I love to taste the truth of the Bhagavad Gita's words. This morning, I don't have anything that I particularly want to talk about. So, if you have some questions, I'd like to hear what is on your mind. Once at a previous lecture you said something about being, if you're practicing Zen, to really practice you have to be completely in it, and otherwise your practice is kind of a form of pre-practice.

[01:01]

Could you say a little bit more about that? The whole point of practice, you know, is to be in it, in it. That's the point. And everything that we do in our practice points to this point. to be a whole being, you know? A whole... What is the whole person? It's the point.

[02:02]

So, to be the whole person means to be the whole person with everything. And if we're... any separation. That's not wholeness. That's not completeness. So the point is to complete ourself. Not that we're half finished, but to understand ourselves. Not understand, but because our completeness is beyond understanding. but that our activity should be in the realm of completeness or wholeness. That's why, you know, practice is based on attendance rather than learning.

[03:18]

Someone may say, well, I'll go home and read these books on Zen, and then I'll learn about Zen. But Zen isn't something you can learn about. It's something you have to be. So you have to be it. And then when you be it, there's no Zen, and there's no idea of all your previous ideas about yourself and about what our life is. give way to our new understanding, our new kind of realization. So, in a sense, each one of us, when we practice, comes up against the resistance of ourself. It's inevitable that we come up against the resistance of ourself. And that place where ourself and practice meet and we find our resistance is the point of where a genjo koan faces us.

[04:32]

Where our problem of ourself meets us face to face. And right there is where our practice begins. And so, we all have this problem, and we all face this problem. But this problem, we call it our opportunity. We don't call it problem. If before you're a Zen student, you call it a problem. When you become a Zen student, you call it your opportunity. And that's the dividing line between ordinary practice and Zen practice. When we see our problem as a koan and as our opportunity for practice, then we have a practice and there's no problem.

[05:48]

The problem is not a problem. but it becomes our means, our tool to work with. So if someone hands you a shovel, and you've never seen a shovel before, and they say, get to work, then it's a problem. But when you know what a shovel is, and you know how to dig in the ground with it, then it becomes your tool. So knowing how to see what comes up as a tool. If we don't see that, then we're always in confusion and we just say, oh, this is too hard for me. I just have nothing but suffering. So for a Zen student, a problem is an opportunity

[06:53]

For someone else, their problem is suffering. And we have lots of Zen students who are deeply immersed in suffering because they don't see their problems as the key to their practice. How could it be otherwise? So, you know, we don't, in our practice, we don't take on some special kind of learning. We just learn ourself. Dogen's famous words, you know, in Genjo Koan, to study Buddhism is to study ourself. And to study ourself is to forget ourself.

[07:55]

And to forget ourself is to merge or be enlightened, or close the gap between ourselves and others. To drop the self, dropping, forgetting the self, means to become one with the problem, to become one with what you're involved with, whatever it is. We're always involved with something. Even when you're asleep, you're maybe consciously not aware of sleeping. But that doesn't mean that you're not sleeping all the same. So when we sleep, to be just completely involved with sleep. People like to dream, you know. For a Zen student, just sleeping is zazen.

[08:58]

Suzuki Roshi never liked to put much emphasis on dreaming. Not that he had anything against dreams, but dreaming is dreaming, and sleeping is sleeping. when you go to bed. For a Zen student, when a Zen student goes to bed, a Zen student goes to bed with the purpose of sleeping, not so much with the purpose of dreaming. Although some people go to bed because they like to dream. Pat has a dream every night. And he tells me his dreams, and he says, you were in my dream. And they're great dreams. I really love past dreams. But strictly speaking, we go to bed, as a Zen student, to sleep.

[10:01]

And just sleeping. I remember people asked Suzuki Roshi if he ever dreamed. He said, almost never. Almost never dream. I don't know if it's good or bad to dream or what, but to just, when you sleep, to just become sleep, to just be sleep, just to make sleep into a complete whole-hearted activity. I think it was Edison, Thomas Edison, who never slept longer than a few minutes at a time. But he had so much going on in his life, in his waking life, that he would work for a period of time, and then he'd sleep for 10 or 15 minutes.

[11:06]

And then he'd wake up again and go to work. And then he'd sleep for about 10 or 15 minutes. And he just did this continually. He may have taken at some point some longer sleep, but this was characteristic of his life. And when he was awake, he was fully awake. And when he was asleep, he was fully asleep. In those 15 minutes, because those 15 minutes of sleep were just sleep, complete, utter, total sleep, he was refreshed and ready to take on his working activity, wakeful activity. And when he was doing his wakeful activity, he was completely, totally involved in his activity. And when we... In certain practice places, when people have sashim,

[12:14]

a seven-day Sashin. They don't sleep very much at all. Maybe two or three hours. Some places, when they do a seven-day Sashin, they don't sleep at all. And the activity, they're so at one with the activity that there's really no need to sleep. I mean, sometimes people would feel tired, But it's possible to do that, to stay awake for seven days, because their activity is intense, and there's no work activity to tire your body. And that's a very extreme case. We won't have sushins like that. When we build a nuzendo, we won't have sushins like that. But it's quite common to only sleep three or four hours during a seven-day Sashin, to have total wakefulness, hopefully, when you sit, total involvement, and then total involvement when you sleep.

[13:34]

In the Fukan Zazengi Dogen, which is Dogen's promotion, Zazen promotion, where he was trying to promote Zazen, he says, Even though, you know, we already are, the sutras tell us that we already have the Buddha nature, or we are Buddha nature, everything is Buddha nature. Nevertheless, unless we practice, unless we set in motion our activity, it doesn't manifest to us. an eighth of an inch's difference is like the difference between heaven and earth.

[14:52]

The slightest gap between doing something totally and doing something 99% is like the difference between heaven and earth. So our practice is always to close that gap. No seams. No gap. between our worldly activity and the universe's activity. The other day, a few weeks ago, Ron asked this question on a Monday morning. He said, when I'm In zendo, I count my breath and keep my attention on, during zazen, I try and merge with breathing.

[15:57]

He said, but when I start my activity, I also try to do that. He said, should I keep my attention on my breathing when I'm doing other activity in the world? Well, that question, you know, that kind of question comes up because of our conception that the forms of practice are only in the zendo, only in the specific activity that we do in the zindo. But, you know, when we sit zazen, and we really sit in a very concentrated way, our body and mind merge with the universe.

[17:10]

No doubt about it. And there's no gap between body, mind, and universe. It's all one activity. And we realize that, or should realize that, or can realize that. But when we go out into the world, we forget all about it. We don't realize that driving the truck, climbing the ladder, sawing wood, washing dishes, typing letters, selling goods, is exactly the same kind of activity. As much as we talk about it, we can't see it. We have trouble recognizing it. Taking care of the children, sweeping the floor,

[18:15]

If there's any gap between that activity and the universal activity, then we're lost. We're just kind of wandering around. So when we talk about pre-practice, in actual practice. We're not talking about just being a zendo, you know. We're talking about how you are aware of yourself as universal activity. I hate to use those terms, but how you're practicing in a concentrated way 24 hours a day.

[19:20]

If you're unaware of practice in some hours of your day, then it's because you see practice as one thing and your daily life as something else. And the point is to close that gap. There's nothing but practice. There's only one thing, and it's practice. And it's not these things in practice, and those activities in practice. So when you can close the gap, then you have practice. But before you can close that gap, then it's pre-practice, getting ready to practice, or preparing yourself somehow to practice. But I did mention that in some other way before my lecture. But this is the most important thing for us, actually, to close the gap.

[20:24]

And How we do that is to be able to take one thing at a time, to be able to, from moment to moment, to be able to focus on one thing at a time, even though there are maybe two or three events happening in one moment. Sometimes there are two or three events happening in one moment. I remember someone asking Sung San, the Korean teacher, a question. They saw him reading the newspaper while he was eating his breakfast. And he said, aha, there's a gap. And they said, how can you be doing one thing at a time eating breakfast and reading the newspaper.

[21:47]

He said, well, I'm just doing one, I'm just eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. That's one thing. You know, whatever we do, we can't do one thing. We're always doing a combination of things. As a matter of fact, that's what our life is, is a combination of things. There's no other self except this combination of things. According to Buddhism, there's no one thing. There is a one thing, but the one thing is many things. And when we can understand the many things as one thing, then we have practice. So we do practice as much as possible to bring our attention down to one thing at a time, so-called, even though there is no such thing as one thing at a time.

[22:58]

We say one thing at a time. In Zen practice, we try to limit our attention so that we can really pay attention, not to neglect things, to really pay attention. But it doesn't mean that you can't pay attention to many things. It's just that the things that you pay attention to don't get your undivided attention. And in our daily life, we always have a flood of things, events that are calling our attention. But our biggest problem is that we worry about them.

[24:04]

So if We have to be concerned, you know, about things. But... We become attached to our problems, you know. So that's what we're... When we become attached to our problems, we really worry a lot. And that's when things become problems. When we're on the side of problems are problems, then we really worry a lot. But when problems are practice, even though we're concerned, we're not so worried. We don't become so worried about things. Because we have the ability to take on whatever comes,

[25:12]

as a practice. It really changes our life. Our attitude means a lot. How we approach things. And if we always approach things, a problem, as a source of worry, then worrying is our life. And if we always approach events as practice, then practice is our life. So it depends on what you want, really. You can have it either way. You can have a life of worrying, worry and flurry, or you can have a life of practice. It's just your choice. But your choice determines what you do and determines how you approach things. We always hear stories, you know, about

[26:15]

famous Zen masters, and how they resolved their problems, their big problems. And how after some event which opened up their mind, they no longer had anything to worry about. It's not that there's nothing to worry you, you know, but because they approach events as practice rather than as problems. They go through life much more easily. Do you maybe have some other questions?

[27:56]

I'd like to pursue the gap a little bit more. How do you know when you are... There's a gap between you and the universal activity. How do you know that? When you start getting depressed. When you start to be depressed. and stay depressed, then there's a gap. Then, you know, we can be depressed easily. If you just look at the events of the world, you know, you become depressed. It's easy, you know. All we have to do is just look around us and we can just easily be crushed.

[29:01]

If you let the weight of the events of the world press down on you, you can just be crushed. As a matter of fact, when you're sitting in Zazen, if you put your legs up without knowing what you're doing, you can just be crushed, right? It just feels like your legs are going to crush you and your body is going to push you down to the floor. We get that feeling sometimes because we see that as a problem. And the whole way to the world, you know, if we take that on as a problem, it just pushes right through the world, just pushes into the ground and we won't be able to get up. If you really think about, you know, all the terrible stuff that happens in the world, Just stay in bed, pull the covers over your head and cry for the rest of your life. But we don't do it, you know, because that's something terrible. You know, something as tragic as always happening in the world. It's not just today.

[30:04]

Every day since the beginning of time. But still we're walking around, you know, and we're doing, going about our business. Everybody's doing various things they have to do. There are millions of paths in the world. And some people are happy, some people are not happy. Some people are millionaires, other people are poor. You know, all the various paths go on. Because even though something's happening, these things are happening, everybody has to live their own life, according to circumstances. Our spirit, our human spirit, is not just our own. It's really, we're supported by the universe.

[31:05]

The universal spirit is this spirit. This is an expression of the universe. It's not just me. When I think I'm just me, that's it. Then, of course, you know, just go to bed and pull the covers over your head. You might as well, if you feel that isolated. If you feel that there's nothing, there's just me, and the whole rest of the world is an object. Objects. And except for me. I mean, this is personal. But everything else in the world is just objects. That's the gap. But actually, each one of us is an expression of the universe, universal spirit, you know, we're all the same, we're really all the same. And if we just take that self-centeredness, that self-centered card and lift it up, it's the same shape as our body, you know, we just take it out, then there we are, you know, you have

[32:18]

good spirit to do whatever needs to be done. So, you know, if you're a nurse or a doctor, you know, working with patients in a hospital, there's all this suffering going on, but you have to be sympathetic, understanding, and at the same time, you know, if you're depressed, as a doctor or a nurse, then your patients will all be depressed. So you have to be optimistic and bring them back to life. And if you're a Zen student, you have to be optimistic and bring people to life. And the only way you can do that is to forget yourself. Stop worrying about yourself and just help people. Whatever needs to be done, you just merge with it.

[33:27]

You don't have to worry about if it's something you like or something you don't like, something you want or something you don't want. Just whatever is in front of you, you can merge with it. And when you merge with it, you like it. But as soon as you start thinking about whether you're going to like it or not, you know, then there's the gap. So the characteristic of a good Zen student is to just, without hesitating, to be able to just take what, you know, just take what comes and to practice with it, not to suffer with it. but to practice with it. Wherever it comes, that's your practice, without hesitating. Could you say something about how to choose what to put in front of you, though?

[34:32]

Because it seems to me that it's only in an athletic situation where something is always there for you, and it's real clear that somebody else has decided what the schedule is and you just do whatever the next thing is. And it seems to me that in lay practice you have tremendous choice about what's going to be in front of you. Right. We have tremendous choice and so we have tremendous responsibility. So choice and responsibility go together. So when we carefully think about what we're doing, carefully choose something. See, that's why it's so important to choose when you're young, to know what you're doing. It's important. But I'm going about this a roundabout way. When we get to a certain point in our life, you know, we realize that all these paths we've gone on lead us somewhere, but because we haven't, somehow we've strayed from the fundamental

[35:41]

the paths that we're going on go someplace, but they don't go, they're not satisfying in depth. So we say, well, wait a minute, let's start all over again and start with the fundamental principle, some fundamental principle, so that our life will start again in some way that the karma leads someplace. And the choices that we have are at least we can deal with the things that come into our life based on the choice and our original choice. So original choice, if we have some original choice, then we always know what to relate things to. But when we don't have any background or any firm foundation, then we make choices out of desire.

[36:52]

And then the response to those choices is not necessarily based on something that's solid in our life. And we get very confused. Does that make sense? A little bit. I may even talk about a different kind of choice. I mean, real, nitty-gritty, detailed choices. You know, like there's three hours on a Saturday afternoon and, you know, part of me says I should spend it with my kids and part of it says I should come and help work on the Zendo and part of it says I should, you know, exercise because I don't get any exercise in my work and they all seem like important things and I don't ever seem to... I can't find any fundamental choice that tells me you know, at that moment, what to do with those three hours on that Saturday afternoon. And I don't really expect you to tell me what to do on Saturday afternoon either, but can you say anything about how you sort of bridge that gap from some big fundamental choice to all the millions of little choices?

[37:59]

Well, the closer you can stay to the fundamental choice, the easier it is to make choices. And the farther you get away from the fundamental choices, the more choices appear. So, when we have lots and lots of choices, you know, then it becomes more difficult. And when we don't have so many, it's easier. And that simplifying life, simplifying our life, makes it easier to make choices. And that's basic. When we only have a few alternatives, it's pretty easy to make choices. But our lives become more and more complicated. You have some choice for your child, some choice for yourself, some choice for your wife, and so forth.

[39:04]

But that comes from having a complicated life. fault, but it's complicated. I know you didn't want me to make up some choice for you, but, you know, you could, you and your child, your family, come in and you can work on his endo. We don't work on Saturday afternoon. You don't want our kids working on the endo, do you? Some of us had a lot of hands. I think a lot of people had a good way out of this. I just wonder if you could be more concrete in speaking about the fundamental principle. Well, okay, first of all, we need to know what is the most important thing in our lives.

[40:19]

What are the most important things? And when we decide that, then we should be conscientious or loyal to those things that we choose. And our loyalty to those fundamental practices of our life. You know, practices mean family, or work, or tzazen, or whatever, you know. We should be loyal to those. And then, the problems that come up will be problems. But we'll know how to decide because we know which way we're going. When you don't know exactly which way you're going, then problems become much more difficult.

[41:22]

And, you know, when we have just a few basic themes in our life, then there will always come up some problem that will be so difficult that we have to kill one thing or another, you know. We have to chop off something or chop off something else. And that's inevitable, because unless, you know, we only have one thing in mind and we just go straight ahead. But life is not that simple. We usually have many things that come and say, well, it's me or you, or it's me or this, you know. And we have to, at some point, kill something. And we have to know how to do it. Say we have two lovers, as an example.

[42:25]

And we were involved with both of the lovers. And it gets back to the point where everybody thinks that everybody's married to everybody else. But it's not so. And at some point, you have to make a choice. you know, and you go this way, and you go this way, but you can't go this way. Your legs just don't stretch that far. But it's that way with many, many, many things, whatever it is that we're involved with. So we have to at least know where the trunk is, you know, and the tree has many branches, but at least we have to know where we're rooted for attachment?

[43:28]

Yeah. It can be mistaken for attachment. But... as long as we are living in this world, we have to have attachment. So when we talk about attachment, you know, it doesn't... we have to know that that's a kind of technical term in Buddhism. It doesn't mean exactly what it's saying. You know, as long as you're alive, you're attached to food, you're attached to clothes, you're attached to walking and sleeping. Those are just very fundamental, you know. But we're attached to many things, of necessity, we have to be attached to. But at the same time, That attachment is a non-attachment. That's how, actually, we turn our problems into practice.

[44:38]

Okay? Problems means just attachment. Practice means non-attachment to that attachment. It means to be able to work with the problem without being finding yourself in attachment. So you're saying if you said something as being very important to you, that thing can also be not important to you? Yeah, well whatever it is, it's important. We always have to be free of it, find freedom within it. So that's why a characteristic of a Zen student is whatever is there, there it is. And without judging it, you find your freedom within it.

[45:40]

If you'd say, oh, I hate this, there's no freedom. But only when you can accept it can you find your freedom. So We can do fine in life, you know, as long as we stay ahead of our choices, you know, and nothing bad ever happens. But as soon as something that we don't like happens, then we're knocked off our base, you know. So practice of a Zen student is to be able to accept whatever happens right away without discriminating, and then to work with that from that point of view. In a way, what you just said is kind of an answer to my question, but I want to raise it anyway. It seems just nature's way to build in self-protective mechanisms.

[46:43]

So when something invasive to the body or to the mind comes up, there is that tendency to protect oneself, and so there you have separation. And would you say that that comes out of illusion? We protect ourself just to the point that's necessary. Just the amount that's necessary. But we don't necessarily always do that, you know, or know what that is. Just the amount that's necessary. So if you're walking along and a dog comes along and bites your finger, you know, there are several things you can do. One is you can say hello to the dog, look at your finger, provided there's no problem, nothing wrong. No, you know, he just went like this. Or you can get very upset and feel violated.

[47:48]

Or you can blame the dog, you know, you can do all kinds of things depending on what your reaction, if you're in a hurry to go someplace, or if you're thinking about something else, it's just something that happened and you just go on. But you can turn it into many different things. You can turn that whole situation into many different, I'm not talking about your incident. Sometimes, you know, a dog will come and bite and really hurt you. But I'm talking of just something that happens. It's not something that really hurts you. But it's something that you can really get upset about. If it really didn't do any damage to you, you can just forget about it.

[48:53]

the next moment and there's no problem. Or you can make it into a huge thing and prosecute the owner, get the SPCA involved, make the world go around that incident. But to know just how much is necessary to protect ourself. To know the limits of whatever action is necessary. That's necessary. We should know that. We should know just how much value to put on a situation. Not overreact to something. make something worse by worrying about it or by worrying it.

[49:58]

But to pay attention, of course, you know, and if there's a... if we have some problem with our body, it's a kind of warning and we should take care of that. But we should know how much to do. We should know how much is really something and how much is imagined and how much we want to have something. Sometimes we want to have a problem. So the hospitals are full of people who have created problems for themselves and want to be taken care of in some way. The problem I have is not so much knowing when to stop. Very often I am overreacting. seems to be a certain physiological or mental or whatever, but just a certain compulsiveness to continue.

[51:03]

It's very hard to stop. Sometimes I'll be doing something I really like and then it's over, but it's hard to leave it behind. That's the positive sort of attachment. And sometimes there'll be an incident with some person and some angry words are exchanged, which is all right, sort of a flare-up, and it should die. But there's a tendency to just keep replaying. And I know that How do you get the rest of you to follow that wisdom? We're always working on that, you know. That's the practice. That's the practice. Bill and I, you know, he tells me a lot that I say things, you know, I react to things in a certain way. And so that kind of conscious exchange that we have is a practice.

[52:03]

We can let it be a problem, but it's better if it becomes a practice. So it's just kind of something that we both look at all the time so we can see. It helps us to be careful and to see where our point of attachment is and our point of misunderstanding comes up. But right there is where, if you are aware and mindful and not afraid to see it, it becomes a turning point, a turning point for practice. So, you know, the difficulties we have with things, we tend to feel that this is not practice, but that writing that very difficulty that we have with things is the heart of practice.

[53:16]

How we respond in a very difficult situation is the test of our practice. So anyway, we should all appreciate the difficulties that we have and use them in the right way. If we have difficulty, it doesn't mean that you should leave. It means that you should focus on practice more. Focus on practice. This is my practice. This difficulty is my practice. then we don't need to get lost in the difficulty.

[54:30]

Thank you.

[54:50]

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