So welcome, welcome back. I'm kind of excited about this next course of study for me, and I hope those of you who join. We just finished, I just kind of untied us and me from the transmission of light, which went on for a number of years, and each of those chapters was a story in and of itself, but the sequence, you know, pretty much took us quite a while to get through. So now we're done. the transmission of light and i had this um uh interest and now inspirations become an inspiration to go back to suzuki roshi and look through his teachings and locate in those teachings uh any koans that he uh presents and talks about so as it turns out there's a whole list of those and um we have lots of lots of opportunities to study koans together, and then also to hear what Suzuki Roshi had to say, his commentary as well.

[01:14]

So one of the things he said is that the important thing about zazen is not that it gives you power, but that it gives you possibility. The important thing about zazen is not that it gives you power, but that it gives you possibility. I thought, wow, that is so good. And I feel like that would be a really good thing to remember, you know, that this practice of ours is really about opening, not about limiting. So that's what I want to be doing together with all of you, all of you who come along for the ride, is to explore these possibilities that are coming up through the study of... our founding teachers' words and also from these ancient ancestors who he in turn has studied, you know, in order to understand ourselves better through the Buddha's enlightened teachings, which is the whole point, right? This is all about the arrow points back toward each of us.

[02:15]

You know, what does this have to do with me? What does it have to do with you? So, there are many things that Suzuki Rishi said. to his students, both privately and publicly, while he was here and living among the founding generation of Dharma students, many of whom, sadly, have either passed away or are now moving away. So that original generation, very few of the original students of Suzuki Rishi are still available. You know, there's Reb. at Green Gulch, Mel has now passed away. And so for quite a long time, we had both of them to ask questions. And there are a few other elders who will be moving soon up into Enso Village. So there'll be a little more time. And I hope we all can find ways to ask those questions of them while they still remember what the answer was.

[03:21]

That's really the challenging part for all of us these days. So among those things that Suzuki Roshi said, a lot of them were gathered and put into books that I think most of you have probably read, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. That's usually the starting place for a lot of people who encounter Zen. And then there's also Zen is Right Now, a little series of conversations, almost koans in their own right, between Suzuki Roshi and his students. And then there's another one, Zen is Right Here. So Zen is Right Now, Zen is Right Here. And then we did look at, some years back, Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, which is a really wonderful book about the Sando Kai, the merging of difference and unity, which was apparently Suzuki Roshi's favorite text by Shi To. Shi To was prior to the founder of Soto Zen, Dongshan, or Tozan, Soto, Soto Zen, but had a great influence on Dongshan.

[04:25]

and on all of the teachers who followed. So we recite the Sando Kai every week at Zen Center. And it has really this resonance between these two teachings of the ultimate truth and the relative truth. Over and over again, that's the dance that we are hearing in these early poetic teachings and also in all of the teaching stories that follow. Everyone's basically dancing with the two truths, which I find very helpful. and orienting myself. So my plan, as I said, for this upcoming year is to use Suzuki Roshi's teachings and to find the koans that are nested in there, and then to explore those, find out who is the teacher that had that story, that conversation, when did that happen, and what else might they have said. But before I do that, I wanted to give you a little bit of background on koans. and how they came to be so important in the Zen tradition as expressions of the Buddha's teaching, kind of distillation of what the Buddha taught.

[05:31]

And really, really, if you image a tree with the root of the tree being the Dharma, the 2,500 years of Dharma teaching and the source, Shakyamuni Buddha's awakening under the tree, and then all of those... the trunk and branches that share the essence of that teaching. As it says in the poem, trunk and branches share the essence. And so, you know, Zen is kind of one of those little branches that came off from that initial inspiration that happened way back in India. That was a long, long, long time ago. So, a few years ago... I was invited to give a talk at the Ho Center for Buddhist Teachings down at Stanford, which was very exciting, very lovely. I'd never been to Stanford before, and it was a beautiful campus. So I had a... Lovely time with the Dharma teachers there, the professors who teach. They really are Dharma teachers, but they're kind of disguised as college professors.

[06:33]

And they all have done extensive studies in many different fields connected to Buddhism. And they've traveled extensively, and they've learned the ancient languages so they can read and translate and so on. Just very, very sweet people. We sat together and had a kind of potluck at the end of my talk. And the students were wonderful, too. They were really interested. and asked these great questions. I have a really nice memory of that visit down there. So I talked about koans during that talk, and I brought up two koans in particular. The first one was about, and these are familiar to you, I'm pretty sure, does a dog have Buddha nature? And the answer given was moo, or no. Does a dog have Buddha nature? No. So it's kind of strange because Buddha said everything is fundamentally Buddha nature. So why did the teacher say no? So that's a koan. And that one represents the teaching of the ultimate truth.

[07:39]

And then the other koan was about this teacher, Bai Zhang, who has an encounter with a wild fox. And this represents the teaching of the relative truth. So here they are again, the two dancing partners, the ultimate truth, no, and the relative truth. How come I'm in a wild fox body? All I said was, you know, a person of the way is not trapped by cause and effect, isn't committed to cause and effect or the outcomes of cause and effect. Why would I turn into a fox? Which is that story, that koan story. You can read both of those in the Mumong Khan, the... collection of koans. The first one is the Mu koan, the second one is the Fox koan. So again, these two koans, these two teaching stories represent the two truths. So I will bring up a little bit more about those koans later on. I think we'll probably run into them as well in Suzuki Roshi's writing because they're particularly famous in the Zen camps.

[08:43]

So this other container teaching, the one that comes even earlier than all of these conversations, is the one that was written in the second century by the great Dharma master Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna was an Indian master, Northern Indian at Nalanda University, which for many centuries was kind of the center of Buddhist studies and scholarship and many, many wonderful writings and commentaries have come out of Nalanda University. So Nagarjuna, second century, wrote a text, a very famous text, called the Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Middle way between what? The two truths. What's the middle way? The name in Sanskrit, Mula Majjama Kakarika, Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. So in that teaching, there's just a little bit I want to read to you. I've read this before. It's quite extraordinary. I think it's pretty simple to understand. This teaching by Nagarjuna is foundational to Mahayana Buddhism, which is the branch of Buddhism that you'll find in the Zen school and the Tibetan school.

[09:57]

Chinese Chaman school and so on. The Mahayana tradition clearly has grown from these early teachings and understandings of emptiness. Form and emptiness, two truths. So here's what Nagarjuna said. He said, the Buddha's teaching of the Dharma is based on two truths. A truth of worldly convention, relative truth, and an ultimate truth. Those who do not understand the distinction drawn between these two truths do not understand the Buddha's profound truth. Without a foundation in the conventional truth, in the relative truth, the significance of the ultimate truth cannot be taught. Without understanding the significance of the ultimate truth, liberation is not achieved. By a misperception of emptiness, a person of little understanding is destroyed.

[10:59]

By misperception of emptiness, the teaching of emptiness, a person of little understanding is destroyed, like a snake incorrectly seized, or like a spell incorrectly cast. And for that reason, that the Dharma is deep and difficult to understand and to learn, the Buddha's mind despaired of being able to teach it. For whom emptiness is clear, everything becomes clear. For whom emptiness is not clear, nothing becomes clear. And then he goes on to say, And yet, liberation is not some ultimate reality existing beyond the phenomenal conditioned world, behind some veil of conventional truth, for that would commit us to a belief in eternal life. something permanent that always exists like emptiness. Emptiness is the ultimate truth of reality and of liberation.

[12:04]

Nirvana, too, is empty of its own existence. There is nothing that distinguishes samsara from nirvana. There is nothing that distinguishes nirvana from samsara. And the furthest limit of nirvana, is also the furthest limit of samsara. Not even the subtlest difference between the two is found. This is a pretty high bar. Nagarjuna is definitely the very high bar. In fact, it's the one that I think a lot of us just kind of avoid for a long time. Although I must say there's a really, really excellent translation of the fundamental teaching of the Middle Way that that I had been, by Jay Garfield, professor, I think at Yale maybe, I'm not remembering exactly, but anyway, Jay Garfield was a philosopher, professor of philosophy, and like a number of professors, Western professors of philosophy, people kept saying to him, well, have you read Nagarjuna?

[13:09]

You know, have you looked at some of these Buddhists? teachers from centuries back, and most of them, of course, had not. A lot of it wasn't in translation then. But when Jay Garfield began to look into the emptiness teachings, he was transformed, and transformed into a professor of Buddhist studies. And he's written some really excellent and helpful commentaries. And one of them that he does is on the fundamental teachings of the Middle Way. So if you'd like to follow up on that, Jay Garfield's book, called The Fundamental Teaching of the Middle Way is a really, really good way. He takes each chapter and then he tells you what's going on there. So it's a very good tool to use. So this profound vision that Nagarjuna had about reality and that he was able to actually speak, put into words, is what our practice and the teachings are trying to guide us to understand. But more than to understand, to actually realize by our experiential, that we actually know it, that our whole body, our whole sense of things is shifted, is changed by this understanding, by this realization.

[14:22]

Practice realization, as Dogen often says. And how we do that is what's been up for discussion for all these centuries. How do you do that? How do you come to this realization? school, the Soto Zen school, we say to students, I've heard it recently myself by the teacher there, just sit. Just sit. Shikantaza, just sit. And then the other school, the other major school of Zen that many of you I think know about is meditate on a koan. Don't just sit there. Meditate on a problem or a koan, like does a dog have Buddha nature? Work on that for 40 minutes, day after day after day. See what you come up with and then present that understanding to your teacher with your whole body. So that's how the Renzi folks work with these teachings. They use these words to try and help the student have what's called a breakthrough and a realization.

[15:29]

So... In my understanding, the distinction between these two approaches to realizing an awakened mind, you know, the one school and soto zen emphasizes the oneness of the ultimate and the relative truth. They're inseparable, which indeed they are. How could they not be? But anyway, the oneness of the two truths is the emphasis in soto zen. So kitchen and zendo are, you know, go to the kitchen, go to the zendo. It's practice. Practice realization. Whatever you're doing is practice realization. What you all are doing, what I'm doing right now is practice realization. You can't pull them apart. You can understand that they can't be separated. That's what we're called to do. See how everything you do is the ultimate truth. Whatever form it takes. And on the other side, the Rinzai school emphasizes this realization, this particular realization of emptiness as an aspect of reality. What they call having a breakthrough. you know, kind of like Eureka, I found it.

[16:31]

And people exclaim, you know, they exclaim, I found it, I got it. And the teacher goes, yeah, you got it. And then I think, apparently, I don't know, I've never been practiced in Rinzai Temple, but people will be shouted out. They'll shout out, yeah, so-and-so got it today, you know. One place I was here, the names would go up on the altar or something like that. I thought, well, that's so interesting, you know. Again, some of you may have experienced that. It'd be really interesting to hear. what you have, what you've done there. So this is quite a difference in approach of the how. How to do it? Well, just sit or penetrate this problem, this word problem. Really come back, come through it, break through it, and express that to your teacher. So before looking at the first koan that I found in Suzuki Roshi's teachings in Zenmai Beginner's Mind, there in the very first lecture, he says, He quotes, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha. So it's kind of an old famous one, a little startling, as I'm sure it was, first time it was said, apparently by Lin Ji, who's the founder of the Lin Ji, or the Rinzai school, Chinese master from, I think, the 12th century.

[17:45]

So he was quite a character. I've just been reading the record of Lin Ji and all of the... Mostly what he does in many of the stories, his encounters with his students, is he hits them. First he yells at them, and then he hits them. He gives them a chance to yell back at him, which they do. Oftentimes they yell back, he yells, they yell, and then he hits them. So it's actually quite, it must have been a very exciting environment, you know, to approach Lin Ji. dare to approach Linji to ask a question. What he was hitting them with, apparently, at least in these stories, is a whisk. So we know about that from Shirtow. He was also hit in the face with a whisk when he was, you know, conceptualizing and intellectualizing his answer to his teacher, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the teacher just whacked him with the whisk, and Shirtow woke him. So this is a kind of tried and true, often tried, and sometimes there's a great relief

[18:48]

for the student who has been working so hard to understand and finally can drop that effort and just look just look and listen quietly and so the thing is what we want to do is find the koans that actually are occurring in our own lives and that's where the life of it is for us what is our koan? how do we find those? so In terms of that, seeking, our seeking for understanding, I really enjoyed another author, another teacher from the, it's kind of a combination Rinzai-Soto lineage, Yasutani lineage, in which John Tarrant, if those of you who have been around a while might know John Tarrant, wonderful teacher of, he teaches koans, and there's also Maizumi Roshi students who went on to do koan study with their students and so on. So there's a lot of that going on in America, or in the West, from, a lot of it from Maizumi Roshi, who was a student of this hybrid form of Zen.

[20:00]

So John Tarrant basically wrote a book on koans that I like very much. And he starts, he introduces the koan on the dog, does a dog have Buddha nature, one chapter that he has in his book. His book is called Bring Me the Rhinoceros. So if you'd like another kind of easy access to understanding koans through John Terrence's commentary, that's a lovely book to get a hold of, too. Bring Me the Rhinoceros. And the cover, there's a picture of a little bird. So it's right there. You're going like, wait a minute. Bring Me the Rhinoceros, and there's a picture of a little bird. So in his chapter on the dog and Buddha nature, he quotes Rainer Rilke, the wonderful German poet, about how to approach unsolved koans or riddles that persist inside of our own inquiry about life. He says to this, he's gotten a letter from a young poet asking for advice.

[21:00]

And so this is called a letter to a young poet. Rilke says, I would like to beg you, dear sir, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything, to live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday, far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. So it may be that the first step in entering into spiritual practice, in other words, into a deep inquiry about our very own lives, is to find out what our own questions really are.

[22:04]

You know, to listen for those. What is it about your life that is seemingly unfulfilled or unsatisfactory or just simply stuck? Sometimes I ask students about that, you know. And it's pretty clear that that's kind of a hard thing to do is to look back on ourselves and to listen. what might be coming up. You know, once in a while, not once in a while, often a student will come in to see me and I just say, well, I don't know what to say or I don't know what to talk about or, and I say, well, that's okay. Why don't you just sit quietly for a while until something comes? Because what I found when I go in to see my teacher, and for years I go in with a question all prepared, you know, I memorize the question and go in, you know, because I want to have something to say. And at some point I realized that if I just sat there with my teacher and listen to myself that these little, I've thought about them as little minnows.

[23:05]

These little minnows would come up from the depths of my unconscious mind, these little tidbits. But that was always kind of a prelude to the big guy, which was just lurking down below. So little ones would show up and then the big one would come and I go, there it is. That's what it is. That's what's on my mind right now. And of course it changes. It was always different. Almost every time I go in to see my teacher, my teachers over the years, there would be a different big fish that would show up. So although you could maybe already feel the question, you know, referred to as the great doubt, and Santa's called the great doubt, unless we discover a way to articulate it, then it kind of remains in the realm of what we call unrequited love. We know there's something we really want. We really want to find something, but we don't know what it is or where to look.

[24:06]

It's unnameable, unlocatable, unrecognizable, missing piece of our own heart and our own mind. It's kind of vague and persistent longing. If only, if only, if only I had... So these questions, the ones that seem to ache, are referred to in Zen as barriers or gates. That's a barrier or a gate, which means that's the place you go through. The gate is the place you go through. Now, it might be closed or it might seem to be locked, but that's where we put our energy. We find out where's the gate, you know, where is it? As in the title of this collection of koans in which Zhao Zhou's answer to the dog appears, you know, it's called the gateless gate. gateless barrier. So this koan about the dog, the teacher in that koan is called Jiao Zhou, and Jiao Zhou and the dog has been around a long time, you know, maybe a thousand years or more, and still in the Rinzai tradition it's considered the best one for beginners, is my understanding, as they enter into some more systematic study of koans.

[25:18]

And to arrive at that kind of breakthrough, that breakthrough into a and a more awakened sense of who you are and where you are and what you do and don't know, which is mostly everything that you don't know. But here you are anyway, right? So this question of breakthrough, as I said, is one of the primary issues of which the two schools, the Soto and Renzai school, seem to have parted ways in a certain sense. I mean, we're still the Zen school, right? We're on the same branch. We're just a little different... sub-branch, little different twigs coming off of the same branch. So, you know, this gate that we are trying to open, again, referring to John Tarrant. John Tarrant says that the gate is the gate of the heart, of the human heart. I think that's really good. I like that. A gate that opens up our hearts to the simple joy of being alive. This kind of reminds me of this definition of nirvana that I found a while back that I like the best as utter contentment.

[26:25]

Utter contentment. You know, that would be, that would be, I mean, I got anything out of life. That would be it. That would be really nice. I am really content. Things are just fine. You know, not too bad, not too good. Just good enough. Good enough. Good enough. So another way to understand opening the gate is to think of it as entering into a new or a different space than the one you're already used to, you know, some new perspective. And in the case of koans, it might mean opening to a new way of seeing things. Like, oh, I never saw it that way before, you know. So kind of the excitement of studying Zen, studying the Buddha Dharma, is I never saw that before. You know, of course you didn't. I mean, how could we? We need that support. We need that help. We need that wish, that urge to know more than we already know, to find out what's over the rainbow, what's behind the next mountain range, or what's through that gate. What is there that I don't know?

[27:28]

So that kind of a shift can take place by changing our focus from the content of the present moment, you know, the little things that are running around in our minds or before our eyes or, you know, into our ears, to the context of our life, you know. It's what Suzuki Rishi called our big mind. The big mind is the context, the container. You know, other words for the context are the universe, reality itself, you know, big mind. So our big mind, we are all, you know. citizens of big mind. We all are born with big mind. That's mom. That's where we come from. We come from big mind and we're going home. That's where we're going and that's where we are now. So there's no separation from reality. We're always in big mind, the context, right? We're always swimming around the great ocean of reality.

[28:29]

But mostly we humans have been wired and taught to focus our attention on content. You know, on the words on the page and the meaning of the words on the page. Or on the foreground of our field of awareness. You know, things like words and images, memories, sensations, objects, and in particular, stories. We love stories. Stories that begin, they have some kind of adventure, and then they end. Dharma, that's called karma. This, and then that. This happened, and then that happened. As if it could. As if it did. So stories are basically, almost for that exception, are delusional. Because this, it's just this. Just this is the realization of ultimate reality. Just this is it. As Reb's been teaching all week, thus. Just thus. Thus. Thus is always in the present. It's always complete. And it includes everything else.

[29:33]

So this and that are thus. So focusing on the this and that, or focusing on the foreground or on the content, is what Suzuki Roshi called our small mind, our self-centered and our limited mind. So we have these two extremes. We have our big mind, the ultimate reality, and we have our small mind, the one that we need to use in order to understand in order to give the teachings of liberation, as Nagarjuna said in his verses. Without an understanding of the relative truth, the ultimate truth cannot be realized, cannot be taught. It cannot be taught. We need words. We need explanations in order to understand how to free ourselves from words and explanations. So once you begin to identify with the background or the context of our life, as well as with the foreground, Again, Reb was saying about pivoting.

[30:34]

You pivot from one to the other. You kind of check out the content and then the context. Expand and contract. Look at the big and then look at the small. And see how they're in relationship with one another. That's what these stories are helping us to do. See that dance. See the relationship of these different aspects of our experience. So particularly we want to look at stories. Koans are stories. And we especially want to look at the stories that we come up with ourselves that we call problems. The stories that we have that are not problems, we probably don't need to spend much time with. But the ones that are problems are the ones that we spend a lot of our time with, whether we want to or not. They're more like they have us than we have them. I don't have problems. Problems have me. And so all of it. You know, the whole show appears to exist in a different way than it actually does, you know.

[31:35]

It begins to appear that things, that problems are really, are really, really are, do really exist. And it's kind of painful if someone tells you that that's just an illusion. It's like, well, that seems kind of insulting. You know, my problems are an illusion. But actually it's intended to be medicine, to begin to look more closely. to spread them out a little bit, give them more room. My therapist used to say, get more room inside, more space inside for your problems. If you put them all together in a tiny little space, that is a problem. How about giving them more room, more air to move around and to be seen and to be thought about, cared about ultimately. We want to care about them. Not get rid of them. They won't go. But how to care for them. You know, how to respect what it is that we care about in our lives and come to some harmony, internal harmony, which then helps us to have harmony with what seems to be outside of ourselves as well.

[32:36]

So if you think about all the stories you've ever told yourself throughout your life, for example, you know, those times that you got lost in the woods or you're... relationship ended, you had a heart, a broken heart, or you were terribly afraid, or maybe you had an injury of some kind, and I recently had a little surgery, and now it's all healed up, and it's sort of like, I'm not thinking about it too much anymore. So it's like, yeah, that story seems to be not so interesting anymore. It was kind of had my attention for a while, now not at all. Or about money stories, or anger stories, or all of them, you know, we've all had a whole assortment of these stories, and where are they now? Where have they gone? I would propose that most of them are forgotten. We've just forgotten. We've moved on. We're looking for something fresh, something new. And, of course, they come. New problems come. But they will go the same way that the old ones did. They don't last because impermanence is the primary truth of our life, of reality, as the Buddha said.

[33:45]

So at the same time, I'm really not suggesting that we treat the things that come into our minds or we treat our problems as simply some transient appearance so that we don't have to care about it, we don't have to worry about it, or we don't have to respect them, or we can just disregard. That's not the teaching. The teaching really is about helping us to do this shifting perspective and to just lessen the weight of what we carry as we continue to work to resolve them. That's all skillful means. You know, the problems really, rather than overwhelm us, we want to put them a little bit out front so we can work with them and see what's a skillful way for me to resolve what's happening here. What steps can I take? What things can I do? So what the Buddha saw and said about the nature of reality, as you all know, I'm sure you've heard many times, is that It's all transient. Like those problems, they will pass. There's no self.

[34:48]

The one having the problems is also of the nature of illusion. And there's discontent, and that has to do with the problems and the one who thinks they have the problems. That there's a discontentment about things not being the way we want. In fact, the cause of suffering is wanting things to be different than they are. And we know, I mean, as soon as I say that, I go, yeah, I know that. I want things to be different than they are. And when I do, that's suffering. On whatever scale, you know, small or big, wanting things to be different than they are. Different than thus. Or just this is it. So it's still very hard for us to believe that that's so, that things are really transient and no self and the discontentment comes from our craving things to be otherwise. Unless we pass through these gateless gates, of great doubt. We really bring it into the front, bring these issues in front so we can study them, like good scholars or good scientists.

[35:52]

We really want to study as deeply as we can with the help of others. We don't go alone into the dark woods. We go with our friends, with our sangha. We explore, we ask, we look at the compass. Maybe we got their GPS signal. So we're always asking for help, and help is there. We want to help each other. So I think that's another part of our journey is making sure we don't forget about others as our companions and as those who perhaps have some way to support us when we're having something difficult going on. So as I said, koans have been around a long time and through all these centuries there are lots of humans like us who have made use of them to understand themselves and to understand the world. and to understand the problem. So for Shakyamuni Buddha, his problem, he discovered, was suffering, the suffering of humanity due to transiency. You know, he found out that his beautiful, young, handsome body was going to age, sicken, and die, and that was unbearable.

[37:01]

You know, I call that the facts of life. He found out about the facts of life, and it just, it terrified him, and so he ran away from home. It's kind of I mean, I don't want to say that was silly, but it is kind of silly. How are you going to get away from old age sickness and death? But I think he thought, and there was a teaching of his era, that you could find eternal life somehow through meditating. You know, you could get out of this horrible body that is going to sicken and die. And you could go to some transcendent space, you know, something like heaven or some Dharma realm or some, the Brahma. You could unify with Brahma. unified with light itself, and then you're free. You've been purified. So he did all that to try and, you know, arrive at that unification with the ultimate truth, as though it were separate, somehow something outside that he could actually do things like meditate or not eat, you know, not bathe. He did all these ascetic practices. And then at some point, your body would be so atrophied that it would let you go.

[38:05]

And your spirit, could transcend to this higher plane. That was the idea. But what he discovered instead is he got very sick, and he almost died, and he realized this is not the way. This is not the way to what I really want, which is to be liberated in this lifetime. I want to find freedom now from my fear of the facts of life. That's really what he discovered, was he freed himself from his fear of What's happening? He was no longer looking for an alternative, like things to be different than they are. He stopped looking for things to be different than they are. And that was the freedom he found from his suffering. So it says that on the Han. I think all of you who've been to Zen Center, you've seen the Han, and you've heard there's a mallet that people hit the wooden board. It hangs outside the Zendo. and on it it says, great is the matter of birth and death. Buddhist koan, great is the matter of birth and death.

[39:11]

No forever. Transiency. Gone. Gone. Completely gone. Awake, awake each one. Don't waste your life. So, you know, you hear that sound, and that's the signal that invites you to the zendo in the morning. So 15 minutes of that sound, bonkho. hit on that verse. Great is the matter of birth and death. So for Dogenzenji, the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, his driving question, the one that sent him across the ocean to China, was this one. As I study both the exoteric and esoteric schools of Buddhism, they maintain that human beings are endowed with Buddha nature at birth. If this is the case, why did the Buddhas of all ages, undoubtedly in possession of enlightenment, find it necessary to seek enlightenment and to engage in spiritual practice?

[40:12]

So Dogen was already ordained, but, you know, for all the things he'd done as a young boy, he was inspired at the sight of his mother's body when he was seven. and he had promised her he would enter his spiritual life, and he did everything, you know, from a very young age. He was in a monastery, he was a novitiate, he studied the texts, he read the originals in Chinese and old Japanese, and he had all of this training in the Buddhist theory and Buddhist teaching and the sutras and all of that. So, you know, enviable body of study he'd done. And yet, you know, why am I doing all this if I am endowed with Buddha nature at birth? Why aren't I content? Why aren't I utterly content? You know, what's the problem? So that was his problem. What's the problem was his problem. So that drove him to China where he was relieved. You know, his famous drop body and mind. Drop body and mind. Drop it.

[41:15]

Drop it. Drop it. Just this. Just now. Just here. Is it. So then, what's the driving question for each of you? I've had quite a few of them, and I'm still driving around, so I think there's lots of promise for us to find questions that we can discuss together. Finding our own questions is the most essential part of this spiritual journey, and it's the first place that you take a step on the path. So one of the ways to work with koans that I understand, or any problem, for that matter, is to see how our judgments arise about the problem and to turn toward those very judgments over and over and over again. You're like, is this a real problem or did I make it up by myself? How will I know? Is this a real problem or am I making this up? Is this a fantasy, an illusion?

[42:17]

Can I step back and try to figure that out? What is the real problem here? And then little by little, we could perhaps come to understand, again, as John Terrence says in his book, and many others have testified, how intimate and how tender our life truly is. John Terrence says this, After years of struggle, my heart was at rest, and the world seemed like a much kinder place. After years of struggle, my heart was at rest, and the world seemed like a much kinder place. Could this openness be the way things truly are? Could this be the way to freedom? So isn't that kind of interesting? It's just that letting go, like letting go, letting go. But without the struggle. we may never recognize that we let go. We need the stroll. We need that mountain to climb or we need that challenge or that knot to try to untie or that friend to help or whatever it is that we need to do these things in order to realize ourselves as fundamentally endowed with Buddha nature from birth.

[43:34]

So then I want to say a little bit more about koan. What is a koan? Koan is interesting. It's an interesting word. Basically, a koan is a story or a dialogue. Oftentimes, it's a dialogue. In the early years of Buddhist teaching, the Buddha gave talks, and those were written down. Thus have I heard was the first opening lines of each of the Buddhist talks. It began with, thus have I heard. Thus have I heard was being written, meaning this is being written down by Ananda, who was the Buddha's attendant and cousin, who stayed with the Buddha for almost all of his life. He was attending the Buddha and copying or memorizing. He wasn't writing it down. He was memorizing what the Buddha said, because in those days there was no written text. But he, along with others, memorized what the Buddha said. And then later on, those things were written down. So, you know, these stories or these dialogues or questions

[44:40]

sometimes from Chinese, you know, fairy tales or lore, are oftentimes supplemented with commentaries, people comment on the koan. So if any of you looked at koan collections, the one we use most in Soto Zen is called the Book of Serenity. And then there's also the Mumong Kan. and there's the Blue Cliff Record, and a number of others, which I'll be sharing those with you, some of those. And when we find a koan that comes from one of those collections, then we can look in there and see what the commentaries about that koan are, and by who. Who wrote a commentary? So in our Zen practice, and particularly Renzi practice, but also, you know, it's not like koans belong to anybody, because all of us who... I know at Zen Center have studied koans, not in the same style. I don't take my koan into my teacher and have him say quats or hit me on the head, and then I go out. It's not like a two-minute exchange that oftentimes I think is what goes on in Rinzai.

[45:42]

Rinzai's tradition, you go in, you state your answer, and then the teacher most often indicates that that's wrong. And then you go out. And then once in a while, a very great while, they nod their approval, and then you go to the next koan. So there's kind of a series of great number of koans that you work your way through. So these teaching stories that we've been studying, we study them more like we talk about them, we read about them, we think about them, and then there's kind of this like, aha, they show up at various times like, oh, that's just like that koan that I was studying or thinking about. But, you know, if you're pushing on them, if you're really... working through them and breaking a sweat trying to understand them, it can provoke this great doubt. And then from there, you can have some initial understanding in your practice. So if the prolonged koan study can also shatter whatever you've made out of the fact that you got some understanding, you know, because then you start to...

[46:47]

humans tend to do is start to inflate. So you begin to understand something, and you kind of go like, oh, I guess I'm catching on to this, you know. You start to begin to puff up a little bit. So the koan study also helps with that, popping you, like they're very good at popping your inflated sense of your own understanding. And that allows further insight, further development of your compassion, and of your integrating these great realizations with your daily life and with your character. So little by little, it's more like you're just weaving. And Reb is talking about the tapestry, reality, the ancient brocade, weaving the ancient brocade, incorporating the forms of spring. which is our daily life. The forms of spring are what's fresh, what's happening with us. Now we're taking those threads of our daily life, of what our life is now, and weaving them into this ancient brocade of teachings, of insight, of study that have been going on now for several thousand years.

[47:48]

So we're the living generation. If you think of a tree, if you think of our generation being the growth ring, of the tree, the one that's alive now, all those other rings have a great influence. They're supporting us to live now and to develop further the understanding and to hold up the tradition. So we're very important. You know, the growth ring, even though we don't know a lot, we're really just catching on and we're really trying our best, but still it's our job to continue to let this tree continue to live and to have an impact. to help with the suffering that there is in this world, as we all know. So the word koan itself is a compound, koan, or kongan in Chinese. Ko is like a public document. And originally, koan was a public case, and the an is a table. So there was a table in public where the judge would sit, and people would bring them their...

[48:53]

problems, and then the judge would rule on them, and that would hit the gavel, and that would settle it. So the judge would settle the koan. So settling your koan, settling this question you have, the great doubt, is what this relationship is all about. So it serves as a kind of metaphor. This judgment table serves as a metaphor for these principles of reality that are beyond the opinion of any single person. You know, it's not just my idea of what the right answer is. It's like, what's the idea that's grown with this tree, that's grown out of this amazing relationship over so many centuries, that this magnificent tree, how do I respect what's happened, what's come before me? How can I make sure I'm not just going off on my own personal idea about what this all means? You know, it's like, keep coming back, keep coming back, you know, stay close to the source of your inspiration. And that teachers may try to help the students to recognize and to understand what that principle is, what that common ground that has been feeding and nourishing this tree for these thousands of years.

[50:04]

Any one common understanding people have is that koans are just tricks or they're unanswerable questions, but actually they're not. They're not just meaningless or absurd. In our practice, it's not It's not just a riddle or a puzzle. You're actually expected to give an appropriate response, something that resonates from your heart, from the gate of your heart as it opens. And there's a Zen teacher by the name of Victor Hori, who says that the central theme of many koans is the identity of opposites. So again, back to the two truths that form an emptiness. form an emptiness or light and dark or any oppositional notions, which are all language, any oppositional notions we have, the koans are trying to help us to stop seeing them as opposites. So Victor Horace says that koan after koan explores this theme of non-duality, non-dual, non-separation.

[51:07]

of the ultimate new relative or of light from dark or me from you, maybe the most important one. Not separating myself from the world or from my place in it in human society. I don't want to go away. I made a vow to live and be aware of the suffering of others and to do what I can to bring some relief both to myself and to those who suffer. So Horace says that koan after koan explores the theme of non-duality. Hakon's well-known koan, two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand is clearly about two and one. The koan asks you to know what duality is, not what is non-duality. And what is your original face before your mother and father were born? The phrase father and mother... alludes to reality. And this is obvious to someone who's versed in the Chan tradition where so much philosophy and thought is presented in the imagery of paired opposites.

[52:13]

So when we're listening to koans, when we're looking at koans, let's listen for those paired opposites to see how they're used to help us to understand and break through the clinging to one or the other side of a dualistic proposition. And this phrase, your original face, another koan, alludes to the original non-duality. What is your original face before your parents were born? There we are. So next week I'm going to look at this first lecture in Zenmai Beginner's Mind and discuss the koan about killing the Buddha if you meet the Buddha on the road. As I said, this koan is attributed to Rinzai's founder. and it can be found in a record of Linji's sayings called the Linji Lu. So I just got a copy of that from my teacher who happily had a copy. He got back in 1973 and he's got these little notations. This is so amazing.

[53:14]

I'm looking at these little notes that Reb wrote, you know, when is that, 50 years ago? Anyway, as he was beginning his studies... with Suzuki Roshi. So I feel really privileged to have gotten this very pristine copy of the Linji-gu from RAB to use for our class. Okay, well, that's what I have for now. And I'd be very happy to hear from you, whatever you'd like to say. We have some chat things going on. Let me see what's going on in the chat. What did I do? That's not chat. Yeah. Melissa sent the fundamental teaching of the middle way. Did you all receive that? You were able to get that in the chat? Oh, great. Yes, they did. Thank you, Melissa. That's great. Oh, good.

[54:15]

Great. Okay. So you've got Hazy Moon by Maezumi Roshi. You've got Bring Me the Rhinoceros. great book and you blue cliff record book what this is all there jeez i had to buy books when i was a new student i had to go and carry these really heavy books and here we are as light as a feather lighter than a feather it's the digital world what a miracle thanks melissa for doing that really appreciate it so any questions any of you would like to bring up or or comments uh whatever you would like to share be more than welcome Any cons? Hi, Hope. Welcome, welcome. Hope has just left Green Gulch for far, far away. Salt Lake? No, Utah. Yes, yes, Salt Lake.

[55:15]

Hello, everybody. Thank you for welcoming me to the saga. This is very important to me. This question is a practical question, but I wonder if there is... a way to be connected to everybody in the Sangha, like an email list or something like that, if that already exists. Or maybe not, and that's okay. No, we kind of gather here at the watering hole. So anytime you want to meet with any of these folks, you can do that right here on Sunday at 5. We talked about that at one time, but I don't really know how we'd go about that. It seems like, I don't know, where we'd put it, and I don't know. But that request comes back around, and people really want to have some way. But, you know, the chat is good because we can share, like we just did, readings, and if somebody wants to meet up, certainly you're welcome to offer that right here if you're coming out to California or you're already in California.

[56:21]

Yeah. and you'd like to talk about meeting with some of us, you're welcome to do that. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Well, welcome. Nice of you. Glad that you were able to come. Tom, do you want to say something about your note in the chat about GroupMe? Yeah, GroupMe. It's an app I used with some people previously, and I don't think you don't even have to give... It's just an app that folks can get probably in Android or also Apple...

[57:22]

And if someone starts it, which, you know, I could potentially be the person to start it, then I think you can find ways to connect pretty easily and like send an invitation to all. And then it's just something because who was asking the question? Hope was asking the question about connecting, possibly, you know, having the option to connect throughout the week. And that would give us... The option, if we wanted that option to connect at other points other than just on a Sunday, if we want that going forward. So I'm just throwing that out there. Thanks, Tom. Thank you. Of course. Say it again. Yeah. Thank you. Yes, of course. My pleasure. Yeah. Hey. Thank you, Sensei. Hello, Sangha. I wanted to say a particular hello to Hope. Hi. I remember you from Green Dolch and my little Dharma sister.

[58:24]

And I wanted to speak to how one creates Sangha in this environment, if I may. weekly in this group how close I feel to its members it's kind of like it's making me choke up a little bit actually I've never had an actual conversation with some of them but we've bantered about Dharma together every week and so when I met my Dharma sister Senkol at our Jukai I felt like I'd known her for a long time, and it was so heartwarming to be in the same physical presence as someone you studied such enormous questions with.

[59:26]

But I built that entirely through being online with these people. And so it's so there, and it's so present, and we welcome you into it. Yeah, you'll be surprised. Thank you, Melissa. I realize now that my question came from longing and sadness leaving Green Gulch. So thank you for seeing that. I feel seeing. Yeah, I'm going to be feeling that myself pretty soon. And we don't have to be at Green Gulch, which is kind of... It's kind of nice to know. It's not located. The unlocatedness of our sangha, I think, is kind of a gift that those of us who can't be here, you know, it was wonderful that Ying could come for Jukai, and that somehow doing the work of preparing for that was able to happen without our having to be in the same place, because we couldn't.

[60:35]

So anyway, I feel really grateful for this. flat screen event that's going on. And the other thing I thought about the meeting online that I really like, when I teach classes at Green Gauch, if there are a number of people in the room, like 30 or 40 people, I can really only see the front row. Everybody's in the front row on Zoom. You know, you're all right there in the front row with your big head and your presence and your name. So there's something about that, just only front row seating. that I also really appreciate about this way of meeting. So anyway, there's, of course, pros and cons. But what's also been very special is when we have had a chance to be together. Lisa was just out here. I showed you photographs from her jukai last week, and that was amazing. And now she's maybe not back home yet. Lisa, are you here? No, not yet. So she was traveling on her way back to Massachusetts.

[61:39]

So, yeah. Dean. Hi, y'all. I'm on my phone, which is a little baby screen, so it's a little bit of a challenge, but I wanted to let people know, and some of you probably know and some don't, the... The literature that we get online, often it opens up generally in a PDF file. And just know the page numbers are not necessarily the same as if you have a book in front of you. For example, I've been studying the hand of thought with a group of people online. And today someone got lost. Half of us have the books. Half of us are using the online book. And the online book has page number 119, and the written book, the actual physical book, is on page 109.

[62:48]

So just keep in mind, because the PDF reads every page. You know, often in the beginning of a book, there's like the moon and a dew drop. Page one is the front cover of the book. And then by the time you get to page one inside the book, there's been 15 pages of, you know, introductions and a drawing and other things. So just keep that in mind that when some of us are studying the PDF, that there may be some confusion because sometimes the books don't have, the digital books don't have even the numbers on the actual pages. So just you'll find out when it happens and it'll be confusing. But just know we all I think everybody struggles with it when we're balancing both of them. Thank you, Dean. Thank you for that. That's a little bit more information about koans.

[63:53]

That part of my brain, that sort of metaphor part of my brain doesn't. It's definitely alive, but it's generally in a state of confusion. And I've been in a koan class for a while, and what I finally figured out is somewhere towards the end, often after we've said goodbye, I've thought, oh, I've got something to say. So just, you know, if anybody else has got a sort of a slow brain around that, just keep in mind that... it can seep in even if we don't know what it means. So I'm encouraging myself here with that. Yeah, thank you. You know, it also reminds me a lot of just looking at abstract art. You know, like you and I are standing there going, oh my, look at those horses running through the field. You're going, what are you talking about? Those are horses and jellyfish or whatever. So it's really also...

[64:56]

It's open to interpretation, which I think is what I like about him best, is that we can all bring our own hit on what it is that those words are conveying and write our own commentary. Gil Francero, years ago, I crazily said I would do a class on the Diamond Sutra, not knowing what I was saying. He just said, oh, yeah, Diamond Sutra, sure. Anyway, it was insane, and I realized I was way over my head, and I said to Gil... who had been at Stanford getting his doctorate, I said, well, so which commentary of the Diamond Sutra should I read? And he said, oh, you can read them, but the one you really want to take care of is the one you write. What's your commentary? And I said, oh. So I like the invitation to find the freedom to your own understanding. You know, how do you see it? And can't miss. Sinko. Hi, Fu.

[65:59]

Hi, Sinko. I have a question, but I first want to just tell Melissa how much, you know, the same feeling I had when I see you guys in person. And I feel like really dearly, she is my Dharma sister. It's very special. It was like, oh, Fu did a magic word. Somehow she just, I don't know. I'm like, it's really hard to express. Yeah. I also have a personal co-on. I've been thinking about it. I don't think there's an answer, but it's something that kind of puzzles me from time to time. So I've been really into this book called Determined by Robert Sapolsky. He's a neuroscientist at Stanford. Basically, he writes about from neuroscience and biology to explain why there's no free will. and why we don't have some kind of soul or some kind of central admin place just determining what we do as we think we have a spirit somehow.

[67:04]

So from a very scientific approach, and I really loved it. And also some philosophy. And also, you know, with the Buddhist teaching, I think it's really supportive. But then another thing I guess I'm trying to understand is sometimes like from my own experience, I find, yeah, I'm very determined, especially at the point when sufficient condition triggered my karma from the past. I would just say things to my kids, like I feel really bad later, but I couldn't control myself at that point, right? So then I start to think, you know, where's my, there's no free will, there's no such thing as a, you know, soul to instruct, but how can I use my awareness, this practice, somehow to, I don't know, maybe not defeat, But managing this karma, that's so deep. And I often repent, you know, my ancient twisted karma because I think it's just so powerful. It's really hard. And then also, you know, scientifically, I understand, really, I like the theory of no free will.

[68:11]

But it's just those things mingle together. I think I'm very confused. I might have confused you. Me? Yeah. No. Well, maybe, I don't know. Maybe I'm confused. I'm talking a lot. Lack of free will. Well, what I thought when you said that, I mean, I understand that teaching. Also, there's a lag time between when we do something and actually the decision to do it was nanoseconds earlier than we're aware of it. I've read that study, too. It's fine. I think the nice thing about the Buddhist teaching is that That conditioning that's bringing forth that thing you wish you hadn't said, we're working to recondition ourselves. So we may not have free will, but we don't have to be conditioned as we got from our parents or the way we were talked to by our parents. We can actually, as things arise into our consciousness from our unconscious. So the unconscious is where all that conditioning took place, that lack of free will, because I've just been trained to think a certain way and speak a certain way.

[69:19]

So I am now in a retraining program. And as the Buddha said, what you are today comes from your thoughts, your training of yesterday, your present thoughts and training will build your life of tomorrow. Your life is a creation of your mind. So the way the method works is that what comes up now in your mind, you may see that as some like really kind of Unkind speech or whatever. So what we're working on is practicing kind speech. And then that goes down into our unconscious. Oh, I just said a really nice thing. I'm practicing nice speech, kind speech. When I'm not being motivated to say something unkind, I'm just going to keep practicing kind speech. And then when my unconscious produces a response, maybe that kindness is going to start to come forward. Maybe my patience is, I'm practicing patience, and I'm putting that down in my unconscious. Maybe the patience will begin to emerge as a response rather than impatience.

[70:22]

And I think it works. I think you know it works. I know it works. So it really isn't so much about whether you have free will or not. It's like, what is your will? That you basically have some influence in kind of repackaging what you're carrying around. Yeah. No, that's really good because sometimes I had a little, yeah, like what you said, I was thinking no free will. It just means we're so conditioned by our past, the past in the past, but then we can change the conditioning. Yeah, yes, yes. I think that's really helpful. You just reminded me because sometimes I have a little thinking about that. Yeah, think about that. And also, you can help with your children's conditioning because you're the one who's conditioning them. So your motive may also be, I don't want this to be generational. I want that behavior to stop with me. And I want my children to have a different option or different set of choices to make other than the ones I've inherited from my ancient twisted karma.

[71:27]

Yeah. So it's not just for you. It's for everyone in your world, in your life that you want to remember. It's my lifetime practice. Yes. [...] Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Dean. Thank you. You know, you just said something when y'all were just talking. And you said, I believe this is what you said, that our unconscious, is where that conditioning comes from. But it made me think that that unconscious is also where, when you said you know that decision, before we know it, it's somewhere. But that unconscious is also where I think our decisions or our knowing comes from, too, because if one of the things I've learned is

[72:36]

is that I'm in an uncomfortable situation and I have to wait. I have to sit before I can move forward. I have to wait for the answer to arise rather than try to get an answer. I have to wait for it to arise. And I sort of think that doesn't that... I mean, what we're doing is... we're maybe working on those conditions that, you know, what Ying was talking about, but also in the same place, there's our, I don't know if strength is the right word or our peace or whatever. Doesn't that also reside there? And what we do in this practice is we're also allowing that, to be part of our, I guess, awareness.

[73:41]

Yes. And yes. And then, yes. And then the, you know, the basic error that the alaya, we're talking about the alaya, the storehouse consciousness, which is what the yoga chart teachings, the mind only teaching are showing us the structure of the mind, which is above the line, there's six sense consciousness. That's all you're ever aware of. Five senses and... and your thinking consciousness, which is aware of thoughts. And below the line, which is where you're sitting right now, is the alaya. The alaya is where all the ancient twisted karma has been carried along from beginning this greed, hate, and delusion and being born through body, speech, and mind. You know, it makes me. That's what I'm made out of. And the good stuff, some of my conditioning was rather good. You know, I was... My parents were nice people, more or less, and they mostly did really nice things and took care of their children. And they basically taught us some nice ways to look at the world, along with other things that maybe weren't so good to be trained about.

[74:46]

But even so, I feel like that good stuff is there too. And how does this living being discern? How do I listen? I think listening is the key. How do I listen for that sound, that sound that's liberative? It's freeing. This direction is also freeing in the direction of how I see the world. So the teachings are all in there too. They're all getting put in there. All these digital systems can be going into the unconscious. They're in their collective unconscious. And we can access those in our conscious studies. We can learn these words. We can practice patience. And that continuously transforms the unconscious. so that little by little becomes more and more beneficial, less harmful, less greedy, and so on. It's a work in progress, as we were saying. And at some point, a fully enlightened Buddha doesn't have an alaya. It's gone. There's just kind of reflections in the mirror.

[75:50]

There isn't that kind of person thing going. They asked the Buddha, are you a human being? He said, no. Are you a god? No. You say, what am I? I'm awake. So somehow, whatever that means to be awake, it kind of short-circuits this thing about... Because one of the problems with the alaya is the other part of the mind that's unconscious. It's called manas, the lover. And that part of the mind loves the alaya. We think that alaya is ourself. That's what we're in love with. That big bag of old... conditioning, you know, I can play the flute, and I can speak English, and I, blah, blah, blah, I've got all these things that I carry around, that's what I'm in love with. So that has to pop, that dualistic notion that I have, possess, and yada, yada, and am different than you, and so on and so forth, that's all stuffed in there too. So all of that needs to actually disappear.

[76:53]

But before it does, we work with it. You know, that's our practice. Just keep working with it, little by little. So I have faith in that. So does it disappear in that it's almost like we absorb it, that duality goes away, and that disappearance happens because we sort of integrate and absorb everything into, No thing. Well, I think the we do it, it disappears. The doer disappears. So it's pretty hard to testify how that happened. You know, it's basically the one who still sees themselves as separate is doing the work. You know, we're the bodhisattvas. We're not abandoning our selfish tendencies or our hateful tendencies. We're learning about them. And we're learning how they work and how they fool us.

[77:56]

And the more and more we're not fooled. by these products that are coming up from down below, the better chance we have of making a different kind of response over time. So I think we can just sort of trust the process if we do, and that if we continue to work with practicing patience, practicing ethics, practicing generosity, and so on, that that's transformative of this whole system. And then as we get really, really old, perhaps we'll just smile, goofy, goofy smile, all that will be left of you, Dean. We've got good practice with that. Thanks. You're welcome. All right, dear ones. I wanted to know what the name of the poem was. Nagarjuna, the poem, Nagarjuna?

[78:56]

Was it the Nagarjuna's here? Hope wanted to, what did you want to know, Hope? Where are you? Hi. You read a poem or recited a poem earlier about inevitably awakening, finding. Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna, okay. So you want to look at the fundamental wisdom of the middle way. Jay Garfield. Give you something to do out there in Salt Lake City, okay? Thank you, thank you. You're welcome. Okay, I'm going to go on gallery. You're putting me on gallery? Okay. I have my own Alaya over there. Okay, are you going to do it? You did it? There we go. Now I'm on gallery. Wonderful. Hello, hello, hello. Why?

[79:58]

Oh, look in the chat. If you want those references, they're all in there. I think you've got to get them now or they will vanish. Huh? Oh, group me. Okay, I'm going to let Tom and Amir, who seem to know what they're talking about, take care of any possibility of linking this in because I am a boomer and I know nothing. It's so embarrassing. No, that's okay. If I could say just another word about it. So the group me allows us to kind of chat with one another and I can kind of make a group and then it's kind of it just allows us to kind of share those links, for example. So it's kind of a yeah, it's just a chat function, a social media chat function. You can look at reviews and read about it more like within the app stores on your if you have a smart device. And I don't I think you have to have a smart device. Maybe you can just connect on any browser. on a laptop or whatnot, but it just allows us to chat with one another and, and, uh, you know, share those links that folks were sharing tonight, uh, going forward or any other information that we want to share with each other.

[81:08]

So at the moment I just gave my name and say, you'd connect with me and then I'll change, I'll make it a group. Uh, if you'd like to do that, I can make it a group called the Sunday Dharma group as an option. So. Does that help to explain it better? Am I being helpful? I hope. You are helpful. I'm sure everyone who's nodding knows what you're talking about. Okay, cool. Good. Yeah, I just barely know what a document is. No, that's okay. I'm just like, what's a document? Anyway, I'm just making new copies of things. I didn't have to make a little page. Okay. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, everyone. Yes. My pleasure. Have a good night. We'll be killing the Buddha. So, I'm very sorry. Sorry. We have to deal with that. But it's first koan. This is a Giroshi presents in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. So, read the first chapter. I think what's going to be really fun is rereading Zen Mind Beginner's Mind together and then finding these little nuggets that we can, you know, poke into a little more.

[82:14]

There it is. Thank you, Michael. And my beginner's mind. Okay, everyone. Many blessings to you all. Hope you're going to have a great new year and life. And we'll see you next week. Thank you so much, Fu. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Thank you, everybody. Welcome. Thank you, Fu. Thank you. Take care.

[82:41]

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