I vow to take the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. Can everybody hear me? New sound system, wow. But I'll still make them, I'll start mumbling, I don't know. Welcome to the last Saturday of 1995 at Hoshinji, Beginner's Mind Temple. The last Saturday. So we start, we get rid of the old and bring in the new, as they say. I remember how they used to show the

[01:01]

New Year's drawings and paintings of the old, the old year, old guy with a long beard. They used to carry a scythe. And then this little toddler walking ahead of him or behind him, coming together. It was always, when I was a kid I'd say, how can that guy, that little kid is going to be that old in one year? You grow up having a long beard. Beginning my Buddhist training now. Time. Time marches on. 1995. It was a good year. It was a bad year. It was. I'm looking forward to 1996. For many reasons. A lot of times in magazines and newspapers, this time of year, they review the year. This was the year that, this is the year that was.

[02:05]

And probably many of us do that. Look back and look at what's happening and what you hope to do in the future. Say, well, I got another chance this year. Try again. I'm thinking of some of the highlights for myself. Or lowlights. What came up a lot was that many of us here were involved in a program with a group of clergy that was called Religious Witness for the Homeless. And many of us joined in the fast that we had. I don't remember how long. Part of last year, six months ago or something. What they were doing, it was fasting for justice for the homeless. Mostly it was about the Matrix program. And we got a lot of publicity. We even got the Board of Supervisors to vote 10 to 1 to ask Samir to stop the program.

[03:08]

And he didn't. But you know what happened. We all know what happened. A friend of mine who works in the Tenderloin, Tony Patchell, I asked him, was the Matrix still present? He said, no, it looks like they're pulling back on it. So it's already pulling back. We'll see what the new regime will do. And we're ready. We haven't disbanded the Religious Witness. We're still witnessing. So if Mayor Brown doesn't do it, we'll be right down there looking at him. But it's not over for the homeless. There's a lot of stuff to be done. There is something coming up on January 14th. It's this distribution of blankets. The Religious Witnesses have got a lot of blankets from the government. Surplus blankets. So they're going to be distributing them. And there's a poster on it and the bulletin board just outside in the corridor out the hallway if you're interested in that. It's on January 14th to go help distribute blankets.

[04:11]

But there's still a long way to go. And the next step, I believe, will be to try to find housing. And we'll see where that comes. That's where my hopeful, my wish for 1996, anyway, is that in 1997, we'll see some steps made in that direction, helping those people. What a mixed story, isn't it? New Year's is another time to people make New Year's resolutions.

[05:18]

This is what I intend to do or not do in 1996. We have given you an opportunity to do that on New Year's Eve in another way. We'll have this sitting on New Year's Eve beginning at about 10.30. The work meeting will be about 9.00. The schedule is outside. And you'll hear more about it from Mark later. But we do, after the Zazen sitting, we come up to the courtyard and we light a little fire. Hopefully we'll light a fire. Everything is subject to change, right? But our intention is to do that and we'll have paper and pens and brushes out there and you can write down what you'd like to change or something you'd like to get rid of for the New Year and you put it in the fire. And we've been doing that for quite a few years. A lot of people like it. I hope we can do it this year. Last year it was raining. We still tried to do it. It was kind of icky. A little fine drizzle,

[06:21]

I think I remember. Anyway, you can do that and make resolutions and say this is what I intend to do or not do for 96th. I also look at the New Year as kind of a renewal. You've got a chance, I already mentioned, you've got a chance to do better. Kind of like a rebirthing type of idea. This is another fresh year. That's what symbolizes a little baby walking with the old man. New, renewed. So... I would like to read a couple of poems by Miyasawa Kenji who wrote in the 30s and 20s. He's popular today with kind of like the Green Party in Japan because he worked with the farmers in his life when he was young and wrote poetry trying to improve the farmer's lot.

[07:21]

So I'm going to read a poem, a couple of... One I consider something like the past, change in the past, the other for the future. Actually, the name of this book, this collection as it is is called A Future of Ice. Chilling. The first poem has and the title has talks about an asura, spring and asura. But I'd like to mention for those of you who have never heard that term before, what an asura is, in the Buddhist cosmology and particularly if you've ever seen that Tibetan wheel of life, it's a circle, it's a wheel of life or a wheel of samsara, and it's divided into about six realms of existence. You probably won't have heard of that if you read a lot of sutras and texts and writings. They talk about six realms of existence. And three of them are the result of not too good karma

[08:23]

and three of them are the result of good karma, good actions. You get rewarded. So there's the asura is one of the realms which is sometimes translated as angry god or jealous god. Sometimes I just recently saw it translated as type, getting into the Western way of thinking. But this is the god that's not very happy. It's a pretty good place to be. They're still in this god realm, but they get angry very easily. And the case that I've read about is that these pictures of the wheel of life is that there's a tree that grows in their realm, but the branches go up into the next realm, the realm of the gods. And so they're always upset because the gods are getting the fruit of their tree. So they're mad. But this one, I'll just read the poem and go a little more later on this other stuff. So it's called Spring and Asura. Out of the gray steel

[09:28]

of imagination, the candy vines entwine the spider web. Wild rose bush, humus marsh, everywhere, everywhere such designs of arrogance. When more busily than noon, when more busily than noon woodwind music, amber fragments pour down. How bitter, how blue is the anger. At the bottom of the light in April's atmospheric strata, spitting, gnashing, pacing back and forth, I am Asura incarnate. The landscape sways in my tears, shattered clouds to the limit of visibility. In heaven's sea of splendor, sacred crystalline winds sweep spring's row of cypress and absorbs ether black at its dark feet. The snow ridge of Tian Shan glitters, waves of heat, haze, and white polarization, yet the true words are lost.

[10:30]

The clouds torn fly through the sky. At the bottom of the brilliant April, gnashing, burning, going back and forth, I am Asura incarnate. Chalcedonus clouds flow. Where does he sing, that spring bird? The sun shimmers blue. Asura and forest, one music, and from heaven's bowl that caves in and dazzles, throngs of cloud-like calamites extend, branches sadly proliferating all landscapes twofold. Treetops faint, and from them a crow flashes up. When the atmospheric strata become clearer and cypresses hushed rise in heaven, someone coming through the gold of grassland, someone casually assuming a human form. In rags and looking at me,

[11:31]

a farmer. Does he really see me? At the bottom of the sea of blinding atmospheric strata, the sorrow blue, blue and deep, cypresses sway gently. The bird severs the blue sky again. The true words are not here. Asura's tears fall on the earth. As I breathe the sky anew, lungs contract, faintly white, bodies scatter in the dust of the sky. The top of a ginkgo tree glitters again, the cypresses darker, sparks of the clouds pour down. I've always liked that poem. The images of color, the blue, black. But it's also, like this collection of poems

[12:32]

of future advice, it says, poems and stories of a Japanese Buddhist. He's talking about the Asura, so he's assuming we know what that is, because this is written for a Buddhist to read. And it made me think of when I was preparing so-called for this talk that it comes up when I teach classes and things like that, and like particularly in basic Buddhism, we come up, we come to the concept of what we call rebirth, reincarnation, something like that. And that seems to be always a problem for a lot of people, West Western people who are giving up their birth religion to try and add a new one. It's always going to be a problem, hard to take. It was for me too, because I came out of a background where there was hell and damnation, and that damnation was eternal,

[13:32]

forever and ever and ever. And I still remember pretty young, I guess I had a class, a catechism class, and we talked about the eternal damnation. And I was trying, I was like going to sleep, I can still remember this, and trying to conceive of what forever was. Eternity. No end. And I kind of shut it and went to sleep. So then I come on years later to Buddhism, where they have a different concept of time. There is stuff that seemed like eternity in there, particularly because Buddhist concept of time came from the Hindus, and they have wonderful concepts of immense periods of time that goes on and on and on and on. But then there comes a reincarnation. This stuff can't, there is an end to it. There is a cause of it, and there is an end to it, a way out of it.

[14:34]

Which is a, oh, okay. So in the Buddhist realms, the lowest realm is the realm of hell. I know what that is. And if you read some of the descriptions, particularly the Tibetan descriptions of these places in hell, there are many different kinds of places in the hell. It's pretty gruesome, pretty hard to read. I don't even want to try to tell you about it. You can go find out for yourself. But they're really awful things. But there is a way out of this. It's not forever. It may be inconceivable time going on spent in this place, but you are going to get out of there. And you get out of there by some form of an action. It's interesting, all these realms. Now you have the hell realm. Then you have the next one, it's called the realm of the hungry ghost, the pretas. And these are creatures that didn't have very good karma, and their result

[15:35]

is that they're very unsatisfied. They hang around on the earth, and they're always hungry. The images of them are very little skinny necks, huge bellies, so they're always hungry, but they can't get enough to eat. Kind of sad. We take care of them in our chanting, particularly at Tassajara where we eat all the meals in the Zendo, and at lunchtime we offer food, a portion of our food, to these hungry ghosts, because they're there and they're really hungry. So we use some part of our chant, we say this food is for the spirits. Anyway, so we recognize that. Then the other realm is the realm of animals. And that's not such a good place either, because an animal, if you're reborn as an animal, you don't, you know, it's kind of like that one description, so you eat what's in front of your mouth, and you sleep, and kind of, you know. And it kind of puts down the animals a little bit, and so that's not a very good place.

[16:36]

I heard a story once that someone came to Tassajara, and when they found out about this attitude towards animals, they left. I'm not going to be a Buddhist when you think animals are not so good. I think animals are great. And I used to go along like, so animals know what to do. Humans are the ones who are hung up. They don't know what to do. Anyway, I'm over that now. And then you have, so then you come out to another realm, the realm of humans. And this is supposed to be the best place. It's not like we're bragging, that's our place. But the reason it's good is because this is a realm that you can practice Buddhism in. This is the only realm where you get to really pick what you're going to do. Now see, I talked about the Asuras, they're so pissed off that they haven't got time to look at the Dharma. They're really angry. And the gods, that's a really nice place to be a god, reborn as a god. You have good karma to get there, but you're so happy that you don't have time to study the Dharma either, because everything is so nice.

[17:37]

But the realm of the human realm, now here's your chance. And that's why it's such a rare occasion. They say this thing hardly ever happens, sometimes even 100,000 million kalpas. There's a saying, a story about how rare it is to become born a human, reborn a human. It's like there's a blind turtle swimming in the ocean, and there's a log floating in the ocean with a hole in it. The blind turtle comes over, and the time it takes for it to find that log, blind, and put its head through the hole, that's the chance of becoming reborn a human. That kind of opportunity is rare. So we say, this is a rare time. Take advantage of it. Don't mess it up, because you may be a long time coming back. So anyway, a lot of people who hear about this theory of rebirth don't like it, because they're coming from, usually like many of them, like myself, you go through rejecting

[18:39]

your birth religion, then go through a period of atheism, put down the religion because you're leaving, so you feel bad about it, and then you come to Buddhism, which is kind of an agnostic feeling. Show me. Well, this is pretty good. They say you do it yourself. Okay. Then you hear this theory. What? Come on, you know. You talk about animals and hungry ghosts and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, so then one way that people have come to grips with this is to say, you know, we're being reborn every second. And the result of getting into these different realms is the result of your action. So you know, kind of stretching it. You say, well, myself, I look that way, I don't even like to repeat that story. I say, well, I'd rather believe in ghosts and stuff, spirits. But anyway, but this is true. Every moment is a different, every moment we're being reborn. And we are,

[19:40]

what happens to us is the result of something we did. That's the whole, one of the basic theories of Buddhism. You take an action and then something else happens. You do A and B is the result. So this is pretty good then because you feel you are responsible for your rebirth. And, well, that's not bad. It makes you be responsible for how you live. And once you get over that, I think, of being frightened of superstition and mythology and stuff, then it's not so bad to become a responsible Buddhist. So in every one of these, when I show the pictures of the six realms of existence, many of the paintings I've seen will have

[20:40]

somewhere in that place. And some of the paintings, you should look at books about these, look at the reproductions of these. Very, very imaginative, particularly the hell realm. But anyway, in each of these places, hell, hungry ghosts, humans, there's always some little figure which represents a Buddha. Like the one I always love is in the animal realm. There's a little food dog, a Chinese dog sitting there and that's the Buddha. So the Buddha is in there to help all the inhabitants of these different realms. They can come in and they can still get a chance to do something, to get reborn in another type of existence. So there's always hope. So you might say Buddhism is a practice of there's always hope. There's always a chance to do something else. So now I'll read the other poem, the last one,

[21:40]

which is more like that Asura one was kind of like something from the past that wasn't such a good memory. It seemed like he was having a very difficult time then and he was reincarnating as an Asura. Gnashing of teeth and all that. This one is called November 3rd. I've been told that this poem, all Japanese school children at one point of their education have to memorize this poem. This is about Miyasawa Kenji is a very famous poet in Japan and elsewhere. So he's like, they say that you ask any of the children who have grown up in Japan they know this poem but maybe with different kinds of feelings of having to be forced to memorize it or something like that. But it's called November 3rd. Neither yielding to rain nor yielding to wind, yielding neither to snow nor to summer heat, with a stout body like that,

[22:43]

without greed, never getting angry, always smiling quietly, eating one and a half pints of brown rice and bean paste and a bit of vegetables a day, never saying, not taking oneself into account, looking, listening, understanding well and not forgetting, living in the shadow of pine trees in a field in a small hut thatched with mycanthus, if in the east there's a sick child going and nursing him, in the west there's a tired mother going and carrying for her bundles of rice, if in the south there's someone dying, going and saying you don't have to be afraid, if in the north there's a quarrel or a lawsuit, saying it's not worth it, stop it, in a drought shedding tears, a cold summer pacing back and forth, lost, called a good for nothing

[23:45]

by everyone, neither praised nor thought of pain, someone like that is what I want to be. So that sounds like a good New Year's resolution. Being something like that

[24:55]

is what I want to be. Happy New Year.

[24:58]

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