Good morning. Oh, excuse me. I'm supposed to introduce our speaker today, who is Alexandra. She says she Japanese name says she you show she's a resident here and she's the head student now during our practice period. We call that our shoe. So and she started practicing in 1987. Thank you. So, I'm going to... Seojin gave me a koan to work with during this practice period, and it's case 43 of the Blue Cliff Record. And it's Tozan. who is also known as Dong Shan from China and I thought most everybody here knows the purpose of the koan which is to bring us in direct contact with reality which cannot be done through an intellectual process

[01:25]

And that intellectual process tends to be what we do. And this is a way to possibly undermine it. So that there can be that merging between subject and object. The real and the seeming. So when I read this koan, got it right away and thought something is wrong. I must be missing something, I can't get it right away. So I spent a lot of time in contemplation of it and I took a look at the origins of the Blue Cliff Record, and look for a little insight as to how the commentaries were done.

[02:38]

There's a verse in the series, there's a hundred koans in the Blue Cliff Record, and Setsho masters Setsho because of a verse. Master Ingo makes the commentary. And then the translator of the book that I'm using describes each line, which is interesting because you can see how the culture of the time played a role in the the language used, because this is the book that I used. So, this has the Imanikan and the Hekigin Roku. So, the translator is Katsuki Sakida, and he has some interesting

[03:53]

ways of viewing the lines in the Koan. And I think... I'll just read the Koan out of the book. Maybe I'll just tell you the Koan. To-san, the teacher, is asked by a monk, when Koin-ten-hik descend, where can I go to avoid it?" Tozan says, why don't you go to the place where there is no cold or heat? And the monk says, where is the place that there is no cold or heat? And Tozan says, when cold, let yourself be so cold It kills you.

[04:55]

And when hot, let yourself be so hot it kills you. And I thought, I get that. You embrace the negative and suffer. And I thought, oh yeah. How can you avoid it? So this is a big question for me because I have been struggling with a situation that at one time had been intolerable. So I stopped there and pondered that. And I have notes that I'm going to put because I could not jumpstart my contemplation without the visual aid.

[05:59]

I've become very visually oriented. So I took notes in this... Those are my notes. And they're going to go on the floor so I can see them. You need rocks. OK. And it needs to go far. Go further away from you. That way. This way. Yes. Perfect. I need the rocks. Yeah. Put two rocks in there. So called and he were described by the commentator who put this book together, Katsuki Tsukida, cold as death and heat as illness.

[07:05]

And as I pondered those two things, I thought there could be birth and death or any difficult situation that brings you to a place where you want to escape. And I don't know if I said he had this illness. He described it as illness. And I had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which many of you know, which that was 10 years ago. I was okay with it because 10 years ago it was not creating much of a change that put me up against it. So I had a comfortable Satsang practice, very comfortable, because I have been doing meditation practice since I was in my 20s and yoga and Tai Chi and

[08:19]

my body was like molded for this. So it was easy for me to sit and my main concern was practicing with my mind. Trying to bring myself back to the present during Zazen and staying in the present during Satsang and I experienced very enjoyable stable meditative experiences over the years of my practice until about five years ago. And five years ago I started getting symptoms that were making me move when I wanted to sit still.

[09:24]

It made me wonder what stillness really was. It brought me to realize that this was getting worse and I'm going to have to do something about it. What did happen was, I remember, Rohatsu was my favorite thing to do. And I would like Rohatsu. And I used to argue with Paul Haller about, let's make it two weeks. Because I'm just getting into it in a week. And he laughed. I think we had Rahatsu and Andrea was there on the porch. I remember I looked at you and said, you know, I can't do this.

[10:32]

And it was the most startling thing to realize that I had come right up against a wall and I was not going to be able to stay. I literally could not sit still. I could not see my practice in this body and I had to take medication that changed the landscape of my mind. My mood changed. So much changed. I was like a whole new person. So anyway, coming back to this koan. There's a line in the middle of it that is where escape no longer is possible. And on the other side of that line, it says, no exit.

[11:38]

And where do you go when you can't escape? And any door you might open leads to I remember this in a sci-fi movie. They open the door and there is the universe below. Galaxies. It's huge and if you step out, you fall. So, there is a metaphor in the commentary about the Thousand Fathom Cliff. and I'm going to read it. There were two or three metaphors that I really connected with. It's Setsho's verse. Setsho says, a helping hand, but still a thousand fathom cliff.

[12:46]

Show and hen, no arbitrary distinction here. Cho and Hen are the absolute and the relative. And that's a reference to the five rings. The ancient emerald palace shines in the bright moonlight. Clever Conroe climbs the steps and finds it empty. So that's a lot right there. Could you say it again? A helping hand. Tozan helps the monk with his answer. His answer was, let the cold be so cold that it kills you. That's the helping hand. But still, a thousand-fattened cliff showed him no arbitrary distinction here. the relative and the absolute, the absolute being the real, the relative our ordinary manifestation, and they are deeply connected.

[14:02]

The ancient Emerald Palace shines in the bright moonlight. The ancient Emerald Palace is the realm of Samadhi, the place where Subject and object come together. Self and other become one. The real is understood within everything and vice versa. It's where form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Samadhi is a state of stability where preferences are no longer dominant because they're understood.

[15:05]

Aversions are no longer dominant because they're understood. So wisdom is a factor of that arises in Samadhi when you are still in a real way. Clever Konro climbs the steps and finds it empty. He climbs the steps of the palace. Konro is a legendary dog in Japan and he The legend goes that he chases a rabbit. He can't catch the rabbit. The dog and the rabbit run as fast as they can and continue running until they both drop dead of exhaustion. Kairo is a reference to the monk who is asking

[16:17]

how to escape the heat and the cold, the difficulty of his practice and he has spent his whole life chasing after enlightenment outside of himself and at some point the monk sees the Emerald Palace, like Conroe sees the Emerald Palace because the moon is shining on it. Wisdom is how I see the moon. The light from the moon is wisdom arising that reveals the Emerald Palace, which is empty. So we go to... ah, I think I'm going to skip ahead.

[17:31]

The fact that Setsho uses the word clever kamara makes me think that the monk is still attempting to discover His realization is enlightenment intellectually. He's still manipulating the process in order to get there. Why it is empty, why he has a why there's like an implication that something should be there. But I am still sitting with this question about emptiness. It can be understood intellectually, but the coming into direct contact with reality

[18:46]

is a whole other thing because it is a confrontation with all of the obstacles that exist in our life. So when I decided one day I couldn't practice at all and just tried to abandon it and then I found there was no place to go even if I did abandon it, that would be worse. So, there's no exit, no escape, but there was a 1,000-pound cliff. I could take a dive. I have that down at the bottom of my picture. And Mel would say every now and then, he would point Because I would go on the Shosan question, and he would point down like over the edge of the Tan, like I had to step over the edge.

[20:00]

And the edge, I didn't recognize that edge. I have places in my practice that I do, but the degree to which I had blocked my situation, which is what I like to call Parkinson's. It's my situation. It kind of puts it on the same plane as everybody else's situation. It's just what I have to deal with. So the question, in order to do that, meant that I would have to let myself go. let go and let be. The letting be was something I just discovered. Letting go was when I was holding on to ideas about stillness.

[21:09]

Stillness is a still body. How can anybody that's kind of rolling around on the cushion be still? So that was, I had to let go of that idea, but then I didn't want to move. So I experimented with this and let myself be as is on the cushion. And so I was going like this and like this and I would go forward and hang my head down like that. That's a good one. And then I'd go up and look all the way up at the ceiling. And what started happening was my being, my actual being, started to line up with my body in a way that was unwinding the tension in my physical self.

[22:19]

But I had to move. That's what my body wanted to do. And if I didn't move, I was in a struggle. So I have gone through a variety of pushing, sitting on the towel, sitting on, laying down, doing a variety of things to to Zazen, and the question was, what is Zazen in this situation? Because it's not the same as it was. The actual practice is always the same. To me, it is to return to the present, to be aware of the breath, to hold my posture, which now is in flow, and So I can still do that.

[23:21]

But there was something still disabling me in terms of doing Zazen, and that was I couldn't daydream. If I daydreamed, all of my symptoms would amp up, like turning up the volume. So I had to do a practice, which is not recommended, of not thinking literally, or verbalizing, because the verbal part of my mind was connected to the tremor in my arm. And everything would just go wild if I went on an excursion into verbalizing, philosophizing, thinking about anything. It didn't matter. Same thing if somebody actually spoke in the Zendo, it would trigger the same thing.

[24:27]

So I stopped thinking. And during Zazen, a thought would come by and my body would tell me right away, you know, come back. So I found that I'm still mentally awake and visually I can sort of think but I don't. What I do is just take in everything that is around me and let it just come and go and I get closer to the seat, the actual cushion. I actually feel close to my body in a way that is different. So... I assume that this will change and I've noticed that

[25:43]

The line where you're up against the wall can change any day for you and for me, because I've noticed that every day I wake up in the morning, something new has happened. Either good, which always makes me happy, or not so good. I can wake up and have something called fire nerves, just wild nervous system and then I have to deal with that and practice and not reject it and especially not judge myself. It's easy if you think something that you have as a difficulty is wrong and you have to get rid of it before you can practice which is what I did for a long time, that rejection is, I don't quite know how to say this, but throwing away a gift that is a surprise.

[27:06]

I never would have thought that my situation could be a gift. but I'm happier now for some peculiar reason and I attribute that to practice in the midst of the difficulty. I don't know when it occurred to me to stop judging illness as a negative. I mean, just pain certainly feels bad, but suffering has everything to do with judgment and the way we want it to be. So, that was a very useful insight for me. So, what time is it? About 7 minutes to 11.

[28:08]

Really? What time do we need to finish? We're supposed to give you a signal at 11 o'clock. Okay. Tozan had an interesting experience that he wrote a poem when he experienced his great enlightenment. And he says, long seeking it through others, I was far from reaching it. Now I go by myself. I meet it everywhere. It is just I, myself. And I am not itself.

[29:09]

Understanding this way, I can be as I am. And long-seeking and through others is where I went, like Conra, always traveling elsewhere to find what was here with me now. Always finding a situation that I could rationalize my practice was not working. Because if it was working, I wouldn't be in this situation. Which is like using practice to make a nicer situation for yourself.

[30:13]

I think I've been struggling. I've been doing Zen practice for 20 something years. But I haven't built up another 20 years of bad habits with another practice. I've been practicing for a really long time, since I was in my 20s. And it was always an attainment. I have never realized the value of what was right before me the way I do now, because I was so forced into having to be present. And then I lost my job, so I had time for a while. And it was interesting to be face-to-face with myself.

[31:25]

I'd look at myself in the mirror and say, Jesus, I don't know who you are. It would be really interesting to come into the moment and start living here. So I started noticing all of you in a different way. And I started getting interested. And then I moved here and ended up feeling like I had come home, not just to the place, the place like the Sangha, but to myself, which was with everyone else. It was good.

[32:27]

I just kind of meandered and I ended up meandering into taking care of people with cancer and other such difficulties. So now I'm busy again, but I would like to leave some room for questions. Ask me a question. Yes? The cliff that you're moving off of, it's definitely a move from a place that you know is somewhat seemingly stable to a place where instability has turned on its head. But there's no landing spot. Is there a feeling of, I still feel like I'm going to crash one day, or I can always jump back into that stable but not perfect place? I know by Samadhi, I can retreat.

[33:28]

You know, I don't care anymore. If I'm in free fall, I'm fine with it. Not to say, you know, that I'm fearless. I'm not. the embracing my situation in a non-critical way and working with it almost from a point of view of I would say happiness, but it sounds so weird I started caring about myself, my physical self and realized that caring for the body and the things of the world is caring for what is real, which is, if anything was sacred, reality is sacred.

[34:48]

So it's everywhere amongst us. I was always afraid of that because of separation. Separation implies something could happen to you. And in a relative sense, something could. Things do happen to people. But if there is awareness of reality as the absolute. It is not as worrisome. That awareness is always, you know, the poetry of Zen and the finger pointing at the moon. It's definitely the thing I can't talk about.

[35:54]

I cannot say that. In the context of this poem that you've been carrying, are you at the top or the bottom of the cliff? Let's see, am I personally? Oh yeah, how do you see it? Yeah, I think I fell over and I don't know what happened after that. I got cornered. Yeah, it was at the no exit part that things went south, literally. But I don't think I hit bottom. I drew this picture as there's a red line that runs right through the cliff up to the Emerald Palace with a red word that says empty.

[36:59]

And the line kind of meanders all through past the five ranks and into the Emerald Palace. So you mentioned that the moon of wisdom arises and reveals the Emerald Palace, which is Eshu. So what's the Emerald Palace? The realm of Samadhi. I don't know your name. What's your name? I think you could say both.

[38:12]

I don't think there's a right answer. I think it's a good question to hold about Samadhi and Emptiness and explore it internally and explore it externally. That was always a surprise. You know, we judge the world as this crazy place to get away from. But there is great value, reality, the absolute functioning in the world. The world is a manifestation of that. So you could explore anywhere. Thank you for your talk.

[39:19]

I was interested in all of it, but my question is about, at the beginning, when you were talking about working with a koan in the blue book record. I can't remember the exact words, but it was something about not engaging in intellectual understanding and instead whatever. The hope is to lead to direct experience of understanding, but not necessarily to not engage in intellectual process because we have a mind that will do that. But could you comment a little further or a little more about how you use, or one might use something like a record? A co-op?

[40:21]

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of ways, but to... What I did was, I read it over and over again, and then painted a picture of Tozem, who turned out to look like a snake, And I separated him, so the snake was cut in half. And in the middle I put my name in Chinese. It's Anna Chop. And then it became my question of Dozan. And I just kept going over it and reading the commentaries. And then I painted what I had, what I had come to.

[41:25]

That's how I worked with it. And I could keep working on this for quite a while. It's short. I've only been on it for two and a half weeks. And if you read the introduction to this book, it tells you a wide variety of ways to use if you don't have a teacher to direct you. Linda? If you didn't get Parkinson's and you just were in your job and your life was going on normally, do you think that you just would have kept escaping forever? Not likely, because I don't think anyone... Or is it already as if getting Parkinson's really made you face that big glitch in a way that you never did before? Yeah. Is it just our normal life if it's going along too normally?

[42:26]

I don't know. It's like we're in the normal life. We used to have one. Nah. Actually, I never did. I have a pretty toned-down, way-seeking mind, John. And I'm telling the whole story. But, you know, I didn't practice with that stuff. I always wanted a normal life. Your life looks great, from my point of view. You're doing... Anybody who can study Sanskrit and go to India and get this and this. See, if I compare myself to you, it's a whole different thing. It's like looking for better practice through looking at how others practice.

[43:33]

See, I'm supposed to be an example of practice. You know, how do you work at that? You don't want to do what I do. I think that practice is pretty much everyone does the same thing, it just looks different because everyone's in a different situation. Before we stop, Paul, would you hold up the practice plan? Again? This is how I have to do it. which means daiji, which means the great matter, diagram of the great matter, a person's death, even though you may not understand it.

[45:04]

You can experience it visually, beyond your understanding. It looks like a bird, Alexander. From there? No, it escaped from your bird. It looks like a... Do you see the woman in there? Yes. I see you. I see you. Does it start at the bottom? No, it doesn't start anywhere. Okay. Oh yeah, thank you. You okay? You can do it without it now? You can do it without it now? Yeah? Alright. Yeah.

[46:27]

She's there. She's still going.

[46:30]

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