I've been wondering over the last few months. Can you hear me in the back? I've been wondering over the last few months how to give the 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 Tassajara. but I'm not satisfied with the way I've found to give lectures here in the city.

[01:32]

If I'm here all the time, you know, as I was last year, almost all the time I was here, because Kadagiri Roshi was at Dasara. I got to know you all pretty well. Even the guest students who were only here for a few weeks, I knew pretty well. I'm sure my talks must be of some use to you, no matter what they're like.

[02:46]

I think they must be useful to some of you. At least some of you say so. But Still, I have some feeling. Suzuki Roshi used to say that when he gave lectures, often he felt like he was selling witch oil. And sometimes I have that feeling that I'm selling witch oil. Because you don't quite know what I mean. I can tell you quite don't. And I have a feeling I'm putting something over on you. Can you still hear me in the back? What did you do this time? You mean the music wears out after? Alright. You know, I'm not interested in Speaking about something you don't know already, I'm really only interested in talking about what you already know.

[04:06]

And the knowledge we mean in Buddhism, wisdom or knowledge, is knowing each other and knowing yourself, intimately. So if I'm selling you rich oil, it's like I'm turning you on to Buddhism, or getting you interested in Buddhism.

[05:24]

And I think one of the precepts is don't sell intoxicants, you know, and Suzuki Oshii 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 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. There's no place for them to practice, and no way, you know. And sometimes I wish we were all gentler and more developed.

[06:31]

And by gentler, I also mean stronger. I wonder sometimes if our separated family way of bringing up... 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 in most societies there's a great deal of sharing of the development of a child, you know? And maybe that's why group practice is pretty important for us.

[07:37]

Because until you know yourself pretty well, until other people are not separated from you, other people are transparent, you know? Do you know them? This should be the main focus of your practice, how to practice with others. So my interest, you know, is to know you better. At Tassajara, that's possible. And maybe in the city practice period that's somewhat more possible than here, and Greenbelch too, because it's only 20 people. But here, with so many new people each week, I never know quite what to say.

[08:45]

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 that soil, at least it seems when I've been in the woods or in some isolated prairie, the soil is very receptive and loose and soft if it's been undisturbed by people 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

[09:49]

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 our practice is very intimate, you know, 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 witch oil 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.

[11:14]

There's a story I told, part of last night, that I've always liked, which is, 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 his friend says to him, you should have said, he corrects him, you should have said, there's no place to meet, and there's no need to meet anywhere.

[12:43]

There's no place where meeting or not meeting occurs. Anyway, it's that kind of conversation. But the interesting part of the story, you know, is the poem which Genro wrote. And the poem goes, between alienation and friendship, there is no separation. between intimacy and alienation. There's no separation. And then it says some other things about the same, but the last line is, the east branch of the tree knows the whole spring, as does the west branch.

[13:45]

And each of you, you know, knows the whole spring. And there's no need for meeting or not meeting, you know. But still, you know, 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 not right. It's just to get you interested. then we can forget about Buddhism because what we're 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 knowing yourself completely is almost impossible and then when you're confronted with that impossibility you're confronted with

[15:17]

Buddhism. So at that point we can talk about Buddhism. Last night I talked about secret practice. Then I could ask you what do you think secret practice means. But what it means is take some

[16:21]

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 to give these Saturday talks.

[17:28]

I've considered perhaps not having Saturday talks at all. So new people would have Zazen instruction and practice here. And maybe we'd have to have some other way, you know, 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, actually. I would find ... it would have to be interesting that I couldn't do it. That's why I stopped giving talks at ... one of the reasons I stopped giving talks at college ... Sukhi Rishi asked me to stop giving talks at colleges, but I wanted to stop.

[18:43]

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 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, you know. Then I would come here and have a little television set and watch it until someone asked me a question and I could turn it off, answer their question and go back, you know.

[19:46]

I would watch about Watergate and what's going on. But then you decide what I talk about, you know. Anyway, Suzuki Roshi had this same feeling as I have and I understand it much better now than I did then and I look back at my notes from early 1960s and almost every Sunday lecture was almost the same and every Wednesday night lecture was more... was different, you know.

[20:51]

If I... Wednesday night lectures he'd take some thing like Eightfold Path or Blue Cliff Records or the Nirvana Sutra. more some saying of Durgon'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, nearly the same every week. 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 telling you about this much of Buddhism, you know.

[22:00]

Because you're all beginners, he can't actually talk about Buddhism. And 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? And Suzuki Roshi mostly just listened, you know, he just didn't say much. He also said that he tried when he first came, and he had that feeling, you know, of... So, that I explained, of selling witch oil. So... So he did two things. He concentrated on teaching just a few people,

[23:03]

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 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 don't think I can ask you for a roll call, you know.

[24:27]

on what we should do or if 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 lectures in some more satisfactory way. Maybe question and answer is best way to try for a while.

[25:28]

So, do you have any questions? Question after effects of practice. My head is pretty hard to control. It's based on... Could you hear what he said? His question was, what about the after-effects of zazen? He feels, and I know other people feel, that your head gets out of control or too spaced out after sitting, particularly maybe after saschins. That's true. I remember when I first started doing Sashins, I found coming out of the Sashin after seven days, it was terrifying.

[26:37]

You'd walk out in this bush street, cars would be going and bright lights and everything. It was 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 sashins, I was very exacting, you know? And I would come out of the sashin 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 sashin I drove everyone up the wall, you know? Anyway, we have various effects of zazen. Actually, last night I talked about it, too. 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.

[27:54]

So there's some subtle point, some effects of zazen rather scare us, and so we worry about whether anybody else has had this experience before or whether I might be going crazy, whether your friends might be going crazy, you know. 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 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?

[29:01]

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 be conscious of it. Do you understand what I mean? You are able to be more conscious, but simultaneously practice is to give up being conscious of it. rather still we need some check you know because zazen is a quite powerful medicine and how each of us takes it is a little different and

[30:23]

You don't want to feel in such control that practice can never hurt you. That way you'll just control your practice. 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. So of course this kind of community 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 sasheen you do have quite a lot of difficulty, some kind of difficulty, that the sasheen clearly brings up, or sitting three or four periods a day is disorienting, it may be good actually to sit a little less.

[31:50]

to not sit sesshin so often or to sit only one day or two days of a sesshin or to concentrate on one or two periods a day and really sit that period of day because our practice isn't just zazen, it's all day long 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 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.

[32:57]

So, we have to have some sense, you know, of letting ourselves become stronger and practicing in relationship to that strength, which for each person is their own an 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. On 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

[34:11]

if you don't feel strong enough to slow down your practice a little. 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? I find that I sort of repress my anger You mean Zazen makes you angry? Or you have such a flow of anger all the time? No, during Zazen, I see. If you weren't doing Zazen, you wouldn't do that?

[35:20]

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's the opposite idea of zazen. Zazen as a method of serenity control is not zazen. People do use zazen that way. 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.

[36:48]

It's a law of opposites. What we're interested in is mental freedom. In this country, you know, we have thought control. Everyone has physical freedom and social freedom. You can do things socially and there's supposedly social mobility and some freedom of physical travel and things. But mentally, no one is allowed to think anything, you know, except what is publicly acceptable. You know, we have a big thought control. thing 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. It's part of the public-private dichotomy of how you behave on the street.

[38:03]

how your mind is supposed to be, you know, there's some unspoken thing about that. So in Tsanzen 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 Zazen 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. Do you understand?

[39:10]

So it's actually a perfect place to be angry. Yeah. Well, if you learn how to 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, too. I mean, you can also holler at the student, I don't know, it's all right. 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 people don't like it, you know.

[40:23]

But if you just, you know, people say, oh, all right, you know. Anyway, anger is wonderful, you know. Anyway, I know what you mean. It's very important to express what you feel somehow, and if it is not appropriate to express it in anger, you can express it some other way. Yeah? But don't lay trips on people either, you know. Yeah? Does an anger profession where you're speaking accept wickedness? Yeah, but not expressing it does too. Something inside of the person they're angry at reminds them of themselves.

[41:29]

So instead of clearing it out and start yelping at people, maybe they should question themselves. And that's a way of expressing anger, to understand why you're angry. But if you just get angry, You develop a mechanical habit of, like playing, throwing up people. And that's the best way to conceptualize this. It's just the opposite of saying it. Good. Well, we could talk about anger, you know, quite a long time.

[42:42]

Anger and hatred or aversion, you know. Desire and aversion and greed or desire and aversion and delusion are the three 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, 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.

[43:49]

Sometimes you shouldn't be angry with a good friend, you know? because he needs to understand something. The important thing is not to be caught by your anger. 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 let it out and how you let it out is some practical decision.

[45:04]

We're concerned with how you exist so that anger doesn't arise, which means giving up, you know, your usual idea of self. and knowing yourself so intimately that you're participating in everything that arises in you, is you. Yeah? And that anger could arise out of the state of pure mind and there wouldn't be any attachment to it, would there?

[46:09]

Would it just be anger without being... I don't know, kind of... painful? Yeah, I think so. In that case, it is... Yeah, I don't know if it's useful to say it's Zen. Anger is something, you know, that comes up, that 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 clusters and nodules of your personality

[47:30]

Then you find that anger, greed and delusion are some kind of fire, some kind of energy that actually 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 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 is just practical decisions. If you're too angry, you won't have any friends, or you'll lose your job or something. So if you want to keep your job, you have to control your anger in some way.

[48:34]

And you will notice how you feel when you're angry. Sometimes you feel better. 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. 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.

[49:46]

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, you know. And it was anger, a kind of anger. Don't step on my blue suede shoes, you know. That feeling, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, The other part of what I was thinking was that I don't quite understand this business of what it is that criticizes or controls myself and interferes with who I am or what I'm doing.

[51:18]

I mean, just very simply, I often get very critical of myself and what I'm doing. Probably other people have the same problem. And I just don't really notice that. And sometimes when I become so depressed, I become angry at myself, but I don't know exactly what part of what I'm being. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. Did you all hear what he said? Um, no. I don't know if working with one theme like this is interesting, 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.

[52:23]

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. And no matter what I say, you know, the actuality is, how we work with and see what we are. And my job, you know, is to say for us, you know, what we want to say. Not some answer, but just to say as if we were speaking to ourselves or to each other, or as if I was speaking to myself. So I don't have any answers to these kinds of questions, just first the idea of some big anger.

[53:34]

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 those two are nearly the same. If you suppress it, you stuff it down in yourself, you know, and if you express it, you stuff it down in your friends. 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.

[54:41]

So, as I said, you know, in the beginning, 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. Okay. How many parts of us are there? Millions and millions. Which part is you? So, again, I think it's useful to not think in absolute terms, but to think in practical terms.

[55:57]

So, if you 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 do know it's directed about a certain situation. Even if it's about a certain situation, which you can see what is coming, you know, where it's coming from, and 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 act on the situation and accept the anger as a legitimate response

[57:10]

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 it's useful to take into consideration, does it help the situation? Does it help the other person? You know? Because anger can help the other person or the situation. If some response to a situation floods us and 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. A lot of people want to get angry because it makes them high. Poets sometimes stay stoned on each other's anger and painters get in big squabbles with each other and then they produce good paintings. I'm so angry at that. We use anger, we use these things.

[58:18]

So you can notice how you're using it. You don't have it unless it benefits you. How it benefits you, how it protects you. But also you can deal with the usefulness of it. But after you've dealt with the usefulness of it, 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 which me is observing the other me, that kind of question. That's maybe the most fundamental entanglement of our practice.

[59:25]

And I'll just respond to it a little bit as I did last night, in the way I talked about it last night, which is that the more you practice, and 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 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.

[60:30]

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? 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. Does that respond a little bit to what you said? So, I think I should stop anyway. Maybe next week I'll... I don't know what I'll do next week, we'll see.

[61:23]

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