All right. For those of you who have any interest, when I came down here, the score in the NBA Finals was Raptors 59 and the Warriors 49. So there you go. What, Ron? That's right, Curry had not really come awake yet. Okay, so welcome to the third class. We're going to begin talking about Zenki. And I'd like to start By reading a little of Zinke from the beginning, read about a third of it, and then we're going to go into it in detail and we'll have time for some questions.

[01:19]

I really appreciated Last week, people leaving space for everybody to bring their questions at their own pace, and I would encourage you to do that again. Yeah? Can I ask a question? Okay. So, you go along and you break into this house, and this house is empty. yes and you're feeling good and then you look around and there's nothing in the house but there's a window and outside the window is your great hate and delusion and all your desires did i break in the wrong i'm starting to think I'm starting to think, or I'm looking out and I'm starting to think, oh, that's nice. Maybe I'm being clingy to this empty house.

[02:26]

Maybe I should go out the window after these... And then I think maybe I'm in the wrong house. Maybe this isn't the empty house. So the whole thing gets pretty confusing. Can you shed light on that? I would pull up a chair and look out the window, enjoy the view, and see what happens. The house is empty. Nothing's going to happen in there. So just sit there and watch the greed, hate and delusion and see how it unfolds. And it's not yours. It's just greed, hate and delusion.

[03:26]

Yes. Zinky. Yeah, it's also Rev. Anderson's name. I think Blanche Hartson's name was different. I think it was Zenkei. Isn't that right? And I think it's probably different. But Rev's name is actually Zenki. Tenshin Zenki. Tenshin was his, so this was, these names were given by some of our teachers. at a time when they kind of didn't know the rules for naming, but they hit on good things anyway. I have one of those names. Lori had one of those names before she was renamed to the word nation. Lori's, her name was Ekai Uji. that was given, I forget what Ekai means, but Uchi is like being time, which is rather grand idea for a name.

[04:44]

So for me, my Dharma name, which is still my name, is Hozon, which is Dharma Mountain. That's the first character. And my Dharma name is Kushiki. which is ku, as in ku, emptiness, and when we talk, when we recite the Heart Sutra in Japanese, and shiki as form. So I am Mr. Formless Form. And that was given to me by Sojin Roshi for a reason. I think the reason at the time was that he was concerned that I was too attached to form. But we would have these naming workshops with Kastanahashi and Shohaku Okamura and different Soto people, and Akiba Roshi. They would go through these names, and there's now a naming book that we use. And they would ask us to present our names, and when I presented my name, it always got a big laugh.

[05:49]

You know, it's like, Kushiki, oh, really weird name, you know. And when I went to Japan, like on my slippers, you have slippers that you are given for inside the temple. My Dharma name is Kushiki. That's what they use. That's what's on my papers. And the Japanese would say, oh, What a wonderful name, which really meant that's the stupidest thing I ever heard. But it's really a great name. I love that name because it's a challenge. The challenge is how do you manifest form in a formless way? And how do you manifest formlessness in a formal way? And I think the same thing of Reb's name.

[06:53]

But also, like me, in general parlance, he uses Tenshin. I'm not sure what the ten is. But I use Hozan, like Dharma Mountain, because that's a more conventional name. But anyway, that's... I used to call it Tenshins. Tenshins? Well, that's because he used to run. Yeah. Okay, shall we go on? So let me read you the beginning of Zenki. The great way of all Buddhas thoroughly practiced is emancipation and realization. Emancipation means that in birth you are emancipated from birth. In death you are emancipated from death. Thus there is detachment from birth and death and penetrating birth and death. Such is the complete practice of the Great Way.

[07:56]

There is letting go of birth and death and vitalizing birth and death. Such is the thorough practice of the Great Way. Realization is birth. Birth is realization. At the time of realization, there is nothing but birth totally actualized, nothing but death totally actualized. Such activity makes birth holy birth, death holy death. Actualized just so at this moment, this activity is neither large nor small, neither immeasurable, neither remote nor urgent. Birth in its right now-ness is undivided activity. Undivided activity is birth in its immediacy. Birth neither comes nor goes. Birth neither appears nor is already existing. Thus, birth is totally manifested, death is totally manifested.

[09:02]

Know that there are innumerable beings in yourself. Also, there is birth and there is death. Quietly think over whether birth and all things that arise together with birth are inseparable or not. There is neither a moment nor a thing that is apart from birth. There is neither an object nor a mind that is apart from birth. Again, let's stop there. So there are a few different titles for this, translations of the title that are used for this fascicle. Kaz Tanahashi and Ed Brown use the title Undivided Activity. Dr. Abe Masao and Norman Waddell use the title Total Dynamic Working, which I tend to favor.

[10:04]

Thomas Cleary uses the title, which is a kind of play on words, The Whole Works, which is like, is works a noun, or is it a verb? Right. Just clever. And Hubert Niermann uses the translation, On Functioning Fully. So I'm going to talk about the characters in the title. But first, let me just say, this is taught to the assembly at the residence of a former governor and official of Izumo province, which was near Kyoto, at the Roku Haramitsu, Sixth Haramita Temple in 1242. At this time, Dogen was 42 years old.

[11:14]

He had been back from China about 10 years. He had pretty much established a practice community and built a formal training monastery at Koshoji in the late 19th century. on the outskirts of Kyoto and he was about six months away from closing down his operations at Koshoji and moving to basically to the wilderness to the west where he created what is now Eheji. And that happened very suddenly later that, I think, in 1243. But this was a teaching like Shoji, really aimed at laypeople, not primarily at monks, and it wasn't given in his monastery.

[12:28]

So that's a kind of context for it. The characters zen tends to mean, in this case, it's not the zen of zen, it's in zen practice, it's the zen that implies whole or total or entire. And key means, implies function or operation. It can mean a loom or a machine. It's how the machine, how every part of the machine works together. This is what Cohen Franz, in a commentary, he says, it's how something works.

[13:32]

In modern Japanese, the character ki sometimes is appended to another word to indicate a machine. For example, laundry is sentaku, and a washing machine is sentaku ki. So it has a very concrete element to it. In that light, Colin Brandt says, we might translate Zenki as the whole machine, or his favorite, the everything machine. That's a great phrase, the everything machine. This is the universe that we're living in. It's the everything machine, where things are just happening. So Dogen took this title from a comment in one of the koans in the Blue Cliff Record.

[14:35]

And this is a koan that is a particular favorite of mine. It's Case 55, which is sometimes known as Dawu's Condolence Call. People know this? I'm going to lecture on it during during session. I'm not going to go into great detail of it now, but it's So the case as you might remember is Da Wu Goes to goes to see a Sangha member, goes to the home of a Sangha member who has died. And he takes his disciple with him. And they get to there and they do some of the rituals and then the disciple kind of goes up to the

[15:41]

coffin and bangs on the coffin and says, alive or dead? And Dawu won't say. He says, I won't say, I won't say. There's a couple of different versions of this koan. There's the koan, there's the case in the Belukov record, and there are actually two versions of this in Dogen's in his Shingi Shobogenzu, which is his collection of koans. But at any rate, I'm not going to go into all these different versions, but the disciple asks him, and Dawu says, I won't say, I won't say. And the student says, why won't you say? He said, I won't say. And he says, the student says,

[16:45]

If you don't tell me, I'm going to hit you." Dawu shakes his head and evidently the student hits him. I think really hits him, slugs him. Dawu says, Okay, I understand this, but now you should probably leave the community because if people found out that you hit me, you know, you have a lot of bad consequences for you." So Dawu goes to – he leaves and he goes to another teacher. and he relates, sorry, the disciple leaves, goes to another teacher and he relates to that teacher the whole story and asks the teacher, what do you have to say? And the teacher says, I won't say. In which, at which moment, fortunately, the student wakes up completely.

[17:51]

So that's the case. In the commentary, the compiler of the Blue Cliff Record, Yuan Wu, comments, how is it possible to climb up the Silver Mountain and the Iron Wall? Tonight, this mountain monk will place a flower on the golden brocade. I would open wide the barrier and discuss this koan. Life is manifestation of the total function of Zenki. Death is manifestation of the total function. Again and again, I won't say, I won't say, is repeated. So this is in Yuan Wu's commentary and this is the

[18:56]

point of departure for this fascicle. This is where Dogen drew his inspiration from Wan Wu's commentary. And I think that Shohaku Okamura writes In Yuan Wu's comment in the recorded sayings of Yuan Wu, he interpreted Dao's I won't say to mean because both life and death penetrate the entire Dharma world, there is no way to say alive or dead. His saying, life is manifestation of the total function, death is manifestation of the total function, points to this reality. In this fascicle of Chogokento Zenki, Dogen expresses his insight on our life and death as a total function.

[20:09]

In other words, on life and death as the workings of the universe which includes all of us. So let's stop there and see if you have any thoughts or questions. Alex. That's something that you also maybe wanted to clarify from last week. So I assume in this festival, Zenki, Probably. I don't know, actually. My question is whether we're meant to understand this as a synonym for samsara existence. I don't think so. I don't think that that's, I mean, I'm curious to know what you guys think.

[21:14]

I have to think about it. I think that the birth and death that Dogen is speaking about here is beyond samsara. I think in a sense, it's the jumping off point because what Dogen is trying to do is to push us beyond our ordinary conception of birth and death. So what I think the starting point, maybe it is a jumping off point, is that we have these, you know, we have our usual understanding of birth and death. We think of birth and death as what demarks something that we call life, with birth at one end and death at the other end.

[22:47]

And I think he's pointing to something, to another way of thinking about it. But I guess my point is that the Buddhists in the 1200s, it seems like it denotes a cycle of that that we're trying to get out of. That's my question, is how much we should be bringing that as a background thing to bear. I don't know. Let's hold that in abeyance. I'd like to, you know, I think we should think about that because we, irrespective of what various belief systems, religious belief systems people have, All of the belief systems themselves are a kind of antidote to our kind of pattern thinking of birth and death and our life included between that.

[23:54]

So I think that one of the things I've been thinking lately and I talked to someone about this is that In many ways, the project of religion, period, not just Buddhism but all religion, is to step around the problem of our conception of birth and death. We see somebody, you know, we see a friend's body on the bed and we think they're dead. We see a child born and we think a new life has come. We tend to think that.

[24:54]

And Dogen is trying to push the boundaries of that understanding. He's both trying to push it and he's also trying to look microcosmically at moment-by-moment existence. We'll get to this. I don't want to get too much into the show. Yeah, Judy.

[25:56]

I had a very intimate experience years ago, which of course I didn't have language for at the time, and it was coming up for me because I can get stuck in all of this. It's either I go to it and it becomes abstract and I'm not really feeling into it. It's not intimate, it's not connected to any really close person who died or witnessing a birth directly and all of that. When I was doing astronomy and I was standing in front of a telescope, a big telescope, a whole experiment going on, and I remember looking through it you know, at this object far away, and suddenly having this experience that I could sense that object as, you know, right here, even though it's over there, and right now, even though, you know, that starlight, the lightbulb was turned on,

[27:16]

at a given moment so many light years away. So it's five light years away. The light bulb was turned off on from our perspective five years ago. But, you know, and Ray Bradbury and others have posed this in their science fiction. From their perspective, our light bulb got turned on five years ago. So whose past and whose future and whose present are we talking about? And at the same time, there's direct present moment communication across these constructs of past, present, and future. But in the intimate moment of that, I realized, oh, I don't need the telescope. I don't have to, quote, study this. I can just sense that. And for me, that's a real experience of alive or dead. which takes out sort of, you know, the pain and suffering around someone just died or the, oh my God, it's so awesome, you know, exciting joy of a birth.

[28:18]

And it's just like, oh. And I feel like that oh is so really important in this to maintain the intimacy and yet the ordinariness. Yeah, the oh is very immediate. Yeah. I don't want to get into more philosophical – I watched a program last night about Einstein's theory of relativity and we're not going to get into that, you know, about the time-space continuum. But it's, you know, it's like he was thinking about this shit, you know, it's really, it's pretty amazing. Okay. I want to talk about the first, this is a series of propositions. The first verse, first line says, the great way of all Buddhas thoroughly practiced is emancipation and realization.

[29:26]

Emancipation means that in birth or life, depending on how you translate it, you are emancipated from birth. In death, you are emancipated from death. Thomas Cleary's translation, let's look at something else as a contrast. Thomas Cleary writes, the great path of the Buddhas in its consummation, is passage from freedom is actualization. That passage to freedom in one sense is that life passes through life to freedom and death too passes through death to freedom. I tend to lean, in the sense of translation, I'm going to comment on Kaza and Ed's translation. So I think it's a little more accurate. Anyway, when it says, so the first phrase, the great way of all Buddhas, Showaku Okamura explains that the great way of all Buddhas is

[30:43]

the path of practice that we work, that we walk, holding bodhicitta, holding Buddha mind, and that it implies the bodhisattva path. So his point of departure, what Jogasan is implying is that, and this is true of all the other commentaries I've read, that this is really about delineating a bodhisattva view of birth and death. The next phrase, what he goes to then is to, he refers to emancipation and realization. And he's also distinguishing between emancipation and realization.

[31:45]

And I think we have to dig a little more deeply into this to have a sense of what he's talking about, because in English, They seemed kind of the same. Anyway, that was my take. And it's like, you really have to stop and look at each word. So liberation or emancipation is a translation of the word todatsu. And realization is a translation of the word genjo, as in genjo koan. So in todatsu, to means to pass through, or means it's something that's transparent, or it shines through.

[32:49]

And datsu means to remove or get out of or cast off. So for example, when a glass is transparent, all of the light freely penetrates the glass without any restriction and everything can be clearly seen through it. So it's like taking, peeling away the layers, the obscurity, the filters, all of the things that might stand between us and seeing things clearly. Yeah. Sure. So you just, my brain just went off on this whole trip. So do you feel like Zenki is a specifically Mahayana teaching in that You know, back in the, like, separating from Hinayana to Mahayana, this is saying, like, the whole, like, to function wholly is to not focus on this one life and being enlightened and not having to repeat.

[34:05]

The Bodhisattva path is to return to save all others, so therefore, like, the whole, like, what he's saying on functioning fully is to get away from that trajectory So certainly I'm just wondering, do you think that's... I'm not sure yet. You know, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not sure they're in contradiction, but yeah. Yeah, I think I'm going to unpack this as we... I just wanted to get to these words first, but I think that that makes sense and I'll give you a context for looking at it that way.

[35:13]

So Datsu, in the Todatsu, is the same word as in Dogen's kind of, his important phrase, Shinjin Datsuraku, where he talks about, that translates as body and mind dropped away. So the Datsuratu, Datsuraku is this dropped away. Shinjin is body, mind, or heart, mind, And this is what he's proposing as liberation, that nothing is restricted by the form that is in. Everything is free within that form. Genjo, which is the, what we're translating as, just want to make sure that I don't get you confused, that what we're translating here as actualization.

[36:31]

or realization. Genjo, as we know, is a key word of Dogen's. And it's the manifestation of things at the present moment. So we have this example in Genjo Koan of firewood and ash, that basically Genjo is implying a Dharma moment or a Dharma position. Firewood is one position. The burning firewood is another position. Ash is another position. So gen means present or current time. And jo means complete or accomplish. So what this represents, Emancipation and realization are two aspects of one reality.

[37:38]

Dogen uses the analogy of firewood and ash. So he says, when a tree is cut down, so first you have a tree, that's a position. When it's cut down and it's split, it becomes a pile of firewood. When it's burned, the after effect of that is ash. And at a given moment, firewood is just existing in the dharma position, in the moment, let's say, of being firewood. And it is free from past and future. But of course, There's some process going on here. And when we think, we really can think of firewood and the process by which it becomes ash.

[38:46]

We can see in our minds the whole process, right? I'm thinking of our New Year's celebration. It's not firewood. It's a press log. It's this lump of stuff and then you light it and it catches on fire and then several hours later, you have a pile of ashes. In my mind right now, I can see the whole process unfolding but actually, each one of them is a distinct moment. And the thinking about it is just, it's the story making machinery of our minds. Which is not wrong, it's actually wonderful. Yeah. Can you speak to the handicap that that gives us the freedom? He's talking about emancipation. Well, let's get to that.

[39:56]

That's the point of this. It's not so much the handicap. I think what Dogen is constantly saying is if you're stuck in one way of thinking, then it's a limited perspective. And what he's constantly trying to get us to do is to think in a very open way of, in both the, we were talking about this in Shoji, in about the Dharma moment and the process of flow. Yes. Is it significant, say, to ask the question, anymore, is it a fire word, or is it ash, or like that exercise you do raising little kids, you know, you say, okay, raise your hand when you know that the raising has become part of you. And it's subjective.

[40:58]

But it is the key point, just living in that question is what keeps you awake, as opposed to there's some definitive Well, I think that it points to the insufficiency of our naming. You know, we don't have names for every moment. You know, we have a very broad name, but every moment of a fire is completely different. Well, he says in that same paragraph, in Gadjah Cohen, birth is an expression complete, this moment is an expression complete. Shohaku Okamura has a wonderful analogy in his commentary. He says another example is a baby.

[41:59]

A baby is 100% a baby. But a baby has life force that negates his or her babyhood and freely becomes a boy or a girl. A boy or a girl becomes a teenager. A teenager becomes a young adult, a middle-aged person and a senior student. And an aged person passes away, disappears and becomes ash. Each moment we manifest ourselves as we are. a baby, a girl or a boy, a teenager, a young adult, a middle-aged person, senior student, finally a dead person. But in each stage, our life force constantly negates its condition. In other words, there's always something that is passing away and there's always something that's pushing to the next moment.

[43:08]

negates its condition and grows for certain periods of time, then begins its decline and shrinks and finally disappears. In each moment, everything is staying in its Dharma position 100% as it is, and at the same time is liberated from its position and moving to the next Dharma position. I think that's a really helpful analogy. Let me finish this. A baby is completely a baby, and yet at the same time a baby is not a baby. Linda. time I was in Bailey's house, and her mother was there, she had Alzheimer's, and she was really far gone. And Bailey, she was very sweet, and she said she will be able to talk to me, but three seconds later, or one second later, she won't remember anything that just happened.

[44:19]

So what you just read from Shoma makes it different. It's not firewood is a moment, and fuel is a moment, and ash is a moment. It's something much more subtle. Yeah, I would say, I wouldn't say that's not a state of enlightenment. I would say that is a state of manifestation, and it's not a state of realization. both of them being components of what we may call enlightenment. That's right.

[45:31]

I want to get to that question. Let's take a stretch break, because it's 8 o'clock, and I have a context for thinking about that question. I think it's a really interesting question. There's tension there. So let's stand up, go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, stretch. No. And you rinse the feelings out? Yeah. Yes.

[51:53]

Me too. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I think there's... No, okay. So let me talk about that. And also then John had a really interesting point, but let me lay this out first. So this is talking about emancipation and realization. And what occurred to me is that this

[52:57]

resonates with another philosophical distinction that also has real serious implications for our lives. So you have in the discussion of freedom in philosophical terms, you have two manifestations of freedom. there is something that's called negative freedom, which is the freedom from constraints, freedom from the limitations that you're experiencing. And that to me is what he's implying by Emancipation. So emancipation, we talk about the Emancipation Proclamation, it's free from the bonds of slavery, free from the constraints on our being or activity.

[54:11]

Does that make sense? The other dimension of freedom in philosophical and also political terms is what's known as positive freedom. positive freedom is the freedom to do something. And I think just the point that Dan, that you're making of realization, realization is the ability to do something. It's the freedom to act. So Emancipation means being free from our karma, being free from the bonds of our life. And realization means so that we can do, so that we can act as bodhisattvas, so that we're free to act in accord with liberation.

[55:16]

Does that make sense? And that I think is the distinction that's being drawn in that first proposition. And I think it's really significant. And I never got this before. I mean, just sort of been digging into this in the last few days and trying to figure out why is he saying emancipation and realization? You know, are they pointing towards not different things, but different dimensions of a human wholeness? The second translation is explicit. It does exactly what you just said. What's that? The second translation you gave us does exactly what you just said in a few terms. The Cleary translation? No. Oh, could you read it, please? Because I didn't read that just now. But yeah, go ahead. It uses more words to make it more obvious.

[56:20]

Yeah, read it out loud. When we thoroughly explore what the Great Way of the Buddhas is, we find that it is liberation from delusion and letting our true self manifest to the world. Oh. Okay. I didn't read that today. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure those words are in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. when it is completely penetrated, is liberation and is manifestation. So it has those two words in it. I would say, you know, I think there's something confusing about using the T-I-O-N word ending.

[57:20]

because it kind of objectifies, it turns it into a thing. It turns into something conceptual. And so our minds necessarily kind of lapse into that conceptual mode. So you could say it's liberation and manifesting, liberation and realizing, which puts it more in an active, Liberating. Yeah, liberating and realizing. I like that a lot better. Right. Right. Liberates itself from life. Liberates itself from death. Yes. Yeah.

[58:30]

But, and what that means is, and we get into it in the body of the Sutra, it's like right within our birth, we are liberated and not attached to our birth. That's how a baby, if you were attached to your birth, you would be a baby for your whole existence. But because we're liberated from our birth, we can grow up and so forth. I think that's, to me, and usually in Dogen we realize that the first proposition or the first sentence is kind of the encapsulation of the entire teaching. So I think that's important. If we play this out, if we had, I don't want to get into this in kind of minute detail, but these are, let me just say, these are actually the questions.

[59:44]

If any of you have read the Federalist Papers. Yes. It's also in Hamilton. Right. Oh, I haven't seen it. I can't afford the tickets. But anyway, these are the questions that were being argued coming out of the French philosophical, French social philosophy. They were arguing about the tension between liberty and equality. you know, the tension between the freedom from. from all restraints, and then the freedom to, and then the question is as parts of a social reality, or even as a, in this samsaric world, what are the bounds of responsibility that are testing those limits in each way?

[60:53]

It's really interesting. But I think that Dogen is pointing to this and also it's very interesting that he's pointing this in the context of a teaching for There we go.

[62:53]

I think he was just trying to get a response. I don't know. So actually, John, could you ask your question? It was related to position. possibly the emphasis there has an ethical dimension. There's an ethical value in having that tension. Because you go too far one way,

[63:54]

Um, well, I'm not sure. I'm curious what other people think. What, what I think about this is, um, that again, our tendency is to see the overall flow of things. And partly our tendency is not to stop. and really see what's alive in any given moment. And I think that he's, so he's including both, but I think he's also recognizing that, you know, our usual way is to see that things that, you know, it's like, that spring turns into summer and summer turns into fall. And, you know, he's saying, you know, in Genshokan, don't say that spring turns into summer. Spring is a Dharma moment, is a Dharma position complete in itself.

[65:13]

And, you know, it's like stopping at each frame of the movie to see what's happening. And if you look at I was looking at a film the other day and it was so beautiful, the composition, and just thinking like every frame, if you looked at each individual frame, it would be wondrously composed. And together it makes a kind of wondrous flow. But each moment is complete in and of itself. And, you know, I think that's part of our practice is to treasure that. Ron? Okay.

[66:26]

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, these are just different uses of language, but that resonates to me. Yeah. I think, taking it back to John's point on ethics, the point, I think, is that you need both. Right. That's simply to take the film as a succession of frames and nothing else. Here, you're in a position of the Alzheimer's patient, and there are certain kinds of ethics that aren't really possible. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, John. So maybe we can get beyond the first sentence.

[67:49]

Emancipation means that in birth you are emancipated from birth, in death you are emancipated from death. So you're free from them. Thus there is detachment from birth and death and penetrating birth and death. Such is the complete practice of the Great Way. There is letting go of birth and death and vitalizing birth and death. Such is the thorough practice of the Great Way." So this detachment from birth and death, what does Shohaku translate it as, Andrea? It says, therefore, there is leaving life and death and entering life and death. Right. Right. Yeah. And what about the last paragraph? Yeah. So I'm not quite sure. What Colin Fran says is that this detachment and penetrating imply getting out and getting in.

[69:26]

I'm not sure about getting. That's the thing which implies some positive action. It's a little more abstract than I want to go. Gary. I was thinking with that sentence, In order for you to move at all, you have to detach from these scary notions of birth and death. And in order to penetrate, you have to detach. I think, I think that's right. And I think the important thing is here, we need to look microcosmically. We need to look at, at all the moments of our life, not the, not macrocosmically looking at our actual birth and death, but just we know, I know this.

[70:34]

It's like, so I'm playing music and I, play a wrong note or something that's not what I intended. And really, the way to practice playing music is just to go to the next note. You know, because if I think about the missed note, then I'm going to miss a whole sequence of notes. And so you really have to, you have to let go of it. And when you think of that as a, that's a really great model for how we live. That, you know, we have an expression that Zen practice is one continuous mistake. One continuous mistake.

[71:37]

You make a mistake, then you do something else, and there's something complete and something mistaken about it, and then you do the next moment. You just not get caught in the moment. So that means entering, getting into the next moment, making yourself available to the next moment, and leaving behind the previous moment. And this is a way to live that I think that both recognizes the integrity of each moment and the fluidity of it, if that makes sense. So what do you think about this? The next paragraph says, realization is birth, birth is realization.

[72:46]

At the time of realization, there is nothing but birth totally actualized, nothing but death totally actualized. What one commentator says is this statement is incomplete because what it should say is realization is birth, Birth is realization. Realization is death. Death is realization. That it needs to include, it's implied here, the totality of it. But what does that mean, that nothing but birth is realized? Someone who hasn't spoken. What does it mean birth is totally actualized, death is totally actualized?

[73:50]

Okay, I have a suggestion. So in line with what we were saying about actualization and realization, In a moment of birth, we are doing nothing but being born. In a moment of death, we are doing nothing but dying. And that is true for every single thing that we do. Yeah? Oh. But I don't want to get ahead of ourselves because in that paragraph, that paragraph is about, it's the analogy of the boat, which we'll talk about next week.

[75:18]

But the implication of that paragraph is that it is your activity that is making the moment what it is. is nothing but your activity, otherwise it's not real. Well, let's hold that in abeyance because I think that's actually the critical question for what does this mean?

[77:01]

What is its value? And what you're asking is addressing Dogen's fundamental question, the question that he brought when he was a young person to his teachers. If dharma is manifest everywhere, why do we have to do something? And that's, to me, I think that's the question that we're going to get to. that are caused by the heat, the tangling, and so on.

[78:05]

So yes, my action Maybe, I'm not sure with that responsibility, but we'll come back to that. Yeah, Helen. Well, I think yeah

[79:06]

Right, so personal response ability, you know, we always re-emphasize this, it's personal ability to respond, which means you're responding to the moment before and the next moment, but you're actually doing something. And one of the, so for playing music, my personal responsibility in that situation, if there's a passage, and we have some other musicians in the room, if there's a passage that you can't quite get, your personal responsibility is stop, in practice, not in performance, stop, isolate it, break it down and go over it slowly, bringing it up to speed so that it becomes what you can do.

[80:38]

And that's your response to that so that you can, in the future, do something else. It was really weird. There used to be, there were songs that I'd play. I played every Friday night in a bar in San Francisco, which is why I showed up late for the Saturday program for some years. And, you know, like some songs, every time I would get to a place where I was doing a solo, I would screw up. And then, you know, in that case, the flow was such that I just went ahead and I forgot about it. And then the next week we play the same song and I make the same mistake. And finally I realized, wait, I have to stop and work on this. And I think the same thing is true. You could say the same thing is true for our moral life or our life of activity.

[81:40]

Yeah. What about turning the wrong note into the right note? That's being creative. There's another tack that you can take as a musician. If you play a wrong note, play it again. Then it becomes the right note. Right. And that's what happens. What happens? Tell me. What happens is what you just described. You get to a point where, for me, I tell my students that I don't like these things, but I have to teach you how to write them, or I have to teach you the importance of them. So, you know, sometimes you have to write everything out, Sometimes if I take the me out of the situation, me, my, how I feel, whatever, and I just do it, then that's where the flow comes from.

[82:59]

So to me, that's the undivided activity, and I think that the connection between emancipation and realization is sometimes just leaving out the me, my. Right. Well, that's, I think, and that's part of the methodology of our practice. It's really hard. because we have, we feel this organic reality of me, you know, and to, so one way that you do this is, uh, talking with, with somebody, uh, You know, a way to develop psychologically or characterologically is to act as if, right? To act, you know, if you're upset about something, you act as if you're not upset. Now, that was a tough one for me because when that was suggested to me quite a few years ago, I thought, well, that's not authentic.

[84:01]

But when we're acting as if, which is take, remove I and me and those personal pronouns from our speaking. or from our, you know, it's the opposite. In one way, we're also given the instruction to make I statements. That's taking responsibility, that's important, rather than making you statements, you know, which are really I statements, they're really me statements. But we can change our language in such a way that we're tamping it down and that actually has an effect on how we begin to see ourselves. What? Yeah, yeah. We actually employed that in Mindful Peace Coaching Sangha Yeah, that's an approach.

[85:25]

It's almost time to end. I think, last word. You men have taken me out of things. Who is responsible? What? Yeah, that's the ethical. You are responsible. You are responsible, but when you change your language, you begin to think in a broader way and I think that this is exactly what you're getting to is the tension that I was pointing to between emancipation and realization. There is a, in the real world, there's a dynamic tension there and this is what we live with.

[86:34]

So let's do the This is the real world. Wherever you are is the real world. Until you are not here anymore and then the real world disappears.

[86:52]

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