I've been I've been wondering over the last few months. Can you hear me in the back? Okay I've been wondering over the last few months How To Give these Saturday lectures in San Francisco I Give some talk every Sunday at Green Gulch and every Friday night with the city practice period students and this time of year sometimes at Tassara I

[01:12]

But I'm not satisfied with Ah The way or the way I found or to give lectures here in the city If I'm here all the time, you know Every as I was last year almost all the time. I was here Because category Roshi was at Tassara I got to know you all pretty well Even the new students who guest students who are only here for a few weeks. I knew pretty well I

[02:38]

I'm sure my Talks must be of some use to you no matter what they're like. I think they must be useful to some of you At least some of you say so But Still I have some Feelings Suzuki Roshi used to say that when he gave lectures Often he felt like he was selling which oil you know and And Sometimes I have that feeling and I'm selling which oil, you know Because you don't quite know what I mean. I can tell you quite don't Know and I have a feeling I'm putting something over on you. You know Can you still hear me in the back? Okay. What did you do this time? Even the music music wears out after All right

[03:39]

You know, I'm not I'm not interested in Speaking about something you don't know Already, you know, I'm really only interested in talking about what you already know And The knowledge we We mean in Buddhism wisdom or knowledge is knowing each other and knowing yourself Intimately So

[05:05]

If I if I'm You know Selling you which oil, you know But it's like I'm turning you on, you know to Buddhism Or Getting you interested in Buddhism, you know and The I think one of the precepts precepts is don't Sell intoxicants, you know and Suzuki Roshi always Interpreted that don't sell Buddhism or don't make Buddhism intoxicating So I'm not so interested in vibes, you know Responding to your Vibes about Buddhism Because the person that gets turned on to Buddhism wears out after a while So It's nuts it's possible, you know to go to various colleges and give talks and you'd have Many college students coming to Zen Center quite excited about Buddhism. And then what would we do? I don't know

[06:12]

It's no place for them to practice No way, you know And sometimes I wish we were all Gentler and more developed By gentler, I also mean stronger I wonder sometimes if our Separated family way of Bringing up bringing each we each most of us were brought up in a separate household Without too much sharing of the responsibility of how you grew up And I'm not an anthropologist but my impression is that That in most societies

[07:14]

there's a Great deal of sharing And Of the development of a child, you know Maybe that's why a group practice is pretty important for us Because until Until You know yourself pretty well until other people are not separated from you Other people are transparent, you know, do you know them? You're this should be the main focus of your practice how to practice with others So my Interest, you know is to know you better And at Tassajara that's possible, you know

[08:19]

And maybe in the city practice period that's somewhat more possible than here and Green Gulch too because it's only 20 people But here with so many new people each week I Never know quite what to Say should I give a beginner's lecture and even a beginner's lecture if I talk about very basic aspects of Buddhism still Those basic aspects include all of Buddhism It's like Again I imagine The Soil isn't at least it seems when I've been in the woods or in some isolated prairie. The soil is very Receptive and so loose and soft if it's been undisturbed by people

[09:24]

and very receptive to rain or Seeds But soil on Even farms where there's so much activity and horses and tractors and things Is all packed and has to be worked, you know over And I think most of our soil is like that we're all packed down and You need to be worked over in some way So So our Our Practice is very Intimate you know and

[10:26]

And To really talk about Buddhism we have to have some very receptive knowing of each other and some intimacy and In addition to feeling like sometimes like I'm selling which oil you know to you Also if I talk about Buddhism in some detail I Begin to feel embarrassed, you know Because I don't know you so well some of you that I'm rather embarrassed about talking about Something that when you look at it with your ordinary mind looks so delicate You There's a story I told part of last night and I've always liked which is

[11:44]

There's a monk that's sick And his friend comes to him and says Where will I meet you? after Death and the monk I don't know. I don't know what he says. Actually, what did he say? He says I Don't know anyway, he says something and Then his friend says to him you should have said he corrects him, you know, you should have said there's no place To meet and there's no need to meet anywhere. There's no place there whether we're meeting or not meeting occurs Anyway, it's that kind of conversation

[12:48]

But the interesting part of the story, you know is The poem which general wrote and the poem goes between Alienation and friendship there is no Separation Ah Between intimacy and alienation there is no separation And then it says some other things about the same but the last line is The East Branch of the tree, you know knows the whole spring as does the West Branch And each of you, you know knows the whole spring And there's no need for meeting or not meeting, you know

[13:54]

But Still That means they know Each other thoroughly, you know, they know the trunk Maybe of our practice of our life thoroughly We can say even that We don't need Buddhism we're just trying to know each other and ourselves completely And Buddhism only comes in when you find it's useful So in some ways to talk about Buddhism in the beginning is Is some not right, you know, it just is to get you interested, you know Then we can forget about Buddhism Because what we are really interested in is knowing each other completely Then you find that knowing each other completely isn't so easy because you have many barriers

[15:04]

Knowing yourself completely is almost impossible. And then when you're confronted with that impossibility You're confronted with Buddhism So At that point we can talk about Buddhism Last Night I talked about them secret practice Then I could ask you what do you think secret practice means but

[16:07]

What it means is is Take some Time to feel out and actually to practice through It's a kind of door, you know into letting your practice flow without The distinctions of Acknowledging it in various ways we want to acknowledge our practice So What I've been wondering is How

[17:18]

To give these Saturday talks I've I've considered perhaps not having Saturday talks at all. Yeah So new people Would Have Zazen instruction and practice here And maybe there we'd have to have some other way, you know of meeting with each other But that doesn't seem so satisfactory And Another way is I could Give the same talk every Saturday That could become quite interesting You know, I would find it I could have to be interesting and I couldn't do it

[18:27]

That's why I stopped giving talks at one of the reasons I stopped giving talks at one of the reasons I stopped giving talks At college Suki or she asked me to stop giving talks at colleges But I wanted to stop and one of the reasons I wanted to stop is I just didn't want to give another talk about beginning Buddhism again Particularly since there was no place for these people to practice once they got interested Another is that someone else could give the Saturday talks, you know And I could concentrate on Tassajar and green gilch in the practice city practice period And another possibility is I could just go on doing it this way because it's okay, you know, of course it's okay And another might be to have Saturday just questions and answers

[19:32]

Then I would come here and Have a little television set and watch it until someone asked me a question. I could turn it off Answered a question and go back in it. I Would watch about Watergate But then you'd decide what I talk about, you know Anyway Suzuki Roshi had this same feeling as I have and I Understand it much better now and I did then and He gave I look back at my notes from 19 Early 1960s and

[20:35]

Almost every Sunday lecture was almost the same and Every Wednesday night lecture was more What's different, you know If I The Wednesday night lectures he'd take some thing like hateful the path or blue cliff records or their Nirvana Nirvana Sutra Or some saying of Dogen's and for a series of weeks. He would talk about one point of it after another often very basic but it depended on Knowing What went before, you know, so Sunday lectures he gave sort of a general talk that nearly the same every week

[21:41]

I Know when Chino sensei first came to America After about one year of going to Suzuki Roshi's lectures He said Suzuki Roshi is only 10 years old. He's a young man. He doesn't have a lot of experience Telling you about this much of Buddhism, you know Because you're all beginners. He can't actually talk about Buddhism and he went he used to go up to Suzuki Roshi and he talked with me about it Won't you give some more some deeper lectures or more advanced Buddhism Let's see Suzuki Roshi mostly Just Listened, you know, he does didn't say much but He also said that he tried when he first came and he had that feeling, you know So that I explained of selling which oil So

[22:50]

You So he did two things he concentrated on teaching just a few people and he Made his lectures his general lectures Very profound if you know Buddhism, well, the more you look at Suzuki Roshi's lectures, even though they're very simple They're very almost impossible to actually unless you know Buddhism very well to see what he's really talking about My lectures are somewhere in between I Take mine aren't so simple as his maybe And they're not as deep as his but I take some aspect that in his lectures is only an intimation, you know And I take that aspect and develop it, you know for you I

[24:20]

Don't think I can ask you for a Roll call, you know on what we should do You know, or if the I should give lectures any differently or something like that But Maybe Confessing to you my feeling will help me find some way to Give these Saturday Saturday lectures in some more satisfactory way I May be question and answer is

[25:21]

Best way to try for a while So do you have any questions? I Could could you hear what he said his question was What about the after-effects of zazen His He feels and I and I know other people feel that your head gets out of control or too spaced out After sitting particularly maybe after sessions Hmm Now that's true I

[26:23]

remember When I first started doing sessions I found coming out to the session after seven days It was terrifying. He'd walk out in this Bush Street cars would be going and bright lights and It's terrible. I just wanted to retreat right back in you know That was the first year, you know, and then the second year After I got a little better at sessions. I was very exacting, you know And I would come out of the session and The street didn't bother me so much, but I was very exacting everything just there, you know, I Became impossible to live with My wife almost left me for about two weeks it was after a session I Drove everyone up the wall, you know Anyway, we have various effects of zazen actually last night I talked about it

[27:28]

To It's not just the effects of zazen That one has to be careful of but the effects of zazen that we want to resist So there's some subtle point some effects of zazen rather scare us and So we We We worry about whether anybody else has had this experience before or whether I might be going crazy Or whether your friend might be going crazy, you know So there's some problem here because you try to It's a kind of acknowledging your practice when you do that and the other side is when you feel

[28:33]

Pretty good and you want to have a ticker tape, you know of your practice you want to keep noting Consciously this has happened, you know Like as I said Your life would be invisible if there wasn't some vapor trail So you want to keep leaving a trail, you know in your mind at least some conscious record of what's happening to you Both those things are a kind of hindrance To practice because you want to let your practice just flow It's interesting practice One aspect of practice is our life can become more conscious Our true activity becomes conscious but practice makes our true activity more conscious able to be conscious and Simultaneously practice is to not to be conscious of it

[29:39]

Do you understand what I mean? You are able to be more conscious but simultaneously practice is to to give up being conscious of it Rather subtle point actually Need some check, you know because As I was in is quite powerful medicine and how each of us takes it is a little different and You don't want to feel in such control that practice can never hurt you you know that way you will Just control your practice. You know, it won't ever touch you But at the same time you don't want to be completely Destroyed by practice or so mixed up you can't hold a job or function with other people

[30:51]

So Of course this kind of community is is One of its reasons is so that you can be more discombobulated than usual and no one minds But a kind of check is If After a session You do have quite a lot of difficulty, you know some kind of difficulty, you know that the session clearly brings up or sitting three or four periods a day is Is disorienting You know, it may be good actually to sit a little less To not sit session so often or to sit only one day or two days of a session or to concentrate on one or two periods a day and Really sit at the period of day because our practice isn't just us and it's all day long

[32:02]

So you don't want to sit at the expense of your all-day-long practice So our zazen posture gets stronger and stronger In fact, it's useful to you. If you have a lot of difficulty with your posture because that will keep your practice developing slowly and your practice won't Will proceed at the same way in which your sitting posture is steady enough to accept anything And Your life should become more ordered so it's stable enough to accept anything So we have to have some sense, you know of Letting ourselves become stronger and And practicing in relationship to that strength which for each person is their own

[33:10]

Intimate problem which you can also discuss with your teacher So on one side you have to practice in that way being in touch with your strength and not overdoing it and the other side you have to be careful that You're not controlling your practice out of fear of unusual experiences I Think it may be okay to be a little on the safe side and If you don't feel strong enough to Slow down your practice a little

[34:13]

But at some point you'll say well, I Must be by this time. I must be strong enough and you take off the damper and let your practice go Okay You mean Zazen makes you angry or you have such a flow of anger all the time that No during Zazen I see If you weren't doing Zazen you wouldn't do that

[35:20]

Yeah, that's true Um Yeah, that's the opposite idea of Zazen you know Zazen as a method of serenity control You know is not Zazen We can people do use Zazen in that way, you know It doesn't make sense to have a model of The serene calm sage, you know, I'm not just speaking just to you. I'm making You know taking something rather serious and making it a little bit funny. Excuse me, but anyway and Taking this image of a serene calm sage and forcing it on ourselves Just because we sit still in Zazen Doesn't mean our Zazen is calm In fact, the reason we sit still is so we can let go of forced calmness

[36:39]

You know, it looks it's you know the law of opposites Well, what we're interested in is mental freedom and In this country, you know, we have a we have thought control everyone has physical freedom and social freedom you can do things socially and There's so there's supposedly social mobility and Some freedom of physical travel and things but mentally we're No one is allowed to think anything, you know, except what is Publicly acceptable, you know, we have a big thought control thing in this In our world our Western world anyway And if you don't think a certain way you think you're crazy If your thoughts are not like other people's Yeah, it's part of the public-private, you know dichotomy of how you behave on the street and

[37:54]

How you how your mind is supposed to be, you know, there's some unspoken thing about that So in Sazen we limit our physical freedom just sitting still but our emotions and anger or Our opinions Our Ideas Can anything you let anything happen, you know at that point you don't want to keep interfering So if something comes up in Sazen and you're angry I Don't think you should start hitting the divider, you know Or banging on your neighbor, you know, you should Just sit still But the feeling can be whatever the feeling is completely Completely You understand so it's actually a perfect place to be angry

[39:04]

Yeah Well If you learn how to Let yours are you let your feelings fully exist while sitting still You'll also know how to go on in your teaching situation Having the full feeling of anger without necessarily, you know bopping the student But it's okay to be angry, you know to I mean you can also holler at the student I don't know it's alright I feel that Everyone actually understands anger and There's no great retribution if you're angry if you Squeeze it out of yourself like old toothpaste, you know or something then Then people don't like it, you know, but if you just

[40:15]

People say oh, all right, you know Anger is wonderful, you know, in fact Anyway, I know what you mean. It's very important to Express what you feel somehow and if you if it's not appropriate to express it in anger, you can express it some other way Yeah, but don't lay troops on people either, you know Yeah Yeah, but not expressing it does too For people So instead of clearing out

[41:21]

Good Hmm Well We could talk about Anger You know quite a long time Anger and hatred or aversion, you know Desire and aversion and Greed or desire and aversion and Delusion are the three

[42:50]

Main ways we classify our troublesome nature, you know And aversion covers both anger and hatred and means ways we Turn away from people turn away from life, you know or separate ourselves And anger itself, of course, there are many different kinds of anger you're talking about one kind of anger Sometimes I mean and it's I don't mean you shouldn't have some insight into your anger Sometimes you're angry at yourself actually Sometimes you shouldn't be angry at someone because it's the only way to communicate something Sometimes you should be angry with a good friend, you know Because he needs to understand something, you know The Important thing is not to be caught by your anger

[43:53]

But what you say is true, of course that each level that you give some feeling form You increase its tendency to stick to you so whether if you just barely feel it and then if you Think it and then if you express it and then if you act on it in various ways each one makes it more sticky So in Zen practice we're not so concerned with what you do with anger after it's already fully formed And ready to come out, you know And the decision of whether you'd let it out and how you let it out is some practical decision We're concerned with how you exist so that anger doesn't arise Which means giving up, you know some your usual idea of self

[45:03]

And knowing yourself so intimately that you're participating in Everything that arises in you Is you Yeah Yeah Yeah, I think so

[46:08]

It is what Yeah, I don't know if it's useful to say it's then Anger is something you know you It comes up it permeates everything you do actually That the whole crystallization of our personality is anger and desire and delusion And you can't separate your personality from anger desire and delusion So And even after you break up The That The

[47:13]

Clusters and nodules, you know of your personality Then you find that anger greed and delusion are some kind of fire some kind of energy That actually are our is your source of practice and being alive Then we can talk about extinguishing Greed hate and delusion So it's not you know, what we're what we're talking about here is some surface, you know, this wave or that wave, you know But so all you can do is practice with what you have which is anger various feelings and the way in which these occur And for the most part what we're talking about now, it's just practical Decisions You know, if you're too angry, you won't have any friends, you know, or you'll lose your job or something

[48:15]

So if you want to keep your job, you have to Control your anger in some way And you will notice how you feel when you're angry sometimes you feel better, you know And Everything that you can't say anger is bad everything that exists has some reason for it. I Found myself, you know that I went through a Period of a year or so at one time Where I began to really see The trips everybody was laying on me all the time, you know, they want you to be a certain way all the time And I wasn't quite able to get free of it, you know So I found That the best way was to be angry with them every time they laid a trip on me

[49:16]

So everything anyone said to me my response was don't bug me man And I became known as don't bug me man Baker Because I said that every time I noticed somebody laying some kind of trip on me I Should eat a certain way. I should do something a certain way So I said it pretty soon. Everybody just thought it was hilarious, you know But it was effective pretty soon people left me alone And It was anger a kind of anger don't step on my blue suede shoes Yeah I

[50:37]

Go ahead What it is Exactly Yeah, okay All right, okay, did you all hear what he said No, I

[51:44]

don't know if Working with one theme like this is interesting to useful for all of you, but Also, I don't just as I'm talking about myself answering responding now, you know It's very difficult since I'm sitting up here in this little platform, you know listening to you and I have to respond That you may get the illusion, you know that I'm sitting up here with a big basket of Responses, you know that I'm not speaking to you, you know that I can So that I have some answer I can give you No matter what I say, you know the actuality is Is How we work with and see what we are My job, you know is to

[52:47]

Is to say for us, you know what we want to say You know not some answer but just to say as if as if we were speaking to Ourselves or to each other or as if I was speaking to myself So I'm not don't have any answers to these kinds of questions just First the idea of some big anger Again, you know, I've said this before you know that The Usual idea model we have of anger is that it's some substantial thing which exists and You have only two choices you can suppress it or repress it, you know nearly the same or you can express it You know and there those two are nearly the same if you suppress it

[53:54]

You stuff it down in yourself, you know, and if you express it you stuff it down in your friends, you know Yeah So neither solution is very good, you know But what we want to do in practice is to find the space inside the anger The space inside our personality, you know so you can walk around and So as I said, you know in the beginning in dozen Whatever feeling you have you should let happen and if you can learn in Zen, you see we don't just express or suppress We let Whatever we are happen without acting on it No, yeah I Know I'm getting there just Okay

[54:58]

How many parts of us are there millions and millions Which part is you question So Again I think it's useful to to not think in absolute terms, but to think in practical terms so You know, so if you have say that you're Extremely angry about something Either you don't have any particular idea about it or What it's all about or you don't or you do know it's directed about a certain situation

[56:06]

Even if it's about a certain situation Which you can see what is coming, you know where it's coming from in general even sort of undifferentiated free-floating anger Actually usually is provoked by something And it's sometimes useful to trace down to what that something is If you can find what that something is Then the anger even though the anger is maybe a hundred times more than necessary You Know it's maybe useful to To act on the situation and accept the anger as a legitimate response maybe an excessive response, but to some extent a legitimate response to something and To the extent to which you yourself determine that it's a legitimate response. You can express something. Well, geez, you know, don't do that But you It's useful to take into consideration does it help the situation does it help the other person, you know

[57:16]

Because anger can't help the other person or the others this situation You know if some response to a situation floods us and it's we can't control it or we're frustrated by it. So you get angry It doesn't mean you can't reverse the process and find out how to act in that situation You can also let the anger a lot of people want to get angry because it makes them high you know poet sometimes stay stoned on each other's anger and they you know and Painters getting big squabbles each other and then they produce good paintings, you know, they I'm so angry at that We use anger, you know, we use these things, you know So you can notice how you're using it, you know, what did how it you don't have it unless it benefits you How it benefits you how it protects you? You know, but also you can deal with the usefulness of it. But after you've dealt with the usefulness of it

[58:18]

Some particular aspect of it may be useful. The rest of it is just your own phone you know and You have to figure out how to Cope with it and I think There's no way except to learn how to let it exist In you without stopping it, but without acting on it Now last part What controls us, you know or what which me is observing the other me that kind of question That's maybe the most fundamental Entanglement of our practice and I'll just respond to it a little bit as I did last night talk and the way I talked about it last night Which is that the more you practice and

[59:19]

Try to determine what's controlling what who's controlling your anger? Who's making sure you don't do something terrible Who's deciding you should be a success, you know? Whatever kind of level, you know The more you look at it the more you see that There's nobody in there controlling anything and that the the idea of control is completely an illusion, you know It's necessary maybe because we have some surface disturbance But actually it's like waves on the surface of the ocean the waves aren't controlling the ocean You know So the more you practice the more you see how millions of Parts of yourself just go on And then you wonder how the hell did I get here, you know How the hell did I negotiate for 25 or 30 or 40 years to this point? When I was out of control the whole time

[60:23]

Then you have to begin and you see you know that there's something else going on That you want to find some way to let go into How to let go into that, you know, there's various ways, you know last night I spoke about it from the point of view of secret practice Is Does that respond a little bit what you said, so I think I should stop anyway Maybe next week. Oh, I don't know what I'll do next week. We'll see

[61:03]

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