We start a sasheen. I always like to come back to very simple considerations of why we're doing it at all. when you get up in the morning. Why get up? What gets up? Who gets up? If you have a moment to lie there after the wake-up bell, your body becomes stuffed Stuff which, you know, ribcage, shoulders, legs. And if you look for yourself in that stuff, you can't find yourself.

[01:34]

I think when you decide to get up, you have some sensation of finding yourself, or the stuff takes on some identity by deciding to get up. But if you look at the decision to get up, what is the decision to get up? It's correct, I think, isn't it, to say, It is I? And not correct to say, It is me? Isn't that right? But from another point of view, It is me is more correct. Someone says, Who's there? You don't say, you don't mean, It is I, from my own subjective point of view. You mean it is me, from your point of view. It's something here at the door that you think is me. It's me. So you're getting up. Who is me? Or you're doing zazen. Who is I? Who is me?

[03:02]

It's difficult to find me in the stuff of your rib cage or in the decision to get up. And if you carry your identity in the decision to get up or the decision to do zazen or do sesshin, or to develop that ephemeral side that is very difficult to pin down. At least you can hit your ribcage, but you can't hit the decision to get up. You know, it's quite ephemeral. But I think most of us identify more with the series of decisions And then if you get sick or in an accident or your ribcage becomes broken, you know, that puts an end to the ephemeral, me, too.

[04:39]

So if we don't make a decision, we just lie there, some meaningless stuff. And even if we make a decision, if the stuff gets broken, we are stopped short, too. So, who is responsible for our doing a Sashin or continuing to sit? What separates this level of decisions or personality and stuff? Or what brings them together? Who is doing zazen? Why are they separated?

[06:10]

When I was going up to San Francisco last time, I was struck again by what most of you must have felt, coming out of Tassajara. Coming out of Zazen, it's the same thing, but maybe after you've been at Tassajara for quite a while, it's more pronounced. you notice it more. You drive out of Tassajara and you enter a historical period, you know, the 20th century, you know. But it wouldn't be so surprising if you drove out and found the 17th century. Do you know what I mean? It's pretty arbitrary, you know. Some big billboard

[07:18]

that Governor Brown put there, or President Ford, or our society put there. And it's very beautiful, you know, even some trashy song on the radio. Quite wonderful song. Or the bright colors, you know, or some motel. Whatever you see has a wonderful transiency, wonderful emptiness about it, wonderful arbitrariness about it, artificialness about it. Some sham show, you know, that we all take so seriously, but you suddenly see it as just an arrangement you have a very tangible feeling of emptiness. Not the emptiness of meaning, no meaning, meaninglessness, that too, but the emptiness of something more than the forms,

[08:47]

The forms are just some arrangement. So you can feel that yourself, too. The decision is just some arrangement to sit. Your ribcage is just some arrangement. You know, Dogen tries to point this out when he says, the painted teacakes are real. eat the painted teacakes. There's some Buddhist story, you know, you can't be satisfied by a picture of teacakes. And Dogen says, Oh, no, that's not so. You should have painted teacakes for dinner. And he means you are painted by five skandhas. You know, everything is some painted picture, some billboard I don't know if you've seen the co-evolution quarterly, but Stuart Brand wanted me to comment on the space colonies, and I didn't want to, or I didn't get around to it anyway. So he quoted me in there, where he says I said,

[10:20]

that people on ships, you know, in the merchantry get a little crazy always being in an artificial environment. And Stuart says, maybe so, but he also said, me, I also, that person also said, Buddhism says everything is artificial. So the other night in front of the Futures Council of the Episcopal Diocese. Someone asked me, is everything artificial? I said, I didn't say that. And Stuart was quite embarrassed. You said that. I'm on an airplane going to New York at such and such. You said it. But if everything is artificial, I can deny it.

[11:23]

And Stuart missed that point. That's one reason I don't like to be published. You can't play with it so much, you know. When you really... just not as an insight, you know, or some intellectual understanding, but you really have a tangible, tangible feeling for emptiness, dwelling in non-dwelling. It's based on... you don't need anything anymore. You can use things, but you don't care one way or the other.

[12:30]

So it means your intriguing karmic stories that I talked about, you've gotten through them. And your intriguing karmic stories, which you know, strangely so, but which you know are artificial, you know are something you've made up from one interpretation of your own events. You know they're just an interpretation, and yet they're what tie you to a sense of reality, what prevent you from the tangibility of emptiness, the looseness of everything. Looseness. everything has its own resonance. It isn't caught in a definition. I don't know why it comes out in contradictory expression, but if you see that this period is actually the 17th century, our 20th century is actually the 17th century,

[14:03]

Everything has a kind of looseness, a freedom, a possibility of not being just the 17th century, of suddenly being also the 20th century. Just some adjustment. And also, you have that wonderful feeling of having been there before. or having been there before it happened. So most of us, you know, somebody trying to understand our world and predict where it's going, is caught in its own prediction. Such a person can't feel the dissolution of it. not only the looseness of it, but it also is the 17th century, but that it's created. It can also be undone. In the story of Quechua's cart that Getan tells, I've told you that story before, it says, and there's one commentary in it

[15:39]

or poem, taking twigs and branches and grasses and etc., making a thatched house. And doing twigs and branches and grasses, again we have a grassy field. You know, usual person doesn't have the imagination, you know, to realize it can also be a grassy field, again. It always, you say, think it has to be something following from the thatched hut. But they don't have the imagination to see. Seventeenth century can be undone. Twentieth century can be undone. And when you have that feeling,

[16:44]

knowing feeling, tangible feeling. You don't need anything, you know? So you are quite free to feel this way. You don't need anything the 20th century can give you. So if you can undo it very easily, when you have that feeling, The world is a very different place. Zen is very simple, you know, if I describe it. It's very simple. But that simplicity, you know, when it's you completely, you live in a very different world. And your understanding of historical process and the possibilities for us, and the meaning and extent of suffering is very different when you see that the grassy field is there, always. Keichu, the story, you know, again, Getan says, ah, Keichu. Keichu was probably mythological cart maker of ancient China. Keichu made a great cart of

[18:06]

a hundred spokes in a wheel. Take away the front and back and the axle and hubs. What will you have? What will there be? What will it be? He says. And he doesn't mean, Getan doesn't mean, form and emptiness, or the contrast of emptiness and form, or before and after. He means form as emptiness itself, that always the cart is apart. It's very loose. Wheels are floating through space, body of cart is floating through space. Arbitrarily, you know, they're together. Loosely, they're together.

[19:14]

such a superb vehicle, understood this way, can carry us. I can't give any direction. You can support us. can go in any direction. So you are not in any particular century. You are sitting with a Dogon, with Nagarjuna or with Buddha, and you don't have any particular history or parents or century to return to.

[21:48]

When you have this feeling through and through, you can see how we generate ourselves, how a deer generates a deer, how everything is generated from inside. You don't have subject-object distinction anymore. You can say all subjective, I, [...] or all objective, you know, me, me, me, me. But subject-object doesn't have so much usefulness as an expression anymore. I like photographs of... which have no space in... or our all space. I mean, no contrast, like a photograph of illuminated vegetable leaf. So you don't see anything but vegetable leaf, or vegetable leaf behind vegetable leaf. So you

[23:22]

Don't escape thinking. There's some escape over there, or some space over there, or some absolute or emptiness, or some particular century to find refuge in. That's all. Rain hitting the ocean. There's no... I don't know. What meets you is... letting your descriptions loose in this way, sitting sashin, sometimes a decision to sit, sometimes your ribcage has its own decision to sit.

[25:09]

But at the same time, viewing the decision to sit in the ribcage as also arbitrary, a painted teakage. So beyond that, how do we sit sashin? Beyond the decision to sit, beyond the physical need to sit, What is sitting? What is arbitrary or not arbitrary or artificial or not artificial? What century are you sitting, zazen in?

[26:26]

do we need to give it a name? By this Sashin can you enjoy the transiency of this Sashin, transiency of this century, transiency of your own body, your own stuff, of your own personality.

[27:52]

Zen practice is defined in two realms. There's the form realms and the formless realms. I'm talking about the formless realms. Enjoying the transiency of this session. Okay.

[29:06]

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