it's ringing. How about now? Yes? Okay. Welcome to the opening session of Aspects of Practice. For the next four weeks or so we're going to be practicing together as we do for the other 48.3 weeks of the year, but with some focus. Studying together this year the drawing from the Buddha's early teachings, which I'll say a little about. And it's just sweet to be here sitting this way all day on this beautiful fall afternoon. Good morning. My main subject today is going to be one of the Buddha's early suttas called the Kalama Sutta, which is sometimes translated as the Buddha's doctrine of free inquiry.

[01:21]

I think this is a really good spirit for us to have as we investigate the Dharma and talk with each other. There are a few things I wanted to say before then. First, just a very brief announcement, which I won't go into, just to say that the book I've been working on for the last six or seven months, the writing for a lot longer, has just come out. It's called The Bodhisattva's Embrace, Dispatches from Engaged Buddhism's Front Lines, and I'm happy that this is out. I'll have another opportunity to do that. Maybe we'll do a book signing, I think, when we can fit something in our very busy schedule. I think it'll be probably in January of 2013. I also wanted to say where Sojourn Roshi and I have been for the last three or four days.

[02:25]

We've been, we were up in Oregon at Great Foul Monastery for a biannual meeting of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, which sounds drier than it is. This is a meeting of Soto Zen priests, teachers, and it was up at Great Bao Monastery in Klatskanai, Oregon. It was beautiful. From our families, Sojourn Roshi was there and Mary teachers, and who are full members, and priests who are associate members from San Francisco Zen Center, and from Maezumi Roshi's lineages, and Shoaku Okamura's lineage, and Katagiri Roshi, Dharma Rain, and a variety of social practitioners in America about 40 teachers and 30 associates.

[03:30]

So it was a big gathering. It was really nice. Just a lot of old friends. What we were doing, we'd always study something. And this year, we studied writings and some of the history and background of one of the two single Japanese Zen ancestors, Soto Zen ancestors, Keizan Zenji, about whom much, much less is known, and there's much, much less writing and authenticated writing and scholarship than about Dogen. But he is very important in the creation of what has become Dogen called it, but it's what case I'm really had a lot to do with the creation of that and his own writing Even that which can't be fully authenticated is is quite interesting and moving so we had we had presentations by was a Teacher from so GG, which is the temple that I

[04:47]

one of the temples that Keisan Senshi founded. He founded it first in rural Japan, and then after a fire it moved to the city, to Yokohama, which is where it is now. So Kenzan Yamamoto gave a presentation. Shohaku Okamura Roshi, whom many of us know quite well, gave a wonderful presentation of a teaching by Kazan and he was there all weekend. It's just always great to be with him. And then a very excellent scholar, William Botterford, who was a professor at UCLA, came and gave two days of lectures on history and the content of Khe Sanh's teachings and that was fascinating.

[05:54]

I missed, I came back early yesterday so that I could be here for the opening and I missed the really juicy parts that Will Butterford was going to do. He was going to talk yesterday about Khe Sanh and esoteric or tantric Buddhism and Soto, which is pretty interesting. I don't know what he said. And then also Khe Sanh. Khe Sanh had a very particular and affirming relationship with women practitioners. That was something that was really unique about him. And so he was going to talk about Khe Sanh's relationship to women practitioners in his time. was mid-13th century or late-13th century Japan, medieval Japan. So that's what we studied. We also accomplished a couple of things which I feel very good about.

[06:58]

The members who were present made two very important recommendations to the general membership, which is One is for an SZBA, Soko Zen Buddhist Association, ethics policy with procedures which would supplement the policies that now they are asking each Sangha to have in place. So in other words, all the member centers are being asked to create a policy so what you do when things go wrong. you know, what to do if there's sexual misconduct or fiduciary misconduct or, you know, misuse of authority, etc. So that's supposed to be in place at the center level and then SCBA has a kind of more overarching policy for how we relate to each other, center to center, teacher to teacher.

[08:00]

And that was about four or five years in the works, and also some years in the works. SCBA, the group that met there, recommended, not mandated, but recommended that member teachers create an actual document of women teachers, much based pretty much on the list that we chant during service that would be given as another document with lay ordination and priest ordination. This is a revolutionary step, actually, and not entirely without controversy. And if we really, if we had the time, we should talk about it. I mean, the whole lecture should be devoted to this.

[09:02]

what it means and where the resistances were and stuff. But I just wanted to tell you that this is this is a big deal. So if you had a document that's given along with the traditional lineage of Keshe Miyake that you receive during ordination and it's something just to say the graphics aren't worked out yet and the list is not finalized but then the graphics It's not going to be necessarily a uniform thing. Each center can do their own version. It's something that I've wanted to do for a long time, but I didn't want to do it just as a kind of lone ranger. I wanted to have a document and feel like I was in sync with the other other teachers around the country and so and then give it obviously give it both to women and men it's not for the women it's just it's acknowledging that there is a side that has done quite

[10:16]

unrecognized or under-recognized for hundreds of years that we're trying to, people are doing great research surfacing this stream of practice that has been suppressed. So there was just sort of an amazed feeling looking around at each other when We actually got to this point in the meeting on Friday. Yeah, Judy. This morning we chanted the names of... Yes. And there were a lot of women. Is that something unique to BCC? No. It's not unique to BCC. It's becoming more and more widespread within Soto Zen circles. There are different lists of names, but it's not unique.

[11:19]

So you're talking about Soto... I'm talking about in America. I'm not talking about Japan. Forget Japan. Yes, yes. But it won't even necessarily be an agreed list. It's just a recommended list. We're not going to... It's really beyond us to standardize because this is not... Even though the male lineage the traditional lineage of Keshamiyaku is standardized. It's still a construct, you know, and the supposed principle is a sort of transmission from person to person, you know, in a lineage form. There's no sense of that necessarily among the women, but these are all women who have influenced and advanced the practice. the other is a document of women ancestors.

[12:23]

It's not from my perspective, and we went into this in great detail, a Keshamiyaku. Keshamiyaku literally means bloodline. So again, the trope in the Keshamiyaku is that, oh, it went from this ancestor to this ancestor to this ancestor, which of course is not true. But that's the orthodoxy. And we don't want to get too much outside that, at least at this point. We may come to that. Yeah. Because the Kitchen Doctrine does express a kind of lineage, even if it's not historical, it does express... Well, it's supposed to be historical. Yeah. And we don't really have that with the women. No. No. But we do have a good... We have a lot of research on women from different Buddhist traditions who have really, who are worthy of recognition. I was going to say that at Tassajara, you know, we have a Fozi Dharma Memorial and a Heidogen Memorial.

[13:28]

Here at Tassajara they have added a Mahapajapati Memorial. And what Steve Stuckey, sorry I don't remember his Zen teacher name, Yogan, Sensei, said about her, he described her as the founder of the complete Sangha. Which I thought was a really nice way of putting it. Because, you know, there's men and women and there's also lay and priests. And so, if somebody speaks for making the Sangha complete, she's speaking to all of us, not just two. Because as lay people, even those of us who are priests are practicing in a lay setting, not a monastic setting, as lay people we want to be included in the complete Sangha. That's exactly right. And I think that's a wonderful way to express it. So it's not something that... It actually supports all of us. We'll talk about this more, I'm sure.

[14:29]

And I think it'll be great to kind of look at the various models of these, the graphic models of these documents, which vary from an Enso to a Celtic circle to an eggplant. It's very sweet. So I just want to let you know about those things. In fact, I think What we were just talking about, it moves into my main subject, which is the Kalama Sutta. I gather Bob gave a good lecture yesterday on the beginnings of the Satipatthana Sutta. And I thought I should say something about why we are studying suttas and what they are, just very briefly. The Buddha's teachings in Pali, anyway, in the Southern tradition, was called the Tripitaka or the Tipitaka, which means something like three baskets.

[15:38]

And the first basket is the Sutapitaka, which is purportedly the the words of the Buddha, the teachings of the Buddha, as remembered by Ananda, who had a relatively incredible memory, at the first gathering of enlightened disciples after the Buddha's death, they brought him in to recite the suttas, the teachings, and this was the origin of the Sutta Pitaka. The other two are the Vinaya Pitaka, which is the rules for monastic life, and then you have the Abhidhamma Pitaka, which is basically commentary that expands on the suttas.

[16:42]

So these are, and the Sutta Pitaka itself is quite large. There are many volumes. We have a fair amount of it in our library. And some of you have read it. Some of you have been studying on your own. Some of you have been doing, Loris has been teaching the suttas for a couple of years now. They're very down to earth. They're very practical. They are not generally cast in kind of mystical and psychedelic language as a lot of the Mahayana sutras are. The Buddha was just, these teachings are very kind of nuts and bolts, the nuts and bolts of our practice and in each case they are teachings in which he is responding to a question or a situation that he encounters as he travels about.

[17:50]

So I don't want to go a lot more into how it's divided up and different aspects of the syncopitica. I will say that if you want to look at things on your own, there's a website called Access to Insight. It's one word, I think, accesstoinsight.org. And there are a lot of excellent translations by Tendisaro, Venerable Tendisaro, Bhikkhu Bodhi, other teachers that have been collected there. And actually I drew this translation and I'm going to use the Kalama Sutta from that. This picture, as I said, is sometimes translated as the Buddha's Charter of Free Inquiry. It's called Instruction to the Kalamas.

[18:53]

I'm not going to read the whole thing. I'm just going to go through it, but we'll get to the center. So, thus have I heard, once the Blessed One, which is the Buddha, was wandering in the Kosala country with a large community of monks. and entered the town of the Kalama people called Kesaputta. So, wandering is what the Buddha did for nine months of the year, from village to village, mostly in North India. And they would go on alms rounds to receive their food, and then settle someplace where there was shade, because that part of India was heavily forested then. and just set up camp, and the Buddha would often teach, or they would meditate, or both. So he was wandering in Kosala. Kesaputra is in what is now the northeastern state of Bihar, which borders, it's very close to Nepal and Bhutan, and what is now Bangladesh.

[20:07]

And it was one of the It was in the area that the Buddha most frequently traveled, and he often came to this town of Kesaputta. And in that town there were several different ethnic groups, and the Kalamas were one of them. The Kalamas were not disciples of Buddha. So this whole sutra is not given to what we might now call Buddhists. But this was a very actively crisscrossed area by many teachers from various traditions. And so they were used to having visiting teachers. So the Kalamas who were inhabitants of Kesaputra went to where the Blessed One was. On arriving there, some paid homage to Him and sat down on one side.

[21:12]

Some exchanged greetings with Him, and after the ending of cordial, memorable talk, which I think means small talk, sat down on one side. Some saluted Him, raising their joined palms and sat down on one side. Some announced their name and family and sat down on one side. some without speaking sat down on one side so they what you get in this picture is you know a group of people who were just they were curious to hear this guy you know some of them felt some of them already felt some reverence and some respect and some of them just came because uh they had no television or movies or radio and a visiting teacher was maybe the best entertainment around. So they had different group relationships and various relationships with Buddhas.

[22:14]

So then the question is asked. The Kalamas who were inhabitants of Kesaputra sitting on one side said to the Blessed One, There are some monks and brahmanas, Venerable Sir, who visit Kesaputra. They expound and explain only their own doctrines. The doctrines of others they despise, revile and pull to pieces. Some other monks and brahmanas too, Venerable Sir, come to Kesaputra. They also expound and explain only their own doctrines. The doctrines of others they despise, revile and pull to pieces. Venerable Sir, there is doubt, there is uncertainty in us concerning them. Which of these reverend monks and brahmans spoke the truth and which falsehood? So there's a question. How do we know what to believe and what to do? There's some resonance in this which I haven't found documented but

[23:24]

makes sense to me. One of the Buddha's first teachers was Alara Kalama, which means he came from the Kalama tribe, or the Kalama group. And he was, after the Buddha took, you know, shaved his head and took on robes and became a wandering monk seeking enlightenment, Alara Kalama was one of the first for teachers that he came to and he evidently was a very deep teacher and Alara Kalama was unusual in that he didn't cite any texts as authority he didn't say that he had heard the truth from others what he said was what he had understood he had realized for himself by his own experience So in a way, this sets the stage for what the Buddha is going to present to the Kalamas.

[24:31]

It seems like a pre-echo. There must be a word for that. A foreshadowing of what comes up in the Kalama suttas. the, Alara Kalama was very accomplished. He had attained everything but true awakening. And the Buddha became very accomplished in his method. And in the end, Kalama, Alara Kalama said, well, you now know what I know. And the Buddha felt, well, this isn't quite enough and continued on. So anyway, I think there is some foreshadowing there. So the Buddha's response to the Kalamas is this. I think that the Kalama situation is very much like ours.

[25:33]

It's like ours in the world. We have even more intense information overload, and we certainly have plenty of people who say they know the truth. that they only know the truth and the other people are just misleading you and telling lies. So what the Buddha says is very careful. He says it is proper for you Kalamas to doubt, to be uncertain. Uncertainty has arisen in you about what is doubtful. He never says But I'm going to tell you the truth. Because then he would just be another one of those guys, right? So he lays out, he then lays out ten criteria. Let me read them quickly in the language and then just say what they are and go through them again.

[26:38]

It's proper for you Kalamas to doubt, to be uncertain. Uncertainty has risen in you about what is doubtful. Come Kalamas. do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing, nor upon tradition, nor upon rumor, nor upon what is in a scripture or book, nor upon surmise, nor upon an axiom, nor upon specious reasoning, nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over, nor upon another's seeming ability, nor upon the consideration, this monk is our teacher, to the ten criteria. Kalama's, when you yourselves know these things are bad, these things are blameable,

[27:41]

these things lead to harm and ill, abandon them, and then he goes through good. When you know these things are good, these things are wholesome, these things lead to happiness and harmony, that is the standard that you should have. So, Buddhadasa has a commentary on this. And just to go through these ten, again, because they're very useful. They're very useful criteria for evaluating the truth of anything. He said, don't accept something. This is Asanga Dada's translation. Don't accept and believe something to be true just because it has been passed along and retold for years. Such credulity is a characteristic of brainless people. Two, don't believe in something merely because it has become a traditional practice.

[28:53]

I like this commentary. People tend to imitate what others do and then pass the habit along. As in the story, this is from the Jatakas, of the rabbit who was terrified by a falling mango. When the other, sort of like chicken littles falling sky, when the other animals saw the rabbit running at top speed, They were frightened too, and ran after it. Most of them ended up tumbling off a cliff to their deaths. So don't believe something merely because it has become a traditional practice. Don't accept and believe something simply because of the report and news of it spreading far and wide, whether through a village or the whole world. Don't accept and believe something because it is cited in a text. And he says, a text or pitaka, basket, is a certain kind of conditioned thing made and controlled by human beings, which can be improved or changed by human hands.

[29:59]

Thus we cannot trust every letter and word we read. Don't believe five. Don't believe something solely on the grounds of logical reasoning. Logic is not infallible. If its datas and inferences are incorrect, it can go wrong. 6. Don't believe or accept something merely because it appears correct on the grounds of what is now called philosophy. Philosophy is now merely a method of deductive reasoning based on hypothesis our assumptions. Such reasoning can err when the method or hypothesis is inappropriate. 7. Don't believe or accept something simply because of superficial thinking, that is, because it appeals to what we nowadays call common sense, which is merely snap judgments based on one's tendency and thought.

[31:08]

8. Don't believe or accept something to be true because it agrees or fits with one's preconceived opinions and theories. 9. Don't believe something just because the speaker appears believable, perhaps due to credibility or prestige. It makes me think of our present electoral process. On the other hand, None of them appear too believable, so maybe don't worry about that. 10. Don't believe something simply because the monk, or more broadly, any speaker is my teacher. The Buddha's purpose regarding this important point is that nobody should be the intellectual slave of anybody else, even of the Buddha himself. The Buddha emphasized this point often, and there were disciples who confirmed it in practice.

[32:19]

They didn't believe the Buddha's words immediately upon hearing them. They only did so after they tested it in practice. So, Buddhadasa writes, the ten examples of the Kalama Sutta are a sure-fire defense against intellectual dependence and not being one's own person. That is the purpose of this practice. That is what is essentially manifest in Zazen itself, to be one's true person. So, it's a defense against intellectual dependence and not being yourself, or neglecting your own intelligence. neglecting one's own intelligence and wisdom in dealing with what one hears and listens to. Whatever one listens to, or I would say whatever one believes, one should carefully and systematically reflect upon it.

[33:26]

When the facts of the matter are clearly beneficial, and it results in the quenching of suffering, one may finally believe it. One of the problems with the Kalama Sutta that has come up in the commentary is that then people take the sutta itself as the last word. And they take its argument to mean, don't believe in anything, which is not the point that the Buddha is making. Buddha is making the point of, please test this in your own thinking, in your own life. I think that the background of this is kind of interesting and it comes up only as you get towards the later part of the sutra.

[34:32]

Why are they asking this question? What are the doctrines that the Kalamas are arguments from one side, arguments from the other side. I think that in the main, well first of all I think you can apply this widely, but in the main I think they were talking about the question of rebirth and karma and you could say life and death. That's what we're all worried about, right? We're also worried, how do we live? How can we be fully alive? So, if you test these things, when you yourself, Buddha said, when you yourself know these things are good, these things are not flammable, these things are praised by the wise, undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness, enter on and abide in them.

[35:36]

And then, towards the end, If you practice this way, then you have an open mind, a mind that is freed from greed, hatred and delusion. And that leads you to what he calls the four salasas. The disciple of the noble ones, kalamas, who has such a hate-free mind, such a malice-free mind, such an undefiled mind, and such a purified mind, is one by whom four solaces are found here and now." So what's interesting are these words, here and now. Not in paradise, not in the next life or three lifetimes from this present one, but here and now.

[36:41]

that we can wake up as we practice and really reflect on ourselves in our meditation, in our action, in our thought, here and now. So these are the solaces and the solaces touch on this question of what's going to happen Suppose there is a hereafter and there is a fruit or result of deeds that are well done or ill, badly done. Then it is possible that at the dissolution of the body after death, I shall arise in the heavenly world which is marked by the state of bliss. This is the first solace found. In other words, Maybe there is a heaven. So that's good.

[37:45]

That's reassuring. The second solace is, suppose there is no hereafter and there is no fruit, no result of deeds done well or ill, yet in this world, here and now, free from hatred, free from malice, safe and sound and happy, I keep myself. This is the second solace found by him. So in other words, heaven or no heaven, if I could live my life this way, I can be happy and harmonizing with the world right now. The third salas says, suppose evil results come to an evildoer, but I, however, think of doing no evil to no one. then how can ill results affect me, who do no evil deed?

[38:47]

This is the third solace. In other words, if evil has a bad result, a bad karmic result, if I free myself from those kinds of actions, then I will have a happy life. And the fourth solace is, suppose evil results do not befall the evil doer. In other words, maybe to my way of looking at things, bad things don't happen to bad people. And he says, then I see myself purified in any case. That doesn't affect how I live or how I act. This is the fourth sthalas. The disciple of the noble ones, who has such a hate-free mind, such a malice-free mind, such an undefiled mind, and such a purified mind, is one by whom, here and now, again, he says it's here and now, these four salasas are found.

[39:55]

So, at the end, the kalamas who are sitting there say, marvelous, venerable sir, marvelous, venerable sir, As if, venerable sir, a person were to turn his face upwards, what is upside down, or to uncover the concealed, or to point the way to one who is lost, or to carry a lamp in the darkness, thinking, those who have eyes will see visible objects. So has the dharma been set forth in many ways by the Blessed One. We, venerable sir, go to the Blessed One for refuge, community of monks for refuge. Venerable Sir, may the Blessed One regard us as lay followers who have gone for refuge for life from today." And that's how it ends. So, it's interesting, in the end, what they do is they take refuge, but they don't feel it incumbent upon them to become monks.

[41:04]

are taking refuge in their lay life as we are in their life in the world because the teaching that they've been given and the standards that they've been given are ones that lead to happiness and liberation here and now. And I think it's obviously a relevant teaching for us So how do you, in this work, how do you trust yourself? How do you trust your perception? I think that's kind of the open question. I don't know what things were like in 2500 years ago in North India. Whether people were given to the same kinds of

[42:08]

self-doubt that we seem to be. Sometimes we may have perceptions that we don't trust. We feel ourselves sometimes tangled in doubt and in what might be self-deception. But I think it's important to remember that the Buddha was talking to a community of people. And each of us needs to take this teaching for our own, but we also exist in connection with others. I think this is a kind of interesting tension in in these early teachings.

[43:10]

And one way that I've been thinking about it lately is that the Indian society that the Buddha grew up in was so highly communalized that it was very difficult to think for yourself. And so a notion, a doctrine, a teaching As it spread, it's like you kind of had to get with the program. And what the Buddha was teaching is medicine. And what he was saying was, you have to think for yourself. Don't go by these ten deceptive standards. Don't be influenced by what others think, or by what is orthodoxy, or what you read, or what is seemingly common knowledge. don't be caught by this kind of communal thinking.

[44:10]

It may be to some extent, I like this phrase that they use at the end of the sutra, when they're praising him, as if a person were to turn face upwards what is upside down or to uncover the concealed. So for us to turn what is upside down might be to take this teaching and stay in this society which is marked by kind of rampant individualism in order to determine what the truth is not just to ourselves. We have to test our perceptions with each other.

[45:14]

We still have to make choices on our own. We still have to sit cross-legged, ourselves, facing the wall. But it's really important, as some of our early teachers said, I remember this very clearly, they said, When I was at Tassajara, I remember Rev saying, you should be talking about the Dharma. You should be discussing the Dharma. You should be arguing about the Dharma. This is the way we forge what we understand. And then it needs to be constantly and empirically tested against the reality of our lives. So, I think I'll stop there. This is just a kind of brief introduction to the Kalama Sutta and just open up for thoughts or questions.

[46:22]

Richard? As you were talking there at the end, I was thinking about the group thinking in contradiction to what you said about the or something. Yeah, well, I think this is what I'm saying is not categorical. That's the thing. I mean, group think is also very dangerous. And, you know, as Martin Luther King said, groups are groups than individuals. So that exists as well. We have to be constantly going back and forth.

[47:30]

I don't have any, again, this thing is advising, don't give any axioms, but it's how do you test it in reality. Groupthink, you know, the Tea Party is groupthink So is often the anti-war movement, his group think. Without really clearly discerned standards, each person needs to think it through for herself or himself. But it's tricky. There's no real... it keeps throwing it back. This is what he always does in all of his teachings. He throws it back on you. He's not going to answer the question, just like no Zen teacher is going to answer the question, because if an external person answered the question for you, you wouldn't have it in your body.

[48:38]

Everything that we do has to be rooted in our body-mind. I have a little reaction to the word argue because I think just the thing you just said about our understanding is rooted in the body. First of all, and then we start to express it and develop a point of view. In an argument situation, there's a danger of holding onto a point of view and a right and a wrong and that kind of thing, which I've seen happen. Really? In various situations here. And where people then have a very strong point of view and it becomes an argument. What if we said debate? Debate sounds. Well, debate, maybe. All those people win a debate.

[49:42]

So I just throw that out there. But if you think about classical debating, you're sort of assigned a side. That would be good, if you could assign people a side that isn't necessarily the one that they have created in their mind objects. In a sense, when you're doing that, then you're actually directly attacking the notion of self and other. But we shouldn't be afraid. I think this is the problem. There's a really nice commentary by Larry Rosenberg on Kalama Sutta, who is a teacher in Cambridge, I think. Did you say that? He's a wonderful teacher. He's coming from a very Jewish background where disputation is part of the scene, you know, and sometimes it's dysfunctional and sometimes it's really a lot.

[50:49]

But you have to understand the context and you have to understand who you're engaging with. So, again, it's not, there's no overarching rule. There's a wonderful story he tells. His father had been a rabbi, like 14 generations of rabbis, but he broke with his... he just couldn't do it. And he tried to pay, when Larry Rosenberg was bar mitzvahed, he actually paid the rabbi not to give a talk. But he gave one anyway. But we shouldn't be afraid We shouldn't be afraid to exchange our ideas, let's put it that way. But we should be able to exchange them. Can you say something specific about working with doubt? Can you say something more about how to work with doubt?

[51:51]

You made a comment about how sometimes we don't trust our perceptions, our experience. What do you personally do when that happens? Well, it happens a lot for me because I'm, on the Enneagram, I'm a doubt type. At this point in my life, I recognize that that's my prevalention. And I accept that. And I think I try to look at these criteria. You know, is an action Does this lead towards connection or does it lead towards separation? In the simplest way, I think that's what we're talking about. Does my belief or my action or my thought separate me from others or connect me? In a very broad way, that's a standard and I can use it. pretend at this point in my life not to judge myself so much for being a doubt type, but to see, okay, that's who I am.

[53:02]

Can I see through it to the extent that I recognize that this is a way that is conditioning my thought? It's not necessarily the truth. Go, a few more minutes. Yeah, Judy. Throughout the talk today, I was thinking that the story that you're recounting here in this sutra seems to me one in which there's this audience of people who keep asking the Buddha to tell them something. And he's trying to get them to see that they need to have their own knowledge. And when one is always asking, for somebody to tell them about it, whatever it is, it's virtually impossible for one in that state of mind to understand what's being said.

[54:09]

If the person they're asking says, look with Dan, and they want to know how to look with Dan, they say, trust yourself, they may go off on some to where they say, well, I know, and you're wrong. And then we have to have a debate. And I just think that this is a profound point. And it's also one that is, by nature of it, profoundly difficult to tell people. Do you see what I'm saying? Absolutely. To tell people who are asking to be told, asking to be poor, seeking to be tall, or whatever. Right. But I'm talking to a room full of people who are sitting here in silence all day. Right? We're sharing this together because we already, I think, have at least a common intention to see through our

[55:14]

conceptual boundaries. But it's a long process. That's the thing. It's not something... I mean maybe one of you is going to actually break through and become the Buddha today. It probably won't be me. And it's a long process in actually restructuring your way of living and thinking. I just want to say, as an analogy, helps to clarify it. It occurred to me one time that the Christian golden rule to love your neighbor as yourself or to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If a person has never been able to actually have even a moment free from the need to defend their ego and to protect their ego, then They don't know what that means.

[56:20]

And they can't know. And yet they may sincerely try to do the best they can and to try to figure out what that must mean. And sometimes that leads to self-flagellation. And it leads to all kinds of strange things that they define as loving your neighbor as yourself or doing unto others as you would have people do to you. Because just the understanding can't be there. And I think that a similar problem happens for us who try to, whatever it is we're doing when we're trying to do zazen, we're doing the best we can. We're all doing different things, almost certainly. And it's very easy with these words to kind of lock into Yeah. No, I understand. I mean, a couple of things come to mind. One is that my belief is that everybody, nobody in this room is trying to do zazen.

[57:26]

Everybody in this room is doing zazen. And I have faith in that process. And some will be able to change their lives slowly. Some will be able to change their lives quickly. I don't know. There's no timetable for this. I think of a verse from Bodhisattva Śiśovo by Dogen, where he just sticks in the middle of this passage. He says, the mind of a sentient being is difficult to change. But we must keep on trying to change. the minds of sentient beings, including our own, from the first moment until the last. And the other thing is a teaching that... not a teaching, it's like four words that this guy Bo Lao Tzu, who works with a lot of prisoners, would have as his essential teaching, which is, you can do this.

[58:35]

So, yes, it's hard. And the manner, I think, of the Buddha, sometimes we get this just from the ... there's something transmitted by the physical presence of a person. If you see a person who is transformed, all of a sudden you raise the thought of enlightenment yourself in a way that you didn't know you were capable of. I feel like a lot of us have experienced it. Some have not. Some have yet to. But I think in these sutras, at the end of the sutra, the Kalamas seem to get it, whether they did or not, who knows. And how many of them did. So then it becomes a matter of faith, but it's faith based on discerning wisdom. So, I think we should probably end now, but obviously there's much more to say.

[59:44]

He doesn't tell you exactly how to do it, he just gives you the standards for looking at your life. So, we can keep doing that, but don't think too much while you're practicing sadhana for the rest of the day. Thank you.

[60:01]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ