Good afternoon. Thank you, Greg, for inviting me and Jakku for us here. I think this is the third time we've been. Thank you. Yeah, it's nice to see everybody here. It's great. Jakku and I, Jakku, where are you? Back there. Jakku and I were residents here, I think we came in 1987. You know everybody. Everybody's like a big river that just came through here. We left in 1990. So anyway, now we have a Zen center in Capitola, California called Ocean Gate Zen. And I'm writing a book on Dogen Zenji's Uji being time for wisdom publications, which will probably come out next year. I think that's probably realistic. So I thought I'd talk about Dogen today.

[01:01]

Thought I'd talk about Uji a little bit. So first of all, I wanted to talk about how do we study Dogen. I wanted to tell you my thoughts on how to understand and study Dogen Zenji. Does everybody know who Dogen? No? Okay. Dogen Zenji was the founder of Soto Zen in Japan in the 13th century. He was born in 1200 and died, I believe, in 1243. No, that's wrong. 53. Thank you. Correct me, Greg. Just jump right in there. 53. So he was 53 years old when he died. And Dogen wrote some quite difficult things to understand about the nature of practice and his understanding about how the world worked, how reality is. Uji is one of those chapters of a, it's a chapter of a book called Shabogenso, which means the true Dharma I. And there are various compilations of the Shobogans.

[02:02]

So the largest one is about 99 chapters, I think. Maybe it's up to 100. I think it was 99 chapters that he wrote about practice, about various things. So let me just talk about my process of studying Dogen. And the first thing about Dogen is when you're reading Dogen, is don't try to fit what Dogen says into something you already know about practice. So for example, we chant the Heart Sutra a lot. So we chant a lot, form is emptiness, emptiness is form. So when you run across something that you don't understand, it's a problem if you say to yourself, oh, that's form, oh, that's emptiness. So I really encourage you not to immediately make that kind of leap when you're reading Dogen into something that you already understand, because what will happen is that you'll actually miss what he's trying to say.

[03:05]

You might miss the subtleties, or actually you might just miss it altogether, because you're trying to make it into something you already know. And that's something that we do a lot, right? We're in some kind of relationship, we're talking to somebody, we're already thinking before we even... before they have a chance to finish talking, we're thinking about what we're going to say in response to what they've said. So this is kind of like that when you're studying. So if you want to work with Dogen, it's important not to lay your own ideas on top of his. I use scholarly resources a lot. Dogen's very difficult to understand, so I think it's important to kind of get a lay of the land. Right before I came over here, I was thinking about that. I thought, what is that kind of like? Maybe it's like a map. Practice would be you're on the ground walking that walk, right? But you need a map to know where you're going.

[04:06]

So reading scholarly essays and scholarly books on Dogen is really important to help you understand whether or not you're in the right ballpark, whether or not you're... You're understanding what's going on. So it gives you a general structure to work with. So for those of you who are interested, I'm going to give you a couple of books that I think are really good for studying Dogen. One is Heejin Kim's Dogen Keegan Mystical Realist. So that's a great book for a general introduction. It's not even a general introduction. It's a... Really good introduction to understanding Dogen. Another book would be Masao Abi's book called, I think it's called A Study of Dogen, and it's a series of essays about various parts of Dogen, and it's actually a comparison of Heidegger, so you can forget that part. Like what I do is when they, oftentimes there's this real desire to want to compare Dogen to other whitehead or somebody like that, to Western philosophers.

[05:15]

So what I do is I just go through and skip all those parts. You don't need all those parts, in my opinion, anyway. I just want the parts where they talk about dogens, so that's okay. Another resource for... So those are kind of two good books. Shohaku Okumura has written books on Genja Kowon, Bendowa, so he's a really good source. Shohaku also... has, I think, the Bendoes that he does, and you can go online to his Zen Center, which is Sangshin Community, and you'll find audio tapes of these lecture machines that he's given. So they cost like 65 bucks for hours worth of commentary on a fascicle by Dogen. So those are really, really helpful. The other thing is there's a publication called Dharma Eye that you can find online that's put out by the Soto Shoe.

[06:22]

So Dharma Eye is a series of essays about Soto Zen. They come out, I don't know, quarterly or twice a year. There's always a translation of a fascicle with footnotes on Shobo Genzo by somebody like Carl Blilfield or somebody who's a big scholar. in Soto Zen, translating Dogen. So that's a really... And also there's always a running commentary by Shohaku Okamura on some fascicle of Dogen. So it's a great resource. You can find it online. You can find like, you know, 10 years worth of this stuff online. Another resource is the Stanford Translation Project. Stanford is translating all of the Shobo Genzo. You can find it online. Just go... type in Google, Stanford, Shobogenzo, and you'll get these translations. Actually, the whole thing's been translated, but the whole thing's not online, but it's still great because the footnotes are amazing, and there's a lot of secondary resource material there.

[07:25]

So, for example, if Dogen refers to a koan, it will tell you what the koan is, it will tell you where you can find the koan, and so if you are interested, you can kind of follow that thread and find out more about that. Um... So those are some resources. Shohaku and Taigen Leighton, who was a student here, trained here. Also Taigen's books that he translated with Shohaku. So, and then let me talk a little bit about translation. So, excuse me, this is a little geeky, but, you know, it's like for you guys who are interested in this, I want to talk about it. Sometimes it's difficult with certain venues because And this is, let me just talk about commentaries, about practice commentaries about Dogen. You try to talk about Dogen in a way that you're meeting your audience, right? You want to meet the practitioners. And so sometimes...

[08:27]

It's difficult if you really want to delve into this practice, really want to go into Dogen. It's difficult to find commentaries that actually kind of go deeply into it. Their tendency is to skip across the top because that's the audience that you're talking to. So excuse me for this, but I want to talk to you guys who really want to kind of have resources to go down into this. So I want to talk a little bit about translations. I don't speak Japanese. I don't read Japanese. If you're young and you have that capacity and you have that brain and you're interested in Dogen, I really encourage you to learn Japanese. Dogen's texts are written in a kind of in medieval Japanese. Mostly what we get is they're translated into modern Japanese and then they're translated into English. So if you can learn Japanese, that's really great because then you can get the nuances, right? Then you can say, oh, what does this mean, and where is it in some other part of the Shobo Genzo?

[09:28]

And you'll know that, oh, that's the same word. Just like in English, when you're studying something, you can say, oh, what is that word? And you can find it somewhere else. The other thing about Dogen is that if you're reading a fast school, like the Genjo Koan, which you probably, you guys probably recite that, right? During service, you recite the Genjo Koan in English. So there's some part of the Genjo Koan that you're like going, what in the world is that about? Well, the chances are good that there's another chapter in the Shobo Genzo that specifically talks just about that thing you're curious about for like 10 pages or something. So I really encourage you to use the rest of the Shobo Genzo as a resource for understanding these things. You can also do something like, not here at Tassajara, but you can... download the text, like you can, the Shobo Genzo is available online for free. It's a four volume text for free in English and as a PDF file and you can like use it and search the PDF file.

[10:35]

So you can do this with English text or you can get them on the Kindle and you can search using Kindle. You can search for words in the text. So that's another way to access the material. Okay, let's see. Practice commentaries. There's Katagari Roshi's book on Uji is one. Again, the book's by Shohaku. Oh, I want to talk about translations a little bit. So, you know, every translator... of the text has a different kind of approach that they have to the translations. So a lot of us, Kaz Tanahashi, right? Kaz Tanahashi just did a translation of Shobo Genzo a couple years ago, five years ago. Kaz's translations are often slightly interpretive, which means that he's not doing a word-by-word translation.

[11:43]

So if there's something that's kind of esoteric or colloquial or something like that, cause will kind of make it easier for us to write in a way that's easier for us to understand. But the general consensus seems to be that his understanding is really good of the text, so you can trust that. Nishijima Cross is a little more of a word-by-word translation, and the Stanford translations are really good. Francis Cook has really good translations, in my opinion, and Taigen and Shohaku's translations, and Thomas Cleary. and Waddell and Abhi. This is Waddell and Abhi, and their translation is the one I'm using for my book. Okay, so that's kind of the nuts and bolts kind of stuff if you want to study Dogen, the sort of how I did it. So, oh, by the way, how long do I have an hour? 4.30. 4.30, okay. So let's talk about Uji.

[12:44]

Has anybody read? Who's read Uji here? A few people. The name of Uji is Being Time, so it's about being time. But Dogen's primary interest, for those of you who've read it and found it probably fairly difficult, his primary interest is to teach you how to practice. Uji is essentially a kind of guide to how to practice Soto Zen. So let me give you a for instance of that. So he says, at the very beginning of the text, he says, although you never measure the length or brevity of the 12 hours, That's 24 hours of your day. In Chinese, in medieval Japan, the day was divided up into 12 hours.

[13:47]

He says, although you never measure the length or brevity of the 12 hours or the 24 hours of your day, their swiftness or slowness, you still call them the 12 hours. As evidence of their going and coming is obvious, you do not come to doubt them. So here he's saying, you know, when we... go through our day, our hours or whatever, we don't usually doubt the nature of our experience. We don't usually doubt the fact that the time, we don't look into time itself. Or when we do, the way we look into time as Westerners is we hear about Einstein or something like that or somebody talking about these kind of things and we get trippy on that. But Dogen's talking about this in a very specific way about the nature of your experience of your life in your day-to-day activity, and he says you don't really pay enough attention to and doubt the nature of your experience. So that's how he starts this text.

[14:51]

He starts by saying, look, look at your day, look at your experience, look at what's happening for you. And then he says, even though you do not have doubts about them, and I would say maybe we do have doubts about them, But let's just look at his point of view. He says, even though you don't have doubts about them, that is not to say that you know them. So he's saying, you know, you think you know it, but actually you don't. Since a sentient being's doubting of the many and various things unknown to him are naturally vague and indefinite, the course of his doubting's take will probably not bring them to coincide with this present doubt. Okay, let me read that again. Since a sentient being, that's us, Dogen also says, by the way, in another fascicle, that everything is sentient. So sentient beings are not just us, those of us who, you know, the intellect. Sentient being is also the table.

[15:52]

Everything is sentient. He says rocks, tiles, fences are sentient. But we won't worry about that right now. Right now he's talking about our practice. He says, so since your doubting of the many and various things, unknown to you are vague and indefinite because from Dogen's point of view, our understanding is vague and indefinite. We're kind of wandering around in the wilderness trying to practice. You don't know what to do. He says, the course these doubtings take, so the questions that you're asking about practice, he's saying here, will probably not bring them to coincide with this present doubt. So this present doubt is the kind of doubt that brings about awakening. Hakon talks about the great doubt, or we talk about in Christianity, we talk about the dark night of the soul. So this is this kind of productive doubt that when you go into this koan of what is it, this productive doubt will bring you to coincide with this present doubt, will bring you...

[17:07]

to this moment and fully understanding the nature of this moment right now. So that's what Uji's about. Uji's about telling us how it is that we should investigate the nature of our experience so that we can practice from the position of Soto Zen. He says he starts out at the very beginning. He says the 16 golden Buddha body is time, because it is time, it has time's glorious radiance. So the 16-foot Buddha body usually refers to Shakyamuni Buddha or a Buddha, right? And that this Buddha has time's glorious radiance, this virtuous, glorious radiance of Buddha nature, of everything being Buddha nature, everything coming forth, everything speaking the Dharma. everything talking to us about the nature of reality. He says, you have to learn how to see that glorious radiance in your 24 hours of the day.

[18:13]

Because our 24 hours of the day are not different than the glorious radiance of the Buddhas. So there's another thing about Dogen. A lot of people like to trip out on Dogen as kind of a intellectual... explanation about the nature of reality that's really exciting. But Dogen was a monk. Dogen was a teacher. Dogen was a priest. Dogen was the founder of the school in Japan. Dogen's primary interest was practice. So we should be able to take what Dogen teaches and apply it to our everyday life. So we often think that practice is something rarefied and different from everyday life. But you guys, right, you're doing practice and here you are. Maybe you came to Tassajara thinking this is going to be this, you know, exalted, wonderful, spiritual experience. And so it might be. But at the same time, you're still cleaning the cabins.

[19:15]

You're still out there, you know, cleaning the baths, doing all those kind of everyday things that you do. And you might even discover that you have some likes and dislikes. You might even discover that maybe, you know, there are some things that make you uncomfortable. Or you might discover that there are people here you don't like, you know? And that all the baggage from your everyday life that you're trying to figure out how to work with, all that suffering that we'd like to get rid of, all of that is like, kind of, gosh, it came with us. It's like, you know, stay back in the city. But it didn't. It came with us. And that's what Dogen's talking about. That's what Dogen's trying to help us understand about the nature of our experience. Okay, so then he says, the demonic Asura with three heads and eight arms, so that's a demon, three heads, eight arms, or it could be delusion. You could think of it as delusion.

[20:16]

Now, if you know Tibetan Buddhism and you think about wrathful deities as being like kind of the good guys, that's not what he's talking about here. Okay, so he says, the Germanic Asura with three heads and eight arms is time. Because it is time, it could be no way different from the 12 hours of your day. So he's just told us that the 16-foot Buddha is not any different than the 12 hours of your day. And he's also told us that... The demonic Asura is not any different than the 12 hours of your day or the 24 hours of your day. So we've got these two things that we like to think of as separate, having nothing to do with each other, like, you know, this far apart. Well, gosh, they're both the 12 hours of your day, and they're both happening, could be happening simultaneously. So then he says... Okay, so then he goes into the part that I was just talking about. What I started earlier was about this business about doubt.

[21:19]

So he's saying, you know, here you've got this Buddha nature, Buddha-ness, the 16-foot Buddha is part of your day, and the demonic shura is part of your day. And then he starts talking about, you know, well, what is doubt? What is the nature of doubt? So he's suggesting that you might take this up as a koan. You know, how is it that both of those things exist? So here's a question for you. When you get upset, negative, unhappy, and you do something unskillful, where does the skillful part of you go? Because you do have skillful parts. Maybe I should start there. When you're like really skillful and you say something that's great and you've done exactly the right thing, you know, you got the perfect birthday gift, you're driving your car and you let somebody in front of you so you've been totally generous or, you know, you're at the checkout line and I live a lay life. You're at the checkout line, you know, and there you are and the person behind you has one item and you've got 40 and you go, oh, please go ahead of me.

[22:27]

You know, it's like, that's pretty nice. That's your Buddha. That's your Buddha. And it is your Buddha because you shouldn't think about your life as not being that 16-foot Buddha nature. You know, all the things that we do that are skillful, that's enlightened response. Enlightened response isn't something that's woo-woo. Enlightened response is right now, this Buddha, in the 24 hours of your day, you do stuff like this all the time and you never think about it. We help each other out all the time. We do skillful things all the time, and we never think about it. So guess what? That's realized enlightened action. It's not special, you know? Okay, so here you are. You're doing all these realized wonderful things, and then you get really upset about something. You get really angry. You do something that's really unskillful. So what happened to the Buddha when you did something really unskillful?

[23:29]

And what happened to the delusional person when you're doing something really great? Right? Are they like not there anymore? Like when you do something really great, is that like no longer you're totally not, never in delusion, you're never going to do anything stupid again? Or when you do something stupid, does it mean that that Buddha part of you just went away and doesn't exist anymore, like was never there in the first place? So this is a question that Dogen's posing to us. He's saying, okay, both of these things are your day, so how does that work? How is that? Okay, so that's gone. So then he talks about, I'm going to skip a couple pages forward here, and he starts talking about, well, how do we understand the nature of practice, what we're doing here? He says, a person holds various views at the time he is unenlightened and has yet to learn the Buddhist Dharma.

[24:39]

Hearing the words the time being, he thinks that at one time the old Buddha became a creature with three heads and eight arms. Now he's talking about Shakyamuni Buddha's realization. So he says, you know, we think, when we think about Shakyamuni Buddha, we think that at one time Buddha was in delusion, right? We've all heard stories about, okay, so even in this lifetime, of course, the Buddha just came out to see to heaven and he was born out of his mother's side and he stood up immediately and said, I alone in the world honored one. And he took 10 steps and flowers came out of his footsteps, right? So we know that. But we also know that the Buddha had thousands of lifetimes before he became the Buddha. before he was reborn as Shakyamuni Buddha. So we have all these stories about what the Buddha did or didn't do. So we have to assume that the Buddha at some point was in a state of delusion. So Dogen says, so at one time the old Buddha became a creature with three heads and eight arms, and at another time he became a 16-foot Buddha.

[25:52]

So again, we have this dichotomy here. It's black and white. He was either in delusion and then he became realized. And this is how we think about our practice. He imagines... Now, he would be the person that Dogen's talking about here, which is us. So we imagine... We imagine it's like crossing a river or a mountain. The river and mountain may still exist, but I have now left them behind. Okay, this is how we think about practice. I have now left them behind, and at the present time, I reside in the splendid Vermillion Palace. So that's maybe what we think Buddha thinks. So our idea about practice is that, you know, we come to practice, we're in delusion, we do this, we do this practice, we do particular things, we go to service, we sit zazen, whatever it is.

[26:54]

I want to say blah, blah, blah. But we have these activities that we associate with formal practice that we do. And that those activities are going to take us from a state of delusion to Buddhahood. And Dogen's saying, actually, that's not how it works. He says, but I have now left them behind. In the present time, I reside in a splendid Vermilion palace. This is what we think. To him, the mountain, the river, and I are as distant as one another from heaven from earth. And by the way, I think this is a little pun here. Dogen says, as distant as heaven from earth. So how far apart do you think heaven and earth is from each other? Heaven and earth are not, there's no space between them. They are the same thing. Okay, so I think he's making a little joke here. So he says, but the true state of things is not found in this one direction alone.

[27:54]

So the true state, the truth of our practice is that it's not going from here, bop, [...] to here, right? So one of the key teachings of Dogen is called practice realization. So practice realization means that we do not practice to become realized that our practice is the manifestation of realization. Okay? So we're not practicing, we're not doing zazen to get enlightened. We're not doing the practice to get enlightened. We're doing the practice because the practice is in and of itself an expression of the activity of a Buddha. This is what Dogen teaches. So this goes along with what he's saying here is that we don't Our practice, even though I would, you know, of course, I would say about my own practice, and I'm sure anybody who's been here practicing a long time or a short time, you know, it's like we would say, yeah, I've learned a few things.

[29:05]

I would say, well, yeah, I would say that from the time I first started doing formal practice, I've learned a lot of things about how to be more skillful, et cetera. And so I can see that there's this progression. But what I can also see is that in this moment right now, this place right here, the motivation or the practice itself is just an expression of what a Buddha does. It's just an expression of Buddha nature. So again, I'd ask you the same question. It's like, this is basically the same question as the one I was asking you before, which is, When you're practicing, who is it that practices? Who does that practice? Who does the practice? Who motivates you to practice? Who is it who had the idea in the first place to practice? That person who had the idea to practice is Buddha nature.

[30:11]

That person is reality itself coming forward. And the reality itself is that we're all in this interconnected, wholesome, hopefully, relationship. That we are reality itself. In accord, in cooperation with all of reality, making the world what it is. So that's our basic state. That's Buddha nature. That's who we are. We cannot be anything other than that. Even in the times that we are doing things that are unwholesome, we are still essentially that. We cannot be different from that. That's the nature of the whole world. So given that that's the nature of the whole world, where does your idea to practice come from? I would say it's some kind of inherent motivation, if you will, kind of inherent practice that we're doing that's coming forward. So this motivation to practice, this is practice realization.

[31:13]

So this motivation to actually ground ourselves in what we call, in Zen, we say, you know, our true, true self, this is our true self, is motivating us to practice. It's kind of like a perpetual motion machine, you know. There's this part of us that we don't even recognize as realization is practicing. And this practice... is bringing about this realization. And so there's this way in which it's going like this and going like this, and it's also very inclusive of the whole world. And this is all motivating us. Dogen calls this the dignified behavior of a Buddha. So this is in another fascicle, I can't remember the Japanese name for it, that's called the dignified behavior of a Buddha. He says in that fascicle, he says, the dignified behavior of a Buddha is chopping wood and carrying water. I can't remember who said that originally, but he's quoting him. He said he calls these mystical powers, the mystical powers of chopping wood and carrying water, and he means, he's not talking about some metaphor, he means our daily activity, the mystical powers of our daily activity.

[32:30]

This is the life of the Buddha. This is the dignified activity of the Buddha. So when you're engaged in these activities here at Tassajara or anywhere else, you don't have to just be at Tassajara, but anywhere that you are, and your sincere desire is to manifest and bring forth this deep understanding, this deep desire and sincere wish to do what is beneficial, That's your Buddha nature coming forward there. That's what's coming forth. Okay, so he says, he says, the true state of things is not found in this one direction alone. At the time the mountain was being climbed and the river being crossed, I was there in time. So, one of the things that Dogen says in here, and this has to do with this issue about practice realization,

[33:35]

is that everything is simultaneously presencing in this moment right now. And I think this is an example that I gave, I can remember talking about this, the first talk I gave a couple years ago. You know, when you come to Tassajara, this particular moment in Tassajara holds all of Tassajara simultaneously in this moment. I know, Leslie, you just hold it in your head. Layla just has it in her body. But the jokes aside, the stones of this building right here, the stones of this building hold all the history of this building, all the people that has eaten dinner here. It also holds, of course, all the geological history of this area, and it holds all of creation is in the stone. All of creation is in this wood. The particular and the more abstract. This is presencing right in this moment, completely presencing in this moment.

[34:40]

And this is true of any moment that we're in. And actually, speaking of a moment that we're in, you know, the past and the present, they only exist in the present moment. Now, Dogen, by the way, is not saying that there's no such thing as sequential time. He's not denying that there is a past and a present and a future. But what he is saying is that the only way that we can experience our life is in the present moment. And in that present moment, everything is right there. So think about it. When you think about the past, or you have... projections about your desires for the future that you have, you know, packaged up conceptually into whatever that might be. I mean, it's not the future, is it? And it's not the past. It's only the present moment. We can only experience the present moment. We absolutely, no matter, even if we're having some big fantasy about something or some memory about something that happened in the past, we can only experience it in the present moment.

[35:47]

When you're in Zazen and you're remembering something that happened yesterday and And you're saying, well, I should have said that, I should have done this, or this thing happened six years ago, or whatever it is. That's only happening in the present moment, right? And we're telling ourselves a story about the nature of that experience that's actually concretizing that experience and making it as something very solid. In Zazen, you know, we're asked to stay present, right? We just say, they just keep coming back. as Zogan says, think not thinking. Not think non-thinking, so we're not trying to not think, think non-thinking, which I think of, I think Shohako Okamura said this, it's kind of like if you've got wheels, you know, cogs like this, have a wheel going around, that you disengage the cogs and you just completely stay present. And that staying present in that moment, then everything is there. Everything was always there.

[36:50]

but now you have more of a feeling for it. It's not a conceptual thing. It's more of a presencing for what's happening in that moment. In zazen, for the most part, there's not a whole lot going on externally, although there might be, like the person next to you, you know, like the way they smell, or maybe they scratch or they do something like that. You know, there might be something going on around those kinds of issues in the zendo. you don't like this person. Or maybe you're in love with the person, who knows. So we just are asked to keep coming back and if we're having a dialogue with somebody, like actually talking to somebody, that coming back to the present moment allows us to completely be open to any possibility. open to all the possibilities that are present, because all the possibilities in those circumstances are present to us.

[37:55]

So we don't want to narrow it down. This is the same thing about our thinking about the way we practice. If we think about our practice as only being a progression from delusion to enlightenment, then when we do have an enlightened response, we don't recognize it. It's like... We are constantly telling ourselves a story about the nature of our experience. So Dogen's saying, the story that you tell yourself about practice, that it starts here, and you do this, this, this, and this, and it ends there, is not really what's happening. He also says in Bouchot, another fascical Buddha nature, he says, if the time arrives is the time right now, So when you say to yourself, well, I'll practice when the time is right, or I'll be realized when I've accumulated whatever it is that you think you have to accumulate, and then this will come forward.

[39:01]

Well, he's saying, no, it's all right here, right now. So this goes back to practice realization, which is there is no if the time arrives. The time is right now. So this is an admonition to us, just in our in our everyday practice of, if you need to apologize, apologize. If it's time to do something that's generous, do it. Don't wait for some time when your small self feels comfortable doing that thing. Just do that thing and find out what that's about. And so that's the hard part about practice, right? That's the difficult stuff, is we have to drop the self. We have to do something that we feel uncomfortable about because it's the right thing to do. A student said to me once, they said, you know, I know what the right thing is to do, but I don't want to do it now because, well, I don't want to admit that I was wrong. So I know it's right to admit that I was wrong, but I'm not going to do it because that makes me uncomfortable. So that's, you know, here's an example of Dogen saying, if the time arrives is the time right now.

[40:07]

You don't wait for this thing. The time is right now. Realization... And maybe realization isn't even the right word. Actualizing the totality of this being time right now is completely accessible to us as best we can do it. I'll add that caveat. So we're doing our best to say, what is it? What is it? What is this? You know, what's happening here? How can I be... How can I kind of let go of my preconceived ideas? Not just about other people, but about myself. How can I let go of, oh, I'm not good enough? That kind of stuff. You know, we stick ourselves in a box. How can I open up and just presence for that? So that's what Dogen's asking. He's saying, you know, that's... He's saying, as far as the eye of practice can see, that's our realization.

[41:07]

That's our actualization. We are human beings. We do get caught. We are caught in delusion, but still, it happens right now in this moment, and this moment holds everything simultaneously. And this moment is the moment where we can wake up. There isn't any other moment that we could wake up. We can only wake up right now. So he says, so does not the time climbing the mountain or crossing the river swallow up the time of the splendid Vermilion Palace? He's saying if you pay attention to your practice right now, right in this moment, the ideas that you have, the Vermilion Palace, about, in this case, about enlightenment, but any ideas you have about a situation that you're telling yourself a story about, if you're really paying attention to your experience right now, hopefully as generously and with as much of an open mind as you can,

[42:09]

the ideas you have get swallowed up by the present moment. And then he says, does not that time spit out this time? Okay, so that time of being completely present means that the present moment will take care of itself. If we completely pay attention to what's happening right now and not worry about what's going to happen, with our practice in the future, that practice, when we get there, will spin out everything that we've already learned will come out in that moment. The actual, some translations are like regurgitate, vomit, this particular section. I had one of my students go, ew, I don't even want to listen to this, you know? Suzuki Roshi gave a lecture one time where he talked about eating vegetables, and he talked about like they go in, you know, in recognizable form, and then they go into your stomach, and, you know, we all become one thing.

[43:14]

So he was kind of talking about the absolute and all that. But this is kind of what Dogen's saying. He said, you know, if you really pay attention to the peas and corn when they're on your plate, then they get all mixed up, and when they come back out again, they are, you know, they are, let's say, they are presencing appropriately for that moment, whatever that might be. How's that? So, again, he's saying, you know, it's not about some story you have about here to here to here to here. And if you've been, you know, when I first started at practice, when I came to Tassara and I sat Tongario, I was going to sit like all five days. I had this in my mind. I wasn't going to go to sleep. I was going to stay in the Zendo the whole time. And you know, I didn't even manage that for 15 minutes. It was like, Nagari was really hard just doing what it was that I was supposed to be doing.

[44:17]

I didn't need to add anything to it. I didn't need to add my story about it. And then after a while, I just quit forgetting about, I wasn't so concerned about realization and enlightenment and all those things. I was just concerned about how to do the next moment. So... Maybe life forces you into this practice all by itself. You don't even have to read about it. But that's just a little taste of what Uji is. So do you have any comments or questions? Yeah, I think so. I think that's right, yeah. Leslie? You said something about inherent motivation. Mm-hmm. does that mean that all beings have inherent motivation? So what happens to that in people who don't find a way to practice?

[45:19]

You know, not necessarily this way to practice, but some way to... Well, first of all, if you say, you know, there's the notion of continuous practice, which is everything in the world is always practicing, always making the world And then there's the issue of human beings, right? Or whatever other animals or beings are involved in delusion. And I think the dichotomy is there that that other part is happening even when we're in delusion. Dogen says in another part of Uji, he says, you know, a partial realization is still a total realization, right? So even in the midst of our delusion, we're still somehow, even though we don't know how that is, we're still helping to make the world. We're still helping the world, world, the world. We're still engaged in some activity that we don't even know what that is. We are making the whole, you know?

[46:23]

And then there's a bodhisattva path, right? So our bodhisattva vow is that we benefit all beings. And I think that... I don't know, Leslie, I don't know exactly the answer to that question because we're just talking about, you're talking about somebody who is just doing things that are completely unskillful, totally clueless, and doesn't even occur to them to do something different, right? You're not talking about somebody who's... I think that's a good question. If you're asking the question, I think you are. And sometimes I wonder about that myself. I don't have an answer for that. And I think Dogen's answer, excuse me, You know, I think he would just say to us, just have faith in this teaching in and of itself and keep going. I don't know, what do you think? Okay. Yes. So when you talk about the skillful being or the skillful being yourself, how does that relate to firewood and ash or winter and spring, right?

[47:32]

So... Firewood and ash in the Gencho Koan, he's talking about what technically is usually called a Dharma position. So a Dharma position, you would say 100% firewood, 100% ash, right? Which is what he's saying in Gencho Koan in that particular section. So I think, Woody, the point there is that this moment for you is 100% who you are, right? You're not somebody else. You're not having another experience. You're 100% this experience. And so you experience your life that way, and that has a certain form, so as when we come to the self, like he's saying, yeah, there is this thing we call the absolute, there is this aspect of totally interpenetrating interconnectedness, and simultaneously there is this, there is ash, there is firewood. Pay attention to that. So when we talk about a Dharma position, which in this case in Genja Kohan would be one of the firewood, let's say, in the moment of firewood, there is still, he says, you know, there is still the before and after of the firewood.

[48:48]

So he's not denying that sequential quality of the firewood. So there's that happening in that moment. Simultaneously in that moment, Everything from an absolute point of view is also present in the firewood, right? The whole universe is present in that moment of the firewood, and yet there is just the moment of firewood. So for us as practitioners, in this moment of firewood, this is where we respond to what's happening in our lives. This is where we make choices. We decide, you know, the time has arrived. This is that 100% firewood. This is 100% you, 100% me, and I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to follow the bodhisattva path, and what is that, and how am I going to do that, and I'm going to make choices about that. So I think that's what he's pointing to when he's pointing to the Dharma position in that way, because we tend to get caught in this or that. We get caught, and this is why I think talking about form and emptiness in relationship to Dogen is problematic.

[49:52]

Because form and emptiness is kind of a binary thing. There's form and there's emptiness. Even though it says emptiness is not different than form and form is not different than emptiness, we get caught thinking we are trying to enter into the absolute. We're not trying to, in practice, enter into the absolute. The absolute is already completely present. It's called impermanence, change. interconnectedness, that's what the absolute is. It's not some kind of woo-woo place that we're going to. And that is embodied in form. It isn't embodied anywhere else. There isn't any place called the absolute. The absolute is happening within the context of particularity, and that's that 100% just firewood in that moment. So he's saying, in that moment, everything is happening yet simultaneously, bang, just this, right now. Kind of answers the question, where does your skillful part go when you're unskillful? Right. It doesn't go anywhere. But it comes, you know, we say some things are apparent and some things are hidden.

[50:59]

So in that moment, let's say, maybe when you're not being skillful, it recedes back, but it's still not there. It's still not accessible. It's still accessible to you. Like that. you can completely access that place. But we tend to reify our experiences, and then we can't access that. So it's really about, you know, how we're experiencing our world in that way. So we're, you know, trying to... And that's what Zazen does. Zazen is like this very visceral experience of sitting there and going, everything's happening there, you know. You're 100% you in that moment, and at this... Five seconds later, you totally even forgot about what you were thinking about. Where did that, you know, what's... So there's this way in which it's all happening. When you talk about practice realization, can you also say delusions, practice realization?

[52:00]

Can you find delusion in that? Well, delusion is... Delusion is... I would say is a vehicle in the sense that Dogen says in Kato, he says, you know, in some schools of Buddhism, you want to cut off delusion, but in our school, we enter into delusion as a way to transform the nature of our experience. So I would say, yes, technically, it has to be the same thing. It cannot be different, yet simultaneously, It is. And it's also the motivator that we have sometimes for practice realization. So I would say in that sense, they're not different. They're different, but they're not different. How's that? Yes, you could say that. Yeah, you could say that. Nagarjuna said something like, samsara and nirvana are not different.

[53:04]

And Dogen says, nirvana is this life. So, nirvana is birth and death. So, okay. Because we have a different path statement in Soto Zen than, say, Theravadan Buddhism. The goal of Soto Zen is not to get off the wheel of birth and death. Okay? It's not to cut off our suffering. It's not to get out of this world, you know. And we're fully presencing 100% suffering. in this moment. And so that's what we're up to. And that's kind of a different understanding. Okay, you guys. Are we done? Anything else? Okay. Be our intention equally extend to every being.

[54:13]

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