You know, it's very noisy up there. And if you want, why don't you move up closer, unless you can hear. It feels very different. So, when you're practicing meditation, can you hear back there?

[01:18]

No? When you're practicing zazen in a sesshin, maybe it'll be impossible to talk to you, I don't know. You're observing yourself or something is observing something. If you can find something, good luck. So we practice Dazen. Yeah.

[02:20]

Okay. How long will it take? Okay. And it was in a big church in New York City.

[05:27]

And it turned out that Suzuki Roshi's microphone was off and my microphone was on. So we didn't know it and we talked for one hour. And everybody said, what I said was so interesting and it was so wonderful to look at Suzuki Roshi. Anyway, are they turned on now? No, not yet. I don't understand. All right. Bye.

[07:16]

You know, one of Uchiyama Roshi's favorite stories in Japan is that the monks come in and they have been out in the garden and they tell the teacher that all the squash are out in the garden squabbling. So the teacher goes out and says, what are all you squash fighting about? They're fighting about something, I don't know what. Monk, the teacher says, feel the tops of your heads, so the squash all feel the tops of their heads. There's this stem, you know, see, and then they, from this chakra or something, you know, so there's this stem that goes around. And they find they're all connected with each other. And that's what I feel like with this. I feel like I'm on some sort of stem connected, you know. Okay, now can I start?

[09:17]

Buddhism says there's no self, you know, and if you practice zazen, you are in mindfulness, you're looking at yourself or somebody's looking at or observing what you're doing. And it's a kind of, what I call to myself, a Morton Salt effect. Because I don't know if you remember, the Morton Salt used to have a picture on it. And on it, there was a girl carrying a package of Morton Salt with a picture of herself on it, carrying a package of Morton Salt with a picture of herself on it, carrying a package of Morton Salt. And when I was very little, I used to eat a magnifying glass. see how many girls carrying Morton Salt I could count as they disappeared into the barbershop mirrors. And when you observe yourself in zazen it's rather like that, you know, because you can observe yourself observing yourself.

[10:29]

So you can look very hard for who you are. And most of you start practicing zazen because you're not satisfied with yourself, or because you're very involved with yourself and you want to improve yourself. And I think that for many of you enlightenment is some super self. It's going to be, everything's going to be okay when I'm enlightened and my self will be improved, or Anyway, you see what I mean. And some of you make big efforts to get rid of yourself. But from the point of view of Buddhism, there's no self. There's nothing to get rid of. You ought to forget about it.

[11:33]

You ought to forget about improving yourself. I mean, you're all right just as you are. So, if there's no self or nothing to find when you look for yourself, you know, because that can be very nervous-making. Because then, who are you, you know? What are you, you know? What do you find? What do you find that's there, that's real or not real? Can you find anything you can call yourself? Can you hear in the back now?

[12:36]

Yes. Okay. Anyway, you should examine this point very carefully. Is there anything about you which you can call yourself? Now I've talked several times about the idea of persona, and partly that's what I was talking about yesterday, is the persona you have when you leave the building, or the persona you have as a priest. The roles you play are different, you know, but they're not actually you. But you'll have some tension and conflict, difficulty, if there isn't at least some harmonious relationship between your persona.

[13:45]

So... So that's one of the reasons we have the Eightfold Path, is that it's an attempt to create a kind of harmony with your persona. In other words, again, right livelihood. There should be some, you know, if you're selling, say, intoxicants and you're also practicing Buddhism. There may be some conflict, it may cause you some difficulty, or if you're building bombs for the war. Now, Dr. Konze recently talked about a famous Buddhist in the world who was a judge and had to, his job was prosecution, and he had to condemn people to death.

[15:00]

Later, he was instrumental in getting the death penalty abolished in his country, but it caused a great tension in him between this job he had as a judge condemning people to death. I guess he was quite vigorous in his prosecution of execution of justice. So we can have that kind of tension, so we have the Eightfold Path to help us relieve that tension, so there's some harmony between our various roles. Buddhism is full of lists, you know, Eightfold Path, and the favorite around Zen Center recently has been the Ten Bhumis. And the ten bhumis are the ten stages of enlightenment.

[16:08]

Now when you're confronted with a list like that in Buddhism, the first thing you should ask yourself is not, what is the list, but why a list at all? Why make a list? Isn't Zen all about sudden enlightenment, etc. ? And why do we need the 10 stages of enlightenment? Well partly it's a substitute for, it's another way of identifying you, a kind of identification that's not self.

[17:29]

The first stage, say, of the ten stages is joy, great joy, and it's based on the practice. There are also ten paramitas, which are the practices leading to enlightenment or of enlightenment, and the first one then is charity. And I think it's pretty hard for Zen students to understand the relationship between morality and practice, but actually they're exactly the same. You can't have Zen practice without morality. So it may not make sense to you, but anyway. Great joy is related to charity, the practice of charity. And great joy, that stage, is the stage at which you perceive that subject and object are one, when you perceive the unity of things.

[18:46]

So the first koan, when you have a, again here's a, you know, people talk about sudden enlightenment, etc., but then you look at the school which You look at Soto or Rinzai and you find they're talking about lots of years of practice. The most obvious one to describe is the koan study. Stages and stages of koans which take a minimum of ten, twenty to thirty years to complete. That's not very sudden except in a very vast sense. big sense. So the first koan, the first so-called satori experience, is aimed at helping the student end the subject-object relationship that he usually perceives. So that's the stage of great joy, and the joy that we mean may be very much like the joy that one feels at

[19:57]

some holiday maybe for Christians, like Christmas, in which you feel, not that you're going to get a present, but that everyone feels the same way, there's some unity of feeling. So when you realize your relationship with everything, your lack of separation with everything, there's an enormous joy and relaxation that goes with it. And as a result of that, The characteristic of it, that you can see in a person, is great generosity. Because if you give something to someone, you're giving to yourself. I mean, or you're giving to another. It's just, there isn't the problem of, you see, you can give everything away. Or you can keep for yourself. Somebody gives everything away, maybe that's, you know, it's to give to yourself, or to give to someone else, or to whatever. I remember Suzuki Roshi used to say, I have these glasses. These glasses are yours, but you know how tired my poor old eyes are, so you let me use these glasses."

[21:05]

So, in that sense we have possessions. And one way to practice it is to practice generosity. The fifth, there's several others, I mean there's like I guess the third is samadhi, the second is purity, and when we say purity we don't mean pure as contrasted with impure, we mean complete. When you perceive things you perceive them as in their wholeness. without edges, without leading, without cause and effect, just as they are, in the sense they're pure. But it's not in contrast to impure, as I say, and that's in the sense that Buddhists mean purity and impurity is pure.

[22:16]

Anyway, the fifth is based on the practice of jhana, or meditation, and it's characterized by a lack of split between your thinking and your acting, between your insight and your thought formations. So maybe you can see there's a kind of, there's a difference between the first one where you perceive and have some joy from seeing that subject and object are one. The second, the fifth one is that what you produce is one.

[23:21]

You see the difference? When you're at the fifth stage, now of course all these stages are simultaneously present. We don't actually go, ah, now I'm at stage one, I'm at stage two, now I'm at stage three. That would be a completely wrong way to look at it. The stages are simultaneously present but there's some difference in emphasis. And touch lists help you notice your practice in some ways, help you give, help encourage your practice. So the fifth stage, as you could call, a kind of abiding, living it. So at that point, everything you think is one with the possibility of acting on it.

[24:25]

Your mind no longer produces thoughts which are irrelevant. So whatever you think is possible. And in reverse order, whatever is possible, you think. Now when we reverse it, you see, we're moving toward the definition of a Buddha more than you. So what Buddha is, now you can ask, you know, who is Buddha? So you can say, who is so-and-so behind his mask? Let's go out and get him boozed up and find out who he is. But you won't find out who he is getting him drunk. You'll find out something you might not have known, but you won't find out who he is if there's a who to find. So likewise, you can't take Buddha out and get him drunk and find out who he is.

[25:29]

I mean, if you think for a while about who Buddha is, who is he behind his mask of Buddha? I think the Hopi Indians have a kachina doll ceremony in which the Young Indians, like our young children believe in Santa Claus, believe in these figures that run around the village dressed up in these masks. And when the kid is about eight years old, he's taken into a secret hut, I think underground. And one of the things is they beat him with these cactus plant leaves that are down in Tassajara.

[26:44]

Yucca. Beat him with those kind of yucca leaves. Then they take the mask off and it's their uncle. And then they're given the yucca plant and they beat the uncle. So, in a list like the Ten Bhumis, is that one end of the list is Buddha and the other end of the list is you. So if you can think everything, the way Mahayana thinking goes is that if you can think everything that's, if you only think what's possible. For Buddha, everything is possible.

[28:00]

Everything that's possible, Buddha thinks. So by this, you begin to see what Buddhism means by a cosmic Buddha. So if in the first one, is the stage of joy. Buddha doesn't have any joy. I mean, if you think of Buddha, what he's like, you don't think of somebody who's involved in feeling joyful. So as you go farther along the list, joy is given up. The fifth stage, as I said, there's meditation and what you think and what you do are the same.

[29:14]

That doesn't mean you have no imagination or something like that. You still could be a painter or whatever, but whatever ever you thought, you would know that you could also paint. There'd be an effortlessness to it. And the sixth stage is direct presence. At that point, everything you are is present with you. And this is the stage. From the seventh stage on, we really have something more than human. The sixth stage is up to you. Seventh stage, it's interesting, is skillful means is the practice. And our skill in contrivance. Now this is skillful means is not for you, it's for others.

[30:20]

So from the seventh stage on, we're talking about teachers or Buddhas. So the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th stage relate you not just to distinction between subject and object or that what you think and act are one, but they progressively move toward where everything you do is you, everything that is is you. So ultimately the 10th stage is dharma clouds or emptiness. The eighth stage is what I talked about yesterday, is steadfastness. Steadfastness is based on the perfection and practice of vows. Now, when you have vows, it means you're based on a vow.

[31:33]

There's no real you we're discovering. You vow to be a Buddha. So the first stage, great joy, is based on your own perception and insight. Maybe that's a satori experience. But by the eighth stage, Your steadfastness is based not on something like your insight, it's based on something greater, more inclusive than that, but vows, your vow to be a Buddha, your vow to be a Bodhisattva. But of course the first step in practicing Buddhism is when you become a priest or receive a raksu as a layman, is you take vows. So everything's there in the beginning, but the stages in this thing we're talking about, eighth stage is steadfastness.

[32:41]

So maybe if you're looking for a you that you want to cling to, so we take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, but if you want something to cling to, you can cling to steadfastness, which is the characteristic of one whose life is based on vows. So uniting your various persona, what you, when you practice zazen, what you find as you sit through the pain is some steadfastness. Maybe that steadfastness is the real you, not some personality. In other words, if you're looking for a you, what is common to everything you do? So when you take away all of the illusions of you, still, you're alive and you need some activity.

[34:32]

So what activity do you take? You have to decide some You have to find, you're sort of in cooperation with everything, some persona in a sense. creates a persona, which is supposed to be the biggest mudra of all, the biggest persona you could take, being Buddha. So it's another way, it's giving you a kind of self. In Christianity, again this is something Dr. Konze has mentioned, Christianity has the idea that each person is a fallen angel.

[35:39]

Well, if you think of yourself as a fallen angel, then there's a great deal that you wouldn't do. It's not befitting for an angel to do such and such. On Buddhism, we say you have a Buddha nature or something like that. But in a way, we're saying we're creating a kind of problem for you because you can What you're doing then is comparing yourself to what you might be, Buddha, say. Comparing yourself to if you could sit through a sashin without moving, with real steadiness, completely inside. Or if you could be as gentle and calm as Suzuki Roshi. So when you practice zazen in a sashin, you should develop steadfastness.

[37:36]

Whatever happens, you stay sitting. Most important is to stay through the sashin. And if you have to stay with your knees up, or in a chair, it's best to stay through the sasheen. And if you can stay through the sasheen, it's best to move toward not moving and sitting as well as you can throughout the sasheen. And if you can sit through the pain of a sasheen, It'll be a big help for you, because it will move you a little bit toward steadfastness. Then you can let go of the various persona you have that you identify as the real you, which aren't you at all.

[38:46]

Then like Avalokiteshvara with his, her many arms, you can do many things to help many people, taking whatever form is necessary. But without steadfastness, And without a concept of yourself bigger than the ordinary idea of self, it's not possible. So that's the meaning of vows and steadfastness and the practice in a sasheen.

[39:44]

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