Good evening. Forgive me, I'm taking a moment to feel sorry for myself. You can join me if you'd like to feel sorry for me or to feel sorry for yourself. It's been brought to my attention that I engage in feeling sorry for myself. with some frequency. But I won't bore you with the details. I do have a talk to get. It's really lovely to be here. I know many of you. I don't know all of you. My name is Jiryu. I arrived here today, just this afternoon, but I lived here some years. in the past.

[01:02]

And today, since arriving, it seems like the object of discussion here at Tosahara is the bugs. It seems like the main thing happening here at Tosahara is bugs. So there's this question, you know, of how Zen people deal with bugs. I can't help but remember one of my first, I think my first summer here in 1997, my friend and teacher Daigon, who passed away just over a year ago, standing there with the shaved head, as I've now also done, which is not a good thing to do when there's a lot of bugs around. licking at my long hair with this kind of envy, you know, saying, at least you're protected, you know. So also feeling sorry for himself, perhaps.

[02:06]

But, you know, so how do we practice with the bugs? When the conditions are just right, here they come, you know. The bugs are everywhere. They're in. They don't seem so bad right now. You know, you have the big ones that bite and the little ones that get in your eye. And so we reach for these practices, you know, there must be some Buddhist way to deal with these bugs. So, you know, I remember often turning to the Avatama Saka Sutra. There's a lovely passage about basically chopping up your body and offering it to beings to eat, you know. Okay, I can get behind that. That's a way to sort of spin this. Yeah. Another way, which I think is a good way, I've been thinking some and teaching some about a classic Zen Goan, an old favorite, Dongshan's Heat and Cold. Maybe a lot of you know this ancient Zen teaching story where the student asks, how do I get away from hot and cold?

[03:18]

And the teacher says, when it's hot, the heat kills you. And when it's cold, you let the cold kill you. So that works too. Just let them gnaw you. Just let the bugs destroy you. Don't even try to find some religious reinterpretation of what's happening. Just let them destroy you. Just be totally open to being pulled apart by bugs. But this afternoon, my friend Claire, who's here for this retreat, who's joined us now for a few years, that Rosemary and I have been doing this Energy and Inquiry Zen and Yoga retreat, she added a page to the ancient koan collections in asking a question which boiled down to, is the enlightened person annoyed by bugs?

[04:25]

So it's a really good question. Is the enlightened person annoyed by bugs? What do we think enlightenment is? And if we should be so fortunate as to attain it, at that point, will we no longer be annoyed by bugs? It has a lot in common with an actual established koan, which is by John Sox. Many of you know this. Another old teaching story. where a monk asks Bai Zhang, ancient Chinese Chan master, is the enlightened person subject to cause and effect? Does the enlightened person get pulled around by the ups and downs of the world, basically? To be enlightened, do you still get pulled around by the world? Do you still subject to cause and effect? That's a good question.

[05:29]

And Claire's question is a good one. Is the enlightened person annoyed by bugs? And I think it matters. Some people think we start talking about enlightenment, and I think some people are like, well, that's not me. So it seems abstract. But it's actually very practical. Is your goal as a spiritual person, is your vision of where you're going, on the path to become someone who's not annoyed by bugs. That's basically, is that your goal, or is something else your goal? So today I would think there would be a lot of ways to answer that question, including some nice classic Zen ways, like throwing something or acting out in some other way. But what I was thinking this afternoon, which kind of gets to what I want to talk about today, is to say... The way I see it, the enlightened person is careful with bugs. Is the enlightened person annoyed by bugs?

[06:34]

You could answer, the enlightened person is careful with bugs. And you could be careful with bugs whether you're annoyed by the bug or not annoyed by the bug. It's a different... different point. It's a different focus. It's a different frame for how we understand spiritual life, the practice, and the goal. And that is what I want to talk about. Two points that I want to convey tonight. One is the sense that Zen, despite what a lot of us think, despite what I've felt myself believe for a long time, I'm coming to feel that it's at least useful to think of Zen not as being about anything that we feel. Zen is not about some kind of feeling that we have, but it's about something that we do. So that Zen isn't about what we feel or how we feel or about getting the right feeling.

[07:42]

It's about what we do. And related to that is this other point, which is that enlightenment isn't a state of mind. but as an activity of taking care of things. So I don't know what you think when you think enlightenment, but I think it's interesting to think of it as an activity rather than some state or experience or feeling. It's a useful shift for many of us, especially those of us who are really into the feelings, you know? The Zen feeling, and you feel it. You can't help but to feel it when you hear Atasara. You know, that kind of... There's the various dimensions, layers of sort of religious feeling or devotional feeling or quiet feeling, warm feeling, peaceful feeling. I want that Zen feeling, you know.

[08:51]

And I think... For many of us, the spiritual life is about, it's a kind of quest for a certain kind of feeling. We imagine that I could live, I could feel a certain way, and then we go along trying to get that feeling of enlightenment or of oneness with God or oneness with everything or emptiness, however we imagine that. I really was committed to this way of understanding Zen for a while. It seemed to me that through meditation I could get this kind of feeling that would be the right feeling, the right kind of Zen feeling to have. And then I decided that that feeling, not sure how, this may have been a little bit out on a limb here, but my understanding was that there was a feeling I could have in meditation, and that if I got that feeling right,

[09:54]

then that would be what we call saving all beings. That that was like I could feel, I could enter some kind of state of mind, state of feeling that would have this sort of deep religious value. I think it's not an uncommon understanding among Zen folks, that there's some feeling out there that's the right one, that's the Zen one. But more and more, my feeling, my belief, is that there is no Zen feeling. Any feeling, and to think of Zen as a feeling, to think of our practice, whatever our practice is, to think of it as kind of motivated by and ending in a certain inner experience or feeling is a...

[10:56]

It's not a useful direction. So whatever feeling, whatever feeling we have, kind of basic Buddhist principle and teaching is that everything is dependent on everything else, right? Everything, each moment comes into being based on a whole set of conditions. So like when I'm at Tassajara, I feel kind of Zen, you know? because the condition of Tasa Hara is Zen-y. So now I'm here, so now I feel Zen-y. And if I'm in San Francisco, I feel maybe something else. And then I think, well, I'm a Zen person, so I should have that Zen-y feeling. So then I'm in San Francisco trying to push on some button that gives me that Zen-y feeling, right? But there's not the conditions there for that feeling. The conditions have changed, and now I'm trying to, like, keep some feeling, the basis of which has changed.

[12:05]

I don't know if that makes sense, but it's an important point, and I would like to be able to convey it, that the experience of each moment is totally dependent on what's happening in that moment, where we are, and what we ate, and how our body is. All of these... conditions that have been accumulating for a very long time, like since the beginning of everything, lining up just right to create a specific set of conditions that create this moment. And those conditions that create this moment are changing. They're constantly changing. So we can't hold on to any particular feeling because we only had the feeling because of what gave us that feeling. Does this make sense? The conditions. And we have maybe, like, sometimes we think we have a little bit of control of that.

[13:05]

And then maybe, you know, as we sit and cultivate various practices, we may find certain little buttons we can press to generate the conditions to support a certain kind of feeling. Like, I know if I want that feeling, I kind of, like, lean a little bit like this and kind of close my eyes and kind of go like this, and then maybe it'll... Ultimately, it's a pretty flimsy basis for our life and practice to think that maintaining a certain kind of feeling, even a nice Zen feeling or anything, is pretty unreliable because most of the time we're not in control and the conditions that gave us that feeling are going to change. So... You know, ideally, if you go to a Zen teacher, if you think that Zen is about having some great feeling, and then you have some great feeling, because you were at Tazahara.

[14:15]

Of course, you had a great feeling. You were at Tazahara. So you're at Tazahara, and you're sitting a lot, so the conditions are there. You have a great feeling. You tell the teacher, I just had this really great feeling. Am I enlightened now? You know, is this enlightenment? It sure felt like it was a really great feeling. The teacher might say, like, oh, yeah, you should keep that feeling, or... Oh, tell me more about that specific feeling. More likely, the teacher will say, how about now? What's your feeling now? So now you've just set up some feeling that you think is Zen, that's the one you want to have, and now you're going to try to blast through the conditions as they change. You know, like, go back home from Tassajara and, like, close the door to your room and, like, light some Tassajara incense and, like, try to get that feeling back. It's the path to madness and frustration and the opposite of freedom and ease that is what Zen is about.

[15:15]

So it's more than getting a particular feeling. It's just, for me, the kind of, the goal, to the extent that there is one, is this sort of flexibility. of what my feeling, I don't even know how I got the feeling I have now. It's interesting to have a feeling I have now. The next moment, it's a new feeling with no sort of like overvaluing or devaluing of any moment of feeling along the way. Does that make sense? Like freedom. Sounds like freedom, right? To be able to feel whatever there is to feel based on the conditions of that situation. So what would it be to practice that? to practice that being in accord with and totally feeling the feeling that's appropriate to feel in the condition rather than to bring the right feeling from somewhere else. We have a tadpole at home now. I live at Greenwich Farm with my kids and my wife, and we caught a tadpole.

[16:27]

My son Frank caught this tadpole. Don't know how we did it. It was a very tiny tadpole. And we had some water with us by chance when we caught the tadpole, and we were going to put the tadpole in the water, but then we realized, well, that was our water from home. You can't put a tadpole from the pond in the water you have from home, right? It's not going to survive. Tadpoles only live in tadpole water. You know? That's sort of what I mean. When you're in tadpole water, you feel like a tadpole. And when you're in chlorinated water, you feel like chlorine. And it's not like... You think the Zen person can be a... The Zen person is like a tadpole no matter what water they're in. That's not true. That's not the ideal. Zen is not about you be the tadpole no matter where you are. Zen is about, like, you are transparent to the conditions that are there. And just let them live your life out for you because there's not someone on top of those conditions living that life. It just is the life of those conditions. This is... This is no self and interdependence, emptiness, which is that I don't need to bring something to this moment.

[17:35]

This moment my life is given to me with some shape. And I accept that and open to that and end that, and then it changes. And that ability to change moment by moment is, I think, the hallmark of so-called enlightenment. But there's actually another point I want to make, or a little bit different point I want to make, which is about when we think of Zen as the experience I'm having and the feeling I'm having. It's so important, right? Like how I'm feeling and what I'm experiencing is so important. And that's religion and spirituality. For us, at least, in our culture, we really understand spirituality as this kind of inward thing for the most part, right? And for those of us who have entered... the spiritual life and maybe were amazed to discover that there was such a thing as an internal life. You know, that's an amazing thing to discover the life, to discover that we have an inner life and to be sensitive to our experience and feeling.

[18:39]

It's so important to know what I'm feeling. But I think that thinking of Zen as like mostly about what's happening inside, it may not be such a good way to understand it. It may be more useful at least for some of us, to think about Zen and maybe even the spiritual life in general as a function or an activity, kind of what we do, not how we feel, like external. So, you know, even when we talk about mindfulness, and we often do this sort of vital core practice of attending to each thing non-judgmentally, mindfulness is It seems to be, at least when we usually hear the word, it seems like it's a kind of feeling inside, right? So this is what I'm exploring. It's like, what about the less value on what you feel inside and more value on how you're acting, what you're doing, you know, regardless of what you're feeling?

[19:52]

And that maybe the Zen practice and Zen teaching and even Zen enlightenment is about a kind of way of acting. rather than a way of feeling. Does that make sense? How are you, I think, is an interesting question. And if some of you would like to stump a Zen student, you can ask them, how are you? And it can really throw a Zen student who is really... inquiring deeply into what human life is, you know, this question of how are you, it's like hard to get a handle on if you're really inquiring, you know, into what it is to be human. But even that, we say, how are you, and it seems like when we say that, we're saying, how are you feeling, right? But couldn't it be just like, couldn't it also mean, how are you acting? Why is how are you feeling so much more important than what you're doing, or how are you acting?

[20:56]

And if the question is, how are you acting, maybe actually I should be asking the people around you, you know. How are you acting? So this acting, especially in this kind of Zen, the lineage of Zen that this temple belongs to, Soto Zen, is very much about enacting, acting enlightenment. Acting mindfulness, right? Enacting and embodying enlightenment rather than feeling necessarily mindful or feeling enlightenment. You can act it whether or not you're feeling it. And in a way, the most important thing is that you're acting it. I think it's useful for me to think about love, this word love. The concept of love, I think we understand as kind of like there's a feeling that's a loving feeling.

[21:58]

Maybe... You've had it. But it does not count for so much, really. Love is about what you're doing, right? And that makes sense. Or peace, you know? Peace is not like an inner state. There are inner states that we call peaceful. But peace is about an activity. Just like love is about an activity. It's kind of... So enlightenment, what if we thought of enlightenment in the same way? That it's not enough for me to just sit over here loving you. It's kind of like, okay, thank you for loving me. Can you show it? I don't care if you feel it, actually. I need you to show it. And having small children is very useful in this study. There's no... Those of you who have been... close to small children may know this feeling of, you don't, like, having a loving feeling towards your children is sort of transient.

[23:09]

You have all kinds of feelings about your kid. It's not dependent on, like, my feeling. Like, I'm a loving father when I'm feeling a certain way. When the conditions are right, you know, and they're being real nice, and, you know, my little two-year-old little kisses, and of course, you know, You know, of course you love, you have a loving feeling. But that has nothing to do with my actual love of my children. My actual love of my children is what's expressed in my devotion to them, right? I take care of them no matter how I'm feeling. That's the love. Does that make sense? So sometimes I feel very loving and sometimes I feel significantly less loving. But the devotion, the manifestation of the love, is what continues and that's what matters, you know? So some people think, oh, we talk about acting enlightened but not feeling enlightenment necessarily. I don't know if this is making sense, but this is Soto Zen anyway, kind of Soto Zen language is a lot about enacting, embodying enlightenment.

[24:12]

And some people say, well, some people have some problem with that and it's reasonable to have some problem with that. One of the ways it can sometimes be taught and understood is that is like fake it till you make it, right? Like you act enlightened. Just act enlightened. And then maybe later you'll come to feel enlightened. That's like fake it till you make it. And that's an interesting idea. But I don't know why we don't think of love that way at all, right? It's not like, well, act loving, and then maybe later you'll feel loving. It's like, who cares about the feeling loving? If you're acting loving, already the feeling loving is kind of secondary. So fake it till you make it still has like the inner feeling is the most important thing. But just enacting enlightenment is like, that's it. Not like so that later you'll get the real thing, which is like this, you get to be a tadpole no matter where you are.

[25:13]

It's that you've done it. You've enacted enlightenment. You've done it. It's not like in order for something. But something I've been thinking a lot about and talking about and want to share, at least just to mention before I end here, is the way, and this really, for me, is the heart of how I'm trying to practice now, and a practice invitation I wanted to share with you, and a practice intention I wanted to reiterate to myself. There's various ways that the tradition talks about how we enact this enlightenment. One of the ways is through this Japanese word menmitsu, which is to just to take care of things, to be really kind of diligent and careful in our caring for things, to really attend to detail and to have an intimate, to relate intimately, to act intimately with everything.

[26:31]

that's in our world. Acknowledging that everything is our life. And that there's nothing dead in life. There's nothing that's not... Everything that's in my life is part of my life and can be taken care of as... alive, you know, as part of my life. So this sense of warm, scrupulous, intimate, careful, detailed attending to things, in Soto Zen tradition, it's very clear that that's what enlightenment looks like. And that you can do that whether you're feeling enlightened or not, you know. You can sort of attend to the bug, you can care for the bug whether you're feeling annoyed at the bug or not. And in that caring for the bug, Enlightenment is being enacted. It's entering into this intimacy.

[27:47]

And I think many of us are nicer to people than we are to things. Because we think, like, the people are paying attention and the things aren't paying attention to us, you know? Or, like, more to the point, the people will tell some other person that I wasn't. But, you know, like, the toothbrush that I just sort of throw across the bathroom won't tell anybody, right? I'm kind of, I'm alone with these things and I, you know, they, I don't need to care for them. But this practice of understanding that everything gives me life and everything in my life is a lie, that the world is not filled with these kind of extraneous objects for me to use and get something out of, but everything is bringing forth this moment of life, which is the only way I can have a life, and living with the things, the actual things.

[28:52]

I love this part of Zen. that's about caring for things. And it doesn't matter how you feel about them. It's about caring for them carefully and attentively, with attention to detail and intimately. To walk in a way that takes care of the ground. You know, the late abbot Steve Stuckey talked a lot about this. You can walk taking care of the ground. We may think that Zen is about some kind of flashy insight, some kind of flashy knowing of reality, and that Soto Zen is very clear that it's about this kind of quiet and consistent expression of attention to things, and that we can practice that even tonight with something to just enact that

[30:10]

respect and care and intimacy with whatever it is we encounter. I want to close with a short Zen story that very much to this point about, many of you know this story about the seeker who was on pilgrimage and asked, arrived in some place and asked, who is the enlightened person around here? Who can I go to for teaching? And they say, well, up on that mountain, there's a hermit who has the eye of the way. You know, they'll be able to teach you. So the pilgrim walks up the mountain along the stream, sees the smoke from the hermitage. He's very excited. You know, I'm going to meet this great teacher. And as he gets close to the hermitage, he sees a leaf of lettuce floating down the stream. And he sort of pauses and looks at the lettuce leaf or charred leaf, whatever it was, floating down the stream. And then he turns around and goes back down the mountain.

[31:13]

And his friends say, what was the teaching? Did you meet the master? And he said, I did meet the master, but he did not have anything to teach me. He may have had great samadhi power. He might have been a great meditator, attaining all kinds of refined and lovely states. He may have been able to expound the sutras and give the greatest Dharma talks ever. but he abandoned this piece of lettuce. He was not, and it told, you know. What are we looking for? What is our ideal? Our ideal is a human being who totally cares for each thing, and that we can strive to that ideal. And I think having that ideal is a little different from having the ideal of being a human being who feels a certain way. being a human being who acts a certain way, especially for those of us spiritual types, you know? How about just being a human being who acts a certain way?

[32:17]

That would be like, then it wouldn't matter what I felt. Just keep enacting enlightenment, no matter what. So please do take good care of at least one thing tonight, if you can. And thank you very much for your for your attention and your patience tonight. And I hope that our conversation together and this practice of acting in Lent will bring benefit to the world. Thank you very much.

[32:55]

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