We're at the beginning of a session and we don't know what we face. We don't ever know quite what we face. But how we face something how we meet our pivotal attitudes, how we begin. Something which we don't know what we're doing is what I'd like to touch on this morning. By first going back again to language,

[01:05]

because it's so intimately part of our pivotal attitudes. By pivotal attitudes, I mean some secret or unknown belief that most of us have, which we are extremely loathe to give up, and in fact many of us will die rather than give it up. A kind of example is some of us believe we are invincible

[02:08]

Actually, some of us believe we're invincible, which is very depressing. You'll be depressed all the time if you believe you're invincible, because you won't get much convincing feedback, or you'll keep yourself sufficiently out of touch so that you don't have any disturbing feedback. It's important also whether these attitudes are kept in a drawer and not an operative part of your life, except in maybe a crisis, or whether they're an operative part of your life. I don't know which is worse. operative part of your life or in a drawer. Another pivotal attitude that many of us have is that we won't die. But actually, we won't die. Somehow we'll continue or find some way to continue those things which are central to

[03:34]

It's by these pivotal attitudes that we cling to life, cling to a stationary life. How do we cross this boundary? As I was speaking last night, how do you realize that which no one can possess. I was thinking about the word entrance. How do you enter? And when we look at, as I do often, language,

[05:20]

almost all the words we use, basic words we use, completely interrelate, amazingly interrelate. One of the two words I studied the most in Japan when I studied Japanese, I would say in two years of language study or three years of language study, about a third of it was spent on the words to go and to come. And to go suggests some movement. not in relationship to anything else. And to come suggests movement in relationship to something, a companion, someone you go with, someone you come to. It means also a platform or seat, something that's done together.

[06:48]

In Japan they say, you ask where someone is and they say, where is so-and-so? And they don't say, he went out. They say, he'll return. It's always specified in relationship to coming back. We don't say that. We say, He went out. He's gone. And they can't say, Come to Macy's tomorrow at two o'clock. They have to say, From this point I'll go to Macy's tomorrow at two o'clock. Because they don't imagine, they don't allow their verbs to come and go. to imagine a future in which tomorrow you can be at a place and someone can come to you.

[07:59]

Our use of the word sexually, to come, is the opposite in Japan, where they do everything together, they use to go. The idea of trance or transient are all the same word, and they are a bridge between to come and to go. Entrances both to Trans, of course, is to cross over, like yate yate. Trans is to cross over. And entrance is then to cross within or to go crossing. Entrance also is to go and also to enter.

[09:44]

And the word trance is also related to Janus, J-A-N-U-S, you know, from January, the god of doors, the god of entrances. And Janus is like Jane and Joan, and John, which means the grace of God, with the grace of God, something like that. So these words, Janice or Joan or trance, have to do with being in two worlds at once, both entering and yet in the entrance, not gone completely. Tir, tir is the root of trance, and it means to turn and to cross over, to go beyond and to thresh, from threshold to cross the threshold, or to stay in the threshold. Anyway, to go and come are movement, you know. But trance is

[11:20]

I'll have to find some way to express what I mean. Anyway, it also means to thresh, and it means a pair of oxen or an ox which treads. A pair of oxen is called a ... yeah, a team of oxen is called a trio, I believe, in Latin, and it comes from oxen treading on wheat to thresh it. So both to go and come mean to step or to tread, and trance more like to go or come but not go anywhere, to include both.

[12:59]

So, again, to go and come are a movement just from one place to another. But transient has the sense of a boundary, something you cross over, but a boundary that can be crossed over. So this word has in it the idea of a boundary. To go and come don't have the idea of a boundary in it. Trance has the idea of a boundary which you can cross. So we're talking about, in Sesshin practice, in Zen practice, a boundary which you can cross. Time is, Dogen says, Buddhism is time. But time, life and death, time ends when we die. But trance is maybe to die and yet be alive. And that story I told you about

[14:47]

Suzuki Yoshi, and driving back from Berkeley, in which I discussed with him time. And I said, Time doesn't exist. And he said, Time does exist. And I explained it more, and he said, But time exists. But for whom does time exist? Did he mean for me time exists? Or for him? Or for everyone? Or did he mean until you exist in such a way that time doesn't exist, then time exists? What is the ceasing of going and coming? The sasheen is about the ceasing of going and coming. Time comes down to mean a kind of meeting. So I was coming from Berkeley,

[16:17]

going to San Francisco with Suzuki Roshi and talking about meeting. So he was talking to me about meeting. How do he and I meet? So he said, Time doesn't exist. So again I had to meet him. Another boundary that I'd like to speak about in this sense are our clothes, what we wear. This again is a kind of boundary. And some of you don't wear enough, and some of you wear too much. And there's various ways to look at how we dress, which I'd like to discuss a little bit. It doesn't have anything to do with Buddhism, except that Buddhism works from our cultural attitude. So at what point does Buddhism touch our cultural attitude about how we dress? So I won't make an exhaustive list of

[17:46]

the way we dress, but I'll list a few things. We can dress like vanity. We can dress and not care at all. We cannot care because we are depressed, so depressed we don't care about how we dress. or we cannot care about how we dress as a kind of power. And under caring, we can dress because the clothes are beautiful, because we're involved with the physical clothes. Or we can dress to express our body or to express sexual sexuality. To address, to express sexuality outside of special circumstances is usually you're either a male or female whore, without knowing it, or you want to control people, and it's the most effective way to control people.

[19:14]

or you want to be controlled by the attention people will give you. You need some kind of attention or control all the time. We've done away with culture in the West, and so we don't have much sense of when to dress, say, to express our body or to express sexuality. It's quite a normal part of a society to dress to express your body or to express sexuality, but it's only done at certain times. To do it all the time is something neurotic or unstable. These are all under caring or vanity that I'm discussing. Another way to dress is, you know, of course you can dress to hide your body, which is the same thing. Another way to dress is to express ... I would guess what people

[20:36]

into it, or what they think they're doing, is they're expressing their subtle body, or they're expressing their subtle, or they're expressing their mind, subtle mind. And these are people who dress, the clothes aren't necessarily beautiful, and they don't dress sexually, or physically, but the tones of the colors, or feeling of the cloth is mesmerizing. This is more subtle kind of vanity. And this kind of person can wear anything, very good clothes or poor clothes, and overall effect is rather mesmerizing. Something subtle makes you want to see what kind of person they are. Okay, last is, under vanity, is neutral. You can just dress, try to dress neutrally, not to express any particular kind of thing. Now, we could look at how we dress as

[22:07]

or the need to dress as a form of weakness. We should be strong enough to be naked all the time in the cold or in the brush. But we are so hairless and vulnerable that we have to cover ourselves. But ideally we'd be able to be barefoot all the time get skin quite tough and always warm. I think some of us have this idea. The ideal would be to wear the least possible. This is a defeating, self-defeating attitude, actually. But let's say that because we're weak, you know, we must wear clothes. careless and vulnerable. So when I'm talking about weakness and strength, you know, in last night, if wearing clothes is a weakness, let's look at it. Make that weakness our strength. We could look at our clothes as our flexible fur.

[23:29]

We don't have to be so hairy. We can adjust our clothing. Now, fundamental attitude toward clothes in Buddhism is that clothes are a source of strength, are a form of strength. And you dress to in relationship to your strength, to increase your strength. American Indians do this, and Japanese culture does this. The way they wear things around their waist, and the haramaki, the stomach sweater, and the way they attach their clothes to their body, is all to develop a certain kind of strength. And until you have that kind of strength, it's rather difficult to wear Japanese clothes.

[24:37]

And I would guess if you tried to wear some traditional American Indian clothes, you would have some difficulty till you had that kind of strength which makes the clothes work. So your attitude toward clothes is different. If your view is completely naked is the strongest, you won't know how to use clothes for your strength. We also dress, of course, for health, to keep ourselves warm. And you can go too far in that direction and try to pretend that hot and cold don't exist. So you try to dress as if it was never cold, or you try to make yourself a little house, or a ventilator in the summer, the reverse.

[25:39]

I mention this, you know, only to give you a sense of how attitudes and culture affect very basic things, you know, how we dress our boundaries here. And Sashin has a great deal to do with how you take care of your boundaries, the boundary between pain, the boundary of pain. The boundary of discomfort or restlessness. The boundary of being too cold. The boundary of trying too much, not trying enough. The overcoming of boundaries is trance or samadhi. Nectar. You know, we actually shouldn't be drinking ambrosia, which is food. We should be drinking nectar. But people don't like, who worked on the translation, don't like the connection with peach nectar. I don't have that problem, because when I was a child, they didn't have peach nectar, as far as I know.

[27:14]

or any kind of drinks called nectar. But people younger than me all objected to nectar. But nectar means, ter is to cross over again, same as transient, and nek is death. To overcome death is nectar. So when we drink our bowls of water, And nek also means to attain, to come to some completion, or to know enough. It's also nek. And we have a yearning, you know, a deep, deep yearning to do things completely. And most people I know who talk about or who have committed suicide, are all people who have never done anything completely, and they yearn to do something complete. And to cross over is their only chance. And that yearning to do something complete makes them constantly dissatisfied with their life. And it is, as Dogen says, you know,

[28:44]

life or practice is one continuous mistake. So how to do something completely, and yet it's always incomplete? How to cross over in each thing you do? How to know the samadhi of life itself? It's the purpose of this satsang, in which I can't give you much guidance, because there's no way to show the way. By the way, Janice, the god of doors, is also the same root, I believe, as Yana, from Mahayana, the vehicle that crosses over, the way of knowledge. Literally, Yana is vehicle or way of knowledge.

[29:58]

So what is our vehicle, our way of crossing this boundary that includes life and death, God and ordinary world? That's beyond time. Transient is a subtle word. We use transient to mean everything's changing, but it has a wider meaning of beyond everything changing, including everything changing. Another example of interesting cultural difference Harry Roberts, some of you know who he is. He's a Yurok Indian who's trained by a rather famous... One of Kroeber's main contacts, a rather famous Yurok shaman, one of the most famous... And the people of Tencenter, the first people he's ever been able to feel he can teach.

[31:32]

He's had many young Indians who are, partly through Western anthropological literature, have a revived interest. This is something Gary Snyder predicted some years ago, that Western anthropologists would help the Indians find their own culture again. And many young Indians have come to Harry and tried to study with him. He works with them, but they want to understand the way of knowledge in five years. And Harry says, when they find out it's at least 20 years, they want to do it. And many young white people have come and studied with him, and mostly they talk too much. They go and talk to their friends or want to write an article or something, or they give up. But two things struck him at Greenbelt. The people practicing Zen knew immediately what he was talking about, and the second

[33:00]

He didn't have to repeat it, either to them or to others, because he said, you people talk to each other. So if I tell one person how to do something, everyone finds out. And we talked about many things. Rather interesting, there's a special Yurok Indian way of running and a way of using mantras and a meal verse which is very similar to our way. They say, when they're about to eat a meal, this animal or this plant gave his whole life to me in this meal. Anyway, we talked about... there are many... his way of... again, his way of talking about things. It's interesting how close most American Indian ways are similar to Buddhism, are so close to Buddhism. I don't know all of them, but all those I know well are quite close to Buddhism. So we talked about those... he knows so many things.

[34:34]

about the land and plants. He showed us how to harvest the watercress in the stagnant ponds, and which ones are poisonous, and which plants, which look just like watercress, are poisonous. So we had wonderful watercress soup the other day. And many things about Green Gulch, how deep. He used to work as a cow boy, I guess, on that ranch forty years ago. He's done many, many things. And he remembers a time when the topsoil was that much deeper at Green Gump, by various rocks which are now exposed, which he remembers, were just tip-showing. And before that, topsoil was much deeper. for redwoods to grow there, which he says there were redwoods there. And he knows many of the plants that will grow there and the wind and et cetera. We can't grow what is native there because the land is too changed. Anyway, he knows that kind of thing, and he also knows a simple thing like they were trying to... one of the sewer pipes got plugged up

[36:03]

and it was overflowing, not going into the tank or the leaching field, and it was overflowing at the entrance to the zendo, which was rather muddy and smelly. So, Lou Hartman was running a chain, you know, what do you call it? Snake. Snake into the pipe, trying to find out where it was. And Harry came up and he said, oh, you want to know where it is? Take a screwdriver and put the screwdriver in the ground and put the bone of the back of your head to it. So everyone did that. Two people did that. And they discovered exactly where the plug was by listening through the screwdriver. And they dug at that point, broke through the pipe, and there was the plug. He says nowadays plumbers have various listening devices they use, but he said, we just used a screwdriver. Anyway, he knows many things like that. But a couple of things he mentioned which I think are interesting is that, and this is also borne out in Africa, is that in Africa when

[37:34]

We've gone in, and by we I mean the Western experts, have gone into Africa and gut the Africans to clear the jungle and forest land and put in cattle. People starve because you cannot produce as much cattle per acre as you can produce as wild animals already live there. Also, the variety of plants is greater, which allows a greater variety of all kinds of things. And he says the same thing is true of the Green Gulch area. When the miners first came, there was far more meat, deer and elk, per acre than there possibly can be with cattle. And the Indians had a cultural relationship to the land, so they controlled it. All through the West, he says, and this is not just his account but many accounts, all through the West you could walk through the forest, there was not much brush, and you could walk through the forest and the trees were all limbed, you know, about walking height, because the Indians kept the trees limbed and brush-cleared by burning so the deer could increase.

[38:58]

And they had such large stores when the miners first came that for maybe nearly ten years the miners lived off these large stores of food the Indians had. Then the miners proceeded to kill all the deer very rapidly, without any way of letting them continue, and then cattle came in. What's interesting about this is we don't have any cultural relationship to the land. We only have an economic relationship. So until you can control the produce of the land economically, we take everything. But the Indians had a cultural relationship to the land, so they had more... they could maintain the deer. I suppose if we could get some way to benefit economically from deer, they would be controlled. But once the deer are wiped out, a person brings in his possessions and sells his possessions, and you can have then some control over food supply. That kind of thing is just a cultural attitude. And likewise, the Indian idea was that wherever you were belonged to you.

[40:29]

Wherever you are belongs to you. So you took care of wherever you are. So if the trail needed mending or there was some debris in the way, you did it as you went along. Everyone did it. So he says the trails for running and traveling were incredibly good shape all through the West. But we have the idea that we only take care of a certain area. This is a clear example of boundaries. I had a pretty big experience once, many years ago, when I was, I guess I'd been practicing only a few months, and I was coming, I was working in a warehouse down in San Francisco near the docks over Fourth Street and Branham, over that area. And I was coming back from having lunch. And I had a cigarette package or candy wrapper or something. And as I was walking over these railroad tracks,

[41:58]

in a kind of alley, I threw the piece of paper down on the ground and started to take a step. And my first thought was, I should have thrown it down in the warehouse where it will be cleaned up. But my attitude before that was, this is outside, you can do things outside. Inside we take care of, outside everything takes care of itself, or something like that. Anyway, I made some distinction between outside and inside. And when I threw it down, it made my distinction reverse itself, that actually outside was inside, inside was outside. inside was where I could throw something down. There's no place where you can throw something down. So I realized my own barrier between idea of outside and inside completely at that time.

[43:25]

was a rather strong experience for me. But this idea of the Hare, of the Indian, that where you are belongs to you, is maybe completely similar to Buddhism. So what I'm trying to talk about is the way attitudes play a role in or are actually some unstable thing our life is based on. That influences how we dress, how we do zazen, how we sit each period, how we eat,

[44:27]

How can you get beyond these attitudes? How can you find these attitudes in yourself and be willing to fail? Because usually we can't look at them, because to take them away means failure to us. If we're not invincible, or if we actually die, or if there's no thing to achieve. If there's nothing we can base anything on. And how to enter this boundary by trance or samadhi? Many conversations between teacher and disciple in Zen have the sense of Have you entered? And the answer is something like, entered but not gone anywhere, or standing in the doorway. No one ever says, I have entered. This idea of being at the boundary, including both,

[46:05]

So you don't push through, you know. Tir also means truculent or aggressive, and tir also means to bore or rub or to make a hole. Ezra Pound's rock drill cantos are like this. The rock drill cantos are all about grinding wheat. Allen Ginsberg's name for his house in the Sierra is Bedrock Mortar. the koan Lu used in the Shuso ceremony. Polishing a tile, rubbing a tile. Tur means to rub, or Aladdin rubbing his lamp and a genie comes out. All these are very, very similar. So, you know, the second part of that story

[47:09]

Nanaku and Baso. After, he says, why are you rubbing a tile? He says, how do you expect by doing zazen to attain enlightenment, to become a Buddha? And then Nanaku says, if you want your cart to go, do you hit the horse or the cart? This is a very profound question. If you want your zazen to go, if you want to enter, if you want to cross over, gyate, gyate, do you hit your horse or your cart? What makes you hesitate? Okay.

[48:22]

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