How about now? How about now? That's awesome. Excellent. I had a medium-length career as a rock musician, and you don't know how many times I've walked up to a microphone and gone, test, test, one, two, three. Anyway. Normally, in that setting, what you often, not always, but what you get, they've usually swabbed down... the mic with Lysol right before you got up on stage.

[01:12]

And so you walk up to the thing and you lean in and you go, test, test. It's like, oh my God. So this is really better, actually. It's good. So it's great to see everyone. And I want to thank... the Tonto and everyone for giving me this opportunity. I really, really appreciate it. So it's great to be here. I feel like it's been a long time since I've been in this seat. So how many people are here either for the first time or it's been a long time? What do you think? So, nice. Welcome. So a little... bit about me. So I've been a student here since about 1993. I haven't always been in the Bay Area in the interim, but most of the time.

[02:19]

And I was sort of certified to... some sort of teaching by around 2007 and ordained as a priest in something like 2014 and so on. But my connection with this place in Buddhism actually goes way back before that. I was raised in the Bay Area, mostly in Marin. Not completely in Marin, but mostly in Marin. And You know, my parents were part of this group of people that hung out with Alan Watts. And I used to go to Alan Watts' place in Druid Heights and play with his son, Mark. And mainly I remember Watts walking around the house in his robes complaining that we were making too much noise.

[03:22]

I think that... There's a lot of that. And then also the people that founded Esalen, so Mike Murphy and people that were around him, like George Leonard, the editor of Look Magazine, and then Xiaofu Feng and Jane English, I don't know if you know who they are, but they wrote what was for a long time the kind of definitive coffee table book of the Tao Te Ching. He translated and did calligraphy, and she was a very talented photographer and did these incredibly beautiful photographs. When my parents were down doing 18-hour encounter sessions with Fritz Perls at Esalen, he would look after us. Wow. That was kind of my basic exposure to that era, and my mom practiced both here and at Tassajara through the late 60s and early 70s, and when I was 13, she would drag me off to sit with Bill Kwong's group in Mill Valley, and I was a dreadful sitter of zazen.

[04:50]

I was... completely hopeless and was completely baffled by chanting the Heart Sutra. I was like, what do I do? But I nonetheless submitted to being dragged there. My dad also was a pretty dedicated Tibetan Buddhist and also had a very stringent Kundalini yoga practice. I would go stay at his house here in the city and he would... We'd have dinner together, and then he'd essentially sit up all night chanting and meditating and ringing bells and so on, and I would go and find a room to crash in and so on. So that was kind of my life in Buddhism back then when I was young. What I mainly remember is sitting around listening to a lot of grown-up talk about... about what it was about. And if I can characterize what it was about from what I heard, it was something like this, right?

[05:53]

There was this thing that would happen to you if you meditated diligently enough and if you were lucky, and it was called enlightenment with a capital E. And after you had usually the words used, the verbs used were attained or achieved enlightenment, then you it wouldn't be a problem to be human anymore. It would fix the human condition. The things that we think of as problematic about being human would not be a problem. And then, of course, I completely ignored that for 20 years. But you might ask where those people got that idea, my parents and so on, where they got it.

[07:04]

And one obvious thread is the kind of idealistic romanticism of the mid-20th century. There's a tremendous amount of idealistic romanticism in the 20th century. And people really thought they were working on some kind of final stage of human liberation, actually. And it had a bunch of different dimensions. It had a dimension in kind of techno-modernism, but it also had a dimension in this other sort of human potential movement. I mean, I don't know how many of you recall this, but they used to call... the Esalen Institute, the Manhattan Project of the Mind. Does that ring a bell for anyone? That's pretty extreme. It's not even totally clear to me how to parse that. Are we making this bomb that's going to explode in everybody's head and after that we're all going to be fixed or obliterated one or the other? I'm not really sure. It's a really peculiar construction, but that's what they used to call it.

[08:13]

And so there was a lot of that, right? But it turns out that that's not all that was going on. And there's been this interesting thing that's happened in recent years. There's a bunch of Buddhist scholars, notably this guy named Donald Lopez, who I think is at University of Michigan, and a guy named Robert Scharf, who's... as I recall at Berkeley, who done a lot of digging into exactly this. And they made this kind of interesting discovery, and Scharf in particular kind of labeled it Buddhist modernism. And his take is that it's a kind of indigenous Asian response to... high-friction contact with the West and Western ideas.

[09:17]

He points in particular to Burma under British colonial occupation. There was a lot of stress on the Buddhists, in particular on the priesthood and the hierarchy and so on, and a number of people kind of got this idea that they needed to reinvent Buddhism for the modern age. And similarly in Japan, Japan wasn't a colonial possession of any sort, but there were two things. There was a lot of cultural exchange between Japan and the West and students like D.T. Suzuki and so on came West to study and also Japanese teachers, in particular Sasaki Roshi and so on, came West both to experience the West and teach.

[10:21]

And that was going on at the same time, actually a little earlier, there was tremendous pressure on Buddhism in Japan from the Meiji Restoration. In fact, right after the Meiji Restoration, there was a kind of solid plurality of people in Japan that wanted to completely ban Buddhism and throw out all the Buddhists as a sort of pernicious foreign influence. And that caused a lot of soul-searching. And again, there was this impetus to cook up a story about Buddhism that had some sort of compatibility and affinity with the Western ideas that people were exposed to and sometimes exposed to in a rather extreme and forceful manner. And the general consensus is that what came out of it was a Buddhism that kind of elevated...

[11:34]

individual meditative experience and practice, right, that kind of deprecated what had traditionally been seen as the kind of devotional and formal practice. And... at least in some cases, particularly in the case of the modernization of Zen, really emphasized enlightenment or Satori. If you read this in D.T. Suzuki, he's pretty strict about that. He spends a lot of time talking about the absolute importance of enlightenment. Similarly, if you read either the translations of the literature by Ru Sasaki or some of the teachings of her late husband, Sasaki Roshi, they really, really stress that as a point.

[12:50]

And so in some ways the Buddhism that we were exposed to in that era, in the sort of middle of the 20th century, was sort of custom-tailored to fit the preoccupations and predilections of Western students. There was this idea, for example, that Buddhism, of all the world's religions, was uniquely compatible with science and with kind of rationality in this peculiar way. And that played itself out over the course of a lot of literature that I read during the course of the mid-20th century up to the 70s and so on about the sort of resonances between, say, quantum mechanics or modern cosmology and Buddhist philosophy and so on. So there was this happy or perhaps not entirely happy confluence.

[13:57]

That's where we ended up, right? That's how, honestly, that's kind of one of the causative conditions of the founding of this place, right? And then, like I said, I ignored it all for about 20 years and came back in 1993 for various reasons, but mainly the reasons everybody, not everybody, but almost everybody comes to this practice for, which is that life is suffering, right? And I saw a lot of it in my life that I couldn't possibly justify based on the circumstances of my life. And so I thought, that seems wrong, and I should fix it.

[15:00]

And the way to fix it is to practice, because that's what everyone has been saying all this time for my entire life, so why not go for it, right? And I landed here and started practicing. And it took me a while to work through all these preconceptions about practice, but the thing that was the single most helpful event was this. So I was working in the kitchen and there was this guy at the time, I think he was Lebanese, his name is Bijan, and I don't know at all what happened to him in the course of then intervening, you know, 20-something years, right? But he was a marvelous guy and he was one of these people that would, as you were washing the dishes, he would come over and stick a spoon in your mouth and say, what is it? And he'd go, hmm, coriander, I don't know.

[16:02]

And then one day, he walked into the kitchen with a copy of the Bluecliffe record, and he handed it to me, and he said, you should read this. And he gave me a copy of the Bluecliffe record, which I think probably everybody knows this, but for those who might not, this record The founding principles of Chinese Zen were something like transmission of the Dharma outside of scriptural texts, right? So we don't need that literature. And something about how that transmission is face-to-face. It's based on direct meetings between people, right? And And also between people and things. The idea is that actually the myriad things also teach us, continuously, whether we pay attention or not.

[17:13]

And so, not surprisingly, somebody at one point must have asked, what does that look like, actually? And so over time, over the course of the Tang Dynasty and into the Song Dynasty, where these things started to get written down and collected into volumes and commented on and so on and so forth, this literature developed, which is, you know, for those of you who haven't seen it, it's very peculiar. It's just these long lists of mostly really short stories about interactions between people and occasionally between people and things. And of course, initially, it's completely baffling. You have no idea what's going on. But as you dig into it, you start to see the ways in which it's talking about something completely different than what my folks and all those other people were talking about when we were sitting around

[18:25]

you know, Drew at Heights and preparing to get into the world's, they're California's first hot tub and so on, right? Not that that was bad, that was good, but it's different, right? And the... So... to get at what some of the differences are. There's a case in the Blue Cliff Record. I would have read it really early on in my exposure to it because it's case five. That's good. I probably got to it within a month. I'm not going to recite case five, but there's a couple of stories. It's a case that has to do with a particular Zen teacher by the name of Shui Feng who had a really, really hard time of it. He was one of those people you meet who was full of energy and whose heart fundamentally seemed to be in the right place but was just constantly kind of messing up or overdoing it.

[19:37]

So there's a story, the story of his life or a sort of abbreviated story of his life is told in the commentaries on Case 5. And one of the first parts of the story is he was at, he was at Dengshan's place in China, and he was the rice prep guy in the kitchen. And so one day, Dengshan walks into the kitchen and says, hey, what are you doing? He says, I'm prepping the rice. And Dengshan says, oh, so are you washing away the grit? Are you washing away the rice? And Shui Feng said, says both the grit and the rice are washed away, and he turns over the rice bucket, which probably made this terrible mess, right? And Dengshan looks at him and says, you know, you'd do better studying at Dershon's place, and sort of kicked him out, right?

[20:39]

And presumably he had to clean up the rice and wash it again and so on. And so he goes to... He goes to Dershon's place and has a number of significant exchanges with Dershon. And finally, much later, after really just having a hard time of it, he snowed in with his companion, traveling companion, Yento, on Tortoise Mountain. I have no idea where that is. Maybe somebody does. And, you know, Yento, who's a pretty relaxed guy and already kind of had a sense of what was going on, was kind of lounging around. And Shui Feng was sitting Zazen and being really quiet and formal and being really intense and all of the things that probably drove Yento nuts about Shui Feng. So finally, at one point, he goes, come on, man, give it a rest, right?

[21:42]

And... And Shui Feng says, yes, but my heart's not at peace, right? And Yantou goes, okay, here's what we do. Let's go through all the things that you think you know, and we'll talk about them, right? So Shui Feng goes through his history as a Zen student, and he says, oh, there was that time when I turned over the rice bucket. And Yantou goes, okay, hereafter, don't ever talk about that again, okay? And then he says, and you know, when I arrived at Dershon's place, I asked him if I had any place in this, in the great matter that's been passed down from the ancestral teachers, and Dershon whacked me, and I kind of had this moment of awakening, right? And again, Nyanto goes, you know, drop it, okay? And in the end, Nyanto says, wait, don't you see that...

[22:44]

which comes in through the gate, is not the family treasure. He says, it has to flow out from your heart and cover the whole world. And then, maybe you can be a little awake. And so, Shui Feng finally gets something and he bows and he says, ah, That was great. And then he goes off and he has, again, case five, he has a number of cases in the Blue Cliff Record that show that he acquired this kind of practice which was beneficial for everyone and was helpful in exactly the way that the literature is intended to exemplify. He helped people wake up. He was flexible and and unflappable and skillful, right?

[23:50]

Great. But what is it actually saying? What does that thing say, right? It's not so much that we don't have these experiences when we sit. Everybody who sits starts to get a feel for this broader picture of the human experience. I mean, I think we start building our self-construct at age two or something when we start talking. And by age two-ish, this thing happens... probably everyone's heard this story, but I was talking with my daughter, my now adult daughter, when she was two and a bit, and she said, Dad, I discovered today that I can talk to myself without having the words come out of my mouth.

[24:59]

So we start doing that. And we get more and more skillful at spinning a narrative of our lives and defining and redefining and buttressing that narrative and our sense of self with these powerful emotions that come along with it, that are intended to compel that self to act one way or another. And usually by the time we're nine, that thing is pretty solid. You meet someone, my daughter, again, who at age two and a bit discovered that she could do this. By the time she was 12, she had, in some ways, this marvelous adult, real solid, well-defined,

[26:03]

self-construct, right, that was, I think she would at that point in her life have considered that her whole self, right? If you had asked her, who are you, she would have said, I'm this one that's built in this way, right? And the nice thing about it is that at age 12, you have that and, you know, your hormones haven't kicked in all the way yet, so your adolescent hasn't come along to ruin it. But... It was this wonderful, you know, kind of wonderful moment. We took a road trip together in eastern Canada in the summer of her 12th year, and it was like heaven, right? Really wonderful. But that's not all there is to being human by a long shot, right? And that thing, that self-construct, that because it takes so much time and energy and effort to maintain it, tends to obscure all the other capacities that we carry around with us in our body that are always active.

[27:13]

Our ability to meet the world in a way that doesn't have to do with self and other or with the planning and scheming and social... complex social interaction and so on, that meets the world in a way that's straightforward and unloaded by any of that. And that we also have this innate capacity to mirror each other and network in this way where we pick up sensations from each other's bodies that that speak to how they're feeling, how they're doing, you know, maybe what they want to say and so on. It's amazing, right? We have all this and we use it continuously, but we don't really pay much attention to it when we're tangled up in self-construction, right? And as we sit and practice and observe the arising of our lives,

[28:17]

without necessarily doing our habitual default response, that picture starts to open up a little bit, and we start to see these other ways of engagement with the world, our other modes of being, right? And initially, they're quite startling, right? And sometimes it leads to these riveting experiences, right? You walk out of the Zendo and see the world, and it appears both more familiar than it ever was and completely different than we'd expected. Amazing. And that sensation, powerful sensation, lingers and melds subtly with our self-construction, our conceptual framing of the world, and something has changed. So it's not like we don't have those experiences.

[29:18]

But the story in the Blue Cliff Record is saying in some ways the exact nature of those experiences or the way they happened or even the powerful feelings that arose as a result, the power of the experience is not exactly the point. It's not the essential thing. the essential thing is what comes out of your heart and covers the world, meets the world. It turns out that the essential message of the Koan literature is more about conduct. And that shouldn't be surprising to anyone because Most of the major Chinese philosophical schools are about conduct, Taoism, Confucianism, legalism, and so on, right?

[30:30]

And so why wouldn't Chinese Buddhism also be about conduct? But because it's a Buddhist school, it is also about experience, right? And interestingly, if you read the, I mean, I'm sure there are other documents in the Taoist literature that talk about this more, but if you read the Tao Te Ching, there's not a lot of stuff about experience in the Tao Te Ching. It's mostly about how people behave and how they behave when they are in tune with the virtue of the way and how they behave when they're not, right? And basically, there's a whole bunch of constructions that say in the Tao Te Ching that say things like, when everybody has the way, it's all cool. When people start to lose it, then they need moral guidelines, and then it devolves into warfare, legal wrangling, and after a while you have to have a police force, and so on and so forth.

[31:35]

Because Zen is a Buddhist school, It also focuses on what you might call inner conduct, right? So you have two things going on at once, right, in this hypothetical situation where you're meeting the world where, let's say, you know, Schweifeng and Yanto are having this exchange, right? You have the... the observed conduct of the principles in the story, and this is true for any exchange that we have, right? You have their outer conduct and your outer conduct, and then you also have what's going on in here, the interactions between the sort of flora, fauna, and furniture of your inner life, right? And that,

[32:39]

inner conduct, that state is entangled with the outer conduct. They affect each other, obviously. If somebody says something really hurtful, then all the half-formed beings in your body that want to respond to that hurt get up in arms. That's the domain. in which this, our conduct, the crucial choices around our conduct play out, right, is that confluence and entanglement between our inner conduct and our outer conduct. So, recently I ran across this great metaphor that sort of sums this up, right, so, and I guess what I want to say is that in some ways that, the decision, decisions that are made in that space, in that entanglement there, are the pivotal decisions that determine the difference between suffering and awakening.

[33:51]

So the metaphor is this. It's due to a guy named Hershock who wrote a pretty good book about more or less exactly this topic, the way in which the Chinese Buddhism and the literature in particular is sort of about conduct, right? So he says, imagine you're in a jazz band, right? And you're playing, you're banged through a bunch of standards in a presumably smoky club and some, you know, presumably, you know, problematic, but... but passable neighborhood in a big city somewhere, and everything's cool, and you're playing How High the Moon, right? And let's say you're the tenor sax player. In the middle of your solo, the piano player plays the wrong chord, right?

[34:53]

So there's two possibilities there, right? One is you stumble... you go, what is that? You look, everyone glowers at the piano player. The music kind of goes, ah, right, and then picks back up again. And pretty much everyone in the audience is like, wow, these guys are terrible. But the other possibility is this, right, that you hear the chord and something in your being goes, wow, I can work with that. And you make something up. on the spot that makes the music make sense. At that point, everybody in the audience, even the people that don't know what's going on, but especially the people that do, go, excellent. That's the essential pivot.

[35:59]

The ability to either double down on your default narrative and your default response to the inevitable situations in which our narrative runs up against reality and a mismatch is found, or to inhabit that gap and do something fresh, do something that is new and that responds as closely as possible to the actual facts and information that's arising in this moment, right? That's it, right? That's what's called for and when you look at the, again, back to the Cohen literature, when you look at the Cohen literature, it's full of stories of people either doing that or failing to do it and, you know, often getting hit with sticks and so on, right? And even when they succeed in doing it, sometimes they get hit with sticks, just because why not?

[37:03]

But the jazz band metaphor also has this other aspect, which is this. So what does it take for the tenor sax player to be able to do that? So some of it just has to do with technical knowledge. It has to do with an ability to hear the way in which the chord was wrong and to know how to use it and so on. So yeah, that's good. And that's a form of training that musicians are familiar with and that in principle makes this possible. But there's another form of training as well. That's the key because you can know everything about the music and still mess it up if you don't have this kind of comfort and this kind of relaxed, unstressed engagement with the music, right?

[38:25]

with what's actually happening right now. The reason why Zen is the Zen school, which is to say, well, Dogen once called it the Zazen school, is because that's what we practice when we're sitting. That's what sitting is for, is to embody and develop that sense of unloaded, connected, and self-compassionate, broadly compassionate awareness of what's actually happening now. And the useful way to think about it is there are these three, in the literature, there are these three great bodhisattvas. And if you... chants around here ever, you're always chanting their names.

[39:28]

So there's Manjushri, the bodhisattva of great wisdom. There's Samantabhadra, the bodhisattva of skillful action or great activity. And Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. You know, there... it's useful to look at them as the three components of this particular practice and to think of them as being present in every moment of practice. So what does it take to be the tenor player that actually does something fresh when the piano player plays the wrong chord? So to enter the moment in a way that acknowledges both the wisdom that's acquired through study, and also that holds that stuff lightly enough so that there isn't some kind of objection when the wrong thing happens.

[40:43]

There isn't right off the bat a kind of, that mismatch between... the canon and reality doesn't immediately cause a distinction. So it means holding your preconceptions and expectations lightly and comfortably without clinging, without grasping after them because they feel like the only raft in a stormy sea. Just to float there with it. And then to bring up a mind that's compassionate both with yourself and the piano player and curious about what can happen next and what this is about. It invites that kind of freshness and connection. And then Samanta Bhadra, the bodhisattva of skillful action, normally when you're practicing zazen, the only action is

[41:51]

to keep sitting zazen, right? Which is good, right? That in itself is usually the way to settle down our habitual response to any reality that arises in our body and mind is, you know, just sit, right? And again, just sit. When you're the tenor player, something very different is called for. Something to jump in and step right into the middle of what's happening and be in it and do the fresh thing that comes to mind. And what you discover after a while, after a while sitting, is that that exact impulse starts to show up in your everyday life. The impulse to... Keep the scope of your activity here to be both compassionate and curious about what's happening and to step directly into the middle of whatever it is, regardless of whether that action of stepping into it makes you happy, sad,

[43:22]

etc. It doesn't have to be all shiny and great. Sometimes the request is to step in and completely inhabit a kind of grief or receptive quiet and receptive um sympathy with the wrongs of the world or with the wrongs of your own body right to be to be sick for example um and not know if you're going to ever recover right requires a certain a different kind of

[44:27]

stepping into the middle, right? It's okay, but it doesn't have to be joyful, right? So in the end, as Dogen said, right, there's actually no way of... untangling or disengaging being awake from practice, from the practice of being awake. He uses this term gyōji, which is usually translated as continuous practice, but in some ways could equally be translated as steadfast conduct, conduct that stays close to this pivot point that we're talking about. or in the words of this old Chinese text, turning away and grasping are both wrong because it's like a massive fire.

[45:39]

To stand next to the massive fire and neither grasp it or turn away and thereby lose any chance you ever had of being warm. So what can be wrong with that, right? Let's all practice it together for ever in a day and see what happens.

[46:34]

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