Although sometimes we may feel like Suzuki Roshi said he felt sometimes, although we may feel sometimes as Suzuki Roshi did when he said that he felt like he was offering us snake oil, still what we're talking about is well-trodden path. I mean, it's quite well known, this practice, and many people have practiced. And the more you practice, the more you realize in what detail this practice is understood. I remember Tsukiyoshi used to talk about so many aspects of practices, which I had some intuitive confidence must be true, but it still seemed an impossible

[01:29]

goal, although the only goal I could see worth trying. But if you try, it's not actually so difficult to practice Buddhism. Any goal you have, actually, any purpose you have in your life, can't be a complete purpose. There will be some way in which it's limiting or incomplete. And the more you try to find some purpose, the more this will become clear. And the only purpose that I've ever been able to find is practice itself.

[02:57]

Perhaps we're mature enough now to realize that worldly solutions or goals aren't satisfactory, and that passions, desires, when they catch us, aren't really worth the entanglements they cause. And perhaps we're also assisted by how sick our world is,

[04:18]

It may be easier at this time to turn away from worldly solutions to our life, but any society you live in is sick. The nature of our life and our accumulated life is a kind of suffering. So, often Buddha is called a doctor. And Buddha's practice is a medicine. First of all, to make you able to live in a sick world. useless to blame the world for our own sickness. Buddhism is how to be well yourself. If you are well yourself,

[05:53]

you have an entirely different perspective on our sick world. It's not sick in the same way anymore. Just as if you're sick, sickness is a part of life, actually, and if you're sick, and you're practicing, Sickness is not anything except some different pace. But if you're attached to enjoying your life, then sickness is very unpleasant because it interferes with your enjoying your life. But if you don't have anything special you have to do, and it doesn't matter so much what your situation is, then sickness is rather interesting. But if we say sickness is not enjoying our life, then maybe almost everyone is sick.

[07:22]

because most people don't enjoy their life. So, from another point of view, Buddhism is about how to enjoy your life. Sickness, you know, can't destroy you. You can survive sickness, but maybe not practicing can destroy you. So in Buddhism, our real purpose of life is practicing. We say there are three gates to the beautiful land of nirvana. And we've been talking about them in various ways recently. One of the gates is sunyata.

[08:54]

one of the gate, and here we go on my bad memory for unfamiliar words. Another gate is an-ni-mi-ta-ta. That doesn't help you any, does it? And another one, I'll say the words first, and then I can talk about something else. Another one is a-pra-ni-hi-ta-ta, I think. Anyway, They're very closely related. One is sunyata, you know, emptiness. And the second we might call non-clinging, and the third we might call maybe the precepts. These three are, you know, maybe you do one at a time and they include the other two, but these three are the three gates to Maybe we can say nirvana. And I want to define them a little more clearly. Sunyata means the insubstantiality of everything.

[10:22]

which, if you practice zazen and you examine things closely, you will realize. The second is non-clinging, but maybe more exactly, as a practice, it means refraining, refraining from giving Refraining from letting things become occasions for clinging not clinging to determinate or conditioned things. As a practice, it means not when you see something arise or you're in some situation, you don't treat it in such a way that it gives rise to clinging. And the third in this, if you allow things

[12:04]

to become occasions for clinging, then your passions can be attached to that, and you want to control that situation, or to maintain it, or possess it. So the third is, you abstain from responding to things that spring from passion. If something's coming from some passion, some real desire to eat something particular, you have some caution. If you're just eating, that's fine. But if you can notice your activity in this way, treat your activity in this way, so that you don't

[13:30]

treat things in such a way that they become occasions for clinging, and further, so that they don't become, so that you, if they are occasions for clinging, then you stop it at the point it becomes a something you're reacting to out of strong feeling or anger, some kind of passion. If we use the terminology or what I said the other day, the term I used the other day, everything is a version If you turn with that toward emptiness, toward sunyata, toward the insubstantiality of things, then you don't react to that situation as something you can cling to, or as something you can have some strong feeling about. But if you turn with that toward the determined or mundane or conditioned world, then

[14:59]

That's what's called, you know, in the twelve chain, nidana. You respond towards things, giving birth to things. That's giving birth to things. When you turn towards things, toward the conditioned world, you're giving birth to karma, to attachment, to clinging. The thing itself for each of you in your practice doesn't change. Each thing exists. The important thing is how you turn with it, whether you turn toward the conditioned world with it or whether you turn toward sunyata with it. In a determined world, or the determinate world, the conditioned world. Remember, our second brochure on Hathahara said, an unconditioned response to a conditioned world. The conditioned world, we can say, exists in three modes. One is its complex form or its gross form.

[16:28]

that we all know. The second is its subtle form, its subtle constituents, which usually you don't know unless you practice meditation, unless you slow down, unless you can stay with things. When you can stay with things, when you can wait for things, you can begin to see the subtle nature of everything. Seeing the subtle nature of everything, the third mode is the combination of the gross or complex and the subtle, and how you participate in that combination. But unconditioned or sunyata actually includes the

[17:30]

indeterminate world and the determinate world, or the conditioned world and the unconditioned. Unconditioned has two meanings. One is, as an antithesis to condition. Another is that actually the conditioned and unconditioned are not divided, but altogether you call them the unconditioned. but normally most of us get caught in just the condition. So we have to turn away from worldly solutions, turn away from seeking for rebirth in the conditioned world. So yesterday I talked about two kinds of meditation, samatha and vipassana, or chi and quang, or calmness, maybe, serenity and insight. And the first, as I said yesterday, emphasizes the maybe static quality of zazen, the calm quality.

[19:06]

the concentrated, steady quality, in which you experience a dropping away of mind and body and a dropping away of the doer of your life. And the second emphasizes more the more active meditation, koan meditation, following your breath, letting your states of mind come and go, is more active meditation. This meditation is more, which Zen emphasizes,

[20:08]

And in Zen we continue it, not just meditation, but the same state of mind in our activity, same attitude, things come and go, and we allow them to come and go, noticing their insubstantial nature. that though we see things in a determinate or conditioned sense, the background is unconditioned, indeterminate. And if you practice in this way, you'll notice changes in your life, in how you do things. And as most of you, I think, must have noticed, some smoothness or softness in your physical nature, and some joy in doing simple things.

[21:34]

folding a piece of cloth or opening a book. Some unexplained joy because the book opens or because the cloth folds. Anyway, these two meditations I'm talking about You notice these things because they're in contrast to your usual way, most people's way of perceiving things. And we might say you're still practicing in the conditioned world,

[22:38]

with a meditation practice that makes you feel better or gives you some insight. The second more active form of meditation sometimes is called insight meditation because you're... It's not just a physical experience of softness and clarity but a mental experience of seeing the nature of things. Anyway, this is a kind of preparation for the first of the four jhanas. And the four jhanas are sometimes translated as the four trances. But if you have this kind of preparation in your practice, turning toward sunyata with everything.

[23:48]

At some point you enter the first jhāna. In the first jhāna you don't have the same kinds of contrast between gross and subtle. So you don't have the contrast, you don't have the experience so much of likeness or heaviness or something, just your experience is very consistent. So trance is an inaccurate translation, but it has some accurate quality in that

[25:15]

Everything is exactly as before except that everything is like connected or like a manifestation of light. And you have very easy, soft feelings. Your mind is very soft. Your mind has no... it's not like a horse that you have to put a... a... halter? Bride? What do you call it? Bridal. It's not as much like a bride. A bit, yeah. The bit goes in the mouth and the bridal goes around the head. Anyway, it doesn't have any rough... It doesn't have any nature at all, either. It's very soft, and it does whatever you want it to do, you know? It just flows wherever, with some situation. It doesn't have any reactions. You go like this, or it likes this, or... You know, it doesn't... back off from the situation.

[26:56]

It can be concentrated though, this way you can concentrate a flashlight beam. You can concentrate it on what you're doing completely. There still may be rough elements in your practice, and there is still an exploratory phase, a researching phase, where you experiment still with how your mind is. And the successive four jhanas give up primarily

[28:03]

those elements which are a contrast, like between awake and sleep, or researching or experimentation, and they give up joy. So the final jhāna, you've given up joy, and you no longer are experimenting. But in the first jhāna, you're still experimenting. So actually, Your practice now is a kind of experiment in which you see how to practice non-clinging, or how to practice refraining from responding to things when there's strong feeling involved. And there actually are some 37 steps, which are ways of experimenting sometimes turning away, sometimes turning toward, responding in various ways to the things that arise in our mind and our activity. If you look at them as some list or stages,

[29:32]

It's not so accurate as looking at them as a way of experimenting with your mind. The four sometimes boundless minds or sublime abodes various ways, it's called, the four boundless states of mind, you know, compassion and joy and equanimity and maybe goodness, calmness. As those begin to occur naturally, you experiment with them. Anyway, in this way, your practice, if you can practice with confidence, and bodhicitta, the thought of enlightenment, means getting rid of that contaminated likeness of yourself.

[31:21]

So as you practice with some confidence and application, this path is very clear. And if you practice really with confidence, without hesitation, we don't have to worry about all these stages. Now, when you practice non-clinging, At that moment, freedom is there. And when you practice abstaining from responding to those things that spring from passion, freedom is there. And in your zazen, and in your activity, when you turn toward the The insubstantiality, the emptiness of everything. Freedom is there. Complete freedom, you know, means there are no residues left. And then actually in our practice, there will be residues of passions or clinging. Complete freedom means there's no residues left. But just now the stopped clinging is freedom.

[33:01]

And it's enough. And eventually you'll experience the first jhana. And maybe you won't even know it, but people will tell you in various ways. And then you'll, maybe, If you have to look back, notice, there's no contrast of this kind in my life anymore. But as you practice, actually the more and more difficult it is to notice what your practice is. When you notice it means usually something's wrong. And then you can think, ah, somehow I've gone wrong, and you can correct your practice. And so in this way, our mistakes are very useful.

[34:36]

And the more strict you are with yourself, the more you'll make mistakes as a way of showing yourself clearly, being very tough with yourself. Now, you've just made a mistake and you may bite your tongue. Or some kind of way you'll signal yourself that in your deeds, either mental or speaking or thinking, you've noticed or acted in such a way that creates calm. Sometimes your experience of pressure or heaviness or sorrow precedes, gets worse even, and precedes some feeling of lightness or some spring breeze, you know, in our life.

[36:12]

some very soft feeling that is inside us. So you never know what your practice is exactly, but We have some feeling of gratitude, gratefulness for our problems and our mistakes and our strange feelings.

[37:21]

and this practice which brings everything together. Samadhi, you know, means most accurately, maybe, a collected state of mind, not just empty state of mind, but a collected state of mind. So that what usually are problems, even wisdom, knowledge or insight or calmness can be a problem if you don't have a collected state of mind. The first jhāna is a completely collected state of mind. We can say a continuous kind of samādhi. Sometimes it's called, as I said, a trance. But it's not a trance, it's only maybe like a trance in that it's more like you see things actually, more like they were a dream. The scale of which you see things is so wide that whether they go this way or that way is unimportant. You don't see things as

[38:53]

unrelated problems, requiring solutions even, but rather each thing seems complete, not at war with anything else, just in the process of turning, concluding. I think you all know what I mean, and as our practice becomes more consistent and concentrated, it'll become quite clear what I'm talking about, our practice together, and your life.

[40:27]

In this way we can cure any sickness and even make some progress or get some assistance in making our sick society more bearable. Do you have any questions? Q. May I ask if you have any other questions for Mr. President? I called the third one.

[42:39]

Precepts, because precepts give us some guidelines for how to cut off things that spring from passion. That's not what she asked, but I just wanted to say that. The same question, I think, someone asked me yesterday. She said, when we're in a situation, any of us, a conditioned situation, there are conditioned responses. And how do you participate in that situation without doing violence to the situation, but at the same time turning toward emptiness? Is that what you said? Is that all right? Turning toward the more creative side of the energy you're working with. That's more difficult than the way I said it. What Alice asked is the very nature of our practice, actually. How to respond in conditioned situations, in a conditioned way, that goes with the situation in some way but doesn't catch you.

[44:05]

If you see things, if I said the determinate world has three modes, the usefulness of this kind of distinction is in that when you perceive only the complex mode or gross mode, or you see things as complex entities, then it's almost impossible for you to do anything but be caught. But when you see the subtle, aspects of things. Maybe, you know, talking to Alan Chadwick about planting fruit trees, he talks about spreading each layer of the very fine roots that come out. You know, there are very fine hairs, maybe, almost, that come out from everything. When you perceive the subtle aspect of everything, the roots of everything, maybe. It's much easier to respond in a way, some subtle way. And if you see how the complex and the subtle go together and you can participate without even thinking, beyond thinking, it's easier even.

[45:39]

But our practical experience is, in each situation, some kind of experiment. So let me respond partly the way I, when I talked to someone yesterday about it, about how to speak and how to engage just in some banter with people, some conversation about something. Naturally, if somebody wants to talk with you, it's rather funny to turn away. So you can have some practice, like whenever anybody initiates a conversation with you, you respond. Maybe you may respond in some way which doesn't prolong the conversation, but you respond. And you can watch, it starts to roll along, and you can roll along with it, or you can respond but not push it. That's one way. Another way is, though, you don't want to be going around only responding to other people, you want to offer something yourself sometimes.

[47:03]

So if your mind isn't confused all the time, it's very easy to notice, oh, today I started three conversations. I initiated that, either by speaking or by the way I invited some conversation. And you can have some limit in which you, if you've started seven conversations during a day, you feel uncomfortable. If you started two or three, you feel okay. If you've started one or none, you feel reclusive. So, in that kind of way, we can experiment, until it's quite easy for you to participate or to refrain from participating, or even if you're in a situation which is out of hand and everybody's just da-da-da-da, you know, everybody's heads are singing, you can participate in such a way that you absorb the conversation. that instead of adding to it, you actually absorb them and all of them sort of slow down. Anyway, that's no magic, it's just a matter of practicing in that way. So in any situation like that, the more you can sense whether your participation

[48:35]

turns that particular version of the world that's occurring at that moment toward creating more and more, or toward stopping creation and just existing itself and… Does that answer a little bit of what you meant? No? Well, that's much harder. It's much better to learn how to do it and stay free of it first. Then you can learn how to do it and enjoy it and keep it going, you know. But that's rather dangerous. It depends on the purpose, you know. But even then, at some point, we've had enough of enjoyment, you know, and we fall. If possible, you've participated in a way that it's possible to stop it. But at that point, it's no longer possible to stop it, because someone in the situation is addicted to the particular kind of enjoyment that you initiated. Then you begin to have some trouble. Anyway, for our practice, we want everything to drop away.

[50:07]

Much nicer, I'll tell you. I'm not so good at it, but I don't get caught as much as I used to anymore. Some other questions? Can you speak louder? When I'm in a situation in which I'm trying to keep myself from getting caught, my mind is always reaching forward, looking out, saying, you know, this is going to happen, this is going to happen. That would be by being caught. Even though the situation changes, it goes on. It's there, right there. There's not a real problem. Well, you can fool yourself by saying, did you hear his question? No. He said, when you're in a situation which you want to continue, I think that's an unstated aspect of what you said, you're in a situation that you want to continue, how can you continue it and satisfy your wants without being caught? It's actually even more difficult than what Alice said.

[51:37]

But it may be the same thing, actually. That's like asking me, would I run into a burning house, you know? I would, I suppose, to save someone or something. well, or to run into an imaginary burning house. Well, that situation is pretty fraught with problems, and if we try to not be caught by stopping looking at the planning, this is going to lead to this and that's going to lead to that, just because you stop looking at where it's going to go doesn't mean it's not going to go there. But if you're going to go there, and you're determined to, then you have to think about how a particular situation can exist, and from the whole situation there can be some space or freedom. Freedom doesn't mean that you stop the creation of all situations.

[53:07]

maybe some situations we create and want to create. It depends on how wide that want is. If the want includes practice, if the situation exists maybe most fundamentally as a way of practice and not as a way to satisfy some want, then it's rather difficult. it's quite safe if you're careful, a quite beneficial way to exist. But if it's just, or mostly satisfying some want, and the aspect of it at practice is small or sort of tacked on for appearances, then you have some problem. I don't know if it's a good thing, and I don't know whether I act in a fashion where I don't sometimes I don't feel bad about it.

[54:32]

It's kind of humongous to me, but it's more humongous to me than it can be to somebody else. So are you saying that we can have certain habits that potentially harm other people? I think one of the things that I'm afraid of is that it impacts the community. If I want to do it, I need to do it. That is the statement of the priesthood. [...] If I want You didn't hear, right? I think she said that, briefly anyway, she finds it worse if she cuts off some natural response to things, anger or whatever.

[55:56]

and that it builds up or something, or it continues anyway, and is worse, and if she just expresses it, she gets it over with. Well, that's true, and there's lots of things we can say about that. One is, it may not be natural to respond to a particular situation with anger. It also may be a question of why did we get ourselves into that situation in the first place, which then prompts anger. The problem may have occurred by creating the situation, not in stopping the response. So our practice has to be very thorough in that we rearrange our life. If you try to practice on top of your usual life, you're not trying to rearrange your life,

[57:00]

There's no hope, because you then have the responses, natural responses. But anger is, it's maybe more a question, is anger an appropriate response, a useful response? Why do you respond with, not you, I'm just talking in general, why do we respond with anger or any particular feeling to a particular set of circumstances? Many responses may be appropriate, but until we have some space in ourselves, there's usually, you know, we've created a mold first, and then out of the mold comes anger. But when you can look more at the mold you've created, then you can look more at, well, actually I don't just want anger to come out of that mold, my purposes are other things too, and you can begin to have a more varied response. This is some practice in noticing the subtlety rather than the complex, gross form. And the more you notice the subtlety, the more your responses are more subtle, not just anger, but anger and other responses. And you begin to be able to, well, emphasize one instead of the anger, that kind of thing. Also, we all have a belief from recent Western psychology, Freud,

[58:28]

etc., about the dangers of repression and suppression. And in Freud, you either express or you suppress or repress, and there's no alternative. And I think without realizing it, most of us take that model for granted. But in Buddhism, suppression and repression are considered ridiculous things to do, I mean, not even categories of response, but it's recognized that we do do that. Anything that exists should exist, but not necessarily expressed. In fact, expression is considered to cause more problems. In a sense, expression is a reverse repression from the Buddhist point of view. that repression pushes it down into your so-called unconscious or something, and there it sort of festers. And expression is to push it out into everybody else's consciousness, and there it sort of festers. So either way it causes problems and continues rolling on and on.

[59:54]

So we want to stop that rolling on and on. Stop the endless rebirths. The turning the wheel of the Dharma means turning toward emptiness, not endless rebirths. So our field, we call our Buddhist robe, a field. Our practice, a field. Or the dhātu, field. Dharma dhātu, the field of everything. In this field, you allow whatever exists to exist, but you neither repress nor express. You may completely feel anger. Your forehead may be throbbing, but there's no need to verbalize it or physically show it or mentally show it. It just exists. And when you can do that, that actually opens up your whole body to all kinds of other experiences. The experience, the ability to do that, opens you up to the four jhanas, too. In other words, if your possibilities are expression and repression, your actual spiritual, physical, mental being is very primitive. The possible channels of existence are closed up.

[61:19]

to allow just anger or fear or hatred to just exist opens up this field which we are in. That's one way, anyway. I told this story once or twice. I had some resistance to telling it, but I'll tell it. I had some problem like this. And my problem was that I liked pretty girls very much. So every time I saw a pretty girl,

[62:25]

it was almost impossible for me not to turn my head and follow her as she went somewhere. I'd have to sort of grab my shoes and keep walking straight ahead. So I tried not looking at pretty girls for one year. Any girl, because they're all pretty, terrible. And so I would, at that time I was working at the university, and I would eat my lunch sitting on the campus, and the campus is just alive with pretty girls. So I'd be reading the Lankavatara Sutra or something, and eating my lunch, and I'd keep my eyes down like this all the time, and I'd look at the grass, and I'd follow the grass up, and if I saw a... whoops! At first it was some effort, and then after a while it became a habit. Every time I saw a girl, I just averted my eyes, like a good Hinayana monk. And in those days, I was practicing a kind of Hinayana practice. So, people would come up to me, actually, and everybody thought I was in a trance all the time, because I was always like this, and I wasn't looking around, I was reading and reading. And people, friends would come up and they'd give me a little kick, and they'd say, can I speak to you? But after about a year, I had the experience you had of some

[63:55]

some not recognizing my feelings occurred. And I had some crazy feelings, some bottled up, nothing to do with sex or girls or anything, just some crazy feelings. So I decided I had to quit that. So then I just looked anywhere. And I had to practice the third one I mentioned, stopping Well, the first, the two actually, trying to control or stop situations that caused clinging, abstaining from acting on things which were related to passion. So that was more difficult in some ways, but I didn't feel so crazy. Then a third thing happened which was rather interesting, is instead of having to stop, I found, instead of following the girl who went by, I'd just quickly focus on the next one. And she was just as... And she would be just as ravishing as the one that went by, right? So then I found I could do that with everything. Instead of allowing myself to be attracted by whatever it was, a painting or a girl or anything, I'd just focus on the next thing really quickly, with a kind of desperation, and it would be wonderful, right?

[65:17]

So I felt fantastic. I'd walk along, and each thing in front of me would be absolutely wonderful, you know? But then I got caught by that wonderful feeling, and each thing being wonderful, and then I really got caught. I got in one of the big messes of my life. Because, uh, I wanted to maintain that wonderful feeling. Anyway, I escaped. And, uh, barely. And, uh, Then after that, I don't know, it's not so difficult. I can look at things or look away from things and there's not so much problem. Anyway, I had that kind of problem. Excuse me. Oh, okay.

[66:10]

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