Today's one of those days when I feel sorry for you, having to listen to me again. Some days I feel, if I could only get this across, they won't even pay attention, but if they'd only pay attention... Nevertheless, some years. But today I... I don't know, you have to listen again, I'm sorry. And I depressed you so much yesterday, I should apologize. The chanting was so awful afterwards. It's one thing, I guess, to hang by a rope, you know, fraying rope with a thousand foot drop and a tiger at the top of the cliff and just one flower on the ledge.

[01:01]

That's bad enough, but to find everybody, the whole rest of humankind is hanging there with you is rather discouraging. It doesn't do much good to be discouraged, though. So I've been talking about Shoyo Roku number 16, 17, and 18. And 17 is, you know, I told you last time about if I ask, you know, I might ask you, if there's a hair

[02:05]

Breadth's difference, it's the difference between heaven and earth. How do you understand that? That comes from the third Patriarch's opening lines, you know, that real way, the true way is not difficult, only avoid being choosy, only avoid picking and choosing, loving and hating, and so forth. But if you miss it by a hair, it's bricks," he says. It's the difference between heaven and earth. So, anyway, again, Wise said, I'm sorry for you having to listen to me again, because here I'm talking seemingly, at least, about the same thing. Don't pick and choose. comparative thinking and so forth. And you know the story goes, if I ask, if there's a hair's breadth's difference, it's the difference of heaven and earth, how do you understand it? And a shoe shine,

[03:34]

says, if there's a hair's breadth difference, it's the difference of heaven and earth. So Fayan says, well how can you, putting it that way, how can you say something? How can you understand it? And Shushan says, I am just thus, what about you? He says, if there's a hair, fire, and then says, if there's a hair's breadth difference is the difference of heaven and earth. And then also, this is, in this koan, called breaking the chain of thinking. And the one, the god of fire, the god of fire seeks fire is called breaking, getting past the barrier of feelings. But you know, you know there's some difference. I hope you wouldn't be here, I think, if you didn't know there's some difference from your sitting, some difference in sitting and sashi.

[05:06]

that this tunnel of seven-day tunnel – maybe it's like Stanford's two-mile-long linear accelerator – if you can stay in this tunnel of sasheen, your concentration of zen is not concentration but better make use of it, your concentration will build up. And perhaps you'll begin to feel and see things differently. If we could get out of this idea that there's a three-dimensional world. There's no such... That's just draftsmen. Not even carpenters think the world is three-dimensional. I remember my son telling... Didn't I tell you about the earthquake guy? Anyway, I'll tell you again. He was saying, how do you test the building? And my son took showed the difference. We put this round post, small round post here, where the most strength is needed, and we used the square bigger post here, where it's not needed to be so strong. And that you can't test, because he takes the small round post, because it has the structure of the wood in it, and how it grew. And the square post is just cut from the side of the tree, so it's not as strong.

[06:30]

Anyway, world is multi-dimensional, not three-dimensional. Multi-dimensional. When you talk, I don't know if I should tell you, it's kind of funny to tell you things like this, but when you listen to somebody, listen to their voice print. You know what a voice print is, like a fingerprint. But you can hear. some lilt, some shape, some form that's independent of the words and goes. I'm trying to get you to find a kind of seeing and hearing and thinking, too, It's not different than what you're doing, but some difference. There's a hair's breadth difference. So it's exactly the same, and yet, a chain of feelings, or a chain of thinking,

[08:00]

barrier of feelings is crossed. You know, I guess the main idea behind the killing of all those people in Cambodia was the anger. They killed people who could read and write. They killed what they saw as the intelligentsia, or anybody, urban people they kill. And I don't think it was just, as the news puts it, you know, between the haves and have-nots. I think it's between Western haves and have-nots. Because just have and have-not, when you have the same culture, most of the things you have in the same continuum. Maybe you have a few more possessions, but that's not so important. But when you have a different culture, relative poverty is increased. There's real dislocation and you blame it on somebody. Everyone is pretty nice if they're not crossed. I was in Iran for quite a while. It was, of all the places I went in the Near East, it was by far and away the friendliest country.

[09:29]

and most people, very dignified people. And Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead's daughter has been living there the last few years, and I know her quite well. And she had quite a nice life in Iran, many friends. And suddenly to see, just very quickly, within a few months, All millions of people chanting their hatred of the United States. Difference of heaven and earth. Don't mind my talking about her now and then, often, but I watch her, you know. And one of the things she's doing, she's rather interesting to me, is she, you know, as I said, she's learning, she's on the verge of language.

[10:53]

So, she's got all these words she's not quite saying, but exploring, you know, Kao, and she knows in any... if you open a book she knows all the... you say, where's this, where's that, she points to it. Sometimes she gets bored and she just points with her eyes, you know, she gets so tired of pointing when she looks over at it, you know. But she knows everything, but she doesn't necessarily use the words, but she knows them, but she tries out some words. Then she tries out a word which is more abstract. You know, like owl. And she's got it down, you know, complete. She has a whole repertoire of owls. Owl! You know, she'll do it, she'll say, she'll do these various owls, she'll grimace her face and say, and then she'll look around for something to recreate, she'll look around for somebody's hair to pull. But the word comes first, you know. I think that's very interesting, you know. You grab someone's hair and they say, ow. She sees that there's this thing called ow, you know, and so she tries out all... she has about five or ten different ows that she tries out and she mimics the whole thing completely. Then after she's tried out the word for a little while she tries to get someone to lean toward it and she grabs your hair or does something else to see if you'll go do that thing which she's learned, like a theater piece.

[12:22]

But it's not so different from S&M. S&M is, you know, you want somebody who's really... you like people who are in S&M like doctors to beat them because they know where to hit them so you don't get hurt. Not some people, you know. To think that you can also have a private life, Tozan says, seek hidden practice and secret activity. Or secret practice and hidden activity, something like that, he says. May seem stupid and foolish, but when you succeed to the true teacher, you will be a teacher among teachers. It means everything is visible. You think you can have some private life. So if Elizabeth got stuck on the excitement of au and took it away from the excitement of the au or the interest in the word, that level of event, not that it results from pulling your hair... You know, we'd eventually say she was neurotic or some...

[13:46]

needing some symbolic activity or wanting to call back that experience or some sense of punishing herself. She also, Sally will sneak up on her, you know, or do something. You know, ooh, and then jump out. She's very hard to startle, almost impossible to startle. Other little kids will run up at her and they get charged up for swinging something and they get right up to her and she stands there and doesn't flinch or anything. And then they get right up to her and they don't know what to do. So she... Sally will do that. And instead of jumping or getting caught, she immediately mimics it. And she'll go, ah, ah, ah, ah. This time she did it last time we were sitting in a restroom. And she can't reach you to jump at you, so she goes, ah, ah, ah. And then she bangs the table. Boom, boom, boom. Ah, ah, ah. Boom, boom. She looks at you. Because she takes it as a little theater piece. And it is theater. I mean, the reason Sally's doing it to her is theater. She's not really trying to scare her too much.

[15:10]

But if you get confused with the theatre of the owl, in the Zen stories, you may get your hair pulled or your face slapped. Where did the wild goose go? Still, meaning, some pivot. of the word au is pain, some discomfort, something you don't like. But we never… I was thinking about Buddha's father, you know. I can see how he maybe got into not exposing his child, Buddha, to any misery. And the other day, Sally, some television thing was on, and it was... I don't know what, but something, some violence was on television. And she watched it, and it's the first time she's ever seen anybody do anything to anyone else violently. I don't think anyone's ever gotten mad at her. No one's ever shouted at her, that I know about.

[16:39]

So she's not been exposed to anybody harming anyone else or doing anything like that. Until she saw it on television, I thought, I watched her watch, it was very peculiar to see this person taking a big stick and hitting someone else across the head and throwing chairs at them and stuff like that. She was watching it, peculiar thing to do. And yet this kind of thing has some interplay in all of our activity. This koan about Hare's Breath starts with two solitary wild geese flap on the ground and fly in unison high up. Two mandarin ducks stand beside

[17:41]

to stand together on the banks of the pond. But I'm not talking about two arrows meeting. What about when a saw cuts a scale beam? So, in Zen Dust, when Muraroshi finishes the five stages of koans. And last, the goi koans, the ranks of dosa. Then he talks about the precepts. And usually in Rohatsa Seshin we talk about precepts. So I've been talking about definitions and rules. From the point of view of samadhi, everything is equilibrium or beyond equilibrium. No desire, no disturbance. This is the samadhi of seeing or hearing. Everything is

[19:08]

we may say, cloud flowers, where we're all falling at the same rate, we're all falling at the same rate, passing things back and forth. We can say everything is flowers in the sky, but still, the rules make some difference between physical health and illness, between mental health and illness. If you give little tiny children a cookie, if you promise them a cookie, they want the cookie, even if they can't eat it right away, they want the cookie in front of them right now. It makes it much harder to resist. But older children want the cookie covered. They can't have it until later. Older kids in general will want the cookie somewhere else until they can have it.

[20:47]

This is also using circumstances or using practice period or zazen. Elizabeth now knows she has a body, she now knows what it's for and she completely identifies that it's for that, but she doesn't have any idea of waiting. She has no idea of delayed reward or delayed punishment. She just hasn't dawned on her. She knows what it's for, but she hasn't dawned on her to wait to use it. She's in the living room. She does what she wants to. Go to the toilet. She doesn't go to the toilet, she goes to her diapers. Or goes to the rug. Or wherever she is. It just hasn't crossed her mind that she shouldn't do that and she should wait. I don't think when I leave she knows I'm still alive. I don't think it dawns on her that there's another place. So when I reappear she looks at me rather peculiarly. But it will, and she'll get this rule that you aren't supposed to pee on the rug.

[22:15]

You're supposed to wait, even though you feel like peeing right then. You're supposed to wait. Schopenhauer says somewhere, you can do what you want, but you can't want what you want. You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want. This kind of study is called studying from the side. This koan talks about studying from the side. And I've been reading recently, you know, quite a bit about Einstein. Because, like Dogen, he studied himself. He studied how he thought. And he was very... He seemed to be pretty nearly without ambition or vanity. He wanted... He said his ideal was to live in a lighthouse, where he now and then had to check on the lighthouse, but basically have time to think and so forth.

[23:42]

And he always said, you know, where he lived they would lay out cheese and fruit and bread and cakes for him on this table. And he always exclaimed, what more would anybody want but that and a table, a chair, a bed and a violin? You could have those things, you need nothing else. But we feel that way too, I think. Again, it's the... inspiration to practice period or zazen. Or Ryokan's emphasis on being a mendicant, a wandering monk. He says, now his hut has barely more than four bare walls, but he remembers how excited he was, how thrilled he was when he first started his journeys. It's quite a task to keep quite a task to keep this state of mind we are talking about, when you're driving cars and moving past things so rapidly, and have various kinds of responsibility. But actually, Einstein did most of his work not in a lighthouse, but as a patent

[25:13]

clerk for seven years. He did almost all his major work as a patent clerk, working eight hours a day and then in the evenings he worked on his physics. And he dropped out of school, as you know, because he just couldn't understand why he had to study all that stuff and take all those exams. This is also studying from the side. He thought institutionalized and professionalized science killed all original work. So the mendicant... I think this idea of being a mendicant, patch-robed monk, being free, you know, to just follow moment after moment. This is necessary to understand Mountains and Waters Sutra, each person's whole sutra, whole of the sutras.

[26:21]

Everyone, many people have been asking me in the city, what can we do about Cambodia? And I say, well, we should do two things. One, we should have the sensation of helping, whether we do or not. We need the sensation of helping. Second, can you actually help? You know, there's so much disorder there. About $13 million worth of food has gone over so far, and about $3 million of it supposedly has gotten to the refugees, and the other $10 million is on the black market. But I saw that myself when I brought food to Iran many years ago. The same load of wheat a year later that we dropped off was there, sitting on the docks. So there's so much disorder there. It's very difficult. I mean, the suffering is caused by disorder. And to try to help is prevented by disorder. Very difficult. So again, what are rules? What is order? Einstein talks about the free play of concepts. Yeah, if everything is

[28:15]

We have free play, everything, flowers in the sky. This is not harmony, you know, but unity. And yet the flowers count, or make a difference. Precepts make a difference. The rules, the order in your life makes a difference. The order of Sachine makes a difference. How you do things makes a difference. But we also need some free play of it. By knowing unreality of it, you have this free play. But by knowing what? The saw cuts the beam, even though the arrows meet in here.

[29:20]

our friend is dead. And yet, afterwards, we did a funeral, some order, we did. I don't know, maybe Keith and Leslie told you about the funeral at work meetings, but Kageyoshi and Murayama sensei And Red and Lou and myself all performed the ceremony. And I'm now beginning to teach Red and Lou about ceremonies. So they performed it with me. And the five of us, it was... difficult a thing to do as Chris's funeral. It felt still quite good, the five of us doing it. And I ordained Chris as he wished. And ordain is order and rules. When you're ordained... I don't know how... I can't...

[30:51]

figure out how to say it. It's provisional and yet consequential. From one point of view it's karma, from another point of view it's dharma. This use of things needs to be understood. It says in this koan, how could basis and aspect arise from origin and destruction, being and nothingness? This is a very interesting statement. You look at this, it's the kind of statement you kind of skip over, one of those political things in the koan. How could basis and aspect arise from origin and destruction, being and nothingness? basis and aspect as precepts, rules. How could it arise from origin and destruction? You know that we're in the midst of great changes in thinking, Freud, psychology, physics and biology, in the last

[32:22]

hundred years have changed everything. And even Gödel, do you know Gödel's undecidable proposition? As I said, you know, when the... This is so general, it's not, you know, it's so generally accepted now, but not by everyone, but generally accepted by people studying it. You have, as I said before with Leibniz, Newton and so forth, you have the phenomenal world beginning to wag God, right? We got that far. And so then sciences are more real than God. And sciences are based on math, right? And so they try to make mathematics the formally consistent description of reality. And what Gödel did is he demonstrated that there's no proposition that you can base a formal number theory on which you can either prove or prove its negation. At some point, it's an assumption.

[33:52]

And he also, his corollary to that, or his second theorem, is that you can't prove any system within the system, within its own system. That's God of fire seeking fire. But, so Gödel threw out, really, mathematics as a formally consistent system. So the phenomenal world wags God, And so then there's science, and everybody tried to base history now and sociology, etc., social sciences, on science, and it's all supposed to rest on that there's something true called mathematics, and Gödel shows that mathematics is based on undecidable propositions. And then Gödel, which is very interesting, went on. The latter work of his life was to prove the existence of God. He went full circle. And the proof was incomplete at his death a couple of years ago. But you have Einstein, who's... when you look at him, he's so interesting. I mean, I find him very interesting. Because his thinking is not Jewish, and not... although his background, his emphasis, which is, I think, one of the big differences between Christian and...

[35:25]

Jewish society is so based on values so highly, scholarship and study, independence. Anyway, he felt grateful for that, but his thinking is not particularly Jewish or Christian. In fact, it's, you might have guessed it, quite Buddhist. So, anyway, what you come to with Einstein is that time and space are also not absolutes. The different times are different. The time is relative. And then from that, you know, they got to space. Space is not an absolute either. Once they saw that, you know,

[36:33]

the gravitation of the sun is so intense that you can measure molecular interactions, and they will be slower on the sun than here. So that's a kind of absolute of time, and they're slower there. So then they figured from that, if gravity affects those things, there must be an event horizon, which means that there must be a certain point when gravity gets so intense that when it approaches a certain point it can't get past that because nothing can escape the gravity, so everything will crush to a zero volume, so you have no space. This is what they write about in newspapers, Time magazine, black holes. In quasars, you know, maybe white holes. In a quasar it's like you have Just to put it on the scale, you have a quasar, say, as big as our solar system, emitting as much energy as a couple hundred billion stars. And it looks like the reverse of what a black hole does. So quasars are sometimes called white holes. And this language is so close to

[38:00]

If the universe turns into these things, in which time and space is crushed, I mean, in a black hole, the entire mass of the earth would be as big as a golf ball, if it escaped the center. I mean, that's inconceivable to us, there's no... This concept. Those two guys are playing with mud balls again. But if our whole universe, on this vast scale, that we can at least get enough data and make some comprehensible picture of it – Einsteinism used to be in awe that as much of it was comprehensible as it is – it still comes down to this origin and destruction, the Hindu idea. So, out of this origin and destruction, what do you get? Time disappears, space disappears. What does it matter? I know somebody who studied Buddhism quite a while in Japan, finally wasted away. His wife got fatter and fatter, and he got thin. This is a true story. It's a sad story. We used to call him Jack Spratt and so forth. I don't think you knew them, but you know the story. They studied at N. Taiji.

[39:33]

And really he got thinner and thinner and thinner, he had two quite bright kids, and she got fatter and fatter and fatter, and finally he was so weak she had him flown to a hospital in San Francisco, I believe, and she sat by his bed and he said to her, nothing matters, N-O-T-H-I-N-G, and he died. And she now teaches Buddhism in Colorado. But this koan says, basis and aspect, how can they arise from origin and destruction? Time and space, being and nothingness, rules, precepts. How do you live? What is the way? Elizabeth says, here's the word au. And what's the meaning of au for her? All the various ways we can say it, the excitement of it, the excitement of making somebody say au.

[41:06]

or getting someone to stop hurting you? Should she wait? Or should she spend her whole life wetting the floor? Freud was right. It's a problem. I knew people in New York who were Reikians. And they thought you shouldn't teach toilet train your children. They let them shit and pee all over the house until the child sort of thought it was a mess. It was a mess, I tell you. It was hard on the visitors and friends. So what do you do? At what point do you tell each other? What do we tell each other? What do I tell you when I see you doing something? Pakistan's angry they didn't get atomic nuclear plants and weapons. Elizabeth is angry if I shut her out of the room I'm working in. Why do you keep me out of there? Who's going to decide for you what your rule is for how you live? Who's going to give it to you?

[42:38]

Does a dog have Buddha nature? Yes and no. No and yes. What is hair's breadth difference? Too much order? And all the small farmers are taken over by organized organizations with a lot of order, because they can store food and control prices and sell it when they want, which the small farmer can't. So when the small farmer has a bad year, he can be bought up by bigger organizations which can store the food. So too much order, too little order, mendicant monk, Real con. Why should you be doing a session? Who's going to decide for you? And if you're deciding, how fully and utterly are you deciding? Are you half deciding? Are you sort of going along with it? What's the decision?

[44:05]

Who's going to decide? Where is the basis and aspect? Are you going to do the session or not?

[44:25]

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