So on page 87, the last paragraph, which we talked about yesterday, I'm going to go over that again. Where, I'll let you find it first. And so these lines, of course, are the lines above from the next talk. Because I want to read the lines for the next talk so you can understand the lines for this talk better. So eye and sight, ear and sound, nose and smell, tongue and taste, these are for each and every thing.

[01:08]

Depending on these roots, the leaves spread forth. Trunk and branches share the essence. Revered and common each has its speech. I don't know whether that clarifies it or not, but we'll continue. These lines express the understanding of what I call independency, and I talked about that So you can say it both ways. You understand? Usually when we say independent, we have no idea dependent. But that is not a boost to understanding reality. We always try to understand things completely so we will not be mixed up. So we should not be confused by dependence or independence. If someone says everything is independent, we say, OK, that's so. And if someone says things are interrelated or dependent,

[02:13]

That is also true. We understand both sides. So whichever you say, that is OK. But if someone sticks to the idea of independence only, we will say to him, no, you are wrong. There are many koans like this. For example, here's this koan. burns everything up. At that time, will the Buddha nature exist? Sometimes the teacher will answer, yes, it will exist. And another time he will answer, no, it will not exist. So both are true. Someone may ask him, why did you say it will exist? and that it will exist is also right.

[03:20]

It depends on which side you're speaking from, because not includes will, and will includes not. But dualistic thinking is either is or isn't. This is called the double barrier. the double barrier is. Yes it will is a double barrier. No is a barrier. No it will not is a barrier. It's not a barrier if you realize that within yes is no and within no is yes. No includes yes and yes includes no. So the answer to this koan is Just be totally present right now.

[04:27]

This monk had a kind of idea of, what will happen to me when I die? Will I exist after I die? Why don't you ask us a question? Who cares what happens millennia from now? Do you care? After the Great Conquest? Who cares? The question is about what will happen to me when I die? Will I still go on living? Will my life end when I die? The answer is yes, and the answer is no. The answer yes includes dying. The answer no includes living. But we think there's death and there's life. The reason why we die is because we're born.

[05:32]

The whole reason for being born is so you can die. The main reason for being born is so you can die. And the main reason for dying is so you can be born. But we don't see that or know that for sure. What we do know for sure is, here I am, right now. Both living and dying. Living and dying are taking place at the same time. Birth and death is on each breath. This is living. That's dying. We do it moment by moment. All you have to do is study your breath. That's what we do in Satsang. We study our breath. living and dying, moment by moment. So, if we want to know, if we want to understand, we don't have to think about what happens after we die, so to speak, just what's happening right now.

[06:45]

Why is what's happening right now going to be different than what will happen at some time in the future? For the purpose of being born. You know, we're dying the moment we're born. Death is there the moment we're born. In other words, death meets history. We are historical beings. The moment we're born, there's another moment, and then that moment that we're born is the moment of death. it will never appear again, that moment. But yet, the present will always be present, because the next moment is present, and the next moment is present, and the next moment is present. So, in a sense, the teacher is saying, why are you worried?

[07:51]

What's your concern? Anyway, I don't want to explain it any more than that, but it's an interesting koan for us. Yes? It's interesting, the reason that the koan, it's related to the discussion we were having at the priest meeting the other day about a question the Buddha wouldn't answer. Yes, that's right. But the reason that this koan has a lot of urgency We're obsessed as humans with beginnings and endings. Yes. Well, yeah, we are concerned with that. Right. But every religion has a narrative about beginnings and endings, except for this one, generally.

[08:55]

Even this one has some fudging around it. Buddhism is not about beginnings and endings in that cosmic sense. It's in the momentary sense it is. Not attached to beginnings and endings. Right. But that the beginnings and endings don't somehow determine what you do with the rest of your life. That's right, because in Buddhism, because a beginning presupposes an ending. So, that's why in Buddhism we say no birth and no death. Only continuation. It's just continuation of, not continuation of some special form, but continuation of transformation of forms.

[09:56]

The transformation, it's like compost. Why do you think this is such a pressing concern? Well, because we don't want to stop breathing. We don't want to stop our consciousness. We don't want to end consciousness. We don't want to stop breathing. And we want to continue walking around and stuff like that. So, we find interesting things to do, you know. I have this wonderful book that someone gave me about dying, about the nature of death, and it has these wonderful illustrations. The Mexican ones are fantastic and they all show our illusions about death, our illusions that we can just keep going and that there's this death image that just keeps showing up in every aspect of life.

[11:20]

But we avoid it and we have to bring it up and look at it. our life is to try to avoid it. You know, that's what our life is about. We're always trying to avoid the subject of dying, and especially in America, even though we're killing more people than anybody else in other places. But we try to, you know, kind of not So at some point we can't continue doing what we're doing, and we have to wait a little bit. But then there's the question, and Buddhism certainly has a lot to say about the question of dying. But, you know, Zen leaves it as a question.

[12:27]

It's like Dao Wu and the condolence call, knocking on the casket, dead or alive. Tell me, is he dead or alive?" Dabu and his student went to a funeral and the student knocks on the casket and he says, tell me teacher, dead or alive? And Dabu says, I won't say, I won't say. And then as they're walking away from the funeral, the student says, tell me teacher, You know, if you won't tell me, I'll hit you." And Dao said, well, you can hit me, but I think that you'll get in trouble if you do. So he hit him. And then, of course, the student had to run away. Eventually, he ended up with another one of Dao's students and asked the same question.

[13:33]

And the other student said, Question is, I'll go on. If you say dead, that's OK. If you say alive, that's OK. Either one is OK. Is your grandmother dead or alive? Well, I won't say. So, Jim, maybe I missed something. But I don't understand how it's true that a person in a casket who is not moving, is decomposing, is alive.

[14:38]

How is he alive? Well, because you can't kill life. Even though the first precept is don't take life, in its deeper sense it means Life cannot be taken. If you chop the earwig... I'm getting that it's not those conventional sense of being alive. Right. There are two levels. Life with a capital L. There are several levels, but two levels. One is the level of, I was born, I grew up, I matured, I got old, I died. That's the usual understanding. Deeper understanding is there's simply transformations of existence, moment by moment.

[15:44]

And so our limited perceptions start with the time I was born and the time I died. So that's our limited perception, and that's the way we usually think about birth and death. But the deeper understanding is life doesn't come or go. I keep thinking of the person's family, and I'm just wondering if this dead or alive could possibly be comforting for someone who's grieving their father, husband, brother. Yeah, there's so many Buddhist stories. I wish I had brought that with me. I was just reading it. Little poems about how there's an inevitability called disease, which is the product of increase.

[16:54]

Because in a life cycle, one is born and then one deceases. So without being emotional, to just see that as a process is reality. Then overlaid on realities are feelings, which are also real, but they can be anything you want them to be. But the fact of being born and deceasing is not an idea. I mean, it is an idea, but it's a cold idea. I mean, we know this happens. But the feelings, the emotions and thoughts about it are whatever we want them to be. So when your friend or your relative or somebody dies, you have feelings. But those feelings, although related, are independent of the fact. When we just had Buddha's Parinirvana and we had this picture on the altar.

[18:02]

The picture on the altar is Shakyamuni Buddha laying down on his side saying goodbye. And all the arhats are crying. But there are also arhats who are more mature and they're saying, why are you crying? As a matter of fact, Buddha's laying down And he's saying, why are you doing this? Why are you crying? This is the most natural thing in the world that is happening. Why are you crying? But that's to illustrate a point. When somebody dies, you should cry. No problem. We should all cry. When Suzuki Roshi was dying, all of his disciples were in the room with him. And everybody was crying, except one person, I would say that is.

[19:05]

But of course you're crying. You should cry, even though you shouldn't. Because there's another side, a human side of grief, which needs to be expressed. But the reality is, I remember when I was a little kid, and I was maybe four, and we went to this place, I remember distinctly, maybe three or four, and I got an ice cream cone. And I was walking with my ice cream cone, and I remember it was chocolate and orange ice. And I was crying. They took me back and they gave me another one.

[20:06]

And I was very happy. But, you know, we cry when things happen to us. There are people dying all over the place that we don't cry for. But we cry for those who we know, or who we have feelings for. So it's all about our feelings. But the fact is, this is what And if someone doesn't cry, it's okay. Sometimes someone will come to me and they'll say, you know, my grandmother died, and I didn't feel anything. And sometimes you don't get the feeling for a while, and then later you grieve. It's okay to not have that, but people feel guilty when they don't. Often. And I think it's okay not to feel that way.

[21:08]

There are other ways to feel. It's not necessary to have that unless you really feel it, and it's okay to not feel it without feeling guilty that you're not feeling grief. Sometimes we feel happy. If someone really old and they're suffering. And this goes on and on, and when they die, it's a relief. Everybody's... That's how it's... They're mixed feelings. That's a good transition to my question, which is, when somebody dies young, you know, we say they were taken before their time. Yes. But is that possible? No. Yes and no. There's another no. That's another cause. Yes, because we would have liked them to have lived longer, but no, because it's their time. It's definitely their time.

[22:10]

But it's not their time according to the way we would like it to be. But it's their time according to what, then? According to... This is it. Because we have an idea of a progression of development. You have this idea of a progression of development. And we say, well, the person didn't have a chance to develop. Sometimes a person will die young, and you can have various feelings about that. You feel they never had a chance to grow up. But another way of looking at it is person is maybe five or six, and they had a wonderful life up to that time. They didn't have to worry about all these other things. Mortgages, money, grief and stuff like that, and they had a very happy short life. That's not so bad. We just keep breathing.

[23:12]

So there are different ways to look at it. There are different ways, but you know society kind of pushes us into various ways of thinking about something. But it's good to grieve, because otherwise we become callous, easily become callous. We shouldn't become callous. That's why, even though you know that this is the inevitable process of life, to grieve and to cry is good, because it overrides your tendency to be indifferent. So just to see something in a reductionist way. The reductionist way is just this is the bare bones but it's also important to fill it out with the body so that you have a more complete

[24:17]

response. Emotional response is important. But as we say, grieve. If you're going to grieve, just totally grieve. And then go on. So the going on is important. Otherwise you end up as Heathcliff. And do you remember Withering Heights? Heathcliff could just not let go of this lady when she died. And he ended up going into the graveyard at one point, digging in the middle of the night, digging up her grave. It's a movie.

[25:25]

It's an old movie. But it's about not being able to let go of something. Extreme attachment. So... In Buddhism, there are all these... ideas about rebirth, reincarnation, and all this. But they're basically based on the fact that when something ends, something else begins. This is Buddhism. The end of one thing is the beginning of another. Yeah. Yeah, I think this conversation is fascinating, and I think it's really fascinating, and it's almost the koan in itself, that we can be so sad for something that is the natural order

[26:26]

Yeah, it is. And the law of karma gives us impetus, because the law of karma means an action produces a result, which produces an action, which produces a result, which produces an action. And when the conventional idea of death appears, then what happens to karma? Does that disappear too? That's actually what this is about. It's like when karma, when life ends, Does the karma continue, or does it not continue? Well, you can say, yes it does, and then you can have a whole theory based on yes it does.

[27:38]

And you say, no it doesn't. You can have a whole theory based on no it doesn't. But in Buddhism, it does continue in some form. But reincarnation means the carne, or the flesh. reappears, which is not physically possible. So instead of talking about reincarnation, mostly Buddhists will talk about rebirth, which means that habit energy continues in some form, because everything is transformative. So that's the impetus for transformation. It's interesting. What you just said reminds me of a quandary I found myself in this week, entering into the language and culture of home hospice. But one of the things, just particularly in recent years, the focus in general in health care is patient-centered care.

[28:43]

So in hospice, it's a patient-centered goal. And sometimes they even are very adamant about saying, no, it's not patient-centered goal. It's person-centered goal. Because in hospice, we focus on the whole person, not just the curative medical thing of patient. Because if they're dying, we're not going to cure. So that includes the family system, which it always does. But there's a particular emphasis. So what happened is we're in an interdisciplinary meeting. And we're going over this person who had died. And I happened to have visited them one time. And they had a goal, and were supposed to enter it, whatever we think their stated goal was. And this woman's goal was she was supposedly at peace dying. But she was concerned for her daughter, who had had a really hard time denying the father's death a few years before. And she wouldn't talk about the mother's death, the patient's death. And so she was concerned for that.

[29:43]

So when the social worker was reporting this, one of the things you're supposed to assess For some reason, he was also acting as bereavement coordinator. That person was in the room. It's a separate role. That this person he had assessed was low risk for grief. That she was having a normal. That was the word he used. And the child bereavement coordinator was in the room. They usually child bereavement as young kids. But in this case, this is a woman in her 90s who died. And I said, first of all, I'm not sure, even though we have a term for it, complicated Greek, of exactly what we're talking about when we're saying normal and complicated. And I'm not sure what you're assessing. But I heard that the patient had this goal, right, of wanting the daughter, something for the daughter. So anyway, the point is, at what point does the relationship of this patient-centered goal, the karma, if you will,

[30:45]

get transmitted in this system of hospice to what we want or how we're going to care for 13 months for the daughter. And what we're assessing is the grief and what her goal is. And all I can tell you is it led to a very interesting conversation about how we assess grief risk. That's a very complex story. Thank you. But my response to that is Suzuki Roshi is talking about independent, dependent and independency. So the dying person is independent but also dependent because all the people surrounding the person, right? So it's an individual process but it's also a shared process. mostly, unless you don't have anybody. So the people around the person who's leaving ideally should help the person to leave, not try to make them stay, but help them to leave.

[32:02]

So that's how the process becomes realistic. So the grief has a way to express itself as helping rather than hindering. If you say to the dying person, oh, I don't want you to go, please don't go, then the person feels guilty for leaving. And you're creating a problem for the person who's leaving instead of creating an aura or situation where you're feeling whether you're allowing a person to leave without attachments, without worrying about the people that are left behind. So when we do that, we're hopefully taking care of the people that are left behind or

[33:08]

It's a shared situation, and that's where grief has a place to be expressed as inaction rather than just helplessly. I think that's hospice. For me, that's the goal of hospice, is how you help a person to feel that it's OK to be doing this, and that I'm not worried. And there's even some humor. Yeah. So in responding to a patient who expresses concern that their child, in responding to a patient who expresses concern person expresses concern that the child who's going to be left behind may have difficulty, you can respond to that need to take care of them, but you don't necessarily also assess that that child has the same risk that the parent has concerns about.

[34:31]

Your first goal is to help take care of the person's concerns or goals for themselves. attention to that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your assessment is the same as the parent's. The parent has that concern, but that may not be the reality. Well, my response to that is that, you know, don't worry, I'm going to be okay. You know, I can take care of myself. and all the help you've given me will help me take care of myself, and so please don't worry about me at all. I asked Hoitsu one time, I said, as a Soto Zen priest, what do you tell people that are dying? How do you deal with them? And he said, well, I just tell them, don't worry, everything else in the whole universe is just going with you.

[35:34]

Everything around you, your whole surroundings, and everybody in the whole universe. He didn't say that much, but he said everything is going with you. So you're not by yourself. You're doing this with everybody. And everybody's doing this with you. It's not like you're all alone in this process. So you can't take it with you. You can't. I like that. I don't know why I moved to share this. A musician friend of ours wrote this beautiful song about his mother dying. And he has this line that I found very moving. His refrain is kind of, fly away home, fly away home, to his mother. And he says, fly away home, we don't want you to die. Fly away home, we just want you to fly. It's kind of like, get both sides. and not hide anything or cover over anything, but make it a worthwhile experience, a realistic experience.

[36:48]

If nothing else we've accomplished in our life, it would be how do we accomplish our dying, and that's important. I mean, actually. I just want to say something about the people who have a lot of difficulty. I mean, I think we're talking about something really hard to do, which is to have the realism and then have the kind of open-hearted presence when someone's dying. And in the years I did hospice, I saw people literally holding onto a body and not letting the undertakers take it out and screaming. And on the other end, I saw people who said, they're already dead. I'm not going to talk to them. I'm not going to speak to them for the last two or three days. And just to hold that, I think people, what we're talking about doing is so hard that a lot of people just want to turn the lights switched all the way on or all the way off.

[37:56]

They can't do the gray area. Those are the two extremes, right? Yeah. So where do you find the middle? Yeah. So from the point of view of that, So from the viewpoint of independency, everything exists with Buddha-nature, no matter what happens to this world. But even so, nothing exists when seen from the viewpoint of utter darkness or absolute. So that which exists is no-thingness. That which exists is nothingness, I like to say no-thingness or darkness, in which many things exist as one. Many things exist, but there is nothing you can see or say about that.

[38:59]

There is no way to understand things by just explaining them individually. This is just an intellectual description, but you must have an actual feeling as well. I think what he's talking about is you can't explain one thing in a way that is isolated from everything else. You can only explain something in relation to its surroundings or what its support system is. So it's like trying to understand what a frog is by cutting it open and looking at the organs. You can see certain things about the frog, but that doesn't tell you what a frog is. So, if you can appreciate each thing one by one, then you will have pure gratitude.

[40:00]

Even if you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything. see it in that way, but at the same time, that which exists is just the flower. So there is no need to see it and nothing to be seen. Then the feeling we should have in our practice and in our everyday activity, then whatever work you do, you will have a continuous feeling of pure gratitude. You disappear and the flower disappears. And there's just this. You know, when we used to use the kiyosaku, a lot of you don't even know what the kiyosaku is, but the stick. We used to go around every period I was in with a stick and hit each other with a stick to wake up or to relax.

[41:11]

And when the stick is done, just right, you disappear, and the person that's hit disappears, and the stick disappears. And there's just this, pow! And everything disappears, and you wake up. It's wonderful. But somebody complained, oh, my father used to hit me with a strap, you know. So we stopped doing that. But actually, I do it sometimes during Sachine. I use the stick still. But that's, the point is, That's called waking up, is when you disappear, the object disappears, and the instrument disappears, and it's just boom, just this wonderful moment of awakeness. When we think about something in terms of duality, we observe and understand it intellectually be improved, that understanding should be improved day by day by pure non-dual thinking.

[42:19]

We say, you can't catch a fish in the same place twice. Today you were fortunate to catch a big fish in a certain place, but tomorrow you should fish in some other place. So we also have this saying, to notch the rail of the boat in order to mark our location. So the fisherman goes out This is the place, so he marks it on the boat. The boat is moving, but you mark the rail to remember the place. Oh, there was something beautiful, and we should remember it. Marking it doesn't help, because the boat is always moving. But we do it just the same. This is a good example of the thinking mind. It shows your foolishness and suggests to us what Buddhist life is. You know the story of the old Chinese story of the hunter who sees a rabbit run into a tree stop. So he's standing there with his gun, and he's waiting to shoot the rabbit.

[43:24]

And this rabbit runs by, and he's standing next to a tree stop. And the rabbit runs by and runs right into the tree stop and drops dead. Boy, that was easy. Except the rabbit goes home. Then he comes back the next day. used to also talk about the girlfriend, you know, who you wait to see her, she walks by. She's not a girlfriend yet, he just has no idea about her. And she walked around that corner and she was so beautiful, you know, and I was just stunned. So the next day I went back right now.

[44:30]

Oh, what a beautiful flower. That's all. Oh, what a beautiful flower. There's this wonderful movie, Las Animas, with Toshiro Mifune. Mifune, you know, the great Japanese actor, made this movie, Las Animas. It's a Mexican movie. And he loved Mexicans. He said, Mexicans and Japanese are like this. So he played this peasant. And in the village, every year, one person, one man, was supposed to put on a festival for the village. And it cost a lot of money. And wealthy people did this. But he wanted to do it. He was kind of retarded. And so somehow he got himself into a position he found this little bird and fell in love with this little bird and the bird was crippled or something and he was standing there and so he put the bird in his hand you know and oh my goodness and then he held the bird and said I love this bird I love this bird and when he opened his hands it was dead because he suffocated it through his love

[45:59]

So, we should appreciate what we see right here, right now, a beautiful flower, but we should appreciate it, but we shouldn't mark it on the rail of the boat. Do we have any questions? That's about right. Could you say something? I don't know if you want to get into I would say either take an easy position, as you are doing already, or stand up for a minute.

[47:19]

Now, this third question. Actually, I wrote down for this third question. Good for the newsletter. I don't know if I put it in there or not. Long time ago. So the student asks Sugiroshi. This is page 91. When I see a situation in which one person seems to be hurting another, I become emotionally upset. And by becoming upset because I'm not seeing the situation as it actually is, if I were seeing it as it actually is, would I not be upset? Well, Suzuki Roshi answers this question. That is a very difficult question to answer. It's difficult to know whether one person is helping another in an appropriate way or not. you may be upset.

[49:57]

That happens, you know. If someone is helping your girlfriend or boyfriend in an appropriate way, you may get upset anyway. So that kind of thing happens pretty often. So then the student says, Roshi, my question is more like this. If a person really sees things clearly, is there then no situation that would upset him emotionally? But affected, yes. There's a big difference between these two, between being affected and being emotionally upset. A Buddha may be upset quite easily, in the sense of being deeply affected. But when he is upset, it is not because of his attachments. Sometimes he will be very angry. anger is allowed when it is Buddha's anger, but that anger is not the same as the anger we usually have.

[51:05]

If a Buddha is not upset when he should be upset, that is also a violation of the precepts. When he needs to be angry, he must be angry. That is the characteristic of the Mahayana way of observing precepts. When we say sometimes anger is like a sunset, actually it is a beautiful red sunset. If anger comes from pure mind, then purity like a lotus is good. Because it's not self-centered anger, it's not Sometimes I get angry, but I use anger rather than being used by anger.

[52:07]

In other words, I'm not angry in order to express myself or in order to express my feelings, personal feelings. The anger is to help you, to make a point, or to... In other words, it doesn't come from the harbour. We say, don't harbour ill will. Harbouring ill will is the precept that we use. Literally, the priest says, don't give way to anger, but that means don't give way to your own personal preferences.

[53:14]

So, this anger is not dualistic anger. It's an appropriate response. that comes from pure mind rather than from your dualistic mind or your preferential mind or the mind that wants to hurt. So often anger is a reaction. So the reaction is different than a response. Reaction is you do something and I get angry. But a response is After all considerations, which may only take the snap of a finger, the response comes from a deeper place, which is not self-centered. And it's to show something without being attached.

[54:19]

So one is not attached to the anger. The anger doesn't have a root in your own personal considerations. And since it doesn't have a root, it doesn't last any longer than it needs to. So a teacher can be angry at a student, but it's not a personal thing. We have to be very careful. I get angry at people, but it's not a personal thing. It's not a matter of I like you or I don't like you. You know, I cannot treat a student according to I like you or I don't like you. That's out of it. Even though there are people that I like, people that I don't like as well maybe, but

[55:28]

to base feelings on whether I like or don't like someone is not a teacher's role. Even though you may have certain feelings about one person and you don't have those feelings about another, the anger has to be neutral. And only if it's teaching something. or making a point, or pushing a person out of their position. It's like, boom! You know? Like, when we hear about the teacher slapping the student, or hitting the student, that has nothing to do with anger, in that sense. It's a response to shake somebody out of their position. So I can imagine that with a teacher-student, but it seems like most of the anger I see is not that kind of anger.

[56:49]

Most of the anger in the world is not that at all. Not at all. No, that's right. It's all in the name of Allah. But it's really all personal, unfortunately. But can a person who's not a teacher still have that kind of teaching anger or neutral anger that you were talking about in their relationships. Can who have it? Yeah, just me. Say me. You can. Yes, you can. But, you know, it has to be cultivated. Sometimes a person will say, how can I control my anger? Well, I can tell you how you control your anger, but it's not going to help, because you have to practice controlling your anger. When I say control, I mean not tight control, but placing it in the right place, allowing the anger to come from a deeper place and not re-acting with anger.

[58:02]

That has to be practiced. When you practice that over and over again, then when a situation happens, that becomes natural. But unless you practice it, it doesn't become natural. And then you say, well, what's the key, you know? And you can tell a person, but unless they practice it, they won't be able to put it into practice. So it's a practice to for lack of a better word, control. Control means not letting things get out of hand, in that sense. To not let your emotions get out of hand, your anger especially, it has to be practiced.

[59:04]

Because there is a tendency It's an emotion that comes up. You can't deny that the emotion is there, but it's what you do with the emotion when you want to express it. Emotions just come. You don't say, well now I think I'll feel angry. It's not the way it works. It just comes up. And then we have a choice. Some of us don't have a choice. We have a choice. This is the thing about, is there such a thing as free will or not? It's an interesting question. But of course we have free will.

[60:06]

I can decide how I'm going to express this emotion. Am I going to express it in a beneficial way or am I going to express it in a way that's simply getting something off my chest? and trying to hurt somebody. Anger is mostly expressed as, I want you to feel what I feel. That's mostly, it's some kind of retaliation. So we don't control our anger so that it's not retaliation. you know, have this guy feel what I feel, you know, but I don't express that. It's just, it's just a thought in my mind, but when I actually go to express anger, I don't do it that way.

[61:07]

So how do you practice the anger to clarify or something? Instead of reacting, I think, what is the appropriate response? I always think, what is the appropriate response? And then I have an opportunity to be in control. And I can choose how to express it so that And as Suzuki Roshi said in the previous lecture, I think it was, you're always protecting the person, he didn't say it this way, you're always protecting the person that you're having the problem with. Here he says it. I can tell you what I think, but it's the same thing.

[62:29]

Even though we are angry at someone, we can still acknowledge that person. Because a teacher knows a student very well, sometimes she The teacher knows that the student is very good, but sometimes the student will be lazy, and the teacher will hit him. Hit him. We don't do that in America. That's why I said we might get sued. It's common for... And I don't think Suzuki... In fact, I do remember Suzuki Roshi hitting Phil Wilson. You know, he was an All-American or something at Stanford. This was back in the 60s, 50s, 60s. And he loved Suzuki Roshi. He would call him Reverend Suzuki because I mean, he called him Suzuki Roshi. At that time, he was Reverend Suzuki. Reverend Suzuki, God, I don't know.

[63:41]

Suzuki Roshi was this little guy and Phil was this huge guy. And he just submitted himself to Suzuki Roshi. But he has a big ego. And Suzuki Roshi would take his stick and hit him. Bam! Bam! Bam! Ego! Ego! Ego! I remember that. But he was so kind. And Philip loved it. He was transmitting love through this meeting. He was. And it was great. Too bad about Phil. He had some of the greatest stories about Suzuki Goshi, but he never wrote them down. But he loved him to the end.

[64:42]

He loved him to the end, yeah. So, you know, Suzuki Yoshi was impressing Phil with his, that, you know, wake up to your ego. But he did it with love, but with rough love, you know, in a way that Phil could understand. But it never hit him hard enough. go around with his stick and hit all of us during Zazen. We all loved it. Great. There's some kind of physicality that, you know, if he came up and hugged us all, that wouldn't be so good. But to hit us is good. Okay, I'll say it.

[65:48]

Because people will persecute you. So why are you doing that? What other things do you have in mind? Yes. Yeah. thinking the two things are very important in all of this, which is intention and container. And that quality that was described in one of the versions of water, the quality of water to contain. Oh, yeah. The water contains the tree. Yeah. And so I was thinking about that the teaching that all beings are bodhisattvas. So viewing everyone as a bodhisattva changes relationship.

[66:56]

And then there's also the viewpoint of, like in that first page of Akamaru, she's living by vow. Ordinary beings are pulled by their karma. Bodhisattvas live by vow. So that's all of us and none of us. And that's this group over here and this group And so in that context, and this thing of containment, sometimes where I get stuck, particularly around anger that comes up, is to have this viewpoint, like we're all in Sachine. We are all practicing together, and anger is arising. And how do I respond appropriately What's the container here? Yeah, the container is appropriate response because it's anger.

[68:04]

When you're angry, it's okay to be angry. If you think it's not okay to be angry, that may be so, but Anger is just anger. It's what you do with it that makes it what we call anger. Anger is like fire. So we have this fire in our hand and it can burn us, it can burn down the whole town. So what do we do with fire? We contain it. So we have a fireplace we have a stove, when we turn on the stove, we turn on the fire in the stove, and then we put the kettle on it, and then we say, well, let's see now, we want the appropriate heat, the appropriate, you know, should it be this high or this high? So, and then when we have the lantern, if you turn the lantern up to, the kerosene lantern up too high, then it all smokes out.

[69:15]

And Suzuki Roshi talked about that too. One of his examples was the smoky kerosene lamp. We used to have these kerosene lamps at Tassajara. That's all the light we ever had. So we had a lot of experience with kerosene lanterns. So when you turn it up too much, the chimney gets black and stained. fire, smoke everything up, turn it down so that it becomes useful. So when you take fire and you contain it and you control the height of the flame, it can be useful and beneficial. This is a stretch, but it contains light.

[70:17]

and it also contains heat. So how do you use it is the question, not whether I need it or not, because this is a Buddhist anger, knowing how to adjust the lamp. So how to make anger, allow it to be useful instead of destructive. So when we talk about anger, we usually talk about its destructive side, but it also has a useful side. All of our emotions have a useful side and a destructive side. Love has a useful side and a destructive side. has a useful side and a destructive side, even though we are not so sure about its useful side.

[71:22]

It's a little. You've got everything in proportion. It seems like you have to relate this conversation with the culture you're in as well. Yes. The expression of anger in one area can be so entirely different in a different area and how it's used and how it's expressed and how it's accepted. It's all about the conditions. Yes. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. OK. Oh, I wanted to read you something. I've read you this before. It's about good. It's a story, but you didn't make it up.

[72:35]

Opposites are endless, good and bad, day and night, right and wrong, mine and yours, praising Opposites produce each other. Day becomes night, and death becomes rebirth. The egg becomes the hen, and the hen makes the egg. In just this way, good luck and bad luck are an endless cycle. There was once a farmer who lost his mare. When the mare disappeared, the people of the village said, bad luck. But when the mare came home the very next day, followed by a good, strong horse, the people of the village said, good luck. Yesterday, they thought bad luck. Today, they think good luck. Yesterday, they said loss. But today, they say gain, which is true. Gain and loss are opposites.

[73:41]

When the farmer's son rode the beautiful horse, he fell and broke his leg. Then all the people said, bad luck. War came, and all the strong men were drafted. Many men fought and died on the battlefield. Because the farmer's son had broken his leg, he could not go to war. Was this loss or gain? Good luck or bad luck? Who knows?

[74:05]

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