I'd like to talk to you a little bit about suffering. Last time I was here, the questions that arose were more or less about suffering. And at Tassajara, when I went back, again the same kind of questions came up. So I'd like to talk about suffering a little. Can you hear me in the back okay? Also, it interests me, before I start, it interests me why you come to hear lectures at Zen Center. I don't completely understand why you come. Some of you are practicing, of course, zazen. Many of you are, you know, maybe, I don't know, maybe you practice at home some, but

[01:42]

I think some of you just come to listen, and I wonder what you hear that makes you come back. Some of you are familiar faces, so you do come back. It's an interesting problem for the person speaking, because Buddhism is completely related to practice. It doesn't have much sense just in talking, you know. And it also is, everything that's said about it, it relates to your particular practice at a particular time. So the fact that some of you are just beginning and some of you have been practicing a long time makes quite an interesting situation, you know, to talk, because some of it sounds

[02:46]

like magic or something special or strange if you haven't been practicing much, and the other sounds like beginners, you know, if you've been practicing a while, it sounds like beginners' lectures. Anyway. Anyway, the first, so-called first, holy truth of Buddhism is that everything is suffering. And suffering in this sense has a very wide meaning, you know, it means everything is suffering, but that's pretty difficult to understand and it's said that Buddha achieved

[03:57]

enlightenment when he realized that everything was suffering. And he also is supposed to have said that there's nothing more difficult, I guess he has some simile, that shooting an arrow through, I don't know, a target of some kind is difficult than shooting it through the eye of a needle is more difficult. But to understand that everything is suffering is even much more difficult. I also want to talk about why or what Buddhist thinking is.

[04:59]

And Buddhist thinking is different from ordinary thinking and especially different from our way of thinking in the West. And I think a lot of you have difficulty with reading sutras and commentaries and listening to lectures because you don't know exactly what Buddhist thinking is. Buddhist thinking is intimately related to the idea of the vow. But first let me say that Buddhist thinking is situational and related to doing. So words have, you know, if you try to define a word like dharma or buddha or karma, it's impossible because you can't pin it down, it exists only in the situations in which

[06:08]

it's used. So sometimes buddha means everything, sometimes buddha means a specific way you practice with buddha, etc. And also everything relates to what you can actually do now. You know, there's no meaning to anything that's said in Buddhism unless it pertains to what you can actually do now. So from everything you hear in Buddhism or read or experience, the only way to relate to it is, what can I do now, this moment in my practice? Maybe you know the five stages of such-and-such or the eight or ten stages of something else, but there's no point in trying to figure out what the stages are, you know? It's useful maybe to know about it, but the important thing is to know, yes, right now

[07:10]

this has meaning to me and I can do such-and-so. So, why do we get involved in this idea of suffering at all? You know, we all have certain difficulties and we try to alleviate them, but why make a big deal about suffering beyond the alleviation of your difficulties? That's not something I intend to answer directly, but just put out, you know, for us to be with.

[08:21]

One side is that the attempt to alleviate suffering prevents you from being alive, almost. You know, to try to protect yourself from suffering is to have no life at all. And so, a bodhisattva is a person whose life is the awareness that everyone is suffering, that everything is suffering. But again, there are various examples used, but one example is that for an ordinary person, suffering is like a hair in your hand and you don't notice it. But for a bodhisattva, suffering is like a hair in your eye. You notice it quite a lot. You know, there's no idea in Buddhism of over there.

[09:39]

You know the famous story about the two monks, one is maybe a teacher and one is a disciple, who are walking along and one sees a wild duck or goose or something and it's flying overhead. And the teacher says, what's that? And the monk says, those are wild ducks. And the teacher says, where have they gone? Or he says, where'd they go? And, thank you. And the monk, being a very straightforward person, he says very simply, oh, they've gone away. And then the teacher grabs him by the nose and goes,

[10:44]

but for the monk, there was something over there. But for the teacher, there was nothing over there, it was here. And for the bodhisattva, there's no suffering, it's not his own suffering. How do you, just in practical terms, you know, if I try to imagine, what gets us into this kind of situation, you know, just practically speaking? And I think the first, I suppose most, I would say that for most of us, it's at some time we actually tried to help someone. And we couldn't. And most sensible people would give up at that point, you know.

[11:52]

And say, well, it's true you can't, you know, everyone has to suffer and so-so. And most of us, you know, after being 25 or so, we give up and we do what our lives are. But the bodhisattva is more foolish than that. And he doesn't give up. And he tries to figure out, what can you actually do about suffering? And the first thing he finds out is, of course, that it's the you that's the problem. What can you do? You are interfering. You are suffering. Your own suffering doesn't allow you to enter into other people's suffering. You've got enough of your own. So, I think most of us have had some kind of aspiration,

[13:05]

some kind of desire to do something. And it's come to some kind of knot, you know. And... So... But even if... It's rather difficult to accept what we mean by suffering. And so you have to be rather strong yourself. And... So our practice partly is just to make us strong enough to accept the fullness of what our life situation is,

[14:09]

including the suffering of other people. We say all sentient beings. That's it. And so we have various vows. We vow to save all sentient beings. And when I was here last, I talked to some extent about will. But will is also closely related to willingness. The willingness to be alive. The willingness to accept your situation. The willingness to accept your own karma. The willingness to accept other people's suffering. The willingness to actually practice zazen. The willingness to go to sleep at night. And most of us are pretty ambivalent. And so the more you see how your thinking is just a matter, your ordinary consciousness is just a kind of organizational process, you know,

[15:15]

of which something that you can take a look at what's going on, and you can come to some... you can recognize that you've come to some conclusion. And a vow fastens it down. You can take a vow. Oh, I see what the situation is. Okay, so now I'll do something. And you make some vow. I'll practice zazen. Or I'll sit through this period. And it's not so much a matter of willpower. I'll sit through this period. Sitting through a period of zazen or seshin, if it's done with the sense that you have to do it, that's not freedom. You also have freedom to stop sitting, to not sit. But you have a willingness to just, you know, do it. And when you can think in this way,

[16:16]

when you can begin to work in this way, to be alive in this way, so that thinking is really a kind of process of allowing willingness to occur, which you can call a vow, in a formal sense. For example, when we just simply go to sleep at night, most of us, I think, we don't want to go to sleep. We want to stay up and do something. Or we want to go to sleep. You know, we're very tired. There's various things. But when we go to sleep, we lie there in some kind of half state, still partly awake and partly asleep. Many things from the day are part of your beginning process of sleeping.

[17:17]

Kind of dreams. We're a little bit ambivalent about going to bed and waking up in the morning. We sort of don't want to quite wake up. We want to sleep a little bit longer, kind of feeling. But when you have this kind of feeling, I'm talking about a willingness. When you go to bed at night, there's nothing else you want to do. You just want to sleep. It's a kind of single-mindedness, an ability to just want only one thing, to go to sleep. But when you can feel that way, how wonderfully you sleep. How completely relaxed and rested you are when you sleep. You lie down and your mind says, I'm going to sleep. You're into deep sleep within seconds.

[18:21]

And you sleep absolutely fully. And in three or four hours you wake up. Okay, what next? But it's quite simple if you can sleep that way. But it's very related to this idea of willingness. For example, when we go to sleep sometimes, there's a large noise outside. If you don't live in Tassajara and you live in the city, there's some big truck for some odd reason is deciding to gun its motor at one o'clock in the morning for 20 minutes. And it changes and it stops and it revs it. And then you can hear somebody clanking and fiddling and it's a terrible noise like a cement mixer. But you also enter that completely. You're completely willing to have that noise. Where you get in trouble is when you say,

[19:24]

I'll try to shut out that noise so I can sleep. You see, a bodhisattva doesn't shut out the noise. He completely enters into the noise and he completely enters into his sleeping. They're not contradictory. So you're right in the middle of the machine. You can hear the pistons going and you hear clank, clank. You can feel the pistons inside you, you know, and the noise and the guys banging you on the head with a wrench. But you're completely going to sleep. Do you understand what I mean? And sort of, it comes from, you know, making this kind of, being able to make this kind of willingness. So the attitude of, oh, it's noisy out there, I can't sleep, you know, I must go in another room. As soon as you try to protect yourself from suffering, you actually cause suffering.

[20:26]

You actually keep yourself awake. Or you don't sleep so much. So, most people try to adjust their lives, you know, always, to keep suffering at a minimum and make as much of their karma as they can. And, it's pretty easy to get through life that way and you feel, if you have a fair amount of skill at protecting yourself, you can understand what all this talk about suffering is. But also, from the point of view of Buddhism, you're not fully alive, you know. You're probably maybe taking a sleeping pill at night and pretty much bored during the day. Not necessarily, but... ... So practice works for people, your practice works for you.

[21:40]

When somehow you come to the point that you're willing to practice, just as you're willing to go to sleep, now it's time to sleep, you know. Now it's time to practice. And you're not just simply not distracted. You know, should I do this or should I do that or should I go... You know, you go to work or whatever you have to do. You come home and you do the next thing and the next thing and it's quite simple, you know. But it requires some real looking too at your karma and understanding your situation, how you accumulate karma. So, you know, suffering also means karma, accumulated suffering. So once you see that everything is suffering, there's no limit, you know.

[22:42]

The Bodhisattva doesn't say, I'm only concerned with this, my suffering or this person's suffering. He sees that the whole world is so interrelated that his teacher can grab his neck or his nose, you know. So, you know, your karma is impersonal. It's not you. It's just karma. And your karma includes, you know, whether you're attractive or unattractive or intelligent or dumb, you know, or, you know, full of energy or without energy or well or sick, you know. But you make a big mistake if you think that pile, that accumulation is you. You know, it's just something that has come together

[23:48]

at that particular spot which you occupy and you're stuck with for a while. So it's not to your credit that you have a beautiful nose. It may help other people that you have a beautiful nose and you can offer your nose, you know, to people. Right? And it's not to your discredit that you're dumb, you know, you know, or ugly or whatever you are, you know, because actually you'll notice if you practice with people. You know, you start out, somebody comes to Zen Center and they're rather funny looking, you know. And they're very unhappy about being funny looking and they hope you don't notice. And they hope you notice some good qualities

[24:55]

that they've tried to think up. But after they've practiced for several years, you know, there's some light in them, some feeling in them that somehow their features, everything... I can't explain how it is but it's fantastic, you know. They still have the same features but somehow they fit together better or something. There's no physical change but there's some... something you feel from them, from their eyes and from the way they are. That's actually what being beautiful is. So our particular karma we have is rather unimportant, you know. It's important only if you're interested in accumulation. If you're interested in accumulating a lot...

[25:56]

At Tassajara I said the three mundane treasures, you know, are being beautiful, being intelligent and having a lot of energy or power, you know. And everybody wants to be one of those three things, possible an extraordinary combination of the three. And then you, of course, want to be very modest about it and not let anybody know that you have those qualities. And usually in our very Protestant culture you don't even let yourself know, you know. Most of us are afraid to think about our qualities about how intelligent am I, how beautiful am I, how much energy have I. We're actually scared to think about it, you know.

[26:57]

But if you're practicing Buddhism and you realize your karma is not you, you have to look at how intelligent am I. Well, not very. So, you know, or very, you know. And you have to recognize the problems that come from being intelligent or unattractive or attractive. And probably being unattractive is better karma than being attractive because you face up to your karma rapidly, you know. But if you're quite beautiful, you know, you always get this subtle reinforcement and you don't understand why life is easy for you and difficult for someone else. You don't understand how you, when you go into a store to shop, how immediately the shopkeeper gives you attention, you know. You live in a world that seems quite nice and you have some secret idea of the elect or the preferred, you know. And that's really quite annoying karma to have and pretty difficult to get out of, actually.

[28:03]

Anyway, we look at our karma, what our situation is. And we look at how we accumulate more karma, you know. You know, it comes in through our eyes and ears and nose and touch. And when it comes in through our six senses, we then do something with it. Usually, you know, we organize it around some benefit to ourself. We try to reorganize all the information, which is rather neutral to start with, to see how it enhances us or hurts us. And then we take the stuff that hurts us and put it in a big box with a lid and we try to do something about the stuff that helps us, you know. But if you have that kind of feeling, you know, you're just involved in accumulation and possession.

[29:08]

So Buddhism says that actually, let's look at these things not in terms of how you can organize them into self, but let's look at them, how they exist without the idea of self. And then we have the, this is what I'm talking about, mostly is the sutra we chant every morning, you know. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Avalokiteshvara, look down from, etc. The Heart Sutra. And in the Heart Sutra it says, it talks about the five skandhas. So we notice that this material that comes into our five senses consists of attitudes and perceptions and consciousness and feelings. But when you look closely at those things, none of them have an idea of you in it. But the whole world can fit into that. So the more you can notice the world in this way,

[30:20]

and the idea of dharma is the same, you know, it has no you in it. You can begin to, when you really see this, I mean you really feel it as an accurate description of the world. One useful thing is maybe to read Dr. Kanze's translation of the, and commentary on the Heart and Diamond Sutras. But the more you see this and can come to see that this is the way the world is actually, you know, then you can, you know, tie it down in a sense with a vow. Your mind now, if you're released from ordinary active, you know, excited and analytical causal thinking, you know, and you just see how the thinking process works, you know. And then you can, you see how thinking is useful

[31:31]

only in the sense that it shows you what you can do now, actually practice now. So you can say, okay, now I see that's what the scene is, right? That's how I have my karma, and that's how I accumulate karma. And you can make some, okay, so that's the way it is. And, you know, when you come to that conclusion, it's something firm in your life. You don't have to sort of think about it, because you can see that that kind of thinking about it and wondering and blah, blah, blah, has no meaning, you know, when you see how the thinking process actually is. So the first truth is suffering, and the second is that it has a cause, you know, and that cause is clinging or craving. And the third is that it can be stopped. This is where nirvana comes in, that it can be stopped.

[32:34]

And the Mahayana Buddhism says that not stopped is also stopped. But before you can go around and think you understand that, you have to know what just stopped is. So that's what I mean by thinking relating to your actual practice. Your actual practice is not not stopped is also stopped. Your actual practice is, I think, you know, probably, that you're caught in. So what does stopped mean? And then the fourth is the path, how to stop accumulating karma, the eightfold path, right thinking, right views, etc. And once you've stopped accumulating karma, you can look at what karma you've got,

[33:37]

you know, and how to work with the karma you've got each moment. To actually fully be your karma each moment is our practice. But for most of us we're not our karma each moment, we're in the process of piling up more good and bad karma. Just to sit, you know, just to practice, or just to go to sleep, we say. Just to sleep. is related to the ability to insight or Buddhist thinking, which I think you can understand

[34:51]

best from the point of view of the vow. I don't mean you're all the time going around making a, now I vow to go to sleep, you know, and lay myself down and all that, but the vow is just one aspect of this way of thinking which notices what's happening and is able to just, all right, now it's time to go to sleep, you know. It's a great, it's, you feel very clear when you can do that. Do you have any questions? Yeah? Could you clarify what you meant by saying, be your karma, instead of creating, or creating

[35:56]

more? She said, could I clarify what I mean by, be your karma, you know? I mean you're you, that's all. You have no choice, there's no alternative but to be your karma. So actually it doesn't mean anything to say, be your karma, because you can't go around being someone else's, you know. But there's a willingness, you know, to be your karma. And when you can actually be what your situation is, without it being sort of followed up and mixed up, then each moment is quite, we say free from your karma, but also it can mean you work with the actual, you are what the actual situation you're in is at any particular

[37:00]

moment. And you don't try to say, if your karma is to be sleeping in the middle of a cement mixer, then you don't try to find your way out of the cement mixer. Okay, this is the conditions under which I go to sleep now. Doesn't mean you have to go around looking for cement mixers, you know. Or that you can't change your situation. Obviously if you can do something about something in a reasonable way, it's okay to do something about it. But most things we actually can't do anything about. And the willingness to not do anything about them is closely related to the ability to actually do something about them.

[38:01]

Yeah? If you're living this way, you then cease to put out any good or bad karma. Just don't make any waves. That's the idea. Actually, no one's perfect. But we express that sometimes, cause seals cause or cause seals effect. Which everything you do is complete. It doesn't lead to the next thing. And one reason you can, is you can sleep this way, you know. Is because you're not bringing a whole lot of stuff into your sleep from the daytime. What if you, you see, it's an interesting process that occurs when you do zazen. Which is, when you start, after a while you find that your dreams change a bit. And that what's actually happening is during zazen a lot of the stuff that used to be material

[39:09]

for your dreams is occurring in your zazen. And that whole thing of having an area which is unconscious and an area which is conscious begins to fade. And you know the full contents of your mind at any moment. Dream things and fantasies and all that stuff which is usually you try to, it's very interesting how this all is, when I was a kid I used to call it the law of opposites. And I was trying to very simply see what was that. But it's very interesting how we talk about just, you know, being willing to go to sleep. Or concentration, or single-mindedness. But single-mindedness also means being completely open to the entire contents of your mind. You know, they sound like contradictions but actually they're the same thing. So, at first you find you dream less, you know.

[40:19]

Or you dream differently, or your dreams are more clear. There are certain things that you begin to notice. And that you sleep a little less because what happens, the need for dream sleep, you know, is supplemented by zazen. One reason actually we shorten sleeping hours is to force some of the activity which normally occurs in sleeping into your zazen. So, you become more present in your full mind. But then you find that your zazen is, after a few years, you know, no longer has anything happening in it exactly. The usual thought things aren't piling up in it, and you don't have dream stuff or anything happening much.

[41:22]

And that's a period when you can get rather bored actually. Unless you have some help or insight into where your practice is at that time. But that doesn't mean that your zazen is good, and you've been able to push everything out, you know, something like that. It means that you're following the eightfold path. Because it means that in the conduct of your life, an eightfold path is only simply that if you don't follow the eightfold path, you get yourself in a mess, you know. If you're doing things that are always tying you up or compromising you or you don't feel good about, you get small rewards. But those kind of rewards, they say, are like the ocean in an ox's footprint.

[42:23]

It actually just dries up, you know. So, when you're following the eightfold path, and you're not accumulating karma during the day, you know, there's nothing to carry over to your sleep time or your zazen time. So, when cause seals cause, when what you do during the day is complete, then your zazen is very clear. Because part of the dream process is that you save up things that happen during the day that you can't deal with, or that tune into deeper parts of your memory. You save them up till nighttime to sort of fiddle around with them, right? To sort them, stack them somewhere. But if each thing you do is complete,

[43:27]

now I'm going to sleep or now I'm picking up a piece of paper. Just simply that. There's nothing left over to dream about or bring into your zazen. So then you enter into a whole new realm of your mind that actually is you already, you know. It's just that you've got all these moving picture shells going on. Yeah? How did we enter into this world of mistakes? Doesn't it have some purpose of its own? It exists, you know, that's all. If you look for some purpose, you make it smaller than it is. It includes many purposes,

[44:29]

but actually it's much bigger than any purpose. And it's not a mistake. It just is. It couldn't be any other way. It's just as it is. There wouldn't be anything, you know. As soon as you have anything existing, you have a mistake. So it's wonderful. Actually our life is, Dogen says, one continuous mistake. So how to work with that continuous mistake? And see that means the world is suffering. Same meaning. So how to work with that continuous mistake, or that everything is suffering, is freedom or liberation. Yeah?

[45:31]

The kind of life that you're talking about, in a sense, it's easier, it seems, when there's always the next thing to go on to. But sometimes, maybe for most of us, it seems like we come to a point where there's a choice. And I know for myself, that's where I get hung up. It seems like, when there's a choice, could you talk a little bit about choice as it relates to this? Yeah. When you come to a point where there's a choice, it means you don't know your karma. And it's a good chance, when you have to make a choice, to see why it's not together. It makes me think of the subway tunnel in New York, where they dug from way uptown,

[46:34]

with all their equipment, and they dug from downtown, uptown, and they got to the Lower East Side somewhere, and they missed by about three blocks. So, they had a choice, and they covered it all up with big timbers, and tried to let nobody know what had happened. And it sat there for years, and it was hard to find out why there's all these timbers in the... What are all these timbers doing down here? No one exactly knew, but these two tunnels had not met. So, it took them some time to come around. I think the new subway may be a repair in New York, maybe a repair of that. So, when we come to the point where something's not meeting, we have to figure out, why isn't it meeting?

[47:35]

And generally, it's not really a choice. It's actually, you have to find out what the mudra of your life situation is. What... And the more you look, the more what you have to do is clear. So, we try to sit still for it, try to be willing to... The trouble with choices, too, if you go into making a choice with your past, then nothing but your past can come out of it. So, you want to make a choice free, you know, completely free, as if, you know, you don't know what's going to be. Anything is possible. You don't say, oh, I should stay in Zen Center, or I should go back to college, or I should do such and such. I don't know, you might imagine flying over the buildings.

[48:40]

Anything you want, you can... What can I... And if you can be open in that way, the railroad tracks you're on up to this point, you just chug right on to what's next, you know. But the... When we have to make a choice, it means that our life is not together on the deepest levels, you know. So, when you see that, you can... You don't... Most of us try to make choices by adjusting this and this, you know. But what you really want to do is come together below that, you know. And you see... Yeah? How do you prevent the willingness to learn when there's so much competition from

[49:42]

the desire to dream and the desire to be comfortable and the fear of suffering? Well, the best answer I can give you is that you're willing. Willing, too, to dream and to be comfortable. But you can practice in little ways, like when you see yourself dodging something, like the noise on the street. Instead of dodging it, just enter it completely. If it keeps you up all night, okay. Keeps you up all night. If you... But also, enter your sleep completely. Now I'm sleeping, you know. That's all.

[50:43]

But how? Mostly we come... And we don't really want to go to sleep. We want to still think about something that happened during the day that was bothersome and it sort of goes off into some kind of sleep thing, as if we're going to try to think about it all night. But you just lay your empty head down on the pillow, you know. As if it was an eggshell that had been blown out. You know? That's all. It's true. Yeah? I'm not sure it seems that you're making a distinction between choices as being a reaction to the past and allowing yourself to cling to things as being a complete opening without the desire to react

[51:46]

or the need to reinforce in that way. Are you saying that? Something like that, yeah. When you say you're making choices, are you saying that that process of decision is by definition motivated by a desire to escape, you know, from what is behind you? Oh, when you find yourself... it necessary to make a choice. You mean you think it may be motivated by a desire to escape from what's behind you. Or you react against it as being creating the future. Sometimes that's true. You know, this kind of... Our practice, we shouldn't think about it too much because it's too subtle for our thinking. Particularly, you see, you can make some career decision in terms of your karma.

[52:47]

You know, my karma is such and such that it means I should be a doctor and I'm going to be a doctor. Okay? So, you're a doctor and you do what's necessary to be a doctor. That's fine, you know. But if you're trying to see what your life actually is, which may not be a doctor even though you plan to be a doctor, then you enter a very complicated area of am I avoiding practice by being a doctor? Or is my practice to be a doctor? Or, you know, it's... You can't exactly think it out, you know. And it's not something your mind can work with. So, you have to see the limits of the thinking process. Okay, I can only think about it so much that it won't fit into any other categories and any more categories are just ridiculous. So, you put it aside.

[53:49]

And then you don't think about it. But you still are existing. And I don't know what to... what to say. Making... Let me just... I think the easiest way out for me in this situation is to say that if you're practicing, you know, practice is a process, that the making of decisions is usually pretty easy. Actually, you... Okay, that's what, you know. But... What we want to do is make choices that we can actually follow.

[55:00]

And choices that make sense of our life up to this point. And so, the real part of practice is not the choice so much as what you do with the choice, how you tie it down, you know. Okay, yes. So, a real choice, as long as you have some doubt, maybe you shouldn't make a choice unless you have to. If you have to make a choice, just jump in, and if it's a mistake, great, you know. Just do it completely, right? But if it's a more fundamental choice, you know, it's better to just do now what you actually know you can do. And what you... Life will be built up of this small thing you're sure of. This much I can do, sit straight. And sitting straight is also our mind, and our attitudes, and our breathing. But if you start trying to think mind, attitude, breathing, choice,

[56:07]

it's too complicated. So what can you actually do? And... You want to come to choices in your life which are... you're able to vow, that are able to be in the realm of the vow. Ah, that's it. I'd like to talk for a minute. We've been having conversations all this week about Zen Center and what we're... what we think is actually happening here. And this will only take a second, you don't have to worry.

[57:08]

Everybody's shifting. Laughter You know, Zen Center could inexorably get bigger and bigger and bigger, or smaller and smaller and smaller, or more and more confused, or busy, or something. So we want to think about, what are we doing here? You know, we want to practice, and we want to take care of our practice. And we want each of us to be able to help each other take care, you know? And we can't take care of each other as well as we'd like at this time, you know? Take care of our own practice as well. So, why are we... What kind of situation are we in? Why don't we limit Zen Center to 25 good students? Then life would be much simpler, you know? Why do we keep the Zendo door open for anybody to come in?

[58:12]

And yet, when you're in here, there's nobody to much talk to you, or straighten your posture, or anything, you know? There aren't enough older students to take that responsibility even. Well, I think what Zen Center is, if we look at, you know, the mudra of where Zen Center is right now, Zen Center trying to make a choice about what to do. Let's limit Zen Center to what it actually is now. It actually is such and so number of students. A couple hundred who are practicing pretty regularly, and more than that who come and go. But 200 maybe who come a lot every day, practically for Zazen, at Tassajara Green Culture, San Francisco. Well, if we take this particular group of students,

[59:18]

and we think about, of these students, some of them want a place to practice for a few years, and then they want to do something else, you know? They want to express their life in any of various ways. And there's no distinction between whether you practice or live in any one of the many situations we can live in, in this life. Or whether you stay in Zen Center or with a Zen group all your life. Yesterday, after seeing lawyers and other things about some of Zen Center's problems, I felt like that I wanted to go join a Zen group somewhere and find some peace and quiet. So, why do I? Mostly, I don't have to do this kind of work now at all. Zen Center has many good leaders,

[60:21]

and they do about 90% of it. But sometimes I have to help too. And why do I? I'd rather just be teaching and practicing with you all. I'd rather just be teaching and practicing with you all.

[60:34]

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