Wow, I can't believe so many people turned out the day after New Year's. Well, thank you for coming and Happy New Year, or is it Happy Millennium? First Sunday of the something new, new beginning. When I was coming up here to sit down, I flashed back a few years, quite a few years actually, to being one of you and watching the elaborate ritual that the speaker goes through in our practice before even opening his or her mouth. To take your seat with all these robes, these yards and yards of material, is a lesson in what we call the first level of entanglement. These robes have a propensity for catching on

[01:09]

to the slightest thing that sticks up, like twigs or door knobs are especially treacherous. I can remember once going in to see one of my teachers, feeling already on edge, and as I closed the door behind me, my robe got caught in the door, and I heard this tearing sound behind me as I bowed. But clown Buddhas are necessary. This is one of these Sundays, the first Sunday of every month, it's a custom now at Green Gulch to have the children here with us. So we have a lot of you today and it's wonderful to see you. I have a story, a little story,

[02:12]

to tell you for about five minutes or so. Maybe long enough. Or too long. This is a story about dragons. Dragons are, in most cultures, it seems that there's a figure of a dragon. In the West, I mean in Europe and the Western world, dragons are often depicted as being rather, not only furious, but kind of spitting evil. And very dangerous critters. But in China, as we know, dragons are looked at as being kind of, not only a powerful image,

[03:17]

but also a spiritual image, one of transcendent power. So the dragon is looked upon a little bit differently in the Far East, traditionally, than it has been in the West. In any case, in both cases, you know what dragons look like, right? They kind of have long faces, long snouts, like alligators. And then a long tongue that comes out with fire and they breathe fire. And they have scales that go back and back, and then a tail that comes up with a big one on the end, like a stinger or something. So this story is about somebody who had heard about dragons, of course had seen many pictures of dragons, and loved the way dragons looked. And began as a little boy, or might have been a little girl, but I think the story I heard, because they were talking to me about it, was a little boy. This little boy loved to take pictures, or think of pictures,

[04:20]

or look at pictures of dragons. And as he got older, he began to carve out of little pieces of wood with a knife that somebody had given him for his birthday, these dragons. At first, they weren't so great, you know. They didn't really look like dragons, and people would kind of laugh and say, that looks more like a frog than a dragon. But he persisted, had great faith in his ability to carve a dragon. And little by little, he began to turn out some very interesting dragons. And pretty soon, not only did he turn out interesting dragons, but he began to turn out a lot of them. Little pieces of wood, any piece of wood he could get hold of. Out would come the knife, and the carving would begin. And so the dragons began to accumulate. First, they were on his dresser top, right? And pretty soon, they began to move into the other rooms of the house, and then into the closets. And pretty soon, there were dragons under his bed. And pretty soon, the whole garage outside was filled with dragons. You'd go up in the attic, or you'd go down in the basement,

[05:23]

and you would see dragons of all sizes, and shapes, and colors. So one day, a real dragon was flying overhead. You know, dragons live at the bottom of the sea. That's one place that dragons live. And this dragon had come out from the bottom of the sea, and was flying through the air. Whistling Looks down, and lo and behold, he sees this young boy carving dragons. And because dragons have this kind of super skill to see, even through walls and so on, he could see all the dragons that were carved down there. So suddenly, he swooped down, and came up to the window, and appeared at the window, and the little boy, who was carving the dragons, suddenly looked up and went, Whoa! Yeah! Because he had never seen a real dragon.

[06:24]

And in fact, he was scared out of his wits. Scared out of his wits. Do you know what he saw? What did he really see? That's what you're going to talk about today. What the real dragon looks like. It might not look just like the dragon he carved. The real dragon that turns up suddenly, and knocks on the door. It's not the Avon lady, maybe. This is a little bit like another story you've probably heard. I'll tell this one, too. You've heard the story about the elephant and the four, or is it five? Five blind men? Five. Five? Four. Four. Six. Six? Well, let's start with four. So four blind people come up to a dragon, no, come up to an elephant. Remember, how does the story go? You don't know? You don't know. You know? Well, remember, they want to understand,

[07:30]

they've never seen a real elephant either, just as the boy hasn't seen a dragon. So they're going to come up and feel the elephant and describe how the elephant, what an elephant is. So the one comes up and grabs the leg, right, and what does he say? I think it's big. It's big. It's like a what? A barrel. It's like a barrel? That's good. Maybe an elephant is just like a barrel. Another one comes up and grabs the tail of the elephant. Like a rope. Like a rope, or maybe like a snake, too. Could be. Another one comes up and feels the side of the elephant. What's that going to be like? Wall. Yeah, an elephant's just like a wall. Another one comes up, and how about his trunk? That's a hard one, just like a. Sink washer. What? A sink. A sink? Sink washer. A sink washer.

[08:31]

Sprinkler. Oh, a sprinkler. Spritzer. Spritzer, huh? Faucet. Faucet. That would be like a faucet. That's good. What else? What else, maybe? A cane. Maybe, maybe a cane. It's kind of big and it moves around, right? I always thought of a hose, big hose, like firemen had, right? Big hose. But none of them actually had described an elephant, had they? They just described... Oh, the ears, I forgot the ears. Like what? I didn't hear you. Mice. Mice. The ears are like mice? Well, that's a good one. Elephants are scared of mice, right? Mouses. Well, what do you think, guys?

[09:36]

Maybe this can be a subject for some kind of discussion with your friends and folks about what the real dragon looks like or what a real elephant is or isn't. A little philosophical for the New Year, but this is the information age, and maybe if you can't get the answer out there, you can look it up on .com or something. Elephant.com. Dragon.com. Try it. That gives me an idea, but... Maybe we can start doing our Sunday lectures with .com. Well, thank you very much. I'm going to go on talking, but I think it's time for the kids to go out and play in the sun or, I don't know, maybe discuss things

[10:37]

and have a philosophical discussion about the meaning of life. Thank you very much for coming. I haven't seen you since last year. So long. That's a great hat. Before I go on, I want to say one more thing. That's that for the past almost a full week, we've had the honor of hosting about 40 or 50 people here

[11:44]

who have come and volunteered to take part in a New Year's end-of-year program joining us to clean up, repair, work period at Green Gulch, and it's something we've tried a couple of years, but this year it seemed to go especially well. And for all of those people who are still here, some have left, but many are here yet, I want to say on behalf of everybody, thank you so much for your labor, for your practice. I've never seen a New Year so quiet, actually. We had a wonderful New Year's here. It was very quiet, sitting and working together, very harmonious. It's very inspiring that when we say Zen Center, we realize that the center is everybody, is the center of the Zen Center. And without all of you, each and every one of you, there is no such thing called Zen Center.

[12:45]

So thank you very much. I suppose we're sick to death of talking about and hearing about the so-called millennium, an arbitrary division in time based on an somewhat arbitrary calendar. But it is interesting that we celebrate New Year's at this particular time, and have for quite a while. By this particular time, I mean in the dark of the year. And that seems fitting. The spring of the year, when day and night are exactly equal, the time of the vernal equinox, zero degrees Aries, time is marked from that point that comes around every year. That has also been the beginning of a year, and that seems also a significant place to start counting the solar year.

[13:55]

But there's something about, isn't there, something about the dark of the year of going into the long night, and then the slow return of the light, the slow return of warmth, the promise of spring, the promise of a new beginning, and so on. That seems, psychologically at least, to be a good starting point. Time to make new promises, vows, resolutions, a new beginning, to clean the slate, as it were, of the past. So we clean up our act at the end of the year, and that's what we were doing here. It's a custom in many countries to do that. Japan is one. At the end of the year, we clean up our act and start to try to clean up our debts, start with zero, and the same kind of applies, I would say, to our relationship with one another in the world. So one of the, I think one of the words that occurred to me,

[15:02]

concepts that occurred to me around this time of the year is the question of what faith is. People talk about faith a lot, and ask about faith, and I get that question in discussions a lot from folks who are practicing what I think about faith, how that works in our practice here, that is to say in the Buddhist practice, and in particular the Zen Buddhist practice, of what faith is, and how to renew faith. We use faith in many ways. Faith applies to loyalty, faith to our partners, faith in some concept or ideal about the world. We have faith in our jobs, and faith in the future, and so on. So faith has a lot of different connotations and shadings, I think,

[16:08]

but in our practice, faith is not, we talk about blind faith, we also say people, we have to just have kind of accept something blindly and not start from zero, and just hope, and believe in something. And there's a truth in that, but actually the word faith in Buddhist practice translates as conviction. In the early Buddhist practice, faith was called the first faculty, the first power that we developed without faith, without conviction. And conviction in what? First of all, conviction in somebody who's telling us what we consider to be the true, what we might say, conviction that the teacher is telling us the truth.

[17:10]

Some conviction about that. And conviction that whatever is being taught has some validity. That kind of root of conviction. But it is conviction that is based on a teaching that says, don't take this on blind faith, take this on the practice that is based on the experience. And what is the experience? The experience in early Buddhism is that we are responsible, each individual, for the consequences of our acts, which we call karma. You've heard that word, I think we're familiar with karma. And that by studying karma, which is the result of our mindsets, which comes out of the intention that we project on the world, and then react to the force of those projections, that the karma that we have accumulated in at least this lifetime, and in the model of the early Buddhist teachings in many, many lifetimes,

[18:14]

over many lifetimes, is being reborn again and again, that we begin to pay some attention to our actions in the world, and that those actions are the result of a mindset, of the way we project our ideas and our views onto experience, and react to the force of those. And usually, because the world is, as we have learned or learn, is impermanent, that all things are constantly in flux and change, that our views often bounce back to us in a sense of our own resistance to the things that change in life. And so the karma that we study, and the karma that we begin to look at, requires that we start someplace. So we say we have faith in the three treasures, in the triple jewel. We have faith in the fact of the Buddha.

[19:15]

And what is the Buddha, you see? Well, in time, the faith in the Buddha is the faith that we already have inherently goodness in us, a seed of goodness. It is our birthright to have that, to be that. That there's a spark, that our life, in short, is workable. That's a simple, maybe even simplistic definition of faith in Buddha, but that's a starting point. And that the faith in our own inherent, or the goodness with which we are born, the possibility of openness to the experience in the world, is a faith in a path, and a faith in a direction that we can take. That we're not putting our energy or faith into some other power in some other place. In Buddhism, there isn't a god in which we have faith. The faith comes back to a practice that there's a path by which we can take,

[20:19]

and which will give us the answers to our problems. So we take faith in what's called the Dharma, the Buddha Dharma. And the faith in the Buddha Dharma is that we don't practice alone in the world, we practice with all things, all beings, everything else, practices together in a great interdependent whole, in a universal whole. And that's the Sangha. That's the triple treasure. In other words, each one of us is unique in the sense that each one of us has a vision of the world. Or we could say the universe has a vision of itself as each one of us uniquely, that we work out. But we can't work that out independently, separately from everything else. There's nothing that is separate from anything else and everything else. So we begin to realize that this interdependent relationship, this path that we take, demands a certain discipline. And so we begin to apply ourselves to some practice.

[21:23]

What brought you here today, you see? What brings us together? There's a dynamic force in the universe that we can call Buddha or Buddha mind that brings us together to open up these questions about how do we overcome our negativity, those savage qualities in us that have brought so much suffering. If not great suffering, at least dis-ease or anxiety or stress in our life. We come to this practice because we have a sense of stress, of anxiety, of dissatisfaction. And so we hear about something called, we have to recognize first of all that that's true in our life. That there's something not quite satisfying about the way I live. That no matter how much progress I make, how many things I have, how many relationships I make that seem successful, they all change.

[22:26]

And at the very least, you're going to get sick and die at some time. What are we going to do about that? When all the things that we get, we lose eventually. How do we finally come to that point? Is there a way of really meeting our life in the face of the fact that everything changes? The person I was last week, the person I was even a few minutes ago, let alone the person I was when I was a child, is not one person. It's constant, constant change in our personal identity and in our universal identity. So what kind of teaching do we take up to deal with that? So the Four Noble Truths is one. That there is in life, in this conditioned existence, dissatisfaction, anxiety, stress, fear, a sense of isolation.

[23:29]

So we begin to have some faith that not only is this the truth, we have to admit to ourselves that first of all, this is so. And we have to admit that we are the ones that are responsible for this being so, rather than finally saying it's because of, and naming some aspect of phenomena. We turn it back to ourselves and say, the suffering begins here. So the practice begins to look inward. What is the cause of all of this suffering that I admit? Where does that begin? I can finally blame the government. I can finally blame this or that. But in the end, I have to turn it back and look at myself. The Second Noble Truth is all dissatisfaction starts with craving. The desire to hang on to some aspect of a world that's in flux and cannot be held on to. I have to admit that that's true. I have to have faith in that fact.

[24:33]

I have to have conviction to see that that is so. Enough conviction to at least sit down and practice with it. Come to a place where I'm dumb enough to give up everything and sit down and look at a wall, for example. To watch, to sit down and simply fold my hands together and stare at a wall and notice that everything changes, not even the thoughts and the feelings that I call me have any permanency whatsoever, are constantly in change. And there's a way out of this. This is called becoming, constantly becoming something new, grasping on some new aspect, some new aspect of phenomena that will arrange the world for me in such a manner that it becomes more sufferable, more enjoyable, happy. By abandoning that particular mindset, by finally surrendering to the way things are in that sense,

[25:34]

is the next step, having faith that that is possible. But this is very difficult for us to do. It's very difficult for us as human beings who have been conditioned by our society, by whatever society we were born into, not to think of ourselves in those terms as absolutes. I am Daigon. That's a Buddhist name. I'm a Buddhist. I'm an Aquarian. I'm an American. I'm a male. I'm a this. I'm a that. And see that those are all conventional aspects. Those are all conventional ideas that are absolutely necessary, but in fact are constantly changing, and that I'm a man, for example, and not a woman. That's true, those dualities. But that is not the absolute truth. That's a relative truth, that things occur as dualities, as pairs. I have to have faith. I have to conviction that.

[26:39]

And when I begin to see that that is so, I get some inspiration from that, a little bit of inspiration to go on to the next step, that it's possible to drop those aspects or those ideas I have about myself and the world whereby I can perhaps take a step forward into the unknown. What is the unknown? Is there a way to step into our life without assurances? That things are going to be okay, to take that step. I knew a woman who told me that not recently that she went through this incredible crisis in her life. She lost everything, all the beliefs, all the meaning that life had, family, job, education, all the things that she had worked for, all the things that had been conditioned in her life.

[27:42]

Suddenly lost all her savor. Her health was okay. She had her health, she had her life and nothing else. And she decided all she could do to keep going is to count from one to ten and start again. And she said to me that as I began to count from one to ten and just start over and over and over, I noticed something very peculiar. I noticed that everything just kept going on, that I got hungry, that I had to go to the bathroom, that when I walked outside the sun shone on me just the same as when I was happy, that the rain fell on me, that nothing had actually changed except my ideas about what the world is and who I am in it. That is what was changing. And all at once, she said, I felt a certain release, a certain desire, something went ping. I could step back into life a little bit again. Things began to pick up for me.

[28:45]

But now, she said, I began to see things in a different light. I began to see that although everything is undependable in the way I thought, she used to think that everything, she could depend on certain things, that the life didn't have to be undependable. Life did not have to be secure. She could step out into open space and that there was suddenly a new release. And she said, I got a tremendous desire again, persistence to just open up my heart, my life, the door of my life she used, open up the door of my life, and let a new cat in, let a new person in, let a new way of being in. She had faith in herself. She had faith in life. Her faith was self-generated out of the experience that she found herself. She gave herself enough space, 10 breaths, to start over and over and let the life force, if we want to call it that,

[29:50]

the Buddha Dharma, if we want to call it that, the divine event, if we wanted to call it that, manifest. Faith in the Eighth, there is a path, the Eightfold Path, the right view. The right view, the Buddhist right view is the view that things are impermanent. Right meaning complete view. That things are empty of our concepts of them. We call this, you know, Thich Nhat Hanh has a wonderful analogy of emptiness in our life is holding up a piece of paper. Some of you probably have heard that. He says, do you see the moon and the sun in this piece of paper? Do you see the tree in it? Do you see all the elements that fed that tree? Do you see the people that cut the tree down, that milled the tree, that trucked the tree, their families? Do you see the interdependence of all things

[30:51]

in this piece of paper? And this piece of paper is going to turn yellow and it's going to eventually crumble away. Do you see that? So what I'm trying to bring forth here, however stumblingly, is that we do not take in a Buddhist Dharma something just as blind faith. We hear a teaching, life is, for example, impermanent, things are impermanent. And look at, and put that, and see if that's actually true in our life. See what our feeling about that is. Practice with that. If it's true, then we, out of that conviction, are willing to maybe take on a more pronounced practice, a more detailed practice. In Buddhism we have what is called,

[31:59]

particularly in the Mahayana, that is, the large, maha means great, and yana means great vehicle. In the early teachings of the Buddha Dharma, called the Hinayana, or smaller vehicle, that was for more monastic practice of people, that people could practice and get liberated from the suffering, that chain of events that causes suffering, called dharmas. And that these dharmas and that these skandhas or these five elements that make up an individual form our bodies, for example, feelings, sensations that we have from the bodies, what we make from those, how we like and dislike, and our perceptions about those. The stories, the formations that we set up, and the consciousness of that, that those elements constituted a self in some sense. But the later Mahayana said, even those elements, the form, the feelings, the sensations, the perceptions, the consciousness,

[32:59]

are themselves dependently arisen, and have no basis as a continuous substance, self. That all things, even those things are in flux. The Mahayana teaching, the greater vehicle teaching was that even the Buddha Dharma is not something that you can hang on to and take home and grasp. There is nothing, nothing, nothing that ultimately can be held on to. That is the ultimate truth. But the conventional truth is the truth by which we live in the day-to-day world. I'm a man, you're a woman. We have to practice on that basis. But can we see, can we practice with the idea that although that is so, for the functioning of the world, these are mere conventions? That becomes a practice that we have to take to begin with on faith. It does not seem obvious to us as human beings at all

[34:02]

that things are empty of self. We hear that teaching, but we have to practice it. And one of the ways we practice it is by doing zazen. We begin to gain conviction out of our lives and out of our practice by actually taking it on, assuming it. Hearing it first, thus have I heard, and then practicing with that. Aspects, different aspects. Faith, you know, we all have, there are a lot of stories about people who have faith, you know, the placebo effect, for example. There's a Tibetan story about a woman, I just read this one recently, that's why I remember it. A mother who was a devotee of the Buddha Dharma and her son was traveling to India and she wanted him to bring back a tooth of the Buddha. You know, after the great ones, the holy ones die,

[35:05]

and the ashes are scattered and so on, little pieces of bone and so on are picked up and if they were great, great teachers and so on, and they're considered to have powerful healing properties, transcendent properties. So she wanted a tooth of the Buddha, but he forgot all about it. He had other things, he had a lot of business to do there. So he came home and she said, where's the tooth of the Buddha? And he said, oh geez, Mom, I forgot. But I have to go back, I've got to go to business next week, go over the Himalayas. And when I come back, I'll bring you the tooth of the Buddha. But of course, he got over there and there's other things more important. Even if he could have found the tooth of the Buddha, he had more urgent business, came back, and the mother was very disappointed in him again. She said, you know, son, I'm going to be dying one of these days and if I don't have that tooth, I think I'm going to kill myself before I die of natural causes because I can't live without it.

[36:08]

Being a good son, he thought, I better get that tooth. But again, he forgot because whatever he was going over for had overriding power and we could guess what that might have been. But when he was coming back, he saw a dead dog lying beside the road. So he pulled out one of the canine tooth of the dog, cleaned it up a little bit, I'm sure, and brought it to his mother and gave it to his mother and he said, here, mom, is, well, maybe wrapped it up nicely. Here's the Buddha's tooth. And she said, oh, I am so happy. And whatever problems she had, they all cleared up in her life. The cancer that she had disappeared or the doubt, the great doubt that maybe she was suffering vanished from her. It filled the room with like sparkling luminescence. And she was very happy. And she had faith that that tooth, you see, was the Buddha's tooth. And in fact, it is the Buddha's tooth,

[37:13]

just as your tooth and my tooth is also the Buddha's tooth, if we believe that deeply enough. But we have to balance, you see, in this practice, faith with understanding. We say that one strong in faith and weak in understanding has confidence that is uncritical and groundless. So in the Buddha Dharma, we give you something. Life is impermanent. Things are impermanent. Check it out for yourself. Bring back a self that has not changed and bring back, knock on the door, some family that hasn't lost somebody. You know that story about the Buddha, the woman who came in great distress and had lost somebody, was in grievous shape. The Buddha said, go get a mustard seed, knock on the door, go get a mustard seed. That family which has not experienced the passing away of a loved one. Of course, she couldn't find it. So we have to base this on the hard experiences,

[38:14]

the real experiences of our life. In the early Buddha Dharma, the faith was gained by practicing the Eightfold Path, Right View. Right Thought, Right Speech, Complete Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Concentration, Right Samadhi or Meditation and so forth. But in the greater vehicle that includes all people, not just monks, all of us here, part of the Sangha, all possible of discovering that we are already the World Honored One, every one of us, without exception, the World Honored One. Nobody can fill your shoes but you. And yet it depends on the whole universe to do that. The path is the path of what is called the Paramitas. The Paramitas means, the Para means,

[39:16]

it has two meanings actually, it means to cross over. To the other side, from the side of suffering to the side of realization. The first Paramita that we can practice is the Paramita of giving, of generosity. The generosity of, first of all, in the strict sense of the word, the generosity of passing on the Buddha Dharma. But the generosity of giving our time, the generosity of giving material things, the generosity of giving help where it is needed. Practicing generosity. But in order to practice generosity, we also need some kind of moral and ethical structure in our life. But the moral and ethical structure in Buddhism, as I try to point out in other talks here, is not based on good versus bad, some absolute like that. It's based on whatever the conditions that are arising require. So although we take on the virtues of precepts and so forth,

[40:26]

not killing and not stealing and so forth, they're not set up as absolutes. And so though we need precepts to guide us, we see them not as absolutes. We begin to practice with precepts to help us to give more freely without asking anything in return. There's the precepts then of, there's the paramita, the way to help us to cross over our suffering by patience. We need patience, particularly in the Mahayana view that speaks of this life that is ungraspable, that the ultimate cannot be understood. It cannot be understood by the logical, discursive mind. We need patience to begin to practice these virtues.

[41:30]

And we need to practice with some kind of vigor and persistence. And so these are kind of natural steps that one can take in faith that one is already Buddha. But, you know, in my own experience, I have to say this, that the faith has actually come out of the dark night. It is not when things are really going well. It is when things fall apart. You know, darkness, in the Buddha Dharma, darkness means the undifferentiated. You can't see in the darkness, you know. We say our whole body turns into hands and eyes as we feel our way through the darkness. That kind of faith. The practice of waking up

[42:35]

and feeling that where are we in the darkness, reaching back for a pillow, you know, reaching for the lamp and so on. That it is when you reach the end of all of the kind of meaning that ordinary life has provided like that woman and nothing seems to be working out for you anymore. It's at that very moment if you can open yourself find God on your knees as we say. As Christians say, find God on your knees. We find Buddha in our knees maybe. When everything is ripped off, where is the faith then? Well, your heart still beats, your breath still comes and goes, blood still circulates. In the Zen tradition there is a teacher called Hakuin in the past

[43:50]

and he said great faith, great doubt and great persistence are the three legs of Zen practice. Great faith means the kind of faith I'm talking about. When there's nothing that's going to, it's up to you to realize you're the world-honored one and how you do that. And that means that great doubt is not, I don't mean just a little pessimistic doubt. The kind of doubt that comes up, you know, that is easy, around which it's easy to become cynical. It's very easy to become cynical and pessimistic in this world that we live in, isn't it? Very easy indeed. In fact, it seems the only sensible way to act sometimes when you pick up the paper in the morning. But great doubt is the great doubt about being itself. It's an ontological basis. What is life? What is the meaning of life? What is this about? Why am I practicing? What is Buddha? Is there such a thing? And that begins to take hold, the great doubt.

[44:52]

And having, as Stephen Datchler in one of his books says, the great faith to doubt. Faith to doubt. Faith in the whole process that takes place, in this dynamic process that we're talking about. The Buddha Dharma is a dynamic process. Faith in that process without any assurances that go along with it, that it's going to work out. And great persistence. That persistence comes because naturally, arises naturally, I think, when we sit zazen. And in this practice, we don't sit zazen in order to get something. It's all right to sit zazen or to sit practice to get something, to feel better. But in this practice, we simply sit for the sake of sitting. We simply assume the posture and open ourselves, our minds and our bodies,

[45:59]

to whatever arises without judgment. There's no way, finally, to judge the practice. There's no way, finally, to judge your life or anybody else's life. But we have to put ourselves in that, take that step to put ourselves in that posture, that place where it is possible to open to being itself and non-being. And is there such a thing as being and non-being? What is this? And not once, but again and again and again, endlessly. If the Buddha Dharma were a thing that we could get hold of and finally wrap up in a single teaching and so on, it would be a closed system. But life is not a closed system, have you noticed? It keeps evolving. We're in the start of a new age right now that's evolving into something, socially speaking, conventionally speaking. We don't know what it is.

[47:04]

I have a little quote from Dogen Zenji. Dogen Zenji, of course, is the founder in Japan of the Soto Zen lineage and our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of the particular practice that we do here. And in one of the chants that we do, we call it Genjo Koan. He says, Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in the water. Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in the water. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. Even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass even in one drop of water. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration,

[48:14]

reflects, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop and realizes the limitlessness, the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, however long or short your life, however long or short the realization you have of the Buddha Dharma, is the entire Buddha Dharma. That's very encouraging. When I was getting this brown robe, there's a thing that we read called Daiji, the great matter. That's what this is about. That even if your practice is very, seems very small in comparison to Dogen Zenji's or to Buddha's or something, your practice, just as it is, fills the entire universe. And not a single thread can be removed. Not a single thread can be removed, it says. Even if we're very small or very large, we reflect the whole moon in the sky,

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enlightenment, the awakening possibility. Do you have faith in that? You have to find the conviction that that is so. There's a lot of mundane, not exactly mundane because all poetry is spiritual. But I like David White very much, the poet David White. I think he's an extraordinary poet. He came here recently and he'll be back for the Millennium Series that's coming up in September. But I happen, you know, when I think about faith, I happen to pick up a book of David White's and the funny thing is, I turn to a page, you ever notice this kind of serendipity that happens in your life as you pick out the book about the very thing you're thinking of, the word is there before you.

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There's something mysterious at work here. And there's a poem called True Love, or The True Love, and I'd like to just finish by reading that and maybe it'll make things a little clearer for you. There is a faith, there is a faith in loving fiercely. There is a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours. And he also reads the work that is rightfully yours, the life that is rightfully yours. Especially if you have waited years, and especially if part of you never believed, never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way. Especially if you can never believe that you deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way. I'm thinking of faith now, I'm thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world. Years ago in the Hebrides,

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I remember an old man who walked every morning on the grey stones to the shore obeying seals who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water. And I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them and how, and how we are all, how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, that abrupt waking and that calling and that moment we have to say yes. Except it will not come so grandly, not so biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love. So that when we finally step out of the boat toward them we find everything, everything, everything holds us and everything confirms our courage. And if you wanted to drown, you could, but you don't want to because finally, after all this struggle

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and all these years, you don't want to anymore. You've simply had enough of drowning, you've simply had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love and you will walk across any territory and any darkness, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours. Now we all know that kind of faith at some moment in our life. It might take the shape of something called Buddha Dharma, but it usually takes the warm flesh of another human being. Who teaches us that kind of faith of love in life? What time is it? A quarter after? Wow. Well, thank you very much.

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