I vow to taste the truth of the Tathāgata's words. Morning. Morning. Morning. It appears that Norman is going to be doing most of the actual explanation, line by line explication of the Diamond Sutra. And in doing so, it allows me to stray afield a bit and explore some aspects that are relevant,

[01:08]

and germane, I hope, but not necessarily specifically addressed to just that sutra. The last time I talked here, a few days ago, it seems that there was a lot of interest in exploring, well, let me say it this way, that people seemed to feel the need to express something that transcends the usual kind of dry categorizing doctrinal parts of our learning here. And I thought today, one of the questions that might allow that to be a kind of key to open some discussion a little later,

[02:09]

after I say a few things, is that question, that big word called identity. I said the last time that I was here, I used that phrase you've heard me use before, that the name of the game, the name of the game, is the game of the name. And we said that we've already, you know, pretty much come to grips with the idea that the psychophysical events, forms, relationships we have with the world called dharmas, carry with them characteristics, fire is hot, water wets, earth is solid, eye and form, ear and sound, and so on. And that we attribute characteristics, project characteristics from our experience onto phenomena that's essentially empty of our ideas about them or it,

[03:19]

and react or respond accordingly to the kind of identity we have, or identities, I think it's more a question of plurality that we have established between ourselves or one's self and one's world. So I want to talk a little bit about that, and I want to read something from the Garfield translation of Nargajuna's The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, which I had brought up, because I think it's important for us to understand how we reify our identities, all the various sub-personalities that we have developed from the beginning. When somebody asks us who we are, we usually explain ourselves, don't we, in terms of what we do, what do you do? I'm a Buddhist priest, I'm a doctor, I'm a lawyer, I'm a this, I'm a that, I'm out of work.

[04:26]

We don't usually say that. We have an identity that arises in terms of who we are when we're with a one-on-one relationship, a wife, a lover, different identity maybe with a good friend, a different identity that comes up at our work, identities that we have associated with our families, that we have put together, and mostly we put it together out of language, and the emotional, as I say, reactivity that concurrently arises with the words that we associate ourselves with. And that in seeing the dharmas and the characteristics that we attribute to people, places, and things, while we do have an identity and it's necessary in the conventional world, we begin to get a little bit of wisdom or get a little bit hip into seeing through our game, the name of the game.

[05:32]

At the same time, it's very important that we have an identity, that we know what our place in the creation, in the world is, and most of us, at one point or another, and particularly in places like Green Gulch, are in transition. We're in some kind of movement in our life where the identities that we have established in the past no longer work. We're looking for a new identity, a new way to come to grips with who we would like to be or who we're going to be. And in the studying of this question of emptiness, we begin to get sensitive to the fact that identities are conventional modes of expression. But, as I said before, they're not only linguistic conventions, but they're emotional conventions, and they're very necessary to our sense of well-being, of belonging someplace, somehow. And it isn't enough to say, well, I'm empty of any intrinsic self, therefore I must be happy.

[06:39]

And then I, you know, I either want to kill myself or go bowling. And I quoted from Nargajuna, from the Karikas on the Four Noble Truths, which is a very important part of the fundamental wisdom of the Middle Way, or the Mula Madhyamaka Karikas, that which said, whatever is conventionally arisen is explained as being emptiness. That, being a conventional designation, is the Middle Way. And I thought, as a kind of doorway into what I'm driving at here today, two things. To see through our identities and how they come about, but also the importance of identity. This is a very wonderful book, by the way, Jay Garfield's book, explaining some of this.

[07:47]

We have it in the library. I find it very useful. You can see I've got it marked in many spots. It's difficult. So he said, whatever is dependently co-arisen, that is explained to be emptiness. That, being a dependent designation, is itself the Middle Way. This is Karika 18 of the examination of the Four Noble Truths. And he says, Nargajuna establishes a critical three-way relationship between emptiness, dependent origination, and verbal convention. Between emptiness, dependent origination, and verbal convention. And asserts that this relation itself is the Middle Way. As we shall see, this is the basis for understanding the emptiness of emptiness itself. Nargajuna is asserting that the dependently arisen is emptiness. We've already talked about that. Narmus talked about that quite a bit. I don't think there's much question that we have to go into with that aspect.

[08:48]

Emptiness and the phenomenal world are not two distinct things. They are rather two characterizations of the same thing. To say of something that it is dependently co-arisen is to say that it is empty. To say that something is empty is another way of saying that it arises dependently. Moreover, whatever is dependently co-arisen is verbally established. That is the identity. The identity of any dependently arisen thing depends upon verbal conventions. To say of a thing that it is dependently arisen is to say that its identity as a single entity is nothing more than as being the referent of a word. The thing itself, apart from conventions of individualization, has no identity. To say of a thing that its identity is merely a verbal fact about it is to say that it is empty. To view emptiness in this way is to see it neither as an entity nor as unreal.

[09:52]

It is to see it as conventionally real. And it is as conventionally real that all of us are most of us. That some time or other strive to be. Now, you could say that we're born with a certain predisposition. That we're born with a certain way of taking, you know, we have a certain posture, a certain stance, a certain style of coming on in the world. And it's very clear what that is to oneself and one's family and friends after a certain amount of time. So that's given to begin with. And what's interesting as a kind of footnote to this is that when people put on robes and sit in the zendo and move about in the zendo versus wearing just street clothes and so on,

[10:54]

you can see the individuality more clearly, the individual particular style or stance that a person has, or posture you might say. Not only in the formal sense but just how one carries oneself in the world than you would have suspected otherwise. I've noticed that many, many times that when people wear robes, we're all wearing the same thing, that our individual identities, differences, are more accentuated than when we don't. And see if that doesn't hold true for yourself. We know that when we sit still, you know, and our eyes are down and a person is walking by, if we've been around very long, we know without even looking up, just kind of out of the periphery who that person is. I remember I once sat for 24 hours. I was, talk about zealous, but I decided once that after fire watch I would sit all night. We'd sat all day, so I sat in the gaitan all night.

[11:55]

As you know, living in the gaitan, there's a lot of coming and going. There's people go to the bathroom and open and close their doors and go. And whoever it was that came by me during the night, without even looking up, just by the footsteps and the way the person walked, I knew the identity of that person. So we're programmed this way, aren't we? We're programmed to have these identities and to, you know, place an identity and a word for each thing in the world. And that's how we function. But to the extent that we take these seriously, particularly, let's say the name that we are given, is, and to reify and to substantiate it to some hard-line view of ourselves is, of course, a recipe for misery and suffering, as we know. There's a koan, it's case 68 of the Blue Cliff Record. You probably have heard this one. Yangshans, what's your name? Yangshans, what's your name?

[12:58]

Yangshan asked Sun Xing, What is your name? Xing said, Hui Qi. Now, Hui Qi is another way of saying Yangshan. Actually, in Chinese, I guess, this is a pun on the mountains from which the two names were taken. What's your name, Yangshan, or Hui Qi? Yangshan said, Hui Qi, that's me. Xing said, my name is Yangshan, or Hui Zhan. Yangshan roared with laughter. It's like saying maybe Mr. Black and Mr. White, two mountains, what's your name? Black meets White. Well, I'm Black. No, that's my name. Okay, I'll be White. So, the whole point in the poetry and in the commentary is talking about how these two saw,

[14:08]

you know, we talk about the two truths, right? There's the universal or the, what we call the ultimate truth, which is the truth of emptiness, the ungraspability of phenomena. And at the same time, there is the conventional truth, and that these two, as is always the case in koans, are playing with the relative and the absolute. So, when, as always in koans, when one posits the absolute, the other comes right back with the relative. So, Yangshan says, you know, my name is White. Well, what's your name? Or, let's say I'm White and you're Black, and you say, well, I'm White. Well, no, I'm White. Okay then, I'll be Black. And so we just, we see the relativity of names and we kind of empty out the importance that we attach to that. And at the same time, if we take somebody's name away, you know, if somebody deprives you of your name,

[15:09]

of your identity, as you know, if you've been in an identity crisis, and sooner or later we all are, and not once, but more than once, then we know the importance of what happens when our name is usurped in some way. Correspondingly, when I was given the name of Daigon, I actually decided when Mel gave me that name, I kind of like the sound of it, because it was easy to remember, but I thought, what would it be like actually to take on another name at this time in my life? Would I be a different person with that name? Well, the question is yes and no. That actually when I began to be addressed as Daigon, rather than David or Dave or Lunkhead or something else that my family had called me, or my friends, I had a good friend who used to call me Dingleberry, that was his name, that I would respond accordingly. Daigon carried, you know, the great vowel carries a certain weight and a certain responsibility with that weight and so on, and I would find out that when I'm Daigon,

[16:10]

like I'm being Daigon's giving the talk, you know, not Dingleberry, that as Daigon, I react a little bit differently than I do in other cases and under assumed names. And as an actor in life, and we're all actors, aren't we? We all act out these different roles that we assume and are given. And I say assume and are given because, as you see, it does depend on the arise, doesn't it? You see me a certain way, I begin to respond a certain way, and as Norman said yesterday, when we treat people as Buddha, then people begin to actually respond as Buddha. So this question of having a name just can't be, you know, sloughed off as something that's superfluous, like a shirt, that we can just take off a shirt and get a new shirt. We cover our nakedness, our psychic nakedness with names as well as we cover our physical nakedness with clothing. I can tell you some stories here

[17:12]

about this. I was thinking about a time about 14 years ago, more or less, when I went through a period of being you could say denuded of all identities I had. I no longer had a job. I no longer had a personal relationship. I was not at Zen Center at that moment because I had chosen to leave. And I found myself living in this hut near the water and relying on the good offices and benevolence and beneficence of friends and other people to support me. The incredible anguish that arose by not having an identity.

[18:13]

Nobody came to see me, particularly because people had their lives. And I discovered something. Amidst my suffering, I discovered that well, a couple of things. One is the obvious thing that whether or not I was responding to some sense of myself as an identity, as a place that I had found that I had lost my place in the world. And losing your place in the world was like losing yourself. But I realized that this darkness, that going into this kind of dark place would be very rich. But if I had had a choice to avoid it, I would have done so. But I had willy-nilly in some sense set my life up to find this place, actually. I noticed, however, that when I walked outside, the sun shone on me, I've said this before, that the dog knew me, didn't care who I was, that he would follow me around wagging his tail, became a good friend. And if I was painting,

[19:15]

doing some work around the place, caretaking for the folks that were taking care of me, which I did, I would say, I would write a letter. Well, now I'm a letter writer. And I noticed the importance with which to give myself some, you might say, rotating designation, conventional designation of what this side of experience was about. And I saw the importance of having a name, of searching for a place in the world. And I also realized that I had led a long life filled with people, places, things and experiences. And in my training as a Zen student, before I had left, I had already, of course, come upon the emptiness teachings and about the fact of what I'm speaking of here,

[20:16]

that things are empty and knowing that did absolutely nothing to relieve the pain I was suffering. And I felt all of these voices in me, all of this desire to express myself, to find my place in the world. And I began to realize the importance of poetry, the importance of finding your place, your voice. And so some of you have heard it, but I'm going to, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to read a couple poems today, but I'm going to start with this one because I think it's relevant. And by doing this poem, by writing the poem, suddenly I was a poet. Suddenly life came forward. It was like you hit bottom, you know, it's like you go deeper and deeper and deeper

[21:17]

into the darkness. You know, maybe just breathe from one to ten and start again like that woman, friend of mine did. Whatever, whatever, you know, gets you through the night, the long night. You will hit bottom in a sense where you hit a place and you go boom, things will go boom, and you start coming up again. And as you come up, language comes in, words come in, thoughts come in, who is left in the attic among the discarded albums calling out my name to tell its story. Leave everything it says, leave the dishes in the sink. I was doing all the dishes for them, answering their phones. Leave the dishes in the sink, let the phone ring, lock the door and tell my story. Even you, I'm calling you from the addictive silence of stars.

[22:18]

You who have talked to trees and listened to stone on a hot afternoon who gave away your voice to the stream that you might know its cool message. For the clock keeps running and my words are wrapped in yellow paper. Turn your eyes toward me one last time, turn your eyes toward what is hidden in the bones beneath your shirt, where songs come from, I'm here, I'm here with you. As you stand, head pointed skyward, arms and fingers spread. I would do that sometimes like this. Feet planted apart on the ground in emptiness, in emptiness that breathes in thunderheads this summer day, in the garden blooms that twirl before the wind, in hungry tongues that long for one more song for time that thirsts endlessly for itself, I'm singing through the roots

[23:22]

deep in the soil of your being now, now. Take a sheet of white paper and write these words on it, quote, do not be afraid, this is what I am. So at that moment, at that moment, I realize you have to proclaim who you are. To say I can see through language, I can see through words, I can see through the different roles I play. And like Yang Chan and like these other adepts simply move from one to the other so easily just by understanding that process. No, no, no, no, it's not, it doesn't work quite like that. The reason I'm also bringing this up because the other day as we talked I thought there was a hunger in the room that out of these teachings that we have there's a hunger for us to get in touch with the, the poetic life.

[24:22]

And by poetic I don't mean the exaggerated life, the candy coated life, I mean the deep, the deepest aspect of ourself, the part that moves us most, most profoundly in the world. To find that place, that identity is what I think this practice is about, that the sitting practice is about. Because even as we sit and hear these various voices calling to us and watching them come and go, when, even if we go through different jhanas and states and where that whole narrative ceremony drops away and we're free of that constriction, that limitation, we can face the moment to moment death of our identities and so on without any contraction or pain. Even, even so, even then, as soon as we get up, turn away from the wall and move outside into the sunlight and the world of other people and so on, the drama starts up again.

[25:25]

The question of who am I and what am I with all of, all of you. And the what am I with all of you as we have already established very clearly is I am what I am with all of you because all of you are exactly who you are and so on, clear across the cosmos, evidently. Space expands that much more and so forth. As deeper as I go into myself, that much more does inner space open in, open out or inward. And I look for a place in which to place myself, open my hands and say, I'm here. As we get older, as we know as we get older and we look in the mirror, we play those games even when we're young. When you looked in the mirror and you really stared at yourself in the mirror and you'd watch your face change, become, I'm not talking about when you were on acid or something. We all did that too.

[26:28]

I'm talking, I mean, that was easy to see it then or the faces of your friends turning, you know, going through from babes to old crones but just watch your own face going through all these changes and, you know, it's kind of a little bit spooky that, you know, you can't grasp this intangible self. But there's a woman, a wonderful poet, she's an Australian woman who got to be a certain age in her life and had played the whole game of identity in the world as being a woman. Now, I'm sure the women in this world, in this room appreciate the fact that as a woman, there's all these other things in a, quote, so-called male-dominated society of the past, at least, that you were required to play. And she's reached a place in her life where she's finally gone through a lot of that. I don't know much about her. Her name was Fleur Adcock,

[27:29]

Fleur Adcock, she's an Australian poetess. And she goes to a place where she's alone to find herself a bit in a solitary place, apparently. So she wrote a poem about weathering and she's looking in the mirror and seeing herself and sees the face in the mirror and suddenly she understands this new kind of weathering that is happening. She's a woman maybe approaching late 50s. She writes, My face catches the wind from the snow line and flushes with a flush well, that was a metropolitan vanity wanting to look young forever to pass. I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty and only pretty enough to be seen with men who wanted to be seen with passable women. But now that I'm in love with a place that doesn't care

[28:30]

how I look or if I am happy, happy is how I look and that's all. I love that line. But now that I'm in love with a place that doesn't care how I look or if I am happy, happy is how I look and that's all. My hair will grow gray in any case, my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken and the years work all their usual changes. If my face is to be weather beaten as well, it's little enough lost for a year among lakes and fells where simply to look out of my window at the high pass makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what my soul may wear over its new complexion. Isn't that great? If my face is to be weather beaten as well,

[29:30]

it's little enough lost for a year among lakes, it's little enough lost for a year sitting on a cushion where simply to look out of my window at the high pass makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what other people say to the mirrors of the world and to what my soul may wear over its new complexion. Fleur Adcock A-D-C-O-C-K Now I actually heard this off of a record and it may have been Babcock but it sounded like Adcock and I remember that the identity that would start up came out of tears. I remember saying to myself real tears burn my cheeks and out of them shall I bloom again. We have to go through this question of identity crises and see through that game

[30:31]

but we can't just see through it intellectually that's the whole point of this talk. We have to actually go through it emotionally and we have to do it in the world itself wherever that world may be to find the, you know, we say to find the real me please stand up and raise your hand and the real you will stand up sometime and raise your hand but that real you of course will be real for a while and then another real you, another part of you, many sub-personalities, the many-faceted self will come forward because we are infinite in our ability to change but most of us sell out I don't think anybody in this room is here because they've sold out to the world I think we're here because we refuse to sell out to the world in terms of how we can be pigeonholed and I think that's one of the reasons that people come here to study the Dharma with us is that they feel that you know, the identities that we glean from the mass media

[31:31]

and from one another in our upbringing aren't adequate in fact are a definite source of anguish it's a little bit it's a little bit problematical you know, if we're a trained musician or something like that and have a profession that is also very fulfilling that's one thing one question if we're on the spiritual path and take vows and so on the whole question that evolves around that is to of course renounce, to shed the various selves to see through the games of the name that we place on ourselves and not to get caught in status questions but of course as any of us know who have studied here very long we all get caught up in our it's no longer worldly status it's the status of how we wear our robes, how we bow how we do our oriyoki the comparative mind is still at work

[32:32]

and the identities that we take on thereby in reflection of other people can still be a big problem and at the same time really choice choice meat raw meat for practice we come here and fall in love a lot of people do that and by having relationships and being sensitive to one another and becoming involved in one-on-one relationships is another way of finding our identities or who we are too often we fall into the old pattern we come here trying to break away from old patterns only to find out that we're drawn right back into the same old games have you noticed anybody I guess not and you know you get very

[33:38]

you get very prideful because we are we do have this ability to split reality into two parts and that's a marvelous accomplishment I think Reb talked about this once about how prideful human beings are because we have this ability to split up the world and to reify it and so we're a little bit proud of that you know but we carry that to the extreme of projecting our particular views and so on onto others and then reacting accordingly to whether we like it or not what comes back at us and that causes of course the suffering so we'll have a little discussion but I have to tell you this story first about how you assume you know who somebody is you know we just as I said earlier we look at somebody and right away we have all these projections we've already pigeonholed one another into separate identities this is a person that has all these characteristics

[34:38]

all of these marks and that person has all those marks or characteristics all those dharmas and that's who that person is and I can tell myself that's not true but still I notice I'm responding accordingly so I was I had this job once I've told you this story too but it was a wonderful job it was a remarkable opportunity I was keeping body and soul together different ways while I was trying to learn how to paint and also I was doing some astrology as a teacher and so on while I was taking on different jobs about 25, 22 years ago 20 years ago maybe somebody offered me a job of selling papers on the street for 2 hours every morning 5 mornings a week for $300 a month and my immediate response to this friend it happened to be somebody I had coffee with every morning he was a newspaper distributor was selling papers on the street I'm a college graduate I mean you don't sell papers on the street you know I'm somebody

[35:39]

I said do it do it, do it, do it don't say no don't get caught, do it so I said well okay and I guess it was because the Chronicle was putting on this this campaign when USA Today came out first so they were almost giving these papers away anyway he'd give me 100 papers every morning I'd go down to 4th and Heatherton in San Rafael which was a transfer point for all over Marin so I got to know everybody on the street because I'd be the one person standing there in this sea of bodies moving off and these mechanical dragons roaring these people away to the city and I got to know a lot of the street people and one of the street people all the street people would sooner or later know that Dave was an easy touch so they would say you're going to have to stop and talk to me

[36:43]

and one of them I called him actually I called him to myself Limpy it wasn't a very nice name I forget what his real name was but he limped and you had to kind of stand back from him because he gave off a very unpleasant odor and vibe but he always liked to stop and talk to me and that's how everybody decided that I was going to be and that this was my street ministry I didn't tell anybody this because people would come up and just confess everything to you one person just one person got off the bus once came straight up to me and said she left me she took the car and left me the cat and I'd say oh I'm sorry and I'd listen because I was a stranger and I was all one and he got 300 bucks a month for it

[37:45]

but anyway I began to stereotype these people they were no longer fresh and I was beginning to resent this guy and then pretty soon I'd see him coming I'd kind of look away and he'd come up and he'd start talking to me and sure enough he'd hit me up for some money and I just couldn't say hey pay up or shut up so one day I saw him coming up and I really tried to ignore him you know, limpy he always wore black and he limped and he said hey and he said hey come here and I finally turned and he said watch put out your hand because he's owed me something like 13 it wasn't a lot of money and he went up to 13 dollars and how about a buck

[38:46]

for interest don't think you know it all like that so at that moment at that moment I woke up and I thought and the phrase came to my mind and I've used it many times since who knows how the bodhisattva comes who knows how the bodhisattva comes in our life the bodhisattva is an activity that wakes us up to everybody these identities and just the way he said it he was much smarter than I gave him credit he knew the whole trip that was going on with me and he was going to teach me a lesson and he did don't think you know it all smart guy you're a bodhisattva but you can be an asshole here's a poem by that's I think vis-a-vis works by David White called The Sun and

[39:49]

the wonderful thing about his poetry is that he's talking he talks about these transition points about dropping away our old identities breaking through the crust and the shell that we have developed around ourselves and he also sits in fact he'll be coming here for the Millennium Series wonderful poet just marvelous this is called The Sun he's writing about an Irish poet named Cavanaugh I don't know if you've heard of Cavanaugh Cavanaugh was a great great great Irish poet and ended up his life it was kind of a drunken very sad story in many ways but he had fought against the usual Irish kind of nationalistic posture that the poets had taken and so he was very unpopular in his own country for a long time but after his death Cavanaugh and his later poems he writes all these later love poems trying to reclaim his lost innocence 50 years before he'd been in love with a young woman named Hilda they're called the Hilda poems

[40:51]

I think Ingin recites poetry by him yeah yeah he did Ingin down in Tassajara had a book of Cavanaugh and I was it's hard to get I've tried to get Cavanaugh's poetry it's hard to get but it's one of those of which David White writes and I'm not going to read all the poem but some of those things that I think are germane to what I'm talking about it's called The Sun This morning on the desk facing up a poem of Cavanaugh celebrating a lost love she was the sun he said and now she still lives in the fiber of his arms her warmth through all the years folding the old man's hand in hers on a Sunday Dublin morning this is the phrase sometimes reading Cavanaugh I look out at everything growing so wild and faithfully beneath the sky and wonder why we are the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our own flowering

[41:55]

sometimes reading Cavanaugh I look out at everything growing so wild and faithfully beneath the sky and wonder why we are the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our own flowering I know in the text of the heart the flower is our death and the first opening of a new life we have yet to imagine but Cavanaugh's line reminds me how I want to know the sun and how I want to flower and how I want to claim my happiness and how I want to walk through life amazed and inarticulate with thanks and how I want to know that warmth through love itself and through the sun itself there's more in the poem but that's so what's the name of the volume? the volume is called The House of Belonging we may have it here in the bookstore David, do you have your poem out at the Boards of Africa? yeah, I do, gee Martha Martha's my shield she's on me for some reason I put it in

[42:59]

but I wasn't going to read it but this, I was thinking of after I mentioned that who knows how the Bodhisattva comes I did write a poem and that is the first line who knows how the Bodhisattva comes the one who saves all beings before herself he may drive a bus she may serve you in a greasy spoon it could be you or me but not when we are trying consciously the drunkard on his knees as he wipes the dirty face of his lover with a handkerchief wet by his mouth with such tenderness with such tenderness as stuns the watcher of the scene the boy on thin ice pulling from the freezing water a schoolmate who's fallen through but also my friend, also as you sit there looking at your hands anger and grief, fear or lust not to mention despair given room, given room allowed the space to breathe like a snowflake

[44:01]

it melts before the gaze of your accepting heart this wipes the dirty face of a lover was also actually two people two street people spastic young woman named Sharon who used to come I call her spastic actually she wasn't spastic she had multiple sclerosis she was a street person I didn't know it was female persuasion at first because of the dirty clothes but absolutely fierce determination to be who she was in the face of her own personal catastrophe and she would go up to people in the line and put out her hand and here are all the people buttoned up tight, right their briefcases, everything on the bus and here she comes up to them kind of going like that once she said to me

[45:02]

you know she was as soon as she would get her SSI she'd go out and drink it and well anyway and then she had this other street person another alcoholic young guy named Mike who was younger than her they got together somehow and then one day you'd see them together and the next day she turned up with a black one day she would turn up with a black eye and you wouldn't see him and then you'd see Mike watching her from behind cars and then the next day Mike one day Mike would turn up with a black eye and she'd be watching him and then there was this day where I hadn't seen either of them for a while and she stumbles down the street and sits down in total kind of just collapses on this bench and Mike comes along and he gets down in front of her I never will forget and he says well they're going to find you dead Sharon in the street one of these mornings

[46:04]

and then they're going to take what's left of your body to a place clean it up a little bit and then lay it under a sheet on a big stainless steel table under very bright lights and an amplifier filled with young interns and faces looking down pull the sheet off of you and the pathologist would come up to her down to your pelvis and reach in and cut out your big diseased liver and hold it up and say this is what alcohol does and she looked at me she said thanks Dave you always make my day anyway I think the whole point

[47:06]

of everything I think you got the point but whatever ideas we have about people each of us here and you know anywhere else in our life about our identities and how we project the different characteristics is we play a slippery game you know and if all the world's a stage as they say then we should all be joyful players and play like the two monks who play with each other's names back and forth bandied them back and forth stole each other's territory stole the flag and drum this dependently arises with all the feelings and that drama very drama of our life is our very place to be without attachment if possible so now it's five minutes to ten I've managed to as I was hoping I could do take up the first hour and then leave some room for discussion about identity

[48:07]

if you wish how it relates very very exactly and precisely but how you feel about these questions or something that we're studying here and how it vitalizes us rather than devitalizes us and makes us kind of cold and uptight dreary people rather than happy alive warm-hearted people so I find it extremely helpful to hear that we try to see through the emptiness of our identities but it's okay to still need an identity I think that really needs to be we need to be reminded of that in this practice and I had a question about something you seemed to be about to say earlier but maybe you could

[49:08]

follow through on it a little bit more you said that there's some difficulty if a person has most satisfying work in the world and is also practicing could you say more about that? well it's just that if we work very very hard to become successful in some field I was thinking of a musician for example a professional musician who's practiced let's just take the musician and builds up an identity around that her hands are broken she can't do that anymore the whole edifice comes down like a house of cards if you haven't seen that the conditions with which you have built up this identity are dependently co-arisen and can dependently co-arise in a way that will take it all away from you that's what I meant I thought what you meant was that this

[50:09]

pianist might be nothing has happened to her hands yet and she's being a successful pianist and she's also practicing Dharma and trying to remember that even though she's wildly successful and everybody comes to her concerts that it's empty well she could see that maybe but if she doesn't sooner or later the doctor or somebody is going to knock on her door and ask her a question what are we going to do no matter how successful our life is because we've really managed somehow with luck with good karma we call it what you will to be happy in our life because we're getting everything we need to feel fulfilled vital in the midst of the world being in the world in such a way that the world comes forward and vitalizes us and you know

[51:12]

I'm going to find out that I have only so long to live or sooner or later I'm going to have to die we say what's used to being morbid about it but what do we do actually when our friends begin to die and we can't control things and pain creeps in because in the world of flux what you get you lose so what do we do about our loss what do we bloom out of our tears are we willing to do that or are we going to sell out what David White talks a lot about is how when you get the older you get the idea is to take a really low posture in the world get your insurance together and your retirement funds and so on and hope that you don't stick out so you get slapped down in some way rather than when you were young you were willing to climb the mountain willing to step out take a chance and that life is constantly saying step out, take a chance drop the thing that's

[52:13]

maybe your gift but also your limitation because our gifts are our limitations at the same time keeping us away from some other so to jump into that darkness I think of it as falling backwards in the darkness and knowing that you'll be caught you'll be cradled by the world is taking that kind of chance rather than play it safe but the tendency is as we get older I can see it in myself I want to play it safe I don't want to rock the boat but life says you got to rock the boat yeah somebody else was before you I think it was Martha I was just thinking in response to Sue's question too there's always I think an awareness even though you may be living in a beautiful house who really is the great pianist how did you get to be the great pianist did you really do it did this house really

[53:16]

all your creation I think that's where the kind of the humility comes in when you realize there's a co-arising of all the events that have been created in this particular life so you don't possess it there's some freedom there you meet people like that who've got everything it seems and they also seem to be free of attachment to it at 23 years old most people in this room would call me young but I I feel that there was a time when I started denying life's call

[54:18]

to come forward and put it all out there long, long ago probably when I was around 10 I was in a room and it's just this feeling's come up for me that like how much I'm holding back is immense and there's a force behind a dam and I'm just aware of this tendency this idea that comes up that I want to live for a while and therefore want to protect my life and be safe and protect my ego and not get psychologically destroyed

[55:19]

so it's just I don't know it's just amazing to me that time that pressure held back I feel like I want to be you know, I want to let today be my last day and just let it all be out there and I wonder if you could comment on just to encourage me what seated meditation has to do with that seated meditation has to do well I mean, you're talking about controlling our life and I'm talking about something that comes from without that that will open the floodgates in your life that you won't be in control of what opens the floodgates

[56:26]

of your life I mean, you'd like to be I'd like to be but life comes forward and I think Blanche Hartman was the one who used the phrase somebody told her life jumps suddenly you know you find yourself in quite a different identity as the person who told her that story who was in Mexico and got picked up on a drug charge and found himself overnight from being a tourist there to being in a Mexican prison and the guard said to him hey, gringo life jumps, doesn't it? so all at once life jumps and when you find that and everything's ripped off so to speak all the feeling of supporting it ripped off you're not going to like it you're going to want to run from it that's the usual tendency rather than embrace it so then seated practice Fu said once this practice helps us be able to stand when that force comes because I find

[57:28]

what you just said to be absolutely true I mean, I can't find that day or that energy or that change that is going to open up my life like that I've been searching for it for these 13 you know 23 years entirely well, don't worry just live keep living and it'll happen to you you don't have to worry about that I mean, really I mean, seriously don't take my word for it you don't have to take my word for it but seated what does seated meditation do for that? well, if we're sitting for seated meditation to build another wall you know of security around ourselves then when that wall is knocked down the seated meditation will seem like a big shucking jive act that we did and which also happens to a lot of us at some point that we you know Okamura

[58:29]

Sensei did I talk about this? Okamura Sensei mentions that that he practiced you know he was a monk for years and years at Antachi and so on with with Uchiyama Roshi as his teacher and then went to Komazawa University and graduated with their Buddhist studies you know he was a trained monk went to Massachusetts with those other two or three monks and they built up from scratch this whole temple of theirs and had no money and he worked and worked his body to the place where he couldn't sit and his whole health deteriorated and he had to go back to Japan he had no job he had no status he had no identity he had to go and live in his brother's apartment he said in Osaka for two years he couldn't even do Takahatsu on the street he said because he was too weak to do that so he had nothing and he said all at once spontaneously one day he just sat down and started to sit by himself he said for the first time I understood Zazen it wasn't any longer

[59:31]

relevant to what I wanted it was just something that now arose spontaneously and it didn't solve any of my problems but now I was sitting for the sake of just sitting just was sitting to sit and he said I suddenly understood Dogen Zenji and all my teachers for the first time until then he said oh he said I read this passage I had read this passage I forget what the sutra was about the arrogance of youth and health and he said I had had youth and health and of course that had carried me through but when my youth and health was suddenly ripped off who was I in my sitting and he was very depressed you know very he felt that he couldn't do this practice anymore he could he said I couldn't do this suddenly I realized that I no longer am doing this practice you've heard before the practice begins to do you so by sitting I think what Fu was saying too by sitting with this practice you see for a while when that time comes in your life the floodgates open and sweep you you away you might just finally sit down and count

[60:32]

from one to ten and say that's how I'm going to get through this then for the first time you'll be sitting maybe for the sake of sitting and so will I and so on so don't worry so much about it it'll happen for you life will arrange it yeah for years when I would sit I had this image that would come up being on the edge of a cliff you know like a bird with its wings down and I wanted to jump but those wings were not going to go up it was just like nope I'm going to sit right here like the edge of the tongue and I told my therapist who's a hypnotherapist once I told him this image and he said hmm he said maybe it's a curb well that that image isn't of leaping from the 100 foot pole

[61:32]

or I remember the Castaneda story about Dhamma about leaping you know in this open space and so on seems to be part of the teaching about just leaping when yes I'd like to hear that part in your poem again about listening to the creek listening to the creek I'll reset it to you after hmm Sandy the fundamental wisdom of the middle way I think we have it also in the bookstore maybe yeah yeah it's a wonderful book I Sandy the characters are extremely difficult to understand it all by yourself but and there's another book called The Emptiness by String

[62:32]

String huh String that's another good book The Emptiness but I find this Garfield book to be a wonderful text for explicating for really explaining the emptiness of that the importance that language in the conventional in a conventional world how explanations descriptions how we reify that build up a life around that and then how at the same time we have to see that we live in that as the middle way and not get stuck in it that's a tremendous practice to suddenly realize even the very things that we're describing in here just yesterday as the abbot is describing all of this we have to realize that we're just listening to more description more storytelling and not just I mean that just we can't stop with just you know we would like to stop with a just or the mere concept but we now take that and build a little home around us a little nest around us with the emptiness teachings

[63:32]

so the emptiness teachings has to also be emptied out and then the world of form you know emptied out and emptiness again is recovered in the world of form as we understand and that happens in our life this process you're talking about gets emptied out and then the form it reforms itself this is a process actually that we can learn to trust in if we can just get through the dark nights without doing ourselves or other people in you know in some way or or getting trapped in escape mechanisms alcohol or whatever yes Andrea with this discussion of identity I'm reminded of something that Wendy said to me in the practice period I did last year and it was something that Jacob Roche said about being very tough on artists who

[64:33]

wanted to do their work during a practice period that he really thought it was not a good idea and Wendy didn't say why but I've been thinking I've been thinking about that a lot you know being a painter and I've always by the way as an aside I've always felt uncomfortable when someone will ask me what it is that I do and then for me to say yes I'm an artist you know I've always felt that was a rather pretentious kind of response and also limited to who I feel I really am that it's an integrated part of a whole bunch of things you know things going back to the big bang but I was wondering if you if what you think about that about setting that work aside in terms of identity and and practice yeah for the first ten years if you're going to do

[65:34]

practice for ten years don't do it that's because that's what I did I'm just saying I'm not trying to be facetious I just mean that when I came here I brought I brought some things along you know some old paints and canvases a little bit that I was finishing up kept them in my room in the Gaitan and so on and finished them and gave them away but I was also giving up with those last paintings my identity as quote a painter even though I had not ever ever thought of myself except as a kind of Sunday painter as a hobbyist painter but I didn't dare to actually that's where but at some point I realized that the reason I had come here wasn't because I was satisfied with what I was doing in the world at large

[66:34]

in my world at large I came here because those things were not I guess fulfilling is a tricky word but were not adequate and that I had it was by abandoning at least for a while by putting aside something for a while and just allowing just following a schedule and learning to be selfless in a way that was hard is hard not trying to fulfill my own needs my direction for a while give all that trip up for a while and I brought that same question up to Reb a long time ago and he said just give it up for now and later it'll be there and you can do it again but for now he said just drop it all and that's what you're learning here and I thought that was really good and I did for years I gave it up and then look started all up again because my wife wanted one picture yes I have a question about this because what you've been talking about is identity as an artist as opposed to

[67:36]

I mean I my identity of being a filmmaker isn't the same as it was because I'm not that's not solely what I'm doing but the energy the creativity that I'm used to it's sort of just a flow for me of how my being moves in the world and how responses happen and habit and it's joyful and sometimes it's helpful so I've been looking at whether or not to sort of lock off that activity or let it slowly fall away and I'm sort of sitting in the middle of that I don't know exactly when something comes up I respond and I get great joy from it and I think having a chance to play in that way play creatively lightens my heart and you know possibly helps me in other ways and helps other people so

[68:36]

you know this idea of shutting off the light seems seems erroneous I haven't I mean I've thought about it and I've tried it and it doesn't work because you know the light comes back on in response to situations and it's just sort of a way and well you know what what pops into my mind is is that we're all in this big pot living in a sangha living in an intentional particularly intentional religious community is is like being stirred in this big pot there's that poem by Rumi right or is it Rumi that Ed used to talk about a chip you know and that that we're in this pot to give flavor to to everything else and we some of the flavor gets drained out of us so we all become part of the the stew we contribute to it that way actually so maybe that's how we contribute to the stew is how you're saying but the chickpea

[69:38]

tries to jump out of the pot and the cook knocks it back with a ladle and he says don't you try to jump out right you know you think I'm torturing you but I I'm just giving you flavor so you'll mix with the rices and spice to be the lovely vitality of a human being remember when you drank rain in the garden that was for this that's a wonderful remember when we did that that was for this and now you gotta give this back you know you gotta let's see it's a grace first sexual pleasure grace grace, sexual pleasure and then a burning fire begins and a friend has something good to eat so in some sense I think we are contributing all of our creative but we have to do it in this big stew of sangha here where sometimes it's joyful and sometimes it's not so joyful at least that's been my experience I bump I bump I find out that some of my when I think of my creative tendencies bump into what other people

[70:38]

whose creative tendencies are and then we have to create a new creative tendency create a new way of being together and that's what we're doing I think that's what we want to do here isn't it use our vitality in a way that contributes to come down off the mountain of the ego and don't spare ourselves and working for the common good in some way and I think that's what we're all trying to do to the best of our ability even if we fail in our own or other people's eyes often this is a little bit relating to what Sam was talking about about the pressure building up behind the floodgates and and I I remember several years ago I used to bike a lot and I would see that in the beginning of the day and actually throughout the whole day I would be holding back as I would bike because I thought I have to have enough energy to make it through the day and so I would never

[71:41]

fully put it out there except for a few times and then I started to see that I did that in all aspects of life and I couldn't understand like why I did that and like maybe I can't help this person because I won't have enough time for myself that same on the same line and just trying to understand what that what that fear is about what that holding back is about I don't know if you could speak to that well you know Reva said he's talked many times about how painful selfishness is even though we hold back ourselves from other people and the needs of other people again and again ultimately and not even ultimately almost immediately we feel some things not quite so healthy or comfortable in it holding back something I remember Tia came to me and said can you be the Tenzo again

[72:43]

and I thought I was all done being the Tenzo but the Tenzo had quit and I would have you know if I could have run out of the room if I could have found some kind of excuse but I just remember saying you know Tasa Hari don't hold back here give everything you got and this is why you came you know hold back so I said ok and right now I'm being asked you know will I direct the spring show you know the Buddha's birthday pageant part of me says oh man I don't want you know harder I don't know blah blah blah then I think what am I holding back for it's like that same thing I'm holding something back from some request that comes to step forward now there are times there's real reasons you have to hold back but most of the time I've discovered in my old life I'll hold back because I want to keep something in reserve for me even though I don't admit it quite that way I mean it's some activity that's going to benefit but it's really for me

[73:43]

and that's seems to be part of our condition as human beings maybe it's building this survival system somebody has their hand oh hey Nick this is maybe related to what you're saying in terms of identity I kind of find it inspiring to know that there are fish that can fly and birds that can swim but I'm also appreciating the notion that a leopard doesn't change its spots there's some feeling of tolerance and helpfulness in that kind of situation so in your own experience how what are the things that you rely on have faith in or trust in in terms of when you

[74:46]

decide what animal you are what behavior a monkey in a buddhist robe is still a monkey I don't want to be a monkey but I monkey around a lot and that's the hand you're dealt that's one of them in the holy game of poker you get more than one chance to get a different hand but that's one I'd rather be a leopard but I think I'm a kind of monkey I know that and it's okay now but it wasn't okay for a long time I made a lot of people miserable a lot of people miserable in my life because it wasn't okay I can swing from

[75:48]

branch to branch now and say that's what I do time is running out for me and that's part of it as you get older you know that your days are numbered so you're just going to be what you are because you might not be here tomorrow I'm going to enjoy being a monkey if that's what I am right now if I happen to turn into a leopard or a tiger overnight watch out but it probably won't happen he's directed it's going to be the monkey who's directing right that's the only choice well I mean I'm using that metaphor I don't want to put too fine a point on it but whatever I am I can't say who will step forward what identity will what sub-personality what nuance will come forward and exhibit itself

[76:48]

when I finally put on the director's role who knows and that's one of the reasons we should do it I should do it to find out maybe I'll get my own chair with my name on it a megaphone David W. Griffith does that answer it? yeah kind of let me say this is there there may there be a situation or a request that's made of you where you'll say a leopard can't change its spots oh of course haven't you noticed I mean I've said many times to people no it's not who I am I'm not going to do that I'm not going to do that anymore I'm not don't ask me I'm not going to be on the practice committee I said that but when I came here

[77:51]

when I came back from Tassajara I'd had enough practice committees and meetings to last my life and I said I'm not going to be on it give me a break you know now I can do it again but for a long time I could say no but years before that I wouldn't say no I'd say yes and then just exude resentment you know and so now I can say yes and then wholeheartedly give myself to it difficult as it may be yes Sue has a question actually add on to Mick's question is there some part of yourself that you think doesn't change some part of your identity that you really don't think well you remember what I started out saying a couple of days ago I said I had this revelation that I've always been here and what makes me think I won't but that there's no here or I that I could ever get hold of in any of that but that feeling that feeling that you had when you're five when you're ten when you're twenty when you're sixty I feel the same the person said

[78:51]

that I felt when I'm twenty but my feet go clump clump clump no everything else is changing but that feeling that subjective sense self sense what is that you know you can't find it I can't find what that is because as soon as I try to express it I have to express it in terms of self and other and role playing and all these words we're using but it seems to supersede that or it seems to to you know like Quicksilver you can't get a hold of it but I also said at the beginning that we have a certain stance or posture we take in the world you know and we're we kind of have a predominant one of the maybe one of the six realms maybe I'm a I'm not a I'm not an Asura I think I belong in the human realm but I'm also an animal a lot an animal greed you know greed realm that feels kind of familiar to me I'm not I'm not in the hell realm

[79:53]

for all reason but my style is more greedy and more I tend to be a fringe person I like people but I I'm kind of on the periphery I like to be on the periphery and then I can be right in the center like I am now and feel very good with it very happy but I don't want to be in the center all the time I like to get back and be anonymous they say that's an Aquarian trait I don't know that's just another identity you know I'm an Aquarian I've got another role I can play I'm not telling art, no art, art or not practicing art so that's very easy for a non-artist to say well thanks a lot but you know I also

[80:55]

somebody once said to me why don't you turn your life into a work of art and I thought God that's what Suzuki wrote you and that's what all these these remarkable human beings are their whole life is the work of art and that's the wonderful aspect of it we can turn our lives into works of art from moment to moment and we do actually we actually do did you? somebody had their hand up oh yes you did it's amazing to me the sort of how things all come together because I was wanting to ask you about the experience you had in the garden that you described in the first talk that you gave us with that sense of having been there forever are you able to say my question is really about identity and language are you able to say if that experience of your having been here forever was before thought

[81:57]

or did you have some kind of experience which you then closed with oh I think I've been here forever well the only way I can answer that is partly theoretically and part experientially theoretically is probably that all experience happens some instantaneous fragment just before you know the thought process sets in that's how the mind works but this came more as a flash and then immediately was put into almost instantaneously took the form of the expression I used I've been here forever what makes me think I'm not going to be even though subsequently I also said what is this I what is this here and what is this forever I can't find any part of that and yet and yet that's how it came but the feeling of that was kind of multidimensional it was a very totally expansive feeling

[82:59]

and absolutely knew it to be true but couldn't say it other than the way I'm saying it and it preceded it seemed to precede language it was prior to the condition of the arising of words because is it that that which preceded the arising of words that's it isn't it that we sit on our cushions and we study the Dharma that is it ever more than just a tiny flash even though it might change everything apparently for the people that live in that dimension all the time apparently I haven't met so many but I think there are go to India that's where a lot of them are they seem to live in a kind of Jhana state but that's not our practice really our practice is just to get down in a kitchen sink level and see that as perfection of wisdom

[84:01]

which is harder in a way than getting into a state where you can manifest a lighter on your hand or something by thought who's that Shree Baba these are definitely fancy psychic tricks I was respectfully referring to the experience no, [...] no I know that I understand that thank you thank you I can't answer other than the way I do and the more I talk about it the further it gets away which is another phenomenon we must have noticed anyway it's now 10.30 and we have to go sit so thank you very much

[84:43]

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