How is that? Yeah. Okay. It's good to see everybody here tonight. And this is the third class, I believe, on aspects of practice And so I'm going to talk today a little bit about the lineage. And I'm kind of not totally up to the task, but I will try to do my best. Most immediate thing, I just came in Thursdays. Usually I have my children. And Gabriel, who's nine, is away at a three-day retreat, but I have Noam, who's nine.

[01:04]

I mean, Gabriel is 13. He just had his bar mitzvah last Saturday. Thank you. Noam is nine, and he's quite willful. And we had a bit of a tantrum today about he didn't want to come here. And now he's happily, it looks like, at Alan's house, playing with Alexander. So we said that Alan would check at 8.30 and see how he's doing. So we may have to end at 8.30, depending on the subject of the whims of a nine-year-old. And also, I just got back last week. I haven't been here for all of the aspects of practice because I had to go to Chile and my father died. And I managed to get there 24 hours before he passed away.

[02:09]

And thank you. I'm going to try to talk more about it. I have to give the lecture also on Saturday. And I'll try to choose an appropriate koan for it. And maybe I'll share more with you about it on Saturday then. So anyway, I won't go into it so much now. I guess I'll just say maybe there is a bit of a link to the question of lineage, given that I also had to come back, make it on time for my son's Bar Mitzvah, you know, so from the death of my father to my son's birth into adulthood, which partly is what the Bar Mitzvah is about.

[03:12]

And there is a kind of transmission of light that takes place with birth and with death. Both the birth, being present at the birth of my children and being present at the death of my father had something in common at the same time that they were quite different. the same light is present both in birth and in death. I want to start saying something about the Sandokai and the first line of the Sandokai is the mind of the great sage of India was intimately transmitted from west to east.

[04:16]

And so right there in those two opening lines, there is the theme of transmission, mind-to-mind or heart-to-heart transmission. And in Suzuki Roshi's book, the one that Mel edited, Branching Streams, there's a commentary there that san no kai, san means many, and kai means one. So it's the unity of the one and the many. although we have it translated as the song of sameness and difference. So another translation is... Harmony of. Harmony of. Thank you. Sameness and difference. Another translation is the unity of the one and the many. And so although there are many Buddhas, there's only one Buddha. And even though we're all many Buddhas in this assembly here today, there's only one Buddha.

[05:23]

Same mind, same nature, and yet different. But Sekito Kisen, who wrote the Sandokai, Suzuki Roshi points out that he wrote it as a way of sort of settling the debate between the Northern and the Southern school. There had been this debate raging in sort of the North and South of China, this division between North and South. as represented by these two archetypal figures of Jinshu, a Japanese name, and Ino, Daikan, Ino Wineng, a Chinese name. And usually, the story, yes, as it's usually told and read, seems to put the emphasis, and of course, the fifth ancestor gave the seal of the robe to Winang, chose Winang, based on two poems that he asked the assembly to write.

[06:48]

And it's interesting that shortly, I don't know how many generations the robe has passed on, but at some point they decided to stop passing the actual robe because it was said to actually, if you pass on the robe without passing on the mind, it actually kills the person. But Sekito is emphasizing that actually both Jinshu and Eno, north and south, are two sides of the same dharma. So it's not that one's right, the other one's wrong. It's just two faces of one truth. And this along the lines of the unity of the one and the many. One Buddha, but many different expressions

[07:53]

And the two poems, as we all have heard it, Mel has talked about it many times, and it's figured in the Platform Sutra, which is the only Zen Chinese sutra. So it's actually quite accessible and interesting to read, and I think we probably have all read it at this point. But as the story goes, The fifth ancestor asked the assembly of monks to write a poem to show their understanding. And so everybody thought that he was going to choose Jinshu, who was a scholar. and a monk, the head monk, and he had been there for many years. And then Winang was just a novice and he had just arrived and was said to be illiterate.

[09:02]

Although his mind was quite sharp, actually. So anyway, so Ginger's poem said something like, the body is the Bodhi tree, sort of paraphrasing here, and the mind is a bright mirror, and all you have to do is just keep the mirror free from dust. So it's the wipe dusting, the practice of dusting the mirror. Wipe, wiping out, wiping the mirror from dust. So, which is like the practice of Zazen. The dust is our thinking mind and we're constantly bringing back our mind to breathing and emptiness.

[10:08]

But it seems to create a duality between the dust and the bright mirror. So the fifth ancestor wasn't quite satisfied with his poem. And so the Winang or Eno, Daikan Eno said, there is no tree and there is no mirror. So since there's no mirror, where could the dust fall on? So there's nothing to wipe and there is no dust and there's no mirror, bright mirror either. So, so these two sides, and for a long time I thought actually that, that, that Daikonino was the deeper understanding.

[11:15]

And actually reading this commentary, Suzuki Roshi clarified that point for me and I'm able to see it now more as a balance between the two, which is sort of like the two sides of form and emptiness. So that the practice of cleaning the mirror is the practice of form is emptiness. Actually, emptiness is form. So the practice of emptiness is the practice of form. Of all the different forms that we have in the zendo in our life is the practice of wiping the mirror. of cleaning the mirror.

[12:19]

And actually, I think it was in The Crooked Cucumber, there's a story of Susuki Roshi used to go to one of his students' houses, and it was one of these hippies who lived in a totally chaotic house, and all he would do is go to his house and start cleaning his house. That was his practice, to clean the house. So you clean your house, you clean your mind. So actually, the way we take care of our surroundings also has an impact in our state of mind. And that's of course very, we're all very familiar with that, that's very traditionally Zen.

[13:23]

But then on the other hand, if we don't keep the other side of the teaching, that form is emptiness, then we can get obsessive about cleaning and about form and attach to ideas of dust and bright mirror. And then we get lost thinking that emptiness has some particular fixed form. Or thinking that the practice is just about keeping everything in the right place and doing everything right. And then if something is a little bit off, then we become very anxious and rigid. So that's the side, you know, where Freud talked about religion being the obsessional neurosis of humanity.

[14:27]

The obsessional neurosis is, you know, where we develop this kind of neurotic right where we're used to having everything in a certain kind of way, and if it's not done that way, then we lose our balance. So, you know, if the Doan doesn't do everything exactly right, then we get very upset. So we have a certain way that we practice our forms, but sometimes we do things differently and we throw everything off. Did anybody want to say anything about that? I think that's kind of an important subject.

[15:32]

Yes. I think it almost reminds me of when Suzuki okay to be a little mischievous? Like, all of a sudden I thought when you said that, to just blow out one of those candles on the altar and just leave it. But in a way, it's almost like it's not, you know, we shouldn't emphasize too much mischief because that's when you get real problems. But it's almost like, you know, if you hit the bell wrong and it's not intentional, then that's okay too. I mean, it's almost like, So those are the two sides.

[16:53]

Work on tone and don't be so tight. Yes? And it was interesting because Mel started improvising on the Maccubio, something we had never heard before. He was doing these weird beats, and it was totally intentional. He wouldn't allow us to do that. having it in your body so deeply that you can then be free with it.

[18:01]

In a way, yeah. Also, Michael was dancing, wasn't he? I don't know. I wasn't watching you. I was paying attention. But it seems like you would just want to dance. And that was very sweet. Okay. Then in the little sutra, the Buddha says to Shariputra that if he explained enlightenment, all people would be startled and perplexed. and hardy disciples might fall into the great pit. So this was his first inclination to try not to explain the Dharma and saying that the Dharma is subtle and scrutable and

[19:14]

uh... that if you try to explain it uh... it's so perplexing that then people wouldn't believe uh... respectfully uh... and certainly there's something uh... perplexing and impenetrable about uh... sin and about the dharma and uh... It's a way of using language in a non-dual way so that it makes it very difficult to understand because we used to use language in a linear kind of way and can actually be quite frustrating or impossible to follow or to speak about. So we really don't understand Zen or the Dharma.

[20:27]

And that's why we have to practice. Because in practice we have a direct experience of it even though we don't understand it. And actually maybe the not understanding is what leads us to practice it. And then with the practice, the teaching becomes easier to understand. But in this instance, in the Lotus Sutra, Shariputra begs the Buddha to explain the Dharma. and to explain it discriminately.

[21:28]

And the same happens in the Suram Gama Sutra, where the Buddha rebukes Ananda for his discriminative seeing, for trying to understand Buddhism conceptually, And yet Ananda starts weeping and supplicating the Buddha to explain the dharma to him. And the Buddha actually tries to do it. And I think you just had a class on the Surangama Sutra. And I don't know if anybody has tried to read the Suraṁgama Sūtra, but it's quite impossible to understand. Just like Dogon is impossible, and koans are impossible and quite frustrating. And so out of that impossibility or perplexity comes this, oh, what is this about anyway?

[22:35]

What does this have to do with anything? Oh, this is just Dogen and his craziness. So that was what the Buddha was concerned about, that if he did try to teach it and explain it, that people wouldn't be respectful of the Dharma and therefore wouldn't incur bad karma on themselves. So the teaching of the Dharma is compared to the Udumbara flower, which is seen once in 3,000 years. And so our whole lineage is said to start with the transmission from Shakyamuni to Makahaśāpa.

[23:38]

And in this story, once at Vulture Peak, the Buddha, instead of giving a discourse, he took a flower and twirled it between the fingers of his hand. And while he was smiling silently as he turned this flower, It is said that none in the assembly understood this gesture and only Kshapa understood and responded with a smile. And so this is the teaching of the special transmission outside the scriptures. And here the Buddha said, and I'll read it, I have the treasure of the eye of true dharma, the wonderful mind of nirvana, the true form of no form, the mysterious gate of dharma.

[24:47]

It cannot be expressed through words and letters and is a special transmission outside of all doctrine. This I entrust to Mahaśyapa. So, this reminds me a bit of the actual experience of lecture, or listening to lecture, where actually, particularly when we're having lecture in Sachin's, where you can't, actually it's, the lecturer said, you know, often says that it's a mistake on purpose. And so the whole purpose of the lecture is to sit Zazen. And it usually goes on longer than you expected.

[25:52]

And it becomes particularly painful. And so she and Mel goes on and on sometimes. And our legs are quite, you know, painful and hurting. And so you can't really concentrate on the content of what he's saying. So we can't listen there to lecture with our discriminating mind. Now this question of the flower, this twirling of the flower, what is this flower? What is the mystery of the flower? In sort of going over some of my notes to try to put together this talk,

[27:00]

This class, it made me think of the Narcissus flower. Do you know the Greek myth of Narcissus? Where, you know, it's become narcissism, it's become a very popular term. It's a term that Freud coined to describe the love of self. and actually the suffering that comes from being attached to the self or the love of self and actually the condition that describes supposedly in psychiatry And actually in social thought also the condition that best describes the suffering of contemporary society nowadays is narcissism, narcissistic disorders, character disorders. They're all based on being attached to self.

[28:02]

And it is said to be particularly true of individualistic societies. And the United States, as an individualistic society, particularly suffers from narcissism. But in the Greek myth, Narcissus was trying to grab a hold of his image reflected in a pool of water. And I think in Zen we have also many stories about ignorance being represented by a monkey trying to grab the image of the moon reflected in the water. So, then of course in trying to grab his image, he falls into the water and drowns. With the implication that narcissism is deadly. So the more we try to grasp a fixed image of ourself, the more deadly it becomes, or the more pain we have.

[29:20]

But that's not the end of the story. In the story, then, in the place where Narciso fell in the water and drowned, the Narciso's flower is born. so that when we're not, when we can let go of our, this fixed image of self, this image of ourselves that we love, the way we like to think of ourselves conveniently, all these reflections, which are like thoughts, you know, that's the experience we often have in Zazen, we have all these kind of parade of images of self and other, uh... that we are fixated upon or that have have us in their grip in some kind of way and uh... the more we hold on to it to them the more they hold us and the more we suffer uh... and instead when we can let go of these images

[30:37]

then our flower self opens, or the flower of our self opens. So that's one way I thought of this twirling flower in Buddha's hand. Now, the flowers also... It's not like the flower is pure and our thoughts are impure. That's another way that we think, dualistically. because the flower is just as much a product of mind as our thoughts.

[31:42]

So what is this flower as our own mind? And in this, there is three transmission stories that talk about flowers. Eka, and actually it's the same poem in different kinds of ways, that Eka recites to Sozon and then that Sozon says to Doshin and then Doshin says to Forget the name But anyway, the poem is from the seedbed of your mind the Dharma raises flowers

[32:57]

Yet there's no seed, nor are there any flowers. So this flower comes from the seedbed of our own mind. But usually we think of the flower outside of us as some kind of object that is outside of us. not as something that's blooming inside of our own mind. Then the next two most important teachers in the lineage after Makahashapa are Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu.

[34:32]

And they're a little bit quite scholastic. We usually don't talk about them too much. Mel actually tried talking about Vasubandhu in recent lectures. But they are part of our lineage. And Nagarjuna developed the middle school, the middle way, the Madhyamika Buddhism. And he's the one that developed the whole notion of emptiness. And all out of a commentary on the Prajna Paramita Sutra, And so the Prajnaparamita Sutra, which Alan's going to talk about next week, is at the core of the Zen school and also is at the core of the teaching of Huineng, you know, the sixth ancestor.

[35:50]

And the Diamond Sutra is a section of the Prajnaparamita Sutra. And the central teaching of the Diamond Sutra is the non-abiding mind. And Winang was said to be turned towards practice upon hearing this phrase of the Prajnaparamita Sutra about the non-abiding mind, the mind that doesn't abide anywhere, which is the teaching of emptiness. And emptiness in Sanskrit The word in Sanskrit for emptiness is sunya. And sunya in Sanskrit means both cipher and emptiness. I think in English, cipher also means both number and zero. And so...

[36:57]

number and zero, or form and emptiness. And all the numbers depend on zero for them to be numbers. And so one, it depends on zero to be one, and yet one, two, and three, up to ten, they all have meaning in relationship to each other. And actually, in Zazen, we count our breath. So as we breathe out one, we realize the meaning of zero, of emptiness. As we breathe out two, we realize the meaning of zero, or emptiness. Now, Nagarjuna, at the same time that he was an ancestor, he was also a scholar.

[38:04]

And one of the things that he was chiefly concerned with was how to recover within words that which is beyond words. You know, in Zen, even though we deny, you know, the importance of words and of language, you have to use words to deny words. So we reject words, we're also attached to words and language. And Tozan, in the poem that we read, he says, meaning is not in the words, but he also says it's not beyond words either. So how to use words to express something that is beyond words?

[39:06]

and that's sort of the difficulty of speaking about Zen or giving a Zen talk or a Dharma talk. So This part of Nagarjuna is a little bit intellectual, but what he said was that in order to, how to use words to speak about something that's beyond words, he thought about it in two ways. One was the twofold truth, meaning that truth is twofold. There's a relative, a conventional truth, and then there is an absolute truth. And so how can language recover its suchness in spite of it being relative?

[40:20]

And so it's the relationship between language and emptiness which allows us to say anything in language that may be true. So, in language also we have the structure of interdependence. Every letter depends on every other letter. Every word depends, has its meaning from every other word. And every word is empty in its own being. Because it doesn't have a meaning except for every other words. And then the other way that he used words to speak about that which is beyond words is what he called the language of the other.

[41:30]

So he talked about languages being something that doesn't belong to the speaker. And this he calls the language of the other. And this other is just interdependence. And another teaching of Nagarjuna was what he called the dialectics of samsara and nirvana.

[42:50]

And Nagarjuna advocated keeping the defilements as a course for the Bodhisattva's compassion. that meaning if if you don't If we don't have desire or attachment, then there can't be any life. There wouldn't be any reproduction.

[43:58]

So, how do you think we can use desire creatively in a way that doesn't perpetuate more suffering. By being alive to it, and by accepting the suffering that does come from it, and being alive to that, I'm continuing. I think sometimes when we seek to not suffer, You have to experience life. And I think that the life that is, the suffering that is life, will never not be. And I think it may be a mistake to try to seek, not to escape it.

[45:05]

But that's not really a mistake. Well, sometimes, my situation now is that I have a relationship, but we're only together every six weeks, two months. And so the time when we're not together, then there's the desire to be together. So at that moment, then my practice is to, well, be able to recognize the desire for contact when there's no contact and to realize how

[46:13]

we are together even though we are apart. So this object of desire, which is she, say, what part of me is it that I'm looking for in her? And yet, that part of me that I'm looking for in her is already there. with me when she's not there. And I actually used to experience quite a bit of grief and frustration about being apart. And yet opening up to the grief I think produced a certain kind of clearing that leads to contentment.

[47:21]

And actually now, you know, because my father used to say marriage is like a cage, you know, when those that are outside want to be in and those who want to be in want to be outside, you know, so that You know, when you are in a marriage, in a living situation, you long for those moments when you're going to be alone. And when you're alone, you long for those moments when you're going to be together. So how to be alone when you're alone and to be together when you're together, that's one of the koans. So when you're alone, to realize that you're not really alone. And in some senses, we're together with all beings, then we can be alone and quite contented.

[48:32]

And in my case, I'm alone even though I know there's a relationship there. And then when we're together, to be able to also enjoy being together and enjoy desire. Because desire is not, we think it's something very enjoyable, but actually it can also be quite difficult to enjoy. And because we have particular ideas associated with the object of desire, so our desire is conditioned by these objects of desire, these ideas we have of desire about what we enjoy in the other and what we don't. So how to enjoy a desire without those conditions?

[49:42]

So we have to leave the object of desire unfixed, mutable. And maybe that's the root of desire in emptiness. Because we desire when we feel empty. Or without the object of desire we feel empty. So how to turn that emptiness into emptiness itself. So I tried to give you a little bit of personal juice there to talk a little bit about this dialectic of nirvana and samsara that now Arjuna is talking about.

[50:59]

Otherwise, this can be kind of dry. Yes. Well, having been on occasion in the position you're describing, I've never been able to see to be very alone or very lonely, to be very together or very apart. I don't see how you're going to get the goose without the sauce, so to speak. But which one is the sauce of aloneness? Togetherness. Right, but are you together in that moment, or are you apart? If you're together, you're certainly together. Well, but when you're alone, you're longing to be together, and yet you're not together.

[52:05]

Well, I'm not alone. Well, but you may not. You may have resolved that. But I think for most people, being alone is difficult. Maybe it comes from being alone with a child. I don't know. Maybe so. You know, most people when they lose a loved person, the natural response is grief. And feeling a sense of loss and loneliness. As if we've lost a part of ourselves, so we feel separated.

[53:10]

That's the problem. of more cultural and then here in California myself and that sort of lineage back to the old country and then my, sort of my own expression and I think about our practice lineage in India, China, Japan, you know, by and large with other streams entering and was wondering if you could kind of give like a two or three sentence sort of encapsulation of what we have in those three sort of streams

[54:38]

Did you have some thoughts to get us started? I had some thoughts on it. When you talked about Vasubandhu and Nagarjuna, that they were intellectual, that it seemed like in India, we don't know much about their actual practice, the sitting practice, but there's this whole body of work about working with the mind, and that's sort of the foundation of our practice. And then when we went to China, recently and saw the Chinese style of practice as an informal, kind of casual looking manifestation of something that's very formal. Yeah.

[56:19]

Well, you know, in terms of the North and the South, the North is stricter with form and more formal. I mean, my experience of North America and South America, I think of the North as kind of the head and the South as the heart. People in South America are very friendly and warm and kind of interact and grow into and out of each other's life with much more ease. here is more formal and I think it's easier in some way for practice to get rooted in the north because practice is so much based on some kind of strict form and even the schedule that we have fits better with the lifestyle of the north.

[57:33]

You know, in the South, people go to bed late, they get up late, so it's harder to have a strict practice. And yet, in this kind of strict practice, it's also easy to lose the heart. in some way. So people talk about Zen as being kind of aloof and, you know, detached in some way that, yes, we practice all together, but then how we make the transition from the formal practice to the kind of the social link in the sangha, a lot of people talk about that there's a gap there. There's a difficulty going from one to the other. So there's always this kind of duality.

[58:37]

I teach a class at CSPP on the psychology of religion. And one of my students came to the lecture last Saturday. She's Japanese. She was saying how she felt, and actually this is the second in the other semester also, I send actually my class to here to get Zazen instruction and then to stay for the lecture. And then I get to here, I ask them to write a paper about it and what their experience was like. And so, So she was saying she felt uncomfortable when Mel was talking about something about incense and how much it's, I wasn't here at the lecture because it was my son's bar mitzvah, but something about how much incense burning there was going on in China.

[59:38]

I don't know if those of you who were here sort of referenced that. And she felt that actually that Mel was criticizing Asian form or Asian culture in some kind of way. So she took it kind of like a criticism of her culture. And I actually explain that my fantasy, at least, was that what Mel was talking about was because we've gone through some changes, cultural changes here, because we've had to adapt to some people here feeling very uncomfortable with the incense. And that's also a local thing where people here have a lot of problems with allergies. In South America, you never hear that. So being allergic to incense, for example, or being bothered by this kind of smell or that kind of smell or this kind of food or that kind of food.

[60:39]

I think that's also a cultural expression in some kind of way. So my thought was that Mel was referring to, well, if we did things like that over here and burned all this kind of incense, then it wouldn't fit very well here with the sangha, because here some people have problems with incense. So just that, I mean, I'm not answering your question directly, but that's a question of cultural differences. But the other thing that she said further to the point was she's Japanese and her family comes from the Soto Shu in Japan. And so she was saying how she liked the fact that she came here and was able to come right into the middle of a Dharma talk that Mel was giving. And she felt right in the midst of Dharma in some way.

[61:42]

Whereas in Japan, you can never go. She was saying, I don't know if this is true. Those of you who may know better and been there may correct me, please. But she was saying that to go to a, that non-Soto Shu people or non-Buddhist people cannot go listen to a Dharma talk in a zendo. And that sort of Dharma talk in Zen is for the actual monks in the Soto Shu. So it's all very segregated and compartmentalized. So, she was marveling of how here in the United States we have this kind of open Sangha, you know, where men and women are sitting together and some are Buddhist, some are not, or some may practice different kind of Buddhism and, oh, welcome to just come right in and be part of Dharma.

[62:45]

So I think that's something unique about the flavor of Zen or of the Dharma that is taking on in being developed in the West. And maybe we also have this, you know, the, you mean it went from west to east, right? So India is west in some way. And people talk about India, Indo-European languages, you know, or the Aryans who went to India part of the same European family. So maybe the Dharma is kind of circling, you know, going from West to East and then coming back West, right? And then going back East, because then also it seems like there's increased interest in Buddhism in Japan, secondary to the West being interested in Buddhism.

[63:52]

So it's kind of a circle there, west to east, east to west, back to east, and so on. And also the Chinese and Japanese culture are more pragmatic and express their practice and their realization of Dharma in certain kinds of activities that were typical of the culture. So, for example, Hyakujo, I believe, which is one of the ancestors in the Zen lineage, was the one who said a day of not working is in the fields, a day of not eating. Whereas the monks in India were forbidden to plow the earth because they could kill some insects that were living in the

[64:57]

ground, so they were not allowed to plow the earth, the ground, the field. And actually, because Hyakujo had that saying and had all the monks working in the fields during the day that Buddhism was able to escape a massive persecution from the emperor who saw all these monks as being kind of idle bums, you know. So because he put all the monks to work in the fields, then also Buddhism was able to thrive and express itself in a very kind of Chinese kind of way. Because of course India doesn't pay much, hasn't paid traditionally much emphasis on material development. and they're much more speculative.

[66:01]

So the Indian Buddhism was more intellectual, whereas Zen and Chan is much more, you know, pragmatic in everyday life. And also, but then the West is more intellectual, you know, than the East. Yes. I was just thinking about the flower. Well, just like a mantra is like a flower. A flower has a center and then has all these petals around it.

[67:10]

So, if we say, Om Shakyamuni Buddha, That's like a flower has a center and has all its petals around it. What if you make a proposition, a sentence? Is that different? Is that different from a flower then? I mean, the word Shakyamuni Buddha is maybe as an image in your mind. Yes. But then to make it into a proposition, Well, no, I mean, it's a whole made out of parts. But there's something about, there's logical reasoning and discrimination in language, which is not there in a flower.

[68:28]

And it seems that there's something about logic as a human dharma that separates us from our nature and yet at the same time is an expression of it. Why is that? We talk about discriminating. Why is it that when you start putting words together into logic, what does that do? Why is that so different? Because it divides something that is originally one and together gets broken up into pieces and loses its original unity. Earlier you mentioned the assembly of Buddhas and one Buddha.

[69:37]

And the twirling was in my, you know, the Buddha picks this flower, but he doesn't just hold it. We have this notion of twirling it, like a prayer wheel. which has a mantra on it, and some mantras have some linear meaning, but actually in application it's more like twirling the Or you don't, anyway. And mantras or dharanis are like that as well.

[70:40]

They, some, not all, have a linear meaning. That is, you could translate it and it would make some kind of sense. But when you use it, when you practice a mantra, It's like twirling a flower, or spinning a prayer wheel, and the linear meaning somehow is transformed into something else, like breathing in and breathing out, or a flower, which isn't immediately evident what the linear meaning of looking at a flower is. Yes? I wanted to get back to desire, and remember how we used to say, beings are endless, I vow to say them, desires are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.

[71:52]

I don't know if it was Malie's idea or not, but I just have this really clear image of Malie getting a bright smile on her face and saying, I think a little desire is good. And so, I just wanted to bring it up because I I just kind of cringe at this sort of pushing that down and how the desire is, you know, desire to practice, for example. I don't know if you could say that's karma creating, I suppose. Strictly speaking, you could say desire to take care of your family and your loved ones and your friends is, strictly speaking, is a problem. But I don't know. I think that the desire is good. I just learned it. Yeah. That's the Freudian part. That's the repression. Well, that's the, yeah, that's the repressive, I mean, Buddhism as a religion. Say it again.

[73:07]

Two weeks ago, Saturday, I remember talking this very Zendo, which I think reflects what you're saying. That is, it's more a Mahayana interpretation of this arrangement of truths, the Four Noble Truths. So I understand you to be saying that the notion of extinction is in some way I would be quiet to agree with you about that. In medicine, there's something that is part of the health and the homostasis of the body that has to do with sexuality. So there's something of sexuality that needs to be expressed, used, enjoyed in some kind of way for the very health and life of the body.

[74:14]

Held and contained. Yeah. But yet how we do that is the koan. Yes? Well, I kind of disagree with Andrea because I'm all for desire, but I think what the point is, and from Buddha on down, is that desire, if it's not understood and if it's not handled skillfully, it causes suffering. If you don't want to suffer, then don't desire blindly. That's what I was saying. I disagree. I don't think that's what I was saying. I think you misunderstood what I was saying. That's what I was saying. I'm not saying, yes, just do this. That's not at all what I was saying or how I practice. But I agree with you. Well, Durbin says to have few desires. The eight awarenesses, you know, in a night person, one of them is to have few desires.

[75:21]

Not eliminate desire, but have few desires. Alan? You said so yourself. Yeah. But it is possible to have few desires. Alan? And I want to distinguish, there are desires that lead to suffering, and there are other things that we should be careful about whether we call them desires or attachments. You know, when we think of way-seeking minds, or the wish to practice That's deeply encouraged in the Buddha Dharma. It's not what is generally being construed as desire that leads to suffering.

[76:30]

It may lead to suffering, depending on how we hold it. But I think it's important. all kinds of wishes together under one, you know, just in one category If we have lives, if we have families, there are things that we wish for and hope for, for them.

[77:36]

And that's exactly the realm, that's exactly what the work is, I think. You know, Laurie, I just remember from the very beginning, her koan for the last 11 years is, I'm willing to get sucked into this discussion, actually. The first one I was thinking about, actually, and a couple of things Alan said made me think of this, is that the Metta Sutta says, let us not desire great possessions even for one's family.

[78:38]

And something just sort of made sense to me, which is I think the kind of desire we're desiring to save all sentient beings, or desiring to practice. Mel always says, you know, that's great, you know, that's not really the kind of desire we're worried about here, because I think that desire is coming from a place of non-duality, of not setting up a sort of a self-gratifying self. So that's the first comment I had. And the second one I think is that I don't always think that desire and attachment are the same thing. I think you can, like when we sit in zazen, I think you can, I mean sometimes it's very hard to do of course, but I think sometimes you can just, if you're in one of those modes when you can observe your mind, you can

[79:38]

Well, maybe the problem is not so much desire but craving, the craving in desire. When we can't accept where we are at the moment or our being, where it is, and we're craving desperately for the object of desire so that we have some kind of lack that we can't come to terms with or reconcile with, so we feel divided, and then we're desiring in the context of that craving or division, then that's an unwholesome desire. Yes? Hi. I wanted to pick up something that Ross was saying, although I've been listening about desire. The first Buddhist that I hung out with, I met on the Argentine dance floors.

[81:40]

They were speaking specifically because of your South American culture. And so when you were speaking about South Americans and meditation, often the conversation was the concentration, the sheer focus, the sheer presence one had to have in order to dance tango. And I was just, so it was sort of like my first sangha were these people who had a practice almost to help the tango, who had a tango practice almost to help their buddhist practice. I was wondering if you were part of that lineage. That's a lot of Chilean say, but... Thank you.

[82:47]

Actually, tango was a dance that was danced in the bordellos in Argentina. And it was very much looked against by the culture of society. And then gradually it became part of the... the regular culture became an art form. But at first, it was sort of an artistic expression of the sexual relationship between a man and a woman. Talking about desire. The diaphragm, Lee. Oh, okay.

[83:51]

Okay, time. Well, thank you so much.

[84:01]

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