Today, this Memorial Day weekend, this weekend of remembering and recollecting, I would like to focus on the other side of the koan I've been given, which is on the reunion of Sejo and her soul. The name of the koan is Sejo and Her Soul Are Separated. So there are probably people here who weren't here the last time, so I'll briefly tell you this story. It's a koan based on a Chinese folk tale. And Sei Zhou, Sei is her given name, Zhou is a diminutive meaning little girl, is a very adored and very lovely little girl. She's especially adored by her father because her older sister died. She has a cousin, and they play very compatibly together.

[01:01]

They look like they belong together and fit together. And at one point, the dad sort of teasingly says, you ought to be married someday. And they took that to mean that they would be, as children do. They take their parents' words seriously. And yet a wealthy neighbor imposed on Sejo's father to ask, to allow his son to marry Sei. And so at the point at which Sei and Ochu, her cousin, had fallen in love and were a young man and woman, she was betrothed to someone else. And Ochu was, they were both heartbroken. And Ochu left town without telling anybody. He took his boat down the Yangtze and didn't tell Sejo. And in the middle of the night, he sees a figure running along the shore and he goes over to inspect and it turns out to be Se.

[02:08]

and they embrace and they realize they can't go back. And so they elope, they leave town and establish themselves, get married, have two children, and have a life. Eventually, Saif feels a longing for her father and feels incomplete and says that to Ochu. And Ochu said, yes, I feel the same way. We should go back and ask forgiveness. So they do that. They boat back up the river, and as is the custom, Ochu goes to Sei's father first, leaving her at the river with the two children, and explains to him and apologizes that they have ilok, they have children, they've been gone for five or six years. And the father is puzzled. He said, that can't be. because Sei is still here. She's in her bed.

[03:09]

She hasn't moved or spoken in all of his time. She's as if she were drunk. And Ochu says, that can't be. She's down at the river and the father takes him in to prove it and there is the prone Sei. And Ochu then says, I will go get the other Sei. And the other Se, as the other Se is approaching the house, the Se who is in bed smiles and stands up. And as they come together, they merge into one. And Se says about it that she had not known that she was separated. She had not known that she was incomplete. So, You know, koans are pointers, right?

[04:10]

They're not legal precedents as they're cases, but they're not legal precedents in an argument. They're pointers toward what is wholeness, what is the absolute. The word soul is a little problematic, and we don't think of, in our Dharma, we don't think about our having a soul, a kind of, a unitary personality, we think of ourselves as being myriad beings maybe, various, you know, aspects and manifestations. But I think it is more directed at something like essence and maybe even Buddha nature that we're talking about rather than soul. And that the story is talking about say being Separated is an interesting word because actually it's that she's unaware.

[05:10]

She's unawakened to her Buddha nature, right? And when she runs away, she's running away from home. It's like she's abandoning her roots, her essential Buddha nature. and following her wishes, her heart's desire on the one hand, but in the end doing that by itself turns out not to be satisfying, not to provide ultimate and deep peace for her. I would say in sort of argument with a metaphor that's presented in the story, that she's not separated because in her longing for home is an expression, I think, of a way-seeking mind. And that way-seeking mind, when she expresses her longing, awakens it in her husband. I imagine that that longing grows out of her empathy for her father because

[06:17]

As a mother she now understands what it would be like to lose a child, what it was like for her father to lose her. And coming home is coming home to a whole self. It is a story about a Kensho experience and there is at the end a smile that is very much like the Mahakassapa's smile who smiles when the Buddha holds up the flower. And there's a realization of non-separateness. There's a reconciliation that happens, I think, on all levels, on the absolute and the relative. and the reconciliation has a healing effect for her but also for everyone around her. The way I've been attempting to hold this is to look when standing in diversity to look for oneness and when standing in oneness to look for diversity.

[07:40]

Another metaphor that I've been thinking about is one that I heard Hoetsu say. Hoetsu is Suzuki Roshi's son. And I think there's a story of Suzuki telling this, that Suzuki told this story at some point too. So I'm imagining it's a metaphor that's broader than just the two of them. Huisi was describing visiting a man who was dying and comforting him with this analogy, this metaphor, which is that he is like the droplet of water that comes off of a waterfall together with all of the other droplets of water that are falling and will ultimately join the river. Still part of the river, still, but in their diversity, in their separateness, they're still part of this flow of river. But so those are my sort of attempts to enter into the meaning of it, but still there is the matter of how to embody this, how to feel this in one's marrow and blood.

[08:56]

And for that, I'm going to go back to the Mulan's commentary, which I'll read and then I'll try to unpack a little bit. When you realize what the real is, you will see that we pass from one husk to another, like travelers stopping for a night's lodging. But if you do not realize it yet, I earnestly advise you not to rush about wildly. When earth, water, fire, and air suddenly separate, you will be like a crab struggling in boiling water with its seven or eight arms and legs. When that happens, don't say I didn't warn you. So when you realize what the real is, this is that we are all in the stream of cause and effect.

[09:58]

There's nothing else. It's all flow. It's all transformation. There's nothing else besides that. When you realize what the real is, you will see that we pass from one husk to another like travelers stopping at a night's lodging, and that's the flow of our lives, that's the arc of our lives, from one state of mind to another, from one place to another, traveling through time. If you do not realize it, I earnestly advise you to not to rush about wildly. quietly and earnestly practice Zazen, then everything will become clear. The ancients thought that we were composed of earth, water, fire, and air, so when those things separate and dissipate, that is us decomposing. So at the moment when this tangible physical self dissolves, if I haven't realized the flow, then I will be like a crab struggling

[11:12]

in a pot of boiling water, which is a very graphic image, which I know from my childhood I've seen this happen. When that happens, don't say I didn't warn you. I have long advised you to practice zazen to come to experience reality and to achieve enlightenment. So, This is where the two elements in myself start to struggle between faith and doubt. How does one know one's true self? How does one learn to recognize and trust the manifestations of big mind? And I mean viscerally, I mean in the marrow and blood. You know, this, One of the things that I rely on, I have relied on, of the Triple Treasures is Sangha.

[12:19]

When I have doubt about other things, I can find solace in the company of all of you. We have gone through some periods of kind of rough times, I would say, over the last number of months. in the Sangha realm. And in the middle of that, I had a question that I took to someone, which was, what can I rely on when things are falling apart or they feel like they're falling apart? And the answer I got was quite wonderful. The answer was, Buddha's last words before he died, be a lamp unto yourself. And I took that in and I thought, but wait, I don't know where that is.

[13:27]

How can I find that? I thought you couldn't peek. You can't see your own big mind, right? And so the suggestion was see it in the minds of people around you. And I thought, I can do that. In fact, I have been doing that and I can see big mind in the people around me. I can feel it in my body when something rings true or wise or spot on to the moment. So that's one place where I could find my way into this. We're also directed towards Zazen. And a question I have had about Zazen for a long time, and I took it to several people, is how do you know when you're not wasting your time in Zazen?

[14:35]

Having heard that it's possible to spend years wasting your time, sitting zazen. And one answer I got was when you don't want anything. And that has been actually a really useful instruction in terms of zazen because when I notice that I want to be colder or I want to be hotter, I want the timekeeper to wake up and ring the bell. I want something. I can see that that's not Zazen. That's a very direct experience for me. Another answer I got was when you can see change in the arc of your life. Well, that's actually not that easy to do because it's like trying to see changes in yourself is like trying to watch a tree grow.

[15:36]

You know, if you don't take a big enough span of time, you don't see much. But when I looked at the arc, I could see places where things were incrementally and slowly changing. In my last Wayseeking Mind talk last week, I talked about a moment of whether extreme stage fright or self-consciousness in which I was giving a talk, this is in 1982, and a part of me separated off and was on the ceiling looking down at myself and doing commentary about how I was doing in the talk and saying things like, you're probably not making any sense, and you're probably not even speaking English. I mean, it was, anyway. That's where I started all those years ago. Recently, not too long ago, I started noticing moments when I would think of something and then say it without regard to the worrier, the worrier who worries about my reputation and how it's gonna look and how people are gonna react and so forth.

[17:00]

I mean, it's not that I actually don't think about how people are going to react in a way that I want to be mindful, but the self-referential part, which felt uncharacteristic. And so then there was another part that looks back and says, oh, that's different, which is not the same kind of worrier. It had more of a witness quality to it. In psychology, we would call it an observing ego. in a positive sense of ego. And one way that I have been thinking about it is what happens when I get myself out of my own way, when something is kind of dropped from the situation. So then I was asked, when you get yourself out of the way, what comes forward. And that was quite an interesting pointer for which I do not have an answer.

[18:08]

Maybe you do for yourselves. One might be intuition. An instinctive knowing what to do. But I am most happy to think about it as mystery. a manifestation of mystery. And there is a way when that happens that one doesn't take credit for it because it isn't me, it doesn't feel personal, it doesn't feel like it belongs to me, it feels mysterious. So Genjo was someone, so the person who asks the question about this koan is Goso, Master Goso. He lived 1,000 years ago, and his predecessor is Genjo, who he knew, and it was Genjo's words that set Goso on his path, and his words were,

[19:22]

When he was, Ganjo was asked, what is realization like? What is experiencing realization? And Ganjo said, it is just like a woman who drinks water and nods to herself, knowing for herself whether the water is warm or cold. And here the operative word is, knows for herself. Gozo reads this and asks, knowing whether the water is warm or cold is easy, but what makes her nod to herself? So, I have been told, I've heard that awakening mind is not some special other thing. It has to do with our deepest understanding and some glimmer that brings us to practice.

[20:25]

And that it's not difficult to touch it. It is present in everything. And one thing I can test too is particularly in you. Blythe has a wonderful thing about realization, movement and stillness, two and one, say at home, say abroad, the absolute and relative, the moon and the mountains, which is the real one? The answer is, as before, all that we behold is full of blessings. Now, there is still the matter, anticipating the Linda Hess question, There is still the matter of the crab in the boiling water.

[21:27]

We are not free from our myriad selves. We have to say something. We get into trouble or we make mistakes, we fall apart, we disappoint others. We feel pain, we feel despair for the world. We can return to Zazen and try to be like one of those heavy bottom Buddha dolls. When it gets knocked down, it comes up again. But we are nevertheless a work in progress, a flow. In my day, I've done some river running, which is a great metaphor for flow. And when you come to a big rapid, the thing you do is scout it You get out, you park your car, park your car, park your raft and you walk down to the bottom and you look where you want to end up and then you trace back up to see what the route is, that's plan A. And then you get in your raft and the river takes over and that's when plan B, plan C, plan D happens.

[22:36]

And what I know from that is you don't hang on to plan A. As soon as plan B starts happening, you go with it. So there is a way, you can't fight the river. The river is stronger than you are. You can swim with it, you can navigate your way laterally as you go down, but the river is going to be going, you're going to be going in the direction the river is going to go. So I guess we say to the crab, they got to merge with your situation. You got to, you know, deal with the heat. If there's diversity and oneness and oneness and diversity,

[23:40]

emptiness and emptiness form, then our relationship with the cosmos is not different from our relationship with each other, I think. And that the healing that happens on one level can be a mirror of the healing on another. So, Sejo's, I would call it, his dissociation of the mourning for his first child, which turns into this clinging to this daughter and not minding her wishes, and causes him to overfreight that relationship, is healed when she is healed. Her healing is not only her healing, it's also his healing, and also her husband, and also her children, who now have a grandfather. I've seen this happen in my own life. My mother had, unbeknownst to me, a physically abused childhood.

[24:50]

And the way she dealt with that was to put it in a box. She told me this after a trigger had caused her to re-remember her childhood. She said, I put all of that in a box. I wrapped the ribbon around it. I put it in the back of the closet of my mind, never to be opened again. But the problem is when we do that kind of, separating from ourselves, it doesn't go away. And actually what happens is it leaks in a very indirect and uncontrolled way. So the way it leaked in the household I grew up in is that she would not tolerate anyone being angry. And she would reinterpret that into something else. You're not angry, you're disappointed or whatever. So it created a little bit of a house of mirrors in terms of what was really going on. She told me when she was in her 70s and I was in my 30s, this story of having been abused, having had it called up for her by some trigger, doesn't matter what it was, and reintegrating it into her life and understanding of who she was.

[26:11]

That allowed her to get beyond the fact that she had more than a stepmother. There was a stepmother who abused her. She had actually had a mother before that who had died when she was two who loved her very much. And so she had this healing in her own self. But for me, it changed my relationship with her because I went from being mad at her for, you know, not allowing me to have my righteous anger, to being grateful to her for not having passed on the blow, for doing what she could. She did what she could. She was not abusive. She did not pass that on. And in that moment, I realized her changing changed me. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I think we're all in this together.

[27:18]

So. Taryn. Thank you. It's so rich. When I first heard this koan, kind of working with me. And one of the things in my life that I noticed, you touched on it in your talk, is when I notice something about myself that I don't like and I want to change it, you know, it's kind of like I want to slip out of a husk. You know, I'll leave a husk behind. I don't like this one. I'll leave it behind. shinier one that people like better.

[28:24]

And there's so much aversion in that. There's so much aversion to myself that it's almost like I'm setting myself up for failure when I do something like that. It's like, yeah, I'm going to wage an internal battle. Every time I hear myself swear, I'm going to smack myself upside the head. That kind of thing. And I really haven't had much luck with that in my life, but the thing that happens is setting an intention. Setting an intention to do better, to be better, to not harm people by the way that I speak. To be more honest or whatever. Just having the intention is usually enough. to be a hero of some sort. And when the change happens, it's usually more like a gift than like a win.

[29:34]

You know, more like something that, oh look, you know, finally I'm not struggling with this thing anymore. Finally this thing isn't happening anymore. I've moved beyond this somehow. know rather more than oh look I really worked hard and gained the prize you know so you know there's something in that and learning how to that I get here in Sangha. Because when I'm just rambling around by myself, I pretty much can get away with anything. When I'm here and showing up, I'm accountable to everybody here. And I get to interact with everybody and find where my rough edges are and how it bumps against people and hurts them and maybe somehow I want to shift that so that

[30:45]

You know, it's not getting in the way so much. But yeah, and there's people who want to call you back to that husk. You know, I don't like the way you changed. I want you to be back the way you were before. I think we can be aggressive toward ourselves and the parts that we don't like, which is a way of separating, dividing ourselves into separate parts. It doesn't go well. Peter. Give it up. Go with it. I never saw a crab get out of the boiling water.

[31:48]

How's the crab? Does the crab ever see that? I'm sorry? Does the crab ever get to see that? Oh. Well, its next iteration is food, right? And it gets to be part of us. I mean, is there something else beside the flow? I guess that's... Yes, Linda, did I not ask your question? And I honestly don't know which one I'm going to ask, but I'll go with the other one.

[33:06]

So you ended your talk with, we're all in this together. And this question is less formal than the other one, but it's kind of like when somebody How responsible are we I don't even know if I should ask this question publicly, but I feel a separation of somebody, a painful thing, you referred to it, and I just wondered if we're tending to healing that.

[34:20]

Right. I think we are responsible, actually. And then the question is, that's not the hard question. The hard question is what does that mean we should do? And that's a question that can only be answered moment by moment. I mean, one thing that I know is that I carry in my heart people that I don't see all the time and think about them. connect with them there. And I don't think it's a question that we can answer each person by ourselves. I think it's a collective answer that includes the separated, has to include the separated person.

[35:25]

Because any action that we do has to come with information from that person or understanding how the connection needs to be accomplished from their point of view as well. So, I think the best thing we can all do for each other is to understand that we are not who we were last week or last month or six months ago. We are new in each moment and to not hang on to old views of each other and try to reestablish the connection with who we are now. and who we are coming to be, who we have come to be now.

[36:36]

Gary? I was just thinking that couldn't that, in response to Linda, couldn't that be say, eating say? You know, like how to respond to other, It could just as well be say meeting say. Yes, right, right, right, yes. It happens on all levels, that's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The comment was, isn't that like say meeting say? The reconciliation of, the reunion of say with herself. Thank you so much for a really nice talk. Thank you. I'm always so drawn to the husk that was left behind. Because the husk was her physical self, one that was interacting in the real world, even as her spirit was kind of running away and having trouble in the fulfilled life.

[37:41]

And I agree with everything that you said in terms of how we hold space for each other, and leave room for us to be and be well and be ill at the same time. how do we hold that space? The thing I'm curious about, of all the things I'm curious about, what could her father have done to heal her? How could he have called her back? Because all he did in this particular story was to hold space for her. Merely hold space until It kind of relates to one of the other questions. And sometimes I'm not sure that it's anything. Sometimes I think it's just holding space and allowing people to reenter easily and gracefully.

[38:48]

I don't think holding space is a small thing to do, actually. I think that's huge and maybe the most important. I mean, I think... People come to their way-seeking mind in their own time. and maybe say had to do all the things she did in order to get to that place, to find out that that was not complete fulfillment for her. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of the nature for me of a finger pointing. Well, I think that our tendency is always to see something from one side. And the way we see things is from a biased point of view.

[39:54]

And we think that we're seeing accurately. And that's called delusional. And we only see things from one side. And the whole world is falling apart because people only see things from one side. When Sejo meets herself, she sees the whole picture. And rarely do we meet ourself. So that's what this poem is about. How do you meet yourself? When you meet yourself, you understand what individuality means. Otherwise, you don't know what it means, and it just feels separate. I think this is relevant to this koan. How do you realize the whole picture? So we feel separate because we don't realize our oneness.

[41:06]

And when we realize our oneness, As somebody once said, I think it was Sawaki Kodo, he says, when you're old and on your deathbed, you realize all that stuff in your history is meaningless. And everything is history. Everything. And even now it's history. So, we start with enlightenment. That's not a big deal, but realization is hard. To see the say that ran away as the spirit

[42:11]

and the say that stayed behind as the real body. Isn't that not seeing this as oneness? As opposed to, it seems like people think that what left and got married and had kids was the spirit, was the desire to be free, but couldn't it be the other way around? Couldn't it be that what stayed in the bed was the spirit? and isn't how we view that got to do with our own spec view or history? Sure. Sure, I can go with that. One more. Judy? As you were talking about feeling it in the bone, in the blood and feeling the marrow, I started hearing that song, you gotta walk that long Sunday.

[43:18]

You gotta walk it for yourself and nobody here can walk it for you. You got to walk it for yourself. But, you know, that sense of that the hills and the valleys and the rivers are flowing with that sound, you know, that line and sensation of ease. of the diamond or something. So my question is, in that moment where there's this action play, interaction, of the father goes to get this say, and the husband goes to get this say, and the children in the boat also, that there's a bearing witness. And at the same time, each one has to walk. And as you were talking about the river, you know, the plan B, and so... How do you walk?

[44:24]

How do you flow in that not knowing? How does that bearing witness happen for you when plan A is no longer the plan? Hmm. What choice do I have? I mean, I guess, maybe I don't understand your question, but it feels like there's only plan B, and then if that doesn't work, there's only plan C, that you just go. It's something about not resisting. I think. Not resisting what is. So it's like this moment of recognizing the resistance in order to release it. Right, yeah. Okay, are we there?

[45:28]

We're there.

[45:28]

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