I like to welcome Lee DeBaros today. Lee's been practicing since the late 60s and presently is the treasurer of Green Gulch Farm. As treasurer, I hope you'll all donate a lot today. I often listen to the, you know, at Green Gulch. I give the announcements afterwards and I'm, you know, don't forget the donation.

[01:02]

So now I'm a lecturer. I can say whatever I want. I started practicing, actually, at Berkeley Zen Center years ago when I was sitting in the attic over there on Russell Street. And remember that? And Mel ordained me years later. So it's something of a homecoming, you know, when I come to Berkeley. I really enjoy it. I wanted to speak about Wright Effort today. There was an individual named Ruck Rucker, trimmed trees for many years at Green Hills.

[02:07]

We have a lot of trees. And Ruck, for 16 years, has come and trimmed trees. He died March 9th in an accident in River Beach. And Ruck was, this is not to eulogize or memorialize Ruck, but he was 56. He was a guy of tremendous energy and always put a complete effort out when Ruck looked at you and he was there completely for you. You felt acknowledged by Rock. Everybody remembers Rock. He did a heck of a good job at whatever he did. He had this kind of, seemed to have the kind of effortless effort that affected everyone he touched. Ice Treasurer, for instance, I used to pay him, so I had a lot of relationships with Rock.

[03:14]

many years ago. So we were thinking about effort, you know, what is this effort? What is right effort? And I've been thinking about it, and I thought I'd share some of the things I run into with you. Just to put it in some kind of context, you know, the Buddha lived 500 BC. And during his considerable efforts, his teachings, you could boil it down to, let's say, the Four Noble Truths, which are the truths of the fact of suffering, the first one, the second one, that there's a cause. The cause is ignorance and grasping. ignorance being the fact that we don't fully acknowledge and understand that things are impermanent and changing, and caused.

[04:21]

Everything's got to be embedded in that causal network. But we really have this sense of ourselves as solid beings that go through time without changing, and that we grasp at ourselves and other objects, trying to keep them, you know, to have security, get money in the bank, hold on, and kind of just gradually alienate ourselves from the world by this process. A foolhardy process that nobody's made work really well. Well, maybe somebody has, I don't actually know. But the suggestion of the Buddha is to try a different strategy. The third noble truth was that since there is a cause, maybe you could stop it. And the fourth is that there's a path for trying to stop it, the Eightfold Path they call it. And it's one of the neat things about Buddhism is that there is this Eightfold Path and you can kind of like learn it, work it out, try it out, try to penetrate it.

[05:29]

It's quite helpful. And the sixth, enumerated sixth element of that is effort, right effort. And the Buddha was really big on right effort because he really encouraged everyone to make an effort. He couldn't make your effort. He could sort of point you towards the path, he'd give you some of his wisdom, but he couldn't do your work. So he emphasized and tried to encourage people to find their own energy, find their own effort, and direct it. There's a kind of effortless effort, isn't there?

[06:40]

You know, when things seem right and harmonious. Working without resentment. And there's a kind of effortful effort. An effort where you don't bring your whole life to that effort. And we find ourselves mostly involved. I don't know about mostly, but often involved with that kind of effort, resisting what we're doing. But there do seem to be people who reside in the effortless area a little bit more, always seem to have a lot of energy, have a lot of joy, and seem to bring that to everything they do. I'm going to read you an old story that Dogen used to like, maybe he still does, about effort.

[07:51]

During the Tang Dynasty there was a certain student named Matsu who lived in a hermitage and practiced seated meditation all day. His master, and knowing that he was a vessel of the Dharma, went to him and asked, virtuous one, what are you figuring to do sitting there in meditation? Matsu replied, well, I'm figuring to make a Buddha. And the master, thereupon, took up a tile and began rubbing it on stone in front of Matsu's hermitage. And Matsu said, master, what are you doing? And the master said, I'm polishing this to make a mirror. And Matsu said, how can you make a mirror by polishing a tile on a stone, even? How can you make a Buddha by sitting in meditation, was the teacher's reply.

[09:01]

So there was Matsu. And he says, well, what should I do? This is a typical Zen student question, right? What am I supposed to do? Master said, if a man is driving a cart that won't go, should he beat the cart or beat the ox? Are you studying seated Zen, or are you studying seated Buddha? If you're studying seated Zen, Zen is not still sitting. If you're studying seated Buddha, Buddha is not a fixed form. Sorry about this. In a non-inviting dharma, there should be no grasping or rejecting. If you're studying seated Buddha, you're killing the Buddha. If you're attached to the form of sitting, you're not reaching its principle. It kind of leaves you dumbfounded, which of course is good.

[10:16]

Master Ma lived during the Tang Dynasty, as it says here, which is the golden age of Buddhism in China. There were, Zen had kind of swept China. It was in the early formative years where they were doing all sorts of interesting and different kinds of things. And Ma Tzu was the eighth ancestor in China. He goes back to Bodhidharma was the first ancestor in China. He came from India. And his teacher was the last one in India, Prajnaptara. And actually, Prajnaptara, when he sent poor old Bodhidharma to China, can you imagine being Bodhidharma and being sent to China from India? He gave him a lot of encouragement and said, also made this prediction that there would be this great horse that would trod the earth and destroy delusions.

[11:32]

this prediction came true, they say, with Master Matsu. And Matsu, Ma means horse, actually, and Tsu means patriarch. He was a giant of all the Zen masters of the time. Master Ma. There are a lot of stories about him in the Koan. Quite a guy. would risk anything. They say he could have walked like a bull and glared like a tiger. He's more over in the Renzai lineage rather than our lineage. But that's fine. They all come together in Dogen anyway. So, and you go back from Prajnatariya, you get back to Shakyamuni, who, I mean, talked about making an effort.

[12:36]

He made a tremendous effort in all areas of practice. He renounced his princely prerogatives and took on the monk's robes and tried everything. In fact, the great vow of Shakyamuni was a vow of effort, which was, I will not move from this spot until I penetrate the truth of suffering and the end of suffering. And he said, I won't move even if all the flesh falls from my body. And it almost did, actually. So if you look at all the patriarchs, they're all polishing the tile. They're all making the effort. They're all doing the practices. So what was Masu's teacher talking about? You can't make a mirror of the policy of the town.

[13:39]

He didn't say that, actually. He just said, I'm trying to. What is the effort that Masu should make? Well, Dogen later points out that, you know, you shouldn't, he says, be trying to make a Buddha. And you shouldn't get attached to sitting still. That these are the difficulties and misdirections that are happening. But then what do you do? I remember years ago, going to a teacher. Many, many years ago, I had sort of one of these Zen experiences, non-duals or whatever experiences, and then it went away, you know, it dissipated.

[14:43]

I thought, gee, that was great, I want to get back there. And gave it a try, and I remember talking to a teacher and told him that that's what I wanted to do. And the teacher said, what? That's not our practice. That's trying to get some special state of mind, right? That's trying to make what you think is a Buddha. It kind of sobered me up. I still wanted to get back to it. I'll take it. But, you know, I'm weak. And then I was like, don't get attached to sitting. I was really putting an effort out on this regard. I really got into sitting without moving at Green Gulch. I reconnected with Mel over there.

[15:47]

And at some point in my sitting practice, I was very alert and awake. And I noticed that one day I started falling over. And I was still awake, but I was falling over. And I was really surprised. And then things started to decay from there. And I was really disturbed about this, and I went to Mel and told him. And he kind of looked at me, and he said, well, that's real progress. I said, real progress. It totally blew my mind. This should be a coin. You know, like, they should add this to the program. He said, yeah, well, now you have to find your deeper intention. It's been fun. You've been playing with this.

[16:49]

You've got to find a beginner's mind again. So that was me getting attached to sitting. So I recognized me in this. wanting a special state of mind, becoming this special state of mind, and not moving. So Dogen says, don't do it. That's not what we're doing. Thank you. So really, as is revealed, and this is not actually a classical koan, so I'll just like lay it out for you. It's when polishing, the polishing itself is the mirror. The act of the practice is the path.

[17:49]

Not the mirror, not the clean mirror, but the effort to do the practice. Just do it. I think we've heard that a lot from a lot of different people. Just do it. As Suzuki Roshi says, our practice is to do what we do completely. Just do it. In fact, if you read Beginner's Mind, on effort, that's what he says, just do it. I was in Italy last summer and stayed at L'Install Abbey, which is a Benedictine in Limerick County. And I was fortunate to be able to practice with the monks there and talk to them and have little Dharma discussions with Don Bernard, who Don means like venerable. He was one of the old abbots there, a wonderful man.

[18:53]

And we would talk about about the Dharma, that's what we call the Dharma. And I would be explaining to him some of these practices and he said, you know Lee, I would be a Buddhist, except for one thing. And it was really great, he's in his benedictine robes. So what's that for, Don Bernard? And he said, well you know, the self has a way of always leading back to the self. which has to do with, you know, the ego gets involved in your practice when you're making the effort. This is in the spirit of Jeff Dua. He says, self always has a way of leading back to the self. The self tries to do the spiritual practice, but somehow the ego captures it all the time, you know, and uses it, you know, pride in it, whatever.

[19:56]

So we're kind of thrown into this kind of difficult situation of what to do. And, you know, we can decide what to do, of course, but it's kind of helpful also to look at what suggestions come down the pike to us from the Buddhas and Ancestors or whatever other religious group we happen to be interested in. And then there's the question of just doing it, really bringing our entire life to whatever and becoming intimate with it. If we do things with an ulterior motive, and we always are, but to the degree we do, we're being alienated from it. The call is not so much to perfection, to doing things right. The invitation is to intimacy, to communion with our own life.

[20:57]

This is Just Do It, is to bring ourselves forward, join our life, and meet all beings rushing forward, all historical forces, rushing forward to create and open up to that intimacy. Isn't that what we want? But we're afraid. We want to reserve something. We want to be secure. We're afraid. Love is terrifying. So we have to polish the time.

[22:18]

And I wanted to, you know, really secretly what I want to know is, what do you think? You know, what effort are you making? But I'm the lecturer, so. We do have a little bit of a question-and-answer period. Maybe we can share some things together. One way of looking at these efforts of the Four Vows, and I ask the Jishya to give me how you do it here. Beings are numberless. I vow to awaken with them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. Beings are numberless. I vow to awaken with them. Well, another way of putting that is they're numberless. I vow to save them. And this is the rising of the mind of enlightenment. This is the cultivation of bodhicitta, the Tibetans call it.

[23:26]

The intention of helpfulness in my heart. This is the first vow. Now, it's one thing to vow it. And the other thing, another thing to kind of apply ourselves to, how do we, you know, how do we cultivate this in ourselves? And I remember Tarutoku, a rebushei who was teaching at Green Gulch, and he pointed out that when you become intimately aware and realize completely or to a degree, how totally dependent you are on all other beings, on that floor you're sitting on, on the air, on your mother, on all beings, how completely intertwined we are, how we're holding hands together in life, completely connected.

[24:37]

And we are, in fact, that interconnection. When we penetrate that, mull that over, let that in, naturally it arises that we want to help everybody. It's a natural thing. It's a gift. It comes from that realization. To cultivate that realization. is to cultivate bodhichitta, the interdependence. That was Buddha's insight, wasn't it? That all things are interdependent. That there's nothing abides. Everything is temporary. Pretty hard to give up that last bastion of security. Mostly because we don't even know where it is. We got it, but it's not even letting us in on it.

[25:44]

So how do you deal with it? I mean, we were baking bread in one of the Tassajara bread bakers now lives at Green Gulch, so it's like bread world in the kitchen in the afternoon. I go in there and talk to him. He was, you know, watching this stuff, you know, they do. And these loaves start to form, and he watched the whole thing happen. And gradually, it was just a couple of days ago, he was in there. I said, well, can I roll that dough up? You know, they were kind of kneading it, and it was a matter of rolling it up into a kind of a loaf form. And it was a little tricky thing to do, and then they put it open and stick it in the oven. And I was doing it, and I thought, gee, I'd like to do this from scratch. And I was thinking, well, what is from scratch?

[26:48]

How do you make this from scratch? Actually, in my mind, I saw them with a big bowl, whipping stuff up. I thought, well, I'd like to do that part, too. But is that from scratch? Then you think, well, where did that stuff come from? And there's a barrel over there with the flour in it. And then there's the wheat field. And then, so we're all discussing this. We're rolling this stuff up, thinking, well, what's from scratch? And there's the recipe, and who did that? Who wrote, and the paper, where did that come from for the recipe? And the bowl, and the mountain, the ore, the wheat, where did the wheat come from? Well, it came from something which wasn't wheat. You know, I mean, you know, there's a kind of an evolutionary thing. So if you're going to go from scratch, you've got a lot. But we're all thinking about it, and we're thinking of it, because you start thinking this way, and you stop.

[27:49]

You think, well, that's from scratch. You forget that wheat came from someplace. I'll just go out and get the wheat, and that'll be from scratch. But then you break through to that. And then you find, and you can keep, and I think I just keep on breaking down. And it's all there, you know, we're kneading and this stuff, and I noticed as this started to happen that it became easier to knead this dough, you know, and to kind of make these loaves. And I sort of like disappeared, sort of, and my, these hands were like doing this. And then, rolled it up, and then I remember this guy said, boy Lee, you're a natural for this. And then I got into trouble, right? The ego started arising. It's like when you're hitting the bell, you think, wow, that was a nice bell. And then you make a mistake, right down the line.

[28:52]

that ego or that selfish effort aspect of it arises and it kind of fogs the thing, sort of like you're driving along and then you look in the rearview mirror and the police are there and you can't drive. So there's something, there's some problem you're still working on, thank goodness, because that's our life is working on these problems. You know, Padma Sambhava, about this ego, this Tibetan, I think it was Padma Sambhava, he used to have the ego for lunch. I mean, not to eat it, but to actually talk to it. And he'd sit it over there. He called it the, well, actually, it was kind of like eating it. But he would sit over there, and they call it, the Tibetans call it the self-grasping eye habit. Self-grasping, I have it.

[29:59]

He's sitting over there in a pub and somebody says, well, okay, I know you're going to get nervous when I make this suggestion to you, but I want you to hear me out. And he said, I've got this way, I think we can have everything. And the self-grasping iHabit goes, he's heard these, you know, I've probably done this before, and he said, oh, okay, what is it? He said, now, I think if we give everything up, that is, if we stop kind of thinking of ourselves as owning these things, then we'll get everything. And the self-grasping iHabit goes, oh, come on, you know, we've been working really hard, we finally got a few things. You know, we've got a little bit of respect, and we've got a few rings, and we've got a house, and so on. And things are kind of nice now, and now you're going to do one of these crazy things.

[30:59]

And he said, don't listen. And we talked to him, and he would try to convince him over a period of time, because Bob came to see the interdependence of all things, and the cause of suffering. And had this wonderful relationship with him. He wasn't trying to push his ego away. He didn't dislike that impulse. He actually invited it to tea. And gave it, you know, talked to it, showed it how it could have what it wanted. Which was everything. If it would give up everything. It's kind of upside down Buddhist logic, you know. When you give up or let go, all of a sudden you have, what do you have? You have the sky and the tree. You have everything.

[32:04]

Everything rushes forward to confirm you. Everything comes and meets you. This was Padmasambhava. So when we were kneading that bread, all of a sudden, all beings rushed forward and made the effort. All of history, all inanimate and animate objects, all things, came and focused on this activity as we talked about. And it became the effort. We didn't have to make it. We just opened and the effort was there. We were in harmony. Until, of course, pride slipped in.

[33:10]

But that's OK. Then there's more. more to deal with. The Dalai Lama, for instance, says that altruism is the wisest form of selfishness, talking about this sort of thing. And Jesus I think. I don't know exactly, I can't remember the quotation, but it was basically, give up your selfish efforts and get the whole world. There's a lot of parallels between Christianity, I noticed, and Judaism and Buddhism. But Kadagiri was here years ago, he told this koan about Avodhya Kirtishvara, Avodhya Kirtishvara.

[34:14]

On the right. How many arms? Right in between the memorial cards. Oh. 642 arms. 642, is that all? 642 arms. And each one, you know, has something in it that you And Awa Kishvara sees that you do, and he's like air, you know, a typewriter if you need to type. And the question was, which of all those arms are Awa Kishvara's own arms? I'll tell you what he said. None of it.

[35:16]

Because Avogadishvara doesn't own any arms. There's no abiding specific arms that Avogadishvara has. It's all interdependent. No specific solid arms. So, these are various ways of looking at interdependence, and various ways that the mind of Bodhichitta can arise, that have been tried. This is the kind of effort we can make, or we can consider that. I'm going to say something very quickly here. One important aspect of effort is consistency.

[36:21]

If our effort is inconsistent, we need to look at it. We need to look at our life. There are many lessons to be learned by our inconsistent effort. Like me, for instance. You know how you vary in your ability to do things? Sometimes your IQ is really high and sometimes you're really stupid. And sometimes you've got a lot of energy and sometimes you can't do anything. So when you're full of yourself, you know, when you're really riding the wave, you're really up there, everything's clear, you can do anything, you get more energy than anybody else, what do you do? You take on more responsibility.

[37:27]

You create more projects for yourself. You generate expectations for people that you can't meet when you're down there. This is a real hard one to give up or a real hard one to kind of adjust to for me. So what do you end up like disappointing people or not being able to, you know, people suffer, you suffer. Effort needs to be continuous, taking these things into consideration. I could talk for 45 minutes at consistency of effort, but I don't have the time. So let me see whether anyone has any questions or wants to share anything about effort. Yeah. What motivates your question, I don't understand.

[38:42]

I don't know. I mean, I could think of a few reasons. I mean, is there a reason to stop? Why should someone continue to sit continuously forever? Well, they would get very stiff, you know, and hungry. And that shouldn't sit. I mean, they can do what they want, but that's what would happen. It'd be a great deal of stint. It'd be really stint. And I think what would happen, I mean, people would have to come around to kind of ask them what's wrong. When you told the story about the Benedictine monk, I didn't quite get what he felt the difficulty was in Zen practice.

[39:51]

Was it the process of the self going back to the self that made him uncomfortable? Well, what I was doing was I was talking to him about various practices to try to do certain things, to accomplish certain things, and he saw an ego motivation in these practices. He saw me polishing the time. trying to make a Buddha. And he said, you can't make a Buddha by doing its practice. You have to just do a practice without that motivation. And in fact, the Benedictines have a practice. It's called the Jesus Prayer. It's a mantra. What's it called? The Jesus Prayer. saying Jesus over and over again, said mantras. And once they realized that, they thought, well, I should be the expert because I'm a Buddhist, you know, about mantras. And I told them, well, we don't actually do that practice much.

[40:53]

Breathing is our mantra. But that's what he meant, was that how do you leap? He was talking about how do you leap beyond what's called spiritual materialism, beyond the ego grasping at your spiritual practice. Any effort you make is fraught with danger. The self always leads back to the self. You open your mouth and you start talking about practice, you stick your foot in it immediately. And somebody can say that. And that's good, and then you can get into more explanation and find a common ground in the conversation. So we were on the same page, actually. We were in the same book, we were just on different pages. Yeah. I was thinking about, when you were talking about grasping and the suffering from that, if you have some experience in dealing with the suffering of children when they're grasping, when they're locked in that,

[41:59]

Yeah. I was in a supermarket once, and there was a little girl and a mother with a pushcart. And there was this incredible wall of bread of every different kind you could see. And they were getting stuff for a party of some kind. The mother was shopping. People were coming over. I happened to be around there. And the little girl, the mother said, well, now we have to get some bread. And the little girl kind of looked at this wall of bread, and she saw what she wanted. So she went over and said, I want to get that one. Well, the mother, that wasn't the bread that the mother needed to get. So the mother said, no, wait a second. No, oh, I want to get that one. And it started escalating, like a bad scene.

[43:04]

And the mother's kind of put a little bit more energy into, no, you know, and the kid put more energy into it. I want. And then I was watching this. And then the mother just stopped. And she took a step back and looked at the kid. And something changed. The mother said, honey, you really want that bread, don't you? You wish that you could really have that bread. You're unhappy that we're not going to get that bread. And the kid went, yeah. And the mother reached up and said, well, we need to get this bread. And then they drove off. So it was this, like, acceptance and recognition of the feelings of the kid that dissipated the energy. It's like Zazen, you know, when something comes up, if you allow it to be what it is in full awareness, it just goes away.

[44:12]

If you don't, then it has a tendency to develop its own little life in your mind and create a whole universe. So she could have created a universe with the kid and applied it. Threaten the kid, punish the kid, created all sorts of stuff around that. But instead she was able, knew how, because of her relationship with the kid, to completely accept the kid, but not do what the kid wanted. Any other questions? Yeah. One more. One more. Yeah. I like that expression, from scratch. Because there's a couple of ways to think of it. One is like, from the beginning. Including everything from the beginning. But also, isn't like, from scratch? Like, scratch is nothing. Let's start from scratch. Like, clean slate. And it seems to me like, here in practice, lots of things from the past

[45:22]

He is God.

[45:49]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ