This morning I want to comment on one of Master Hong Jue's practice, so-called practice instructions. I've done this many times, so I think most of you are familiar with Master Hong Jue's practice instructions, but Just to say a little bit about Hong Zhe, he was a 12th century Chinese monk who was well known in his time and quite highly venerated. And he was the abbot of Mount Tiantong before Ru Jing, who was Dogen's teacher. and he influenced Dogen quite a bit as the popularizer, so to speak, of what we call silent illumination Zen.

[01:13]

So his practice instructions are not like do this and do that, it's more like the underlying essence of what is practice. So he talks a lot about illumination and brings out in a very poetic way the qualities of practice. So I always find Master Hongjie to be very inspiring and to really hit the essence in ways that are different than most other ways that are expressed in Zen. So in this

[02:21]

One, he says, in the daytime the sun, at night the moon, each in turn does not blind the other. This is how a patch-robed monk steadily practices naturally without edges or seams. To gain such steadiness, you must completely withdraw from the invisible pounding and weaving of your ingrained ideas. If you want to be rid of this invisible turmoil, you must just sit through it and let go of everything. Attain fulfillment and illuminate thoroughly, light and shadow altogether forgotten. Drop off your own skin and the sense doors will be fully purified, the eye steadily discerning the brightness. Accept your function and be wholly satisfied. In the entire place, you are not restricted. The whole time, you mutually respond.

[03:26]

Right in light, there is darkness. Right in darkness, there is light. A solitary boat carries the moon. At night, it lodges amid the reed flowers, gently swaying in total brilliance." So that's his poem. So to go back to the beginning, he says, in daylight the sun and at night the moon. Each in turn does not blind the other. These are terms which we use in Soto Zen. Daytime and nighttime, the sun and the moon. Darkness and light. Daytime is like when things are illuminated.

[04:29]

When the sun is out, you see the trees, and you see the streams, and you see the mountains, and you see the city, and you see your friends. Everything is clear and clearly delineated and illuminated. And at night, when the moon is out, things are more vague, and you see less detail. This is the dark side, where everything is more concealed. And we call this oneness without differentiation. So, our true nature is this oneness without differentiation. But differentiation is also our true nature. So these are the two sides. One is the revealed, the other is the concealed. One is apparent and the other is in the shadow.

[05:36]

So our deep nature is total darkness. So in the Sandokai, Sekitoki-sen talks about this. Within darkness there is light, within light there is darkness. So the most brilliant light is within the darkness. And the essence of light is darkness. And the essence of darkness is light. light and darkness follow one another like the foot before and the foot behind in walking. So,

[06:39]

So darkness and light don't hinder each other. The absolute doesn't hinder the relative. The relative doesn't hinder the absolute. When you sit in zazen, we come back to the dark side of our nature. And then when we go out into the world, we walk into the bright side of our nature. But the bright side doesn't hinder the dark side, and the dark side doesn't hinder the bright side. When you can go back and forth without any hindrance, this is called true practice. So, back and forth, back and forth. Is that still the dark side?

[07:47]

The dark side is always present. The dark side is the basis for the light side. So this is why, you know, within stillness there is activity. Within activity there is stillness. The stillness is the basis for activity. and the activity is the function of stillness. So we talk about essence and function. The dark side is the essence and the light side is the function. So the essence of practice is never to lose sight of the stillness within activity. When you recognize the stillness within activity, then you have some stability.

[08:53]

You can never be pushed off your place. This is called being the boss wherever you are. Nothing can upset you. Zazen has a triangular basis. When you sit in Zazen, your knees are on the floor. Ideally. Your knees are on the floor, and your behind is on the floor. So this is a triple base, which is the most stable base. It's hard to push you over. So Zazen exemplifies this stability. When you serve meals on the floor to somebody, you should always go down on your knees, not squatting.

[09:56]

If you're squatting, I can come along and push you over. That would be really tragic. So you never take a position where you can be pushed over. This is called mindfulness. whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, or in all of your activity, you should always find a stable place, a stable position for all of your activity, so that you can't be pushed over. And not just in the body, but also in the mind. You find a stable place for your mind, which means that you don't say something that doesn't have a stable truth to it. So I always say practice is like water, always seeking the stable position, filling whatever vessel it enters.

[11:06]

always finding the lowest place so that it finds its stability. If you start speaking beyond your understanding, then you're losing your stability and you can be pushed over. This is why Nagarjuna, the great Buddhist philosopher, always used everyone's argument in order to show the fallacy of the argument, because he always took the lowest position, the most stable position, beyond speculation. So, then he says, this is how a patched-robe monk, just translate that as Zen student, this is how a Zen student steadily practices, naturally without edges or seams.

[12:23]

Without edges or seams is like your clothing, you know, it has edges and seams. Sometimes in Zen we talk about a seamless monument. or a seamless practice where there's no, it's just one continuous practice without things being stuck together. It's like not adding something or sticking something onto your understanding. But your understanding coming from one place, always coming from the source, not adding something from here, something from there. In the 60s, when most Zen teachers came to America, started practicing, they always advocate not shopping around.

[13:37]

Just do your practice where you are. Stay where you are. Go deeply into one thing and don't shop. Shopping is like, oh, maybe they have something good over there. Or, gee, I like what they have over there. And then you take some of this and you add it in your basket. And then you take some of that practice and put it in your basket. Pretty soon you have a kind of collection of practices. from here and there in your basket, but there's no real practice in it. It's not your own. It's patches and seams put together, something put together, a confection. So, practice, in order to be genuine, should come from one place, which is the Source, not adding something. There's nothing to add.

[14:40]

If you have to add something to your practice, it's not practice. Although we study, the study is to inspire us to go deeper into ourself, not to add things to our basket. So then he says, to gain steadiness or stability, you must completely withdraw from the invisible pounding and weaving of your ingrained ideas or opinions. In other words, we always have a lot of I think ingrained ideas are pretty good. It's like the stuff that we've collected over our lifetime, the way we construed the world, constructed it, and see it, and the ideas we have which are only partially true.

[15:53]

are partially real. Our sense data is always partial. And the way we think about things is always partial. And our expression is always partial. Because it can never be whole. Speaking is necessarily discriminating. So, he says, let go of this stuff. That's the hard part. But this is why we have such a thing called Zazen. It's the practice of allowing yourself to let go of all your ideas, to let go of all your opinions, to let go of all your partial ways of thinking, and simply sit in reality. non-dualistic thinking, or non-dualistic non-thinking.

[16:58]

That's what really Zazen is. It's just giving us the opportunity to let go of all that. But it's scary, because if we let go of all of our ideas and opinions and partiality, what will we have? I mean, we'll just have reality, but you can't hang on to reality. There's nothing to hang on to. So he said, to gain such steadiness, you must completely withdraw from the invisible pounding and weaving of your ingrained ideas. If you want to be rid of this inner turmoil, you must just sit through it and let go of everything. You know, when we sit, Zazen, this stuff comes up. Our thoughts, our ideas, our longings, our feelings, all this stuff comes up.

[18:07]

And we just sit through it. Just sit with it. Just let it come and go. Just let it come and go. And just sit there in stability. You know, we say that Zazen is painful. Life is painful. And, you know, in our life we're always trying to get comfortable. If you look at what's happening to everybody in their life, almost everybody wants to be comfortable in some way. And we have couches, we have pillows, we have food, nice food, comfort food. And we try to be as comfortable as we can. We have wealth to make us comfortable and security.

[19:14]

So we're always looking for comfort and security. And, of course, we can't find it in this way. There's no way we can find comfort and security except by letting go of everything. But we do the opposite. We try to find comfort and security by collecting and by hanging on to things. But this is the opposite of actual comfort and security. True comfort and security comes from finding inner stability and letting go of the rest. So when we sit in zazen we have pain because we want to find something comfortable and stable or comfortable and secure and there's an inner kind of battle that goes on, you know, in a kind of dichotomy.

[20:26]

In order to be comfortable and secure in zazen, we have to go the opposite way of our tendency, because when we have some pain, our tendency is to put up a defense. But in Zazen, you just have to let go of defenses and let the pain be what it is, and then it's no longer pain. But if we don't do that, then pain becomes suffering. And this is our lesson about how to live our life. So our teacher in Zazen teaches us, if you really heed the lesson, It teaches us how to live our life. Painfulness is a part of life. Not just part of life, it's underlying life.

[21:30]

Because painfulness is nothing but a feeling. But through our discriminating mind, we turn it into suffering. So how do we get rid of suffering in the world? Pretty hard. Because we want to get comfortable through acquisition instead of letting go. This is called the world of delusion, the realm of delusion. That's why the world is called the Saha world, the world which is based on delusion and suffering. Not seeing the reality, not going with the reality, even though we know that life isn't permanent, that everything is impermanent, still we act as if it's not.

[22:39]

And this causes a great deal of suffering. So people want power because power is comfort, and power, domination is comfortable and gives people the feeling of security, but it makes everybody else miserable. So we cause each other and ourselves a lot of misery through this acquisitive need to find our comfort through other people's suffering. Instead of just feeling our own pain and letting it go. So then he says,

[23:42]

Attain fulfillment and illuminate thoroughly. Light and shadow altogether forgotten. So, light and shadow is like dualistic thinking, you know. In order for there to be a shadow, there has to be an obstruction. When there's no obstruction, there's no shadow. So, illuminate thoroughly light and shadow. What creates the shadow is our sense of self, our ego, which creates the duality. So, attain fulfillment and illuminate thoroughly. So, in order to illuminate thoroughly, we have to get out of the way, because our nature is illumination.

[24:48]

Sazen is silently illuminating, just getting out of the way, taking the obstruction out of the way, so that light can simply illuminate. freely without obstruction. That's called enlightenment. Then he says, drop off your own skin and the sense dusts will be purified. The eye readily discerning the brightness. We say to see Buddha nature with your own eyes, with your naked eye. Dropping off your own skin. Dogen says, drop body and mind. But the skin is like something that holds things together, right? So we have a kind of ego skin, a kind of ego body that we build up and confines us.

[25:56]

So to let, like a snake, grow out of that skin and drop it, so that you have no boundaries. You're not confined by this idea of yourself. So, the sense dusts, you know, we have dust in our eyes, so that when we see, we don't see. Everything is revealed in front of us, but we don't see. When one is enlightened, everything is still the same. But what one sees is, oh, that's the way it really is. I've been seeing this all my life. I didn't realize that this is the way it really is. So, accept your function and be wholly satisfied.

[27:13]

Accept your function. I don't know if that's a good translation, but accept yourself as you really are. Just accept yourself as you really are. This is one of the hardest things to do. When you become enlightened, you will accept yourself as you really are, warts and all. This is me. I see how I really am. I don't, you know, have any excuse. That's it. I see. Okay. I accept. I accept. I'd be wholly satisfied. Wherever you are, you are not restricted.

[28:20]

In other words, there's no restriction. The whole time you mutually respond. It's a little strange, but it means you flow with things. You respond to what's in front of you in a real way. You have your yes and you have your no. You either, you know, take... Suzuki Roshi talked sometimes about a fish, you know, the way fish are in the water, they're like... And then if something floats in front of them, they swallow it. They don't necessarily go looking for something to eat. They know they want something to eat, but they just... And then something floats by and they eat it. Not looking for anything special, but responding appropriately.

[29:27]

So then, he says, he quotes the Sandokai of Sekito, you know, the Hokyo Zamae, the Jewel Mirror Samadhi and the Sando Kai and the Five Ranks are the documents that were always transmitted in Soto Zen in China. So, quoting from the Sando Kai, the oneness of sameness and difference, is something that's always happened, always been commented on in the Soto school. So he says, right in light there is darkness, right in darkness there is light. Meaning many things, you know. As I talked about this in the beginning.

[30:42]

And then he said, A solitary boat carries the moon. At night it lodges amid the reed flowers, gently swaying in total brilliance." This is his poetic description of Zazen. A solitary boat carries the moon. The moon is always a symbol of enlightenment. Not the Sun. The Sun is too hot and brilliant, but the Moon is a cool, cool light, bright and cool, and you can look at the Moon, you know, but it's a reflection of the Sun. reflecting the light of the sun.

[31:46]

And the moon carried in this little boat. In China they have these wonderful little boats on the lake. You've probably seen pictures of them. And in the picture you see this lonely boat with a big landscape, a little boat. And at night, a solitary boat carries the moon, and at night it lodges amid the reed flowers, which is a kind of safe place, you know, still safe, feels good, quiet, gently swaying in total brilliance. There's another the sentence that he has, which has always been my favorite. He says, when by the side of the ancient fairy, the breeze and moonlight are cool and pure, the dark vessel turns into a glowing world.

[33:05]

If you have this kind of feeling in Zazen, You're doing, you're jazzing pretty good. You know, you just let go of everything. Posture is good. Your effort is well balanced. There's no duality in your thinking. You're totally concentrated. Your energy is And no one's home. And the light just, the brilliance of your own light just shines through. That's Sazen. Silently illuminating. Do you have any question?

[34:17]

What's the difference between accepting yourself as you are and not working on something that needs to be worked on? Same thing. When you know who you are completely, when you accept yourself completely, then you know what you have to work on. Sound okay? everything and I've had occasionally the experience of letting go of everything but I've also had the experience of resignation which didn't exactly feel like letting go of everything it felt like clinging to it but being resigned to a lot of pain which was not letting go of the pain What you're not letting go of is your desire to have it some other way.

[35:28]

Even though you feel that you have resignation, it's not real true resignation. It's not yet resignation. It just feels like resignation. So we should try to have true... True resignation. So, you know, there are levels of resignation. Levels of letting go. When there's total letting go, then it's not a problem. But until that time, we have levels. So, that's okay. Just as long as you keep practicing.

[36:32]

Because life is not so, you know, it's not easy to have final resignation. Because it's like dying. It's like saying, completely letting go. I don't care what happens. Whatever happens is okay. I have the experience of feeling like going through a cycle of death and rebirth.

[37:37]

Is that Zen? It's happening. It's just life. Life is... Zen is life. Zen is life and death. Zen is beyond life and death. But every moment is a moment of birth and death. So of course, that feeling, you have that feeling because that's what every moment is. A moment of birth and death. On each moment, we have birth and death. So, otherwise, if there wasn't death, there wouldn't be any renewal. So, everything is renewed moment by moment.

[38:43]

because everything is dying moment by moment. So if we want to understand birth and death, just look at our life moment by moment, which is a microcosm of the way things go. To study the Dharma is just to study the Self. If you really study the Self carefully, you'll be studying the Dharma. And a lot of dying is not letting up. So let things die so that things come to life. Otherwise, there's no hope. Otherwise, there's simply... life looks like a disaster. But as human beings, we have this thing called, not hope exactly, but optimism. That, like, you know, you mean we're alive now and then we'll be dead.

[39:50]

And so, blah, blah, blah, you know. Black and white. But it's not black and white. It's within birth is death. Within death is birth. That's called non-duality. So our dualistic mind thinks in terms of birth and death, life and death. I don't like to use the words life and death as opposites. I think of birth and death as polarity. Because life includes both birth and death. The largeness or the wholeness of life is birth and death in this sphere, in this land. Those words could not have been too much picking and choosing, otherwise the Lamb was picked up.

[40:55]

Well, avoidance is a big part of our suffering. Avoidance, yeah, a big part of our suffering. So yes, we have to accept both sides equally. And when you sit in zazen, you have to accept both sides equally. As soon as you start to pick and choose, you fall into suffering. So, you just see how it works. And if you look at your life in a larger picture, you see how your own picking and choosing in your daily life causes your pain and suffering. So Zazen is just a microcosm of life. It's all right there. You can just see where reality is and how we cause our own problems. It takes time, you know, it takes a whole lifetime.

[42:02]

And at the end we say, I got it! Shucks! Too late. But it's not. It's not too late. The last moment is important. The last moment is probably the most important part of your life. So, you know, How we approach our demise is really important, because if we have the right attitude toward dying, then we have the right attitude toward living. So, we live our life in accordance with our understanding of what birth and death is. That's why birth and death is the great matter in Zen, in Buddhism. That's the great matter, coming to the right understanding, so you can live your life in the realm of reality.

[43:13]

Mo, did you want to say something? I was just, you sort of, kind of answered it, because I was going to ask you about reincarnation. But I guess it's all this reincarnation is going on within our own life. But I was interested in this thing of reading this guy called Amit Goswami about non-location in the quantum. You know, he said that we can reincarnation outside of this life? I mean, I wouldn't be God. Okay, yeah. I don't think in terms of reincarnation. You don't what? I don't think in terms of reincarnation. I think it's a dualistic idea. But the fact that birth, birth generates, within birth is death, within death is birth.

[44:32]

And you can draw any conclusion you want from that. Everyone will think about it in their own way and experience it in their own way, whatever it is. But there is something very fundamental about that understanding. But the rest is speculation. So, I don't give into that, I mean, it's okay to speculate, but I don't hold on to any speculative idea as this is the truth. Simply, it's okay to speculate if you want, but simply to understand that within, that birth, death, birth, death, and that regeneration comes from death, and birth gives, they just alternate, like the foot before and the foot behind are walking. It's like, boom, birth, death, birth, death.

[45:35]

That's the way it goes. And you just follow it. It's an adventure. You know, you just, what else is there? I mean, it's inevitable. And so whatever regeneration or renewal or rebirth happens is not something we know about. It's simply something that happens, that life lives us. Life, we say, I'm living my life, but actually life is living this being. This being is simply a, and I am living my life as long as I realize that life is living me. It's a cooperative activity. And to have the kind of trust that life takes care of things, it's the most important thing.

[46:42]

What will happen to me? I don't know what will happen to me when I die, but I trust that life takes care of things. Life takes care of itself within the realm of birth and death. So, I do think that nothing is lost. All the traces, you know, Master Tozan talks about the bird's path. The bird's path, or the fish's path, you know, the bird's path leaves no trace. Birds fly through the air, but let's see, they went like that. No, you can't. It's gone, right? The fish's path, it's gone. It's just simply being in the present moment, wherever you are. That's it. and to settle in that, knowing who you are, or not knowing who you are.

[47:49]

Anyway, we keep working on it. That's our real life's work, and it's never finished. Also in letting go, getting outside of your smaller self or your ego to realize your larger self, is there somewhat of a dichotomy or a contradiction there in that in zazen you are quiet and you don't have emotional outbursts and yet if you're aware or experiencing

[49:04]

Because it's only when it's my pain. Sazen is not my pain. There's just some pain in the body. As soon as you say it's mine, then you have those feelings. This is not my pain. It's simply painful legs sitting on a black cushion. Me and mine are extra. As long as there's me and mine, there's suffering. What suffers is self. When there's no self, there's no suffering. This is the message of Buddha. How to end suffering. That's the entire message of Buddha. How to end suffering. When there's a self, there's suffering. And what brings up a self is attachment and grasping. When there's no attachment, no grasping, no dualistic discrimination, then there's no self.

[50:23]

Even though there is a self. But that self is not a self. You feel that what can be one side or the other or whatever. Human nature itself has to do certain things in order to get rid of the pain. That's right. It's like Buddha nature and self nature, so to speak, are buddies. and one is the teacher of the other. So we let our self nature be the student of our Buddha nature.

[51:28]

But it's hard, you know, because the Buddha nature is a strict teacher and our self is mischievous. So we have this relationship with our self, you know, with our higher nature. And it's always a challenge. But, you know, we respect our Buddha nature and we bow to our Buddha nature, you know, and all this. And this is the grindstone, you know, which refines our nature. It's called practice. It's called continuous practice. Answer your question. Sorry.

[52:22]

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