Maybe it's something you learned in first grade or third grade. Don't do that, you know. But what our zazen does is give us a field of application. But at first, before you can even begin to see how to apply Buddhism in our life, you need to be more alert and more subtle. And that field of application is at first a field of contradictions. As I talked in Green Ghost last week about the idea of wabi and sabi and aware.

[15:09]

These are three kinds of, three descriptions of contradictory emotions. Emotions arising out of the contradiction in things. That you should be able to sustain. Wabi is usually translated as poverty, but actually means something like leaving things alone. Like the flower pot, which suddenly you haven't done anything to it and suddenly a flower comes out of it. You have to leave yourself alone. Leave your feelings alone, no suppressing arrival, no following departure. And sabi means that aloneness, catching yourself against emptiness.

[16:22]

Realizing, first of all, that you're completely isolated. Not starting out, well my relationships aren't so good with people, I'll improve them. But first of all, realizing you don't have any relationships with others. You are quite separate and quite isolated. And, you know, as that Irish monk's poem, you know, in the Middle Ages. Alone I came into the world and alone I shall go from it. Anyway, that feeling of, that's very painful on the one side and satisfying on the other side. Satisfying to be just at last alone. And zazen, you know, or seshin, at last just nothing to do but breathe.

[17:30]

Sometimes we have it when, if you've ever gone to sea in the merchant marine or something, you know, the ship pulls out of New York Harbor or San Francisco Harbor. Oh, such a good feeling, everything disappears, you know. And zazen is like that, you know, oh, at last, you know. So it's painful and satisfying. And aware, spelled like aware, A-W-A-R-E, means that feeling of the passing of things, you know. Or more specifically, that we're always killing something. You know, as the Jains don't, one sect of the Jains don't eat and don't wear clothes

[18:43]

and if they're very strict they starve themselves to death because they don't want to kill anything. But for a Buddhist this doesn't make sense, you know. Your mother had to eat to get you here to make that decision, you know. There's no choice, you know, no animal, no creature exactly has that kind of choice. It just, this is what we find ourselves, you know, and we kill plants and animals and we walk around on, just walking around you kill something. In your everyday life, when you ignore what's happening, when you don't see what's happening, you kill a million possibilities, you know. There's no way. So you feel, I'm doing this and it's giving life and it's killing.

[19:45]

And as you see your actions in their minute form, there's some, you always have some sadness. Oh, the effect of my actions is so dreadful. And yet still there's some effort in it to not create karma for yourself or others. Anyway, you can't see what's happening if you only want simple emotions, you know, this feeling or something, you know. Our life is so full of contradictions that you must be able to exist and sustain that presence which is full of contradictions, full of painful suffering, full of rejection,

[20:46]

always full of some kind of failure. That area is very fertile, actually. Out of that situation, everything grows. Silence. Silence. This means, you know, to include always that side which we don't know.

[22:05]

The practice of mindfulness emphasizes knowing this thought, knowing that thought, knowing this feeling. And the next step, you know, in practice is knowing that thoughts have no existence. You know, if we say everything is emptiness or everything is tathagata, emptiness doesn't go away, emptiness doesn't diminish or increase. And if your anger is empty, then your anger doesn't diminish or increase either. So it's some contradictory kind of situation I'm talking about. On the one hand, we want to get free of our ego which always measures,

[23:12]

our anger which is some kind of measuring. But the tathagata is measureless. Or we say the tathagata knows everything, that everything is measureless. So for you, from your point of view, not from Buddha's point of view, but from your point of view, you practice not measuring. So as the sutras say, you know, Dogen says, think no thinking, or as the sutras say more specifically, you know, no thinking as no thinking, you know. And then they make a parallel. Prajnaparamita literature makes a parallel to the practice of mindfulness and says, do not review your thoughts as existing or not existing.

[24:25]

Do not review your thoughts as discontinuous or not discontinuous. No suppressing arrival, no following departure. No following departure. And our bodies with our body, you know, and our minds with our minds, and our speech with our speech. Mostly what I'm always talking about is don't be caught by that way your mind formulates, you know,

[25:30]

mostly in speaking or thinking. But your state of mind is your body. So we don't say practice with your body or practice with your mind. Because your state of mind is your body. If you say something is finite or infinite or lives or dies, that's in terms of the five skandhas, you know, form, feeling, perceptions, impulses, consciousness. But tathagata or emptiness or our practice actually is measureless.

[26:36]

All completely how your mind is your body. So for that reason we only talk about the mind with the mind or the body with the body. So you may think, you know, that something is missing in Zen because we don't talk about it. But you have to trust the practice and bring your practice alive by bringing everything to it. You know, as I said about smoking, you know, many of us take refuge in cigarettes, you know. You use cigarettes as some kind of breathing practice.

[27:43]

It's true, you know, you stop and... It actually is some kind of breathing practice. And also you have some... Often I think we smoke because we have some undefined longing. We feel some urge, you know. Maybe it's the true religious impulse. But we can't express it so we say, I want a cigarette and we... Somehow it goes up in smoke. Excuse me. But it's true actually, you know. You should bring that kind of feeling to your practice. If you have that feeling of some undefined longing, you know,

[28:51]

bring it to your practice, not to cigarette or to some activity. Only in this way will Buddha practice Buddhism. Otherwise, you're practicing Buddhism. And you may become some very developed, competent person with an interesting destiny, you know. I don't mean to make it sound so foolish. Because that's what most people do, you know. But for Zen, we want to be invisible. The Tathagata doesn't even have 32 marks. No marks. You know.

[29:52]

Visible and yet invisible, you know. You know. Nakamura Sensei, who teaches tea here, she, you know, also is a good teacher of utai or chanting. No chanting. And she also does koans work with the Kancho or Abbot of the Shokokuji, Rinzai sect. But she brings her whole life to her tea.

[30:58]

You know, every sadness, every feeling, every need she has, she brings to her tea. So her Zen practice helps her tea. And her chanting helps her tea. And her chanting comes alive because of her tea and because of her Zen practice. But her tea teaching, you know, is the more you spend time with her, you know. Everything is there. Anything you imagine, some kind of infinite worlds of experience that one person has, you know. All there somehow in the teacup or in the tea or how you make it. How you, what kind of experience, you know, is there. So if your practice is Zen, you should bring everything to Zen.

[32:07]

And if Zen is not good enough, then you should be willing to fail with Zen. If this world isn't good enough, you know, we should fail with this world. No special dispensation, you know. You know, it's very easy to see that

[33:14]

if there's a big weight or a dumbbell, you know, over there that you want to lift. And you say, I want to lift that, but I'll lift it when I'm strong enough. You'll never be strong enough, you know. You have to go start lifting. That's quite simple example. But it's a little more complicated when you say to someone who's practicing Zen, Oh, how do you, it's in three hours, you have to get up for Zazen. It's now 1230. How do you get up? Where do you find the energy to do it? Well, you don't wait to find the energy, you just get up, that's all. If you practice in this way, you'll find everything you need.

[34:26]

I don't mean you should ruin your health, you know, you have to be careful. But we don't have energy because our state of mind is clogged up, actually. But you'll find the energy if you practice Buddha's way, Buddha's activity, or traditional way of practice for at least a few years. There's some wisdom there that you can't figure out for yourself or have the strength to do by yourself, or even the hubris or chutzpah to do by yourself.

[35:30]

If you, the deepest tasks, you know, you can't imagine, they must come from Buddhism or your teacher or other people. But it's really difficult, you know, if you give up looking for sunsets, you know, or give up trying to alter your breathing, say, you know. I don't know why I became so convinced of it, but, you know, as I said last week or a couple weeks ago, for eight years I didn't change my breathing. I, you know, I didn't want to change my state.

[36:44]

Just this is enough, I won't, who can change it? And so you go through maybe a pretty long period without sunsets, you know, without anything much interesting happening. And unless you have that kind of faith, it doesn't make, even this lifetime doesn't make any difference, you know. You won't get rid of that person who always wants to change his situation or her situation. But eventually, that who gives up, you know, and then you find actually you're open to everything Buddhism ever has taught.

[37:51]

Anything that's possible can come or go. It doesn't come from you anymore. So Zen teaches in this way. And even if you have some wonderful experience, you know, you say, oh, that, you know, nothing special. You also see it as empty. Empty. Without trying to form an explanation. Someone talked to me at Dasara, that during my lecture he had, I kept, excuse me for saying so, but I kept changing into fat man, old man with beard.

[39:21]

Oriental face, you know, and roundabout. So he wanted an explanation. He came up to me, please give me an explanation. But it's, he just had that experience, that's all. Why does he want to add an explanation? If you always want to add an explanation, you'll never be able to hear, you know, the pre-voice of the ten thousand things. You know that story which I often talk about. How do you hear it, you know, and the teacher answers, although you do not hear it, do not hinder it. Hinder that which hears it. If you look for an explanation, always trying to explain what happens to you or what you did, you just become deaf.

[40:32]

This is a point I don't know if scientists will ever understand who try to study Buddhism. That by studying it, they become deaf. So your practice can't come from scientists or from books or sutras or me or from anywhere. Except your own subtle, minute, alert observation. Without any idea, you know, without forming ideas. Without following distracted thoughts.

[41:45]

Oh, what if we say, who can practice this way? Anyway, who can know this practice? Someone who has, you know, dried up outflows. Who practices right views, right intentions, right livelihood, etc. Who realizes our thought, our life is measureless. So your practice right now is to stop measuring. Don't wait till some future time. Just now stop measuring. Beauty comes from you, you know, Buddha comes from you, your practice comes from you.

[43:05]

But if you look closely at that you or that body or that mind, you can't find its limits. How to exist in a realm first of contradictory perceptions and then finally in a realm of you don't know, know but are. Many of you are in the session today, you know. Just forget everything, just go there and sit, you know. Like this was the end of the world. Like there was no other place. Like your whole life has been a journey, you know. Your whole life is this afternoon. Today, you know, have everything you need.

[44:16]

Everything you've ever wanted and everything you've ever not wanted too may be there. You don't have to have everything one at a time. You don't have to think in terms of space or time. Just be there. Including everything. Without ideas that cut you off or limit you. Thank you.

[45:53]

Our mind is actually a physical experience which is not limited to this body and not anything you can imagine. You know, your two visible eyes can't see the eye of wisdom. And if you look for it in that way you'll never find it. Thank you. Just nameless monks, persons practicing together.

[47:13]

Thank you.

[47:34]

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