Dharma talks are tricky, they're tricky for me. They're fine until I start talking and then everything starts going awry. What I want to try to talk about is something that Sojan has mentioned frequently and that resonates with me. the idea that we are all, in every moment, both Buddha and sentient being. And so you could say, so, when I said, as soon as we start talking, or as soon as I start, well, anyone starts talking, we go astray, you could say in the silence, we're Buddha. When we start talking, we're sentient beings. And I'm going to try to talk about this from a number of different angles.

[01:12]

Maybe one angle is that suffering is when when our experience isn't that ... So Buddha and sentient being every moment, and sometimes we don't realize it, and that's suffering. So you could look at zazen as an exercise in the activity or the experience of that intersection of Buddha and sentient being. So we're sitting Zazen, and the Zazen itself and the container, the silence, the stillness is Buddha, and our chattering or wandering mind is sentient being. Both are happening at once. But it's still kind of dualistic. I am Buddha and sentient being at once during zazen or any moment when I'm completely there, completely present, completely embodied.

[02:41]

So Suzuki Roshi, he's fond of ... I think one of his metaphors or the way he talks about the same thing is the simultaneity of big mind and small mind. Buddha, big mind, small mind, sentient being. And that every moment both are there. He has the metaphor of the screen, right? There's a blank screen, a white screen. That's Buddha. or big mind, that's zazen. And our experience, our being there in zazen, our experience of ourselves and our mind is essentially a being, is the movie on the screen of small mind. But often, more often than I like, I don't experience myself as Buddha.

[04:01]

I just experience myself as a sentient being. And that's suffering. And Buddha without sentient being isn't really possible. That's a kind of deadness in a way. So today, there was the Bodhisattva ceremony. And it seems to me that the Bodhisattva ceremony is a ritual of uniting Buddha and sentient being. All my ancient tangled karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, I now fully avow. So let's unpack that. So where's Buddha in that?

[05:07]

Buddha is, I now fully avow. But what am I avowing? I'm avowing completely, without gap, without space or hesitation, my sentient being, my ancient tangled karma. I'm avowing completely who I am and what my life is without leaving anything out. I'm avowing completely my suffering, my greed, hate, and delusion. to use another word, my neurotic self, my neuroses. So Buddha doesn't mean not being neurotic.

[06:08]

It doesn't mean not being a suffering sentient being. Buddha is avowing. So it's an interesting word, avow, because avow, I mean, you could say, well, another word might be I accept. I don't, that doesn't feel quite right to me. A vow is I am, I embody, I land in exactly right now and what my life is and who I am. I avow being completely myself. and all that it entails. So another feature of this that I think is worth contemplating, or it is for me, is ancient tangled karma.

[07:14]

You know, there's one way of experiencing this ceremony or that vow or that chant where I'm thinking, oh, this is my greed and hate delusion, my Buddhist version of sin or something, my problems. So another word for the Bodhisattva Ceremony is the Repentance Ceremony. you know, I need to repent my stuff. And that's true, but you know, my stuff isn't really my stuff. When we chant all my ancient tangled karma, we're also avowing the fact that, or I'm avowing the reality that who I am, my suffering, my neuroses, my joy, my very being was co-created by the entire universe, that it goes back endlessly, that, you know, there's some people more involved with it than others, like my parents, my grandparents, you know, my teachers, you all, my friends, my children,

[08:42]

but it also includes every president of the United States and every Iman in the Middle East. And so, there's a letting go of another neurosis, and that is that what I'm avowing is just me. I'm avowing the whole universe and my, the way I am a stitch in it. I think it's an avow of my humanity. of my being completely human.

[09:45]

And maybe completely human is that intersection of Buddha and sentient being. So I think another term for the Bodhisattva ceremony is a repentant ceremony, the atonement ceremony, atonement. That's a very interesting word because atone comes from at one. So that vow is a vow for me to be at one with exactly what is, what my life is. Now, at one, again, it's not just acceptance. It's not just observing. It's being. So maybe another way to say the intersection of Buddha and sentient being is being.

[10:49]

Being without affectation, being without my, you know, I don't like to use the word ego. It's almost impossible to talk about these things without. I'm already way astray, right? As soon as I started talking all these words. So ego is such a hard word to use because it has you know, idiomatic meaning and specific meanings in psychological terms. But... So what was I going to say? All right, it'll come back to me. I'm sure I've... Something about ego. At one. Yes, so ego... It's that one being. Oh, being. Yeah, ego. So ego, being. So we spend, I spend, have spent most of my life, maybe not most, but a lot of my life, not just being.

[11:57]

That's what suffering is. Not just being. We have greed, hate, and delusion in our neuroses. I have my greed, hate, and delusion in my neuroses because because of my suffering, but then that just is what ends up creating my suffering. And rather, I'm trying through my ego or trying through my sentient being to deal with my suffering, rather than just landing with my suffering. So maybe I'd like to return to that. So I'm going to go further astray now. A word I've been thinking a lot about lately, which is a word that I've resisted for a long time, especially since practicing Buddhism, is the word soul.

[13:06]

So we don't have that word in our practice, right? No abiding self, no self, no abiding self. So how can there be a soul? Wikipedia says the soul, in many religions, philosophical and mythological traditions, is the incorporeal and immortal essence of a living being. So that's not something that we buy into, an immortal essence of a living being. But I found myself thinking about the word soul a lot lately. So what is the soul? And I'll tell you why. So my suffering lately has been around my work. I've worked in the same place for a while, and it's been rewarding at times. But over the last year, it's become very toxic and very dysfunctional in a lot of ways.

[14:13]

And I've been trying to practice with it. And I've been trying to practice by letting go, by not attaching, by being present. but I was noticing that I was suffering and that I'm yelling at my kids a lot, I'm grumpy, and I realized that, or one word that came to me was that in my work, I felt like my soul was dying. My soul was dead. It wasn't being fed. And I said, well, soul, that's not a Buddhist term. So I started thinking about, well, what do I mean by that? I don't mean an incorporeal, eternal essence of myself, like Wikipedia says, or the conventional, idiomatic understanding of what the soul is. I don't know if you can follow me here, but the idea is that my soul is alive, that my soul is nourished, that my soul actually is here right now.

[15:32]

It means something when I say that. It seems to make some kind of sense. It describes some kind of experience. I think that experience, that sense, is the intersection of Buddha and sentient being. When I am completely awake, avowing my life and who I am, when I feel alive, And so that aliveness or that nexus, that being, I think, is just a recapitulation of the experience of avowing all my ancient tangled karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion.

[16:37]

It's actually embodying, feeling, breathing all that I am and all that's ever happened to me and all that is happening. So there are correlates for this kind of understanding, I think, in Western psychology as well. A person who I've read a lot and I really respect in the Western psychological canon is D.W. Winnicott, who is a British analyst who worked I guess between the wars and during the war, World War II, and then after, and a lot with children.

[17:48]

And he was a developmental psychologist. He talked and studied a lot about how we develop as children around our environment. And he didn't use the word soul, but he came up with this idea of the true self and the false self, and that in the midst of early suffering, when being itself, what should be natural, what should be natural is to be embodied in the soul, to be in the nexus between Buddha and sentient being, is unbearable because of lacks in the environment. When that happens, and let's face it, life is suffering, right? The first noble truth, sometimes life is unbearable no matter what our environment is.

[18:49]

But that when that happens, we lose touch with the true self, with the being self, with the soul self, and we develop a coping self, the ego, I guess, a presentation self to the world in order to mediate the pain. And that our development as adults is the mediation and the navigation of those two selves. He said that we can never really completely embody true self. True self is always going to have to be mediated in the world through our presentation self. Does that kind of make sense? This to me is a similar idea to this dualistic idea of Buddha and sentient being. Sorry, what did you say?

[19:54]

Something and sentient being? Buddha. Buddha and sentient being. that in the midst of our suffering, sentient beings are born in me that arise, and those are the ones that have greed, hate, and delusion. Those are the ones, the me's that, in trying to deal with my suffering, mediate with the world. That's how I try to cope with it. And that's, and insofar as that sentient being has lost touch with Buddha, has lost touch with soul, has lost touch with being, that's suffering. That's more, that's the suffering that I create in response to my pain.

[20:56]

Does that make sense? No? Does it make sense? A little bit. It's like the difference, it feels like there's a difference when I, you know, there's pain and then there's suffering and then there's suffering. So there's pain and suffering, it's just life. And there's times when I can be completely embodied in that. And I feel still. I feel alive. I feel whole. But then there's all those other times where I'm trying to fight it or I'm trying to fix it. Now, that's the false self, the sentient being that has lost touch with Buddha.

[22:06]

And that's Dukkha. That's Dukkha. Now, the opposite enlightenment, the opposite of Dukkha isn't the sentient beings disappearing and just being Buddha. It's the harmony of Buddha and sentient beings. Now I think, just my own experience in the arc of my practice life is that I haven't always understood this in this way, that the kind of near enemy for me of non-attachment has been rather than a harmony of those two parts is maybe a little dissociation of them.

[23:11]

I was going to look at, I was going to try to be non-attached as a way to, oh, I'm going to find Buddha so that I don't feel pain. Consequently, I was cutting off from sentient beings that were in me, that are a part of me, that I have to be with, that I have to avow, and that just creates more suffering. you know, non-attachment isn't, and so I saw this quite lately around this dealing with this job thing, which I don't really want to go into in detail, but I kept telling myself, if I just had a better, if I could let go, you know, because a big, essentially a being I cut off from quite a lot is hate or anger.

[24:18]

So my job situation was creating a lot of anger, which is why I yelled at my kids, right? And I just have a very, it's very difficult for me to be angry and to avow anger. But the environment and the circumstances were such that anger arose, a sentient being of anger arose in me every day, many times a day. Actually, it's still going on. And so I kept trying, I'm going to practice with it, just let go of the anger. Don't participate. There's dysfunction around me. These people are making bad decisions and I don't want to describe all the craziness, but just set your boundaries, Greg. Set your boundaries. And I've been doing this for months.

[25:20]

But then I started thinking about, I'm not feeling so good. I'm feeling dead. And that's when I started thinking about this idea of the soul. I was feeling like I was losing my soul. And so that means, so one thing I think is important about embodiment, avowing, harmonizing this is expression. I think another near enemy I've suffered from is that when I feel these difficult emotions like anger, I just keep it to myself. I'll sit with it on the cushion. That's okay, but sometimes it's just not enough. Being means expressing.

[26:27]

It means expressing yourself. Not always, but often. Very often. So, you know, I found this, a couple quotes from our friend, Suzuki Goshi. He actually has a chapter in here called Express Yourself Fully. So just a couple of quotes. The way to extend your practice is to expose yourself as you are without trying to be someone else. harmonize with the true self and not just go into the world with our ego self, our false self, our presenting self.

[27:29]

When you are very honest with yourself and brave enough, you can express yourself fully. Whatever people may think, it is all right. Just be yourself. I like the use of the word brave. It's not so easy. It's not so easy. You know, when I'm suffering, when my soul is feeling that way and I'm angry, to really avow that, to express it fully, for me, requires courage because I don't feel very zen-like. I feel like a mess, right? I'm angry. I feel like a mess. But that's Buddha and sentient being to be able to allow that. We don't know what will happen.

[28:43]

If you fail to express yourself fully on each moment, you may regret it later. Because you expect some future time, you miss your opportunity, and you're misunderstood by your friend. Do not wait to express yourself fully. That's the last line of the talk. Do not wait to express yourself fully. So we're supposed to have skillful means and right speech, right? Right speech. So this is a pretty interesting understanding of right speech, right? How much time we got, Paul? A minute. That's a minute before you- Okay, good. So this is a great story that's not in a formal koan and it has no formal teachers, but the teacher in this story is a female ancestor.

[29:54]

I think it speaks to to what I've been talking about in a particular way, and especially from the aspect of my own experience of that near enemy of non-attachment, which can lead to, or non-attachment that veers into, let's say, resignation, or that's not quite the right word, or something like that. There was an old woman who supported a hermit. For 20 years, she always had a girl, 16 or 17 years old, take the hermit his food and wait on him. One day, she told the girl to give the monk a close hug and ask, what do you feel just now? And I think in the other versions, she has the girl sit on the monk's lap. The hermit responded, An old tree on a cold cliff, midwinter, no warmth.

[31:05]

The girl went back and told this to the old woman. The woman said, for 20 years, I've supported this vulgar good for nothing. And in so saying, she drove the monk out and burned down his hermitage. Pretty good, huh? So it's a very interesting So his soul, it's a story about the way he practiced or his misunderstanding, he kind of killed his soul in a way. I mean, we don't have to go into what would have been an acceptable response from the monk for the woman not to be upset. But she wanted some kind of life from him. Demonstration of sentient being, of being in life fully.

[32:16]

So I'll leave time for questions or comments. Thank you very much. Peter, you. Yeah. Something very interesting about what Suzuki said, you quoted him. It's interesting that he says, he encourages, he says we have to be brave. This acknowledgment that we don't know what's going to happen, that it's actually risky. But would you rather have that, or would you rather be stuck in Buddha extension beings, I don't know which is which, or the suffering that you're talking about. It's kind of like, it's encouraging us to express ourselves, and to take a risk, and to show up fully. And what are we going to do with that? Yeah, I guess the other great line, when Zen is Zen, you are you.

[33:26]

So, Zen is Zen Buddha, you are you, sentient being. You're right, so the dualistic language of Buddha and sentient being, I look at it as completely astray, let's face it, right? It's just, express yourself, right? So, it's that thing of wanting to be safe. That's right. You know, so the other thing that's connected with this idea of expressing yourself fully is, so you're suffering, how do you move? You know, we have these metaphors of, you know, jumping off a 100-foot pole or, you know, something going beyond. Right. So, can you talk about that? Sort of taking a risk, right? Well, I think it does have to do with taking a risk, and it has to do with expression, and it has to do with taking a backwards step from what feels safe, what the sentient being who goes

[34:52]

the normal route would do in order to feel safe, in order to control, in order to fix. What if I take the backwards step from that? And I think one thing that was kind of in those quotes, but is more in the talk, it has to do with being naked with others. So express yourself. Be brave enough to expose yourself, to expose yourself. There's a lot of hands. I think this gentleman, what's your name? John. Hey, John. You're talking very interesting. Thank you. And it brings up in me the proliferation of beauty. Well, there are a lot of them, yeah.

[36:13]

In the jars, and separate, and you know, every time there's a separate part that can't be accepted, not you, but we often create another being, put it in a jar. Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that's why we chant, right? Beings are numberless. I vow to awake with them. They're numberless. We just have to do it over and over. I vow each one. Is that our responsibility that they're numberless by this way of thinking? I think they just are numberless. Every moment a new one is born. Ross? And then I'll come over here. Go ahead, sir. You said something about you didn't want to get angry or something like that. And I'm wondering what the difference is of sitting in anger Well, sitting on anger hurts, right?

[37:19]

Well, you sit with what? You sit in whatever, right? Do you mean sitting on is in a sense of trying to stuff it or something? Yes. That's what it feels like. And I think that enables one to express himself fully. Although, you know, Dogen said, practice is one continuous mistake. So I think sitting in is being sentient being too. It's the sentient being of anger. It doesn't go away because Buddha is there. They're both there. They're the same. See, that's why. They're the same, right? It's like a hair's breadth deviation. Go ahead, yes. practicing with something or letting go of something is skillful or unskillful?

[38:27]

And how can we discern that in the next moment when you decide that you're feeling dead, therefore the previous moment may be a little off? I find that this is a lot of practice. This is a fine line in my own practice between wisdom and stupidity. Do you know what I mean? When is it skillful? Skillful to what? Skillful to practice letting go. And when is it skillful to not practice letting go? How do you determine? At what point do you determine when it's skillful? Is it after the fact? Is it during? Well, let's talk about it. Let's be clear what letting go is. So, I cannot make myself let go of anything. Right. The letting go is grace. The activity of letting go that I can control and that I have agency is simply the awareness of what is.

[39:34]

Being aware of who I am, what this is, whether it be anger or joy or whatever, and just being with it. That's letting go. That's the only letting go that I have agency over. Now, I want my anger to go away, so I want more full letting go, I guess. But that's outside my control, beyond just being with. Does that make sense? Yeah, that does make sense. However, my impression of your talk was that there was an active practice within your work situation to practice the invitation of letting go, may it be so, and that after the fact you felt a certain deadness of the soul and therefore it gave you cause and caused you to reevaluate the situation. So I'm just wondering, how do you know what was skillful when?

[40:38]

Well, because I was confused. I didn't know what was skillful because I was confusing what I thought was letting go with trying not to be present to, right? And you know, it can be hard. It's a hair's breadth there, too, that I can be aware of my anger, but not really avow it. See, that's maybe awareness. Sometimes it's just not good enough. It's a vow. That's why it's a good word, a vow. At one, at one. I can be aware of being angry, but not completely at one with it. And so I was doing that over and over, but I never really landed in being angry. And that's what was soul-killing. I wasn't completely myself.

[41:40]

He's got the knocker, but I'll be out there. This is for the benefit of all beings, what I was going to say. Okay. Thank you very much.

[41:55]

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