Good morning. Yesterday, I went to Davis to attend my son Daniel's graduation from Davis, UC Davis. And I was thinking about all of you sitting here in the heat, afternoon heat. It's very difficult to sit sashin in the heat. That's why we don't usually have summer sashins. Would you get more sleepy and tired? There's something about the heat that... Is it... The wind's blowing the dragon.

[01:04]

Okay. I was thinking about a cool breeze, but... We don't want to disturb the dragon. And your body tends to swell up more, maybe subtly. Your legs tend to swell up a bit when it's really hot, so it becomes much more difficult. So anyway, but it was hot there. And I was sitting on a bench, hard bench, for three hours with somebody's knee in my back and my knee in somebody else's back. Anyway, whether it was worth it or not, I can't say. Yeah. He graduated in Russian.

[02:06]

There were eight Russian graduates, but six of them were Russians. So, the Russians also had other majors, so they graduated in the other majors rather than in Russian, which they didn't really have to study very hard for. So it was a difficult class in a way, because since everyone else was Russian, except one other guy, and the whole class was in Russian, and they already knew it, so they had to really scramble. But he could speak Russian. When he went to Kansahara a year or two ago, there was some Russian people there, and they struck up a conversation, and they were very pleased that he could speak Russian with them. So he can do that, but he says, I don't know what you do with a Russian.

[03:14]

Anyway. Tell the story about getting to Russia in the first place. Well, when he was at Diablo Valley College, junior college, he and his buddy who were roommates since high school, befriended these Russian girls. A lot of Russians come over here to study economics. And so the Russian girls come over to study economics. And of course, Dan is not interested in economics, but they all made friends. And so he said, well, I'll study Russian so we can speak in Russian. So that's how he got into Russian. But he did very well. His teachers liked him. When he applies himself, he does very well. And Russian's supposed to be a hard language to learn.

[04:20]

So we'll see. But whether it was worth it or not, it was worth it to go up there. We had to talk him into actually attending the graduation. because he gets a certificate anyway, which they send you three months later or something. But we wanted him to do that, so he did it. And he was grumbling like crazy about, you know, I'm glad that's over. And he just kept twitching. And finally I said, Daniel, stop it. You're ruining my day. And he stopped. Well, today is Father's Day. And I heard that Greg gave a good talk about being a father yesterday.

[05:22]

I don't want to do that, but, you know, I think maybe it should be called Parents' Day. But that's just my opinion. You know, fatherly attitude or parental attitude is very important in our practice. That's why I like to think of parent parental attitude rather than fatherly attitude. A lot of projection that goes on between teachers and students. And the older you get, the more people see you as an old father figure, which is fine. But Dogen, in Tenzo Kyokun, he talks about three minds, the joyful mind,

[06:28]

kind mind and magnanimous mind. And kind mind refers to parental mind. He says kind mind is like the mind of a parent that is always concerned about taking care of everyone. And this is the mind that we should cultivate. This is the mind that Tenzo should cultivate. because the tenzo is cooking for everyone, and the tenzo has people around them helping to take care of everyone through cooking. And so he talks about parental mind is not just toward people, but it's toward all of your tools, all of the pots and pans, the knives and spatulas and the stove and the floor and the way you maintain the pantry and so forth.

[07:31]

So everything is taken care of with parental mind. So you extend yourself and forget yourself. This is parental mind. Parental mind is forgetting yourself and extending yourself so that you lose yourself in extending, but your self is also included. So, that's definitely a very essential part of our practice, this bodhisattva practice, basically. And in our practice, in the Soto Zen, the term comes up, grandmotherly mind. So an old teacher is supposed to cultivate or embody grandmotherly mind, which is the same thing really, parental mind, grandmotherly mind, same thing.

[08:42]

It's not just the way you take care of your own children, but the way you take care of everyone. and the way you extend yourself to all things and all people. When Dogen was, when Tetsugikai was practicing with Dogen, Tetsugikai wanted Dharma transmission from Dogen. But Dogen said, there's something, you're a good student, but there's something you lack. And what it is he lacked is grandmotherly mind. So Gikai had a lot of trouble. And he was kind of a difficult figure in that time, just after Dogen. Nobody will say what exactly I've tried to pry out of this Japanese priest.

[09:46]

What was it about Gikai that was so difficult? But they would never say exactly. Well, he was a little bit like Richard Baker. But I don't know if that's true or what that means to them. He was troublesome. So that's very interesting, what Dogen required of his students. So this is, you know, we talked about Zen training. In one sense, there's no such thing as Zen training. But in another sense, there's definitely a sense of what Zen training is.

[10:47]

Although it's not a progressive training. It's more like a mushrooming. Because when we talk about training, we usually think of instilling something in you. But it's more like education. Education basically means bringing forth something from you, bringing out your basic intelligence, so that you can meet all of the demands of life, rather than instilling knowledge into you. So we say, There was Kumarajiva's Chinese disciple, Seng Chao, who succeeded Kumarajiva in China, wrote a treatise, the title of which is Prajna is Not Knowledge.

[11:53]

Prajna is something else. It's like what comes forth from you rather than what you know. It's deep knowledge rather than information. It hasn't much to do with information. It has to do with fundamental, something very fundamental. So knowledge is important. But it's not the most important thing. So, you know, when we say we take refuge in the sutras, deep as an ocean, you know, deep like the ocean, that's extending ourself, extending to knowledge.

[13:01]

But What's that word? When everything comes together in a small space. Well, zazen. Where everything is there in the smallest space. Yeah, the microcosm and the macrocosm, maybe. So, reducing to something very fundamental. Distillation, that's the right word. Distillation and expansion. So, distillation is zazen. And what we really concentrate on in practice. And then expansion is also necessary.

[14:05]

So studying the sutras is wonderful, but when it comes to expressing ourself, it should be through our distillation. Today, we're going to have shiso ceremony. And... where everyone will ask a question. The people in the practice period will ask a question, and the shuso will respond. There are three places from which you can respond. One is your hara. The other is your heart. The other is your head. Some people respond from the head. Some people respond from the heart.

[15:06]

Some people respond from the aura. This is the place of distillation. Right here. Some people say it's two inches below the navel, but that's a little too... directive. It's like this solar plexus, this place that is beyond words and feelings, actually, which includes words and feelings, but it's the fundamental distillation that where the most fundamental response comes from. The heart, you have love and compassion, and that's a good place to come from.

[16:11]

The head knows something. Well, a good response would be based on the hara. with the feelings from the heart and the directive of mind. So all three are really present in a response. But without this, there's something that's not enough. So this is enough. If the response comes from here, this is enough. but if it can include the heart and mind, that's a wonderful response. So when you ask a question, you're not asking a question necessarily to get an answer.

[17:13]

Answer means here's the question, here's the answer, thank you. It's like the response. So the question, would be not so much from here. It's good if it's from here. It can be from here. But your question should also have some depth to it. And when your question has depth, then that brings out the depth from the shuso. You're stimulating something from the shuso. So it's Dharma dialogue. It's sometimes thought of as Dharma combat. That's very Japanese. I think that it's something that developed in Japan with the kind of samurai attitude and Zen.

[18:16]

But we have a whole different thing here. Not whole different, but a lot different. First place, we have both the masculine and feminine aspects of our practice. In Japan, it's masculine here and feminine over there. And the attitudes come from a masculine attitude. So, you ask the shuzo, shuzo! And then the shuso goes, oh, oh, oh. That's male, a very male kind of attitude. But when we have a female shuso, it's a different feeling. So we have to be aware of that. At the same time, you know,

[19:19]

we should not lose the vitality. We don't expect a female shuso to respond the same way a male shuso would respond. But at the same time, we don't want to lose the vitality. So we have to be careful. and at the same time not hold back. This is why I think that if our questions are deep, then the response will be matching it. So that is like match the response, match the question with the right response. That's what's vital here. We're testing the shuso.

[20:29]

It is a test. But it's like, how do you respond to this? Not what's the answer. Sometimes, yeah, the answer is okay. I'm not saying we shouldn't have an answer, but basically it's what's the response to this question? How do you respond to this? Sometimes if the questions are not deep, then the response is not deep. And then we say, oh, that was kind of okay. So it's not just one way, it's a two-way thing. the quality of the responses depends a lot on the quality of the questions. So, I've seen the whole development of questions and answers in shuso ceremonies since we started doing them.

[21:33]

And people used to ask the dumbest questions. It's gotten much better. The questions have improved tremendously. Yes? Yeah, I'm going to give you the examples. Who's going to win the game tomorrow? You know, it's stuff that is totally irrelevant to what's going on. You make quite a point about having a female Shuso as opposed to a male Shuso, but I mean, it seems to me that Yes. I don't know that, I mean, the female-male is only one distinction. I think it's a librarian versus software engineer. I don't expect anything. But I do. agree that everyone is different.

[22:46]

There's no shuso ceremonies that are the same. There's no two shusos who are the same. So this is like when you sew your robe, you want to do the best you can, but you look at it in the end, and you say, gee, all these mistakes, and everybody else has a nice job, but you see, but it's a mirror of you. So at the end, it's a mirror of you. And it's not like good or bad. It's like it shows you who you are and where you are, and gives you a sense of where you are and how to proceed from here, how to practice from here, what you, you know, sense of direction, actually. So you've come up to this point, and then you have this kind of landmark that shows you where you've come so far in your practice, and then how to proceed.

[23:58]

So that's the next thing. Yeah. To carry on that point, I'm sorry to harp on this, but I have to say that the way you talk about male and female keeps being very disturbing to me. As if, for example, you said, you have a female shoe sole, so that's going to be different for the male, but that doesn't mean I can explain what I mean by that. I want to... I think I know what you mean by that. I want to draw feelings very loving from my heart towards you.

[25:02]

From somewhere else also, I feel I want you to feel that. I see that. Thank you. I appreciate your point. warrior of art, which probably is not really how it is. But that might have sparked... I don't know if you're responding to some of the things I said. I might be. Yes. I think that You know, men need to claim the grandmother, but women also need to claim the warrior.

[26:13]

And so I, it's not a warrior in a violent sense, it's a warrior in a, you know, challenged sense. You know, last year people sort of said, you know, Greg, go for it, you know. And I, you know, I really hope that, I feel like you know, being two hundred percent vitality. Those are both qualities that we all have. So go for it. My personal reaction isn't so much in favor of battle, but I do notice that I get a little churned up at the suggestion that perhaps women are not as vital as men. That troubles me. That's a misunderstanding, but I understand your point of view, yeah. I'm not saying that women are... That's not the point.

[27:20]

I don't know what my point is anymore. Yes. Shobo. I found this point which, yeah, it points to a big question in our tradition of how do female to, you know, inherit patriarchal form. So it has, I would really point, wanting to point out, it has not been a sort of problem with our expressions of that in this position, you know, and how we would maybe be formed, you know, it's probably not satisfying at all to just put female ancestors next to male ancestors and say that's it, because that's not, that's a male, I don't know if I would want a chance That's a big question.

[28:24]

I really invite all of us to study this, you know, since it's vital, very vital. Oh, I was just going to say, I thought you were talking about energy, and what I thought about was when Ron was the Shuso, he got annoyed with us because so many of us didn't take on a little bit of that combative nature that you were talking about. thanking him, and he was thanking us. And there was a question in there, but the ceremony went on for hours. And so I thought you were talking about joining forces with, you know, kindness and heart, but also a little bit of Shosan is between the teacher and the student.

[30:25]

Shuso ceremony is between peers. So that's different. So when you're asking a question to the teacher, it's different than when you're testing the shuso. And victor and vanquished. That can happen, but it's not the point. It's not a matter of winning and losing. Somebody wins, somebody loses. In India, when a teacher would want to challenge anybody, they would set up their banner. and the people around, the teachers and students around would come and they would challenge, they would have a dharma battle, and whoever won, whoever lost would become the student of the other one.

[31:32]

That's, I think, probably the origin of this kind of thing. but that has transformed in many ways, and that is not our purpose here. So, winning and losing is not the point, or being vanquished. I don't think the hierarchy is very high. My point here is that we should take into consideration who we are addressing, how we see their abilities,

[32:43]

and how we connect with this person, and our questions should be directed in that way, not just, you know, like, oh, here's somebody up there and we should throw something at them, you know? But how would you ask a question to this person that you feel this person can deal with? Not, you know, like, how would you describe the fundamental difference between the Madhyamakas and the Yogacaras in the 12th century, you know, the shustra is not going to be able to deal with that. It's not a reasonable question. Yeah. and it just shows where you are. It's not like anybody else who loses. That's right, it's just bringing forth the dharma.

[33:46]

It doesn't say challenge me, it says let's bring forth the dharma. It's the dharma that wins. Well, you know, in Japan everything is ceremonialized. So the questions come from us, the questions have certain answers to them. It's like capping phrases. koan study, the koans have capping phrases which are relevant to certain koans, and that's part of koan studies is to, when asked a question about the koan, that the student should cap it with a capping phrase that matches, like the box and its lid.

[35:04]

So I think shuso ceremony has taken on that kind of, in Japan, that kind of The questions are understood, and the answers are understood, and you find the right answer for the right question. But here, in the Wild West, we deal with the questions and we bring out the answers, the responses. That's our style. both have their merits. I think the other one has its merits because you learn something about Zen, about Zen lore. But it's so stylized that we don't like our stuff to be stylized, and we try to avoid that. One time, Tadagiri Roshi, somehow he's gone back to Japan, sort of gone for a while, revisited the times, and he actually talked about how moved he was by that.

[36:23]

By what? By seeing the stylized one, because the sincerity of the person can be what comes through, and how they say, and I think for anybody who's interested, that would be great, just to know the answer, and then it's just, how do you, how do you say it? It's still a lot, there's still a lot there to how you say it. So, I can see how it could be an empty formalism, but it doesn't necessarily. No, it doesn't have to be. So anyway, it will be what it will be. Yes, sure. When you were describing the Indian style of putting up a banner, I was thinking of the story of Ananda's awakening.

[37:26]

That's right. So there's a koan between Mahakasyapa and Ananda. And Mahakasyapa, according to Zen lore, received Buddha's golden robe. And Ananda asked Mahakasyapa, what did Buddha give you besides the robe? And I hope I'm remembering this right. I'm not forgetting something in between. And Mahakasyapa said, Ananda. Ananda said, yes. And Mahakasyapa said, take down the flagpole at the gate. That's the koan. I can't hear you. Isn't that his awakening story? Didn't he wake up at that moment? Yeah, he's supposed to have awakened at that moment. That's how Mahakasyapa awakened Ananda, because Ananda did not have enlightenment, so he wasn't invited to the first council after Shakyamuni died.

[38:40]

He wasn't an arhat yet. But Mahakasyapa said, well, I have to go out and enlighten him. Take down the flagpole at the gate. And then Ananda had this realization, because Ananda remembered everything that Shakyamuni had said, according to the tradition. And he could just, you know, recite it at will. And so he had all this knowledge, but he didn't have understanding. There's something about that. I think it's more like stop depending on your knowledge. It's not depending on your knowledge.

[40:00]

When you depend on your knowledge, then you don't depend on your gut. That's why knowledge can be an impediment to realization. It's called prajna. I know what it's called. It's intuition. It's directly touching. We're not the intermediary of thinking. So it's direct. There's no gap. Yeah, well, that's instinct.

[41:19]

How do you use the term depth? The term what? Depth. You use deep. D-E-F-T. Depth, yes. Yeah, deep. So what is a heart of depth as opposed to, say, a heart depth or a mind depth? it's like without a self. The heart creates feelings and creates a self. The mind creates thoughts and creates a self. The hara doesn't create anything like that. It simply is a gateway for intuition. So when we have bare attention, there's no thinking, and there's no arising of emotion.

[42:37]

There's simply bare attention, seeing sees, hearing hears, Even thinking thinks, but there's no thinker, there's no feeler. There's simply feeling, thinking, and so forth. But in bare attention, no self has arisen. But then you take a step back, and thinking begins, feeling begins, and then there's self-consciousness starts. Bare attention is without self-consciousness. Then you take another step back and there's more thinking and feeling and emotion. So, bare attention is intuition, basic intuition.

[43:41]

Yes, a groundedness. And that groundedness is endless. It doesn't have a bottom. So we call it depth. I mean, deep is just a manner of speaking, just like the east is not a direction. So when we get butterflies in our stomach, That's when emotion arises, butterflies, self arises with butterflies. We really have to stop.

[44:30]

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