An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with even in a hundred thousand million galpas Having listened to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. So this morning I'd like to keep moving backwards into this Genjo Kahn.

[01:17]

Pretty good description of Shashin. It's like when you walk forward you sort of feel like you know where you're going. When you go backwards it's like it's both unknown and in another way it's territory you've already covered. taking the backwards step. And Dogen Zenji called it. Okay. Here's the piece I'd like to talk on today. Here is the place. Here the way unfolds. The boundary of realization is not distinct. For the realization comes forth simultaneously with the mastery of Buddha Dharma. Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is grasped by your consciousness. Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may be distinctly apparent.

[02:25]

Its appearance is beyond your knowledge. first short sentence. This here is the place, here the way unfolds. Shashin often has a rhythm to it. First couple of days, We create a big fuss. For whatever reasons we have about creating a fuss.

[03:29]

And then somewhere, blessedly in the third day, we start to chill out somewhat. Sometimes. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we persist in our fuss. Fussing to the bitter end. Not to say one's better than the other. Sometimes the persistence of our fussing is a deep message. It's like it's saying to us, are you listening to me? Do I have to tell you this again? Well, okay, then I will. So please listen to your fussing. Or it might just get lighter and angrier. Or sadder.

[04:35]

Or more filled with the lonely yearning. I heard recently that John King, that many of you know, and maybe some of you don't know, a priest here, went to San Quentin to be with the prison Dharma group that he has helped foster and nurture. And John, as many of us know, is in a precarious phase in his existence. Death is imminent. And John chose that, even though this was the case, to go to St. Clinton and be with the Sangha. I was thinking, oh, what a gift. What a gift for the prison Sangha to realize, to experience, to witness.

[05:41]

This person has limited time in this body. And what do they choose to do with it? come and be with me. This person has limited time in this breath, in this body. And what do they choose to do? Practice. Practice kindness and generosity. It's a funny thing having a mind. You know, there you are, right in your own mindset. It's so real, it's so vivid, it's so compelling, so appropriate. And every now and then something else pops up and it seems kind of small. Oh. So that's what John King's doing.

[06:48]

So why exactly am I worried that my nails don't look so pretty today? Why am I a little bit annoyed that they serve this kind of hot cereal instead of that? Or that the person I'm serving with walked in front of me instead of letting me go first? In the intensity of that moment, That's an atrocity, that person going in front of you. Then you put it in a bigger perspective and it's just part of the sweet dance of existence. It's not a matter of which one is the true Dharma. They're all just hammer of particularity striking the bale of emptiness.

[07:57]

This is what it means to say, here is the place. Here is the moment. Here is the particularity of this existence. This moment with a truck passing and making noise is exactly it. It's completely what's happening. The way I flavor it, hold it, consider it, that's exactly part of it too. And the exactness of that moment, in the context of all being, the way unfolds. For the first couple of days, I've been trying to talk about this is the place.

[09:06]

This is it. Be here now. For those of you that don't know, in the 60s, Ram Dass wrote a funky little book called Be Here Now. It was a great revelation. Went very well with taking acid. Seemed like a perfect match. Be here now. We pay attention as completely and exactly to what's arising and that's what illustrates And more mysteriously, that's what creates the mindlessness of all existence.

[10:10]

In the Dharma, it's called flash of lightning in a vast dark sky. Can you know all the potential of the moment, all the possible scenarios? All that can be known, all that can be apprehended is what arises in the moment. And then the intrigue comes around the passion of our involvement in our own experience. The passion of our involvement co-creates the moment. If you say, I have to crush the passion of my own involvement, I have to crush the fact that I'm irritated that that server crossed in front of me when really I was going over there and I should have been the one that went first and they should have waited and come after me.

[11:25]

I have to not think that or feel that. I have to have a serene, calm, generous mind. Practice is more direct. What is it? Here is the place. The mind that arises is the mind that arises. That's the karma of the moment. Quite naturally, when that arising mind has some calmness to it, has some breath to it. When the rising mind thinks, oh yeah, John King, oh well, so what, they crossed in front of me.

[12:30]

I love them anyway. I just love them for being who they are. Then we all give ourselves high score that contracted bitter mind that's just searching for something to get upset about we give that a low score To be utterly shameless about contracted, bitter mind, just searching, spoiling for a fight. To be utterly shameless, that's our practice. To just say, hmm, contracted, bitter mind, spoiling for a fight.

[13:40]

striking the bell of emptiness. It's precisely and completely itself. It's precisely and completely the codependent arising out of all the potential and possibilities that could come into being. That's the one. How utterly and completely amazing and incomparable. all the ways my being could manifest, that's what happened. So in Zen lingo, we call this coming from the mind of emptiness. The mind

[14:52]

that says, well, there's good and there's bad and it should be like this and if it's not like that, it's bad. This is the mind of preconceived ideas. That mind registers the world according to its agenda. Okay, I had a lovely thought of John King. I am a good Zen student. Okay, I totally forgot John King. And I was filled with rage of a bad Zen student. So as we settle into Shishin, we can do ourselves the service of laying down some of the burden of good and bad, of right and wrong, of success and failure.

[16:14]

It's a risky proposition. What do you do with yourself? How will you spend your time? If you're not diligently trying to get it right and avoid getting it wrong, what will you do? We don't worry. There's lots to do. But this is Zen's contribution. In the last couple of days, I've been talking really about this is the place in a more classic sense. You have commitment, you have receptive attention, you have noticing the hindrances, you have including attention to the hindrances in being present.

[17:20]

And then Zen says, okay, now open up a little more. Just forget good and bad. Yes? What about the mind that says I'm going to kill that? Fortunately, there are things to do. Meaning that this practice of sashim happens within a container, within a structure. Don't forget, we've already covered just doing what we're told and following the schedule completely this is to within this container it gives us permission to forget good and bad we're not

[18:55]

More usually, we operate in a world constructed from our own greed, hate, and delusion. But in Sashin, we operate in a world that supports awakening. Sashin never ends. But apart from that, we'll deal with that when it comes. Thank you for the question. But you made me forget my thought. So the Zen contribution is to hold these diligent practices of being in the moment and even including in the moment learning from the ways we resist or hinder the moment.

[20:30]

Zen asks us to open up and see how we're framing that and to release notion of good and bad, success and failure. Sometimes we say don't know. And this in a way is the predatory step for what we might call Zen action. How do you do something if you're not holding on to any fixed ideas? It's a little bit like jazz or improv. Dizzy Gillespie or Thelonious Monk play.

[21:42]

They don't script their rift, their improv. They don't sit in a room before they go out and think, I'll do it exactly like this. They go out there and they jump into nothing without knowing and it comes forth. Could they do that the way they do it if they'd never had any training? Could you do it exactly the way they do it, with the same flair and skill? No. So our knowledge, our training comes through when we just be into the moment. but it's not because we've thought it through.

[22:50]

And that's what Dogen's trying to say here. Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is grasped by your consciousness. Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be distinctly apparent. Parents is beyond your knowledge. It's like breathing. You can sit in Zazen and think about how you should breathe. You can give over to something And let it happen. Breath. And some... Something comes through.

[23:57]

So in Zen we say, Zazen, Sitzazen. The breath breathes the breath. The body breathes the breath. This is about... going beyond, coaching us, training us to go beyond our ideas of what we're supposed to be doing, how we're supposed to be doing it. This is about coming from the mind of emptiness. Maybe all this science a little bit abstract and irrelevant. But I'd suggest otherwise. If our definition of practice

[25:16]

is a new and improved version of our karmic preferences, our karmic likes and dislikes. All we're really doing is reinforcing and reinstituting our karmic patterns. How can it not be? So this perspective, this Dharma, this teaching is to have us bring some quality of not knowing, some quality of a full engagement that's not quite literally self-conscious. So we say, let your body breathe. Let body breathe body. And we initiate this by sitting down and rather than mind thinking of posture, let body be conscious of posture.

[26:30]

Rather than mind breathing body, let body breathe body. Rather than mind walking down the hall, let body walk down the hall. Rather than mind eating your lunch, let body eat your lunch and discover what's body's response to this. Was that too little food or too much food? Not a fixed idea in your head, but your body's response. And something starts to shift. in what's guiding and defining our practice. So I'm hoping now, as you settle into Shashin, that this starts to be doable, accessible, possible.

[27:44]

And it's important to remember, it's not like all of a sudden our karmic stream shuts down, turns off. But there is some way in which we become less ensnared and less utterly preoccupied by it. As those moments when awareness happens to now reside in them to let them bring forth a way of engaging that's just letting the moment be itself letting the body be the body to give yourself permission to slow down some to start to notice how

[28:54]

Even in our body, we have habitual gestures, habitual postures. Part of the rigor, part of the challenge of Sashim is to carry Zaza in body all the time. When we're sitting, when we're walking, when we're in lecture, Even when you're resting on taking a break. This is allowing something, the co-creation of the moment to define itself. And then as Dogen Sinji says, what arises out of that is not necessarily your knowledge.

[30:02]

What arises out of that has some A sense of spacious being. The sound of the card horn is not some annoying interruption. It's just what's happening in the moment. And then in Zen teaching, from that spacious mind, the mind of emptiness, this emptiness of non-asserting my ideas and my opinions, that's the mind, sometimes called no mind. So that's the mind with which we act. That's the mind

[31:23]

with which we sweep the steps and the steps sweep us. That's the mind with which the co-dependent arising of being starts to display itself. And as I say, it's not like karmic mind disappears. Our car horns stop going off. Or they go off exactly when you want them to. No, they go off exactly when they go off. And can we just... Let that have its own life. Let whatever it produces be produced.

[32:28]

It doesn't mean there isn't a glimmer of relief when it stops. This codependent writing, this is our heart's desire. This is our source of joy. This is our sense of belonging and belonging to. This is our sense of creating and being created. So there's a discipline of being here. There's the discipline of paying attention.

[33:31]

There's the discipline of not being distracted. And that creates its own heat. That creates its own disturbance. We settle into our unsettledness. That's the human condition. You quiet down a little bit and then you get to notice what it is you've been skipping over, too distracted to attend to, or been holding down through your own psychological defenses. Yeah. Settle into your unsettledness. But right along with it, We can introduce, in a kind of reckless, shameless way, we can introduce just walking down the hall.

[34:36]

So what if your mind is ranting and raving like a mad lunatic? Just walk down the hall. Just experience body moving through space. Just eat your lunch. Just notice the sunlight casting its shadow in the courtyard. those orange flowers in the back courtyard blaze with orangeness. It's not a matter of waiting for some perfect being in some perfect world.

[35:47]

No, the orangeness is right there. It's right here. Here is the place. Here the way unfolds. Whose permission do we need to live a life of joy? Once I shot Shashin with a teacher, a fierce Rinzai teacher. And we were doing fierce Rinzai theater. Theater. You know, you go in and you have a con and you... It's theater. It's life and death theater, too.

[36:52]

And I would then enter into the fierce fire of that theater. And he just said, I don't know where, where everything else comes. What is joy? I was clueless. I was stopped in my tracks. How could I be fierce in response to a question like that? How could I be clever? How could I be determined? How could I be anything? What is joy? Do you want to live a life of suffering, destruction, disappointment, resentment, or a life of joy?

[38:05]

Whose permission do you need? When will you take that step? Why notice the blazing orangeness of the orange flowers in the back courtyard when you could keep complaining about how that server crossed in front of you when they shouldn't have? And of course, this prompts us to hold our own suffering with a deep compassion. What on earth would you want to do with suffering other than that? Because we see it separates us from joy.

[39:15]

something about needing to release the intrigue of our own determined efforts to make it the way we want it and avoid the way we don't want it. To release that so we can respond to the request of Dharma, break our own hearts, and meet it with compassion. That's a Zen version of a love story. It's got some drama. It's got some scary moments. But in the end, everybody lives happily ever after.

[40:28]

Here is the place. Here the way unfolds. Off to a good start. The bindery of realization is not distinct. Okay, getting a little scary. For the realization comes forth, even though motorbikes are going by, still comes forth. For the realization comes forth simultaneously with the mastery of the Buddha Dharma. Each moment gives us its own teaching. But don't suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge. That just folds it back into your own karmic thinking. Although it's actualized immediately, this vastness of being

[41:37]

the source of joy is beyond your knowledge doesn't mean you don't have ideas and feelings about it just means their ideas and feelings about it completely themselves so please Make a big deal out of walking down the hall, out of eating your lunch, out of holding your own difficult feelings with compassion. Make a big deal out of it and then marvel at your own capacity for making a big deal out of things. Want me to say that part again?

[42:43]

Capacity to make a big deal out of things. It's like Suzuki Roshi saying, take yourself seriously, but not too seriously. Thank you. Every being and place with the true merit of God's grace.

[43:25]

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