I miss bowing. I mean, it's nice to bow with you. You know, one of the practices at Zen Center is when you pass people on the pathways, we stop, you know, we don't have to say anything. We just stop walking and we each just, and we bow and then we keep going. And it's such a nice way to acknowledge other people without having to get into a whole bunch of conversation or, chit-chat, just to bow. Seems like more than enough. Very, very sweet. And so maybe someday. And so Village will start bowing to each other in the hallways. That'd be very nice. So today we're going to continue studying, as we have been, Suzuki Roshi's book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And I think I've given, this is the fourth session or gathering we've had since i came back from my traveling and um so we've been looking at the final talks in section two of suzuki roshi's book and that section is entitled right attitude right attitude um and soon we're going to be going next week we'll be going to part three the new section uh which is called right understanding so what we've been looking at the first

[01:43]

months, in the beginning of this year, was section number one. And section number one is called, I forget, let me look that up, is called Right Practice. So Right Practice, Right Attitude, Right Understanding. Those are the three big sections of Suzuki Roshi's book. He didn't put his talks into those categories, but the people, the students who were wanting to... create a book out of his lectures, chose those categories as kind of a way of gathering the various things he talked about, which, as you know from reading his work, it's not so clear, like, what's he talking about? What's the topic? Or what is the major principle that he's covering? Because he covers a lot, and he touches on it a lot. So part of the beauty of his way of teaching was it's kind of a little bit like finger painting. You know, he kind of covers the whole sheet of paper, but he does so with a lot of different colors and a lot of different concepts. And then somehow he brings them together in this kind of lovely way.

[02:45]

So I think we can map these sections pretty well onto the foundational teachings that I talked about last week from the Buddha's first sermon, you know, called the Eightfold Path. I think you're all probably familiar with the Eightfold Path. And the Eightfold Path, as you... may recall, is the fourth of the four noble truths. So these are kind of like bedrock. If you were going to start with somewhere in your studies of the Buddha Dharma, you know, Dalai Lama says, start with the two truths. And then from there, you've got the four truths. And from there, you kind of go on into a whole, a lot of elaboration about what those truths are all about. You know, the word truth itself is a translation from the Sanskrit, the word Dharma. So the Buddha's Dharma is his truth. So number one, the first truth of the Four Noble Truths is suffering. Number two, there's a cause of our suffering, and the cause is desires based in our ignorance about the truth of non-duality.

[03:53]

So there's the two truths. The ultimate truth is the non-dual nature of the universe, that there are not two things like me and the rest of the universe, but there's me and I am part of and complete the universe, as do each of us. So when we don't see that, when we don't think that, and it doesn't look like that for most of us, we suffer. We suffer from the pain of separation. So that's the cause of suffering. Wanting things to be different than they are. Noble truth number three is the cessation of suffering, which has a cause, and the cause is... Noble truth number four, called the path. And the first sermon is called the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path. Basically, how we live our lives. That's what the path is. How do you live your life? It's every day, all day. How are you living your life? Are you on the path? Do you think about the path?

[04:54]

Is there something about your life that you feel would benefit from? path or knowing there's a path so that's kind of what this whole direction of of the teaching is about so how you live your life for the buddha is made up of these eight eight folds you know and then those folds can be in turn folded into these categories of suzuki roshi's book so one fold might be the right practice you know all of the different ways of practicing with your speech with your conduct with your livelihood with your effort so these are how you actually enact your life so that's right practice right attitude how do you view your life what's what how do you see things you know if you were to ask you what's going on here you know what is a human being where are we you know what is the universe if we start to inquire more and more deeply into these questions about our life you know our attitude starts to get a little bit wobbly

[05:55]

You're like, well, I don't really know. I'm not really sure. So these are kind of the big questions that the Buddha and others have made a great effort in their lives to try and offer something comforting for us about this very precious life that we've all been given. And then there's right understanding about our place in the world, our place in the universe, what we're here to do, what we've come here to do. So the students who gathered Suzuki Roshi's lecture into this book, as I said, chose these categories in order to help us to locate Suzuki Roshi's teaching among the Buddha's own. So there's a nice way that they've made these connections for us who are beginners in Buddhism. And Zenists can feel... kind of advanced, you know, to a lot of people, it's like, whoa, that seems a little too advanced for me. It's not actually, but it takes a lot of explanation to teach somebody how it's not really advanced, it's really very simple.

[06:56]

So it's really kind of the authors or the collectors, editors of Suzuki Hiroshi's book to try to help us tie back into the very basic teachings that the Buddha gave. So under this first section, the first section, that we read earlier this year, Right Practice. There are lectures included around these basic teaching elements that are common to all Buddhist practitioners, such as your posture or your breathing, such as the mind weeds, you know, the confusions, the delusions that form and flow through our minds. Bowing, you know, this teaching of non-duality from the first sermon. And then particularly Zen edition is a lecture that's called Nothing special. Nothing special. And then under the second session, Right Attitude, the one that we've been studying these last few months and that we're about to conclude with tonight's lecture, there are titles including various answers that Suzuki Roshi gave to questions that commonly arise as students begin to practice with their posture, their breathing, their mind weeds, and their attitudes about themselves, about the world, and about Zen.

[08:13]

So titles included in that section, as you may or may not recall, are Repetition, Single-Minded Way, Zen and Excitement. That was an exciting one. Right Effort, No Trace, Study Yourself, and Limiting Your Activity. So and then in these last few weeks, we've looked at the lectures called Constancy, Communication, Negative and Positive. And this evening, the final talk in this second section is called Nirvana the Waterfall. Nirvana the Waterfall. I think you might be familiar with this term Nirvana. I mean, there's a band called Nirvana, so it's kind of gotten out there in the common language. Nirvana, I think, is one of the places where Buddhists often try to help each other understand. define or figure out or describe or something, and there's not a lot of agreement about it. The definition of the word, as I understand it, means something like blown out, to be blown out.

[09:19]

Well, that could mean a lot of things, like a candle's blown up, but there's still a candle, so did the fire go, or what happened to it, or all kinds of follow-up questions around what it means to blow out something, and what are we blowing out anyway. Does that mean the end of our life? And so on. So anyway, this talk is about Nirvana as a waterfall. And so I read this talk. Yeah, it must be. It's so shocking to say, but it's probably 50 years ago when I read this talk, this lecture. And I was at the time living in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and working in a bookstore. And I was taking care of the books. And there was a little section I mentioned in a lecture the other day of books on spirituality. And most of them were pink or turquoise. And they had these really wild psychedelic covers. And they were all about various kinds of exotic forms of yoga and so on and so forth.

[10:22]

And then there was this very dignified gray book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind on the shelf. these other books and so i i looked at it i picked it up and it's really beautifully made and um started to read it i have no idea what they were he was talking about um but i liked it and i particularly liked the picture on the back i think many of you do i have it here somewhere i think i do there's a picture of suzuki roshi artists on the back of zen my beginner's mind you know I don't know if you can see that, but that picture with his eyebrow lifted, which is a sign he was thinking about things that you just said. I was like, what does that mean? Anyway, so Suzuki Roshi's face is really, I think, what got me to buy the book. Who is that? What kind of a person is that? It didn't feel very posed.

[11:25]

It just felt like... something's happening here and um so that as i said was a long time ago um but i remember this particular lecture nirvana the waterfall and uh i think something happened you know this this kind of feeling i had even though i was living in a place at the time that had lots of waterfalls you know in the mountains there in the rockies i don't think i noticed them all that much i don't think i noticed anything all that much i was Most likely just trudging up the hiking trails with my big backpack on my back and thinking about my problems or something like that. Or wondering if I was lost. I mean, that would happen. But as a metaphor for our life and for the life of the universe, Suzuki Roshi is offering us this image. And something that's very different than was taking place inside of me at the sight or mention of a waterfall. Something else has happened. That idea of a waterfall became a living metaphor and something that really helped me, actually.

[12:30]

I hope maybe you'll find the same sort of, I don't want to call it encouragement, but some relief that came when I read this talk. So, you know, I don't know about all of you, but I have come to attribute poetic meaning now more and more to what I see in nature. And I think that's one of the things I've always liked about Zen. The language of Zen seems both terribly obscure and very poetic at the same time, which maybe is what we like about poetry. It's pretty obscure a lot of the times. So Dogen Zenji, the 13th century founder of Japanese Soto Zen, talks about needing to abandon reading poetry as a young monk because of how beautiful the words of the poets can be. And how seductive. They would draw him away from his sutra studies. He just loved reading poetry. And yet, he is as guilty as anyone in Buddhist history of putting his thoughts into very seductive language.

[13:36]

For example, as in the title of his collection of lectures called Moon in a Dew Drop. That's one of Dogen's images, the moon in a dew drop. The vastness of the universe is reflected in a drop of water on the grass. So that's a Dogen line. And then another line in one of his poems, the whole sky, the whole earth, the whole spring, new. Whole sky, whole earth, whole spring, new. And in another poem, he says, eyes, eyes become the sutra. As you read it, your eyes become the sutra. And then there's his death poem. He was a young man when he died. Maybe not for his era, but for our era, he was very young. He was 54. And he wrote this. He was quite sick at the time. 54 years lighting up the sky. A quivering leap smashes a billion worlds. Ha! Entire body looks for nothing.

[14:39]

Living by plunge into the yellow river. 54 years lighting up the sky. A quivering leap smashes a billion worlds. Ha! Entire body looks for nothing. Living, I plunge into the Yellow River. So the Yellow River is the river in Chinese mythology, I think, maybe Japanese as well, that takes you into the underworld. So that's where you go when you die. You go into the Yellow River. So living, he dives into the Yellow River. So, you know, whether you have a poetic inclination, you know, that's dominated by feelings or a pragmatic one dominated by thinking or both, this particular talk by Suzuki Roshi holds a kind of power that has lasted for me all these many years. You know, there's a kind of power here. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it was strong.

[15:41]

And I still remember that kind of like a thread. from way back then, myself way back then, till myself now. So it's both as a way of thinking about life and as a way of feeling the daily quivering that is our life. Thinking, feeling. So the first line placed under the title of this talk is, our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore. Nor actually... nor actual difficulty in our life. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore, nor actual difficulty in our life." So I think it was this sentence, this first sentence that had gotten my attention, when many years later I arrived at the Zen Center, riddled with difficulties in my own life, and enchanted, but not in a good way, by the idea

[16:44]

or maybe better to say, the fact of death. I heard about that. There's something about that. Time-swinged chariot I had already begun to relate to, you know, as a 30-year-old. The hoofbeats were getting stronger. So what could he possibly mean, you know, by this, our life and death are the same thing? That doesn't seem obvious to me. So I think I've been sticking around all this time to figure out how that is so. you know, to the point where there's really not so much left to be said. There's just this fact of our death, as Dogen says, snuggling close to our hearts as we leap live into the Yellow River. So Roshi begins his talk with a story about Dogen. During a visit to Eheiji, which is a beautiful monastic temple up in the mountains of Japan, I had the privilege to visit there once with our Our dear friend Mea, she and I went traveling together in Japan.

[17:48]

It was a wonderful trip. So this temple, Dogen founded, is in this very wooded rural area of Japan. There's these giant cryptomeria trees, kind of like our redwoods, but some of them have been there since Dogen's era, perhaps, or at least they're the offspring of the trees that were there then. So this is way back in the 13th century when he founded this temple. So as you cross over this little bridge, Suzuki Roshi talks about this little bridge that you cross going to Eheji, and it's called the Hanshaku Kyo, Hanshaku Kyo. And Hanshaku, Hanshaku, Kyo is river. Yeah, a bridge, sorry. Hanshaku is a dipper. It's a half of a dipper. So I don't know if you've been to the tea class yet, or tea offerings that Maya does here, but there's this... long beautiful bamboo water dipper and so the the little cup at the end is made from bamboo and then it's has a handle that's fastened into it it's all very tightly sealed together so nothing drips and you use that long handle dipper to take hot water out of the kettle for making tea and then pouring the water into the into the tea bowl and in tea as well you don't put all the water from the from the from the ladle

[19:10]

into the tea bowl. You only put some of it, about three sips full, and then the rest of it goes back into the kettle. So that's one of these ritual gestures in the tea ceremony that is connected very directly back to Dogen's own practice at a Heiichi monastery, at Half Dipper Bridge. So this is the name that comes from this practice that Dogen followed of returning half of the dipper full of water to the river after drinking it. or in the case of tea, to the kettle after using some of it for making tea. So this is a practice that I learned many years ago at the city center when, as a server, so we, I don't know how much you all know about what we've been all doing over there at Zen Center, but one of the things we do is have formal meals in the zendo. They're called oreoki meals. Oreoki is a bowl, a white bowl. We're covered with white claws. You have three bowls and there's a white cloth covering and then there's a little napkin and there's chopsticks and a spoon.

[20:15]

And that's how you eat. So you have these set of bowls that you take into the Zendo and you sit down behind you when it's time for meals. There's some chanting. You bring your bowl out and you set it down and then you open it up. There's a certain way to do that that works if you do it right. It all works out just fine. And then you have your utensils and you have your bowls and you're ready to eat. And then the servers come in and they bring food. First, the first bowl of food and the second bowl of food and the third bowl of food. You chance some more and then you eat and then you get seconds if you want. And then you get some water to clean your bowls. So you clean your bowls with this water and then the servers come back in with these wooden buckets. and you take the water that's left from cleaning the bowls, and you pour the water toward you into the bucket. Okay, so that's maybe more complicated than it sounds. I mean, it's not as complicated as it sounds. So the point I was going to make is that as a server, when I first was learning to be a server, I was holding the wooden bucket, and the people were pouring their wastewater into the bucket, and then we were told to take the bucket out into the garden,

[21:25]

and pour that water toward us into the soil. And, you know, the reason for that is to show respect. To show respect. That's what Suzuki Roshi is talking about here, too. You know, when... I was going to mention that if any of you are interested in watching how the Oriyoki is done in an extremely... careful way and meticulous way, our former abbess, Linda Ruth Cutts, who will be coming here next year to live with us, did a video of Orioki. And you can watch her doing Orioki from start to finish. And, you know, it's a great study tape for anyone who'd like to get down to the very fine details of eating meals in the Zen Do. I just looked it up myself on the Zen Center website, and it's pretty easy to find. You just look up Zendo meals. So, oh, one of the things I also wanted to add is that for those of you who would like to try Orioki meals sometime, or go back and have one if you have before, you know, it's really good to be reminded that there will always be a review.

[22:44]

We always have Orioki review before retreat, like a sesheen or practice period. And that everybody is basically in the same situation. You know, we're all in the same boat, having forgotten all the details of the oryokis. So it's really nice to know that, you know, we're just watching each other. And, you know, I look across the way to see what Linda's doing or Reb's doing, if I've forgotten something, and other people look at me. And, you know, so it's really a, it's just a, it's just kind of, it turns out, it's just a lovely thing to do together. You know, the meal's silent, everyone is efficiently fed in about an hour, and then everything's cleared away, and then we take a break, and then we come back to sit again in our place in the Zendo. So Suzuki Rishi says that this is how we express our respect for water. He says this kind of practice is beyond our thinking, and yet, as I can testify, it is not beyond our feeling. You know, lots of feeling.

[23:46]

So there's something about doing these simple rituals that many are familiar from the tea ceremony as well, the ones I was mentioning. They have the same roots as Zen that allow us to appreciate everyday objects as if we're seeing them for the first time. One of the things I heard was unusual about Suzuki Roshi. When people watch him, you know, they always watch what he was doing. He would pick something up, you know, like this bell. And he would pick it up and look at it as though he'd never seen a bell before. It was like this amazing thing. What is this? He had that quality, almost like a child, but not childish, but a freshness about looking at objects, appreciating objects, and holding them carefully, very carefully. So in the tea ceremony, we hold our bowl, the tea bowl, with two hands when drinking tea. We appreciate the color of the tea. the steam that's rising up from the hot water kettle. There's an odor of incense.

[24:47]

Incense has been placed carefully around the coals inside where the water's boiling. There's charcoal underneath there, and there's little bits of incense that begin to warm up and fill the room with lovely fragrance. And then there's the presence of the other guests and the quiet. And then there's also the amazing practice skill of the person who's making tea. I mean, that's what you watch. You watch someone make you a bowl of tea. I hope you'll take an opportunity sometime to come and watch a tea ceremony, either here or at Green Gulch. So each of these offerings arouses feelings that are intentionally designed to accompany the variety of sensory events that are taking place during Zen ritual activity. You know, feelings that in turn evoke gratitude. and profound appreciation for the host. You know, in the case of the tea room, it's the host who's made us a bowl of tea and shared with us some delicious small treat.

[25:53]

And in the case of the meals in the monastery, the gratitude is for our founders, Shakyamuni Buddha and Dogen Senji and Suzuki Roshi, and all of the Bodhisattva practitioners who for centuries have carried on the traditions of practice and attitude. So, after talking about respecting the water, Suzuki Roshi tells us about his trip to Yosemite National Park, where he saw some huge waterfalls. He talks about the way the water creates a curtain of mists and droplets as it's thrown off the top of the mountain. And he says these tiny streamlets, which he compares, he then starts to compare to our own life as they fall. So... He says that, you know, there's this utter unity of the universe, you know, kind of imagine that, that was happening, that's even a word to use, before we were born. So if you imagine the time before you were born, I can't really remember any problems in the time before I was born.

[26:58]

I can't remember anything at all. You know, I have no idea. what I might have been doing out there, or what parts of me were doing what, where, and so on and so forth. I mean, I just can't comprehend anything called before I was born, and I have no comprehension of that. And so then there's this feeling of separation that happens, you know, when we leap off the cliff when we're born. We come into this world of droplets, and each of us is a little droplet that's falling down a very long way, you know. That feeling of separation takes place after our so-called birth. There's a feeling of being separate, that the water no longer is just this one flow. It's now come into parts. And then back to the unity that follows our so-called death. So we all know that. We don't know before we're born. We kind of know, but we don't really know exactly what's going on here once we're born. And then we don't know again after we pass away.

[27:59]

So he says that it's only when we, like the droplets, are separated from the river or from the wholeness of the universe that we begin to express some feeling about that, including whatever sorrow or joy appears in our own individual existence. You know, my life, my droplet. And we attach to the feelings we have about our own life without knowing how those feelings are being created, where they come from. Our ignorance about our own creation makes us afraid. The universe is, therefore, afraid of itself. And then he says, whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Followed by the sentence from the beginning of the talk, our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore and have no actual difficulty in our life. Roshi then says, when we take a dipper full of water, as Dogen did, we can feel the value of the water and of the person who uses the water, feeling ourself and the water together in this way.

[29:08]

We cannot use it in just some material way. You know, it is a living thing. It has become a living thing. When the water returns to its original oneness at the bottom of the waterfall, it no longer has any individual feeling to it. It resumes its own nature and finds its composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river. Of course, he's talking about us. How very glad we might be to come back to the original river. That's why we say that to attain nirvana is to pass away. But then he adds, to pass away is not a very adequate expression. Maybe it's better to say when we join or rejoin or when we go on, when we continue the flow. A little blip there of birth and death and then the continuing going on. So in the last part of his talk, Roshi suggests that when we find a better expression for death, we will also have a better understanding of our life.

[30:12]

Just as he did when he saw that giant waterfall at Yosemite. He then says, imagine that 1,340 feet high. He's just so excited. about the height of this waterfall. Really made an impression. And the last part of the talk is about this word emptiness, which he likens to the idea of the universe itself, of one whole mind, of the river before the water separates into drops. Everything comes out of emptiness, he says. Before we understand what this means, before we see it, we are only seeing our delusions, our ideas. There are feelings, right? When in our delusional state, we may exaggerate the beauty of the world. We can enchant it. Or simply ignore it, as I remember having done in my early years, so busy with the troubles that accompany our young lives on the rudderless sea.

[31:13]

He says delusion means our small mind is not in accord with reality. And then he finishes his talk saying... Once you find the true meaning of your life, your rudder, even though you still have difficulty falling upright from the top of the waterfall to the bottom of the mountain, you will enjoy your life. May it be so. So before I turn over to the group conversation, which I'll do in just a moment, I wanted to announce that I am... planning to offer a precept class again. I did that last year for a group of you who was considering perhaps taking the precepts at some point. And I have four names of people in the group who've asked about studying precepts. And I thought I would mention that to others of you who might have that same thought. And if so, currently my plan is to begin a study class, about a six-week study class, on November the

[32:19]

13th at 4 o'clock in the afternoon online. So if that's something you want to talk about with me, please send me an email and let me know. And then we can have a discussion. Maybe we can have a conversation together, a Zoom talk, and find out if this might be the right thing for you to do now to study the Bodhisattva precepts. Okay. So... Let's go on to gallery view, and I'd like to invite you to offer whatever thoughts or questions or comments that you'd like to about Nirvana, the waterfall. Kakua. I see... There you are.

[33:21]

I don't want to say much more. I think this talk speaks for itself. Both Suzuki Roshi's talk in Beginner's Mind and in your talk here as well. I just wanted to share how much comfort and how powerful would be a word, but it doesn't seem like the right word to use. But this talk really had an impact when I was suffering the through the difficulties of life and death. So I just wanted to extend my gratitude because there really is something that I feel we, I should really be grateful for, for all of this.

[34:38]

So thank you so much, and thank you to Suzuki Roshi. Yeah. Tim. Tim? I was going to say that the Theravada, you know, nirvana is, they call it the probably word nirvana, but in the bone dry definition of it, at the moment of death, someone that's achieved that state, they call it cessation without remainder. Right. And that's kind of frightening, but yeah. Only if you have some remainder. Well, yeah. Like us? Yeah, I think you're right. If you have some remainder, it's frightening. All right.

[35:38]

Thank you. Sure. Yeah. It's interesting because one of the ways Nirvana, you know, like my teacher, Rep. Anderson, calls his... his temple in Mill Valley, the mind of no abode, or the nirvana of non-abiding, non-abiding nirvana, where you can't stay there either. It's just one of the many portals that you pass in and out of. So I appreciate the non-permanence or the feeling of nothing's steady, nothing's happening that's just like a thing. It's just flow process. I've been reading a lot of enjoying quantum physics, and it's just like that. Everything's just like that. There's no things. There's just little things. Not things, but just movement and encounters. When something encounters something, it looks like a thing, and then it's gone. Anyway, if you like that kind of stuff, there's this wonderful series by, I mentioned before, Lisa, our dear friend.

[36:47]

Lisa, are you here? Are you there somewhere? There she is, waving away. She sent me Carlo Rovelli's first book called Helgoland, which got me going. And now I've got the order of time, which has really got me going. So if you enjoy, like, you know, overworking your brain, it's a really good way to do it. Okay, Musho. Hello, everyone. I wanted to mention that... I also had read Suzuki Roshi's book many years ago, and I also had no idea what it was about because I was just starting my practice. But I did remember this chapter, and I think I had heard a Dharma talk about it another time. And the metaphor that I got out of it that I thought I would let you guys know about was that the top of the waterfall is like before birth, and the water is calm. And then there's the waterfall, which is your life, a tumbling waterfall that hits the surface.

[37:52]

And then the bottom surface is calm again, and you return to the river, and that's death. I thought that was really cool because if you are to try to fight your way up the waterfall, you're going to get really, really tired. And it's really going to be a struggle. But if you were to just let yourself drop... through your whole life down to the bottom, it wouldn't be as hard. And I've always carried that with me, and I was surprised to reread this, because that's the way I sort of understood it, maybe from a Dharma talk, I don't remember. But it's a very beautiful, very beautiful way to think about our life is just this fall from somewhere to somewhere else. And I know, I always loved that. That's all I wanted to say, and I'm glad to see it again and talk about it with you all. Thank you. Yeah, Dogen's enlightenment statement to his teacher was, drop body and mind, body, mind drops.

[38:57]

So I think that idea that you just said of dropping is just like dropping, like drops, you know, just falling down. Yeah. Falling down. I like the image of trying to climb back up, you know, like crabs on a wall. No, no, no, I'm not ready. But anyway, reality wins, and we're all dropping. And I do think finding the joy of the journey is what we're called here to do as best we can. Not always happy, but not always happy. Something about being able to do both of those appropriately. So thank you, Michel. Hello, Griffin. Hello, everybody. I'm Griffin. I love that you started this talk with the words attitude and then mentioned affect because those are both something that comes less from the mind and more from the feeling in the body.

[40:03]

Something more just to be rejoined from something you already know or remember, both attitude and which is why I always cringe when people yell at children to have a better attitude. But there's some little sweet event that's happening every day to me, which is changing my attitude about life and death. And that's when I sit on my balcony. There comes this little hummingbird, which is just beautiful. barely feathered body in the phenomenal world like my body sitting on the bench and it feels equally something vibrating energy separate or beyond in a sky beyond form and emptiness it's both it's

[41:11]

Simultaneously, I feel it's organic life on Earth and an energy connected beyond. And that, of course, makes me come to, well, then what is life? Is it this little furry creature? Or is it... Or is there what is beyond? Is that what I'm calling death? You know, the energy that is beyond that body and perhaps goes on and on. And I'm just beginning to question about whether my attitude about life and death is really based on a preference. from ignorance. And just like this little hummingbird, it's both.

[42:18]

It's this energetic vibration, and it's this little feathered creature. And it's moving me to question differently. What you were saying, it kind of reminded me of the saying that Dogen said, sutras, The eyes become the sutras. You know, as you're experiencing the hummingbird or your friends here at Enso Village or your dinner, whatever it is, your body becomes what you're experiencing. There's no separation there. So the eye becomes the hummingbird. There's completion there. That's temporary. And the hummingbird flies away and you go off down the hall and so on. But each of those moments is complete in itself. You know, right now, complete in itself. What's happening right now is the sutra. Your eyes becoming the sutra. So, but work the questions.

[43:21]

I think they're great. I think we should all come up with our questions, like things that spark us to go like, well, I don't know about that. I think that's what this dharma has grown out of. Like all the great questions that, you know, everyone's always raised their hand around this stuff. Like, what? What? So, thank you for your questions. Appreciate it. Senko. Hi, Fu. Hi, everyone. Yeah, I love this waterfall. I still, I remember I was like, you know, I was reading a book many years ago. I didn't know what's going on. But this waterfall metaphor just kind of remained. Now, you know, as Mushu was talking about the, like the before birth and life and death, It's really helpful. And also think about, you know, the life part when the water is like coming down. It's like all separated. And that's the beautiful part, right? Maybe it's not the calm part. It's not as calm as before birth or after death.

[44:25]

But it's so beautiful. Like, we'll go see it. And I feel like maybe that's the delusion. You know, we're in this. We see separation when the water falls down. But because we see the separation, for me, a person without a Zen center, like close to me, you guys are like the other water drops. It's really like the teacher, the Dharma friends, my Dharma sister, like supporting. I see the other water drops. Maybe it's illusory, but they're trying to drop upright. It's very difficult. And it's really supportive. I just want to voice my appreciation, my gratitude for my son God. Thank you. And for you. And that's to you. You know, it's like the rainbow. When the water droplets come, you get the rainbow, right? Yes. It's the suffering and the beauty together. The colors. Yeah. So I think about Nirvana as, yeah, the Nirvana is the life part.

[45:27]

Not just the, it's like the suffering and the Nirvana like together. Yeah. I was also very touched. Yeah. by this poem of Dogen Zenji's, his death poem, where that stuck with me too, the idea of leaping live into the Yellow River. You don't leap dead into the Yellow River, you jump, you know, it's like, this is it, this is your big shot, you know. So I think there's all of these... ways of using language to help us, to inspire us with something that's happening anyway. We're falling and we are going to die. And so there are all these things that are happening to us. But I think the more we're able to come up with language that gives us some joy and some humor and anything else that we can use as we're falling. I do appreciate, I certainly appreciate Zen for that reason. Yes. Poetry and humor.

[46:28]

poetry great medicine yes thank you [...] okay hope is hope are you next hope i hope so hello can you see me hello well you're somewhere you go from being right up there to somewhere in the in the mix i gotta find you now there you are i see you now yeah got you Hello, Fu. Hello, Sangha. I'm not sure why, but I have this newly developed anxiety about speaking in front of people and something about just vocalizing it kind of eases that. So I have a lot of anxiety speaking to you all when I'm just saying that from my own.

[47:31]

But I find it very interesting that this topic of death has come up today. Oh, thank you so much for the hearts, Amir. That's so nice. Death is really present in my orbit and on my mind lately. I'm actually training to be an end-of-life doula right now. yesterday had one portion of that training and we were learning about some of the signs to look out for in different phases of dying and one of those first signs being something like excessive crying and withdrawing socially not talking much preferring not to eat and all of these things and I was like, wow, I mean, I must be dying.

[48:33]

We must all be having these periods of our lives where in a way something or somebody or some version of us is dying. And that there are these other phases and there's this period called a rally. This is specifically within hospice or people who are terminally ill. And there's a rally period where somebody might be very near within hours or days to death and they'll all of a sudden get this burst of energy and maybe somebody who hasn't spoken in months will start speaking and start remembering things that they couldn't remember before and feel all better and stop using their walker or start wanting to eat again or these kinds of things and then they'll pass away. And learning about these things has just been very interesting.

[49:39]

And I've been kind of noticing or realizing the perspectives that my culture or the culture that many of us come from, the way that we view death as something that is negative, as something that is sad. And reshaping this perspective as something that's more interesting or more curious or always happening has been a really interesting study for me and something that has been spoken about by the Buddha and the ancestors for thousands of years. And... Thinking about this and having this more on my mind. Like last night I was on a walk and looking around my neighborhood. And typically I'm walking and I'm thinking about all my woes and sorrows and all of the problems in my life.

[50:45]

And this time it just occurred to me. It was all gloomy. I felt like it was gloomy outside. And I was looking around at the houses and it occurred to me how fleeting that was. moment was and how perhaps at some point I would look back at this moment and think about these houses and remember that time in my late 20s and it would just be this memory and then I started to get sad and I started to feel this kind of dying feeling so that's all Thank you. Thank you. Drew. Hi, Fu. Hi, everyone. About 23, 24 years ago, the Zen Center issued a cassette of Suzuki Roshi giving these lectures.

[51:57]

I got one, and it reminded me, because one of the ones that they had taped was the one with the waterfall. Unfortunately, it was a cassette, and mine got eaten up in the machine like they would want to do. I'm wondering, are they still there? Does anybody transfer them to CDs? Hearing his voice and the talk was really amazing. It was really slow. broken English, and, you know, you'd have to kind of struggle with a word or ask somebody in the audience, how do you say? So it was just very real and grounded and just gave a sense of, it just made them come alive in a different way than reading it. There is a, do you know cuke.com? C-U-K-E dot com, C-O-M? David Chadwick, who was, David Chadwick, who was one of. Oh, yeah, yeah. He has his whole website, and you can find everything. Suzuki Roshi, everything there, pretty much. I think Zen Center also has on its website, if you look for Suzuki Roshi videos or recordings, I think you can also find them there.

[53:04]

Someone else can maybe help me out with it if you know better than I do, because I haven't looked for them recently, but I did some times ago, and it was nice to know that they're available. So check the Zen Center website, and then also go to cuke.com. And what David's put on there, because he's got a huge amount of stuff. Is he still around? Is David Chadwick still with us? Yes, I just saw him when I was in Germany at Richard Baker's Stepping Down Ceremony. David was there from Bali, where he lives. And as amazing as ever, extroverted as ever, we ate ice cream. There's a truck. They had an ice cream truck pull up in the back of the Zendo. We were all out eating ice cream stuff. He blew through Vermont many years ago on a book tour. Yeah. I think it was Crooked Cucumber. Did he do that one? Yes, that's the cute part. Crooked Cucumber.

[54:04]

Yes and okay, or whatever the first one was. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I forget that one about his own... spiritual journey. I remember seeing David when I was in brand new person going from my first practice period at Tassahara. And he was one of the older, you know, senior kind of the varsity squad of seniors and mostly guys. And he was on the stepping on the balcony of one of the cabins. And he was said, as we got off the bus coming into, it wasn't bus, but off the cars coming into Tassahara, he said, you people are holding me back. Who is this guy? But maybe he's right. Didn't somebody bet him like a hundred bucks that he wouldn't talk for a year? Yes. And he didn't. He had a chalkboard. And he scribbled furiously all the time. Yeah. I think he got his hundred bucks. All right. I'll check out that. Thanks.

[55:05]

Good. Thanks for the reminder. Hello, Dean. I was about to say good morning. It's so dark. It feels like it's morning. Yeah, they don't know what they've done to us. Yes. They took us away. I am not, poetry is not my strong point. My mind is much more, I don't know if pragmatic is the word, but pedestrian is a pretty good one that fits. Yeah. But I always liked this in his book. And I read it over and over over the last, however many, 20, 25 years. And it never made complete sense to me. But I always kept coming back to it. So finally, I got together with one of our old fellows at Berkeley. And we were talking about it. We were studying it. And I kept saying to him, there's a part where it says, and I thought it must be very difficult. a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down.

[56:09]

And I kept explaining to him, this doesn't make sense because a drop of water, it has the same density, the same gravity, same viscosity as water that's in a stream. So this does not make sense. And we went round and round about this. And he kept saying to me, Dean, it's about us. And I said, I know it's about us. It's always about us. And he kept on saying that all of a sudden. He said you. And I thought, oh, my God, that's why this is about me. When I'm the single drop of water, I'm separated from the stream. That is where the challenge happens for me. So I was able to get away from the science part of water and. And since then, it's been completely fascinating. And when the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has individual feeling to it, which is the it's like the essence of this practice.

[57:21]

When I'm in the stream, I'm part of the stream. I'm not. Hey, look at me. Look at me. And. Coming back into that, there is composure. And then one other part, it says your everyday life will be renewed without being attached to an old erroneous interpretation of life. When you realize this fact, you will discover how meaningless your old interpretation was and how useless, how much useless effort you have been making. You will find the true meaning of life. And although I certainly didn't find the true meaning of life, but I certainly found life. I just found life. And seeing it in this way and me being able to turn this science-y part into what everybody else is talking about, the poetry part, was just really just...

[58:28]

fascinating. And this passes through my mind. Something was said earlier, this is a living practice. And this, it was every bit of life that I could imagine. And it's become me. So it was really fascinating that I came from No, a drop of water. It didn't need a drip at that river of water. They're all water to, um, this complete understanding. And there's a, for me, there's a great deal of comfort when I think about this because it takes, it takes myself away and all those feelings that come with self, um, blaming and judging and measuring. So anyway, it's a, to me, it's a really delightful, um, Little chapter here. Thank you.

[59:29]

Thank you, Dean. Dean, you might really enjoy Ravelli because he goes the other way. He takes the beautiful poetry and helps us see the science, you know. Yeah, I like Ravelli. I certainly do. Yeah. [...] Because he's very poetic and very smart guy. And there's Lisa, the mother of Ravelli. No, just to just find her. Pathfinder. Yeah, so I'm sort of working with the variation in water metaphors. And the, you know, because what comes back to me is the idea of wave and ocean, which is a metaphor that comes up a lot in Zen, versus, which is a metaphor almost of a... that brings forward simultaneity. As opposed to the waterfall metaphor, which the way we're talking about it, it is very linear time-based.

[60:43]

There's a before, there's a drop, and there's an after. And I'm trying to mesh those two. Yeah, well, I mean, I hear that as a challenge, a thought challenge that thank you for challenging me. I think the water and the wave metaphor is really, really good in terms of, you know, never separate. It's always water. It's just taken a form like a wave that sort of looks separate. and I'm looking around here from the top of the crest of the wave, and I'm looking at another wave over there, and we're waving at each other, and then it just goes back to water again. So it's more like a moment-by-moment kind of separation, but not really, and then back to unity. So I think that works in terms of one particular kind of way of thinking that we fall into. I think the water drop, though, for me, is a little bit more like the way we think about our life.

[61:48]

You know, when you do think about it having... linear, you know, I was born in 1948, and then I'm going to die in God knows when. And so, you know, we have that sort of linear way of thinking. So maybe this is just addressing more like what you said, the linear, linear delusions. And this one, you know, is addressing another kind of delusion that we like to have about, and each moment we meet each other, that we think we're separate. But really, there's no separate, you can't find the separation. Anyway, I don't know. I'll have to think about that. And you think about it, and then you tell me what you come up with. Tell us. Thank you. Can you do that? Good. Of course. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Well, oh, echo, please. Thank you.

[62:51]

I really appreciate that discussion, Lisa and Fu, because I was going to see if I can find that original recording and listen to it. Because when I read it in the edited version in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, it never occurred to me that that is life. and life before birth and life after death. I can comprehend it now that I just explained that way, I can understand the explanation, the interpretation. When I was reading it and imagined myself as a drop in the waterfall, I was also imagined that I'm going to go back to the stream and then be ready or somehow looking forward to the next waterfall.

[64:02]

To me, when I read this, it was... Well, before life and after death, it just never came up. It just never... occurred in my head. And it's more about sometimes we are individuals and sometimes we are, it's not the right way to say it, that we are individuals and we are part of the river at the same time. Not like sometimes this, sometimes that, but at the same time we're both. There may be manifestations that looks a certain way, but the truth is that we're both. So thanks for that discussion, and thank you for bringing the wave up, Lisa, because I thought I read it wrong.

[65:12]

Thank you, Echo. So obviously this is a good chapter, a good talk for us. And the next one that's coming up is in this next section that we write understanding, wisdom. And the first one is traditional Zen spirit and talking about Zazen. So that's on page 99 for those of you who have that particular edition. This is Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. But before I say goodnight to you, I just want to go around the room a little bit. and the Zoom room, and just acknowledge who's here that maybe I haven't done so before, and I know Griffin's back, and I think, okay, I'm just going to say everybody's name. So Musho, and Kakawan, and Carol, and Griffin, and Amir, and Drew, Helene, Linda, Lisa, Echo, Kathy, Cynthia, Tim, Hope, Shozan,

[66:18]

Paul, Kate, and Val. Thank you for coming. Senko. Sherlyn, I don't see an image, but welcome. Marie Stockton, welcome. Genshin, welcome. Kosan, we spoke earlier. And I just wanted to mention that you sent me that email with all the Suzuki Roshi references. Maybe that could be sent to Drew in Vermont. Somehow, Drew, if you... I'll figure out how to send that to you or somebody can see. Gi, help me. So anyway, Kosan, help me. Because she came up with an awful lot of really good resources for listening and finding Suzuki Roshi. And thank you for that, Kosan. It was beautiful offering you made to everyone. And there's Tom. Hello, Tom. And Dean again. And I think that's all of us for this evening. Did I say Senko? I did. Okay. All right. Thank you all so much for being here. You can unmute and say good night. Have a good night. Good morning.

[67:20]

Good night. Good morning. Good night. Thank you, everybody. Hello, goodbye. Good night, everyone. Thank you. Thank you, Fu. Thank you. Thank you, Fu. Take care, everyone. Good night. Bye. Bye.

[67:39]

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