You are right where you are and no place else. And until you really are so, you can't make use of anything. That's one of those, I suppose someone could say, Zen statements. Obvious, you are right where you are and nowhere else. Obviously, that's so. But it's not so for most of you. And until it's so, you don't get it. You don't get this practice. For most of you, you have some qualification. I should be a different kind of teacher. Tassajara should be a different kind of place. This is not the time for you to be here. Or you just have some sexual frenzy and you want to travel or meet people or something.

[01:24]

Dogen said, "'You can't learn it from others, and it does not arise by itself.' Ryuun, he wrote a poem. "'For thirty years I have sought someone with the sword of enlightenment. For thirty years I've sought someone with the sword of enlightenment. Many times flowers have bloomed and fallen, new buds have appeared. Today I saw the peach blossoms and found the way. Thankful, grateful, for my compassion of my teacher, Daye, who was also Kyogen's teacher, who refused to tell him anything, and he found out by sound of bamboo. For thirty years I've searched for someone with the sword of enlightenment.

[03:03]

In many times, flowers have fallen and new buds have appeared. Today, I saw the peach blossoms and realized the way. Thanks to great compassion of my teacher, Daye. The purpose of sashim again is to confirm for you, big mind, confirm zaza for you. This is also meaning of transmission, to confirm zaza for you, to confirm big mind, so you have no doubt.

[04:06]

So you are where you are and nowhere else. Thus you can make use of everything. That's how we begin to make use of things. And as I said last night, you cannot follow energy of society if you can't follow your own energy. If you can't listen to your own sound, your own death. If you listen, you'll hear, even without being a hypochondriac, you will hear your own death. News reports for the day. Annette and Ralph's baby is doing pretty well. Did you hear they had quite a difficult time? A little bit. Anyway, at first I heard the baby had depressed heartbeat for quite a long time, both in the birth process and

[05:29]

afterwards, which might mean brain damage, because not much oxygen is getting to the brain. But I guess the heartbeat was depressed only for a fairly short time. Not serious. They don't think there's any brain damage. Luckily, the baby was born in the hospital, or otherwise it's quite likely, probably the baby would have died. It's a girl, and I think she was seventeen days late, and she's still, though, in a fetal condition. She hasn't actually come into the world yet. And she's in an incubator at... UC Hospital? Is that right? San Francisco General? What? San Francisco General? UC, yeah. She was born in San Francisco General but taken immediately to UC because they don't have the facilities for that kind of care. Poor little creature, you know. As soon as she was born, immediately tubes were stuffed down her and everything. She can't be with Annette. Annette can't be with her. Ralph can't be with her.

[06:54]

And I guess what happened, I don't know exactly, but what do you call it, meconium? Which means shit, right? Gets in the water, I guess, and the water breaks, and then into the baby's lungs sometimes. And I guess created an infection, but they don't know quite what happened. But anyway, at first it looked like she would die, but now... I guess she's improving fairly rapidly, though she'll have to be in an incubator for two or three more weeks. It looks like she'll be okay. First it looked pretty bad, but now it looks pretty good. And in Harrisburg, things are still ticking off. It's sort of like having a bomb held by a string up over a major population area, and everyone waiting to see if the string is going to break. It looks like it's getting better, but they now have real evacuation plans, though, to evacuate if necessary. The order hasn't been given yet, but they've prepared people for it.

[08:25]

And people are supposed to keep their cars full of gasoline and be prepared for a traffic jam of immense proportions. And they try to evacuate about as many people as the city of San Francisco, 630,000 people they figure, from an area of 2,500 square miles, 25 miles, in a radius of 25 miles from the plant. That's about 2,500 square miles. And you're supposed to leave your pets at home, and you're not supposed to panic. And... Gosh knows where all those people would go. But Governor Brown has asked to close down the one that's similar In case it's a generic problem, he wants to close down... I guess he has to ask the permission of the NRC, but he wants to close down the one near Sacramento, at least while he's there. George Wald, he's a Nobel lawyer and a rather famous scientist, and he's quite anti-nuclear. He thinks it's...

[09:52]

completely irresponsible, morally irresponsible, that that whole area hasn't been evacuated already. And another expert, who's been pro-nuclear all along, has said, I don't want one of those in my state. He says, we obviously don't have the technology to control it. The technology involved in chemical and nuclear reactions is so rapid It's, again, like an avalanche, so fast. Anyway, they seem to have reduced the... You can't tell exactly. There's an insurance problem. Part of the importance of the Carr and Silkwood case is it may blow the lid off the insurance lid. The government has an insurance, a legal insurance lid. I don't know what, six hundred million dollars or a hundred million dollars, anyway, some kind of, there's various levels of figures. And you can't insure, you can't make claims above that, right? So it means insurance companies and the government can insure these plants. But if they take the lid off, nobody can build nuclear plants anymore because nobody will insure them.

[11:14]

In this case, if the 600,000 people who are presently getting the equivalent of twentieth or thirtieth of an x-ray a day or something, within ten miles you're getting a dosage like that, I guess, were to sue, the most they could get would be a thousand dollars a person. And they could all claim much more, since there's Quite likely. Somebody said, incidentally on television, that everybody within six miles will die as a result of this. Somebody else has said, well, we're all getting used to living under the cloud. Things go on as usual at the plant. I suppose they do go on as usual at the plant. Anyway, Carter has asked that no one pay any attention to what metropolitan utility company says, and only listened to the NRC and him. And he went there yesterday and went within a hundred feet of the reactor and got the equivalent of an x-ray or something, I don't know, with his wife, just to prove that everything was okay, and he wore boots, I believe. I hope he got scared.

[12:36]

But the utility company is a privately owned company, and so is legally liable for everything that happens. So they are naturally, because they can be sued, trying to minimize everything. And they keep saying, oh, it's all okay, and now we've got it all under control, and it's stable, and so forth. And everyone's beginning to disbelieve. I mean, the dishonesty of it is so patent that Carter's finally said, don't pay any attention to them. But they're the ones who are going to have to bear all insurance costs and answer to their stockholders and things. They're trying to pretend nothing's wrong. But I guess they're trying... It's gone down... No one knows. I don't know if any of this is true, but I'm told it's gone down from 700 degrees to 495 degrees, and they hope to get it below 400 degrees, because then the water underneath the reactor will boil instantly. If they can get the water underneath the reactor from boiling, they can start to cool it. And the bubble of hydrogen has gone from 1,700 cubic feet to 400 cubic feet or something like that. And they may release the rest of it all at once or quickly in the next day or so. And I guess the minute...

[14:07]

They're trying not to use the word meltdown at all, but I guess the conservative estimate is one percent of the reactor of the uranium has melted down. That means one ton of uranium has melted down. And the other estimates are a third to a half of it's melted down, or 20 to 30 tons of uranium have melted down. But it's all sort of contained in the building, I guess. If the hydrogen bubble explodes and the building comes apart, then there'll be direct contact to the environment with all of this melted-down uranium. Carter's promised to tell the truth about what's happening. It makes me think of hotels which have a sign saying clean rooms. It makes you wonder.

[15:23]

About, I guess, 20,000 people or so have left the immediate area, they say. I don't know. And if they do evacuate, you're supposed to call for transportation if you don't have it, but probably they can't supply it. Anyway, that's all I can remember. The feeling I have from the news is that it's still very dangerous, but not quite as bad as yesterday. A Dao man named... then teacher named Dao Tzu was asked by a monk, are not all the sounds the sound of Buddha? And Dao Tzu said, yes. And the monk said, but teacher, doesn't your asshole make farting sounds?

[17:54]

And Dao Tzu hid it. So the monk said, coarse language or fine language, all are the truth, or something like that, reduced to the essential truth. Dao Tzu said, yes, that's right. And the monk said, then teacher, may I call you and ask? And he hit him again. Makes me think of these, again, the situation in Harrisburg. Or these movies, you know these gang movies they have out now? They're causing all these killings. Have you heard about that? There's two of them out now. And after the movies, there's one in San Francisco recently, there were several people shot afterwards, and then there've been several people killed at this other movie. And the mayor asked that the Alhambra Theater, I guess it was, not show the film. So the producer came up, and he said, the moral of this movie is that

[19:23]

Violence is naughty, you know. And that's what he says, but he also had the ability to make a movie which draws large audiences who then get violent. So it's incredible nonsense for him to say the point of the movie is to show that violence is bad when it produces violence. People don't pay attention to such moral maxims. They follow the energy of the movie. I remember a young man who came to see me in Japan. He was a boy, actually, sixteen, but very intelligent. And he had this completely elliptical logic going, like the monk asking Daozi about emptiness and so on and so forth, and nothing having any meaning, you know.

[20:52]

And he's smart enough that the logic just made, he couldn't get into the circle. So, finally I said to him something. I can't remember what I said, but something like, he's just a kid and can't understand anything. And he got rather offended and angry. So I said, Oh, if it's all empty, why are you offended and angry? So I got him. But, and he's become a Buddhist scholar, He's now at Harvard. But I didn't get him well enough where he'd be here practicing. Some tribes, not tribes, like tribes in, I believe, the South Seas,

[22:20]

each family or tribe, group of tribes, kind of like tribes, you know, has a stone. And nobody sees the stone except members of that group. Though I guess women who have been married from other tribes have seen stones of their former tribe. Each stone, I guess, of these nine... I guess it's nine tribes are different. And whenever they want to have a serious meeting or get together, they bring this stone out and put it down. And it's a very pleasant stone to look at, the kind of stone, if you saw it on the beach or in the mountains, you'd want to carry it or take it. So it makes... it becomes a vehicle to their interior. So they bring it out and sit with it.

[23:36]

You know, what the producer of this gang movie, or what we tell ourselves mostly, or ideas we have, concepts we have, none of these things, though our thoughts feel like our interior, none of these things are access to our interior. Interior is not right, but good enough for now. So like Rayu and he saw the peach blossom, today I saw a peach blossom. Today I saw the blooming peaches. Plato thought that sound was the vehicle to your interior. Sound or color may be an artist with someone who brings back, you know, a tale or a picture. But that tale or picture is always right in front of you. You don't need Cézanne's painting.

[25:06]

or Philip's poem. It may give us some help, but what says Aung San Suu Kyi or what language you feel is always right in front of you. What says Aung San Suu Kyi is right here. But what is this vehicle, the universe as vehicle or you as vehicle? What stone will be your vehicle or what sound will be your vehicle? An unpredictable mind, I don't know how to say it, to follow your energy, to find a pace, not avalanche, not to be greedy.

[26:46]

A cotton industry is, I read, in Mexico is gone. Huge multi-million or billion dollar cotton industry is gone because they used pesticides in such large doses that they produced a Super Bowl weevil, which in four years ate up, they can't stop it, it ate up Mexico's cotton. And now, It's clear that the use of pesticides is going to wipe out our agriculture, but no cotton farmers in California or farmers in the United States will go back if they say they can't make enough money if they don't use pesticides now. They're hooked to... You know, by contrast, I read in the Tang Dynasty There was quite a busy market in Vietnam for nests of yellow citrus ants, because those nests of yellow citrus ants would eat the red scale insects that killed the oranges, the sweet peel mandarin oranges. But we don't have the patience to

[28:12]

Just eat or find the yellow citrus ants. Sell them and bring them to the tree and place them on each tree. But that kind of pace in our life is necessary. I wish we could in Zen Center not eat, actually not eat Mexican vegetables because of the way they're out of season vegetables because they are sprayed so heavily. But it's pretty hard to make this community just eat seasonal food. And the economics of buying organic food is we can't manage. Maybe we can. It may take time, but we can go in that direction. It will require quite

[29:37]

You can't do it all by yourself. It requires cooperation of whole society to have nests of yellow citrus ants available. Harry is just now teaching us, and it's going to take quite a while, what we can collect, wild things we can collect. And Green Gulch is beginning to cook wild things into there. rice and salads and so forth. And Harry will prepare a completely wild meal for greens. Someone else is going to prepare a completely herb meal for greens. So we can try, but to really do it, your whole society has to do it. We kill insects with pesticides and then we waste ourselves with the waste. We dump the waste and then get ourselves. The Avatamsaka Sutra does not need such confirmation. Just to be in this machine and to make use

[31:05]

and thus find the use of everything. From this point... to know incontrovertibly you are just where you are. Even though you'll be somewhere else later, or should be somewhere else, or want to be somewhere else,

[32:11]

It doesn't change the fact that all of that, true or not, is so thin compared to, has nothing to do with that you are just where you are. you know, there's a green flash you can see when the sun sets. Have any of you ever seen it? Yeah, usually over the ocean. You can see it sometimes from the top of the mountain there, above Green Gulch, where the little cabin is. And there's some scientific explanation for it. Just as the rim, top rim of the sun goes below the horizon, it cuts out most of the red rays and so forth. And if there's, I guess, an inversion layer in the atmosphere or something, just green rays are left and they flash. I've seen it from the top of the hill once or twice.

[33:34]

In some cultures it's considered some mystical experience to see it, or you have to have special powers to see it, but anyone can see it. But you have to be a little bit alert, because it's very quick, and if you for a moment think of something else, or say, oh, it's not going to happen, you know, just in the obfuscation of that thought alone, your friend will say, huh, and you say, hmm. that is completely false. But it happens. I don't know if it could be filmed or if it would come between the frames of a camera. Mizuki Roshi says, Zen is not excitement. It is concentration on our everyday life. And even with concentration on our everyday life, you can't expect a green flash. But if you can listen to yourself, feel yourself through and through,

[35:00]

reside in yourself. Without getting nervous, you will feel many unexpected things. And you won't be able to know the meaning of them, so it may make you nervous. I'm dying. Don't worry. If you are, you might as well know it. Smooth as baseball bat. Smooth as baseball. Continuous. Like children playing in a dump. You're not stuck here, you know, you're like children playing in a dump.

[36:06]

You've just hidden away from your parents in a cave of nothing. What makes you think it's nicer outside? We're like children doing just what we want to do. Who's making you do this? What is the difference between one thing and another? What is, where is the turtlenose snake of South Mountain? Breathing in very soft air, set yourself to one course, to make use of your zazen, to fully make use of your zazen, to not hold back.

[38:03]

much concentration and dignity as you can to sit right on top of yourself right in the midst of yourself sick or healthy or sleepy or awake just whatever you are and try not to wander off into your fantasy You are going to die right here. You won't die anywhere else. And it will happen in a moment just like this moment.

[39:27]

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