I'd like to see if I can give a very practical lecture today, talk with you about practice. You know, every person I've met, or shall I say I've met a number of people, I think we could describe as, although they're not Buddhists, we can describe as realized people. Usually they strike you with the pleasantness and calmness of their feeling, almost aura, the connections, their beneficial connections. Their gardens seem to grow well, their associations seem to

[01:28]

sometimes literally prosper. And they seem exactly identified with what they are doing. Peculiarly one, uniquely one, what they do and themselves. There's no sense of work. It's more just kind of play, or just they're doing what they want to do. I've been fortunate enough to meet quite a number of people. I don't know if I could count, but right now I can think of three or four.

[02:32]

who live... We know something often about their works, but mostly they live rather anonymously. They... I would say that... How does it differ from a Buddha or Buddhism? I think only in scale, if we wanted to say there's a difference. that usually, without the experience of Buddhism or some encouragement, their realization is in terms of themselves, not in terms of Buddha or everyone. And two things. are common to such people that I've met. One is, at some point, they simply resolve what's important to them and also decide to do it. And without any regard to

[04:07]

whether they could do it, or whether they had the talent for it, or whether they would succeed at it. Whether they would succeed at it was not part of the decision. In fact, in each case that I am thinking of, the task was something impossible. Anyway, so we're talking about responsibility. At some point, they simply took responsibility for their own existence. Here we're talking about man-made again, or artificial. There is no dependence on systems in this. The Western man,

[05:08]

It seems to me to have an incredible dependence or belief in systems, astrology or economics or ecology, without somehow thinking that there isn't such a thing as a mistake. Even psychology, you know, a Freudian slip, you know, you don't make a mistake. Everything is intended. But that's really not so useful. That doesn't say anything. To say we're the product of natural selection doesn't say anything. We're the product of selection. Yes, that's true. Whether it could have been a different selection or not, you know. But we have this somehow progress or natural... there's something inevitable that you can't make a mistake. But as I've said, you can't clean your house by laissez-faire. Maybe we think the marketplace will decide on the price of something. But according to Buddhism, for Buddhism it's if you charge as much as the market will bear, say, or you let the market determine the price, it's your choice to get as much as you can for something.

[06:36]

That's all. It's not some system or philosophy controlling you. So, in Right Livelihood, you are supposed to not be a soothsayer, not read the market or predict births, you know, so-and-so will have a man or a boy or a girl. You're not to sell intoxicants, of course. Anyway, there's numerous ones that are rather interesting. But I would say the two main things in right livelihood is you don't use systems and you don't sell intoxicants. I mean, we're seeing now that we are able to make a mistake

[08:05]

on the scale of ruining the atmosphere of an entire planet. Now, you may say, ecology will eventually right this, and that doesn't mean anything. In the scale of anything we have any relevance to, we can ruin the atmosphere of an entire planet. So, we can make mistakes. You know, society can make mistakes. All people on the planet Entire civilization can make mistakes, just as simply as you can fall asleep at the wheel of a car, and you had no intention of killing someone. Society can fall asleep at the wheel of itself. So we tend to depend on our talent or some natural or inherent fateful system which will eventually, at the last moment, rescue us? You know, when the time comes, I'll know what to do. Well, you probably won't, actually. You may be forced into something, which you'll say, you see, I did it.

[09:32]

And it was right, but that doesn't mean anything. You might have done something else. That's like natural selection. It doesn't say anything. So Buddhism looks man-made. It certainly is. I think, the best man-made explanation of what's going on in any realm we know anything about. And it starts out with suffering, cause of suffering, and that it can be stopped by you, because suffering is also created by you. And so, the antidote is not some system, you know, but right views, right livelihood, right action, right speech, right concentration, etc. So, first characteristic of the two is

[11:03]

Such a person that I've seen takes, at some point, takes responsibility, complete responsibility for themselves. This is the life I am creating. And they know what they want to do and they decide to do it without dependence on talent, systems, fate, astrology, et cetera. The apple is gravity, you know, no rules outside, no attributes. Maybe they perceive things in terms of dharmas, multiple. So you get multiple, you know, not natural selection, multiple, momentary. I don't know. There's two more. Conditioned, impersonal.

[12:06]

not conditioned, multiple momentary impersonal something, etc. And the other aspect characteristic of all these persons, these several persons, is complete humility, genuine humility, not concerned in the least with status, with achievement, with being better than someone else. If anything, their effort is, in the sense of bodhisattva effort, to make the other person better. Just simply they don't have any interest in being better. And it's remarkable, because the persons I'm speaking of have enormously achieved But there's no interest in being better. They can be in the Mission Street Hotel of Jerome, or they can be under any circumstance, and it's the same. They're just walking around, you know.

[13:32]

Rinzai's man of no rank. Just don't make comparisons with other people. Their whole relationship to other people is how to be helpful. I mean, it's remarkable to me, not from one point of view obvious, but from another point of view remarkable how accurate how complete these persons' humility is. Humility not even isn't. They just don't think about it. They don't have time to be bothered with comparisons with other people, or whether they're good or bad, or success or failure. They just have something they want to do and they do it. That's all. The world is multiple, you know, so it doesn't make any difference whether, as I said, you have the best restaurant. There's thousands of best restaurants in Kyoto. Remember, I caught one. To be the best doesn't make any sense. The four things characterize the bodhisattva.

[15:05]

the concentration of intention, the concentration of consciousness. Let's see if I can remember them all. The concentration of... Memory. The last one is the concentration of investigation or penetration. Intention, consciousness, energy. I have to always figure it out. And these are practical things you can do. The only one that's some problem is concentration of investigation. But if you're practicing meditation, you can... the other three are not so difficult. Concentration of intention. Now, again, we're talking about a man-made world.

[16:29]

So you find out, you find out, you don't wait for your talent or your belief in yourself or I don't know what, you as a phenomenon, to appear. You say, What do I want to do? If you can't find any big thing, you just do the little things. Wash your face and something. You start very simple like that. Just what you have, you don't worry about whether it's good, bad, or indifferent. If all you can think to do is to wash your face, you limit yourself to a couple of times a day. And you, you know, you know sometimes, you know, being a monk shaving your head, that always strikes me as funny sometimes because

[18:20]

It's sort of a Dick Tracy version of the dedicated person. Dick Tracy, whoever writes Dick Tracy, what's his name? Chester Gould? Gould, yeah. Yeah, right. If he was going to make a dedicated person, a scientist or something, he'd probably baldhead, some odd outfit, right? To go along with the Joker. The Joker, that's Batman. Fearless Bartik. That actually is something of a problem, you know, because you realize that if you're sophisticated, anything you do is a kind of cartoon. I mean, look at it, isn't it a kind of a cartoon to shave your head and dress as a monk? It's like something out of a theater. But how can you get by it being a theater piece or a cartoon to actually, you know, completely exemplifying your dedication or effort?

[19:45]

What was tremendously interesting to me, coming back from Japan, is the completeness with which people wanted me to be a monk. To me, I can't explain to you how It didn't, how completely it, on my side, did not make any difference. And, in fact, I had a, it was difficult, I must say, a kind of bargain, agreement with Zuki Roshi, that I would be abbot, but I might be abbot as a layman, and not shave my head and etc. He said, okay. I needed to do that to purify myself.

[20:56]

Anyway, it's interesting how people want cartoons, and how if you can do it without self-consciousness or just do it, it's something more than a cartoon. Anyway, the ability and maybe lack of sophistication to concentrate your intentions to recognize you are just a man-made world. So you decide, what am I? At least I want to do this above everything else. And so you try to do it. Next step, you are more in the realm of meditation, concentration of energy and concentration of consciousness. And what you're trying to do in Sashin is concentration of consciousness, palpable concentration of consciousness. And concentration of energy is the same with will. As I gave you some Zazen instruction once of pressing down and lifting through your

[22:47]

and gathering your energy. And we can say gathering your consciousness too. Not straying, coming back. Starting to stray, coming back. And you experience your energy. something springy and wide, not like your body, something more fine than your body, more concentrated, not diffuse. Anyway, so the Bodhisattva has no

[23:51]

idea of anything except these four, concentration of intention, just okay, and you yourself decide to concentrate it. You don't wait for the intention to do it for you. You don't wait around. No one's going to do it for you, so you concentrate your intention yourself by your own choice, you know, in this man-made situation. and you concentrate your consciousness, your energy in your activity and walking and talking, and your consciousness in your experience. Not so much difference, but kind of different effort or Anyway, those four cover the ground sufficiently. And the last one, concentration of investigation or penetration, maybe gives you more of a clue. Now, this is also the concentration of questioning.

[25:24]

Except for this penetration, we'd say Buddhism or enlightenment is man-made, but it's not man-made, it's made by penetration, and penetration means Buddha. As I said yesterday, from one point of view we can call this dharmism, but because it's you, we call it Buddhism. And historically, of course, because it's a lineage, it's Buddhism of a particular kind, looking like Japan or China. In a similar way, we don't... It's, again, different from the Christian churches, Western churches, which the continuity is an institution. You refer to the church or the body of the church in Catholicism. Buddhism, there's no institution. There's Sangha and Buddha and Dharma. And there's lineage. So it's a matter of lineage, not of some system. A matter of your unique, as I said last night, what is Tassajara practice, not even Buddhism, what is Tassajara practice.

[26:46]

So we have no connection with Japan or anything. Just right here, Tassajara practice. Where else? So questioning, you know, in Zen we talk about a great mass of doubt. It's like that. It's like, again, concentration on your energy or consciousness. It's a kind of mass or lump, and it always is something active. And what is it? I think of the degree to which even some physicist can't separate, when you're really looking at ultimates or what we think is something fundamental, you can't separate the observation from

[28:26]

You have to say, this atom exists in observation. You can't say it exists outside of observation, really, because we only know it by observation. And the instrument or observer is part of the fact of it. So it's peculiar. You can't say anything about it without including the observer. This fact, you know, in everything is, you will see by your practice, more and more significant. And this questioning or penetration, or waiting. Sometimes we can say waiting. You wait for something to speak to you or appear to you. You don't define it. This is also penetration.

[29:55]

Last night I spoke of the painted moon. Last two or three nights, sliver of the moon has been setting over this mountain here, or rising, I don't know, looks like, maybe, setting. Anyway, it's going down. And we can ask, you know, just very simply, does the moon belong to Tassajara? It's disappearing soon, but while it's there, does it belong to Tassajara? Or does it belong to Rusty Schweikart or some astronaut who lands on it? Or does it belong to a farmer or a green gulch where they take the moon into consideration in planting? Or does it belong to man and woman with your periods every month? So when you point to the moon, you know, you already include the moon.

[31:29]

One thing that occurs to me just now is a rather humorous example of if you practice your tendency not to describe things. It occurred a while ago. People make fun of me about it because Mike Dixon loaned me, or gave me, or he didn't want, or something, a large painting, which was a... except for a rather dangerous-looking, grimacing mouth, it was a complete reproduction of the Marilyn Monroe calendar, on a big scale. And I put it up in the kitchen. And my daughter wouldn't bring her friends to the house. And I could not understand the problem, because people would say, well, what? I'd say, it's just pink and blue. Because all it was is pink and blue. She was on a blue sky, and she was pink.

[32:54]

And I really had no response to it outside of pink and blue. I mean, it almost didn't occur to me it was a naked, very naked man. And so now they make fun of me, they say, oh I know, it's just pink and blue. But I wasn't just making it up, you know, it was actually, you know, maybe that's why Zen art tends toward abstraction, or Suzuki Ueshi said, somebody asked him what art was, he said, an accumulation of sincere drops. So you do, you don't, just pink and blue, that's all. Someone asked me, too, about, well, what do you trust? I can't trust my impulses because every moment there is something contrary. Anyway, something like that. We have this kind of practical problem in practicing. And of course, you

[34:28]

have to stick to something. Usually if it's so changeable, it's not your pure source impulse. But one thing that's helpful if you're practicing in that way is to try to penetrate what looks like a contrary impulse as a comment on what you're doing. So don't see it as something trying to, try to see it as actually a continuation or a comment or an interpretation by you of what you're doing. I mean, often if you're working, for instance, just at the moment you're going to penetrate, you know, you feel, I better get up and get a cup of coffee. So if you understand yourself better, getting up to get a cup of coffee is not an impulse that you should or shouldn't follow, it's a comment, it's a signal that you're taking, you want to take a breath and go, maybe you interpret it as, I'll have a cup of coffee, but you can satisfy it by, and then concentrating some more.

[36:03]

Or, if you're familiar with yourself, you can, without breaking your concentration, actually get up and have a cup of coffee and come back. Mumon Roshi was superb at maintaining his concentration in the midst of circumstances. As I told you, I watched him do calligraphy on a bed in a Hilton hotel in San Francisco, one of those soft beds with the blankets in disarray, with the ink balancing on the blankets. And he was sort of moving somewhat and doing calligraphy on a fan, which has a surface like this, and holding it and talking to people. And no ink got spilled. I couldn't believe it. Though his robe has many spots of ink. Still, he's pretty good. We're watching him in Japan. Reb and I have, the last couple of years, watched him. And people are talking to him and making jokes, and he sometimes responds.

[37:36]

And people are spreading out pieces of paper in front of him and making ink for him. And he's using this huge brush. And if you know anything about calligraphy, you put the brush in the ink and you make two kinds of ink, basically. You make ink that's two or more. It's a continuum. You have ink with a lot of water, and then you have stronger and stronger ink up this stone curve. It goes like this, you see? Like that. You make a lot of water there, and you bring it up, and you grind it here, and push it down and grind it. So it's quite black here, and left more and more gray to the water. So you put your brush in, and as you pull the brush through it, you get various portions of the brush wet. So there's maybe, and then the last bit is maybe you just have the tip come across the very dark part. So when you put your brush down, the tip hits first as a dark spot and then it sweeps. And you get so intuitively, like hitting the bell, you get intuitively that you just put your brush in and you pull it out. But usually you have a brush then partially wet and in a various way.

[39:02]

in various ways wet, but not completely wet. The upper part is usually fairly dry, or you can't control it. And you use different sized brushes, but Momon Roshi is so good, he's really a G6 at this. He uses a great big brush, you know, that big around, and he just lops it in there. And then he just goes... I saw him do a dragon, I figured out it must be a dragon, he gets the brush wet and he went, he had a big piece of paper and he went, splat! And there was a very kind of horny dragon up at the top of the character just from his splat, you know. And then he came down and turned it into a ryu, something, and trailed off at the end like a tail.

[40:05]

But that comes from... Like Cezanne, he probably couldn't draw. It comes from concentration. It comes from being able to maintain your concentration, so you don't lose your concentration when your brush is in the ink, or on the paper, or when someone's making a joke. And you, by your practice, will begin to feel that, and you'll see when the gaps occur. And the gaps usually occur when you think of yourself, when you have an objectification of yourself. We're not talking about any big philosophy, just practically speaking. When you think of yourself, wonder how you're doing, wonder how someone is perceiving you, you lose that concentration. You no longer can act from that concentration. You no longer can trust your impulses. There's a very interesting, you know, I've been talking, there's four koans in the Blue Cliff Records.

[41:34]

Dealing with Joshu and the ultimate path has no difficulties, is not difficult. I think there's number two and number 57, 58, and 59. And the 57, I've been talking about 59 recently, the other half of Joshu's talk. Joshua used Sozon, the third patriarch, on believing in heart, the initial statement. The ultimate path has no difficulties, only refrain from picking and choosing. He used that many times. So these koans are all about monks questioning him about using it. So a monk comes up and says, the ultimate path has no difficulties. Only don't pick and choose.

[42:54]

And then, let's see, he says something about why, some short question he says. How can one do something without picking and choosing? Anyway, basically that's what he says. And Joshu says, I alone am under, in heaven and earth, I alone am the honored one. Isn't that wonderful? He would say that. In effect, he's saying, do something that's not picking and choosing. So Joshua says, I alone am the honoured one under heaven and earth. So the monk says, this is picking and choosing. And Joshua says, you stupid oaf, where is the picking and choosing? And the commentary says, before you penetrate, it's like a silver mountain, an iron wall. After you penetrate, after you penetrate, you find out, you realize that from the beginning, you yourself are the silver mountain and the iron wall.

[44:47]

If you say to me, so what? In the commentary it says, If you say to me, so what? That's pretty practical. So what? From the beginning of the iron wall. That's very good. Who cares anyway? So the commentator says, if you say so what, let me ask you to reveal an action. This is a very practical statement. I don't know what it is in the Chinese, but in English it's rather a technical, practical statement. If you say so what, let me ask you, reveal an action. and observe an environment at the crossing place that's interesting reveal an action let me ask you reveal an action and observe an environment at the crossing place without any idea of holy or profane good or bad holy or profane

[46:23]

If you're not yet ready for this, observe Joshu, this ancient sage. That's the commentary. And then it's the monk asks, and Joshu says, I alone, under heaven and earth, am the honored one. Anyway, this koan just simply means this Bodhisattva path. I alone am taking responsibility for this situation. It means penetration. The commentary, if you can just limit yourself, it's also the idea of that statement, if you can just limit yourself to revealing an action, observing an environment, it means action in an environment, penetrate, without, at a crossing place, very particular, without any idea of holy or profane, just this kind of completely, so specific, you can't even call it humble,

[47:54]

No idea beyond that. So this means concentration of intention. Because there's no alternative. What do you really have but your... If you have anything, you have your intention. What do you want to pass on in your life? What do you want to do with your life? So you concentrate this intention. You yourself do it. And you concentrate your consciousness to realize your intention. And you concentrate your energy to realize your intention. And you concentrate your investigation or penetration The practice is that simple, just to do those things. But you can't do it when you have many beliefs. Then you can't see the value of it.

[49:33]

livelihood, right action, right speech, etc. Tassajara practice. Your Tassajara practice.

[50:23]

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