The real stuff of our practice is confidence or faith. Can you hear me in the back? No? What I said was that the real stuff of our practice is faith or confidence, and a confidence that includes the diversities and contradictions of this world. Maybe the key point is giving up seeking. As long as you're looking for the missing link, outside yourself or inside yourself, you can't come together. What really happens, though we don't notice it, is that eventually we have some faith in the world as Buddha described it.

[01:35]

It's not often the common idea of morality is that, well, the world would be a lot nicer if everybody behaved better, so let's set up some rules and you're fulfilling your responsibility. But Buddhist morality isn't like that at all. The world simply doesn't work if you don't understand the laws of how the world works. It's like trying to pour sand in a gasoline engine. It just doesn't work. You don't know exactly how the world works. So maybe the first rule in the ordinary world is that everything changes, there's interdependency, transiency. And the Eightfold Path gives us some idea about how we can actually function. And if you've ever tried following the Eightfold Path and the precepts for a long time, there's a very great difference in the way you function.

[03:04]

Everything works. The world seems to work. It's an amazing difference. Everything that happens seems to fall right in place, like, well, that should have been that. So we do, if you're in some kind of situation, and you don't know what to do, you can think about the precepts. What makes sense? What is the spirit of it? How far should I go? How much should I try? Should I just give up and say, this isn't worth trying for? If you do as much as you can within the realm of right effort, then if you just leave it, You know when to stop and when to make an effort. It requires some kind of trust that the world operates along a certain way, and if you participated in it according to those rules, the world does it. You don't do it. Buddha does it.

[04:28]

And this doesn't mean that you just, okay, this is what Buddha said, so I believe it. First of all, that's rather difficult, because no one knows what Buddha said, and everyone has written down what Buddha said, and it all is a little different. And so, exactly what you have to find out yourself. And it means some kind of very critical examining intelligence or observation of the world. If you're practicing Buddhism, practicing zazen at the same time, usually it just strengthens your faith, that kind of critical examination. And every time I, in the various things I've tried to do or done, have tried to figure it out without recourse to the

[06:05]

I tried to figure it out just by myself, or what the other people involved thought, or maybe stretched a little and thought, well, this transgression is worth it. If we get this, then maybe we shouldn't have it, but it'll lead to our having that, or something. Every time I've gotten in trouble, things sort of get tangled up about six months later. Every time. Anyway, it's rather interesting to think about the world in that way, and the precepts are

[07:07]

The first one is, do not kill yourself, or anything. The last one is kind of confusing at first, because it says, don't mess around with the three treasures. So, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And first you say, That's not much of a precept, but that means have faith in the world as Buddha described it. Everything else, actually, based on that. The others, you know, do not cloud yourself or others, do not take what is not given. Don't criticize others, praise yourself. Don't put your trips on other people. If you really, in a subtle way, try to notice when you're actually taking what's not given,

[08:37]

or actually laying some trip on somebody else or yourself. Then working with the precepts has some real meaning. You can't have confidence. You have Buddha nature. Some real practice meaning to such an idea. Everyone has Buddha nature. until you have some faith or confidence in the world as Buddha described it, as Buddhism described it. So, from the positive point of view, as I say, the three pure precepts are. The second one is you try to do, as much as possible, you try to do what is right. where you avoid staining behavior. Anyway, it all comes down to how you accumulate karma. And as your practice gets more fine, and as you get, as you become more intimate with yourself, you can actually see yourself, feel yourself accumulating karma.

[10:12]

And when you do, it's a big drag. It really is a big drag. It takes some time, and you don't notice it. Of course, everyone does such and such, and they survive. But until you've been several years with not accumulating karma, and just working with the karma you have, you don't notice any real difference. So, if you understand what Buddhism means by cause and effect, how the world works according to cause and effect, then you don't have to worry about samsara or this ordinary world anymore. You are participating in it according to its rules, not accumulating karma anymore, Then you can understand some next stage of practice. You can understand what we mean when we say cause seals cause, how to act each moment so there's no cause produced, or what really is meant by being free from karma.

[11:37]

And at first we practice, you know, with our body. And maybe we enter Samadhi. Anyway, you practice with your body and you have some... some... very condensed, maybe blissful feeling, though everything seems OK. You have some deep sense of well-being. Not only in Zazen, I mean, all the time. But then you, when you're practicing with your body in that way, in Zazen and walking around, some kind of feeling like that, then something, you find some obstacle. At that point you realize that

[12:50]

Only Buddha can practice Buddhism. You can't practice the unconditioned with the conditioned. So then we speak about enlightenment in a different way. In practice we speak about the thought of enlightenment. And there are various ways to test our practice at that time. We have very subtle residues of knowledge, subtle residues in us, even after we have quite a lot of confidence in the world as Buddha described it, and quite free from piling up karma in big globs. There's some residue. How to? The moon in your heart should be quite pure. Your thought form should be quite loyal. That means Dharmakaya Buddha. Then we have some that what, how useful the names. Dharmakaya and Sambhogakaya and Nirmanakaya Buddha are just names, but at one stage in practice they're rather useful.

[14:17]

to help us notice that we still have some residue. When you've entered into this kind of practice, the whole realm of practice opens up. Every stage is the same stage. It extends everywhere in all directions. Then at this point in practice, when you have been practicing with this kind of feeling, absence of feeling almost, then you come to the point where we know what Dogon means by just sit, or what we mean by we don't know. Sometimes The light in each thought is equated with emptiness, sunyata, citta, sunyata. Sometimes no thinking, or not exactly no thinking, but not known is equated with mahasunyata. Anyway, that kind of distinction isn't so useful, but it does help you at a certain point to find

[15:47]

more residue in your practice. So when we talk about not knowing, it's not sort of like, well, all that world's out there and I don't understand it and I don't know it. It's the world that you are that you don't know. It's not something outside you that you don't know. Anyway, this is a very That's a difficult point to talk about. Actually, it's a matter of practice. When you begin to have problems that are described in this way, then we practice with that. Your practice begins when you actually know who the person is who's listening to this talking. This person is neither man nor woman, has no form, no source.

[17:32]

So, you know, something else I'd like to talk about is the fact that we use in Zendo a stick, and I think you shouldn't worry about it so much. Some of you are rather concerned about when you're hit and if you're hit at the right time and how you're hit. I mean, we don't hit very hard here. So... It's not so serious, you know. You're concerned about if you're standing, you know, and if I miss you occasionally, you know, if I hit you in the shoulder or something. I've slipped you, actually, many times, clipped my ear or hit me all over the place. But if you want to make sure

[18:56]

you can bend much farther forward, put your head out of the way. Instead of being hit here, then, you hit back, across the back. As long as the person doesn't hit you right up and down your spine, or the edge of the stick, you know, that's a silent stick. There's no, there's not really much danger. Fine, I can punch you. But some of you are fairly new at hitting with a stick, and so you're quite afraid of hitting the person's head. So you sat down toward the shoulder, and then you get near the head, and suddenly there's this person bounces off the shoulder because you're afraid to hit. Afraid you might hit the person's head. Makes you aim. Those of you who are being hit can help a person learning how to hit by saying, oh, if this person doesn't know how to hit, I'll offer my back.

[19:58]

and he can just let them learn how to hit on you. And I say, you know, I know it's Ting, so it's nothing. Still, it's of course nothing. You don't have the perspective of him sat in Japan. In Japan, in the ten days of Tangayou I was in, I literally had a swelling almost to my ear. And what you learn in that case, in hitting that well, is to really relax into it. It's all right. And if there's somebody kind, he aims at your bones so he doesn't hit the welt. Anyway, we don't, I don't, that's partly just a Japanese trick. And I don't think we have to do that here. They hit with a much heavier stick, longer, and inside they hit four times on each shoulder. But, anyway, you shouldn't get involved in, it's not, you know, it's not a punishment. You shouldn't get involved in. He hit me. Who's that me? All right.

[21:23]

You just, whatever comes, they hit you. Okay. Obviously. Well, there are two sides. One is, if someone hits you, maybe you're awake, you know, but if you were giving off some kind of vibes, they wouldn't hit you. Reb suggested. They didn't come by and drop the stick and say, well, there's a living Buddha. For some reason, they decided to hit you. Somehow you fell short of being a living Buddha. You can accept it in that kind of spirit, I'm short of being a living Buddha. But actually we should hit with the stick if we're going to use the stick as it's supposed to be used in Zen, though, to bring us up against our practice, up against, put back for that. We should hit whenever we feel like it. We don't exactly say, is he really asleep? If you even think he might be, pow. And I mean, Rev gave a little different instructions, huh? I'm sorry.

[22:50]

He's much kinder than I am. But anyway, Reb is Shuso. You should do what Reb says. But maybe he'll change his instructions. But maybe he won't. He has to feel actually what the situation is. So I'm just telling you in general what the Spirit of using a stickless, not exactly how we should do it. That's for Rep to decide. So, actually, if a person looks like they're thinking, if a person looks like they're thinking, You know, everything that's going on with a person, you can tell from their posture, from how they're sitting. It's really quite clear the more you've walked around. And the people carrying the stick are fairly experienced. The longer you've been doing it, you can know what it means. It's very clear what some people are. Their head's full of thoughts, but more than that, they're trying to practice. They're letting the thoughts go.

[24:13]

Then other people you just see are completely caught in the process. They're sitting perfectly okay, but they're caught. That person is thinking and not really practicing. Whether he's asleep or not, actually he should be. It doesn't really hurt in any way. The second problem is that you can't actually tell when you're awake and when you're asleep, mostly. If you actually know you're awake, you may be probably are just thinking. Because you're sitting there thinking, you've had a consciousness of your train of thought right along. So you say, I know I was awake because I was thinking about such and such and such and such. And some of us spend about 50% of this In fact, of a period of time in sleep. It doesn't mean you spend the first half asleep and the second half awake. It means that one moment you're asleep, the next moment you're awake. One moment you're asleep. Kind of like a fluorescent light. It's on half the time and off half the time. But it looks like it's on all the time. So you think I'm on all the time. And the person carrying the stick says he's off all the time.

[25:39]

I know, because I sleep that way. I think I'm quite awake, you know, but actually I discover my posture is like this. How did I get there? There must have been a moment when I felt just a little bit forward. Anyway, it's hard to tell when you're awake, particularly if you're not thinking much, because there's nothing to measure. This boundary between being awake and asleep is an important one to become more and more familiar with. Because no doubt, Zazen tends to put us to sleep, particularly if you're tired. So how to stay awake is our practice, and the stick is just to remind you. It's no different from straightening your posture or anything else. So anyway, get involved in why someone hit you. Just, oh, they hit me today. And in general, if you're not hit at all, you're either a living Buddha, or you're sitting on the altar, or no one takes your practice seriously.

[27:06]

Why bother with him? No one wants to help someone practice who isn't practicing. If you're just here sitting out your time in the vendor, well, that's all right. We give you a pointer and a cushion and you can sit there. There's no reason to trouble ourselves with trying to help you. OK, the other thing I want to talk about is eating, and more the size of the servings you take. And I realize it's a problem of not only the bowls are fairly small, but also the bowls are organized according to what you put in them. According to Chinese and Japanese eating habits,

[28:06]

which is a big bowl for rice and a small bowl for the other stuff. We don't eat that way, so it's some problem. Actually, the rule is that you don't have any food sticking up above the surface of the bowl to be a proper egg. But we changed that a few years ago because we do a lot of physical labor and the bowls are small and we're hungry and so on. But there's an upper limit. And I don't think the server should get into a kind of ice cream scooping, you know, and kind of stuff as much into the cone as possible. Maybe we should add another serving or something. Actually, in the monastery in Japan, they have three servings at lunch. Makes... The reason we don't do that is it makes the meal longer, and those of you whose legs are hurting, they'd rather do it without a third serving and sit there any longer. And the Zen Center is becoming more and more free of food trips. As you have been here a long time, you know that there used to be a raging battle going on about food, which really came down to you didn't dare let some people go shopping because they'd modify the list, and they'd bring back

[29:38]

food, which then the kitchen would be forced to use. And he didn't allow some people to come in and give volunteer help, because you'd find things in the food. The kitchen's been captured by various groups at various times. And the head cook is more of a kind of, I don't know, He had a terrible time. Had to patch up all the fights. Someone said to me this morning that this is the first time they've been in the kitchen in a long time when there wasn't barbed wire and bayonets. Maybe it's an exaggeration, but the more you got into it, the more you were involved, you felt this kind of tension in the kitchen. It was a hard job. A lot of us are rather involved in what we do. And this is a pretty important point, because Buddhism isn't just a practice to make ourselves better. Our practice doesn't work very well in the practice that we're in. Your practice works best when your practice is

[31:07]

to help other people practice. Of course, you can't help other people unless you can help yourself. So we don't just eat what we want to eat. I certainly have a preference. Myself, I tend to like just vegetables in my food. I don't think we have to go so far as Japan, which is you have to eat everybody about the same and about the same healthings and everything. Because we don't have a... We're not coming from a situation where everybody all over the country eats nearly the same. Actually, we come from different dietary backgrounds. Or we have different eating habits over quite a long time. So I think you can vary how much you eat. But... It's been a long, it's very important in Buddhism, it's been a long tradition that you don't discriminate between pure and unpure food. Milarepa says it over and over again, he doesn't discriminate between unclean food and clean food, between this food and that food. And Dogon, excuse me, Buddha died of eating spoiled pork, supposedly.

[32:37]

We're not planning to serve spoiled pork, but what we do serve, we should eat some of. If at present, in this endowment, we serve rice, and you don't like rice still, you should take some. Eating will have everybody. I don't mean you have to heat the bowl, but you should take some. And no one's going to come around and make you do it. You do it if you want. Actually, you should take some. Maybe eventually we should serve a salad, for instance, which we all like a lot of, in a separate bowl, pasta. This is the way it's done in a monastery when you have some item, particularly like salad, which is so greasy and hard to clean your bowl with just water. But anyway, at present we're not. What time am I actually supposed to start? Is it earlier than then?

[34:19]

I begin to get worried because when he starts picking up the belt stick, I'm like... If I notice during a pause his arm goes up, I'm just... He takes very good care of me. I start getting worried when you're in a bowing position. You look awake. Is there anything we want to talk about? I go along texting with my friends, and for some reason at a certain point I just want to get out of it. Why are you practicing? It's so boring. It's nice to know what you're talking about. You know, I kind of just picked that one. Maybe Buddhism is just like a certain sort of system of indoctrination with certain resorts.

[35:45]

This certain state of mind arises, it infects itself around you. You know, you get caught in a circle until you die. It's just as replicated in another system. Yeah, and that's actually wonderful. such a doubt comes up, because your practice gets rather stagnant. And if you are satisfied with your practice and you keep trying to make it work, it gets more and more artificial, actually. There should be actually a constant doubt. But anyway, until you have that kind of constant doubt, which is... I can't explain why, but it's the same as faith. Faith is very penetrating and deep. Then the doubt comes up at various times. And in a way, you're lucky to be in Zen, because some systems of Buddhism are so organized to produce certain results, which if you get to the end of the result, the end of the series of stages, so-called, then you see, well, actually this was just a shortcut.

[37:12]

it wasn't a limiting system. But all the way through it, it looks like a very definite limiting system, and there's very definite ways to produce the experience that you're Buddha. Because actually, Buddha's body practices Buddhism. So if you're in a thing which gives you some practice, which gives you some rules about how to create that experience, you can also have the big doubt that, well, this really makes me feel great, It's just a kind of trip that makes me feel great. Anyway, so we don't practice that way, partly just because of what you said. Our practice shouldn't ever be different from the ordinary world. It should look just like the ordinary. So when you have such a doubt, you work with it. Try something else. Our practice includes both sides of the precepts. And our way tends to be to let whatever happens completely happen inside you, not necessarily to give it expression. I don't mean by trying something else you have to go out, leave Tassajar tomorrow, or you have to try some other system tomorrow. But you can completely try on another system. Try on your doubt.

[38:42]

You see what I mean? Actually follow through on your doubts completely. It's no harm, you're still practicing. Completely, what if this is a big shuck? If it's going to be, or you think it is, you better find out now. Anyway, that kind of doubt is wonderful. I actually mentioned all of them, but I condensed them into simple ways of saying them. If you can look them up, the translations are pretty bad, because they're translations by people familiar with Christian morality.

[39:45]

So they translate them rather simply in terms of what you do and don't do. But anyway, I'll talk more about various ones before we get down, and eventually we'll cover all of them. Anyway, if you get an insight into the precepts, it's quite simple. We're living that way. Oops. Everyone's hands came up and hers came up like this. I've been saying the other way every time I've talked.

[40:46]

So just listen carefully. Anyway, I've been talking back and forth about step ladder practice and no step ladder practice each time. But I'm not making myself too clear on purpose. No, partly on purpose. Partly I don't know how to do it, you know. Aum.

[41:24]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ