Good morning, everyone. Next Saturday afternoon, I'm going to be doing a seminar on Japanese Buddhist schools and practices. I thought today I'd talk about one particular issue in Japanese Buddhism and how it relates to our practice. So as following the Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist tradition from Dogen and Suzuki Roshi, we have a particular way of practicing. And yet, as American Buddhists, we also have the opportunity to learn from all of the different Buddhist schools and the different Asian Buddhist cultures And we have good representatives from all of them and their American successors in America.

[01:01]

So it's really a wonderful time and a wonderful opportunity for us to develop our awareness and to be open to seeing our own practice tradition in the light of various aspects of Buddhism as it's developed. In Japan particularly, there are many different Buddhist schools and approaches, and I don't think we need to be as separate or sectarian about these as Japanese, we're not Japanese. But also in some ways because of this, there are many different really wonderful expressions of the Budo way that developed in very unique ways in Japan that we can learn from. So I wanted to talk about one particular issue.

[02:05]

I'll talk about this more next Saturday afternoon. I wanted to talk about the issue of self-power and other power. And this is not usually a kind of topic in Zen, but it's an important topic in Pure Land Buddhism, which is the most prevalent form of Buddhism in Japan. And I particularly wanted to talk about Shinran, who was a contemporary of Dogen, the founder of Japanese Soto Zen, who I talk about quite a lot. Shinran founded what's called Jodo Shinshu, or true Pure Land Buddhism. And that branch of Buddhism is very much present in the United States and in Chicago. There's the Chicago Buddhist Temple, which is, I think, at Broadway in Leland, somewhere up there near Lawrence.

[03:08]

and there's also the Midwest Buddhist temple at Menominee. There may be other Buddhist Church of America temples in Chicago, I'm not sure, but this branch of Buddhism is actually the, in terms of numbers of parishioners anyway, the most popular in Japan. And I think there's something for us to learn from it. And particularly this issue of what Shinran calls other power and self power, and that this is a way of talking about practice in Pure Land Buddhism. So just, I'll go more into the history and the different schools and different practices next week, but just very briefly that in the Kamakura period, in the 13th century Japan, there was a great kind of revolution, reform, shift, and there were new forms of Buddhism that developed out of the previous esoteric or tantric Buddhism and the Tendai-inclusive Buddhism.

[04:18]

All of the new forms, Rinzai and Soto Zen, the different forms of Pure Land Buddhism and Nichiren Buddhism, which is also still important today, developed at this time. So this idea of other power, I think is relevant for us to consider in terms of our own practice and the practice of Zazen that we've just been doing. The way this is expressed in Pure Land Buddhism, going back to China, and actually its roots go back to India also, is that one of the You could say Cosmic Buddha is one of the meditation body Buddhas. There are many different Buddhas, but one of them is named Amida Buddha. And the main practice of Pure Land Buddhism and of Shinran, and they don't even like to talk about it as a practice, is just to chant Namu Amida Butsu, which is homage to Amida Buddha in Japanese.

[05:27]

And the idea behind this is that this Buddha, when he was a bodhisattva, before he became a Buddha, vowed a whole series of vows. 47, I think. 49. Anyway, one of them that's most important for Pure Land Buddhists, the 18th vow, is that he said he would not become a Buddha unless anybody who chanted his name would be able to enter his Pure Land after they died. So this idea of Pure Land I'll say a little bit about, that when a Buddha awakens, and this is true for all Buddhas, they create a field of awareness. And I'm going to talk about how all this applies to Soto Zen and Dogen in our own practice, even in the context of Soto Zen, and in all of Buddhism, actually, that when a Buddha awakens, part of what they see is that all beings have this capacity for awakening, what we sometimes call Buddha nature.

[06:41]

And this is important for our practice in terms of seeing the ways in which we are supported by Sangha, by the world, by everybody we've ever known, by our culture and those who inspire us, maybe even including the difficulties of our culture and society. At any rate, Buddhism, particularly Shinran, attacked this idea of self-power. I don't know that anybody has ever claimed that they represented self-power, but from the Pure Land perspective, and particularly Shinran, had this really radical humility. He felt that there was nothing that he could do himself, that his own efforts were totally irrelevant, and that people who think that they can

[07:46]

reach enlightenment or gain spiritual awareness or develop themselves spiritually by their own efforts were really arrogant. That by ourselves there's nothing we can do. So Shinran took this to great extremes. He started a new school. He was the first Japanese priest or monk to openly marry He had a vision of Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who's also important in Zen, who I talked about last Monday, saying that she would come and appear, and he took a wife who he thought was Kannon. Anyway, he really was unusual in terms of feeling his own human limitations and worthlessness. He said things like, if even a good person can enter the pure land, how much easier for a bad person?

[08:51]

Which sounds a little strange to us. We think that being good is part of what our spiritual practice is about. But Shinran understood that people who are good think that that'll take care of it for them. So again, he was a kind of extremist radical about his sense of his own limitations. But I think there's something about this that we can all learn from. And again, Shinran had this feeling that he couldn't even say Namo Amida Butsu without Amida Buddha helping him to do it. And some of the other forms of Pure Land Buddhism emphasize if you chant this, you will enter Amida Buddha's Pure Land after you die. There's one form where literally people on their deathbed would have a picture on the wall in front of them of Amida Buddha descending from the sky with various bodhisattvas around him, and there'd be a string coming down from that picture, and they would hold it in their hands as they died, chanting Namo Amida Butsu, so that they would enter Amida Buddha's Pure Land after they died.

[10:10]

Shinran actually didn't agree with that, or certainly didn't emphasize that. He talked about if we receive what he called faith mind, Shinjin, that if we awaken to that, then the Pure Land is right here. So in some ways, Shinran, of all the Pure Land teachers, feels closer to me, maybe not in terms of his practice, but in terms of his understanding, feels pretty close to me, to some way in which Dogen and Suzuki Roshi and our Soto tradition expresses our awareness of Buddha nature. You know, I feel like I have some particular personal affinity to this tradition. My first seven days Zen Sesshin with my first teacher in New York was at the home of a Pure Land teacher, a Jodo Shinshu teacher. I've been teaching for 15 years or so for the Pure Land Jodo Shinshu Seminary in Berkeley now, online.

[11:17]

One of the things that's interesting is that American Pure Land Buddhism, which for a long time has been basically a Japanese-American community cultural thing, is starting to have more and more non-Japanese-American priests who are training and people joining in. And they're also becoming more flexible about accepting practice. So they actually do some Zazen. And Bishop Ogwee, who used to be the Reverend Ogwee here in Chicago, was a good friend of Suzuki Roshi. So I want to talk about this idea of self-power and other power as it applies to our practice, our practice of Zazen. So the idea of self-power that Shinran criticized, I think there are forms of Zen, some branches of Zen and some Zen lineages that seem to almost believe in this self-power.

[12:28]

And maybe there are branches of Vajrayana Buddhism. where really the emphasis is on your personal effort. So one of the issues here in terms of self-power and other powers, what is our effort in our practice? Where is our effort in our practice? In the Soto Zen tradition and in my own way of expressing meditation, we're not through our self-power, accomplishing, gaining, reaching some enlightened state. That's not how our practice works. Dogen says very clearly that this zazen, that this practice we've just been doing, is not some system of accomplishment. It's not learning the skill of meditation. That said, of course, there is a kind of craft that we become more familiar with as we integrate this meditative awareness practice into our life.

[13:48]

So what I want to say is that I feel like our practice is a kind of both self-power and other powers, an integration of self-power and other power. But first I want to say how Our practice includes other power, what Shinran calls other power, in our own way. So we don't chant to Namo Amida Butsu, but we do sometimes. We have Shakyamuni Buddha at the center of our altar. We have Bodhisattvas, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, Manjushri, sitting in front of him, and the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Kanon, a couple of places in our Zen Do and as Tara in the front hall talked about this bodhisattva's compassion last Monday, we do have a sense in our Zen tradition of, in some ways, calling on the bodhisattvas, calling on the Buddhas. And also in Zen particularly, we talk about the Buddhas and ancestors.

[14:51]

So the idea of dharma transmission and that Zen has been transmitted personally, hand-to-hand, mind-to-mind, through every generation, by people doing what we're doing this morning, sitting together, and by this personal connection back to Buddha. This idea of the Buddhas and ancestors, the ancestors or patriarchs, sometimes they're called. There were great women teachers historically up to Suzuki Roshi. In our lineage, the names we chant are all male, but we also chant great women teachers historically, and there are many women teachers now. But this idea of the ancestors, the particular people in each generation who passed along this tradition. In some ways, it's not exactly other power in the same way as calling on Amida Buddha, but in some ways we call on them.

[15:56]

We talk about these teaching stories, these koans, that involves some of these ancestors. We talk about teachings from the Buddhas and from great ancient masters. It's not that we don't also talk about our current situation and the various ways in which the teaching allows us to engage in our own lives and world from this awareness, but also we have a sense of our support from Buddhas and Bodhisattvas from Zen ancestors and also from all beings. So Zazen is not the cause of realization. It's not that by sitting, by logging enough cushion time, at some point automatically you will become, quote unquote, an enlightened being. Actually, our understanding of our Zazen is that

[17:00]

each of us, in our own way, through our shedding practice, is expressing the Buddha nature that is already, in some ways, part of us. Of course, we can develop our practice and unfold our practice in awakening and express it more and more fully for ourselves and our friends and family and the world, but it's not about through using sitting meditation as some technique to get something in the future. Dogen says very clearly that in the Buddha way, Buddhas do not wait for enlightenment. We're not waiting to become Buddha by sitting. Our sitting is a kind of way of expressing, of informing ourselves about the Buddha nature that's already here. So in some ways we, we could think of other power as the way in which each of us individually and all of us together are supported to express Buddha in our own lives.

[18:08]

And we see that in Sangha. So as most of you have experienced, it's easier to come together and sit in a space like this and sit together with others and face the wall and face ourselves with the support of all of us. So we have this circle of all of us just being here today. We could see this as a kind of other power practice, that we appreciate the support, the power, the benefit that we receive from others in our Sangha, from the people who support our Sangha, from all the people in our life who've helped us to find our own opening to spiritual practice, from teachers, friends, family, many beings, and in some ways the whole universe. right now is allowing us to practice. So we also do this in some of our ritual formally. In the meal chant, we chant before meals during our monthly day-long sittings or half-day sittings or longer sittings.

[19:19]

We chant names of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. We call on them. In our dedication, after our service Monday evening, we call on Buddhas and Bodhisattvas And there are other ways specifically. There's a chant that is done when we sew these Buddha robes for those of us who are moved to take formal refuge in Buddha and do lay or priest ordination. We chant these, the raksus that some of you are wearing, and these are cases. And when we chant, with each stitch, we say, Namu Ki Ebutsu. I take refuge in Buddha. This is a kind of nembutsu, a kind of calling on Buddha practice. Namo kiya butsu. I plunge into Buddha. I take refuge in Buddha. I honor Buddha. During the ceremony of lay ordination that we'll have in October, the people doing that will come in chanting Om Namo Shakyamuni Buddha.

[20:24]

This is very much like chanting Namo Amida Buddha. We take Shakyamuni as our main Buddha. in Zen, but we also honor many Buddhists. So there's some way in which the core understanding and the core reality of our sitting practice is about accepting and receiving and benefiting and appreciating and expressing gratitude for all beings, for Buddhas, for Bodhisattvas, for the ancestral teachers, for the beings in our life. So there's a way in which we are not so different from Shinran in terms of accepting other power. This is not how Zen is usually spoken of. But when we look at the rest of Japanese Buddhism, when we look at this particular Jinran, we can feel something about our own practice.

[21:28]

We can be informed about our own practice. And the way in which that we appreciate that we are here thanks to many beings. Dogen says in one of his first writings about meditation, The Self-Fulfilling Samadhi, in his Bendo Wa, When one person sits, there is a mutual benefit that happens, a mutual assistance that's imperceptible, but that happens between the person sitting and, he says, grasses and trees, and fences and walls even. That the whole nature of reality is involved in supporting us and vice versa. that in some ways we're, our willingness to pay attention as we sit upright and face the wall, to pay attention to our own sensations and body and mind and thoughts and feelings, and keep returning to attention, that that is in some ways,

[22:34]

some mutual resonance in which we are connected to the world. And maybe this is how, when a Buddha awakens, a Buddha field is created, a Buddha land, if you will. Now, of course, our Zen practice does also include some aspect of self-power. So I feel like we have some integration of both sides. our understanding includes that actually nobody can be Buddha for you. That each of us, in some ways, has the personal responsibility to show up in our lives, or to show up as you all have here this morning. It's not that we can create Buddha through our great personal self-power, but we have some ability to respond, we have some responsibility, each of us.

[23:40]

So we could see this as a kind of self-power. It's not that through your efforts in meditation you will become Buddha or become enlightened or that kind of thing, but that in some ways, each of us, The fact that you showed up this morning is an expression of Buddha mind, Buddha heart, Buddha caring. So in Soto Zen, we don't emphasize that there's some right or wrong way to do this Zazen meditation. It's not about doing our forms perfectly. It's showing up. There is some effort involved. What is our effort? So Shinran said, nothing you can do on your own matters.

[24:52]

He would say, only Amida Buddha allows you to show up this morning. But I think we have some way in which we have an integration of this. We have to take responsibility so the precepts, I'm going to be talking about more in the next few months also, are ways of taking responsibility in our life. Again, it's not about being perfect or being good. How do we take responsibility to try and express this aware heart-mind? this kindness of Buddha nature in our own minds. We learn how this unfolds through being willing to show up and just sit and be upright and pay attention. What is it like? This body, this mind, not our ideas about how we think we should be, but really this body, this mind on your cushion. So we receive this from all beings.

[25:58]

We receive this from the lineage of teachers who've made it possible, have kept this practice alive for 2,500 years so that all of us could learn to practice awareness in this way. And also, there is some effort involved. We have to show up. you know, that I can't be Buddha for you. Nobody can do that. But also, you can't be Buddha just by yourself and just for yourself. We are connected. So this idea of non-self means that actually who we think of as this limited self, you know, that's some construction that we've made from our karma in this lifetime from our experience, from our genetics maybe, from family dynamics, from all of the ways in which we've been, sorry to say this, but all the ways in which we've been hurt or damaged by living.

[27:12]

It seems to me that that's a universal, we sometimes call that the first noble truth. do we take on all of this and also see that in the midst of all of that, somehow, all of you are here, sitting upright, engaged in this attention to awareness and kindness. So we benefit from others, and our effort is to return our attention to this dynamic We could call it a larger self that includes all others, or we could call it other power, but that we are connected with self and with other, and our self isn't separate from others. We all depend on each other, just as we depend on Don now as our work leader to go prepare for temple pinning that we will do after this. So what is our effort?

[28:16]

Part of this is just, again, returning to kind of attention, to, oh, I've been thinking about whatever for the last two minutes or 20 minutes, okay, coming back to my posture, to breathing, to facing the wall in front of me, to facing everything in my life. Through doing this, we do develop some power. Now, is it our own? Is it our self power? Well, I think I agree with Shinran. It's not just about ourselves. We do this together. Sangha is about other power, that we support each other. And Sangha can be seen, you know, quite widely, the Sangha of everybody in your life. How many of you had hats when you were children? Okay, well, almost everybody raised their hands. In some ways, Does anybody have a pet other than a dog or a cat?

[29:19]

What kind of pet did you have? You had guinea pigs. Eric, what did you have? Crap, oh my gosh. At one point, after I was a young adult, I had lizards and frogs and toads. But anyway, even those beings are part of who we are now, right? And if you think of your, and of course your dogs and cats and who, you know. So many, many beings contributed to our being able to be who we are right now. And yet, it's up to each of us to show up, not just to show up at the Zendo or to show up on your own cushion at home during the week, but how do we pay attention to all of the challenges and all of the possibilities and joys and frustrations of our everyday activity, of our work, our family life, our relationships?

[30:26]

This is the challenge. It's self-power, and it's also other power. Just a couple more things from Dogen, particularly, about this, and then I want to have some discussion. The role of meditation is not to create, achieve, or obtain some enlightened state through the power of one's personal effort. Rather, meditation, and I've talked about this already, is the necessary expression of this interactive event of awakening. All practitioners are gifted with the opportunity and responsibility to express this together with grasses and trees, fences and walls, and space itself. Dogen says in the beginning of Bendel Wado, engaging in a wholehearted way, although this teaching is abundantly, and this reality is abundantly inherent in each person, It is not manifested without practice. It is not attained without realization.

[31:30]

When you let go, dharma fills your hand. So, it's not enough to have heard of Amida Buddha, or Shakyamuni Buddha, or Dogen, or the Dalai Lama, or whoever. How do we express it? How do we manifest it in the world? So, is that self-power or other power? Well, I think it requires some of both. In the awesome presence of active Buddhas, one of Dogon's writings I like a lot, what allows one corner of a Buddha's dignified presence is the entire universe, the entire earth, as well as the entirety of birth and death, coming and going, of innumerable lands, and of lotus blossoms. The whole world, again, supports us. And then there's the saying from my friend and translation collaborator, Shohaku Okamura, his teacher, Uchi Amoroshi, says, gain is a delusion.

[32:44]

Loss is enlightenment. It's difficult for us because we're from a consumerist society where we've been trained very deeply to get more stuff. And we can think of that as material stuff, or sometimes in our society when people come to practice, we think of spiritual stuff. I have to get this power in this practice. But actually loss, letting go, is awakening, according to Uchiyama Roshi. Suzuki Roshi also talked about this. He said, everything is Buddha's activity. So whatever you do, or even if you keep from doing something, Buddha is in that activity. Because people have no such understanding of Buddha, they think what they do is the most important thing, without knowing who it is that is actually doing it. People think they are doing various things, but actually Buddha is doing everything. So this is Suzuki Roshi's expression in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, and many other power.

[33:48]

We think it's just us. And in our materialist society, we've been trained to think that it's just us. We have to do it all ourselves. But actually, what we do ourselves is connected with deeply with Buddha. Buddha is here in our activity. This is, anyway, Suzuki Roshi's expression of this. So, anyway, I think we have a tendency to think of all of this in terms of, you know, self-improvement or, you know, kind of therapeutic contexts or And not that that's not useful and helpful, but how do we see our activity as really connected to Buddha, where it's not a matter of self or other, where we realize that self and other is yet another construction we've created to separate ourselves from the world?

[35:02]

Each of us, each of you, is deeply, deeply connected to Buddha, even if it's your first time here, your first time doing this. Really, Buddha is part of us. We are part of Buddha. And then we have our own ability and response that allows that to manifest in the world. So maybe that's... enough for me to say. Are there comments? Yes, Wendy. Yeah, I was thinking that I've been, I don't know, for some reason, I guess partly I have a friend who has Crohn's disease, so her digestion is really complicated and just the mystery and just it's incredible what your mind does. Digestion is a really complex process. Yes, it is. There's just a mystery to this intelligence that knows what to do with this food that you eat.

[36:08]

And so I was thinking, in a way, like, you know, okay, yes, we eat, but the nourishment of the body, I mean, it translates into energy and the way it sustains cells. I mean, this vast intelligence that's expressed in our body is like, you know, other power. Like, I have no... And I was just thinking there's a somewhat of an analogy. No, I think that's right. Digestion is a way to think about our practice. Katagiri Roshi used to talk about this a lot. How do we digest our awareness? How do we digest our world? How do we receive other power ourselves? Yeah. Thank you. Other thoughts, comments, questions? Keep going.

[37:17]

This is a separate thing. I just was, I heard a, I was watching a bit of an interview with Chaudhry Trumpa and Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti was talking about personal experience and he was saying that meditation, the question they were addressing was what is meditation? And Krishnamurti went on and on about how, you know, we imagine this to be what we might call personal experience and he says, you know, he was, it just reminds me of this self power, other power because in the sense of, you know, personal experience, it's about me and mine and he was saying Religious experience is not personal experience. Again, you're preparing for a guest, but the arrival of the guest, that's not yours. That's this thing showing up. But yeah, I found that interesting. I just wondered if the idea that religious experience is, quote, not personal experience, I think it's interesting.

[38:26]

Yes, thank you. I think that's very much to the point. Spiritual experience, religious experience, is about something that goes beyond certainly our idea of self or even the limitations of this karmic stream, this body-mind that connects us with something larger. That's what brought us all here. We wanted to have some sense And just for myself, I'll speak that as a teenager, I had this deep, you know, real pain about wanting to have some way to connect with something meaningful, to have some purpose. So in our Zazen, we talk about not having some goal or a particular gaining idea. It doesn't mean that there's not a purpose to our practice, that there's not a meaning to our practice. It's just that it's not limited by our own ideas of some limited accomplishment we want or experience we want.

[39:33]

Our experience of spirit, our experience of truth, our experience of awareness, of kindness and caring for ourselves or others is not personal. Yeah, it's deeper. Eric? I'm really intrigued by this analogy of digestion. What you were saying about all the intelligence that is manifested in that kind of a system, the digestive system, and every other system of our body and mind. And it's true that know all that sort of exists kind of independently of you know what you think about it or ideas about it whether you need a different thought at all but nonetheless you know in terms of what actually happens in the world

[40:37]

of what choices we make in terms of what we put in our bodies, whether we eat well or not, whether we eat enough or not. And yeah. I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's sort of interesting to be sort of, you know, it's an interesting question to ask why this whole sort of self-power, other power comes up in Japanese history in a way that it didn't before because, you know, because I mean one way of looking at or somehow outside that whole system of intelligence rather than as just another expression of it.

[42:19]

I don't know if that makes sense. Do you know what I mean? Yes. And one of the things I'll talk about next Saturday is just the historical context in which this idea developed and how it was a response to previous Japanese Buddhist expressions. But yeah, we are connected with everything going on in our society, Not that we can take care of that just by taking good care of our diet either, because we don't even know all the poisons that are out there. Anyway, it's very complicated. But yes, how to... But I think there's some usefulness in thinking of, even if it's an illusion, of thinking of self and other in this context too. How do we... Where is our effort? How do we receive the benefit of practice? How do we express the benefit of practice? And so, yeah, there's a way in which the idea of self and other itself is a solution, but it's something that has been important in spiritual history in various contexts.

[43:27]

Yeah. Thank you. Doug first. Oh, I was going to say, I think Shinran really speaks to me very profoundly. I always feel a lot of sympathy when I look at anything he... at some of his sermons and letters that have been collected. I think for him, It's not that he doesn't recognize that there isn't some sort of awakening. Shinjin isn't just faith in Amida Buddha. It's at the same time a recognition of how our own greed and desire to get something and change things controls everything we've tried to do. But at the same time, in recognizing that, I can see that in my own practice, certainly, that I would certainly say more often than not, I sit down on the cushion with some sort of expectation or hope that something is going to change.

[44:41]

I'm going to feel better. I'm going to at least wake up here and not just sleep the whole time. And I think that the turn is when you somehow start recognizing that you're doing those things. At the same time, I just don't, I'm not sure I really understand how that happens because I feel like we sit down and we're willing for a certain to wake up. I'm not sure that we cause ourselves to wake up. it's happened and recognize when it happens. And maybe it happens more often because you've recognized, oh, I woke up this time. It goes away. I woke up again. I think we want, not we, but who we are, what we are wants to wake up. And that's the sort of sense of other power I think maybe that Shinran was talking about, that somehow Amida in us and the awakened mind in us wants to wake up and does in spite of our efforts.

[45:45]

Yes. Yeah, I think Shinran's writings are very deep. I appreciate them also. And this idea of shinjin, faith mind, it's not that we create that. It's somehow that, it's the realization. And so we talk about Bodhicitta, the mind of awakening that inspires us, that informs our practice. It's a related idea, that Shenzhen is, I think the word recognition is very good, that we recognize, oh, Buddha, where, somewhere, out of the corner of our eye, in our knees, wherever, we, oh yeah, Nancy? I just want to offer sort of my own reflections on this too, that in a way sometimes I can feel like some of this is like, you know, dirty words and sad and like, you know, you just want to talk about that. And for me, I never had that much of a problem with the whole idea of God, but I know a lot of

[46:49]

us, maybe in particular, in this country, grew up in some kind of Judeo-Christian tradition and maybe found Zen as a way of like, let's get away from that. And I always have to remind friends of mine who are like, what are you doing? It's not that Zen says, or Buddhism says that there's no gods. It just doesn't deal with that question so much. But I never had that much of a problem with it. And there's a way in which sometimes forgotten out, all that I was going to say. There's a way in which, though, we can get kind of reductionistic about our practice, that it's just about observing moment to moment and deconstructing the self. And it is. It's not that it's not. But I like thinking about the self as being so much bigger and maybe just looser than we think. Somebody used an analogy once of waves on the ocean, that maybe each of us is kind of like a wave, or just forms for a little while, and then crests and breaks and goes back into the water.

[47:54]

And it's not that it's not the water, but for a period of time, it's like a wave. And so, yeah, it's like the whole self, power, other power. For me, it feels like it's a little bit of an invitation just loosen up some of that stuff and not have to hold on to any one particular idea so tightly. And I also wanted to believe that there was more out there than I was capable of seeing. And for me, Zen offers a lot of tools to be able to perceive that a little bit more. So that's just my own personal on that, but it always makes me happy when I hear about other power, because it's like, you know, magic is a dirty word too, and I don't think it's like magic, but it's just like, there's so much more going on than I can control or comprehend, it's just always kind of like,

[49:00]

great and you know it does it does it's not you can control it and say okay if I you know chant these things five times I'm going to get you know the pony that I always wanted or whatever but it's it's like stuff you know you put things out there and the world does kind of need you and sometimes it's your own karma and sometimes it's you know I don't know it's not a magical incantation but there are things that happen that I didn't make happen. Yeah I don't know well Suzuki Roshi in that passage I read says that we never make things happen exactly that Buddha is part of everything we do, or however you want. You don't have to use the word Buddha even. But he also said that the world is its own magic. So we can start to appreciate the way in which what happens is not some mechanical product of something. But anyway, there certainly is an element of devotion and devotionalism in our practice. We bow. chant, we, you know, we appreciate this sense of gratitude for that which we should be grateful for.

[50:10]

Wendy, you had something before? Yeah, I was just, I don't know, I'm assuming I can build it to whatever you were saying, but I was just having this image of... Feel free to go back. You know, like, if your eyes are covered and so there's, I think this is the self in a way, And there's this big world out there, this vastness, and the self is here. And I think that what our effort is, is seeing all this efforting. Like, what looks like this feels and looks solid to us, but with attention you see it's actually all this activity, you know? And it becomes more clear, oh, it's these thought thinking, and these ways that I'm constantly, my mind is moving, and then with that motion comes, you know, the sort of, like the world is coming in. So I think like, yeah, the effort of seeing efforting, feeling efforting, and then the sort of opaqueness becomes more translucent. And over time, more of this, the vastness can get in.

[51:15]

Yeah, another way to say that is in Buddhism, things aren't nouns, they're verbs. Stuff is happening. So we've gone a little bit over, but if anybody else, maybe anybody who hasn't spoken yet would like to add some reflection or question or comment, please. It's really difficult to live in a world where, because it seems like the self and other is like a super game, we're all playing, and it's constantly being reinforced. And how do you remind yourself that, okay, we are deeply connected and this is kind of that team effort.

[52:19]

And any good advice on how to live in muddy water like the lotus? Yes, we live in muddy water like the lotus. And it's partly being open to reminding ourselves of being reminded by the world. The world is its own magic because it presents us with possibilities for remembering. It's not just about me. everybody in your life is part of who you are. So re-minding. Nambutsu, chanting the Nama-mida-butsu, literally means remembering Buddha. So in that sense, that's the heart of our practice. How do we re-mindful ourselves? How do we Bring, you know, what you just said, bring back to our awareness that this deep connection to all beings and awareness and kindness.

[53:33]

So maybe our effort is just to remember, to remind ourselves. And we can use tools, little, some of us sometimes wear beads just as a reminder to ourselves or, you know, whatever is helpful to you to, Just enjoy your breathing and realize that we are connected. So thank you.

[53:58]

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