I've been talking this session more or less about the Eightfold Path and right views, right thought, and right speech. And right intention, right concentration, right mindfulness, and right conduct, right action, and right livelihood, I want to give the appearance of talking about today. They're the most particular. Yesterday I was trying to speak practically, and today maybe more particularly. The Eightfold Path, Right View is the first one, means the understanding of the Fourfold Truth, the Four Noble Truths of suffering,

[01:29]

origin of suffering, stopping of suffering in the path, and the path is the Eightfold Path. And suffering is not seen just as something to be gotten rid of, something we don't like, and so the Eightfold Path is an antidote. but rather suffering is seen as this first step or the doorway. So, if you practice, you increase your suffering. The moment you practice isn't the moment you start to get rid of suffering. It's the moment you increase suffering and begin to be able to sustain it. Suffering, you know, somewhere Buddha says, supposedly, that the ability... how hard it would be to shoot an arrow repeatedly at a great distance and enter a keyhole and each time do it, some example. He says it's much, much harder to realize that everything is suffering.

[02:57]

In one sense, suffering means changing. Everything changes and everything changing is suffering. Suffering also means the awareness of the innumerable possibilities. I think when someone dies, particularly someone young, we feel the pain we feel is because of the chopping off of their possibilities. So, as you free yourself from your karma, as you see this man-made existence, You also aren't thinking so much in terms of talent and fate and a fixed path. So you see many, many opportunities that are always cut off. These are the howling spirits or wandering hungry ghosts.

[04:26]

So practice usually opens us up not only to that neutral blah state I talked about, but also to a sorrow, a kind of sorrow, which has no end. The more you are open to feeling what's going on and how people live and the poverty of their possibilities and their incapability of understanding what's happening to them, you know, you can't almost... The more you're open to this, you almost can't bear it. So the bodhisattva or the warrior too is one who can enter this world of death and come out with some order.

[06:12]

That poem I read you, told you last night. Little dragonfly chaser, how far have you gone today? It's pretty hard to express what I mean, but let me be more specific. Something we don't usually say or talk about. But there are many people who have been very close friends of Zen Centre and of mine and my teachers too.

[07:49]

who are gone now. And the more you feel that, you know, the more You go on as if you also were dead. I don't know if I can explain exactly what I mean, but Matsu, Baso, was asked by a monk, who is it that goes on without anything for his companion, without things for companions? This is not goodbye or aloneness. And so on, Roshi in San Francisco, remember, said, We join the majority. We join the majority. And the majority, the dandelion chasers majority, are quite present.

[09:09]

I say this just as a matter of fact, but on the altar here, we have chunks of Trudy. And Trudy Dixon, and Suzuki Roshi, and Dan's sister, and my sister, and Bocha Fisk. And many, and other people. And one day you'll have chunks of me. No blocks. And you'll have to figure out what to do with it. And if you're busy, you'll put me aside for quite a while. And I'll have chunks of you.

[10:28]

to do something with it, too. So temporarily we're here together, that much we can say. And there are those who are missing, who are in San Francisco, or Green Gulch, or farther away than that, chasing dragonflies. Very temporary kind of spotlight that we have here. And I guess the more you feel that, the more at some point you recognize that it's just as it should be. And you want to tell people, you know, this is just as it should be. So that's why we start to practice with people.

[12:01]

and recognize the oneness of possibilities, I also want to talk about teacher, what a teacher is. Teacher isn't necessarily somebody you like, you know. So you'll realize many people are your teacher. Teacher is someone who has

[13:27]

who can reach you, negatively or positively, you can reach you. Also, someone who changes your direction. Because of something they did, your direction changes. And also a teacher is someone who you reference, maybe all your life you reference. What would they say? What would they do? more subtle ideas. A teacher is someone who directly shares this life with you, so you have the idea of sangha and wider. But that's a little more difficult to understand, to accept that as teacher. And a teacher is also someone who teaches you skills.

[14:53]

And one of the things I've been trying to teach you and teach older students in Zen Center are survival skills. I don't know how else to put it. It's exactly the same, not so different from the priest or the warrior, the priest who can enter the realm of death. But also, someone mentioned to me recently, Castaneda, it's just like Don Juan teaching Castaneda how to hunt rabbits. Didn't he teach him how to make traps? And I'm always trying to teach you, some of you anyway, directly, how we hunt rabbits nowadays. Now we do it a little differently, you know. The warriors of samurai of Japan, when people first got guns, they stuck to their swords, you know, and they would go out and meet armies with guns with their swords, and of course they were decimated.

[16:34]

I think that's part of what happened to the British in the American Revolution. Americans were more used to ordinary hunting, and the British would march in line, because their way of training came from sword fighting, not from guns. You can see it in the movie, Barry Lyndon. They just keep marching each other and shooting each other down. Anyway, that kind of stupidity. So, but nowadays, you know, warrior, what does warrior mean? Warrior means one who knows the worst. who can get some order or survive in the worst. War is the same as worst. The worst is war. Most chaotic human confusion. So the warrior's job is to protect his or her community. And nowadays, you know,

[18:06]

coming over the hill is not a bunch of guys brandishing swords, but it's a bunch of lawyers and tax assessors and things like that. And if you go out there with a rabbit trap, you know, you're not going to be able to protect your community. So some skills are needed. Because one of the functions of our... of Sangha and of Buddhism is to establish order. The physical order of absolute stillness and the order of community and wider social order. This is not so difficult. It doesn't require some special skills. You know, people are going to say about me, they already do say I'm an excellent fundraiser. And they also will say I'm a very good organizer or something like that.

[19:40]

But it's not true. I don't know anything about fundraising. I tell that to people and they say, uh-huh. But it's not true. I don't know anything. But I do know how to accomplish what I set out to do. So if someone says, what about fundraising for this or that? I don't know. I'm not setting out to do that. All I know is Suzuki Roshi said... I said to Suzuki Roshi, shall we get Tassajara? Shall we try? He said, let's do it. And I said, all right. That's all. All I said was, all right. Or he said, let's... This is right conduct and right livelihood I'm talking about. He said,

[20:44]

we have to take responsibility for the community, and we should probably support ourselves and grow our own food." And I said, all right. And that means Green Gulch, you know. But all I said was all right. I didn't know anything about Green Gulch. There are many reasons why we have Green Gulch. having to do with America and Buddhism and all kinds of things. But those dreams were awakened by All Right. Paul Reps said to me, I want to give you a book You know, I've known Paul Reps for quite a long time. And he used to know Dan's sister quite well, a writer of them. And he has this thing, meditation or not meditation, like Alan Watts said too,

[22:15]

And he said, I finally, after coming to Zen Center, you know, it's difficult for the previous generation to deal with a large group of people meditating. So he said, not only did he come and stay with us one month first, and then two months, I think, I can't remember exactly, but at the end he said, I want to give you a book about sitting. I said, all right. But I knew it would cost us two or three thousand dollars. What could I do? So I said, all right. I don't know anything about book publishing. But with the same conviction that I said, all right, I said I had to put it off till I had time, but finally I had time to watch the steps. Paper, stock, quality of printing, typefaces, layout, etc. I don't know anything about it,

[23:45]

Dan, beside my lamp on my desk, the yellow lamp, there's a piece of paper leaning against it, okay, on a little card. Somebody's pasting the card. Will you get it for me? It's about Cezanne, in case it's fallen down or something. Anyway, the result of that book, doing it, you know, step by step, is now Reps has offered us two more books. Dr. Konze is offering us two books, and the University Buddhist group don't want to publish with Dharma Press, Shambhala, or the University of California Press. They want their whole Berkeley Buddhist series to be published by us, and several other things. I had no intention of establishing a publishing house.

[25:29]

I don't know anything about publishing. The skill I'm talking about, you know, isn't a skill of some talent. It's based on two things, I think. One is non-discrimination and the other is consistent awakeness or no interruption in your concentration. Those two things are the skills necessary. Anybody can do it. Non-discrimination is a way of saying what looks like humility or something like that.

[27:00]

My Stewart brand has this quality too. You know the story of... the background story of the whole... him getting NASA to take the picture of the whole Earth? You don't know that story? Some of you know it. Anyway, briefly, he... he... thought... well, there were many steps before it, but at some point he decided there should be a picture of the whole Earth.

[28:04]

He should see the Earth from that point of view, and it's been a profound influence on the ecology movement. And so he decided to do something about it, and he got a piece of paper, printed, all black, with a circle in it, and a statement, why haven't we seen a picture of the whole Earth? And he began distributing it. That's all, a very simple act. And he sent it to scientists in Russia and NASA, and you know he was investigated, right? Did you hear that? He was giving a lecture one day, somewhere. Such a wonderful story, I don't mind telling it again. He was giving a lecture one day, and afterwards he was talking with some people, and some girl or something took out to dinner, I don't know what, but she brought him to their house, her house, and the father met them and said, I know who you are. I investigated you for the FBI. He said, what do you mean? He said, well, we heard there was this man asking NASA. NASA sent me out to investigate this person who was asking for a picture of the whole earth. So I investigated you.

[29:27]

finally had to write them back that they had to understand that this was California, and that sometimes people just did things because they wanted to. And he wondered, it was a real question for him, and he wanted to know why people, why there hadn't been a picture of the whole earth. Anyway, the guy finished his report and at the bottom he said, and by the way, why hasn't there been a picture of the whole earth? Anyway, the next shot. NASA took a picture of the whole Earth, and Stuart put it on his magazine, Whole Earth. And I remember when Stuart first started the Whole Earth catalog, Again, it was very simple, like I was talking about yesterday. You have some intention to do something, that's all. He had been a friend of Ken Kesey and Steve Durkee and other people, and involved with Indians, and several communities he saw forming. And he saw, he just happened to observe... All the support systems are for...

[30:56]

big farmers, you know. Anyway, he saw there was no support system for these two or three, so he just thought of a simple mimeographed sheet of paper of some kind, listing where to get things. It was simply his intention. He wasn't of an entrepreneurial nature, sitting down and saying, now, what can I do to make it for me or my family, or what kind of If he'd done that, he never would have thought of the whole earth that way. If you do that other way, you sometimes make it, and what you choose to do is a success, but usually it's at the price of personal suffering, personal failure, usually. So he wasn't involved in success. Part of this is a generation thing. We talk about previous lives, but when we're talking about how you practice, whether you practice, what is practicing is not just you, but a personality that extends several generations. And I know

[32:26]

here, but some of you aren't really practising, and it makes some of the rest of you mad. Why is this person here who's not practising, who's so casual about this teaching, which I take so seriously? But I know – excuse me for saying so, but I think so – I know that You may not be practicing now, but when you're 40 or 50, this will be the basis for your practicing. And I also feel, particularly in our work in the city, that the grandchildren of some of the people we are working with now, just simply giving them a loaf of bread, will be practising and will be Buddhist teachers. So we're not just concerned with the scale of an individual. It takes several generations, usually. Sometimes a person can break through in one generation, but usually it takes several generations of preparation before a person can actually be free enough to practise.

[33:54]

So there's a lot of preparation that goes into this skill, like Don Juan had Castaneda know the terrain very well, know the habits of the animal very well, and make the trap himself, and understand the animal in the trap, etc. Anyway, Stuart just went from two or three communities, Tassajare and the school in San Francisco, and Lama, and New Mexico, and one thing led to another. They said, well, what about that community and that community? So suddenly he had a catalog. And then, finally, it was the best-selling book in the world for two years. But he had no way to imagine that. He just did something. That's all. The reason I got this, because I noticed this once, and someone pasted it up for me and made a bookmark. And I discovered it. Oh, look, that was nice. I didn't even notice that. They put Picasso's bookmark.

[35:26]

Anyway, this is the statement of Picasso. To us all, Cézanne was like a mother who protects her children. He was my one and only teacher. I spent years viewing and studying his paintings. Cézanne was Cézanne because he perceived every detail before his eyes, like a hunter stalking an animal he wished to kill. That's exactly just like Don Wong, like a hunter stalking an animal he wished to kill. If he saw a leaf, he would not let go. If he had the leaf, he had the branch, and then the tree would not escape him. If he had the leaf, he had the branch, and then the tree would not escape him. Ha! If only everyone were capable of that. Now, Shibayama Roshi points out that the artist often does this. The difference between the artist or some of the people I was speaking about yesterday is the Buddhist or the Bodhisattva does this in everything, without discrimination.

[36:45]

Because Cézanne has been a very important teacher for me too. I've sat, from when I was a teenager, and earlier actually in reproductions, but from the time I was a teenager, I've sat in front of his paintings for a long, long time. And you start out just what Suzuki Yoshi called a sincere drop. And it was just part of my asking questions, too. Why does everyone say this guy is such a good painter? I couldn't figure it out. And since I couldn't figure it out, I just sat down in front of the painting. And I sat there and sat there. And so pretty soon, after about 20 minutes, I saw how he put the paint on the canvas. And next thing, and next thing, and it was like going on a vacation to that particular spot. I mean, it was as close to actually being there, closer to actually being there. If I were there myself, I probably wouldn't have as observant an eye as Cézanne.

[38:27]

But it's also that it's like dharma elements. It's successive moments. A photograph could not do it. A photograph just gets it at a particular moment. But Cézanne gets it, multidimensional, from many angles, every angle, internal. It's an internalized world. existing with simultaneity. And you actually, and there is no point at which his attention wavers or his concentration wavers. In most paintings the man is, person is very moved. You can see it in poems. The first line or some parts of it are very good and then there's parts that are fillers you know, connectives, and then maybe something. And in paintings, there's parts which less... But in Cézanne, everything is... That's why Cézanne marks a great break. All modern painting comes from Cézanne, I would say. But as I say, Cézanne couldn't draw.

[39:57]

But he had this intention I'm talking about yesterday. I'll give you another simple example. We were discussing something at the council meeting a few days ago, a week or two ago, and the question of typeface or something came up. And you know, I don't want to keep making all the decisions, I didn't say anything. And there were many typefaces discussed. And I went away and helping Charles Brooks determine the site of his house. He's going to build a house, you know, in Muir Beach. There's the town of Muir, there's the beach, and then there's a

[41:03]

the point coming down where Mrs. Borden lives, she has a house out in the tip, and then there's another ridge. The higher up, that ridge, the whole top of it, Charles has. He's going to put a house right... I'm trying to get him to put it not on the top, but down a bit. And probably the house will be our house, too. He wanted me to come up and help him choose a suspicious site. So when I came back, The meeting was almost over. Actually, I walked in the meeting and everybody lit a match and began singing Happy Birthday. Everybody was holding up matches, you know, because we couldn't afford a cake or something. But I asked about typeface, you know, and no one had chosen the one I chose. And I said, I guess I was asked or something why I chose that one. I said, well, I just read each typeface as if I was a potential reader, rather than what I liked. This is the only one which... But no one else had read it that way. They'd all looked at it from which typeface do they like. Well, that's nothing, no big deal.

[42:37]

Anybody could think of, well, I should read this from the point of view of the reader. That's nothing unusual. The only unusual thing about it is that in the creation of something, if you are forgetful once, you sink it. It's just a filler once. This isn't always true. It sort of makes do otherwise. But the skill I'm talking about is you don't have a weak link in it, the situation. And the weak link is inattentiveness or you just didn't. Now, I have no idea which typeface is better or will communicate what's going to be said better or more fully. My only example is

[43:44]

that something so simple as this is that you don't discriminate about it. Every detail you treat the same. And the weakness in many of our practice, many of ours, many of us, anyway, is that we actually do discriminate. We say Zazen and the Zendo is more important. Or someone says, working in the garden is more important than being on the phone. You know, it is and it isn't. And it's a dilemma for me, because my practice now, my effort now, is as much as possible not to design the rabbit traps. But in many instances, I do design the trap, but then I say, why don't you get the rabbit out of the trap? My problem is, unfortunately, quite often the rabbit escapes.

[45:17]

So then I have to spend a year or two trying to track the darn thing down and get it back into the track. And recently we had such a thing. About two years ago, someone told me they were going to do such and such, and I said, the rabbit will escape. And they said, well, I want to... this is the right way to do it. Some emotional feeling was there. This person should do it. I said, you'll lose your house and your rabbit if you're not careful. So I let it go. And last week, still because of this person, person's feeling, we were not worrying about the rabbit trap.

[46:24]

And so next thing I found out is the house had been lost and the rabbit was gone. So I decided at this point to track it down. And I tracked it through already three successive owners, which had occurred in two days, and got it. But it cost Zen Center $12,000. Now, if I'd gone to the city, probably it would have cost $6,000. So I had to make a decision. Is it worth $6,000 for me to leave Tassajar for one day? And I decided it wasn't, and I stayed here. But $6,000 would pay a lot of your expenses. A lot of your $160 a month. But I don't care about the money. I'm interested in your learning how to trap rabbits.

[47:44]

And as I say, I have no special skill at fundraising or book publishing or catching rabbits, you know. But I do have this feeling, you know, which I learned from Suzuki Roshi. If you get the leaf, you've got the branch. If you've got the branch, then the tree won't escape. I remember going with Suzuki Roshi to look at some land up north by Russian River as our first possible site for a monastery. And we walked around it. taking some moss out of this man Richard Heap's garden. And we also ate some, some, uh, ferns that he found there that also grow in Japan, which you have to get the acid out of them by boiling with ashes.

[49:13]

He got the ashes out of the fireplace and boiled them. We had these big nails in our... Graham Petchy was with us. He got sick. I remember it. I didn't get sick. He says I got sick too, but I didn't. Anyway, we looked around this place. And it was pretty nice, 12 acres overlooking the Russian River and the ocean. And we left, and as we were going down, we were talking about it. And Tsukuyoshi mentioned things. He already knew where there was likely water, what the kind of geology of it was, where you'd have to place the buildings, the likelihood of... The whole thing, he understood it. He had the whole piece of property as if there was a monastery on it, and if you could build on it, what would be where you would get what would happen under certain rainstorms, which way the wind came from. He had it. I realized something from that, and I watched him much more carefully after that. Those details.

[50:38]

like, you know… And the history of details. I don't know if I can… The preparation starts a long time ahead and you can't see it, you know. I'll give you another example from Stuart. It's called the Co-Evolution Quarterly, which there's a history of why it's called the Co-Evolution Quarterly, like the Whole Earth Catalogue. But it's also called CQ, you know. because it's co-evolution, quarterly. And the CQ comes from, his father was a ham radio operator, as my father was also, and my father and Stuart's father were fraternity brothers at MIT. Anyway, CQ is what a ham radio operator uses when he's hunting for somebody on the radio. He says, CQ, CQ, seeking you, seeking you. So this magazine is for Stuart, too, what he felt from his father, why his father was calling these people. Often his father helped people and rescued people, you know, some ship or something, you get the message and then you relay to someone else that you've got a message that someone's in trouble or something. The feeling his father had, why he was motivated to be a ham radio operator,

[52:06]

is very similar to what Stuart's trying to get out in the Co-Evolution Quarterly. And this message he's trying to get to you. Seek you. Seek you. This is also very close to why we suffer. Because if you really seek, you learn suffering and how to be exact like a warrior if you're going to survive. The Green Gulch Green Grocery started the same way. No one could see why we should do it or that it would be successful. But if you excuse me for saying so, I knew exactly what would happen, in fact, exactly how much money it would earn month by month. People say, how did you know it?

[53:19]

I knew it because I had the leaf. I knew what it was like to walk in there and what kind of floor there should be. So now, now many of you have a sense of this which, as I say, has nothing to do with ability. It's just non-discrimination and the ability to maintain your concentration. So you don't discriminate. This detail is more important than that detail. And it's not a matter of, oh, OK, then we'll never go to the zendo because something else, just because you It doesn't mean you don't also go to the toilet. So we do zazen and we do other things, too. But we do them with exactly the same attentiveness, exactly the same attentiveness. You cook in the kitchen, whatever it is you do, if you do it, you don't know where it'll reach, but you'll get the whole treat.

[54:40]

So the first thing you should learn is like the first thing Don Juan learned was hunting. You should learn this kind of hunting. And the usefulness of a community is you can see the consequences. You can see whether the bakery works or not. We'll see it, you know, like you can see your zazen, whether you can be concentrated or not, whether the meal comes out or not. So this is, on the Eightfold Path, this is right conduct, right action. Right action means unimpeded action. and right livelihood. I'll probably stop in a minute. But if you want to change your posture, it's okay.

[56:35]

Okay. I'm trying to encourage you to put your, by various examples, to put your attention, not worrying about you yourself or how good you are or anything, to put your intention in every detail. without discrimination, without discrimination. Whatever the detail is, you just do it fully, like you try to practice zazen. This is also dharma elements, momentary flashings into the void. This dharma element, it's a little like

[58:51]

I can remember again when I was young asking my father, how long is 12 o'clock? I said, if it has any length of time, it's either before or after 12 o'clock. A second before, a second after, that's not 12 o'clock. So 12 o'clock has no dimension that you can say… My father said, well, we say when something is approached and then passed, it exists. That's a pretty good answer. But also, twelve o'clock is just the sun somewhere above us. But is it above us or above the tree or above Japan or above… what is it? You know, the Buddhist statement Don't mistake the finger for the moon. Don't mistake the sutras for the teaching. But as you know, Dogen says, painted cakes are the teaching. Painted cakes can be eaten. It's like the dumb statement, you can't have your cake and eat it.

[60:21]

But who wants dry, stale cake anymore? The only way to have your cake is to eat it, unless you want to put it on the shelf. But what Dogen's saying is the moon is in the finger. This is the highest teaching. First is sutras, first level is sutras, second level is don't mistake the sutras for the teaching, and third level is the sutras are the teaching, the finger is the moon. So these momentary, you know, you can't grasp what twelve o'clock is. Dharma elements are like that, something without dimension, multiple, you know, momentary, And what I said yesterday, the translation is mutually conditioned. But conditioned has a dualistic feeling to it. It's better to say modulated. Modulated. So dharma also means simultaneity. And Cézanne's paintings have this quality of simultaneity.

[61:47]

So they have a kind of existence of the light and insects and tree and feelings about the tree and changing, moving sky are there because each, you know, two heads are better than one because they're capable of simultaneous, separate location. So sangha is also this meaning. So, as Dogen says, Buddha nature is all... If you are one with each Dharma element... You know, like Whitehead, we can say Buddhism or Enlightenment is more an aesthetic, satori is more an aesthetic than some philosophical thing. If everything is Enlightenment, what is the difference between Enlightenment and enlightenment?

[62:50]

It's the kind of aesthetic difference between whether you're paying attention in your chanting or you're not paying attention in your chanting. There's still chanting whether you're paying attention or not, but there's a difference whether you're attentive, aware, awake, concentrated, uninterruptedly concentrated in your chanting and chanting. So Dharma elements means this uninterrupted Oneness, which is a Dharma element. When this happens, you have the leaf, the branch, and the tree. This is the skill of the hunter or the warrior. And it's how you enlighten others, how you practice with others. we're just here, you know, together, creating some hodgepodge, some practice together, not saying too much about what we're doing, but it's a field ripe with the opportunity for your alertness, for your... it will... your practice and

[64:30]

And Buddhist practice and your teacher and your lineage will all come true, so to speak, be true, when you have uninterrupted concentration, when you don't discriminate. Then we'll work on the garden together, in the shop together, on our community life together, helping people who won't practice for several generations together. Because you don't discriminate, you just seize the leaf.

[65:33]

And you know now that if you seize a leaf, you have the whole tree. You can learn this from Cezanne, or from me, or from Dogen, or Suzuki Roshi, or a leaf single blade of grass. And you will find out how we go on alone chasing dragonflies throughout time. In this state of mind,

[67:29]

Everything is refreshing. Everything is a cool breeze, warm breeze, smell of flowers along the stream. Everything occurs to us in this way. What happens goes like that rather than that.

[67:52]

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