I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, for five days we've been sitting here in Zazen, hearing the Dharma expounded, expounding it ourselves with our bodies, and I want to ask you, are you saved? SAVED! Are you saved? Have you meditated properly? And have you found salvation? Have you walked through the dharma gates of repose and bliss? Have you drunk deeply from the cream of the long river? Have you seen the gold of the earth? Brothers and sisters, put your hands together in your mudra. Can I get a witness? Hallelujah, as the cowboys say. The ancient Indians say, bodhisvaha. And Philip Whelan says, oh, mama. Okay. I just wanted to say that the right wing and the fundamentalist Christians don't necessarily have the market cornered on evangelism.

[01:13]

And they don't have the market cornered on salvation. We are really blessed with this opportunity to practice this way. In the whole world, this is a very rare opportunity. And also in the whole world right now, there are little clusters of people sitting rohatsu, celebrating this event that happened 2,500 and more years ago. And because it was so powerful and so important in the unfolding of human consciousness, we're still doing this. And so it's really wonderful to imagine that there are people all over the country, all over the world, sitting Rohatsu, just as we're doing here. And everybody is engaged.

[02:19]

in this work of salvation. And the Zendo is kind of, it's our ship of salvation, it's our home of salvation. I was remembering yesterday, I don't know, it was 20, 21 years ago, when I first came to the zendo here, I think I started sitting sometime in late November or mid-November, it was just before or in November, it was just I think Sojin Roshi was in Japan and so I hadn't met him and I came to Zazen every day and then all of a sudden there was this thing called Rohatsu And I didn't sit rohatsu, I hadn't sat a one-day sasheen, and it was pretty intimidating.

[03:27]

And I walked in to the zendo, the same place, and everything was really different. The whole energy in the room was really different. And I just felt then, oh, something's happening here. and that I wanted to be part of it. I felt that I wanted to partake of that energy in some intuitive sense, knowing that that was what I needed to do to save my life. And so I made a vow. It was, It wasn't like one of these vows that you write down and you put in your calendar. I just sort of said to myself, well, I'm not gonna miss one of these again. And I haven't.

[04:30]

Although last year I was in Japan, but that's a whole other story. But there was this natural way-seeking mind that came up in me at that time And what I suspect or believe is that there's nobody in this room now who hasn't, in one sense or another, made the same vow to themselves. Nobody's here by accident, I don't think. Nobody happened to fall into Rohatsu Seshin. And if you did, Well, congratulations. So, I was talking a few weeks ago. I was thinking about the Zendo as an ark. And sitting here, it really looks like a boat.

[05:34]

You know, it's this big wooden thing. You probably, if you dumped it in a bay, it would float. it's the ark that carries us through the world in safety. It's the boat that allows us to go with the flow and yet to go with the flow we have to be careful because in the flow there are tides and eddies and shoals and whirlpools So up here at this end of the room we have our bold captain who sets the course and Sotin Roshi is flanked by Suzuki Roshi on this side, Dogen on this side, and a cluster of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and great spirits in the

[06:38]

And at the other end of the room, you know, sort of seeing from my seat, you know, we've got chairs to make it possible for people to sit. We have the fire extinguisher. And we have an automated external defibrillator. You know, we have all these safety devices. So the idea. is to make it very safe for people to encounter themselves. But the question is, what is our salvation? Which is, in Zen, very difficult to describe as a religious experience. You know, we're not born twice. we're actually born a million times, we haven't been, right.

[07:54]

We don't hear, I hope, particular voices or calling, something external to ourselves. This salvation is not external to ourselves. It's really a way of life and it's not an easy way of life. Sometimes we're sitting here and it really is a space of repose and bliss. Sometimes it's a place of ecstasy and sometimes it's a place of really, really hard work. Jack Kornfield has this book, the title is, I'm very big on titles, that's about as far as I get into some books. His book is called, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

[08:57]

And that's right. You know, if you dwell completely in this kind of blissful samadhi, you wouldn't do your laundry, you wouldn't brush your teeth, you wouldn't shower, and this is not actually the Buddha's practice. It's not dependent upon the ecstasy, it's dependent upon just being out on the in this ark on the riding with it and doing whatever you have to do. The other image that I came in, and maybe this is not quite appropriate, but I wonder if this is an ark or is this like a galley and we're all the galley slaves.

[10:01]

Scratch that one. So we can't really talk much about salvation, but we can point to it from various directions and do our best to live freely. The essence of Buddhist salvation is freedom, freedom from attachments, freedom from the suffering that comes with this being caught in this notion of me and mine and the form of salvation is our Zazen mind, the mind that we carry with us, we cultivate here and we carry with us all the time. We aim to carry it

[11:05]

with us all the time. We actually do carry it with us all the time, except that sometimes we forget or we're distracted. And the function of it is zazen itself. Just this physical act that we do with our body of sitting down, what Dogen called practice realization. Another way of thinking about salvation is as shikkan. as in Cikantaza, it's translated roughly as just, which is an interesting word in English because it has a kind of legal and moral implication to it in some sense, but it means something simpler than that. It's just. So in Cikantaza, just

[12:07]

sitting, or just eating, just serving, just working, just doing each act completely with your full attention and your full energy. And in the act of constantly just returning, if you find yourself straying away, salvation is just returning to what your intention was, what your action was. In several places Dogen Zenji tells us to practice as if saving your head from fire. Now that's a fairly strong image and you know one thinks about it, it's kind of an emergency probably.

[13:16]

But what it means, saving your head from fire, it carries with some real intensity. But if your head is on fire, you don't want to be trapped by franticness or any excessive action or, you know, anything extra. If your head is on fire, you really don't want to waste your time or effort. And you certainly don't want to do this thing, you know, we have this choice and we experience this in our suffering all the time. some of us, and I would include myself, my habit in life has been you fall down in the dirt and you want to say, I'm dirty.

[14:19]

I'm dirty. I'm in the mud. I'm rolling around in the mud. I'm dirty. Instead of like, well, get up. And the same thing, you know, if you run around screaming because your head is on fire, well, you'll attract some attention, but probably by the time you do, you know, you'll be a sinner. So you have to take care of this without anything extra. And that's a way of life. And that's our training during Sashin. I think a lot of us have really learned this and have this experience. I remember when, a long time, 10, 12 years or more, we'd be coming up on Sesshin and someone would ask Sojin Roshi, well, how do you get ready for Sesshin? And he would always say essentially, well, I don't.

[15:23]

I don't think about it. And I used to think, well, this is really extraordinary. How do you not think about it? Here it's coming, and it's this big thing, and it's intense. And I think my question always was, can I do this? Am I up to this? But then it would get channeled off into these various other pointless pointless little areas like, I wonder what job I'm going to have during Sashin. I wonder if I'm going to have a good job, which means a job I think I want, which usually has nothing to do with what I might really enjoy or might be useful to everybody in holding things together.

[16:27]

And what I have noticed is that that sort of went away over time. And I don't think of it, I don't think of Sashin much in advance because there's not a damn thing I can do except make sure that my robes are in order. But what hit me in the first few days of this Sashin was This is just a very normal kind of life. And it's really pleasant. Actually, my house is pretty quiet. I love to see, you know, come in and see Lori and the kids. We're all just, and Catherine and John are staying there. We're all just sort of taking care of the space. Everybody's taking care of the space here. Everybody's taking care of their jobs. You know, it's normal life.

[17:32]

In normal life, there are emergencies, so Roto-Rooter came the other night, and Ross, in his usual fashion, stayed up until midnight to make sure that that was taken care of. This is our normal life, except we do it in this kind of measured and perhaps slightly more knee-painful manner. But it's very measured and very smooth. And I haven't got over the experience that came from the very beginning. When Sashin, especially when Rohakta or longer Sashin is over, I feel a little lonely that night. you know, and that's also, I fold that in to the experience of Seshin, and I fold into the experience of Seshin the fact that the kind of awareness and stillness that arises, a bunch of it ebbs away, and I just say, okay,

[18:53]

I enjoyed you, this mind, while you were here, and I enjoy my life as well. And the loneliness is also something I savor, in a sense, because it points out we've been so connected functioning like one organism for these seven days. And even though we don't talk, I see all of your faces, and we see our bodies, and we see our grimaces as we get up, and we know how each other serves. I mean each of us I'm sure could demonstrate to others how somebody served you 15 years ago, you know, little foibles or moves that somebody did.

[20:00]

It's like the stuff is really imprinted. So this is just normal life. It's not just sitting zazen. That's not entirety what it's about. It's actually about just living. So we sit zazen, we walk, we eat, we have our breaks, we work. It's just this very natural rhythm of life and this is our salvation. So I've been really enjoying Sojin's lectures on the Heart Sutra. I don't think I've heard you lecture on the Heart Sutra or I can't remember. It's been a long time and it's been really really instructive and it seems to me that the essence of the Heart Sutra is about salvation.

[21:04]

Right in the very first line Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva while practicing Prajnaparamita perceived that all five skandhas in their own being are empty and was saved from suffering. Now one thing that occurred to me while thinking about this line, and this is what distinguishes Buddhist salvation perhaps from salvation in other religions, usually In religion, the notion of salvation is a kind of what theologians might call an ontological change, transformation, you know, something really essential, fundamental is changed and life is ever different.

[22:09]

you know, that's done. I think what's different in Buddhism is that salvation itself, at least so long as we have bodies, and when we don't, none of us here can talk about it because we don't experience it, we don't know it, But while we have bodies, salvation is itself impermanent. And while I was thinking about the first line of the Heart Sutra, I realized that's what's going on in part. You have Avalokiteshvara, kind of the highest level of Bodhisattva, really a Buddha who's taken the vow to remain in this cycle of birth for the sake of saving all beings.

[23:15]

But Avalokiteshvara, while practicing Prajnaparamita, perceived that all five skandhas in their own being are empty and was saved from suffering. So that implies that when she wasn't practicing Prajnaparamita she wasn't saved at least in the context of this sentence that there's an impermanence to salvation and that even this great being whose job on heaven and earth is to save all of us and hear our suffering still goes through cycles of salvation. Now this is perhaps a heretical view, I'm not sure, but what Avalokitesvara is doing because

[24:26]

she or he knows that this practice of Prajnaparamita is the practice of liberation, is saving herself so that she can also save, she can save all beings in her mind and she can save all beings that includes ourselves. I was talking with someone last week who was facing a dilemma in their life and spoke with a close friend. Anyway, what this person said was referring to airborne emergencies in an airplane. if your airplane loses cabin pressure, the first thing you do, say you're with your children or your elderly parents, the first thing you do is you put on your oxygen mask.

[25:31]

You save yourself so that you can be of use to others. You put out the fire in your own head on your own head so that you can be of use to others. I think that was a really neat image. It just seemed, when I heard it, it just seemed exactly right. You put your own oxygen mask on first. So this notion of impermanence, I like the the formulation that impermanence is usually seen as one of the three marks of conditionality. You know, impermanence, non-self, and dukkha, or suffering, or ill. You know, and basically it's like, this is bad.

[26:36]

You know, this stuff is bad. But really, why? Why is impermanence bad? Thich Nhat Hanh, in one of his books on basic Dharma, said, and this is a conventional, I think Eric and I were talking about this, not such an unusual Mahayana perspective, that impermanence is nirvana. Impermanence is neither good nor bad. It's beyond good or bad, it's just like You know, it's like gravity, it's the law. You know, it's just the way things work. And the same is true with salvation. So our salvation in the course of this week comes and goes, right?

[27:38]

Sometimes you feel saved and you can jump up and say hallelujah. And sometimes you feel like you're just grinding it out, and it's really hard. Or you've had an interaction that has, you know, been really painful, or somebody's breathing in a way that you wish they wouldn't. Or you got something, you know, to eat that you didn't want to eat. I mean, any of these things, they become very large. So, our salvation comes and goes, and it's affected to some degree by causes and conditions, but really it's just the mind, our mind, moving. it's our job to work it out. The wonderful thing about this practice is that we're all sitting, we're not sitting in, you know, each in our own meditation cave or cell to do it.

[28:49]

We're sort of, we're doing it out, we're doing it, working it out together because we understand that it is about our connection and our relationship with each other. And so we have this wonderful cooperative form. As I was thinking about this, I was thinking about, I think Sogen Roshi talked about, he brought up the repentance, he was talking about repentance yesterday or the day before, and quoting from the Platform Sutra, which I've been reading a bunch lately. And I thought of this Huining's framing of the Bodhisattva vows. We chant these vows.

[29:51]

We'll chant them at the end of this lecture, right? Beings are numberless. I vow to awaken with them or save them. We don't like to say save them because it has, we sort of changed the language, I think. We actually do want to awaken with them. we vow to deliver an infinite number of sentient beings of our own mind. So that's where it starts, these sentient beings of your own mind, and then we vow to get rid of the innumerable defilements in our own mind. We vow to learn the countless systems of dharma of our essence of mind. We vow to attain the supreme Buddhahood of our essence of mind. But what I want to focus on is this, we vow to deliver an infinite number of beings of our own mind. This is where we start this practice of salvation. And what, there's a little explication from Whitney.

[30:57]

And what he says is, now what does it mean to deliver oneself of one's own, oh I'm sorry, learned audience, all of us have now declared that we vow to deliver an infinite number of sentient beings. But what does that mean? It doesn't mean that I, Wineng, am gonna deliver them. And who are these sentient beings within our mind? They are the delusive mind, the deceitful mind, the evil mind, and such like minds. All these are sentient beings. each of them has to deliver himself by his own essence of mind, that is, by his own mind as Buddha. Then the deliverance is genuine. So yesterday, even though he said he wasn't going to talk about dependent origination in five minutes, you spoke about dependent origination in five minutes, pretty quick, and I'm not going to speak about it much, but

[32:00]

Usually the interpretation of dependent origination that has been handed down as Theravada or Hinayana orthodoxy from Buddhaghosa that this dependent origination and rebirth unfolds over three lifetimes. So it unfolds from past life to our present life into the future and so it's this continuing cycle. But this is not actually our understanding and I noticed at least a couple days you were book on dependent origination. So this is another vital stream of Theravada Buddhism today, but also it's really our Zen understanding, and that is that rebirth, and this is why I said rebirth happens millions of times, rebirth is instantaneous.

[33:04]

And this is the rebirth of the sentient each time we form an attachment. And that attachment is an act of creating, creating an I, creating a sense of me or mine. And once we're attached, we are then reborn in one or another of the various realms. You know, the human realm, the god realm, the fighting demons, the hungry ghosts, and so on, the animals. I think I forgot one. Hell, right, right. As I was saying, we're usually reborn in one of the six realms, and usually it ain't fun. But it is, more or less, since we're short of being Buddhas, unavoidable.

[34:13]

And this is what Wineng is advocating. Save the sentient beings of your own mind, because they're constantly being generated. So if suffering is attachment, is this creating of the sense of me or mine, Now, I don't know how to tell you to do it, but I know that that's what we're about in here. Dogen says, when you release it, it fills your hand. This letting go is a method of zazen. When you try to hold on to it, you just cause suffering. So when you release it, it fills your hand. And this is how we train ourselves. And we train ourselves in a very kindly way.

[35:23]

Even if we happen to be a kind of rough person, or blessed or cursed by strong energy, we keep trying to let go, keep asking how. This is really the important question of Zazen. How? Not even how do I do, how what, but just how. How to let go and how to release into kindness. So how can I let go? of the person who's breathing hard all the way across the zendo and think, oh, that person's having a really hard time right now, me too. Yesterday I burned the cereal, which is probably one of the least of my transgressions of late.

[36:33]

Where is that mind now? It doesn't seem really important now. No one's falling down from lack of food. And it just flowed through. But I was upset. I wasn't upset with any of you. I found myself in that moment of feeling, oh, I screwed up. In that moment of attachment, The first thing, I did really look, tried to figure out where was the blame. Where was the blame outside me? And I couldn't really find it. The blame was, I had a lack, there was a gap in my attention. Oh, I learned something. I learned I'm never going to use that pot again, I'll tell you. But also, I learned to... I'm not blaming.

[37:40]

God forbid. But I learned my attention wavered. It's very subtle working. this morning we were doing service, we do the Buddhas and Ancestors and there's bows that the doji has to do. If I think about something, anything, I miss the bow. And it's like, there's nobody to blame. There's just this sentient being in my mind. In that case, it's very small. And so that being has a half-life of about two seconds. It only gets harder from there, though. if I receive a criticism from my teacher or from my peers, this is very difficult. It's hard for me to take because I want to be a good boy. And I do that same thing.

[38:50]

I'll look, I will, I see that resistance in myself and I may look around to shift the blame or throw it back, but I also know at the same time that it's not going to work. That because I've given rise to that thought, there is a sentient being in my mind who needs to be saved. And that means I have to, oh, I gotta take care of this sentient being now and see him or her to the end of their life. That may be an hour, a day, a week, whatever period of time.

[39:51]

There's nothing to do. The act of salvation is actually the act of taking care of that being so that it doesn't run amok. So that it's not just out there wreaking havoc in my life and in other people's lives. And that is, I believe, that's the act of saving sentient beings in one's own mind. And when you learn to do that, Even if it's inconsistent, which it inevitably is, there's some inconsistency. Some people are more consistent than others. Those are the people we really look up to. And even they are not perfect, but we watch them for how they, it's what Sojin Roshi was talking about yesterday, how they repent. They turn. and go in the right direction.

[40:54]

And I think that's part of what I intuited when I came in here 20 odd years ago. It's like, oh, these people in this room are doing that. They're turning in the right direction. I want to turn in that direction too. And I think I'm still working on it. All of us are still working on it. So hearing these words though, and sitting zazen, reciting the precepts, the refuges, taking the bodhisattva vows, these are actions of salvation. And in a sense, they are irreversible. even when we fall short. You know, something has changed inside us by the act of hearing the Dharma, reciting it, receiving the precepts.

[42:03]

We can never again be the person who hasn't experienced that. And so we are doomed to take responsibility for ourselves. And also to work on this understanding that our self is not just confined to this skin bag. You know, our self, this is what we're doing here in this ark, in this room, for this week, one big self with different parts. The same thing is like, you know, your body, you have an arm, you have a hand and it has these fingers and they work independently. And they work together in a coordinated way. So it's one large self. I think I want to close with a poem and then see if you have any comments or questions.

[43:11]

So first is from Walt Whitman, which struck me. Come, said the muse, Sing me a song no poet has yet chanted. Sing me the universal. In this broad earth of ours, amid the measureless grossness and the slag, enclosed and safe within its central heart, nestles the seed of perfection. Every life a share, or more or less, None born, but it is born. Concealed or unconcealed, the seed is. So, it's time for a few questions, comments. Catherine?

[44:12]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a really good question. Actually, you don't have to give birth to that being. No, no, not just it comes. This is, I mean, if we got into a detailed study of dependent origination, you could see you can break the chain at a fairly early place, in which case a being is not born. You just say, oh, unpleasant feeling. That's not a being. You know, it's like once you start to think, I really don't like this, or this is not my idea, then that being is born. Right, or I screwed up, right, something like that.

[45:37]

But really what you want to do is catch it as early as you can, you know, so that that being isn't born. But once it's born, then I think what I try to do is just recognize that I'm hurting or I'm angry or whatever. I try to recognize my state of mind and often I'll remove myself from the situation that inflames it. There's a wonderful book by a psychologist called Paul Ekman, who's a guy who studied kind of the rapid motions of faces, of how emotions kind of play across our faces. People hear about him? It's really amazing. He can analyze what state of mind you're in in a second. But what he talks about is, in psychological terms, what he calls a latency period. And I think this is the same thing. So in other words, if I'm really hurt, or really defensive,

[46:40]

I'm not going to make sensible judgments about what to say or do in that moment. I won't do that until what he calls the latency period has kind of tapered off and the feeling has ebbed away, and then I can see, oh, wait a minute. you know, this is the story that I made. In the latency period, it's like you create a story and it's a fully diluted story. And this is about saying, oh, this story has to go to, you know, I just have to allow it to lose its power. So that's a sense. I mean, each of us does this in our own way, but it's very important not to believe the story of me. And to take in from other people what they're perceiving. Even if I don't like it, there is invariably, it's like the seed that Whitman was talking about, there's a seed in there that's being given to me.

[47:46]

Just follow up. Well, this is exactly what Sojournoshi, I think, was talking about yesterday and the day before.

[48:49]

We talked about opening, expanding to include your suffering. If you exclude it, if you encapsulate it, if you create some rigidity around it, then this being has a really hard time. that place, contact will happen. The question is, sometimes you say a being doesn't form, attachment doesn't happen, and sometimes it does, and that becomes becoming, only there's a whole story that evolves. I wonder what your experience is of the transformation that takes place that allows that contact not to become attachment. What I'm wondering about is the experience that you have physically in your body, or how that might arise when you work with it, when you begin to feel the contact generating some kind of activity where you go, uh-oh, I'm in trouble soon.

[50:04]

But you're able to tap into it. Yeah. Once I say I'm in trouble soon, I'm in trouble. You know, it's really subtle and fast. if I'm open enough so that I can just receive without any reaction, then that being doesn't get born. I'm not sure, I don't think of things in, there are people who think of these things abidomically in a very technical way, and I don't, I sort of go, it's more, broad strokes, but I really like this formulation that Ken MacLeod, a western Tibetan teacher, he reframed the second noble truth as the source of suffering is emotional reactivity. So as soon as there's an emotional reaction, then there's suffering. Something I've been working a lot with and noticing a lot in my work outside of the Zen

[51:10]

the sensation, how powerful our physiologic sensations are. And that when there's something that will have a charge for me to bring up my judging, controlling kind of mind, I can feel it first. I can feel a kind of tension or rapid heartbeat. And if I can be enough in touch with that, then I don't necessarily act on it. I can sometimes turn the volume down. And that seems to me to be something that's come out of sitting a few years of God's end. But I'm wondering for someone who's sat many more years, what that experience is. No, that's exactly right. And just my way of thinking about it is, oh, you've taken care of this being very quickly, very directly, and it's had a very short life. And you're reborn again in, you know, kind of your more measured state. But that's just a way, this is just a way of thinking. Two more maybe. Walter. That's the way winning talks about them.

[52:21]

I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. I think it's important to experience the emotion, understand it, feel it, and then let it go. My concern is that if you don't, there's a tendency to control, repress, hide, sit on, and then that being just best. Yeah. I understand what you're saying, and I think I'm not I don't feel there's no contradiction there. I just don't, I don't want to put emotions on a pedestal. And when I say break that chain earlier, totally not talking about repression. I'm talking about more like what Andrea was saying. It's like, oh, I feel this thing in my body and just really, tune into what's going on in my body, and if a feeling, an emotion, or something, or some narrative clearly arises out of that, fine, but it doesn't necessarily all the time.

[54:07]

It may just be the, you know, and you can leave it at that. One more, Tamar, I think. And so, once I asked him, I assumed he must have a mind, and I asked him, have you saved all beings from suffering? How did you do it? And he said, already finished.

[54:55]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ