To taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning, everybody. That was funny. I almost fell off my seat. Did you see that? Jeez, how embarrassing. Good. What a way to start. to all the young Buddhas today. Thank you for coming. I thought of a little experiment we could try today. The older people can do this too if they want to. Let's practice with the five senses.

[01:11]

Starting with hearing. So everybody close your eyes and be quiet inside. And Meg is going to ring the bell and we're all going to hear the sound of the bell all the way through to the end. Let's do that once more. Listen very hard to the sound of the bell. Now that the bell has stopped, listen to the other sounds.

[02:29]

What other sounds can you hear? I just heard on the radio that somebody wrote a book called The Songs of Insects. And you can get this book. It has pictures of insects and a CD in it with the songs of insects. Let's practice touching.

[03:32]

So everybody find a partner next to you. Okay. And we're going to work with our partner. So one person is going to touch the other person. So the person is going to be touched should close your eyes. And the other person is going to very, very gently touch the person with the eyes closed on the forehead. Just touch your hand on the person's forehead and just leave it there. And both of you now close your eyes and feel the touch. Be very quiet. Don't say anything. Just concentrate on feeling that touch. What does it feel like to have someone's hand on your forehead or to have a hand on your forehead or to touch someone's forehead? Does it feel cool? Soft?

[04:36]

warm just feel be quiet and just feel what that feels like the touch and now the person will very gently very slowly take the hand away very gently and very slowly And then both of you keep feeling whether you can still feel something in the hand or in the forehead, even though the hand isn't there anymore. I don't say you can, but see. So what about smelling?

[05:41]

Let's practice smelling. Let's smell our own hand. Take a big sniff. See if you can smell anything on there. Maybe get your clothes and sniff your shirt. Can you smell anything on there? Take a good sniff and really, now we're laughing because it's funny that we never do this. Maybe our laughing is preventing us from actually smelling. So let's not laugh so much and just really smell. Because it's not a joke. Let's just smell. See if you smell anything. Okay, now we can stop smelling and let's be quiet inside and see if anything remains. of the smelling. So hearing, touching, smelling.

[06:51]

What else? Tasting. All right. Taste your hand. Take a good lick. What does that taste like? Maybe there's soap or something? I don't know. What does skin taste like? Or you might even taste your clothes. Is there any taste there? Cotton tastes like something maybe? Dye? Can you taste something? Now just taste your tongue. Is there a taste just in your tongue? Be very quiet and just really pay attention to tasting. Is there anything there that you taste? Yeah. So what's left? See?

[07:54]

Okay, let's all look up at the ceiling. Probably a lot of you have been in this room, but have you ever looked at the ceiling closely? Just look really closely and feel your eyes looking. and see what you see, what colors, what shapes, and what thoughts come into your mind when you look at things. When I look up there, I think of all the money we spent on those big beams, and how long it took us to raise all that money to put those beams up there. which are such a different color from the rest of the ceiling. And don't you wonder why is there a bucket hanging over there? So, those are the five senses.

[09:07]

What are they? Who can remember the five senses? What's one? Hearing. What's another one? Smelling. What's another one? Seeing. What's another one? Tasting. Are there any more? Did we leave one out? Which? Yeah. Touching. Yeah. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, Which did I leave out? Smelling. Smelling. So those are the five senses. And with these five senses, we experience a world, right? If we didn't have the five senses, what world would there be for us? No? Think about it. Now I know that

[10:09]

you're going to go outside in the garden. Right? Everybody's going to go outside in the garden. So when you go in the garden, practice the five senses. Taste things. Touch things that you see in the garden. See them. Smell them. Listen to them. Is there any sound that comes from a plant? So be quiet inside. Close your eyes. Don't just, you know, we use our eyes so much, but don't just use your eyes. Also use your taste and your hearing. And it's better to close your eyes if you want to really pay attention to hearing and tasting and touching. I mean, it's, you know, look at a tree and then put your hand on it and close your eyes and feel the tree. So... Everybody should go outside, the adults as well as the children, and use the five senses to bring the whole world alive for you.

[11:17]

And if anybody leaves out one of the senses, remind them, oh, you forgot about touching. What about smelling? What about tasting? Just don't eat the hemlock. There's a lot of hemlock out there. That one is better not to taste. But a lot of other things you can taste. Even if you don't swallow them and chew them up and eat them, tasting is not the same as eating, right? You can taste without eating. So, have fun. Okay. Thank you for coming. Take care. Thank you. There are a lot of seats up in front of you that are opening up, so if people in the back would like to come forward, please do. There's nothing better to do last night, so I was thinking about this.

[13:12]

The five senses. Something that one doesn't usually think about. And it occurred to me that in the Zen stories, which are always stories about awakening, It's actually very rare for awakening to happen in meditation. The stories almost never take place during meditation retreats. Awakening in all the Zen stories occurs with a sudden recognition in the midst of a sensual experience of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and so on. Did you ever think of that? Actually, if you look at the stories, it's true. One master was awakened when he heard the sound of a pebble striking bamboo when he was sweeping at a grave site in the cemetery.

[14:26]

Another one was awakened when he looked at a flower One was awakened when somebody suddenly blew out a light and all he could see was darkness. Lots were awakened at the sound of a voice pronouncing a word or a phrase or were awakened by a sudden shout or sometimes by the sudden stabbing pain of being hit over the head with something or knocked down. So this is kind of interesting, that awakening is not produced in the midst of deep quiet and meditation. It doesn't come in visions or states of high exaltation.

[15:32]

It comes in the middle of ordinary sense perception, with a sudden recognition of the actual experience of sense perception. And yet, we're always having sense perception all day long. And we don't seem to be particularly awakened by sense perception. Have you noticed this? We don't have these experiences when we see or hear. In fact, it's almost the opposite for us. We're so inundated and bombarded by sense experiences. that it seems to overwhelm us or dull our minds so that we get tired of sense perception. We want to run and meditate so that we can get away from it. So it's quite an interesting thing that it seems as if our practice of sense perception and the practice of the ancient Zen masters of sense perception is very different.

[16:45]

So what's the difference? I said that there are five senses and we usually think of five senses, but in traditional Buddhist psychology they say there are six senses and the sixth sense is the mind. The Buddhist analysis of sense perception is actually fairly complicated. So it starts with the recognition that there are six senses, five physical senses and one non-physical sense. But by themselves, the six senses are mute. They don't experience anything. The eye, left to its own devices, can't see anything, the ear can't hear anything, the nose can't smell anything, the tongue can't taste anything, without an object of sense datum to activate it.

[18:00]

The eye is mute, the ear is mute, but when there's a sight object or a sound, the eye becomes activated, the ear becomes activated. In Buddhist psychology they say that there are six sense organs and six sense objects and together these make one list of twelve that are called the twelve ayatanas or the twelve sense spheres. So there's eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, sights, sounds, smells, touchables, What else did I forget? Tastes and thoughts and feelings. And these 12 are called the 12 ayatanas. Now in a way, okay, that's nice, but it's kind of obvious in a way.

[19:03]

Why would you go to all the trouble of saying all that? Seems obvious enough. But if I go outside or you go outside, as the children are now outside, and we confront a tree in front of us, and we listen to the wind in its branches, and maybe because of the encouragement, we actually lick the bark of the tree and taste it. We look at its shape, its color. And we might think to ourselves, well, now I'm hearing, I'm seeing, I'm tasting this tree. Isn't that how we look at it? But that would actually not be entirely true. I would be seeing sight, object. Ear would be hearing, ear object.

[20:04]

Sensing organism that the body is would sense touch object. We would be having actually six entirely different sorts of experiences that were only possible because six entirely different sorts of sense organs were being activated by six entirely different kinds of objects. When you think about this, again, it's strikingly obvious and yet whoever thinks of this, the eye and the way the eye looks and the way the eye functions is utterly different from the ear and the way the ear looks and the way the ear functions or the nose or the organs of touch. Each one is completely different from the other. Which is why we can never see music.

[21:17]

We can only hear it. And we can never hear the color of the rainbow. We can only see it. It's why holding an apple in our hand is an utterly different experience from taking a bite out of it and chewing it and tasting it. So the senses, each is utterly different from the other. And the implications of this for our living are actually astonishing when you contemplate them. The closer you get to these sense experiences, the more obvious and marvelous it is how different they are from each other. And the more you experience that and focus on that difference, the more you begin to get the feeling of that the world that we have defined for ourselves may not be the world we're actually living in.

[22:24]

Now, it's a little bit dubious what the actual etymology of the word ayatana is, but in Buddhist dictionaries they define ayatana as ayadvada. Ayadvada, which means, ayah means arising. Something arising. The arising of something as contrasted to the passing away of it. So ayah is the arising of something. And davada means door. So the twelve ayatanas, the senses and their objects, are doorways to arising. They are the doorways to the world's arising. They are actually the sources of the creation of the world. This is not what we think. We think that the world is laying out there like a big amorphous lump, fairly rigidly, fairly intractably, which is why life is so difficult and we are so powerless.

[23:35]

The world is pretty big. It's a big, bulky world. and we are pretty vulnerable in it. But when you think of the implications of this simple teaching of the 12 ayatanas, you realize that no, that's not exactly right. The world comes to be in a dynamic relation. The word used to describe that relation is sparsha, which means contact. When there's contact between organ and object, that relation produces the world. The doors open and the world comes to be. So the world is not actually a something, a big, bulky, intractable something. The world is six kinds of experience that we are having.

[24:40]

Twelve doorways that working together suddenly open up a world in a new way every time. So the world is actually you and I, our sense organs and our relationship to objects that are just as conditioned by our sense organs as our sense organs are conditioned by them. There would not be an ear if there were not sounds. The ear is conditioned by sounds. There would not be such a thing as an eye if there were not sights. And there wouldn't be sights without the eye. In other words, the world is not, as we reflexively believe, over there, out there. And we are not outside the world, over here, over against it. We are creating the world and the world is creating us moment by moment with the activity of our 12 ayatanas.

[25:47]

We are creating the world and the world is creating us. We are expressing the world and the world is expressing us. And there's no world apart from this co-creation, this co-expression. There's just this ongoing flow of six very different sorts of intimate relationships that we are on a moment by moment basis misnaming and misinterpreting as a world. But the Buddhist analysis of perception doesn't end with the 12 ayatanas. Because even the 12 ayatanas by themselves are insufficient to produce a world. very important element missing. If there were organs and objects that match them, if there was contact, there would still not be a world without one really important element, which is consciousness.

[26:59]

The analysis goes on. Six organs, 12 ayatanas, 18 Datus. Datu means more or less realm or place, site of something. And the six added elements to the 12 ayatanas to make 18 datus are the six consciousnesses, which we know what they would be. Eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, and so on. Six consciousnesses. A particular sort of organ makes contact with a particular and matching sort of object, and a particular and matching sort of consciousness arises in the event. This experience, combined with whatever other sorts of experiences have been activated in a moment, especially mind consciousness, which may have memory, knowledge,

[28:11]

past experiences, traumas, and so forth as objects. All this arises together, this variety of experience, and we put it all into one thing, and we say, that's the world, and here I am. In actual fact, the world is a very complicated, very inward set of relationships. That's what it is. It's hard to really understand exactly what is meant in Buddhist psychology by the word consciousness. There are many discussions of it in many different schools, and it's a fascinating subject, but it's hard to understand exactly what's being referred to. The word for consciousness, or the main word, there are many words, but the main word is vijnana, which seems to mean more or less consciousness.

[29:15]

knowing or awareness or cognition. The suffix vijjana means knowing or awareness and vijj means to cut. According to Buddhist thought, consciousness is the most important and the most basic thing there is. Only It's not exactly a thing, consciousness, and it can't be separated out from something else or grasped or defined. It is fundamentally what we and the world are, one continuous consciousness. Before there's any thing, there's consciousness. Consciousness gives birth to everything, which is why Consciousness is ordinarily called vijjñāna because it's knowing that is cut.

[30:19]

Because once there's anything, it seems to be apart from consciousness. So that knowing is always knowing something. There's someone knowing something. So that the knower and the known are cut from each other. So consciousness is vijjñāna. There's a gap. At least there seems to be. So this, I just, you know, when I've thought about, first somebody sent me an email and they said, the kids are going to go outside and root around in the garden. I said, oh, let's practice with the senses. And then I was sitting around thinking, oh, the senses, hmm. And I was rooting around in some books and thinking about this. So that's what I thought. But then you might think, well, okay, that's very interesting, but so what? I could think that myself. So what? So that's nice. And so yes, we all know we have a human experience of the world.

[31:25]

But does it really tell us anything about what the world actually is? Maybe, yes, we experience the world something like the Buddhists say. They're very smart people. They thought about these things. Good. But what about the actual world? that's out there independent of us. What about that world? Aren't we getting a little bit navel-gazing to be so concerned about all this perception? And that would be a typical way that one would look at this, you know? But think about that for a minute. Think about it. What would it mean to think about a world completely independent of oneself Is that even a thinkable thought? Is that possible? If you thought about the world without you in it, how is it not a projection of your own imagination? Even though you think, okay, now I'm thinking of a world and I'm not in it, but that's your thought, right?

[32:35]

Is it possible? Is it possible? in any reasonable way to think of a world without oneself in it, without human beings in it. How could you ever get outside of your consciousness to see a world that was independent of your consciousness? And I was thinking about this. I had nothing else to do. I was going to wash my car, but it was dark. Wash your car in the dark. So I was thinking, and I thought to myself, well, maybe mathematics. Maybe in mathematics there's a world independent of human perception. Then I thought, oh, what's mathematics? Is mathematics more real than eating an apple? Well, suppose it is. Okay, let's say so. Mathematics is more real than eating an apple.

[33:37]

But where does mathematics come from? Is there mathematics? Without human consciousness? So, I'm not saying that there's no world out there independent of us. Maybe there is. Maybe there isn't. But this is the point, is that we don't really know. And nobody really knows. And it may not even be for us. Here we are. It may not even be that important to know something we do know. We do know that we are alive. We do know that we cause a great deal of harm and that we suffer a great deal of misery. And that we seem to keep doing this over and over again, constantly through the centuries without ever really understanding why.

[34:42]

So it's possible that we have been paying much too much attention to the outward objects whose existence and basic nature we can't at all be sure of. and much too little attention to the inward experiences we are having that in fact actually constitute whatever world we're really living in. We have a highly developed culture of the material world. Stand downtown in New York City and look up and you will see what a command we have over the material world. But we don't have such a developed culture when it comes to the spiritual nature of ourselves.

[35:48]

Now this is an alarming and astonishing thought. Is it actually possible that human beings have, through all these many, many, many generations, been so obsessed with the sort of self-destructive, completely wrong-headed point of view that has caused us to be pursuing exactly the opposite of what we should be pursuing? Is it possible that we have been running all these generations a million miles an hour in exactly the opposite direction from the one that we should be going in? Is that, I mean, that's, wow. Could that be so? Well, when you consider the state of the world, when you consider the policies of almost all the governments of the world, which in the governments after all are really nobody to blame there.

[36:59]

The governments are reflections of our own point of view. We all get the government that our basic collective point of view produces, right? when you consider how those governments work and what the state of the world is, it does seem that we have been for a very long time deeply mistaken in our basic approach to life. The Buddha was not a philosopher, nor was he a scientist. he was really not particularly concerned with the nature of things or with the way the world works. He saw himself fundamentally as a healer whose ultimate goal was the alleviation of human suffering. And so the Buddhist analysis of perception was established for the purpose of reorienting us in our living.

[38:05]

so that we could finally let go of our obsession with outward focus. Not because outward focus is bad and immoral, not even because too much focus on outward obsession is incorrect, but because it's destructive. We unthinkingly create a world out there at our peril and at the peril of the world itself. So let's go back to the Zen Master's awakening. If we in the world are creating each other all the time, and if the experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking, feeling are intimate, unique experiences that could only occur as the world and with the world, then to know that firsthand would be something really remarkable and wonderful.

[39:30]

Don't you think? To feel that in your acts of perception would be something really tremendous because you would no longer be alone and vulnerable. You would no longer be beleaguered by your humanness all the time feeling that you're not enough, that you need to have or be or know or experience something more. You would be instead As the Buddha said, when he was awakened in an act of sense perception looking at a star in the morning sky, you would say, how marvelous, how marvelous. All things in this moment are completely awake. The Buddha didn't say, this is great, I am awake.

[40:32]

too bad about all you other dummies. He didn't say that. He didn't feel that. He said, how marvelous, how marvelous. All things are awake with me now, and they are all beautiful and complete. When we see the world, we don't see a world of awakening. What do we see? We see our own need our own desire, our own frustration, our own fear. That's what we're reading in the newspaper every day. Our own need, desire, frustration, fear. And this is really ironic when you think about it. We have inherited a long tradition of being thoroughly convinced that there's a world out there that's very troublesome and that we're over here.

[41:37]

And exactly because we've been conditioned that way, we look out at that world and all we see is the wounded insides of our own hearts. It's astonishing. We never see anything in the world. All we see is our own wounds. On the other hand, the Zen masters, who knew for themselves that there is no world out there and there is no person in here, they saw the world as it really is, as awake, as intimate, as joyful. If you study the sayings and doings of the old Zen masters, you realize after a while it all seems the same at first, but after you kind of study it for a while, you realize how different they were each from the other. Some of them were happy-go-lucky fellows.

[42:41]

Some of them were serious and ascetic, even to the point of grimness. Some were profound, always saying deep things. Others were like holy fools. But all of them loved the world. And each of them discovered for himself just the right way to be in the world. And they all cared deeply. And that is why they follow the example of the Buddha who, after his awakening, spent 45 years until the day of his death encouraging and supporting others in their spiritual practice. So I'm not saying that we all have to be Zen masters or that we all have to be Buddhists. But I am saying that if any one of us is going to have any hope of being really happy and really sane in this brief human lifetime, and if the world we live in is going to survive in any reasonable way, then we are all of us and each of us

[44:05]

going to have to change the way we view the world and the way we live in it. We're going to have to realize that the world is our best friend. That the world is literally closer to us than we are to ourselves. Then we're going to have to understand That there is nothing to fear. There are no enemies. And ultimately there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can harm us. When enough of us see this, the world is going to be a very different place. So it was getting late.

[45:07]

I was thinking about all this, you know, last night. Once I got into it, I couldn't stop. I stayed up too late. I'm tired now, you know, confused. But I was, you know, one thing leads to another. Pretty soon there's a giant stack of books all around. I just remembered, what was that? I can't find it, you know. Google is no help. But anyway, I did find this poem with Dogen that I'll end my talk with today. He writes, I strain my ears. I raise my head and wait for the dawn breeze. How many times dreamily hurting an ox in the spring rain? Who realizes that this intention pierces heaven?

[46:13]

Just remain with rising eyebrows and blinking eyes. I strain my ears, raising my head, and wait for the dawn breeze. How many times dreamily herding an ox in the spring rain? Who realizes that this intention pierces the heavens? Just remain with rising eyebrows and blinking eyes. So I invite all of you to remain with rising eyebrows and blinking eyes, maybe 15 minutes longer Then you plan to stay at Green Gulch today and in that 15 minutes go out like the children have gone out and practice with your five senses.

[47:19]

See how it's really true, not at the moment of your enlightenment, but at every moment, that the world is your most intimate friend. That the world is protecting you and giving you love at every point in every sensual experience. Please give yourself that treat before you go home. And if you do come to feel this for yourself, try your best not to forget. Thank you. intention to leave

[48:09]

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