Last time I talked about the power of the precepts with zazen in clarifying our activity and our mind so that we can practice real zazen. And how Tathagata offers us this practice as our way of life here.

[01:08]

article or essay or, you know, those words are too weak to describe a document written by, I think, the founder of Tendai school, the school which puts together all of the philosophy Buddhism into one system. And the article is called maybe Meditation for Beginners, that it means beginners in the sense of a complete statement or from the beginning this is a description of meditation. There's two translations that I know about. One is in Charles Lipp's Secrets of Chinese Meditation, and the other is in Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible. Anyway, you might be interested in reading that. It will give you some idea of the degree to which preparation and

[02:49]

control of your circumstances is necessary for Zen practice. Tendai, Dogen's thinking is particularly a Zen expression of Tendai philosophy. Dogen studied at Mount Hiei, which is the Tendai headquarters in Japan. But that essay starts out with listing five concurrent causes necessary for the practice of – it lists ten things, and the first one is five concurrent causes.

[04:05]

I didn't intend to tell you them, so I don't know if I remember them. Can you hear me in the back? When it's raining? Okay. A little difficult. The one is you should have enough food and clothing. And another is you should have good friends. And another is you should have some quiet place or leisure, or what that means is freedom from worldly connections. One is a strict practice of morality. It must be a fifth. Anyway, it basically is a description of the life we have here, the opportunity to practice here. But it doesn't mean, our opportunity to practice here doesn't mean that

[05:38]

we're accumulating some merit by just being here. And when you leave, things will be better for you. That attitude is the same as saying, well, two weeks of sunny weather will make me feel good the rest of the year. It doesn't work that way. Being here is only an opportunity to start practicing. So after the five concurrent causes are supplied for you, or you put yourself in a situation where you have those five causes, five opportunities, then you have to start your own practice. And most of the activity and work of Zen Center is to assure a situation with those five concurring causes. Enough food and clothing for each of you and some protection from too much activity for some period of time.

[06:57]

But then you have to come into actual confrontation with what your desires are, what the various, in this article it says, screens are. Screen of desire, doubt, hatred, various ways we screen ourself, or are screened from our actual situation. One of the ten is regulating food and drink and sleep and your body and your mind and your situation.

[08:06]

This is true in very little things, and I'm not so strict, you know, with you, actually. My philosophy of life is more to give you enough rope, you know, to do whatever you want with it, you know, tangle yourself up or hang yourself, whatever. And I also indulge myself a little in your good practice, because I benefit from it a lot, and I'm quite moved by your actual practice. And so when you, like the last couple of weeks, every morning quite a few people are late, And I should do something about it, actually, but I feel sorry for you. It's such a small thing, that's the very area in which we have to practice. And I told you when I was late, and I have some problem myself with being late, you have to stand in Seiza,

[09:36]

Anyway, you have to stand like this outside the door the whole period. So if we were going to do that, you'd all, who are lay, would have to stand outside the door till the next period began. Anyway, we have trouble with sticking to some image of ourselves. And it's pretty hard to actually regulate our walking and sleeping and eating

[10:43]

etc. Sometimes you feel you're practicing here and you'll save up for it. Later you'll have some change which will make up for being here. I know they had a meeting in the city recently and someone said, quite honest person, said, oh, we don't want to have parties in the building because if we have parties in the building, what we really want to do at parties is to dance for four or five hours and smoke some grass and sniff a little pop or coke. That's a rather interesting idea of practicing. just to practice, and then every now and then you have to go out and have a party and let loose or something. It's not very important, you know, if you... I mean, it's not... If a person wants to do that, it's all right. It's no more important than wearing a dull shirt or a loud shirt or whatever, but it does

[12:17]

that kind of inability to regulate ourselves all the time is pretty much makes practice impossible. And our body has some, as this article says, has some fondness for walking and strolling, but feels some uneasiness sitting, and has some fondness for talking, etc., but some uneasiness from silent. And our mind has some fondness for activity. But our practice is just the reverse of that fondness. So if we divide practice into four, as I said last time, I state a little differently, but views and practice or preparation and action, you can say, I'll say this time, action and realization. So we use the precepts and zazen to clarify our situation and to stop our

[13:53]

situation, and to allow some other way of acting to occur. Last night, in our conversation, I stated that whatever you study, it's a version. A version. And that's a very interesting

[15:06]

word, because it means something like to turn toward or to turn or to translate. Well, aversion, the other one at first was aversion or something, this is aversion or avert, means to turn away from. And when we say the wheel of the dharma turns and turns, that has many meanings. One is that everything changes. But just to say everything changes is quite philosophical. So we can say the wheel of the dharma turns and turns, which means on the one hand the teaching is always going on, like the wind bell poem. The wind bell name is based on Durgan's poem of hanging by your teeth, by a rope like a wind bell, and north, south, east, west, the wind swings you and you're teaching the dharma without opening your mouth.

[16:19]

But it also means the activity of turning toward, turning with. You know, there's a great deal of wisdom in our language, which often denies our usual beliefs. For example, we name for the sky, you know, as the firmament, the firm place. Stars, etc., we call the firmament. As I said the other day, you can go out and look at the stars, some wider scale of reference, some base. And likewise, we can say in our practice,

[17:45]

So we have the five concurrent causes, still you have to make up your mind. On the one hand, that also is interesting. You have to make up, determine. But make up also is like making up a story. You have to make yourself up. So there's an actual creative process of making yourself up. As I've said last time talking about the precepts six and seven, I think, when we criticize others or criticize ourselves or blame others for ourselves, we reinforce beliefs in self,

[18:47]

and a substantial reality, and we interfere with that creative process in which we are creating ourselves and others. And as long as you see a substantial self or reality, you have the problem of aversion, of turning away from And you have the kind of situation we were talking about last night with Dr. Konze. You know, the smarter you are and the more observant you are, the more you see a world which is very difficult to believe in. Whether it's facts which disturb you about Gandhi or about the Catholic Church or whatever, you avert yourself from them.

[19:51]

But to come into conflict with such a thing means that you yourself have some substantial sense of self or reality. So our practice, you know, is not to say the Catholic Church or Buddhism or something is good or bad. We don't look at it as a particular thing, good or bad. I don't know, if I say so, what I mean, it becomes a thing when I say it. Anyway, you don't identify with these versions. You learn to turn with the versions. So,

[21:39]

how to turn with the versions, you know. One of the things he says in the document I've been talking about is that he describes the various kinds of doubt, which are hindrances, and then there's doubt, which is not a hindrance. But to doubt, one of the first 20 mentions is to doubt yourself. I'm no good, I can't practice. And the second one he mentions is to doubt the teacher. He doesn't understand the Tao. His behavior is not so good. And the third is to doubt the Dharma. These three are the major hindrances. So how can someone like Dr. Konsei, for instance, practice when he doubts in that way himself and people who practice and the Catholic Church or Buddhist Church? You know, there's no way out of this trap.

[23:15]

Because if you give things substantial reality, naturally you'll doubt them in that way. So we use the precepts and zazen to clarify, to clear away. And then we make up our mind to practice, to regulate our sleep and food and to control our senses. Because we want to give up, as Dr. Kanzai said, being deluded by the five senses, being caught by a fondness for form and smell and taste and touch. hearing. And making up your mind to do this itself prepares you.

[24:40]

to be able to stay with what you are, with your sitting, or silence, or stillness. Then you can begin to actually make up your mind, to allow that creative process to function, to turn toward or with things. So, Suzuki Yoshi said, for instance, once, you hear something. You and some sound comes, and you hear it, and something new is created. Do you understand what I mean? It's not the sound, and it's not you, but that relationship is something new. You hear the cat cry. That's something new, which actually influences the cat and everything. But I don't mean just something mechanical like that. Even Ted Bastin, when he was here, the physicist, said quantum physics, the insight of quantum physics, he said, was that the observer and the observed

[26:20]

It's the same process. And I would add that, actually, we are... It's too hard to say. So our effort is not at correcting the Catholic Church, you know, or correcting some process, but rather, how can we exist without being caught? If your emphasis is in this direction, how to exist without being caught, by the five senses,

[27:24]

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