Good afternoon. So let's sit for a few minutes and wait for some others to write and then I'll start talking about Hueca and his missing arm. So I wanted to begin this afternoon with this picture that I showed you last week that has had a very big impact on me.

[06:09]

And I've been thinking about it a lot. And I want to talk about it with you today. So I'm going to do a little screen share to start. Oh, here it is. This is Hueca, Bodhidharma's disciple. And although somewhat stylized, you know, it's not totally obvious that he's missing an arm, but that's the story of Hueca, that he is missing his left arm. And in the later versions of that story, he's cut it off himself to show his sincerity to Bodhidharma, who's been ignoring him. He left him standing out in the snow. with tears freezing on his face, you know, trying to get Bodhidharma to teach him. Anyway, rather powerful image of the ancestors.

[07:18]

So I want to share some of the thoughts I've been having about this this picture and what perhaps it represents and, you know, beyond the obvious, you know, horror of him cutting off his arm. So last week, along with this image of Hueca and his missing arm, I received an incredibly inspiring book of drawings and a dreamlike fable about another pair of arms, a pair of arms that were missing and extraordinary story. And so I had also mentioned to you all some of the shamanic elements that show up in Buddhism, certainly throughout its history, I mean, only since the scientists have taken over our way of thinking about the world, have these shamanic understandings and truths been sort of put in the backseat, you know, like for astrologers or something like that. But I think it's important for us to recognize in ourselves, the shamanic quality of reality is pretty mysterious what's going on here, you know, magical.

[08:29]

And, you know, and then we have this dream. We overlay the mystery with this dream as though we can make everything make sense and somehow get it under our control. But it's a pretty thin veil, our dream. You know, we can snap out of it fairly quickly, particularly if there's something rather extraordinary happens. I often think of the example for myself when I was fairly young and the person I was driving with just talking away. And then all of a sudden we got hit by another car. You know, boom. I do remember. I think it was my first experience of waking up. It's like all of a sudden, whatever that chit chat was, was gone. And there was just this incredible alertness, you know, like, hello. So, you know, there are times when we wake up and then, you know, it's not so hard to go back to say, oh, everything's fine. a bumper injury or something. But, you know, sometimes we can stay a little while in that awakened space.

[09:34]

So my first reaction, as I said, to hearing about Wake up cutting off his arm was this is back, you know, back a ways in my late 20s when I first came to Zen Center. I thought it was. amazing that there could be such sincerity or such intention, such a deep resolve, you know, to end suffering. And some part of me wanted to find some sort of resolve of my own, some kind of intention that would, you know, would display my sincerity, my wish to be taught and to learn and to get some help, you know, and, you know, although we all the ancestors have all had this great resolve, as according to their narratives, their stories, to be liberated from suffering, it's a kind of suffering that's kind of hard to pin down. You know, I think suffering is a big bag of meaning. There can be all kinds of suffering and what I might call suffering for someone else's annoyance or whatever. But, you know, it's up to each of us to say, you know, what's my suffering?

[10:43]

You know, to find the source of our suffering is the essential first step in our search for liberation. You know, first noble truth, Buddha said there is suffering. which is followed by, you know, where, what, you know, how, why, who, you know, each of us as humans are trying to locate that, what is meant by that first noble truth. There is suffering. There is suffering. I don't deny that, but then it's kind of elusive. So Huayka wasn't refusing to stand out there in the cold. You know, that wasn't the suffering. That wasn't his suffering. It was unpleasant, but he didn't say that that was his suffering, nor were these tears frozen to his cheeks, wasn't his suffering. And he didn't complain about the dismemberment that he had done to his arm, you know, in order to prove to this mysterious man in the cave that he was worthy of being taught. When Hoekha finally is permitted to ask for Bodhidharma's help, he doesn't make any mention of his arm or of the cold, but instead

[11:49]

He asks about the suffering in his mind. My mind is anxious. My mind is anxious. Please pacify it. And Bodhidharma replies, bring me your mind and I will pacify it. Kweka says, although I have sought it, I cannot find it. There, Bodhidharma replies, I have pacified your mind. So this exchange has such a... importance for us in zen practice is kind of directional signal where do you look and what are we looking for in zen we call these pointers you know pointers that direct us you know dharma that directs us toward some truth or some understanding um fingers that point at the moon in this case words pointing to the mind you know this whole generation of teachers that first came to china were the students of the Lankavatara Sutra, as I've said before, and that sutra is the primary teaching of the mind only or the Yogacara school.

[12:52]

So the approach to teaching during this period of time, several generations from the arrival of Bodhidharma until the sixth ancestor, so that's six generations in China, the primacy is to the mind only teachings, you know, and that's pretty much what we're going to see through these next stories. in the transmission of light, we're going to see how this teaching of mind only of the Lankapatara Sutra is what's being passed along with the robe as proof of inheritance. So I don't know, you probably don't remember, but I read to you a bit from the bloodstream sermon the Bodhidharma gave, and this is, you know, in all of his teachings, he's pointing to the mind. You know, these teachings keep saying, don't look there, don't look out there for what you're seeking. Turn the light around. Look inwardly. Bodhidharma says everything that appears in the three realms comes from the mind. Throughout countless kalpas, which is many, many generations, without beginning, whatever you do, wherever you are, that's your real mind.

[14:02]

That's your real Buddha. This mind is the Buddha. Beyond this mind, you will never find another Buddha. You might think you can find Buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind, but such a place doesn't exist. So this story of Hueca and his teacher, and especially this beautiful painting of him, armless, really got me thinking, as I said, about what the deeper meaning might be of a missing limb, you know, of missing arms. This morning at 10 o'clock here at Green Gulch, we had a priest ordination on the outdoor patio near the Zendo, and two of our senior students received the teaching, the robe and the bowl, the eating bowl. It's such a delightful ceremony. I've certainly experienced it myself. It wasn't as delightful when I was going through it, but it's very delightful watching the new students who are...

[15:04]

you know, these new priests who are struggling to get on their robes and to figure out how to, you know, tie them and to get them over their shoulder. And then once they do that, they're asked to do lots of bowing. So, of course, everything's coming off while they're bowing. And it's sort of like watching your kids learning to tie their shoes or something. It's a very sweet feeling. And I hope they enjoy it. I don't think they enjoy it as much as we do watching them. But anyway, it was a very touching and heartfelt ceremony. this morning. So we have, some of you may know some of the students here, Valerian and Kristen Diggs are the two new priests. So very happy day. So in thinking of the robe, what made me think of that is one of the earliest stories I heard about the robe, Buddha's robe, which is the large okesa that we wear during sitting practice, is that it actually is meaningful that it only covers one arm. So when you learn to put on your robes, you put them on around your shoulders, and then you take your sleeve out and bear your right arm, leaving the left arm covered.

[16:17]

And I was told that there's a reason for that. And the reason is that the Buddha always has one side of his awareness in the ultimate truth. the inconceivability or the inexpressibility or the unknowability of this world, of this universe. It's inaccessible to us. What we might call the dark or the source. So the left arm represents that awareness, maintaining this awareness of the source, you know, and keeping it covered. Then the other side, the right side, is always uncovered in order to offer help. So you have an arm that you can offer for many people, it's their dominant arm, to the suffering world, you know, turning toward the light, reaching, extending yourself toward others. So one side is in dark and the other side is in the light. So in looking at this painting of Weka, I was reminded how Buddhist practice invites us to pay close attention to these very factors of our own experience, like our left arm and our right one.

[17:22]

especially those which are not so clearly visible, kind of like a phantom limb. Weka's left arm may be missing, but it's not forgotten. He hasn't forgotten it, and none of us who've seen the drawing or heard the story have forgotten it. That phantom limb is in some ways much more palpable than the one that you can see. So when I was thinking about this phantom limb, it brought to my mind this time, if we can actually call it time, before we all existed in this universe in a specific human form you know each of us was born right and even though it's really hard to imagine how we were actually inside a woman's womb her belly the belly of our mothers and before that we were some kind of little undifferentiated cell that just happened to unite with a sperm cell from our so-called what we call our father, this thing starts moving around and out pops this human baby.

[18:27]

I mean, it's unbelievable if you've ever watched that reproduction of the cells and how it starts to differentiate and all that. It's beyond belief. I mean, it's not really possible, but there it is. That's what happened and that's how we got here. But before that, there's a Zen question. Show me your face before your parents were born. they're kind of drawing you back into that darkness, that inconceivability, the time before not only you were born, but how about that time before your parents were born? That time that is not visible to us. It's a kind of phantom limb. And yet somehow, as we are moving, I certainly feel it myself, toward a reunion with that unknowable, inconceivable spaciousness, there's a kind of growing sense of familiarity with the possibility of that reunion being wholeness, you know, that this current limited life might even savor a reunion with the unlimited universe itself, from which we have appeared, you know, the matrix, the mother, matrix means mother, you know, and so while we live, we don't forget that something enormous and all inclusive is missing from our view, you know, the matrix.

[19:45]

the womb of our existence, the context, or what in Zen is called the unborn nature of all being. Before we became separated by notions of birth. For those of you who have read Suzuki Roshi, there's a very famous metaphor he uses of a waterfall. We're all in the river together, and then we fall over a cliff, and we're separated into droplets. We all become individual beings. droplets of water going down the face of the cliff. And at some point, we reunite again at the base. And then we flow on again as a river, you know, interesting ways of thinking about the before and after, you know, face before your mother was born, your father was born. So this search for what we fear is missing, the Buddha named the second noble truth, the truth, which is the cause of our suffering. Suffering is caused by seeking something that isn't there. We're looking for something that really isn't there.

[20:49]

And it's very frustrating to try to get a hold of something that isn't there. My grandmother used to tell this horrible little poem that I've recited a few times, and I'm going to do it again. It used to give me chills. She'd say, there was a man upon the stair, a little man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. Oh, how I wish he'd go away. So, you know, this idea that there's something missing, but we don't know what it is. And it's still there. It is. It kind of persists like a phantom limb. You know, I know there's something there. There's something missing. I'm so sure of it. You know, what can it be? So the something that we're seeking isn't really a thing at all, but it's a completion. Or it's a conjoining of that part of us with that part of us that we don't think of as part of us, that we don't include as part of us. The part of us that we call the environment or the other people or other countries or other races or other species or the sun and the moon and the stars.

[21:59]

That's not me. I don't include that. I wasn't raised to include those things as part of myself. And yet that's the missing piece. Awakening has everything to do with seeing how the outside is in and the inside is out and how a shifting perspective is what the ancestors are teaching us how to do for ourselves. To get outside the box of our limited view, to pop open that sense of we already know what's going on, we know who we are, we know where we are. You just have to look at some of these things photographs from Mars to realize you really don't know where we are. It's quite clear. There's amazing things going on out there, but how they happened and what's next, I haven't a clue. So when I was thinking about this shifting perspective, I was reminded, as I often am, of my sister, my older sister, Janice, who was...

[23:03]

given oxygen when she was she was a premature baby and they gave her oxygen and the oxygen kept her alive but it also blinded her so you know i grew up with an older sister who couldn't see and um that wasn't normal i was used to that she was about five years older than me so there was a we were riding one time in the car with our parents and my two other siblings And I don't remember anything other than I asked my sister a question. I said, I think I was about eight. I said, is it dark being blind? And she said, no, it's not dark. And I was very surprised by that. And I said, well, what's it like? And she said, well, try to imagine seeing the world with your feet. And I you might try it yourselves. I felt I do remember that as my first kind of introduction to Zen, you know, like try this perspective.

[24:12]

You know, I just read this interesting article as a little bit of a side. The visual cortex occupied with vision. That if we shut down, if the visual cortex actually shuts down, if we really was blind, if we really were dark, then the auditory would take over. And after a while, and I think this is what's true for my sister, her tactile and her auditory senses have completely taken over whatever was there of the visual because she doesn't use it. She doesn't need it. So it's being used by her fingers. Very, very acute. She can touch anything and identify it. She cooks.

[25:14]

She does all kinds of stuff just with her hands. Her body is like an eye. She's really mastered the sensory world by filling in what these other senses can do. When one is missing, these others come in, particularly if you're young when that happens. So the Buddha saw a star. He saw it, but he also knew something that he couldn't see. He couldn't see that he wasn't alone in the universe. He just knew it. wasn't outside, that he was the universe in the form of a human being, you know, as are each of us. He knew that. He couldn't see it. It's not visible to our eyes, but it is to our wisdom eye, the one that's, you know, right here. So each time that we read another story of Dharma transmission, our own minds are infused with this experience of that reunion between the light and dark sides of our existence.

[26:17]

You know, the conscious with the unconscious or the person with the universe, the known and the unknown, the mystery and the dream about the mystery. Suzuki Roshi, what Suzuki Roshi called the small mind in union with the big mind or the imputational with the dependent core rising, as they say in the Yogacara school, you know, the eyes in our feet. So Vekka's missing limb has become a much more valued image for me beyond that literal horror of him having cut off his arm. And even though the horror of self-harming hasn't changed in the least, there's also within this image a kind of metaphorical or metaphysical remembering, remembering of ways in which we all believe that something is missing, you know, a something that Bodhidharma knew, even as a young boy, was greater than the worldly jewels that his teacher had come to present to his father, if you remember that.

[27:22]

Bodhidharma's father was a king, and there were two other brothers. And the teacher, Prajnatara, came with this incredible jewel to test the boys, their understanding. And the two older boys were like, oh, yeah, that's the... That's the greatest wealth there is. That's the most wonderful, beautiful gem. And they went on and on about this, you know, this value, highly valued physical object. Bodhidharma says, you know, he's a boy at this time. This worldly jewel cannot be considered of the highest order. And among all the jewels, the jewel of truth is supreme. The luster of wisdom is supreme. The clarity of mind is supreme. And this is the jewel. the jewel of our consciousness, of our conscious awareness. And then Bodhidharma says, before heaven and earth are separated, before heaven and earth are separated, how could holy and ordinary be distinguished? How could these dualistic notions ever arise? In this realm, before heaven and earth are separated, there is not a single thing to appear, not a mote of dust that can defile, no separate thing.

[28:34]

But it is not that there is originally nothing. It's when you're empty and open and spiritually aware, wide awake and unbefuddled. Here, there is nothing to compare and never has anything accompanied it. And therefore, it is the greatest of the great. That is why it is said that the great is called inconceivable. And the inconceivable is called the true nature of reality. So these are pointers. These teachers are pointing at something that the Buddha was also pointing at, different kinds of language throughout the narrative, the Dharma narrative that's come down to us through many centuries. All of these teachers are saying the same thing. The Buddha said, my teaching, O monks, has just as the ocean, O monks, has one taste, the taste of salt. My teaching has one taste, the taste of liberation.

[29:36]

So all of these words, piles of them, mountains of them, libraries of them in many languages are all of one taste. They're all trying to help us to become free. And yeah, so we just keep listening. So later on, when Bodhidharma meets the emperor and answers... You know, with don't know, emperor says, who are you? Bodhidharma says, don't know. He's acknowledging and including the missing limb of his identity. You know, there's one part of himself, Bodhidharma, the very small part that's standing there speaking to the emperor of China. And then there's another much larger part that includes the emperor of China and China and the mountains that are surrounding them and the water and the sky and the stars and moon and the don't know. of this all-inclusive reality. So when he says don't know, that's what he doesn't know, this inconceivability, which is part of who he is, the biggest part of who he is.

[30:42]

What we don't know is so much bigger than what we know, that we know. So open and clear, Hazweka also says in response to Bodhidharma, I am always clearly aware, therefore words can't reach it. Words can't reach it. I am always clearly aware. So the next story in the transmission of light that I'm going to touch on today, a little bit of time, is entitled Sengan. In Japanese, it's Kan Shi So San. So when we chant the Buddhas and ancestors in the morning during service, the names that I'm familiar with are the ones in Japanese. So I'm also trying to learn the Chinese name. So Sengan is Chinese name of the third ancestor. So we've got Bodhidharma, right, comes to China. And then Hueca is his disciple. And now Senggan is the disciple of Hueca. So we're building the lineage.

[31:43]

This is now the third Zen ancestor. He's the second Chinese, actual Chinese, native Chinese. And he's the third ancestor from Bodhidharma of Chan. So his story begins the chapter as follows. Sengon said to Zen Master Hueca, I am riddled with sickness. Please absolve me of my sin. Sengon was said to have leprosy. That was the illness reportedly that he suffered. I'm riddled with sickness. Please absolve me of my sin. Hueca said, bring me your sin and I will absolve you. After a long pause, don't know how long, Sengon said, when I look for my sin, I cannot find it. Huayca said, I have absolved you. You should live in accord with the Buddha, the teaching and the community, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. This is very much an echo of the same exchange that Huayca had with his teacher Bodhidharma.

[32:49]

I'm looking for my mind. I can't find it there. I've settled your mind for you. I'm looking for my sin. I can't find it. There, I've absolved your sin. So this ungraspability, the ungraspability of the true nature of reality is inconceivability. Can't find it. That's right. You got it. Don't know. Not knowing is nearest. So after this response from Hueca, Sengon says to him, I can see that you're a member of the Buddhist community. So he's talking to Hueca. So Sengon's not ordained as yet. But what are the Buddha and the teaching? What's the Buddha and the Dharma? Vekas says, this mind is Buddha. This mind is the teaching. The teaching and the Buddha are not separate. This is also true of the community. Single body, triple treasure. One mind, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. And then he gives Sengon his name, meaning the light of the Sangha, the light of the community.

[33:52]

So after he studied with Hueca for a number of years, Sengon is entrusted with the robe and the teaching. And that teaching, again, being the Lankapatara Sutra, the Yogacara teaching, mind only. And then he tells him to live out in the mountains and not to teach publicly for quite a while because there's going to be trouble in town in the near future. So this is the prediction of trouble that was given to Bodhidharma before he left India by Prajnatara. I don't know if you... you don't remember that poem. I don't remember it either. But I remember reading it, that Prajnatara said to Bodhidharma, there's going to be trouble in the future. So don't stay in the South. And you know, this is interesting, because they're writing these stories, and attributing a lot of this backwards. So you can have a prediction, you can write a prediction in later, which really looks like they hit it right on the head, you know. So anyway, this is kind of one of those. Prajnatara predicts there's going to be trouble in China, So don't go to the cities. And sure enough, by the time Sengon is being entrusted with the Dharma, so Bodhidharma is long gone, there is trouble from the Hui dynasty, which began a persecution of Buddhists for many number of years.

[35:08]

So Kweka and Sengon stay up in the mountains and teach the people of the villages. They continue teaching in the countryside, and Sengon then... meets his own disciple, Daoshin, in Japanese, Daihi Doshin. And so these are all singles, you know, there's Bodhidharma, and then Huayka, and then Sengan, and he meets Daoshin. So, so far we have just these single people passing on the Dharma, you know, by just happened to meet someone in the countryside who's ripe to receive the teaching. So after many more years of teaching, Sengon is just offering. He's sitting under the tree, giving Dharma talks. You know, he's very popular. Lots of people come to listen to him. And then he dies one day while giving a Dharma talk, sitting under the tree. Seems like a rather nice way. Unlike his teacher who was executed, you know, for heresy. So Sengon has been... It long declared to be the author of a very famous poem, which is still quite well known.

[36:15]

I remember reading it long, long ago, called Faith in the Mind or Xin Xin Ming. And it's very popular set of teachings, Yogacharya teachings. And at the same time, scholars find absolutely no evidence that Seng Gan could have written this. It's just this kind of mythos side of Zen ancestry. It is part of the transmission story. And so it still belongs, this poem still belongs to him, because that's what you'll see if you read the Zen history stories, is Seng An wrote the poem, Xin Xin Ming. So it's okay. They don't know actually who wrote it. But the poem is a very intentional challenge to the rising popularity of Pure Land Buddhism, which at the same time Zen is coming into its own. There's these other kind of shortcuts to practice which are evolving in China. And mainly they have to do with a single practice so that people who work and they're farmers and, you know, the average person can't go to the monastery, give up their families and give up their homes and their livelihoods and so on.

[37:22]

That's most of us. Most of us don't do that, go off to the monastery. It's a really small number of people who've ever done that. So these practices were being offered to lay people so that they could also enter into a serious engagement with the Buddhist teaching. So one of the schools that was becoming very popular was called Pure Land Buddhism. And all you had to do was chant the name of Amida Buddha. Namo Amida Buddha, Namo Amida Buddha, Namo Amida Buddha. It's still a very popular branch of Buddhism in China and Japan. And there's also the Lotus Sutra, chanting the name of the Lotus Sutra. So these practices, single practices, like sitting was for Zen, were all kind of competing for the same population of people. So faith in the mind was basically a challenge. They're saying... Don't have faith in Amita Buddha. Have faith in your mind. Don't have faith in some external deity that you're going to wait until you're reborn in a future lifetime so that you can actually practice with your own mind.

[38:31]

Practice with your own mind now. So this faith in an external Buddha was seen as contrary to the goal of Buddhism itself. And that is to have faith in your own mind as Buddha, bringing it back home. through a direct experience of the mind of awakening, just as Shakyamuni Buddha had had. So the invitation, the competition here is between putting your faith and your attention on something outside of yourself and bringing that awareness back onto yourself. In some ways, I can see the appeal of this other kind of faith. It's really like devotional practices. So... From the Zen perspective, the mind is already perfect. There's nothing wrong with you. Just the way it is, is absolutely perfect. It's one bright pearl. It's just that we have these false views and notions that are blocking the mind's inherent perfection, you know, the clouds covering the moon. So the central message is to point directly at giving up these dualistic notions and thereby seeing the one suchness of reality as it truly is.

[39:40]

So, you know, we get these flies are kind of, We have to kind of swat away these flies, mental disturbances that come in and buzz around in our heads. I mean, we all know them very well. You know, they come along with feelings, emotionalized conceptions. So they're not just thoughts. I mean, thoughts by themselves are kind of dull. They just kind of, you know, wander around. But thoughts accompanied by feelings are not dull. They're very powerful. They're passion, you know, the passion of our human life. which is the very thing that, you know, distracts us away from the dullness, which is like, oh, you know, things are okay, the mind is inherently perfect, you know, things are fine just the way they are, and still there's room for improvement, as Suzuki Roshi said, but you start with the inherent perfection, and then you bring yourself into a realization of that, but through the practice and through remembering that that's what the teaching says, you know.

[40:42]

So among some of the Zen sayings attributed to Sangam, again, we're still on the third. This is the third ancestor from Bodhidharma. He said the supreme way is without difficulty. Just stop picking and choosing. Stop picking and choosing. Once you have no hate or love, you are empty and clear, lacking nothing. There is nothing extra. There is nothing missing. To which Kezan says, even so, Even so, even though that's true, investigate thoroughly to reach the point of ungraspability, to arrive at the realm of ungraspability. So you have to investigate thoroughly to convince yourself that you've reached the ungraspable nature of reality. That that's actually, you've come up against the wall. You've got your nose on the wall. You just can't, you just don't know. You really don't know, and you're not kidding. And yet don't become nihilistic, Khezan says.

[41:47]

It's not being like wood or stone. You should be able to, here's the exciting one, strike space and make an echo, tie lightning to make a form. So back into the Imaginarium, you can strike space and make an echo and tie lightning into a form. Piece of cake. Kaesan ends the chapter on Sangam with this verse. Essential emptiness has not inside or outside. Sin and virtue leave no traces there. Mind and Buddha are fundamentally thus. The Dharma and the Sangha are clear. So that's the missing limb. So quite happily, I finished well ahead of six o'clock. So I'd be more than welcoming of your thoughts or questions, particularly some of you who haven't, I don't know what, wanted to or felt comfortable speaking.

[43:00]

I'd be happy if you would take a chance and meet the great assembly here. Any missing limbs? Oh, there's one. Well, I've got a question about missing limbs. So it brought up a memory of being in India. It must have been 1982. I was about 17 and we were taken to see a guru and he had two missing limbs. And I remember my horror and sort of revulsion at the whole experience. And my question now is whether... the missing limbs are part of some sort of aesthetic practice, you know, some sort of aesthetic Hindu practice that would have been more familiar in that time, you know, if they were closer to those practices than we are now.

[44:09]

And the response might have meant something different. Oh, I'm sure. We have a different world view. You know, we're all infested with Western thinking. We've all been educated, right, a certain way. And you go to the doctor if you're hurt. You know, you don't go out and become a guru. You know, you get prosthetics. I mean, Westerners are doing the science of missing limbs. They're not, you know, used to actually having those be... Holy people. But I do know, I've read, I don't know if it's still true. I would imagine it is. There are a lot of yogis in India or many, I guess, other places too, which do things that cause their limbs to become quite disfigured, you know, like holding them up in the air until they kind of wither. So, you know, the Buddha also did that sort of practice initially. He was doing some severe ascetic practice. Those are ascetic practices.

[45:10]

And the theory was that if you basically reduced the needs of your body down to the barest minimum, like he didn't eat very much, he looked like a skeleton, his ribs were showing, his face was a gaunt, he fell over, if the breeze blew, he'd fall over. So he was trying to reduce his physical wants of his physical form enough to what I believe is understood to be the possibility of your soul uniting with Brahma. So if the human body is weak enough, then this part of you that is eternal can unite with the eternal cosmos. That was the theory. He basically, the Buddha said, you know, this isn't working. I'm just going to die. And he started to take food. He said, this is not the way. He'd already done a lot of meditative, what are called jhanas or the trances. He mastered those. The same thing, he said, well, it's very nice way up high there, but they all end.

[46:15]

None of them, you can't live there. You don't live in the eighth jhana. You don't live in the cosmos. You always come back here, back in India, where I got to get something to eat. So his body wasn't basically cooperating with his asceticism. So he basically gave those practices up. And that's when he sat down under the tree. to try and figure out for himself, what's missing? Why am I so unhappy? What is wrong with me? That's our question, right? What's wrong with me? What's making my unhappiness or my suffering? And so he came up with an answer to that question, which made him very happy. He was very joyful from that point on, and he taught what he had learned about his mind to... the people who came to him. So he didn't teach those practices of, you know, that was an extreme view.

[47:17]

Asceticism, he said, is an extreme view. Avoid the extremes of asceticism or of luxury and follow the middle way of, you know, enough food, enough clothing, enough of whatever you need, but not too much and not enough. So that was his approach. And I do know there are other approaches, and I mostly only read about them. So was there more you wanted to ask about the... Georgina, you're muted. I suppose that having explained that, I think that Hueke was perhaps... I mean, he's not following the middle way, isn't he? That's a fairly dramatic kind of, yeah. Yeah. You know, idiosyncratic way of, yeah.

[48:20]

Yeah. Yeah. Following the way. Yeah. Yeah, not recommended. You know, when Thich Nhat Hanh, I think you all remember, if you're about my age, when the monk put himself on fire during the Vietnam War. Yeah. And Thich Nhat Hanh knew that monk, that he was a friend of his. And when some of the younger monks did the same thing, Thich Nhat Hanh said, I don't think my friend, I understood his heart, but I don't think what happened because of him was a good teaching. That these other young monks who didn't really know what they were doing, just copied his, be like if other monks cut off their arms, you know, it's like... So you don't want to set an example for other people to follow. You have to be really careful of like, what are you showing of your sincerity? So I think we're really toned down the asceticism and the self-harming.

[49:23]

It's not on the list. It's not on the menu. Just sitting still for 40 minutes is quite grueling if you've tried it. Just do it twice, twice every morning, and you'll have enough aesthetic practice, I assure you. Okay. Bill, I think I saw you. Kelly, Bill, I think I saw you, and then you went high. Hello, Fu. Thank you. Thank you. I was riding right along with you until the last two or three minutes when you talked about looking forward and not finding it and having your face, your nose against the wall.

[50:28]

I guess maybe... I guess maybe I really am enjoying the awe that responds on a daily basis, and I'm not really pushing myself to get to that wall, which I think is probably fine. But maybe I have it wrong. I don't think you have it wrong. I think the wall is awe. It's the blue cliff, you know, the blue cliff record. You can't climb it. You can't. You know, you can't get a foothold or a handhold. And it's like, but there it is. You know, this awesomeness is what we're facing all the time. And it is ungraspable. It's the ungraspability of what you're experiencing or how it's happening or what you are, you know. I think that's the wall I had in mind. There is an uncomfortable shiftingness to it, so...

[51:33]

That's probably, I mean, I'm comfortable with that, so. Yeah, with the discomfort. Yeah, that's good. Well, that's good. Because if you really try to hold to the awe, you know, awe has two aspects. It's got aweful and awesome, right? So, you know, the aweful and the awesome are really twins, conjoined twins, as are all dualistic notions. So we have to not be surprised when it whips around. And I was like, oh, that's awful. And still it's awe, both sides. It's I'm stunned. I'm actually stunned by awful and by awesome. And still we need to find a way to move, right? You're still going to respond. We're not just going to stand there paralyzed. We have to do something, make a response as we're able.

[52:34]

I think that's what they're talking about, you know, just being free of the impact of the world. Thank you. Thank you. Lisa. Hi, Lisa. Hello. Oh, sorry. That's okay. Go ahead. You have similar names. Alicia. Sorry. Go ahead, Alicia, please. Hello, everyone. So I wanted to ask a bit about the shamanic practice. I wanted to touch on the shamanic practice as well as the reunion with the ungraspable. Yeah, I'm just wondering about how it's like a collective delusion, cultural delusion that we become... separate, that we learn the second noble truth, that there's a cause of suffering? Because I'm wondering about a different perspective, like if we were in an indigenous culture where everything is alive and there's more the shamanic practice in our daily life, would we think that we're separate?

[53:45]

Would we feel, would we have a need for the third and fourth noble truth? Like if we never felt we were separate, I'm not articulating this very well, but if you could talk about that. You are. You know, that's a nice, I mean, I wish that we could be there. You know, I think we've lost, at least I've lost my connection with Indigenous life. I don't know what Indigenous means for my history, personal history. You have to go back a few hundred years, I suppose, or a thousand years to get something Indigenous in Europe. you know, I feel like the Buddha was definitely alive at a time when there was a lot of native indigenous culture, right? And unfortunately, there was also a time of creating city-states, of armies coming in on those, you know, it's like, I don't know how many people got to live in peace for very long, right?

[54:50]

I mean, the more crowded it got, the more people tried to come in and know come into your valley or whatever uh some of that whatever it was that was giving them a healthy life was threatened you know by violence and so on so human history is kind of their pockets of peace and where i think california was one of those places actually because there was enough food the oak you know the oak the acorns and the fish and so on so there were lots of tribes living not warring with each other, but had to do with food, being ample supplies of food. So I really have great respect for, I spent some time with the Navajo, who certainly are not without suffering. They've been certainly disrupted. But their sense of place and of belonging is, I was amazingly touched and wishing for myself that I had such a thing.

[55:55]

sense of belonging on the land that they know the land and their many generations on the land you know it's it's what a gift that would be you know yeah yeah yeah thank you for bringing it to mind lisa hi lisa hi kitty Someone else's cat has visited us as well this evening. I was with you. I was with the third ancestor until he said we have to give up love. Love is grasping. Love is a source of compassion. Give that up. And where does the compassion come from if we want compassion and wisdom?

[57:02]

Yeah, I think giving up love is code for giving up attachment, not compassion. I think compassion is extended to everything and all things in ourselves and all directions without prejudice, without picking and choosing who you love and who you don't love. So... Part of the love and hate, giving up love and hate, is giving up picking and choosing who you love and who you hate. These are my special people that I love, and these are the people I don't love. I think that's what they're talking about, is the thing that we know how to do. We know how to get our little friends together, and we learned that in elementary school, and leave other people out. It's a bad feeling to be left out. And it's a bad feeling actually to leave other people out. So part of the retraining of ourselves is to be very open and clear that all inclusive, everybody's in, as my therapist used to say, when I complain about somebody in the Sangha, he'd say, some people just need a little more grace.

[58:11]

Okay. I can do that. That's grace and love from you. It's not, they need to be better. No, no, no, no, no, no. I need to be softening. I need to be more, you know, empathetic and more like curious about their suffering because I think it's suffering I'm feeling. I think so. Yeah, it's a learning I need to do. Yeah. You know, but, you know, love. in in western word as a word is really got some flaws i mean we just use it for everything right yeah it has too too many meanings i know when i was on i was on a ship uh just i happened to be on a ship when i was in high school going to a foreign exchange student going to europe on a ship it was an italian ship and all the waiters and all the everybody was italian except for us kids from california and so we go to dinner and they'd have this nice tablecloth and everything

[59:20]

And they say, oh, tonight's spaghetti. And I say, oh, I love spaghetti. They say, you don't love spaghetti. You love your mother. You love your wife. You don't love spaghetti. So, you know. Yeah. You don't love spaghetti. We need more words, you know, more nuances. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that. Okay. Can you get back on him again? You can be with him. Yeah, I'm good. Thank you. Bye. Hi, Tim. I want to confirm with you. Hello. This might be a non-Middle Path story where one of my first teachers, she told a story during retreat that she went with her husband to Japan in the 60s, and they went to a Zen temple in the winter. And They let her husband in the temple, but they wouldn't let her in.

[60:22]

She is a tough cookie. She said that she sat in the courtyard in her clothes in the snow for two days. Whoa. Two nights. And then they finally let her in. All right. And she said that they were – she didn't speak a word of Japanese and – described sitting zazen for two hours in the evening, unmoving, listening to the discourse. So she was tough. Sounds like Waka. Yeah, yeah, Ruth Denison, she was... Oh, yeah, I know Ruth Denison. Yeah, yeah, she was one of my first teachers and that middle path, I don't know. Yeah, you know, we do something similar, Tassahara. It's called Tongario, which, you know, it's no lightweight deal when you go to Tassahara to practice.

[61:29]

And it's true in Zen temples and what you're talking about, too, where the monks have to show their sincerity or their intention and that they can do this monastic practice. So we sit for five days. without any bells, without any set periods, you just sit for five days in the Zendo, waiting to receive permission to enter the practice period. Wow. Yeah, it's very long. Five days is long. It doesn't seem like a now, it's just spinning by, but boy, those five days are really long. I kind of like that. well you go to bed i mean it's not like five days without sleep you go to sleep and you you eat and you get you go to the bathroom and so on but basically you spend your time on your cushion yeah yeah yeah it's something i don't know what we're doing i sort of i try to tell stories and you know encourage people but uh there's something

[62:42]

grand. And there's also some stuff that may be just hanging over from kind of the military model. I don't know. I'm kind of curious. Interested in Chinese Chan. Chan doesn't seem to have been quite the same in their discipline as Japan. So I'm kind of interested in seeing where the lines got drawn around practices. Well, I visited the Chan Temple in Sunnyvale. yeah what'd you find very strict oh yeah ultra okay okay well there goes that detail yeah every detail email state gringles that's why i love you yeah we're pretty pretty wussy pretty chill yeah pretty chill yeah yeah right Hi, Heather.

[63:42]

How are you? Nice to see you. Nice to see you, too. I really want to thank you for bringing this book up. I'm enjoying reading it. But I want to say that my response to hearing that story about the teacher sitting in the snow is... I'm not going to do that for some man because he doesn't know that I'm a person. Please don't. You know? Yeah. Maybe that's wrong, but like the Tongario thing, I find really moving and I love that. But if it's like some arbitrary thing where he's going to leave me out and not other people, I'm not doing it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right.

[64:43]

We should refuse. And we should know and recognize what's to be dismissed, what's to be thrown away, and what's to be kept. I probably would have done it when I was in my 20s. Well, that's the thing. I'm old. I don't need that. I know. I know. And that's part of the problem is like when you're young, you really want to end the suffering. It's kind of what I was saying is that you don't even know what's wrong. You're just suffering. So standing in the snow might seem like a relief from what's going on in your head. So part of it is really locating the source of your suffering. And it's really hard because we usually look outside. It's very hard for us to start to do the exploration that needs to be done around our own thought patterns, our own conditioning, you know, all the ways that we have learned to believe things that are not true. Yes, I think that's true. So another thing I wanted to bring up was kind of how I deal with things like trust in mind.

[65:52]

and koans and these stories about somebody cutting their arm off or cutting off a child's finger. I think before I started to practice Zen, my frame of reference was these stories. That was all I had heard. And I had this idea of it as really mean. And I... knew since I was a child that I was going to practice some kind of Buddhism, but I always assumed it would be Tibetan. And then when I tried that, it didn't work for me. So I ended up trying Zen, but, you know, my sort of preconceived notion of it was you, the teacher asks you some impossible question, and then you give the wrong answer and they hit you with a stick. Like that was, you know, that was pretty much... what I got from it. So I had to sort of make my piece with koans.

[66:53]

And after some time practicing and meeting teachers, I started to realize that probably in the stories, it was assumed that the teacher was a kind person, or at least many of them were, that their reason for, you know, making some point aggressively or, you know, seemingly aggressively was to bring the student to liberation out of compassion. Maybe you could start with that base assumption. And once I started reading them from just assuming that there was this underpinning of compassion, it helped. And I started to think like the first line of of trust in mind is a good example the great way is easy for those who have no preferences and the first time i read that it was like well that's impossible um so i i started to read it as though maybe the person was laughing you know like oh it's easy it's easy if you don't have preferences you know like it's a joke and um

[68:12]

I sometimes back off of my reading of them as a joke, too, but it's a good way to unhook myself from that initial response. I can't cut off a child's finger. Or cut a cat in half. Yeah, and that's horrible. I know. I can't read that story. I refuse to get anything good from that story. I had to find a way to unhook my initial response. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I still have trouble making a joke out of the cat one. Yeah. Yeah, I'll say something about that when we get to that side of that later on history, because that's been the koan that I got stuck with for a long time. And when I was installed, did the mountain seat as abbot, you're supposed to pick a koan to talk about. And I thought, no, no, no, not that one, not that one. And of course, that's the only one I could... go to because that's the one that was just stuck in my throat. So I did, I did work through that somewhat.

[69:14]

I would be interested to hear your take that one. Yeah. Yeah. That one cuts me in half. Exactly. Exactly. Anyway. Thanks Heather. That's, I appreciate that. I don't think you're alone and having problems. No, I, a lot of people mentioned that one. Yeah. Yeah. With the, the, pulling off the eyelids and cutting off the arm. And, you know, it's kind of to be dealt with. I think one of the things that Reb said during the Lotus Sutra, because there's a lot of stuff in the Lotus Sutra that's challenging. It's like we know what we don't like because it's all included. And we really don't like that stuff about women. We don't like that stuff about mutilation. So these are things we really don't like. And now we need to address them and do our work in creating the Dharma that goes into the future. You know, what are we sending forward? We put the stick down at Zen Center quite a number of years ago. And I was trained to whack people, you know, with a big, long stick. I'm not, you know, not trying to hurt them.

[70:17]

You're hitting them on the shoulder, right? Supposed to be a kind gesture. But, boy, you miss. Sometimes you miss. And you hit them on the shoulder. You hit them on the ear. And, you know, it's sort of like, oh, no, screams. It's like, this is not something I – any of us wanted to do so we put it down yeah and we have it over the door yeah but we don't have anybody nope do not touch do not touch yeah i do know that haakon who's a very famous zen master uh i think you're right about wanting to bring you know in the most generous cases not assuming there are some people are not that well that are setting up temples but That aside, I think that the people who really were kind hearted and trying to help the students, Hakuin was one of those very famous. He brought lots of students to enlightenment, except for one. And he talked about that. There was one boy, one young man who he thought was ready.

[71:17]

And he hit him with something. And the young man went crazy and he never regained his sanity. And Hakuin said that was my biggest mistake. I was wrong. I mistimed. I didn't understand that he was that fragile. So, you know, we're messing around. I don't know messing around, but we're risking human sanity is a very precious thing. And I don't think any of us want to mess with people's mental status in any way. So that's a real caution. And we've learned a lot from therapists and so on over the years, not to be so arrogant that we can fix things that we can't fix. that really needs special care by skilled people. So anyway, thanks Heather. Thank you, so nice to see you. Nice to see you too. Alexandra. Good afternoon. Thank you, Fu.

[72:18]

So Heather, I wasn't going to say anything, but Heather's comment about hitting really brought something just so... into my presence that I needed to share that and, and glad that I sat and listened to the end of what you had to say, because it was about, so I practice in and out for. Zen and Buddhism for a number of years, I guess, since I was 30 and I'm 72. But this one particular instance when my son, my young son, he was a young adult. He was about 20 something. And I were attending a retreat and the teacher hit him in front of me. I mean, right, because I'm sitting, we're doing a retreat together. And so he went up and he got and I it couldn't do it. I mean, it made absolutely no sense to me to witness this in my son and to know as an adult that there's been a lot of trauma in all of us in so many enormous ways, whether somebody understands it or likes it or considers it the same as not.

[73:32]

And also I was raised in a Catholic school where it made no sense to me. The nuns told me that they loved God and God was love. And yet, that behavior towards children around me brought such. So, so I'm really glad that San Francisco's NZ are put down the stick. Really that it took so long and that whole mind. Yeah. saying that this makes sense or as a way of compassion right it's like people abusing their people kids and saying i'm gonna hit you and it's gonna hurt me more than you that kind of craziness yeah so anyway thank you because it thank you alexandra that brought great tears to me to remember that yeah and i i left zen for a while that was 2001 or took me away to wander back i believed in it but i right but The assault and the violence and telling me it wasn't was so much crazy-making.

[74:38]

Yeah, it is crazy-making. In fact, in Japan now, from what I understand, because one of my... I've studied tea ceremony for a number of years, and one of my tea partner's husband is one of the big teachers in Aheji. And she said the parents there are complaining about their sons being hit. And they're like... Well, they've been doing this for centuries. I said, that doesn't matter. We don't want you doing it anymore. You know, they're coming home with bruises on their shoulders and we don't want that happening. And so they've really tried to stop it. And one of the problems is, I think some of you know from maybe military experience or something, or medical school, it's very hard to get the generation that's been treated that way to stop doing it to the next generation. So, you know, putting that... stick down and getting that to stop is really got is going to take some concerted effort you know no really no this is done we're not doing this anymore yeah really no yeah so yeah well i'm thank you for telling me that and i'm i'm i'm glad to report that we have put it down thank you i'm glad you said that yeah okay well okay it's quarter after

[75:54]

Wish you all the best. I hope you're all well, staying well and looking forward to the time when we can all go outside together and have friends over. And it seems like it's getting closer all the time. I've now had my second shot. I've got another week to go. I don't know what I'm going to do. Can't decide what I'm going to do. But anyway, it's very nice that people are getting some safety and able to meet each other again. So all the best to you. Please take care. And we'll leave Hueca behind. Move on. Take care. You can say goodbye if you'd like. Turn off your, I mean, turn on your, or take off your mute. Thank you, Fu. Bye. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you, Fu. Bye. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. Good night, Fu. Take care.

[76:55]

Good night. It's daylight saving time. It's night for me. I know, I know, I know. Take good care. Me too, Lisa. Kate and Paul. Good night. Good night. Good night. Oh, look at that. Who's got that? Charlesy, that's great. I love that particular, this is not a pipe. I forget who did that. Existentialist, one of those guys. This is not a pipe. This is not a pipe. See you next week. Okay. Bye-bye.

[77:26]

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