My name is Ron Nestor and I've been practicing here for a long time but I haven't been around so recently. But I do come in the morning on the weekdays but I never come on Saturdays because I work Saturdays And it's been years since I've been here on Saturday. And before that I was here every Saturday for years. So it's kind of, it's like visiting relatives who I haven't seen for a while. And although I recognize many of you from the morning, or from having given morning talks on Mondays, as I was bowing before I sat here, I was thinking, this is kind of what this talk is about, is the difference between bowing in this context with all of you sitting here in this really kind of contained and

[01:22]

carefully Thanks, just really carefully arranged Setting and all of the the history that goes into this this got into this building and And I'm the only one bowing and everybody else is sitting down and there's this feeling of this is really special and just an hour ago at home that I have a plate full of dirty dishes and I'm sort of running around, I'm late, sort of eating sloppily, a very different feeling. And so, these two different feelings, one is this is like holy, right? And then at home is profane, something like that. But it's the same person, it's just like an hour ago, just in a different setting. So that's really what I wanted to talk about this morning.

[02:27]

And that's what we'll more or less be talking about during the Aspects of Practice period which starts tomorrow. when we're in this room this you know we take this room for granted if you if this is your first time here this all seems kind of pretty interesting but if you've been here a lot you get used to it and you really appreciate it but I think we this room this room itself has a kind of presence to it that's the result of hundreds and thousands of people actually. And maybe millions of people going back farther than we know.

[03:32]

And the room itself, the zendo, is a kind of visible, really visible aspect of practice. And we take care of it really carefully. You know, it's cleaned. It used to be cleaned every day. And I guess we've gotten busier, so we don't clean it every day now. And the altar is always immaculate. And although Mel probably doesn't think so. And the flowers are always really, somebody's really put care and effort into the flowers. And the author changes over time. Things sort of come and go as we change and Mel changes. And the whole Zen Center itself is a kind of framework for our practice. And the whole Zen Center itself is taken care of in the same kind of way.

[04:41]

And we feel that. Except if you go into the garage. And even that, Ross, I think, is working on now, after twenty-two, three years. Finally, we're getting around to the garage, and maybe even the garden shed at some point. And then on the other hand, you know how you feel when you're Like what I described my situation at home before I came here, I don't think there's a single person here who doesn't have that kind of feeling at various times during the day. When we're speedy or sloppy or raggedy in various ways, jealous, fearful, lonely. And then when we're here, particularly when we've been sitting a while, or during a Sashin, you start to feel pretty, there's a kind of equilibrium that happens.

[06:00]

It's not the same for everybody, but there's a kind of stability and calmness. It doesn't mean that other feelings don't arise, they do. You know, we can feel irritated and antsy and have all the feelings that we usually have but there's this kind of calmness and support when we're here that I think many of us feel. And that comes partly from the support of others but also comes from our own zeroing in quality of just sitting. So why is it that there's this big discrepancy? Why is there this kind of feeling of certain kind of stability here and calmness and in our life outside of here often seems rather raggedy? Why are they different?

[07:06]

It's the same person. So, as a kind of a kind of a mirror to this I guess, I don't know if you call it a problem. It's an interesting phenomena. As kind of a mirror for this phenomena, I'd like to use a koan, a case from the Mumon Koan, which is, Zwegen calls to himself, or Zwegen calls master, The Mumon-Khan is the simplest collection of khalans that we have. Compared to the other collections, the Mumon-Khan is pretty accessible.

[08:09]

And we don't have khalan, we don't have a khalan practice here. Our practice is just sitting, as you know. So it's a little, I'm not quite sure, you know, how do we treat khalans or cases? How do we treat them? they're designed, they're not designed to philosophize about or to speculate about or as intellectual topics. Really they're designed to experience in the same way as sitting. Sitting practice is designed to experience. You know, we can, and if you've ever felt inspired when you're sitting, which you probably have, you start, well let me talk about myself. I start, I can come up with wonderful sort of essays, you know, and expositions to give to the world at large about how wonderful this really is, you know. If you only could see how wonderful sitting is. And Zazen is so, it's just so exquisitely subtle and blah, [...] blah.

[09:13]

You can just talk and talk and talk about how great Zazen is. As sincere as it is, it's not the same as just doing it. And we always want to make something. We want to expand. If we have a good experience, we want to expand it. So the koan practice is not designed to talk about. It's designed to experience and practice. But since it's not an actual practice that we do here, it's a little bit, we're in sort of a gray area. So I think that, on the other hand, I don't think that we need to be intimidated by koans either or feel that because we don't get it or that we're not, we don't sort of transcend it and get it that we have no business talking about it. I don't think that's necessary either. So I think we can just approach them as we just approach them and see what happens.

[10:18]

And I think for me they work as a kind of a mirror to understand or clarify my experience. All the while knowing that as long as it's a kind of a thought or a kind of conception, it's missing something. It's only partial. So this case from the Mumon-Khan is Wigan calls Master, and here it is. Zen teacher Zuigan used to call to himself, Master. Then he would reply, Yes. Wake up. Okay. Don't be fooled by others. Anytime or any day. Okay. I won't. That's it. Here it is again.

[11:21]

Zuigan used to call to himself, Master. Then he would respond, Yes. Don't be fooled by others. Are you awake or awake? Okay. Don't be fooled by others. Anytime. Any day. Okay. And then, Mumon, who is the commentator who's put together the collection of koans, has, in every case, he has a very brief, like, three-sentence comment, and then a very brief three-sentence poem or verse. And the comment to this case is,

[12:24]

Old Zwegen buys and sells himself. He puts on different masks. He puts on a god mask. He puts on a devil's mask. What for? If you get caught in his masks, you go astray. And if you try to imitate him, you're nothing more than a fox. which means you're kind of like a dumb animal. And the verse that he uses is actually an old Chinese Zen poem which goes, I'm just paraphrasing these, goes something like, students of the day, students of today or students or practitioners don't know the truth. They only know their consciousness up to now.

[13:33]

This is the seed of endless birth and death. The fool takes it for his true self. So the difficulty with talking about koans is that these, especially these verses and, well the whole thing actually, but the verses and the poems, when you first hear them, if you're not used to, if you haven't read this or are not used to this particular case, and you hear it like in a lecture, it's hard to put it together. You know, it's the kind of thing where you kind of like want to read it 5, 10, 15 times, and then become familiar with it. And then it kind of begins to make some sense, or where it doesn't make sense, you know where that is. But when you first hear it, it's just, it's kind of difficult to grasp. So I'm, excuse me for just throwing that at you. So the body of the main koan is, here is Ligen calling to himself to wake up.

[14:48]

And that aspect is really necessary in our practice. And that's why this case is pretty popular because we relate to that and we admire that attitude. And actually we do that. I don't think there's anybody here who doesn't have some feeling of wanting to call to themself to wake up. You wouldn't be here if you didn't have that feeling. And when we, in just sitting in Zazen, we call to ourself to wake up by coming back to our breathing and coming back to our body, our posture. And then we drift off and start daydreaming and then we ask ourselves to wake up and we come back to just this primal breathing that has nothing to do with what we want or don't want.

[16:03]

Our breathing just goes on anyway. And then as we get lost in our various fantasies and desires and moods, we realize that we're... we can feel that we're going astray or that we're kind of, as like with Zwegen, we're fooling ourselves. When he says, don't be fooled by others, he doesn't necessarily mean other people, but others is like calling himself master, is like calling to his true self, whatever that is. He's calling to his innermost stuff. And the others are what would lead him away from that, being able to experience that, just that, which is what we do when we sit.

[17:13]

So this practice that we have is designed for that, to actually allow us to do what Zuigan is doing in this particular case. However, when we're not sitting, when we're not in a zendo, when we're not the zen center, when we're not surrounded by people who are supporting us in this kind of focus, then what? Then how do we wake up? How do we call to ourselves to wake ourselves up and come back to our most present self? I don't have a... I mean, you could create various answers or suggestions or encouragements.

[18:26]

But ultimately, the real guts of that problem are not something that you can just tell somebody else to do. you know, ultimately it has to come from our own sense of energy and our own sense of what's most important. And somebody can tell you what's most important, but if you don't really feel it, it will have some value, but the most important thing is to really actually feel it. In terms of what we could tell each other, I would say mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness is a way of waking up in our very active life. Mindfulness means just noticing what we're doing. noticing what we're actually doing.

[19:33]

And that's enough, just to notice what we're actually doing. It sounds so simple, but the reason it's so difficult, as you know, is because We have all these plans and we have all these desires and we have these ambitions and likes and dislikes and they become dominant. And so just noticing what we're actually doing is secondary and trying to get to some place that we want to get becomes dominant. And American culture and most cultures throughout the world are set up to reinforce trying to get something that you want. But, you know, even, you know, to really make it really difficult, even mindfulness itself isn't, may not be enough to really get to the heart of what this case is about and to really get to the heart of what our practice is about.

[20:44]

It's more, well, I won't say it's more. The question is who's being mindful? And that's what this case is about. It's not just how admirable Zwegen is for having this attitude of waking himself up. It's who is Zwegen who is asking himself to wake himself up? Both aspects are important. So as we're being mindful during the day, as we're noticing

[21:45]

our body, whether we like things or we don't like things, our mental states, dharmas. While we're noticing these things mindfully, there's also, who's the operator? Who is headquarters? Who's deciding to be mindful and taking all this in? And that's where, and that's Zweikin's masks. He's, you know, he's the person that calls. He's the person that answers. He has these different aspects to himself. And we have different aspects to ourself. And how do we get underneath all the various aspects. Or how do we, how are they how as our life

[22:57]

more than just putting on a mask here and a mask there. Here's the mask that's mindful, here's the mask that's not mindful, here's the mask that's at the Zen Center, here's the mask that's running around driving crazily on the freeway, here's the mask that, you know, is irritated at your child. These are all aspects of our life that we can't avoid, don't want to avoid, but... Are we just sort of like a billiard ball that just goes careening around the table? Mindfully knowing that we're going into this pocket or that pocket or bouncing against this ball or that ball. You know we can I think this this let me just stay for a minute on this this way that we divide ourself up into different parts

[24:17]

and fool ourselves, actually. We can fool ourselves with these different parts. One way is by, if we take a role, you know, I think all of us maybe have some strength and weakness. And we tend to, you gravitate towards where you're strong and you take that role. Generally, if you're, you know, if you're, well, I don't make examples, but I'll take myself as an example. It's the best way to do it. When I was here in the Zen Center earlier in my life, I'm very good at keeping things organized from a lot of different vantage points. I'm not really good at any one thing, but I'm good at sort of keeping a lot of things going. And so, and I really love the Zen Center, so I was very good at kind of keeping things going in the Zen Center.

[25:20]

And in the early days here, things weren't as organized as they are now. It's kind of rougher than it is now. And people were also much younger. The demographics of the Sangha was just younger. So, you know, I had this role of sort of taking care of lots of things in a way like Ross and Alan and the practice leaders do now. And people related to me as this taking on this particular role. But as I began to see that I was actually... that that role was a way of hiding. That I could take on this role and hide behind it. That there was aspects of myself that were not wanting to be... that I didn't want to deal with. But because I had this strong role, that was sort of who I could be. I'm not unique in this. I think everybody has the same kind of tendency.

[26:22]

And I think a real strong part of practice is to begin to uncover and a part of mindfulness is to begin to uncover where we're hiding behind our roles. It doesn't mean that we have to give up our roles but it's that using our role as an identity as a kind of ego shell. So in this verse, in the case, it goes, we only know our consciousness up to now. So we look at the world through our kind of habitual consciousness and we don't realize the limitations of that consciousness. And the fool takes it for his original or his true self, meaning that when we think about practice or we think about enlightenment or realization,

[27:56]

We're thinking about it from the limitation of our usual way of thinking, of our consciousness. We keep trying to understand things in that way. How do you really understand your breathing when you sit? How do you understand that? So the mirror, what I see in the mirror when I look at this case is, number one, that this attitude that Zwegen has is really encouraging and necessary in our practice. And even though I've known this for years and years, I still need to be reminded.

[29:00]

And to see a great Zen teacher from the past having to remind himself and using that as a practice is a good encouragement. But just to want to wake up, just to want to be mindful is only partial. The question is Who is wanting to wake up and who is wanting to be mindful? So those are the two aspects that I see reflected back in this case. And then just move forward.

[30:01]

You could just like melt into a puddle of God, you know, what should I do? But we can't do that either. So that's why we have a very structured practice. It looks very formal, but that's just the kind of outer look to it. And we can use that, and we can be that. So you can say something now. Gary? Thank you for your talk. I was here, I think near the end when you used to come on Saturday, I think one thing I wonder if you could say more about is what is a call-off?

[31:09]

How do you mean? I don't know. unanswerable part to it. An unanswerable part? Yeah. How do you know it's an unanswerable? This isn't a Dharmakāra. Should I agree with everything you say? What was your question? Well, you said that koans have an unanswerable part. I meant for those people here that maybe it's the first time they've come to meditation and koans are sometimes not approachable by your intellect.

[32:19]

Yes. I think you did say something about that. I thought you'd say more about it. Well, I don't know because that's the kind of limitation is I don't practice the koans in the way that they're meant to be practiced. That's why I'm saying there's a kind of a gray area. So if we use them as a study or as I like to use it as a mirror, it's a little different than actually practicing with a sitting. It's like not using it as following your breath or being with your posture. So I can't say. I don't have that kind of experience to really speak from the inside of that kind of practice. Does that make sense? I really enjoy sitting with you in the morning and it's great to hear your point.

[33:24]

Yeah, I feel the same way when I hear people on Monday morning. Since this is sort of the beginning of aspects of practice, could you just be a little bit more encyclopedic about koan? That is, can you say anything about where did it come from? How did that practice develop? How long have people been doing koans? What are the major collections? I can say a little about it. Just to refer to something Ron said, there's usually something unanswerable. And Ron said, how do you know it's unanswerable? It's not unanswerable.

[34:26]

And it's usually a dialogue that throws light on an aspect of practice and often it kind of delineates somebody's awakening experience, although not always. But it's a tool. That is what you are meditating with. You're concentrating on that. Maybe it's just a line or a word from that koan until it unlocks itself and you can actually present your understanding in a physical or verbal way. My understanding is there's a number of major collections, as Ron mentioned, there's Mugham Khan, there's the Book of Serenity, there's Blue Cliff Record.

[35:43]

Dogen, who we think of as the quintessential Soto master, whose picture is right up there next to Ron, had his own collection of 300 poems, and he's referring to them constantly as he uses them to elucidate points of practice. And there's some speculation. There are various curricula of koans, courses that you take in order to develop your understanding. You do X number of koans in a certain order. And there's at least one one speculation that that's something that developed in China with the development of a large monastic system where instead of having the intimacy of just a few people practicing together, you would have hundreds of mostly monks and some nuns practicing in these large centers

[36:58]

transmission of understanding that relied more on these. Now, somebody could probably successfully say something completely contrary to what I would say, but that's kind of it in a nutshell. But I had a question. It doesn't pertain to the cause. It pertains to the point you told. What does it mean to be fooled by others? What do you think? Well, again, what I'm mostly interested in, there's maybe two ways to talk about it. One is if you try to look at it objectively or subjectively. Objectively, you might want to try to understand what, you can read the commentaries to these cases and kind of Do some thinking and sort of try to think what they mean what they're saying this But then also there's what it means to you what it means to me when I'm reading it or thinking or considering it.

[38:23]

I Don't think they necessarily they might be somewhat different. They shouldn't be radically different. I don't think To me what it means is when I I know What it feels like to go on? astray. I know what it feels like to have a desire which I know is going to lead me in a direction which is not really wholesome, not really what I need to be doing. It entrances me, intrigues me, sucks me in. That is a desire that comes out of me and whether I chase and follow that desire or not is up to me. Whether I have that desire or not, I can't really control, but whether I go running off after it, I can control. And so being fooled by others, to me, means being fooled by the vividness of the desire, being fooled and chasing, running after it, and sort of distorting my life from the point of view of being centered.

[39:35]

That's what it means to me. What do you think? I think you can see that. There are no others. That everything is part of oneself. now, creating this feeling and this atmosphere in this room, if you take one of us out of it, it would be different. And we might be hard put to say how. I know, say, I know there's fewer people here today probably because of this session than there often is, and the feeling is different. So there's no others, including

[40:40]

all of those kind of wandering desires that you mentioned, that's part of it. So to me, I think, don't be fooled by otherness means Something like that. And one thing I just want to add. You know, when I came here, you were one of my first teachers. And I think you, I wasn't exactly fooled by you, but I was taught to pay attention.

[41:43]

And it's a debt that can't be repaid or spoken of enough. And that influence... It's being repaid pretty well actually. Whether people in this room recognize you or know you or not, that just continues. So there's no other there, there's no in a way Well, if you think that there's no others, how would you possibly be fooled? I don't want to answer. OK. I don't want to answer. I'm curious to know everything. OK. Well, it's at 5 after. I think we should probably stop. Thank you.

[42:40]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ