Today we are happy to have as our speaker, Greg Dainey, whose Dharma name is Hechen Tondo, which means ordinary mind, right way. Greg has been practicing here for quite a number of years. He's in the senior students group, and he was a Hsu Sao, our head student here, in 2005. He also is a father of two young boys, Sam and Eli, who you see about here from time to time, and married to Marie Hopper, who you also see here. So I've heard, it's said that the Dharma has a cooling effect. And so on a hot summer day, we hope that Greg will keep it cool for us. Well, we'll see.

[01:00]

It sounds loud. Is it too loud? It's kind of reverberates up here. So, yeah, it's been a while since I've given a Saturday talk. I'm not quite sure. Maybe about a year. I. My children are small, three and almost a year. So. as parents know. But it was interesting when I was bowing, I really had this feeling that I was a different person than the last time I was up here. Maybe more so than I have in the past. So I thought I'd mention that because that's certainly an experience in keeping with our understanding of the Dharma. So we have various words for what this is, right?

[02:07]

The Japanese is Taisho, and there's just talk, and there's Dharma talk. And then I was at Zazen. I went to the first period of Zazen this morning, and I went home to check in with the kids, and I came back. And as I was leaving, Alan came up and says, you're giving a lecture today, right? I said, lectures? I'm not prepared for a lecture. Talk, maybe. It's funny how that word sounds so much different. But any case, I'm here. And what I'd like to talk about is the usual stuff, form and emptiness, suffering, the self. And I'm going to read a koan from the Mulan Khan and try to contextualize what I'm going to say around that. So I'll read the koan first. And it's a short one. And I probably won't talk about the whole thing. Just the case and the comments.

[03:08]

This is case 8. Si Chong builds carts. And here's the case. The priest Yu An said to a monk, Si Chong made a hundred carts. If you take off both wheels and the axle, what would be vividly apparent? So you have a cart. If you take off both wheels and the axle, what do you have? What's that? Somebody said something. A box. OK. Well, I'll just start at the end with my understanding of what the cart is. The cart is the self. That is, that no matter what, even though I was a different person when I stepped up here than last time, I was still, that was me, that was the self.

[04:28]

And maybe last time I was here I had three wheels, and this time I had one wheel. Still the Self. So what I want to talk about is, and maybe sort of circling back to the koan at times, is what my experience of the Self is in terms of the Dharma. So I think, I like to put it as simply as this, that the self, my self, or the self, is my life. And equals my life. And I mean that quite literally. That the self is your life. At any moment, at every moment in time. Here's my life. That's who I am. not more, not less. And what I mean by my life is, I mean it in the most colloquial matter-of-fact way that we understand what my life is.

[05:38]

You know, every day we wake up in the morning and there it is, right? My life. That's who we are. Now, I want, and I distinguish, I want to distinguish that versus a sort of understanding like, well, there's, my life is what happens to me. the self like as a dualism so there's a self that was here a year ago and had one life and life is changing me as I come here that's kind of how I put it but really what I should have said was well last time I was here my life was different and now my life is this today So the cart is our life. And sometimes it has three wheels, or it might have one wheel, but it's still the cart, it's still our life.

[06:40]

And that's who we are, what our life is at any particular moment. So then that's different, you know, you take the car and change it further, right? The car is not something we drive, right? Our life is not something we drive. We'd like to think that. Or sometimes we feel like our life drives us. But our life just happens. And that happening is who we are. And I invite you to take that literally. Now, there's this other thing that we call the self, again, colloquially, or a more Western understanding, you know, the ego self, right? And I'm not saying that that doesn't exist. In fact, it's part of life.

[07:42]

That is a component of life. Our sense of ourselves is something that life happens to. I mean, in the sense that I'm not talking about... That's still true in a way, too, because we have that experience. Any experience we have, is part of our life, and so that's part of the self too, including the ego self. So I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, by saying that the small self, or the ego self, doesn't exist. It's just part of it. And a really important part too. I mean, sometimes, maybe I've thought in my history of practice that the pain was going to somehow disappear, right? No, no, it doesn't do that. It hasn't yet. So, in the Heart Sutra, we talk about the five skandhas, right?

[08:45]

The five skandhas may be another way to understand life. The five skandhas are just the sort of processes, some kind of explanation of the processes that make up our sense of being an individual, but more specifically, our life. Everything that we experience, we experience through the five skandhas. form, sensation, perception, formation, consciousness. And I just wanted to bring that up to you because another way of saying what I'm trying to say is that the experience and the experiencer, there's no difference. It's just experience. And the five skandhas are a way of understanding what experience is or how experience happens. And I guess I'm also saying that experience is the self.

[09:58]

Another useful sort of metaphor that helps me is the idea of ground, or mind ground, you hear sometimes in Buddhism. One way of looking at our life is that it's the ground. Our life in its entirety is the ground. Or maybe another word is landscape. Our life has a landscape, right? And on that landscape there are all these features at every moment, right? Those features and that landscape, again, are the self. And that includes everything in our life, right? It includes my most immediate relationships with my family and and you folks, and it includes Karl Rove, it includes, you know, the trails at Redwood Park, it includes, you know, children in Africa, it includes everything that could be included in my experience. And, of course, I can't even talk about anything that's not included in my experience, right? Because just the fact that I can mention it or talk about it or point to it means it's in my experience.

[11:04]

I.e., it's myself. It's who I am. So to flesh this out maybe more immediately, I'd like to talk about more specifically, I guess, the relationship maybe between the ground and this expansive all-inclusive way that I'm talking about and and the small self or the ego self and Also our experience of maybe the more problematic Features of the landscape like like greed hate and delusion Attachment desire Things that maybe at one time I might have thought well, you know as I practice all that stuff will kind of just like go away or they'll get

[12:27]

you know, get smaller and smaller, but that's not my experience. They continue to be features of my landscape with the same charge and the same energy that they always have been. But I think what changes is my relationship to them and how instead of being sort of the I that the life happens to, those things, They just are part of the landscape. I also talk about attachment, non-attachment, and I'd like to talk about it first in terms of my family, because the biggest change in my life over the last few years is having children. I came to this kind of late. Actually, it's a question that comes up in here sometimes, but I have friends who will ask it, who aren't practitioners, and especially one friend.

[13:30]

Every time I see him, he'll ask me, so what's this thing about non-attachment? Like, how can you not be attached or have a strong attachment to your children or your wife? And it's a really good question, because the answer is, of course. Of course, I feel that the connection or the attachment I have to my children is inexpressible. So it's a feature of the landscape that has this valence, that has this charge, that is very powerful. But I want to talk about how practice changes the way that we relate to that feature. So, for instance, I guess one way to express it is that one can imagine a scenario where, because I'm either physically or mentally debilitated,

[14:47]

that I couldn't really care for my children anymore. That would be a huge loss, an inexpressible grief, devastating. But there is, and this is an easy example, there is the moment of asking oneself, let's say the way it played out was I had to decide, was I going to give up care of my children. And so there's the ego self with the attachment that's saying, hell no, there's no way I'm giving up caring for and being with my children. And then there's the ground of things as they are, which includes the interests of Sam and includes my debilitation, whatever that is, and how do I stand on that ground and say, yes, it's the right thing to do for me not to care for them.

[16:04]

It's a very prosaic example of non-attachment. It doesn't mean that the attachment doesn't exist, and it doesn't mean that it's any less strong or less painful or less intense, but instead of the attachment driving me, I can find some ground on which to place it so that I can act compassionately. So there's another way that my attachment to my children, and I want to call it attachment, it is attachment, can inform my non-attachment, and that is that my love for them, my witnessing of their situation and my experience of them and my taking care of them is a gate for me to look at other children, to other people, to everyone as my child.

[17:07]

Because it's very easy for me to have empathy and to sort of walk in Sam's shoes because I'm with him and I love him so dearly. But that experience allows me, can allow me, if I let it, to see the Sam in everyone, including myself. And we chant the Metta Sutta every Monday, right? Even at the risk of her life, a mother washes over and cares for her child, cares for all living things as if they were her child. But that's a koan right there, right? Because if attachment didn't exist, if there was no difference between the feeling that we have as a parent toward our child and the feeling that we have for Karl Rove, then that statement is meaningless, right? It has no meaning, because Karl Rove is already our child, and our child is already Karl Rove.

[18:12]

It's all equal. So that's form and emptiness right in that line, right? attachment and non-attachment, and that the non-attachment that we practice completely depends on the attachment that is part of the field, part of our landscape. So all the stuff that maybe at the beginning of my short history of practice that I thought, well, you know, it's going to Let me backtrack. So the example about my son and my sons is true about everything. All the poisons, all the shadow stuff too. The anger, the heat, the greed, the delusion. Their existence in our field and our experience of them is what allows us to practice.

[19:16]

It allows us to be compassionate. It allows us to understand and include everyone and everything. So it seems, in my experience, that we have a lot of language in our practice that we kind of get beyond. We have language that we get beyond things. There's words like wisdom beyond wisdom. We talk about the paramitas, which are perfection, a kind of transcendence, which is a perfection of a practice that allows us to transcend. It's just the word transcendence. And I guess beyond, getting beyond transcendence, enlightenment, there are words that are helpful but in a way they're a hindrance too because the transcendence is in the stuff doesn't go away.

[20:38]

Everything that we experience the transcendence is including everything that we experience in life and allowing it to be there and part of what's going on and also of going back to the beginning of experiencing and realizing that everything is who I am too. And only who I am. So I'll add that one experience I have around, I don't know how much of it is aging, just getting older, and how much is practice, is that the

[22:28]

The difficulties that I experienced, the hard stuff, my pain, my loss, my wounds, my scars, my anger, my hurt, that, you know, I really, for most of my life, wanted to get rid of them. And I think, you know, entering practice, I thought that I'd find a way to get past them, get beyond them. But, you know, it hasn't happened at all. And in fact, I think I feel things much more than I did before. But there's a relief, too. There's a relief, too. The difference between ... seeing those things as the life that I'm trying to control or trying to fix and cling to that ego self the energy that I put into doing that was exhausting or that I continue I shouldn't say I'm over there I mean it's exhausting and um and when I first when I first began to understand that that that um

[23:57]

to look at those things as features of the landscape, as natural. The natural arising of life. They're like trees, you know? Seeds get planted and then they grow. And I don't, it's not like I'm gardening them necessarily, although I'm sure I'm doing that too. It's nature. And that what practice is, is in the moment. being with them, and then seeing what happens. You make a decision one way or the other. But first, wake up to my life like I'm waking up in the forest. And all these things are nature, as natural as the forest. You know, greed, hate, and delusion. My love for Sam, my antipathy for Karl Rove. And, but that, that, okay, now what do I do? But they're there. And they're there as part of the universe.

[25:03]

And they're there as myself. That is me, right there. Another thought I have about attachment, too, and that question that I get from my friend, and the question that comes up here, I notice that most of my attachments, I'm not cultivating at all. I mean, there's the part that you cultivate, but I think that happens after the attachment arises. I think it's almost, the attachment arises like breathing. I'm not a big sports fan, but, you know, the times, like I'll watch a game, and I don't do it very much at all anymore, and let's say I have no, going in, I have no idea of who my favorite team is. But I notice it doesn't matter. At some point, I am rooting for one team or the other. And I have no idea, really, why.

[26:06]

I mean, after the fact, maybe somebody asks, why are you rooting for that team? And I could come up with answers. But the preference arose. And that, I think, stands for almost all that I'm trying to talk about. That stuff arises. So let me let it arise, and then That's when practice begins. So what about practice then? What does that mean? What allows me to stand with this composure and equanimity on the landscape? and allow the stuff to be just as it is, and then respond. Instead of trying to control, but to respond.

[27:08]

And I think our answer here, at least, and what I've been trying to do, it is Zazen. That's why we said Zazen. That's what Zazen is. It's a ritual that really, when you do it, expands out of being a ritual and becomes not a facsimile of what life is, but a living example of what our life is. Sitting on a cushion, allowing to be what it is to be, and then responding, moment after moment. We study the.

[28:09]

I'll read the comment. What time is it? Ten fifty. OK. What time do we end? Oh, okay. So, Wumen's verse. I'm back to the card now. Where the wheel revolves, even a master cannot follow it. The four cardinal half-points above, below, north, south, east, west. In other translations, they refer to the wheel as a hubless wheel, rephrasing, where the wheel revolves, The center of the wheel is the hub. Even a master cannot follow it.

[29:12]

In other translations they talk about a hubless wheel. That's a good koan. A hubless wheel. How can a wheel not have a hub? But the koan is that that's what we are. That's what the self is. A hubless wheel. That in practice instead of experience ourselves as a wheel that our life revolves around, that just experience the four cardinal half-points, above, below, north, south, east, west, which I translate as meaning the landscape. Just whatever arises, in every direction, that's who I am. Whatever is arising. You know, Dogen and Migenjo-Koen To study the self, to study the hub, is to forget the self. For the hub to disappear and to awaken to myriad things. To awaken to our landscape.

[30:15]

But a landscape where, you know, that suffering ego-self is there, and we have to deal with it. And thank God that we're dealing with it, because it's the source of our practice. That's all I'll say for now. So does anybody have questions or comments? Thank you. Mary. Thank you so much. This is so accessible. I'm really enjoying your talk. So this being with this, letting all these things be in our lives, doesn't seem so easy. It seems to me that it takes a lot of courage to be with Karl Rove, et cetera, and all of that.

[31:23]

So where does that come from? Well, first of all, I want to agree. It does take a lot of courage, in fact. I think that the courage for me comes from my desire for tenacity to suffer. And my experience of the weight on the one hand of trying to fix it and how I'm tired. I'm tired. And the grace in landing in whatever, wherever I am.

[32:33]

And I think that it's in our body to actually want to do that. Because landing where, it's like returning in a way. To be, and that's why I think we call it original self. We don't, we just, I just want to be. I want to stop doing, being versus doing. I want to stop, I want just being to be okay. And for it to be okay, It's like axiomatic. It's going to include whatever it is. And it actually ends up being okay. At least so far. When you said showing off the baby with the bathwater, an image that came to mind was putting the cart before the horse.

[33:40]

The horse can... I don't know what the horse is. The horse could be me trying to fix it, trying to drive my life, drive the car. Or, you know, maybe the horse is my life. And, you know, I can trust the horse. What's so funny? I'm just trying to keep going here. I've really enjoyed your talk. Thank you. You're from the Pleasant Hill group, aren't you? I haven't been for a while. I'm a little bit of a Terra Veda. Can you remind me your name? Dan. Dan, that's right. And I think you make great point about the landscape and just sort of being there with what's there and dealing with it. conscious point of view.

[34:54]

And at the same time, when you talk about, you know, my anger, my everything else is just there, but I can't help but thinking with the second arrow, the first arrow that strikes you, and then the second, you've gotten rid of a lot of the second arrow suffering from, from believing your anger, I guess, from not having the consciousness to know more of what anger means to you, so that I would think that your afflictions have improved, even though you say that the landscape remains exactly as it was. Well, I hope the afflictions have improved. I wasn't saying the landscape. The landscape only exists at one moment, and in the next moment it's different. And hopefully, yeah, you're right, that through practice and through the cultivating of this inclusiveness, including things, allows us so that maybe our anger doesn't turn to resentment.

[36:08]

But we have to remember that we're here right now. And right now, actually I have resentment. And then that's where you start. Yes, Alan. Well, I haven't studied this koan, but I had another take on it when you read it. You know, you asked, what is it if you take away the wheels? Well, you have a very badly functioning sled. But the word there to me that's key is function. So a car with wheels and an axle. that function as cart, or we identify this function as self. If you take away those things that it's probably not going to function, and then you've maybe deconstructed the cart for the self.

[37:13]

And yet, the notion, what I'm seeing, and this I think comes from your talk, is that what we call ourselves is intimately related to how and what we do, how we function. I think that's what you were talking about. So I'm not sure if you take away the wheels and the hassle that you actually still have a car. But it's like the question to me in the poem is, how are you functioning? So, you know, I think there's an analogy there with what you were talking about accepting. That's right. Yeah, you can't. I mean, there's the functioning is functioning and function. Right. So the functioning, even without the card is happening.

[38:16]

We are the functioning. But if we if we if we take off the aim and say, well, we are a function, then that's a problem. Yeah, and there's another conundrum which all of us experience in one way or another, dealing with aging as our functions disappear. Are we not ourself? Is this person I'm taking care of not him or herself? That's a really pressing question. It is a pressing question, and it speaks, that's a really good example about the same The hypothetical I said about my son, I had an experience of being a partner of someone who died of cancer. And I witnessed that cart changing. And in that case too, both are true.

[39:19]

The Michelle that I knew went away gradually in different steps. And so the love or the attachment that I felt for her was affected. I suffered immense loss. She suffered immense loss because she couldn't have her relationship with her kids. They couldn't have her relationship with her. So in a fundamental and inarguable way, she ceased to be Michelle, right? But still, we're here. We're there. And so, um, I didn't stop loving her. Her voice didn't stop loving her. She didn't stop loving her voice. Um, but it was painful. Nancy, do we have time for another one? Four minutes. Four? Okay. Oh, well, my question was a couple of comments ago, so I'm trying to, I'm a little unclear now,

[40:24]

It has to do with cause and effect, and making mistakes, and damage repair, and how to, and just how you go about that, and how you feel about a mistake, if you make a mistake, and how huge a mistake. and one may without really having this toxic waste that they're going to have to deal with for the rest of their given days. Right. Well, that's very impressive. I mean, that's definitely a feature of my landscape that I struggle with, a neurosis that I have to deal with. either expressing my own mistakes in a sort of too dramatic a way, or even if I don't make a mistake, taking on the state.

[41:37]

And I would say, it reminds me, when Mary, I think courage is a really good thing for practice. I think another really good thing is you've got to be kind. You've got to be really kind with yourself. You've got to be kind to let all that stuff be. I mean, it is the metasutra. You have to have a soft heart in this. It won't work. So, I would say, be kind. Hold your mistakes like your child. Like the mother holds her child. and then see what happens. One more, Jerry, and then I will. Thanks for taking us into your field. I've been studying the paramita of patience. And it seemed to me that, and Thich Nhat Hanh defines that paramita as inclusiveness.

[42:48]

And it seemed to me that that's a lot about what you were talking about. that cultivating patience, the patience that allows you to be with everything. I think that sounds right. And the idea of inclusiveness, that you include everything. It's hard. So it does take patience, right? I think you're right. Thank you.

[43:17]

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