You know, I often say that our practice is to know yourself, to find out something about yourself, to see what you are. And that's very much like Socrates' idea that we should know ourself, basic Western idea. But for Buddhism, we also want to not need to know ourself, to not have to know ourself, to give up knowing ourself. The most deeply satisfying things are actually, I think, the familiar. Like hearing on your deathbed maybe some train

[01:16]

whistle, some familiar sound. So, how do we, if we practice Buddhism, the whole world becomes familiar in this kind of way. Everything you hear, everything that happens has some kind of ancient reverberation, as if it's totally familiar. And it's a very satisfying kind of feeling. But to have this actual familiarity, you have to die, have to die in some way. You know, it's very,

[02:24]

you know, at sunset sometimes you can see, it's very beautiful to see the mountains and some clouds and white clouds and some, you know, becoming red. To see that form is very beautiful. But also, why it's beautiful is that it's all disappearing into darkness. Pretty soon you can't tell a mountain from the cloud, just one big sky. And that feeling too, of not knowing what's the cloud and what's the mountain, is why the sunset's beautiful. I guess today is Easter, isn't that right? So, all religions are, have concern with rebirth.

[03:52]

And what rebirth means is how to make yourself new in some scale, bigger than your own scale, some identity that's not just your own identity, maybe God's identity. So, we have three kinds of practice. One is individual practice, in which you try to practice as an individual to attain enlightenment or to solve some of your problems. And another practice is you practice to be one with other people, to include other people in everything you do. And that's important practice too, but it's not perfect. The third practice is you practice as an individual, but you practice

[05:04]

on the scale of a Buddha. You practice as Buddha. So, that's really what, as I've said before, all these lists are like, like the ten Bhumis, is that they, on one end they talk about the individual practicing, and on the other end, the tenth and the seventh, eighth and ninth are about a scale, a cosmic scale. So, at one end, your practice is an individual practice, and the other end, it's Buddha practicing. So, your identity is something more than just specific person, so-and-so. So, how do we have this death?

[06:11]

Actually, of course, every time you do zazen, you finish zazen and you step up from your cushion as if it was a completely new world. You don't know what to do, so there's luckily a schedule, you know, and some rituals you have to follow. Actually, it's sort of like a dead person's what to do next. Now, I bow, you know. But more than that, your practice, if you really practice Buddhism completely, slowly it drives

[07:23]

you into a corner, and there's no sort of way out. And some people get driven into this corner, of course, anyway, and they think about committing suicide, etc. And this is a very important time in your practice, and it's also a pretty scary time, because it's, you know, you could commit suicide. But ideally, you have the confidence in your practice that you'll just continue. That even if your life is miserable, you'll continue. No matter on what base it is, you'll continue. And if you're going to commit suicide, you might as well give your body to science. So if you're going to give your body to science, you might as well put it off for a while

[08:35]

and see if you can be useful to some people. Just become someone's servant. I'm serious. Just literally become someone's servant. You want to commit suicide and you think, I have no good to the world, go out and knock on someone's door and say, you want a servant? Cheap, $20, $30 a month, just feed me. You'd actually be doing quite an interesting service. But that kind of experience is what leads to devotional practice, bhakti. It's finally you just give up, so you just do whatever. You become a servant of God or something like that. So we say, you know, Vairochana Buddha or the Adi Buddha is everything. The whole cosmos is that. So on an intellectual

[09:39]

level, you can understand that this stick is Buddha or this platform is Buddha. But on an emotional level, if you feel that, then you can worship this as Buddha. Everything you see, you can, oh Buddha. You can bow to everything. So you should also feel that. I don't know how to say, but Zen people are a little cooler than that. We don't go around doing that so much. But is there some way this machine can be turned down? Yeah, so I can talk louder? A little down, that's all right, that's fine. Yeah? Okay, well, if I talk louder, you see, I can talk louder. But if that machine's booming at me, I can't talk louder. But I'll try. I don't know what words to

[11:02]

use in English, but we open our heart or some such thing. Anyway, in Zen, we don't go around embracing every tree and flower as if it were Buddha. That's what, as you know, Bhagavandas does. And I guess I told some of you, we drove to Tassajara together, and we got to, and I was quite sleepy, I hadn't had any sleep, and so Angie drove down to Salinas, and at Salinas, Bhagavandas started to drive, which was fine in the city. He drove quite skillfully and well, you know. But as soon as we got to the countryside, it was terrible, because we started going five miles an hour, and cars passed us as if we were parked, you know. And we'd stopped over and over again, and

[12:07]

he'd jump out and race up to some beautiful bush and start howling to it, chanting. And then we'd get back in the car, and we'd drive another three feet, and there'd be some huge oak tree, you know, he'd get out, and he'd boss, oh, boss tree, boss tree. And like a year ago, she walked by the, or he was at the bath at Tassajara, the little bath guy there, you bow to his hair. He was bowing over and over again to him, saying in Japanese, as a chant, domo arigato gozaimashita, domo arigato gozaimashita. It wasn't even a chant, it was just, thank you, thank you, thank you, over and over again in Japanese. And we were, the rest of us in the car were a little worried, and his wife, because we were in the middle of

[13:19]

the road, you know, this way, that way, we'd head toward a field, you know. And somebody said to him, oh, come on, you're on the wrong side of the road, this is my road. Anyway, Zen people don't usually do that, but that kind of feeling is important, because actually this is Buddha, you know. So, when you're, when you practice in a sesshin, as I said yesterday, you, to do the sesshin

[14:26]

completely, or your life completely, sesshin is just a little episode, you know, to give you a little stress, to help you maybe give up. So, at some point in your 50th sesshin, or your first sesshin, you just have to give up, and do, and become somebody's servant. And I don't mean give up because there's some big reward, you know, like enlightenment, or now I'll be important, or something like that. There's no reward. Actually, there's no reward, you know, there really is no reward. Just the same old life, except everything is very familiar, if you've given up.

[15:41]

There's no longer a separation between yourself and other things. Everything seems completely familiar. So, during this sesshin, you should give up trying to understand your practice, or even yourself. Just accept, you know, whatever you are.

[16:55]

If you practice zazen, naturally you'll know yourself better, but you don't need to know yourself. There's no, it's not like psychology, where we can uncover certain things that help us, because if we know that, then, you know, etc. If that kind of thing happens in our zazen practice, but there's no need to know anything about anything. We already possess the whole world, actually. The whole road is yours, you know. So, so, do you have some questions?

[18:29]

That sesshin, someone asked you a question about how you felt, you personally felt about something, and you didn't answer him how you felt about something, you started talking. About what you wanted to know, what you felt about it, but you didn't say exactly how you felt about it. I think it was to do with ecology. I don't know. I really don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

[19:51]

I don't know. You can't sort of will giving up, you can be open to giving up, open to trying to give up. But, and of course, when you talk about, you talk about killing the ego, something like that. I don't know. I don't know.

[21:47]

I don't know. And how you, if you are, I think if somebody sent me a book recently, who I met, he sent me his book, and it's a book written as if he were dead. And I just looked through it, you know. It arrived on Easter, that's rather strange, but it's nothing but ideas about giving up. I'm not talking about you now, I'm just talking. And it's so easy to have, you know, a very common way your ego defends itself is to give you a fake ego death, you know. Anyway, actually, to actually die in the way I mean, requires some very fortunate circumstances.

[23:34]

The easiest way is if in some situation your teacher helps you. He knows, understands where you are and gives you some support, but also maybe pulls the rug out from underneath you at the right time. Anyway, a teacher can help in some way, but there's no way, as you say, that such giving up actually happens, that you can, you know, make it happen. You have to be either very desperate or extremely thorough in your practice. If you're very, very, very desperate and actually not even having one particle of reservation left, you know, then sometimes you can give up.

[24:50]

But if you don't have that desperate situation, then your practice has to be very thorough and you have to be extremely strict with yourself. Anyway, I'm not suggesting that you try to do something, but rather that during a sasheen, as painful as it is, there's some pretty deep reason why we try to give up to the sasheen, to the rules, you know. On the Han, you know, written on the back of the wooden board, the Han, I guess it says,

[26:04]

life and death is a serious problem, but also life and death is our serious practice. And what we mean by knowing yourself and also not needing to know yourself is part of this practice. You know, the Han has various meanings to various people, and one, a girl was coming back from somewhere late at night, and she was on a bus, and the bus driver, I guess if I got the story right, the bus driver said something like, isn't it rather late, does this stop near your house or something? She said, it stops right in front of where I live at Page and Laguna. He said, oh, you don't live in that building that goes ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.

[27:10]

I suppose it must seem very strange to bus drivers and people. Yeah. Well, this is an old dispute between the Northern school and the Southern school of Buddhism. And the Southern school's understanding is that, which we are, is that not that enlightenment happens suddenly exactly,

[28:22]

but there is no substantial reality to the ego, there's no substantial reality to dharmas, to things. So, if there's some substantial reality, then you have to erode it slowly. But since there's nothing actually to erode, that to practice as if you're eroding something, it may be helpful to you, but it's not really Zen practice. So, the way you practice is, you know that your ego's rather persistent, and your habits are rather persistent. But if you practice as much as possible as if the ego didn't exist, you know, so you're not practicing as if there's something to erode, but you practice as if there was nothing to erode, but you can't, you know, you're stuck, you know. So, in your practice, when you're really practicing Zen, you are constantly confronting barriers.

[29:30]

You can't quite make sense of, I mean, when you really examine your practice thoroughly, you still feel cut off from yourself or from somehow, you know. And so you ask yourself the real question, you know, what, as long as you still have sleep and awake or dreams and etc., you know your practices, as long as your actions are still rough. The more you practice Zazen, you get some smoothness. Your skin, you know, has some, I don't know if you've noticed after Zazen sometimes, your skin feels very smooth. But some, you know. Sorry, I haven't gone around feeling other people's face. But there's some smoothness, smoothness in the way your mind works,

[30:40]

like a stream with a current, you know, that's steady, you know, not bumpy. As long as your actions are rough or your mind is rough or you're, you get some, like what, I don't know, I can't explain the, exactly, certainly it was very visible in Suzuki Roshi. Anyway, as long as you find yourself with some kind of rough thinking or any other kind of problem that you see in your practice, your practice at that point is to, the koan means, is to present this to yourself as a question, is to confront it, you know, like a problem, confront it as a question, confront it as if your life depended on it, which it does actually. So, you're working closely with someone, these barriers are always apparent

[31:47]

and you keep butting yourself against these barriers. Way out is not part of your vocabulary. So, when a real barrier means that there actually is no way out, no way out given who you are at this time, you can get out. So, your teacher just, you know, as much as possible just throws you against that, you know, until you either solve it or quit. And whatever your, whatever is in your practice that's like this, you still get angry or you still feel uncomfortable with some people or whatever manifests itself, you know.

[32:50]

Actually, of course, it's not exactly like that, but for people who aren't practicing much that's how you see it and things like that. Yeah? Someone was telling me about the relationship they were experiencing. They mentioned that, how did that not kind of resolve the problems, but kind of having faith, you know, I love to take pride in it. That was very good to hear, but how did that happen? It seems like, I mean, you kind of really break your head on the problems, I mean, you know, your father's there and you just try to resolve it. Well, you see, in both cases, whether it's you practice by faith or knowledge,

[33:58]

there's, and when I say knowledge, I mean knowledge and then also the need not to know. But when you practice these two different ways, they're slightly different. Both of them require giving up. And if you can give up and have faith, you know, this is Buddha. If you can do that, that's also not so easy, you know, to have that kind of faith. Our practice is almost the same, actually, that the same kind of giving up is needed. Exactly the same. But Zen, actually in Zen we're specialists, you know. The Zen way of knowledge is a way of maybe for specialists. Zen isn't a universal religion and we can't get up and don't try to get up

[35:01]

and talk to large audiences in sort of general terms that move them. And we just, I mean, that's not a bad thing to do, it's a fine thing to do, it's just that Zen is a way of a specialist in a sense. I don't know if you understand what I mean, but let me try to. All of us have the capacity, say, to fall in love. And given certain circumstances, a desert island with somebody on it, you're liable to fall in love with whoever's on it with you, right? Given other circumstances, you have a little more choice. Anyway, we have that capacity to fall in love, right? But there's a difference between having that, you know, in a sense, trigger pulled. We also have the capacity to have faith. And there's a difference between falling in love and knowing what love is. Both persons may be in love.

[36:05]

One person knows what love is and the other person is just in love. So they're equally good, you know. But to know, to be in love and also to know what love is, if you can know such a thing, is more like our practice. I understand it's both. Yeah, it's both. But we practice in a way so we know ourselves as well as so we give up. Our practice isn't aimed just at giving up. See what I mean? You're saying that we should practice in such a way that we don't expect a reward.

[37:07]

And then you say, as we practice, we will acquire things through skin. Sounds like Betty Arden or one of those companies. That's a problem. I mean, how do you... that's like candy. So you give a little candy. Maybe there are some rewards of practice, actually. We don't talk about them too much. But if you practice to obtain the rewards, then there's no rewards at all.

[38:14]

If you practice trying to achieve enlightenment, you can't achieve enlightenment. If you think there's such a thing as enlightenment, you can't be enlightened. That make sense? But there is some difference, of course, between Suzuki Roshi and us. So he doesn't... he doesn't feel... he didn't feel any different, really, than he ever did. But he didn't feel separated from himself, from what he was, or something like that. There's some difference. Certainly if you worked with him and spent a lot of time with him, there was some difference. He didn't see it as much as you saw it. So what I was trying to say is that you notice, in a sasheen like this,

[39:37]

we notice certain things, which if we can sit through a sasheen with some dignity, there's some... afterwards, there's some satisfaction you have. And you feel more at ease, or something. Sometimes you feel kind of nervous when you first go out into the noisy street and everything, but there's some difference. And I suppose your practice, when I talked about the four wisdoms, and one of them is perfecting in action, is that this kind of experience, this kind of sense of, maybe, this smooth sense you have in a zazen,

[40:46]

which then you try to carry forth in your activity. It's again this reversal of, instead of being an ordinary person and practicing and practicing, and then becoming Nirmanakaya Buddha, and then becoming Sambhogakaya Buddha, some idea like that. The whole idea of the three bodies is that in your practice, you practice thoroughly and give up to your practice. Then your expression from emptiness is Nirmanakaya Buddha. So your experience in a sasheen gives you some idea, if your practice was really thorough, of how you'd feel all the time. It's no different than you feel now, except some roughness is gone. Probably wasn't such a good example, I'm sorry. Thank you.

[41:56]

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