We all have a pretty fixed idea of what this world is, either clear or unclear, and what I'm trying to do is give you a description of the world based on samadhi, or meditation, so that your meditation practice won't be limited by your fixed ideas that you've inherited. And trying to make the important point that your practice is where your own experience

[01:12]

is, converges with this description of the world from the point of view of a Buddha and your own limited experience. So, the first thing that... ...is necessary, practically, you know, it's... of course it's necessary, first of all, to have the thought of enlightenment or the inclination to practice, but to practice you

[02:21]

need... to apprehend the world you need the big mind which can endure anything. So, at the beginning of Sashin, I talked about undeveloped awareness and discriminating awareness based on wisdom and transcending awareness, and I said that even some blissful state should be like a... just some, maybe, bonfire or campfire in the sky, without disturbing the sky. But if you've ever sat outdoors in the mountains, you find that even one

[03:33]

or two or three mosquitoes are quite disturbing to your big mind or your small mind. They can begin to work your forehead over. That's absolutely incredible, moving from place to place. Pretty soon you feel like you're a piece of meat hanging with mosquitoes, all drinking. Actually, if you don't mind, the... your face swells up a little, but goes down quite quickly, and the bites are not much, but as soon as you start brushing them off you have mosquito bites that last for a couple of days. And in your Zazen here in Sashin,

[04:34]

you have usually some pain or restlessness, some kind of discomfort which disturbs your practice, or is your practice. Suzuki Roshi described Zazen practice or confronting pain. Once he said it was like a little red riding hood or pretty girl or something about to be attacked by a wolf, and she doesn't

[05:37]

shout or run away, she just acts quite natural and is even a little beguiling, he said, but gives the wolf no opportunity to attack. And in our Zazen, you know, we practice and we make sometimes faces, you know, while we're sitting, like Bodhidharma, you know, rolling our eyes back. But it doesn't chase anything away to do that, you know. Just sitting there quite calmly, as if nothing was happening. Zazen practice is pretty difficult, actually.

[06:47]

And as long as you're afraid or avoid facing difficulty, you can't understand yourself or other people. So the willingness to face whatever difficulty comes, without trying to prepare for it even, is necessary. Some of us always want to be on top of everything. Either we ride each moment, you know, like a herdsman trying to control our words or

[07:57]

our situation, so that we can't be criticized. And then when we see the point of getting off that and relaxing or having physical confidence, body confidence, we interpret that into being strong physically. Instead of being defenseless, we try to make our body strong or more alert or something. Anyway, it's always in the realm of doing. And and we have a lot of problem with choosing, should we be practicing or should we do this

[09:08]

or that. And the problem here arises from the idea that, that we might not have to choose, that there's some way not to choose. So we think, well, I could make a choice or I could, I don't have to make a choice, I could just continue. But if you don't make a choice, the choice is made for you by your karma, by your anxiety or tiredness. You know, we get rather tired, you know, we're always struggling and we have various battles in our life and they

[10:10]

get us down, things that people say about us. It's amazing, you know, how weak we are. As Nakamura-san says, just a cloudy day can depress us or one statement by a person that's rather negative makes us feel some heavy, you know, feeling. As long as you have that projected self from past, present and future, which can be criticized, you have this problem of some heavy self, you know, and the heavy self doesn't want to make decisions. Well, it's too much, you know. And we're also afraid of the future and so we avoid making decisions.

[11:16]

So, we could call karma unconscious decisions, the way we make unconscious decisions. And we could call merit, you know, how we make conscious decisions from discriminating awareness. When you are not quite so involved in your self-past or self-future and worried about your

[12:28]

self-present, you can see things as they're happening, of course, much more clearly. And in this way, a choice, choosing is not choosing, a choice is not a choice, but rather a bringing into the area of your consciousness the way things are, or as I said yesterday,

[13:28]

converging realities. Now, it's hard in many small choices we make all the time to see that there's no choice. But if you look at, say, a baby crawling, you know, does a baby really have a choice not to crawl or not to try to walk? You don't say he has a choice to walk or not he walks. Or if you started riding a bicycle, saying, I choose to ride a bicycle the way I learned to ride a tricycle, would be rather odd. When you ride a bicycle, it's not a matter of choice, you know, to ride it like a bicycle. And I don't mean some

[14:32]

idea of growth or development. Or if you take somebody, some big choice, something like maybe Ellsberg deciding to reveal the Pentagon Papers, if you asked him, he would probably say, I had no choice. And usually, if you look at why you practice Buddhism or sit through a sashin or sit through the pain, and actually you have no choice. But the idea that we have a choice or might have a choice causes a problem. So we try to strengthen ourselves because we're so weak and wavering in any particular moment, because past and future weigh on us. We take some vow to recognize we have no choice. I will practice such and

[15:39]

such, no matter what. When all of the considerations of past, present and future are present in a particular moment, you don't have any trouble getting up. The getting up moment includes everything, the rest of the day and the day before. But mostly, we're unable to exist that way because we have this projected self of past, present and future. So you stay in bed half an hour later, and then two hours later, you say, why did I stay in bed half an hour later? It made me, my whole day is foiled up because of it. But you have a split

[16:40]

between the person who woke up at that moment and the person later in the day. But if you practice zazen, eventually that split goes away. And the person who doesn't want to get up at a particular moment is quite, maybe it exists sort of like a flimsy ghost, but it doesn't have much weight, it doesn't prevent you from doing things, you know, without choice, just as the flow of the situation requires. You know, yesterday we started out talking about the realm of our experience, returning

[17:59]

to our experience. And from there, we went to noticing the subject-object relationship, and from there to form, the idea of form and the idea of emptiness. And the idea of form is emptiness. And today I'm talking about how, probably the machine isn't necessary, how just the experience of sitting with the difficulty, pain and restlessness of a sasheen includes all

[19:08]

these practices of form is emptiness, etc. The Huayen philosophy, Chinese philosophy of Buddhism, has a little different way of describing this than the Sunyata or Prajnaparamita literature of emptiness, form is emptiness. They talk about form as events, this or that event, she, I believe, S-H-I-H, and emptiness as an idea with various gradations from rather particular to very abstract or universal or ultimate, like emptiness, called li, or

[20:15]

principle. And li rather means something like suchness. For example, that electricity, electricity would be maybe she or form. And the fact that it sometimes can be explained by us as a particle theory or a wave theory. Anyway, there used to be, I don't know, nowadays in physics, but there used to be two ways of describing electricity and you couldn't bring them quite together but wave and particle. But one explained electricity under one circumstances and one explained electricity

[21:18]

under another circumstance. That would be this, the overriding background that controls the appearance of electricity as particle or wave would be li, or something like gravity. Then they, you have, so that's form and emptiness or she and li. Then you have the realm of non-obstruction of the interpenetration of li and she. Usually it's rather like a holograph, you know, the ocean's wave contains the ocean. There's one and there's totality and there's totality and there's one.

[22:29]

That much is like what I talked about in the first lecture, I believe, about Sandokai. Did I chant in the sutra in the morning just before we do the lineage? Chikido, Daisen, etc. Anyway, san means three or several or things and do means one big mind. So from that point of view you can say san is form and do is emptiness. But kai means shaking hands, you know, and that's rather interesting because this is, you know, really Buddhism, the shaking hands, that just saying

[23:40]

form and emptiness is not enough. There's the realm of total interpenetration of form and emptiness. And someone asked me yesterday about the many little rules we have in Zen. They're so ... she didn't actually say this but she said something like they're so picky that can't be Zen. Anyway, maybe something like that was meant. Anyway, the rules we have are quite troublesome sometimes, particularly for us. But they're based on an intelligent body and they're based on the handshake, you know. So the one she was particularly mentioned

[24:49]

is when we take the eating, the bowl with the water in it, we take the water which we've cleaned the bowls, which accumulates all the waste on the side of the bowl, like washing dishes, you know, and then we say this dishwater is nectar or something, and we get ready to drink it, right? But we don't just drink it ourselves, we also offer it to the great ecological Buddha Vairochana or something like that. Anyway, however you want to understand it simply, we offer it to the various spirits or all beings or something. Anyway, we take it and put it in the bucket. So that's like form and emptiness. We take the particular water and yet we offer it to everything. So those two are recognized. But that's not enough, you know.

[25:56]

That's just some philosophy, one and totality. It doesn't have the realm of interpenetration in it. So we touch the side of the dish to the side of the bucket. It's like almost putting your finger inside someone's mouth. The bucket is maybe a little dirty and everything is. It's like allowing yourself to be contaminated. It's not just, well, this is for you and this is for me. Then you put your hands down into it, you know, you get mixed up with it. Makes me think of a woman who came to Tassajara for a sashin and got, I've told some of you this story before, but she got quite upset because it turned out there was some slight

[27:02]

sewage going into the stream and people were swimming in the stream. It was such a small amount, it wasn't dangerous, but we said, probably you'd better not swim in the stream. She got, she was rather paranoid and upset and everything became contaminated to her. She didn't want to touch anything. And yet, like touching the bull to the side of the bucket, she finally went and jumped in the stream and she felt much better afterwards, you know, not worrying about it, you know. But it's also like sexuality, you know. There's man and woman and they can join, but something else, some new reality, you know, a baby is produced. It's not just form and emptiness, but not just man and woman, but something

[28:04]

else happens beyond our, you know, way of thinking. So, Vairochana's mudra, you know, is five senses and mind, you know, and it also means sexuality, but it also means the of non-obstruction or kai or handshaking, which everything is mutually interpenetrating. And this is not emptiness is form or form is emptiness, but we say form is form, emptiness is emptiness. So, because in Buddhism we emphasize this understanding and we emphasize the identity

[29:15]

of mind and body, we practice with our bodies. If your body is, if you have a dead body or unconscious body, you know, you can't be awake. So, some kind of, Zazen makes our body more awake, but as also do, it does yoga and Tai Chi and Aikido and Judo, maybe. I don't know. Maybe principle is the same, but Zen is based on yogas, maybe more close,

[30:24]

except yoga, this posture is a yoga posture, and if you're patient with it, eventually it does the same thing as yoga does, when everything is ready. Essentially what happens is, not that you become more skillful, but that you move with a different rhythm, more present. I don't know, maybe it was, it'd be like if a continuous light bulb met a fluorescent light, you know, the fluorescent light is going on and off, right? The continuous light bulb could move in the dark spaces and the fluorescent light bulb wouldn't know what happened. He'd keep changing positions because he'd come on and off. So, Aikido, maybe, is the same kind of thing. Basically, it allows you to move in a rhythm

[31:26]

that's more subtle than the person. I've never studied Aikido, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think this is true. It allows you to move in a rhythm that the other person can't move in, because you become so familiar with your intelligent body. But Zazen is exactly the same. So, in Zen, all of the philosophy of Zen is translated primarily into our physical practice. And it's not intellectually visible to you, so much of what we do doesn't make sense. Maybe this kind of practice of touching the bowl to the side of the bucket is only for priests, and rather confusing for people who aren't priests. But by priest, I don't mean robe wearing,

[32:28]

but I mean someone who decides that their whole body and mind and living will be the practice. We may find it useful to express that, to keep us on the track by chanting some mantra or by wearing robes, but it's not necessary. Our practice is for laymen, really, for everybody, whether priest or layman. So, consciousness is that realm in which the many things that arise from emptiness

[33:47]

converge and are articulated into a particular event. The idea that you have a choice is really a false one. The choosing is that process, you know, that you can't, please don't take what I'm saying so strictly that you say, well, that there's no such thing as choice. I'm talking about various levels, you know. From one point, you have to consciously choose to practice and encourage and develop that choice, that decision. But that's only because we have that kind of decision is because we're rather out of touch with ourself and have conflicting selves.

[34:52]

So, but as you become more conscious or awake, that point is that the point at which we act in the world and the point at which we find our satisfaction. You know, if you want satisfaction, if we talk about the realm of satisfaction or a realized life or something like that, some experience like that, you know, well-being, it's when you're at one with this point, you know, you're

[36:05]

life actually exists beyond satisfaction or dissatisfaction. But someone like Suzuki Roshi would certainly say, I had a deeply satisfying life. And what he would mean, means is not that he had some choice, that he made good choices and was successful. Because as soon as you give that area of consciousness or awakeness, which is constantly, I don't know, words don't work very well. But anyway, when you give that area, that realm qualities, some quality, good or bad, or it did it well, or I'm skillful, you immediately change that realm into a realm that creates karma for you.

[37:07]

And a realm that creates bad feeling and difficulty. So satisfaction isn't in the realm of I did it well or I'm a skillful person. But rather, existing effortlessly in what we're calling here the realm of non-obstruction. So consciousness from this point of view is just a useful tool, you know, or a doorman. But as physically, we don't have to be conscious to be ready or alert. Mentally, we don't have to be conscious. Here we can see one of the differences between the emphasis of Soto and Rinzai.

[38:19]

Soto tends to emphasize that big mind which includes everything and is ready for everything. And Rinzai emphasizes that point at which you take action beyond consciousness or unconsciousness, without hesitation. Actually, our practice has to be both. But you can teach a person about big mind, about existing at one with this wide activity that we are, by getting them every time they take an action. You know, that's more the Rinzai way.

[39:23]

Or you can teach, or practice, by, in such a way that whatever hinders big mind is observed. I don't know if what I'm saying is clear, but it's not so important to understand the difference. But anyway, it's since I'm at this point, I can explain some difference in teaching Soto and Rinzai way. Anyway, do, sandokai, do is a big, there's emptiness maybe in san, and dekai is, you can be described as the moment of,

[40:43]

is the inner penetration of everything, or the moment of shaking hands, something like that, which manifests everything. So, our practice is interesting because you are a student of Zen, but you're also what is being taught. You're the student and you're also the teaching. You're a student and teacher and dharma all in one. So, you can understand Tozan's poem.

[42:10]

If you seek for it, it is far away. And I'm sorry, I forget the next line, or if there is one. Anyway, the opposite is implied. If you don't seek for it, but that don't seek for it is the most dynamic principle in the universe. Then he says, alone I proceed through myself. He is, he sees his reflection in a stream. He is me, and yet I am not him. He is me, and yet I am not him. And he says something like, if you know this, all the dharmadhatu, or all the realm of non-obstruction is manifested.

[43:20]

So, in your Zazen practice, in your sitting, your first effort is to not be carried away by your thoughts or by pain. To be able to let anything come and go without even reviewing it. So, sitting still on top of the whole universe. Not interfering with anything.

[44:47]

Do not hinder that which hears it. Accepting everything as it. Accepting yourself. And what's most important is this, our practice can't be done by analysis or practice alone. It must be done with your heart, or compassion, or Suzuki Roshi's phrase was warm, kind-hearted feeling. Without warm, kind-hearted feeling or heart which forgives anything. Which is willing to be on the bottom. Willing to be, to take the inferior position to other people. You know, not as a way of being superior. Just willing to, a willingness to.

[45:58]

Just, I don't know how to describe it, you know. Just, let the moments fall as they may. Something that's kind of corny. Anyway, if you, the only way to diminish the separation between yourself and everything, and yourself and others, to diminish your ego, is to have this warm, kind-hearted feeling. Or to practice with your heart. It's the only way, the continuity is there. Otherwise, you always see distinctions, or doing, or spaces.

[47:07]

But maybe we can say, from the point of view of practice, dharmadhatu, or space, means heart. Very physical meaning, heart. This soft feeling, you know, which is so difficult. Because we are so affronted all the time, is essential to practice. So,

[49:21]

are we actually here together? How are we actually here in this world? Even though you don't exactly know, your practice is knowing. Your life itself is knowing. And, in this way, we practice sasheen, or zazen. Doing one thing at a time, with others. With everything. Without forcing things. Do you have any questions?

[50:26]

Other things can use hindrance, but no hindrance can use other things. He said, hindrance hinders hindrance. And he said, it's almost too complicated to repeat. He said, what is it? He said, arriving. Anyway, I can't repeat it, it's too complicated. But, anyway, any particular phrase, I'd have to have the exact wording, because his flow of meaning is rather complicated. But, he means the realm of non-obstruction. That's what he's talking about.

[51:48]

So, you are hindrance itself. I mean, our practice is hindrance itself. Choice, maybe, is our conceptualizing the sensation of hindrance. Anyway, some other questions? How does that relate?

[52:52]

That's the same thing. It's a little bit, it's too easy a way to define it, though. Because we have so many ideas about spontaneity, that it doesn't mean ordinary spontaneity, or ordinary mind. But, anyway, it means the same thing I'm talking about. So, Do you suppose the dark place occurs to make you doubt whether you're sitting properly?

[53:58]

Anyway we have dark places and you skirt them until one day you decide to, that it's you and you enter them. I said we do have dark places and as long as we have dark places we tend to skirt them in our practice. We either avoid them or think we're going to solve the problem by making the lights outside them brighter and brighter like a drug store in a small town. But eventually you have to just enter and forget about the lights. But until then we skirt around it, you know, in various ways.

[55:08]

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