Gohan, the Japanese term for rice, said, yeah, I did. And Joseph said, well then, please go wash your bowl. So, go wash your bowl, you know. Actually means, go empty your mind. So, you know, when he says, have you had your meal, what he means is, have you been having some kind of realization? So, when the teacher asks this kind of question, it's ambiguous, you know. It can mean, well, yes, I had my breakfast, or it can mean, yes, I'm having a relaxation. And then Joshua says, well, go wash the bowl.

[01:03]

Which would mean, go wash the bowl, or... But we always take it to mean emptying your mind. Let go of your attainment, is what it means. Don't... Don't... Don't... Be attached to your attainment. Whatever experience you had, just chalk it up, put a chalk mark, and go on. And let go of it. Then, drink your tea. There's another little story of joshuas. You probably know this one too. Joshuas in the monastery, And George was talking to him, having an interview.

[02:07]

And I can't remember exactly when it came back. Excuse me, Sergeant. Can you speak up just a little bit? The brain is computing. OK. Or I can shut this window. OK. Does anybody want to? I'll speak up. I'd rather speak up than shut the window. Jaojo says to the monk, have you been to this monastery before? And the monk says, no, I haven't. And Jaojo says, well, have a cup of tea. And the next monk comes and says, have you been to this monastery before? And the monk says, yes, I have. And Jaojo says, well, have a cup of tea. And the director comes up to Jaojo and says, One guy said he had, the other guy said he hadn't, and both of them said, have a cup of tea.

[03:09]

I didn't quite get it. And John said, Director, have a cup of tea. So this is Zhaozhou's spontaneous response. So he says, Zhaozhou's answers, wash out your bowl and drink your tea, do not require deliberation. He says they're arrangements, but deliberation, not delivering. He's giving a spontaneous response. Thoroughly observing each thing with the whole eye is a patchwork monk or a Zen student spontaneous conduct. In other words, seeing with the whole eye.

[04:10]

This is, you know, in the Buddha statue, often there's an eye in the middle of the forehead. This is the whole eye. So, to see things without discrimination, totally and thoroughly, is the student's spontaneous conduct, or the teacher's conduct, or your conduct. So, how does one do that? It's like not having preconceptions. Sometimes, You know, if you have a shuso, the head monk, and then the head monk has a shuso ceremony and a practice period, which is, everyone asks the shuso a question.

[05:20]

And then the shuso answers the question. And in order to answer the question, you can't have anything in your mind. You have to have a complete, totally, what? Empty. mind, without any preconceptions or thoughts. And then the question comes, and then the answer or the response comes from that empty mind. When I have sasheen, often I do shosam. Shosam is like post-shuso, generally. response to the question. I don't want to say answers to questions, but response to the question. And in order to do that, I had nothing in my mind at all. And then the student, I look at the student, and the student looks at me, and the student says something, and I'm not thinking anything at all.

[06:26]

just simply looking, and then something comes to meet that question or the response. So, without discriminating and without... The response is to come from some place which is goes through the filter of the mind, but it doesn't, it isn't by the thinking mind, but isn't discriminated by the thinking mind when it goes through. So, he says, thoroughly observing each thing with the whole eye is a patchwork monk's spontaneous conduct. Do you have any questions?

[07:29]

Yes? When he commented about stillness being the part that doesn't care... Doesn't care? No. It's not bothered. It's not bothered. That's what I wanted to ask about, because sometimes it's hard... it's easier... it's easy to not care, but it's hard to be unperturbed. Yeah, there's a difference between... non-attachment and indifference. Sometimes in the literature, non-attachment is translated as indifference, especially in the Pali literature. The monk is indifferent, but actually the monk is non-attached. Indifference kind of means, you know, you don't take it in.

[08:37]

But actually, you take everything in, and what you want to retain, you retain, and what you don't want to retain, you spit out. Suzuki Roshi described it as the frog. The frog sitting on a rock by the pond, Very still. You know, just the way frogs are. Blink sometimes. And then the fly goes... It's some kind of insect. And as soon as the fly gets to a certain place, the tongue goes... More of it. But that's not attachment. You can either swallow it or spit it out. But it's not a difference. How does this relate to equanimity? The fly... I mean, the TV and the frog?

[09:45]

No, I'm trying to... of the frog specifically I'm thinking of, of non-attachment and the idea of equanimity, of... Equality, yeah, it's that you're in the middle. You're at the balance point of the... and so you don't get tossed up when the totter goes down, when the teeter-totter goes down, you don't get bumped. And you don't make these wide swings, right? But you stay in the middle. But you're the balance point for both sides. So both sides can exist, but you don't get caught by one side or the other. Which is hard to do, because you tend to want to sledge over to one side or the other.

[10:50]

If you keep coming back to the center, there's the practice, yeah. I've never seen a frog have a temper tantrum when it missed the fly. You have to speak a little bit slower. I've never seen a frog have a temper tantrum when it missed the fly. But it simply sits there and waits for the next one. Yeah, yeah. You don't have a tantrum. As far as I know. Who knows? Sometimes I think that ants have big brains, you know. But we think that they're just instinctive. So could you add some more commentary to the sentence that says, of a world, meeting conditions, the self joyfully enters Samadhis in all directions, delusions, and accepts its function.

[12:04]

What is exactly the phrase, accepts its function? What is the function there? Accepting, well, I would say here, it's a little ambiguous. Traveling the world, meeting conditions, you joyfully enter Samadhi in all directions and accept its function, the function of the Samadhi. Okay. Which is? to be open and receptive without assuming anything, and to meet things without self.

[13:08]

You know, self, we all think of ourselves as a self. And then we think of our body as our self, and so forth, and our thinking, and our brains, and our emotions, and feelings, and all this is our self. But technically speaking, in dharma terms, in usual terms, all these describe the self. But in dharma terms, self means that which arises through grasping, clinging, and attachment. So when there's no grasping, clinging, or attachment, there is no self. Even though there's speaking, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, and so forth, and discriminating, there's not necessarily a self. But a self arises

[14:13]

as ego, so to speak. And this is not necessary. It's not necessary to have a self which arises through grasping, clinging, and attachment. So, if you look at it in a sense of There are two ways of looking at personality. There's false personality and true personality. So false personality is that which is formed through grasping, clinging, and attachment. And creating a cake, creating a concoction, which we believe in as ourselves. You know, we put one thing on top of another, we gather something from here and something from there, and pretty soon we're this or we're that.

[15:19]

And we buy into that. It's okay to be this or that. We're all this or that, but we don't have to buy into it. We're going to be attached to that. So, true personality is just the basic personality, the basic person, which is not, which is simply dharmas. as Buddha says, there's no self or personality in it, even though we feel a personality and so forth, but it's a person not attached to the personality. And we think, and so forth, and we call ourselves it, and we name ourselves and so forth. When there's no attachment, no grasping and clinging to things, or to our self, then there's no self, in Buddhist terms, in Dharma terms.

[16:27]

And that's when he says, fully enter Samadhi and all the illusions and accept its function, which is to empty out, so as not to be full of self. He said, it's self-care. That made it more personal by saying self, yourself. Did you have a question? I did. I was wondering if you could comment on the conditions that seem to lead to this clinging, this attachment. Well, desire. Desire is the Four Noble Truths. Life has a tendency to to satisfaction, is the first one, called suffering. And the second one is, the reason is, because of desire. And desire, the Buddha said there is a way to get out of suffering, and it's to let go of desire, which is the cause of suffering, through clinging and attachment to a self.

[17:40]

Is it because you think we feel that we're insufficient, that we desire something else, or we're frightened, or... Well, yeah, all the reasons. You think he's going to leave us and we have to hold him? Of course. Yeah. I mean, all the reasons you can think of are the reasons. And, you know, desire, though, has two aspects. reasonable desire. Reasonable desire is the desire to continue, the desire to eat and sleep and all the functions, and then, you know, the desire to be happy and so forth. And then there is the desire which is over satisfaction, in other words, beyond satisfaction.

[18:45]

And the problem is that, you know, there's always a restlessness in people. Everyone has this kind of restlessness, because if it wasn't there, we'd just stand still. So since everything is moving and changing all the time, there is a restlessness. And in Dharma practice, the trick is to find the balance, the weight at the bottom that keeps the restlessness from running wild. And it balances the restlessness. So the restlessness has a rhythm, can have a rhythm. and a contentment without having to have too much, without having to create, keep creating interesting things to keep it happy.

[19:53]

And so the trick of Dharma is to be able to see in the smallest or most mundane experience, great happiness. And the trick of that is to be always in samadhi. Because if you are in samadhi, then everything becomes alive. But when you're not in samadhi, you keep looking for life. You keep looking for things to make you alive. But if you're in samadhi, you don't need all that, because everything is satisfying enough. Whatever you're doing is satisfying enough. a very satisfying experience. Sweeping the floors is a satisfying experience. Sitting in Zaza is a satisfying experience. You don't need a lot of excitement, you know. You don't need wars and stuff like that, but you're excited to keep your, you know, on edge.

[21:03]

So, also, Samadhi is like entering your innocence, regaining your innocence, kind of like a child. So you're not childish, but you're childlike. You can enjoy just existing. And everything is new. And he discovered new things all the time. It's like looking at a tide pool. Samadhi is like looking at a tide pool. It doesn't look like anything, but then pretty soon, you start seeing all these worlds. If you could say something about how to, I guess, find samadhi or practice.

[22:11]

with the situation, I find myself now totally overwhelming things that I have to do three weeks ago and I want to come to the retreat and do the whole retreat. The difficulty of our life, which is different than the difficulty of lives of other people in different nations, is that we have so much, so much opportunity that we don't know how to regulate our life. Whereas in most places, people are looking for opportunities. But, you know, you can't have a flat surface without it collecting things within a day or two. You know. It's just, it's just onrushing stuff, you know. And things to do, you know. If you look at a bulletin board, Thousands of events, you know. Oh, that would be great.

[23:12]

Oh, I'd really like to go to this one. Pretty soon, you know, oh, Jesus, you're making two or three appointments at the same time. So, how to regulate your life. You have to learn how to regulate your life. And not do things. You don't have to do all those things. What's the most important? What is the most important thing? What are the most important things to do? And maybe there are three, or four, or five. And then the other things you just don't do, and you'll miss them. Too bad. Or maybe it's good. But you have to do that. That's called, you know, we get into this kind of greedy space where we want to eat everything. Yeah, I know all about that. How to regulate, that's really important. That's probably one of the most important things we have to do because as information keeps expanding and as people become more competent and have things to say and show us and perform for us, and that we have to look at and listen to and attend, the more we have to narrow it down to what we can do.

[24:37]

So I have the same problem. In order for me to do what I have to do, I don't go places. I go very few places. I come here. But I don't go to very many other places. And I don't go to Europe, and I don't go to, you know, Mexico. I pretty much keep, and I still can't do anything. So anyway. And there's composure in that. What? There's composure in that for you. Well, there's composure by regulation, by regulating my activities. So what time are we over? About time.

[25:28]

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