And yet, just because you're here and have showed up, you have some glimmer, at least that that exists, that possibility. But I'm not sure if I got your question. Okay, good. And I think I saw another one more hand. Shogun, did you have your hand? There is the famous story of Fa Zang, the Huayan, I think he was the third patriarch of the Huayan school, who wanted to demonstrate interconnectedness to the emperor because the emperor was asking him about these teachings of interconnectedness. Do you know about that? Do you know about Indra's net? Do you all know about Indra's net? Does anybody not know about Indra's net? Okay, so another image for this total holographic. I said that cultivating the empty field is kind of holographic. You can get the whole thing from each little section. And this goes back to this teaching that's developed in the five ranks of the universal in particular, totally interfusing.

[01:03]

And the image of Indra's net is that there are meshes, that the whole universe is this four-dimensional or ten-dimensional or whatever they say in string theory now, network of meshes. And at each place where the meshes meet, there's a jewel. And each jewel reflects the light of all the jewels around it. And they reflect the light of all the jewels around them and so forth forever. So this is this image of how each particular event and person and thing and so forth totally reflects the totality of the whole universe and vice versa. So that's one image of that. But Fa Zong was asked by the emperor to demonstrate this teaching and he built a room with I think 10 mirrors, and maybe there were mirrors on the ceiling and the floor, I don't know, but he put a Buddha image in the middle of this room with 10 mirrors, and the emperor could come in and look at it, and so you saw innumerable Buddhas.

[02:04]

But yeah, I don't know if I've done, tell me about the blackness that you saw. And where are you in that? Like this, but this one's in the back. And these two, you're back here and the mirrors are there? Yeah. And are you looking in one of the mirror or the other mirror or what? I think I was looking at the mirror over here. Oh, there was a mirror in front of you, too? Yeah. So there's three mirrors. Yeah. Or was there two? I mean, I was holding one, and then there was a mirror here and a mirror here. Oh, I see. So you were holding a mirror. OK, I'll have to try that. So I was going to do just more briefly without taking time to actually spend so much time doing it, talk about a couple of other meditation exercises that you can try yourself. You can do this at home. It's OK. It won't hurt you. One is about time. So this is from page 30. There's actually a few places where you can see this.

[03:06]

But one of them is on page 32. the section called Contemplating the 10,000 Years. Sort of the last half of that. Actually, before that is an image about the ox too. There's a lot of ox stuff in here, but I won't read that one. Wandering around, accept how it goes. Accepting how it goes, wander around. Do not be bounded by or settle into any place. Then the plow will break and open the ground in the field of the empty kelpa, of the empty age. And so, do you know what a kelpa is? It's a long time. There's lots of images of that. Maybe I'll mention that. One of them is a 300 acre enclosed city and there's, covering the ground, just one layer of poppy seeds. And once every three years, I think it is, somebody goes in and takes out a poppy seed.

[04:10]

And the time it takes to empty all of the poppy seeds is one kelpa. I use a different version of that, where it's a bird with a silk in her talon, and it's Mount Everest. And once every 100 years, the silk brushes the top of the mountain. Anyway, it's a long time. But then there's also this system of four kalpas. There's the kalpa of arising. There's the kalpa of abiding. There's the kalpa of decline. And then there's the empty kalpa, like where your original face before your parents were born is. And so this is a reference to that empty kalpa. He says, accepting how it goes, wander around. Do not be bounded by or settled into any place. Then the plow will break open the ground in the field of the empty kalpa. Proceeding in this manner, each event will be unobscured, each realm will appear complete. One contemplation of the 10,000 years is beginning not to dwell on appearances. Thus it is said that the mind ground contains every seed and the universal rain makes them all sprout. When awakening blossoms, desires fade and Bodhi's fruit is perfected self.

[05:15]

But this idea, one contemplation of the 10,000 years is beginning not to dwell on appearances. And I think this is really important and there's a specific meditation about time that's implied by that. Joanna Macy calls this deep time. So our practice isn't really to be here now literally, but to see how all the times are present in this time. So for example, I mentioned my practice of trying to stop the war. And if you see that in terms of the urgency of this moment in our country, then it's very easy to get kind of all upset and burnt out and discouraged and so forth. But if we see it in terms of the history of, I mentioned, the 500 years of slavery, to see it in the context of the perfection of the unfolding of karma, to see things in terms of 10,000 years, really helps.

[06:23]

So my friend Kaz Tanahashi is also a social activist. For a while he was working on a 10,000 year plan. to try and see how to develop our society. So this is something, this goes to the vertical dimension that Hoken was asking about too. This is something that Buddhists naturally have, Zen people naturally have this sense of long time. So here we are focusing this weekend on these writings from this guy who lived in the 12th century in China. long before 9-11. And in the morning, we chant the names of these people going back 2,500 years to Shakyamuni Buddha. And even if the Indian names aren't exactly historically accurate, there was somebody in each generation. So we have this very wide sense of time, actually, compared to most of how our society works on quarterly profit margins and so forth.

[07:28]

So just to consider this extent of time, to actually meditate on time, I think is a very useful, specific practice to do in zazen. To feel this time being this morning in the meditation hall, to feel the presence of, this used to be an elementary school of beings before, to feel how will the practice be How will people be supported in their practice in cloud skynine, is that how you say it? In 100 years or 500 years. We're not just practicing for ourselves or even for this, the dark ages we're living in. So this sense of this wide time I think is very helpful and very practical in terms of how we respond to the world around us. Gary Snyder says we have to both practice with urgency like our hair's on fire or our head's on fire if we don't have any hair.

[08:33]

And yet at the same time, we also have to practice. And he says that because of what's going on in the world, we have to practice that urgently. And also at the same time, we have to practice as if we have all the time in the world, both. So this consideration of time, it's not just in Hongzhe, and it's in Dogen too, but Hongzhe really expresses it. There's a couple of other places where he has similar phrases. Again, here it's just this line, one contemplation of the 10,000 years is beginning not to dwell in appearances, to get into the reality, to not just be caught by the particulars. Of course, we need to apply the ultimate reality to the particulars. Do you know about the 10 times in Huayen Buddhism? So we sometimes say that 10 directions, three times. Three times is past, present, and future. But in Huayen, in the Flower Ornament School in China, they have 10 times. There's the past, the present, and the future of the past. And there's the past, the present, and the future of the present.

[09:37]

And the past, the present, and the future of the future. And then all nine of us together is the 10th time. So you know you can change the past, right? Sure. History is just a story we tell about something that happened in the past, and it's a story we tell now. And we can change the past and its meaning depending on how we change that story. this contemplation of the 10,000 years, this being time, so Dogen talks about it in terms of being time. Joanna Macy talks about it in terms of deep time and inhabiting time, that we can become friends with beings of the future, our ancestors of the future. as well as the ancestors we have in the past. And it works in many dimensions. So we chanted, somebody, who's asking me about the women ancestors? You were, yeah. So we have ancestors in the past.

[10:40]

that we chanted this morning, and that's a particular Dharma lineage going back to Shakyamuni, and Nagarjuna, and Bodhidharma, and the sixth ancestor, and so forth, Dongshan, and Sekito, and Dongshan, and Dogen, and Taigen Soshin, who I'm named after, and so forth, Mizumi Roshi, Suzuki Roshi. We also have ancestors in the future. They're kind of watching us now, rooting for us to kind of get it together. They need us. And there's also many other kinds of ancestors. So you have a list of women ancestors too. They're not a lineage, but there are people in the past who So the ancestors are people who have supported our practice. So all of this is part of the meditation on contemplating the 10,000 years. So I started doing this two weeks ago in Chicago and then I did it again last week in Minnesota and with my group this week and I want to do it here.

[11:50]

Just go around the room and say the name of somebody in the past. Let's say somebody who's dead now, in terms of the usual way of thinking about it, who inspires you. And not a Buddhist. It could be somebody in the arts, or a philosopher, or a writer, or somebody who helps society, or just somebody. Just the first name that comes to your mind. Anyway, these are all our ancestors. So it's interesting. One time I said, make it a famous person that we all know. But then I didn't say that. And a lot of just personal names came up. Anyway, we have many ancestors. So this is part of looking at the 10,000 years, too. There are many people who. have allowed us to be here practicing, as well as that lineage of the specific transmitting ancestors. So we can have a list of great women ancestors, Buddhist ancestors, women who helped keep the practice alive. There can be lots of ways of seeing the ancestors.

[12:53]

Yes? I ask this question respectfully. Why aren't the women ancestors integrated in that? Well, here you are. 1, 2, 3, 4. Why don't we, why don't we change them? Well, okay, there's the lineage that we chant that comes from the Buddha is an historical lineage of the people who actually transmitted the teaching formally, who trained other people who could transmit it to other people who could transmit it. And it just happens that In the last 3,000 years or so, most societies on our planet in Europe as well as Asia have really discriminated against women. Do you know there's a book called The Chalice and the Blade by Ryan Eisler, which goes into that, which is really a very good book on this. So historically, it just happens in Asia that there was a patriarchal society as there was in Egypt, I mean Egypt in Europe and Egypt. There were women Dharma heirs, we know the names of some of them, but in the lineages, now there may be exceptions, but I think in the Maizumi lineage and in the Suzuki Roshi lineage, we have now in America maybe as many women teachers as men teachers.

[14:12]

But just historically in Asia, the ones that have survived, I think mostly are just men. There are women's lineages though. So anyway, and then now there are lineages. So my Shuso teacher was Blanche Hartman, who's a woman, so I'm part of her lineage in a way too. But anyway, it's just a historical fact of discrimination. What's that? Yeah, this was part of the. Yeah. But I think for us in America, it's good to chant just names of great women, ancestors, not lineage ancestors, but just like the names we each spoke today. Rilke and Albert Camus came up in one of the other groups. But I hadn't heard Timothy Leary, so thank you. Thank you all very much.

[15:14]

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