This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. If he goes out, interrupt, and then we can close the doors and open the windows. There might be enough mosquitoes in here to keep him busy all night, though. I've been thinking this afternoon about how much the summer is actually a practice period. I've been feeling it this afternoon, and it could have been those beautiful feathery clouds in the sky, which were very much like the fall, felt like the fall. Or it could have been that there are so many returning

[01:03]

Students here now from practice periods, from previous practice periods, I'm kind of of the age where things that are in the past, you know, I can tell what's in the past, but I can't tell how far in the past. So they were in the past, and now they're back in the present. And so they bring with them the feeling of practice periods for me. But I think the main thing that's making me feel this way is... with people and seeing how I don't know exactly what words to use for but the word how soft people are getting how some of them have said to me why am I so affected by this tiny little thing or what's going on I cry all the time or things like that and I think that is partly the effect of the summer practice period.

[02:04]

That's the breaking down of our defenses that are usually so well constructed that we don't even know they're there. We don't even notice that things are affecting us. We're just there behind our defenses, and those start to dissolve some, and we feel the effect of things on us. people have said to me what do i do with this and i have a suggestion straight from dogan it's called all-inclusive study dogan actually writes a whole uh you know thing about it all-inclusive study and I read it and I narrowed it down to three points, which I'm sure if you read it, you'll come up with a lot of other things.

[03:10]

And they are, don't be fooled by ideals, respect what comes, and what... You can go to the back door and come in, even though it's closed. Be intimate with whatever comes. Study intimately whatever comes. So those three things. All-inclusive study. Don't be fooled by ideals. One of the things that Dogen suggests in this fascicle is to ask the question, what is it that thus comes?

[04:14]

To ask that all the time. What is it that thus comes? So as we are living with ourselves, of course, because that's where we live, to always have this question, what is it that thus comes? And as we ask that question, to not have an idea about what the answer should be. So one of the stories that Dogen tells in this fascicle is that a teacher says to one of his students, now that you've come here, why don't you engage in all-inclusive study? Why don't you engage in all-inclusive study? And the student studies that for a while, and then he says, Bodhidharma did not come to the East. So this Bodhidharma coming from the West to the East is one of the main stories in Zen Buddhism. The Bodhidharma brought Buddhism from the West to the East. And so the student comes back and says, Bodhidharma did not come from the East.

[05:17]

And I take this to mean Bodhidharma didn't go looking for what he should be doing. In a way, the East came to Bodhidharma. Or as Charlie was saying in his class the other day, and he was quoting Dogen again, saying, to carry the self forward and meet myriad things is delusion. That we get an idea of who we should be or who other things should be, and we carry them forward, and that is delusion. So to actually stay where we are, stay who we are, and not be confused by our ideals. So I think, yeah, our ideals are very confusing. We have pretty deep but also flexible ideals about who, especially about who I should be.

[06:22]

We can also have them about, you know, what our monastery should be like and what our friends should be like. what practice should be like, what our teachers should be like. And usually the closer people get to us, the stronger we hold to our ideals. I think because the closer they get to us, the more we identify with them, so the more we want them to be the way we want them to be. So if we're considering coming to Tassajara and we hear wonderful things about it, oh, good, that's fine. Then you come here and it's like, wait a minute, it's not what I thought. Is it really where I want to be? And then if you go a little further and maybe thinking of any number of things, doing a practice period or becoming a student here if you came as a guest or taking the precepts, which can feel like joining the group, then the ideal monitor goes way up. Like, is this the right place?

[07:24]

Is this the right way to study Buddhism? So I'm recommending, and I think Dogen's recommending, don't be fooled by these ideals. These are just things that we make up. Not that we shouldn't have any standards, not that we should not have any, you know, just be gullible and walk into any situation and, oh yeah, this is the place for me. But somehow that line between giving up our intelligence and... imagining that we know how things should be and judging everything by that and again i think one of the best places to start is ourself because it is the place where we have really high standards if this is true for me maybe it's true for you if i hear somebody else somebody else's hindrances let's say you know somebody tells me oh i i've i have such bad thoughts about that person you know i'm like

[08:28]

Well, you know, you have bad thoughts about people. It's not such a bad thing. It's okay. But if I have that, it's not okay. I'm supposed to somehow be perfect. Maybe you feel that about yourself, too. So to not be fooled by our ideals. And then to respect what's there. And the story that Dogen tells in this fascicle is that... a teacher says to his students, I studied with Shakyamuni Buddha. So this teacher, he was a Zen teacher, Zen master, so he lived quite a bit after Shakyamuni Buddha. So his students were like, oh, yeah. So one of them said, I wonder, where did you and he, who else did you study with? And he says... we studied with the third son of Zui, that's the name of his father, and he was the third son.

[09:38]

So we studied with the third son of Zui in a fishing boat, which is what he used to do. So I believe he's saying, even back then, even before I was actually practicing, I was studying with Shakyamuni Buddha. Even those details of my life are the beginnings of practice, the roots of practice. There you go. Too many mosquitoes in here. So to have that feeling about ourselves, about our lives, even back then when I was in my fishing boat back in Idaho, He went out. Open those windows. Quick.

[10:42]

Thank you. So to have that feeling about ourselves, about our lives, this was material worthy of studying. It was somehow my liberation was embedded in that story, in those happenings. And that therefore it's worthy of study now as it appears now. And that's the third point. To accept whatever part of the mystery comes to us, however it comes to us, as worthy of study, as something to study intimately.

[11:49]

That is like to study it as part of myself. There's a quote here. In this fascicle, the great road has no gate. It leaps out from each of us. At the moment of going there, you go there. At the moment of coming here, you come here. The entire body studies all inclusively the great road's entire body. The great road has no gate. So the great road is like the road to liberation, the path, the path to liberation. But it has no gate. You don't have to look around to find the gate. The gate's already here. It leaps out from each of us. So this faith or something that when you go there, you go there.

[12:54]

When you come here, you come here. The place to be is the place you're at. What is it that thus comes here? And this is... This is hard for us to believe at certain times when it feels like here is various things, not good enough, very, very painful, confused. Any of those things can make us believe or forget, believe that someplace else would be better, someplace other than here. So in the same way that Bodhidharma didn't come to the East, but did get to the East somehow, it doesn't mean that we won't go places if we aren't always constantly trying to figure out for ourself, where is it I'm supposed to go? Who is it I'm supposed to be?

[13:54]

Our kind of major question, who should I be? What should I be like? Well, I know it shouldn't be like this. Maybe it should be nicer, it should be smarter, richer, you know, various things, more concentrated. That's a very tempting kind of practice that we take up. But this is suggesting the opposite. It's suggesting settle. Settle into who we actually are. Don't necessarily give it a name because it might not last that long. You know, if we think... Oh, okay, I'm confused. I'll settle into that. That's kind of slower than confusion might move. But just that settling, settling. I think there was a story with this one, too, but maybe not. Oh, no, it's just that in the introduction to the beginning...

[14:55]

paragraph of this fascicle, Dogen talks about sweet melon has a sweet stem and bitter gourd has its bitter root, which reminded me of the merging of difference and unity. Harmony, what's it called? Is that what we call it now? See, I am back in the past. Harmony of difference and equality. where when we chant it, we say, Thus with each and everything, depending on these roots, the leaves spread forth. Trunk and branches share the essence. So to have this faith, really, that whatever's coming forth... whatever is appearing to us, whatever is happening to us, whatever is happening in us, are the leaves of the root.

[15:59]

How to study the self, how to study the self inclusively, all-inclusive study, is to study whatever leaves come forth, whatever happens to us, and to study it intimately, and to study how does it pass through this body, How does it reverberate here? What is it that thus comes here in this situation? And again, not to feel like I have to get words for that. When we ask that question, it might not be answered to us in English or whatever our native tongue is. But to turn our attention and turn our hearts toward... What is it that thus comes here? In order to settle with it, in order to manifest completely in this world, which part of the mandala am I?

[17:02]

How do I manifest my part of the mandala by actually being this part of the mandala? He says in the... very beginning of this, that studying all-inclusively is like flying through, he says, he doesn't say outer space, but sort of flying through space with no strings attached, with the clouds shooting under our feet. Now that might sound very free, or that might sound very scary. I think it's actually both. It is free. Being whoever we are and being respectful and studying that intimately is very free. Nothing needs to be done except to be open to that. Whatever it is, whether it's painful or sad or even anger, even anger is okay to study in that way.

[18:11]

But it also is very scary because we don't know what that will be. As we're flying through space with the clouds shooting under our feet, where are we going? What is happening here? It's not something that we're in control of, which is one of our deepest wishes, to be in control of everything, anything that might affect me. So I think the only way to start to feel the freedom of it is to, again, settle into it, just settle with this question. What is it that thus comes? Is it okay to be this person? Now, again, as I've said before, I think that's our one way of phrasing our main question. Is it really okay to be this person? And the only way that we're going to know the answer to that is to be present with this person, to not be fooled by our ideals. to respect what's here enough so that it can show itself to us, and to study it intimately, to actually open our hearts to it.

[19:18]

I have a grandson who's five, and Keith and I over the weekend watched a documentary called Raising Cain. It's about raising boys, and it's had a couple of very interesting things. Often, if we're thinking in gender boxes, which is hard not to do to some extent, although it's, of course, never accurate, but still, there are tendencies. When we're thinking in gender boxes, we often think that boys are less relational. They're more into action and doing things, and girls, little girls, are more relational. And I had taught that from watching kids. But they said they did this study with six-month-old babies that was very surprising, which was they had the mother of the baby, you know, set the baby down, and they'd strap him into a little, you know, one of those little...

[20:28]

slanted seats, and then the mother's playing with them and acting with them, and then they have the mother turn around, turn away from the baby for a minute, and then turn back and look at them just poker-faced. Don't interact at all. Don't smile. Just look at them. And the biggest percentage of little girls would start, you know, they would look, and then they'd, like, look somewhere else, and they'd, okay, we're not interacting now, okay. and seemed to be fine with it. The biggest percentage of the little boys would get very upset. They did not like it. So there's this study, anyway, that they thought was saying little boys, little baby boys, are very interactional. They're very relational. They just maybe show it in a different way as they grow up. And then they had this story of this little five-year-old boy in a classroom where the teacher every day would have each student come up to her and tell a story, and she'd write it down, and then they'd read it to the whole class.

[21:38]

So this little boy comes up, and most of the little girls would write nice stories, like, oh, and they all went to the party and they all had a good time, things like that, things I would write. So this little boy... came up and he says, there was a horse. A man came and killed the horse. A unicorn came and killed the man. The unicorn lived happily ever after. So then they read it to the class, right? She reads this story and Bunches of kids, especially the little girls, say, I don't like that story. I don't like things to get killed. I don't like animals to get killed. They're good. So the little boy's feeling kind of bad, and they have this process in their class where they decide what to do, and they decide not to have any more killing in stories. No more killing. It's not a good thing. They can faint. So then the next day, the little boy comes to tell a story.

[22:45]

And he's kind of just really lackadaisical. I mean, you're watching him. He's kind of like, there was something. I forget what he said. There was a man and something happened. And then she says, what's happening? You're having a hard time telling your story today. He says, yeah, he got fainted. She says, okay, she writes it down. He got fainted. Then they go back to the group, and she said, you know, it's a little bit of a problem. We made a rule that nobody can die, nobody can get killed, but it's hard for some people to tell their stories that way. I'm wondering what we can do. Anyway, they worked on it for a while, and they come up with new rules, which are that only bad things, only bad people, I think, can die. And the little boy was really happy. I mean, you can see him in the back. It's just like this relief. So what they say, these people have studied this thing, is that... And actually, I was telling this to Charlie and Sarah, and their daughter is now quite a bit older than that, but when she was in the school she was in, they said, actually, both boys and girls around that age have very violent things happen internally in their imaginations.

[24:07]

violent things happen. And it's important not to just classify all that as bad, to give them some way of dealing with it, which is kind of why they had the Grimm's fairy tales were so gruesome, right? Like in the school that she was in, they had the kids act out real Grimm's fairy tales and sing songs about them and stuff like, and they put the witch in the barrel full of nails and rolled her down the hill. Anyway, the mother's And fathers were shocked. But the teacher said we need to respect our inner life. We need to find a way to not just pretend like we don't have that stuff or just believe our ideals about how we should think and feel. Instead, we need to be open to how we actually think and feel and not make excuses for it, not pretend like we don't have the potential to harm ourselves. To admit we do have the potential to harm and to take seriously our vows, perhaps, not to harm, but that denying or judging or turning away from parts of ourself doesn't really help us to do that.

[25:26]

That really we have to study more intimately those parts. what is really happening here? What is it really that thus comes? Do I really want to kill the horse? Or is there something else going on there? What kind of pain, I think it usually turns out to be, what kind of pain is happening here? So this all-inclusive study, to include whatever comes, that also means happiness, study happiness. Usually we aren't so reluctant to study happiness. That's great, bring it on. But the more painful things are often more difficult for us to believe that this is really the right thing to study. That's where the respect comes in. Yes, this Shakyamuni was studying with me. So I wonder if you have... Let me see what time it is first.

[26:27]

Yes, we have a few minutes if anybody has any thoughts or questions. Yes. I've been in situations where if I'm all-inclusive and really what I express was in my heart twice without censoring myself, it's totally unacceptable to people outside. Yes. Yeah. Well, I think we've all been in that situation. You know, it's not just you. We've all had times when what we are feeling, if we express it, especially if we express it in certain ways, like how it feels, will be harmful to other people or at least not acceptable to them.

[27:38]

So how to express, I think, is interesting because I think expression is part of what we're practicing. Really, to be our part of the mandala, we need to express it. But I think the more intimate we can be with it, that a lot of our harmful expression actually comes from our not wanting to be intimate with what we're feeling. It's like, I don't want to feel this, so therefore, splat. I need you to be different. I need you to go away. I hate you. I think, at least in my experience, It's been very useful to try to be very close in a kind of... You know, sometimes in Zen we say don't move.

[28:41]

Sometimes we say it about Zazen, don't move. But another way to not move is to... It's like being very, very... gentle and precise with what's going on in us, like to watch the waves of what's happening internally. So I think that that helps to make what we express more complete and not such a partial expression. And then people can understand it better. Yes? Well, thank you so much. There are so many interesting things that I felt like you said. Something in particular that I was thinking about reminded me of a talk last week, where someone said to welcome difficulty, which reminded me of something I've heard, which is that oftentimes, if we relabel problems and situations, we get forgiveness.

[29:51]

And I was thinking a lot about that. It seems like a great ideal, but in practice, how do you do that? How do you welcome suffering and things that are really hard to deal with and that you don't want to feel? Yeah. Well, one way to find out about that is sometimes situations are given to us where we don't really have any choice. So you don't go out and make those situations because difficult situations where we don't have any choice. And then we actually find out, how do you do that? How do I relax to this? Another way of phrasing it is, how am I shutting myself off from this situation? What kind of defenses am I putting up or stories am I telling myself that are actually keeping me from experiencing this situation?

[30:53]

So... Even though some things, like I said, we don't have any choice about it. In some ways, we don't have any choice about any of them. Once they're happening, once a difficult situation is actually happening, even if we walk away from it, there are reverberations in us from it. So I think, first of all, if you're doing this practice, one thing to do is to put yourself in a stable posture. sitting standing walking or lying down and sort of open up to where are you experiencing this in your body because you know any situation that's already happened has already come into your body so you've got you've got it already does that make sense Yes.

[31:56]

Well, it probably is a kind of disrespect, carelessness. But there can be more purposeful disrespects. You know, like, I don't like this. I don't respect this. And carelessness is kind of like, can be just sort of forgetting that I want to respect it. Does that, do you want to say something? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Mm-hmm. I mean, I think people can, that's exactly what I was saying. I think that people can experience carelessness as disrespect. But, you know, accidents happen.

[33:07]

And if we were really, really careful, maybe most of them wouldn't. But still, there's more going on in any minute that we can possibly pay attention to. You know, it's not really our job to, like, know everything that's happening. It's to be present with whatever we are conscious of. And so when the knowledge comes to us that we have been careless with something, then we do what we can to apologize or pick up the pieces or whatever. Thank you. Anything else? Yes, Greg. The fascicle? It's called All-Inclusive Study in English. I don't know what it is in Japanese.

[34:10]

Yes, it's in Munanadu Drop. Yes. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge. and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[34:40]

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