When I say, use the word zazen, sometimes I mean something wider than just our particular sitting posture and how we meditate in this sitting posture. Sometimes I just mean this particular sitting posture. There are many ways to meditate and mostly we don't give much instruction about it, except beginning instruction. How you meditate is something for you to find out yourself and also to ask about in doksan. That depends on your

[01:02]

knowing what to ask and how to ask. When I say don't think about what you're doing so much, but at the same time I say you should know what to ask, it sounds contradictory to me. I don't know how to explain that state of mind which notices, but doesn't exactly... Anyway, it's some different kind of thinking. Certainly it's not the kind of thinking which wants to explain things. That kind of thinking usually overlooks what it can't explain. You

[02:05]

want to look very closely at what you can't explain and just accept it as unexplainable, but also you try to apply it to your life, not just something you think about. Many of you have questions. Sometimes you think they're not important enough to ask, but that kind of perception is involved with, should you ask an important question? I look foolish if I ask this question. We don't need to think about ourselves in that way. Dumb questions are quite interesting. Several people have remarked in Castaneda's book,

[03:20]

he asks lots of dumb questions. That's one of the best ways. He's a good student, a good teacher. You have to regret asking the question. It wasn't a dumb question. In Beginner's Mind, there's some paragraph which I have near the end of the lecture. If you practice something, if you practice our way, you'll attain something. Then he says something like, you won't attain anything, but still something. It isn't anything, but it's still something. What is this something that you attain? The Prajñāpāramitā literature would deny it

[04:25]

more forcefully immediately. If you say something, you immediately deny it completely. Lucio, she only denied it a little bit. What is this something? That's a rather interesting question. If you read that carefully, he says we don't attain anything, I have a gaining idea, but yet he says we attain something. What is that something? What is the whole Prajñāpāramitā literature? What kind of something is that? What is the realm of the Prajñāpāramitā literature? What kind of antidote is it? What kind of reality is it? What is the reality? Someone else asked me a question yesterday or the day before. Suzuki Roshi said in a lecture,

[05:26]

I don't think it's in beginner's mind, but some lecture he said, I think something like that, to walk one mile is to forget one mile. You can figure out something about that. What does that mean? If you figure it out, it's a little too easy. Why would he bother to say it if it's only what you can figure out? So you can think to walk one mile to forget. Why don't anybody say that? That kind of wondering about it, not trying to figure it out exactly, just to walk one mile. Chikang Zenji said, he's the man who was supposedly enlightened by the sound of a tile hitting bamboo. He said in a poem, wherever he goes he leaves no footprint and is not in color

[06:34]

or sound. Same kind of statement. When we carry a tray into the Zen dojo, we don't want to be caught by that activity. I'm carrying the tray in to pick up salt and carry it back out again. That's almost an abstraction. That's what you're doing. It's nice to get the salt back to the other end of the room, but actually you have a tray in your hands. Maybe, I don't know, what it's made of, masonite or plastic or wood. So you have a tray in your hands and then you're walking and then you're bowing to somebody, you're holding the tray in front of them and

[07:38]

you're then letting them actually pick up something with their hands. Maybe it's salt, it's rather not so important what it is. It's picking up something. That's what they know, that their reality at that minute is their hands are on the salt and your reality is your weight. That's all. And you receive the salt with some dignity. And then it's just not the salt you're receiving, you're receiving something from another person. So you bow to that person, recognizing that aspect of it. And then you turn and walk out. Our activity should have a kind of purposelessness, just a position. And the more we practice in that way, the more that seeps into us. So our rules in Zen Buddhism are mostly small rules. Big rules are rather, they're nice

[08:38]

to look at, you know, nice structured rules, but they're not so easy to follow. Little rules like you step out of the door with your right foot on the right side and left foot on the left side of the door. It's actually quite easy to follow. There's no problem about how you interpret it or anything, you know. Just left foot on left side, right foot on left side. So monastic life has many such small rules instead of big rules. Yesterday, the last time, I talked about three entrances. Prana, or your vital breath, energy, and your mind essence, and bringing your consciousness under consideration.

[09:45]

And they're not three, actually three separate doors. It's more like a revolving door, three partitions. How in Zen, rather than talk so much about specific ways to meditate, maybe meditation, sitting Zazen, makes the three doors one door. But how you actually bring those three together and bring them together in all your activities in Zen, usually it's by raising some kind of question, some fundamental question which requires that you bring your consciousness under consideration, that it brings

[10:48]

the essence of mind into under consideration, and requires the focus of your energy. So that kind of question can be anything. Who is chanting? Does the dog have a buddha nature? Does India have a buddha nature? What? Or Dylan, at least. Or Dylan. No, maybe we should get Noah and Dylan. Of course Dylan, he looks more elegant, he's sitting in the middle. India and Noah, they could fold their legs at the end. Not real nature. Noah's been here the longest, he should be Shisho. Noah's pretty good at that. Oh, he is Noah. Okay, Noah can be the retired abbot.

[11:57]

Anyway, yeah, you can ask yourself that question. Does India have a state? What really is happening when you ask such a question? What actually? When we ask, who is chanting? Who is doing Zazen? Who is carrying the tray in? Just carrying the tray, just holding the stick. It's not the same kind of who as, you know, in our culture we say, you should know yourself. It's not that kind of knowing. That kind of knowing is more like, know yourself, exclamation point. Know who you are, with the idea that there's a who that you

[13:06]

can know, or that there's such a state of knowing, which once you arrive at, maybe you're soccer teacher. But the who in Zen has got a big question mark, actually. Who? I don't know. But this who is, at first, rather just a question. But it gets more and more refined. To be present, whatever you're doing, eventually it refines into a kind of own underneath everything you do. It brings together, you know, the three entries. And eventually it's not even some kind of thumb.

[14:09]

The actual event, who, what. And I don't mean absolute or relative. I'm not talking about this is our relative world, Zen is the absolute. That kind of discrimination is exactly what gets us into trouble. And we should refine our actions, too. You notice your actions,

[15:16]

the more you practice, the less, in a way, the less you're able to be disturbed, and the more you're able to be disturbed. Because you're, you know, maybe as you refine, the possible things get narrower and narrower and narrower. What kind of, a little teeny transgression or something that you feel is a transgression, disturbs you, where a few years ago you would not have noticed, even noticed that you did that. But when noticing our actions in that way, again, we don't notice them in terms of, well, this was good, or that was bad, or I feel better about that than this,

[16:18]

so of course we have that kind of feeling. But just, you can't, you know, the more you know about your life and your karma, your situation that's brought you to this moment, there's no way to undo it, or ever attract your own. So whatever you're at, whatever you do, you accept it. Well, this is what I just did. And without some kind of regret or remorse, just, you did it. That's it. So and so survives. What I just did. And maybe you think, well, next time I'll try to do better. Even that kind of idea is not necessary. Just to notice. That's the kind of person I am, this particular moment.

[17:18]

To notice like that means you have a base outside of that, that this or that activity. But your activity, we say great activity, has no purpose. So what motivates you? The springs, when you have that other base, your karma no longer has something feeding it, so slowly, without you doing anything. It dissolves itself. But to try to do good, you're kind of, it's another form of creating karma. And likewise, in our meditation experience, we have many kinds of experience. Not everyone has the same experience. It's rather interesting.

[18:27]

Many of you have some kind of very interesting vision. Some bright light. Some big, dark, black experience. Some deep sadness. From our point of view, our meditation, we don't say, how can I do better than to get that one again? Or, now, me and the ancients have something in common. Just that you still ask, who? Who has this experience? You stay with that. Such experiences are still only phenomena of our mind.

[19:39]

When we talk about light, we don't mean that. Usually, even we say moonlight means something. When we talk about light, we don't mean the light you see with your eyes, exactly, or some special light inside you. Just the ordinary light, which is actually always there, which you don't even notice. Just before you go to sleep, sometimes. Suchi Amarashi particularly likes a poem, which I don't remember exactly how it goes, as usual, but something about in the room, the moonlight, in the room where two people are sleeping.

[20:50]

Or one person, in the room where, in the room, the moonlight moves slowly across the room, and the sleepers turn and don't wake. So, in our life here, all you try to do is meet each thing, the tray you pick up, whatever you're doing, with a clear mind, then the situation is clear, usually. We meet a cloudy situation with a cloudy mind.

[21:55]

And how each thing you encounter, each actual thing you encounter, just a tray. That's Buddhist practice. How can you have that kind of clear? But our mind is always, Zen is everywhere, everywhere present, nothing special at all, but our mind is always grasping the moonlight on the waves. You can't put the moonlight on the waves, you can't. We always want to grasp it, that's good. One subject which people have said I ought to talk about is the thing about having heaters in the wintertime, and it's a very volatile and chilling subject for most of you.

[23:31]

It's been the cause of more problems here than anything else, but the first few winters we didn't have heaters at all, only some of our best students got them for wedding presents and things like that, and how can you get someone to give back a wedding present, pretty soon everyone had heaters. Which might be okay if the rooms were better ventilated, and if they were used with more care, but each time, every winter, we've said, all right, there can be some heaters, but they should be off when you're not in the room, et cetera. There's always a fair number of students that keep their heater on all the time to warm up the room so when they come it's not cold, and then they get sick, and then they keep it even warmer, and you go to visit them to hope they get well, and you can hardly keep practically sick being in the room because of kerosene fumes, and they're there.

[24:55]

It's true. And you don't want to wish them well very long because you get sick. Anyway, but I understand the problem, you know, it's quite cozy to have a heater on, and also, you know, I should say about the heat, we're not following a Japanese model by not having heat. In the, mainly, in essence, in a way we are, but actually, I think some important differences are there which make our situation more complicated, which is the, as far as I understand, you know, a Japanese person is better equipped to stand changes of temperature than we are.

[26:04]

They have an extra layer of fat in their skin, and they have an eyelid which is a little different than an eyelid supposedly developed in the ice age to protect their eyeball from the cold. So Japanese people are rather less susceptible to cold. They still get cold in Japan, of course, but it's not quite the same. Second, they're used to controlling their body temperature, at least those who still live in Japanese townhouses. Not everyone does, by a long shot, anyway, and it takes some time to learn to control your body temperature, even a little. It's actually not so difficult, but to really learn to control your body temperature requires some necessity. There's been a fair amount of research in recent years on it, and if you put a person into, I don't know, you jolt them with electric shock every time they don't, or you reward them every time they do something, they learn very quickly how to control their body temperature.

[27:09]

And also, I remember I first discussed it at the Suzuki Ocean, and it was very cold down there, and I said, oh, heck, you get warm, because you talked about, you know, you produce this heat between your thumbs, and then you spread it up your hands, and I'd say, get warm, damn it, trying to get some heat going in my thumbs, and nothing would come, right? My thumbs were actually rigid. So I asked him about it, and he said, well, he said, it has to be much colder than here, and you have to have a very powerful imagination. That's all, it's rather true. In fact, it took me about three years in Japan to get so that I could, without much effort, not heat the room I stayed in, he kept them, sort of bigger room where guests came and sally-played and things like that, with the heater going sometimes to take the edge off and sometimes to get them warm, but the room I was in, I used to, it was just colder, I had the hibachi going on.

[28:25]

I remember when Suzuki-Oshi first came to America, when he wasn't used to always turning the heat on, in the lecture, everybody was kind of cold and so-cozy in San Francisco, and somebody in the middle of the lecture stopped and said, can I turn the heat on? He said, oh, sure, go ahead, and I was sitting right in the front, in the middle, and then he mumbled, why don't you change your body temperature or something? And, you know, it just hadn't occurred to me that one could do that, but it's, actually, you know, if you're going to really practice Zen, you should be able to control your body temperature, it's not just on feet. One is that, as some of you know from your practice, often a great deal of heat is generated in the bathroom, which you, some people have, some people, the process which has gone through when the heat is produced, they hardly notice it occurs and it's over, but some people, the heat bottles up at certain points in their body and they feel like they can fry an egg in certain locations in their body.

[29:46]

And then you have to work with that problem to release that heat. Anyway, heat is produced. And also, as this recent research about controlling your body heat has shown, what someone noticed is that people who have a migraine headache always have cold hands. And if they can warm their hands themselves, their headache disappears. I don't know if that's always true, but anyway, that's what it is. Anyway, there seems to be, is it autonomic? Is that how you pronounce it? Autonomic? Anyway, it's related to control of your autonomic nervous system. And it's quite true, if you practice Zen, your feet and hands stay pretty warm. And you'll notice too that if you're in some disturbed, you're bothered by something, your hands will be colder, you know. So, to get your hands back warm, you have to stop being bothered.

[30:49]

And you learn how to, I know when I was at Koyasan in midwinter, and I played barefoot all the time, and Koyasan's quite a high mountain and quite cold. You also learn how to move along quite rapidly. So then, you know, you rest your wings. It's almost like walking on ice. You barely touch the floor. Anyway, it's also not so good to go from heated areas to cold areas on a regular basis. That's all true, you know. And if you've gone without heat for some time, where it's not, you know, freezing cold, where it's temperatures like here are not too bad, you enter air-conditioned buildings or heated buildings, and it's just, it's quite an unpleasant thing. Anyway, we don't have three years to get used to it, so it's rather difficult. You're used to living in the city or somewhere, and suddenly you're here, and it's warm for a month and a half, and then it's cold for a month and a half,

[31:59]

and you don't have anyone to take your heater away. Grounds for something. But we're going to keep three rooms, I guess, three rooms heated. You'll have a sleeping bag, you know, in your bed, so you can warm that up. But I guess the library and the office and the dining room, guest dining room will be, the study room will be heated. And you can always go there on your breaks to read or study. Is there anything else we should talk about?

[33:00]

You have any questions about anything? No. I think, um, you know what I think? You know what I think? No. It has to do with, um, being strict with yourself. If you understand our rules from that point of view, that's exactly where they come from. It's the same meaning, being strict with yourself, or rules. As, uh, there's an expression, don't add another head to your head. Rather, our way is to, not to add something, but to limit, limit our head, limit ourselves. And it's pretty difficult to notice yourself. How do your eyes see your eyes? How does your mind see your mind? And there's no way, unless you limit yourself, there's no way to notice without some limitation.

[34:08]

So, again, trying to keep yourself on some fundamental question. So, the changes that you've heard about in the book, are they significant? Uh, you don't have to discuss only things that are significant. You know it's not significant. If something happens to you, you know, let's discuss it. Right. I think it'd be interesting to hear about it. One important, you know, when we say, um, um, save all sentient beings. You know, if you, your incarnation, one reason it's all sentient beings, you know,

[35:18]

that's the point that it's some goal, which is unattainable. It's not seemingly unattainable. Uh, that point of view has been discussed often in Zen Zen. That, uh, it wouldn't, it's much, it's more important to have that kind of goal than some goal you can achieve. But from another point of view, which is nearly the same, a little different, is you shouldn't have a goal which requires you to conceive of yourself as achieving. You can think, aha, well, that's something I can do. That's not the point. So when you ask questions, one secret of how to ask questions, how to ask yourself questions, or your teacher, whatever, the same, is to ask questions for everyone. If you only ask questions for yourself, you don't actually ask very good questions, you ask very boring questions

[36:21]

about how you can practice better. It's okay, but they don't include everyone, and you don't learn very much from them. You know, the only way to learn, if you're going to be a Zen teacher, the only way to learn how to give dokusan is to go to dokusan. Some people get rather good and they think, ah, I don't need dokusan anymore, so they never learn how to give dokusan. So actually we ask questions for everyone, just as all the sutras, you know, so-and-so bears his right shoulder, he says, for all the gods and all over the world here, I ask you such-and-such questions. In that kind of spirit, we ask questions. So when something occurs to you, it doesn't just occur to you, you want to know in a more fundamental sense, not just, well, I know the solution to that, or that's not so important for me. But in some wider sense, you ask the question, well, what does it mean?

[37:23]

Maybe that was what was interesting about Castaneda's dumb questions, if he asked questions which he could write down in a book for all of us. But maybe he sacrificed his own practice in order to write them down in a book. But though we don't write them down in a book, we do ask questions for everyone. So if you have some questions, don't inhibit the question by thinking, is this an important question, a question I should ask? If you just have some questions, ask. Of yourself and of me, in some way in which we also share our practices.

[38:25]

Your practice is also not just your own self thinking about it. Yes? If we do something, we should just better ourselves and then that should be fine. I can feel that that's what we have to do if we want to do something. I think that's what we should do. But on the one hand we have to embrace that and then on the other hand we have ideas that we want to do. Yes?

[39:28]

Did you say something about great connection? You write action without purpose. Again, time goes by. Same kind of poem along the same theme as the famous old poem that the bamboo, the shadow of the bamboo sweeps the stairs like no dust at all is disturbed. How to act in that way is maybe a good idea. And the degree to which you see your actions as indulgence or you have some small action that causes some kind of guilt or feeling of an uncomfortable feeling

[40:28]

gives you some idea how you're caught by it. Even the feeling of the uncomfortable feeling you have which you don't I mean, you don't it's not just a matter of saying well I accept this action so I won't feel guilty you also accept the guilt as an action from the same point of view you don't try to exactly get rid of the guilt this guilt is also an action, an event. It gives us some idea of what we're doing. Yeah, I got it. Just pour hands on me. Okay. Can you say something more about the body control and temperature? I can see you're pointing in my direction if you're cold, you sit

[41:29]

and you warm up but if you're warm and you sit or say like it's warm in here then how do you bring your body temperature down when you're more comfortable? I can see why the point of bringing your body temperature and your heat up so you're not cold but to bring it down so you're not really you're not really warm also is it carrying okay so you're warm when you sit but when you get up and you walk outside then you become cold how do you carry the warmth with you instead of leaving it on the couch? No some more lazy Japanese monks have little tiny heaters and they stick down inside the road and it's very cozy and you can carry it with you very easily anyway we don't if you look at it

[42:30]

with that kind of spirit I don't want to be hot I don't want to be cold you don't it won't work you won't find out how to be more comfortable you know if you're hot you're just as overheated Buddha if you're cold if you're cold you're underheated Buddha I think Wong Po someplace says the cold reaches the marrow of the bone and the and the plum blossom comes out probably that's just a comment on China and Japan where the first flower that comes out in the winter is the plum blossom and it's quite white and looks rather white against the snow but if it's cold

[43:32]

it should be cold maybe some kind of flower comes out of it anyway if it's cold it should be cold and if you're hot it's hot there's no way to get around that you can't escape being hot and cold but still there's some extra heat and extra cold that we have because our state of mind is disturbed if your state of mind is disturbed often I mean activity produces heat so if you're kind of disturbed and while your hand won't be cold your body is warm so if you can lessen the activity a little bit somehow if you can notice yourself enough to notice what that activity is and it's a hot day you can slowly and then you'll stop sweating so much but we're not

[44:34]

I'm not talking about this to avoid being hot or cold it's okay to be hot and cold too but rather there is some advantage to having this kind of awareness of your body and the advantage isn't that if you're warm in the winter or cold in the summer if that was the advantage we'd just turn on a heater and you'd be warm in the winter and we'd have air conditioning in the summer but the point is not to be warm or to be cool I don't know I love when people remember people and they'll come by and they'll ask me what I do and I'll just go down to the dining room and I'm so lazy it seems like when I'm trying to do super effort

[45:35]

I just get sick or get mad at myself or mad at everybody and I'm not inspired in the winter I don't know what to do Yeah I know Milarepa just a thin cotton and it's there in the snow well I think most of that stuff in Dogen that bothers you that way you should forget about and a great deal of it comes out of the historical situation and I think a lot of that's in the Zui Monkey his disciples book and he's trying to you have to imagine the situation of the monks there who are worried about their castle or so and so or their farm over such and such where are they going to get their livelihood from and so from one point of view

[46:37]

it's quite true you don't have to worry about such things and also it's a situation in Japan where there's such a heavy emphasis on ancestral and family responsibility some monks may think that since you're practicing and not doing philosophy is your actual relationship with your other students and with your teacher and with Suzuki Roshi so ask what would Suzuki Roshi say if your mother was dying and you said hey can I leave of course he would say yes that's the level at which you have to consider we it's pretty easy to get confused by what you read

[47:37]

because practice is much more subtle than what you read so of course you can say that you can say burn the buddhas kill your parents but still at the same time you're saying that you're offering incense you can't I wouldn't get hung up on such things and also Shiodogen was in a very medieval time so called medieval time but anyway a time in which there was a great deal of social hierarchy and everything had its place and much of what he said is both to free to get out of that system but also much of what he says in the more ordinary statements is is just examples of that system his own expression of his own views of the 12th, 13th century so it can't be taken as some

[48:39]

absolute document like we try to take the bible it's true for all times and all situations it's not like that it's just a man, a very extraordinary man, one of the greatest figures in Buddhism actually working with his students probably cold in the wintertime when you see someone else's effort you're actually recognizing your own effort and you don't have to think beyond that

[49:38]

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