My job is to try to introduce to you this koan. And This way, the schedule we have of sitting, although, well, the schedule we have of sitting is pretty much like a schedule in China or Japan when these koans would have been studied traditionally. We're not getting up as early, but still the basic feelings, more or less the same. And the teacher would give you some Some introduction, usually it's technically called a teisho to the koan.

[01:21]

Often the koan is presented, and then a bell is rung, and then some commentary is given, and that's all. And the sense of it is that the teacher offers something, part, but mostly you have to teach yourself. And you have to teach yourself with each other. We could say that there's several ways to look at this teaching yourself. One is the teaching of yourself that goes on before you meet a teacher.

[02:39]

And my experience of that is that for me, I did a lot of study looking around, self-examination, teaching myself before I met Suzuki Roshi. But for me at least, I can't say it was bad, but it was pretty aimless until after I met my teacher. Ziellos, aber nicht nutzlos, denn nachdem ich Suzuki Roshi begegnet habe, verbannt sich das plötzlich und machte einen Sinn, was ich vorher getan habe. And then I recognized there were two, three sort of ways of practicing or continuing teaching myself while I was with Suzuki Roshi.

[04:12]

Or rather maybe three ways of study, one being studying with him. Which was, he created the opportunities, but the instances, the actual situations had to be created by me. Er schuf die Gelegenheiten, aber die tatsächlichen Augenblicke, die musste ich schaffen. He was there, but mostly it was up to me to figure out how to make use of his being there. Hauptsächlich musste ich herausfinden, wie ich mir ihn zu nutzen machen konnte, dass er da war. And then there were two other areas.

[05:13]

The second was I continued to teach myself but now within the presence of and connectedness with Suzuki Roshi. And third, we began, the group of us practicing with Sukhiroshi, to teach each other. And that's what a, you know, a little mini version of that is what I'd like us to do this week, these three days. Yeah, and a mini version of that is what I'd like us to do these three days. You know, Sashin, you're mostly in your own stream of being and in the context of the tradition and the lectures and the tradition through the schedule and so forth and the lectures I'll be giving.

[06:25]

But in this kind of schedule, a sort of mild practice period type of schedule, I'm amazed you can translate all this. Thank you very much. I don't know what I'm saying and you seem to say it like I knew what I was saying. You don't have to translate. Better not translate that. But in this kind of schedule we have now, there's the opportunity for me to participate, but also for you to have a more normal schedule than Sasheen, and a chance to find out how to study together.

[07:43]

If you just learn how to study with your teacher, you can't study very well after your teacher is dead. And you really probably couldn't teach effectively at all. A fundamental part of the practice is to learn to teach yourself while you're with your teacher and to learn to study with others while you're with your teacher. And again, trying to create a time like this together is part of seeing that we can do this here and not just at Crestone. Now this koan is partly about the dismay of Nanchuan with his monks.

[09:04]

Here they've committed themselves to studying, they've entered the monastery, and yet they're fighting over a cat. Animals are wonderful, and pets are wonderful. And we can have a very intimate conversation loving connection with pets as most of us know. But I think Nanchuan would feel that if you can't have a thousand times or many times deeper a relationship with another human being, even if somebody who's not particularly a friend, then it would be hard for him to comprehend.

[10:37]

This is a sense of what he means by saying the true imperative. The true imperative would be something, something like, can't say something like, would be, I don't want to take the edge off by saying something like, It would be 100% engagement in the truth that there is no truth. If there was a truth, maybe you could relax, take it easy. But the true imperative, as Tom Cleary points out in the introduction, is a technical Buddhist term, Zen term, which means there is no place to rest. That each moment has consequence, but we don't know what the consequence will be.

[12:19]

Now, it doesn't mean you don't rest. It means that you need to find, in this kind of practice, that nanchuan is... demonstrating for us is you need to find a place to rest within 100% engagement. I think Nanchuan may be difficult for us because he's really not fooling around. And he might love you, but if you're practicing, he wouldn't accept one tiny bit of self-indulgence. And maybe most of us can't have such a great spirit and maybe it's better not to have such a great spirit if you want to get along with others.

[13:40]

But, you know, Nanchuan and Baijiang, who we studied in Kowan, in Kessel, are the two great, two or the three really, but the two most famous of Matsu's disciples. Bai Zhang was a little older. And so probably when Nanchuan was with Matsu, Bai Zhang was already somewhere else. I don't know exactly. But Baijian, but Matsu had, Matsu is the most, probably the most powerful and famous of all the early Zen masters. partly, you know, it's partly his personality and his capacity, but it's also the historical moment where he fits in the history.

[15:22]

So partly it's that, you know, the lineage gives us the opportunity to respond to the historical moment. Maybe for some generations that moment is not there. Matsu was there at the very establishment of Chinese Zen Buddhism. And he brought it together in his person. And passed it on to Bai Zhang and Nan Chuang. And Nanchuan was said to be, at the time he was there, among something like 120 or 130 enlightened disciples, Nanchuan was considered the foremost.

[16:25]

He was lucky enough to first receive instruction when he was about 10 years old. And then he studied many different things, worked very densely with a number of sutras. And you must remember at that time, getting hold of a book was like a miracle in those days. So if you had access to a sutra, which was handwritten out or hand-block printed and rare, you probably virtually memorized it over a period of years. And you treasured it like the wisdom of the ages was appearing through these pages.

[17:51]

And if you were a person like... Matsu, I mean Nanchuan, you probably tried to practice every line of the sutra. So when he was... 40 about after studying with Matsu for some time and he went up into the mountains and built himself a little hut and scraped out a subsistence living.

[18:54]

And he lived in the mountains as far as the story goes, pretty much by himself for 30 years. And when he was about 70, he started teaching. So in this story, we can imagine that he's 75 or so, and And Zhaozhou is 45, 44, 45, 46. So even though he's 32 years younger, Bai Jiang and, I mean, Zhaozhou and Nanchuan are already of one mind. And although Zhaozhou is 30 years younger, the two, Zhaozhou and Nanshuan, are one mind.

[20:11]

Zhaozhou is also a famous teacher, one of Sukyurashi's favorite. And he lived to be, I don't know, 119 years old or something. I think the longest living of all the well-known Zen masters. His teacher was old, so. Nanchuan died at 88, I believe, so he probably got a late start, like us, but hang in there for a few decades. And Jiao Jiao is famous for traveling extensively around, taking anyone, even a three-year-old, I think he said, as a teacher, and teaching anyone who couldn't be a teacher. And in all these years he happened to live traveling around

[21:18]

must have been a man of tremendous vigor and vitality, he brought Chinese Zen together in his person in another way by visiting so many places. So these guys In their understanding and in their practice and in their person, they created the deep basis for the Zen we study today. Now, Only as again as the introduction points out and I've mentioned many times is in the stories each teacher or lineage is used to sort of emphasize a particular aspect of the teaching.

[22:50]

The full range of teaching of a person was for sure much more than is present in the koans. Now the previous koan, again, if you want to look at it, you can, but I'm just mentioning it to put these koans in perspective in this teaching of the Book of Serenity. It talks about the great capacity of Baijian and the great function of his disciple, Huangbo. And here we're talking about the great function of Nanzhuang. And his emphasis on the true imperative.

[24:28]

Now, if you want to practice with these koans and integrate them into your own life and thinking, it's useful to take these phrases and say, what would you see as a great capacity for yourself? Now, in the afternoon I'd like you to get together and have some discussion with each other. We'll have to think about what's the best way to do that. I think probably to break up into groups of six or eight or something, I don't know. And for 30 minutes or so at the beginning, I would like Randy to say something from his experience.

[25:35]

Not necessarily about the koan, but just about the practice and practicing with koans. No, so one of the things to talk about is begin to talk about among yourselves, people who, a lot of you have a similar background and similar school system and so forth. What do you mean, what would you mean by great capacity? Or in your innermost heart, what would you mean by great capacity? What would you mean by great function, function in the world, how the world functions, how you function? And it's helpful to remember in Zen is that everything is considered an act.

[26:53]

There's no real or reality, but there's actuality. And each of your thoughts in Zen is understood to be an act. And ready to act. So if there's a thought, you're ready to act on the thought. And commit yourself fully to the thought. Right or wrong. And if you don't act through speech, you act through the completeness of your thinking, or you act as we say, in different kinds.

[28:08]

To look at it from one point of view, it's almost like with every thought your body twitched. And the world twitched. If you're a painter, your brush moves immediately with every movement of your being. At the same time, this really is only possible, deeply possible, when there's an unmoving awareness. We speak of unmoving, reflexive awareness. Or we could say unmoving, responsive awareness, but awareness that's

[29:12]

Completely ready to respond, but at the same time completely unmovable. If there's no place to rest, there's no truth to abide in. Hmm. then you have to abide in no place. One of the sayings in Zen is that an insect can land in many places but not in a raging fire. Then the mind can rest in many concepts But the mind cannot rest in ultimate truth.

[30:35]

Because the nature of this existence is that it's unpredictable. Even if you fully know cause, you don't know result. Even if you kick over the ocean, such a big act. Dust flies on the earth. Even if you move to greater subtlety and scatter the clouds with a shout, Space shatters. Nanchuan said once, everyone tries to understand what I'm doing, but you can never understand or predict what I'm doing. He said if you could roll space into a staff and hit me with it, maybe you'd understand.

[31:50]

So I'm trying to give you a picture of this big kind of person, big person that Nanchuan was. But probably more than we can aspire to be. But still, such people should exist in our society. And I think it's good to study them without feeling inferior. Without comparing ourselves, we couldn't be like that, so it's not good to be like that.

[32:59]

These cons try in a way to suck you into getting your personality and ego involved. As we saw in reading the koan about the fox, Bai Jiang's fox, it's presented that this poor hapless guy gave a wrong answer and had to live as a fox for 500 lifetimes. And the narrative of the story draws you into, geez, I don't want to make a mistake like that, and this guy made a mistake, and how can you not make a mistake, and so forth. And this is the koan tricking you into reading it with your ego.

[34:14]

And this koan tricks us into reading it with our sentiment and our moral righteousness. He shouldn't have killed that cat. And later on in the corner, you see that there's a guy named, what's his name? Xu? Xu, maybe? Who said he shouldn't have killed the cat. That was wrong. And then it says there's another guy named Venn who said, oh, he couldn't have really killed the cat. He only symbolically killed the cat. And the koan says, his shu is not so bad, you know.

[35:35]

He just didn't like it. But ven tries to apologize for it. That's much worse. So we have to look what's going on here with this unpredictable non-chuan. And his unpredictable disciple who puts his sandals on his head. So both of them turn things around, turn things upside down. I mean, you could have solved the thing by saying, well, let's see who's right, who's wrong. You guys have the cat on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and you have the cat on Thursdays. No. So there's the unpredictability here, and there's the turning around, turning upside down of things.

[36:41]

And there's also the pointing at. What is Anjuan pointing at? Prost had a servant bring him a rat on a silver tray. Presumably tied down. And Proust, you know, was part of a society that eats meat in their slaughterhouses and fisheries and so forth, and he always felt isolated from death.

[37:48]

And we catch many rats. in the corners in the dark with traps. But he wanted to see something die, so he took a needle and stabbed this rat to death in front of him and watched. Somehow it's okay to catch a rat or to eat a hamburger if we don't see it. But to see it, somehow we feel disgusted by Proust's act. Is there a problem here? What do we look at? Or what can we deal with and not deal with, our neighbors in the former Yugoslavia?

[39:13]

I had a friend, Sterling Bunnell, you met him once. He always used to go around with a hawk, you know, on the shoulder and in a cage he carried it. And he kept, he had a cage in two parts and the lower part had mice in it and the upper part had the hawk. And Sterling was quite eccentric. But really brilliant, extraordinary person. Everyone put up with his eccentricities. But he put this cage down in the middle of a conversation with people.

[40:23]

And at least once during the meeting he would open the lower part and take a mouse and throw it in the upper part and then the hawk would... Conversation would go on while they... Now, I'm not recommending silver trays, killing rats, or eating mice along with the hawks. Nor do I expect any of us to startle Frank and Angelica by killing a cat. But we all, let's look at the story, the structure of the story, not just this narrative content. We're all faced with much more difficult decisions than whether we kill a cat or not. In such situations, right now, what are you going to do?

[41:47]

Okay, thank you very much. May our intentions meekly penetrate every being and place.

[42:20]

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