Well, thank you all for joining us on this beautiful Saturday morning. I hope you're all planning to spend some time outside today. So first of all, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Jeffrey Schneider and some of you I know and most of you I don't. So welcome to Zen Center, particularly those of you who are here for the first time. And it's our custom at Zen Center to devote the first portion of the lecture to the children. on the first Saturday of the month. So today we're going to be, I'm going to be talking a little bit to the kids, and then they're going to go off and do their own thing. So, I think it's, if you want to, now it's, you don't have to, but since I said my name, I wonder if you could say your names, can I, what's your name? Corona. Corona, hi. Milena. Milena. Miranda. Hi, Miranda. Aliana.

[01:03]

What's your name, honey? Alessandra. Welcome. Welcome, everybody. So anyhow, what I wanted to do is tell a little story that I thought it would be fun to have some stuff to look at. And so we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to start by having a guessing game. So as you see, we have a box tied with a beautiful yellow, well, it's not all that nice, but it's the best I could do this morning. Anybody want to guess what's in it? What's your name again? Corona. Well, Corona, will you come up here since you guessed right? I was hoping for two or three more. Okay. Now, can you pull the ribbon, please?

[02:06]

That one, yeah. Uh-huh. So that it comes off. Okay. Keep pulling. Okay. So you get the ribbon. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Now, can you open the box, please? Okay. It's kind of hard. If you need help, let me know. I need help. Okay. Okay, now open. What's in there? Okay, pull. Boy, it is tight, isn't it? Good thing it didn't, that's because it still won't spill. What's in there? Penny. Lots of pennies. Okay, I'm going to tell a story about, thank you very much, Corona. I'm going to tell a little story about pennies, and then you can come back up, okay? So, this is the story. Once upon a time, A friend of mine said, you know, I like to play. Do you all know what the lottery is? It's kind of like, you know, you buy a ticket and maybe you win something. A friend of mine said, well, I buy tickets all the time, but I never win anything.

[03:09]

And I said, well, the reason you don't win anything is because you don't play with lucky pennies. So I started picking up lucky pennies for him. And when I got 99, I put them in a box and I wrapped them up and I gave them to him. And I said, now you have to find one more lucky penny and you'll have a dollar's worth of pennies. And then you can play the lottery and become a millionaire. That didn't happen. I mean, I don't think he didn't become a millionaire. However, it got me into the idea that it might be a nice thing to pick up pennies for people. And so I do that now. And every time I pick up a penny, I make a wish for my friend. And I, hello. And when I get 99 pennies, I put them in a box and I give them to my friend and I say, here's 99 lucky pennies and 99 good wishes for you. And some people in here have received some of those boxes. So recently I started thinking, you know, it might be a nice idea to put lucky pennies out so other people could pick them up.

[04:17]

So now when I get pennies, I put them out on the street and I say, Whoever gets this, may they have a happy day. And so I put them out. And I guess people pick them up because sometimes when they go back, they're gone. So what I'd like you guys to do, if you'd like, is each to come up and get a penny. And when you go outside someplace, you can put it on the street or on a doorstep or something like that. And when you put it down, you say to yourself, whoever picks this up, have a lucky day. Okay? Would you like to pick one? Okay. Would you like to pick one? Yeah. So whenever you get a penny and you don't know what to do with it, you can always put it down and say, may the person who picks this up have a lucky day. You'd probably swallow yours. You're not going to get one. Thank you. So at the end of the talk, I'm going to put the box out and those of you who would like to

[05:21]

pick up a penny that you can make magical and lucky can do that too. Okay? So thank you all. Hi. You're a sweetie. I wish I had something to give you that you wouldn't swallow. So anyhow, I'm going to ask the kids to go and hang out doing their own thing now so I can talk to the grownups. Thank you. Okay. Thank you guys for coming. Have a nice day. Go outside. Play for a while. That was the best part of the lecture, by the way. You could probably leave the rest of you. Okay. Well, the kid's got a story, kind of. So I'd like to start out with a story for the rest of us. So, you know, stories are very important in Zen.

[06:22]

because mainly one of the ways the teaching is passed down is by stories. We call them koans. And a koan literally means, it comes from Chinese legal language, and it literally means something like public case. So I guess we would say precedent? Yeah. So it's like stories of what the ancestors have done, and we look at what the ancestors have done, and try to figure out how or if it might apply to ourself. So one of these stories, the story I'm going to tell with a slight twist to make it a little bit more modern, comes from one of the main Koan collections called the Blue Cliff Record. I can't remember which case it is. So it goes like this. A couple of monks walk into a bar. And it's not one of your better bars, right? I mean, there's sort of a faded blonde dragging on a Virginia Slims and drinking rum and coke on the corner, and a couple of sort of heavy guys in soiled t-shirts playing pool in the back.

[07:31]

Smells like Lysol, dead beer, and cigarettes. There's a Coors sign over the bar, and really, really bad country western music on the jukebox. So these two moms walk into the bar. And one of them takes his traveling staff and bangs it once on the floor and says, just here is the summit of the mystic peak. And his friend looks around, nods his head and said, yes, what a pity. This really is a koan, by the way. It really is. So most koans, most stories, most Zen stories deal with the tension, if you will, are the back and forth between the absolute and the relative. So just to spell it out a little bit, when the monks are just here at the summit of the mystic peak, he was speaking from the point of view of the absolute. And his friend looked around, agreed with him, and speaking from the point of view of the relative said, yes, what a pity.

[08:39]

So it's not that hard to decipher, really. But what's interesting is that when we have the dichotomy of relative and absolute, it's useful, but it's not the whole story. It misses the boat, essentially. So what is beyond relative and absolute? Relative, absolute, spiritual, mundane, holy, profane, however we want to dichotomize our experience, are both concepts. In a sense, they're simply words. They're byproducts of our busy language-making concept-assigning minds. And this is not to disparage our concept-making minds, our thinking minds, our relative minds. I mean, it's very, very necessary that we have and use them. They're a pretty good survival mechanism.

[09:42]

The problem, if you will, comes when it's the only way in which we can experience the world. When the only way we can experience the world is by cutting it into pieces and assigning concepts and treating our experience as though it could be conceptualized and put in little boxes. This is good. This is bad. This is pleasurable. This is unpleasurable. This I want. This I don't want. This is whatever. This is whatever. We come to believe, quite naturally, that our conceptualizations of the world and of ourselves are real, that they have actual reality, as opposed to being convenient, well, just convenient categories to help us maneuver our way through the world and for prioritizing our experience. And this is actually pretty important to do. In many cases, if you're driving your car down a busy highway going very, very fast, it's really important to prioritize your experience.

[10:48]

It is not a good idea to be paying too much attention to the pretty flowers that the Department of Public Works has so nicely planted on the banks. You can let your passenger do that. So we do need this mind. Maybe what Suzuki Roshi calls small mind. The mind that negotiates our way through. our day through a series of conceptualizations. But you know, in Zen, how many of you are here for the first time, maybe? Okay, just a couple of you are here for maybe the second or third time or something like that? Okay. Well, most of you are old hands, but for those of you who aren't, I'll just mention that the word Zen means meditation. I don't know if you knew that. It's a Japanese transliteration, a Chinese transliteration of a Sanskrit word that means meditation. So in Zen, in this school and in meditation, we talk about going beyond delusion and enlightenment. So delusion is what we usually think of as us.

[11:53]

Enlightenment is what we usually think of as him. Here I am with my... My grief, hate, and my delusion, my neuroses, my push, my pull, my want, my don't want. You know, this is delusion. And, you know, what Buddha has is enlightenment. You know, sort of floating above it all beautifully and looking down with ever so gentle compassion on us poor slobs. You know, and we want to get there. We want to get to that cloud so we can look down with deep compassion on all those poor slobs who are still struggling. At least that's the way I kind of thought. would like it to happen, even knowing that it won't. But we do talk about being beyond delusion and enlightenment, and by which we mean beyond concept, beyond concept, because delusion and enlightenment are both just concepts. We have some idea about who we are, and we have some idea about who we would like to be or who we should be in the best of all possible worlds.

[12:58]

In the Xin Xin Ming, which is a very old Zen writing from the Third Ancestor, begins, the great way is not difficult. Simply give up picking and choosing. You know, resign from the debating society, as we sometimes say. So this going beyond delusion and enlightenment is not dividing our experience into what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. but rather to experience the world like a head-on crash, to extend the automobile image, which is unmitigated by thought. Dogen Zenji, who founded the Soho lineage of Zen in the 13th century, talked about his moment of awakening, if you will, as dropping away of body and mind. And so that's what we're talking about here, this sort of head-on crash. You know, when something that immediate happens, you're not conceptualizing.

[14:01]

It's just boom. And of course, this is not something that happens very often, either in our cars, hopefully, or on the cushion. But every now and again, such a moment of clarity may happen when the conceptions drop away and we are left with just the naked stuff of our lives. If we have such a moment, it can help to remember the possibility of such a moment, the possibility of such an opening, over and over again. I'm not sure of my quote here, so I'm probably going to misquote, and I don't remember who said it anyway. So I guess it's mine. Somebody said, you know, enlightenment may be an accident, but doing meditation makes you accident prone. Somebody else said of writing poetry that writing poetry is standing out in the storm and hoping that you get struck by lightning.

[15:10]

You know, it's more likely to happen if you're standing in the storm. You're more likely to become to have an accident if you're accident prone. So our practice is... in a sense about making us accident prone, about making us available to drop away body and mind and see our life in a way that is open, wide and non-conceptualized for a moment. The second century Buddhist Indian philosopher Nagarjuna said, Nirvana is Samsara. Samsara, of course, is this, what we think is this, the muck and mile of our minds and our lives, and nirvana is what he's got. Nirvana and samsara are exactly the same, says Nagarjuna. The only difference is point of view. And Dogen Zenji, again, wrote, nothing in the world is hidden. Nothing in the world is hidden.

[16:13]

So this is the teaching of emptiness. And our way of understanding this is that, of this nothing being hidden is that everything there is, everything that is, is on the surface. If we can imagine our experience in our lives and the world as sort of a Mobius strip. You know what that is? Where you take a piece of paper, you give it a half turn, and then you glue it or something. So it's one continuous surface, one continuous surface. And there are no hidden depths. There is no substratum of what is more real than what we experience. And the movie is not projected on a screen. So this is emptiness. This is one of the essential teachings of Buddhism. And when we really begin to see and think in this way, it can have a profound impact upon our relationship to the world. When we imagine this sort of reality, just as a thought experiment, as a game, what would it be like if everything I saw, heard, sensed, et cetera, was all there was?

[17:24]

What if there was no ontological substratum, so to speak? What if things are exactly the way they appear and nothing else behind them hiding out from us? It can have, as I said, an impact upon our relationship to the world. And if we begin to imagine this sort of reality or our reality in this way, if we start to feel a little bit giddy or a little bit shaken in ourselves, then we're beginning to get it, to understand, I think. So we've gone from two, absolute and relative, to one, you know, absolute and relative together are, and then we go to neither, sort of to nothing with no place to stand. And, you know, that's all very interesting from sort of a philosophical point of view. You know, Buddhism is very sophisticated philosophically.

[18:27]

But so what? You know, what does it have? Really, so what, right? That's all very nice. But what's it got to do with, you know, the price of gas? Or getting along with our spouse or our boss or feeding the kids or going to work or anything like that. Maybe nothing. Or maybe something. Two other things that I think that this way of viewing our experience can help us with is, first of all, it can help us get rid of the myth of spirituality. And it can also help us resist the seduction of perfection. And... The myth of spirituality, as I understand it, is the idea that somehow our lives are divided into two or should be divided into two. That there's the spiritual and the mundane. The phenomenal and the numinous. That we have to get rid of the bad stuff in us to make us good somehow.

[19:29]

And that we're going to be able to do this through intense spiritual practice. You know, this is what the Buddha practiced for many years before he found out that it didn't work. This idea that we have to be continually at war with ourselves to get rid of the bad stuff. And, you know, I was having a conversation with somebody just before lecture today when we were talking about the Western tradition, which is steeped in this kind of thought, you know, going at least as far back as Augustine and, well, probably Plato, actually. Yeah. at least as far as Plato, but we won't go there because that's a whole different thing. You can look it up. But anyhow, so to get beyond this dualism of good and bad and flesh and spirit, we have the myth of spirituality deeply embedded into our worldview. And this is an antidote. Much of Buddhism, much of Buddhist teaching and practice can be considered as antidotal to various things that make us miserable.

[20:30]

So going along with this myth of spirituality is, as I said, the seduction of perfection, that somehow if we try enough, we can perfect ourselves. I'm sure you've all heard the phrase, so what have you made of your life? Or what are you going to make of your life? Or what's he made of his life? It's like you're giving a wet lump of clay on exit from the womb, and you're supposed to do something with it and hand it in for a prize at the end. And if it's a really good lump of clay and you've got all the rough edges, then you're perfect. And you get whatever prize it is. I guess you go to heaven or people remember you or they put up statues to you in the park for pigeons to poop on or something. And this is really hard. This is not a good thing because it really, I think for many of us, it goes against everything that can make us happy. everything that can make us effective in our own lives and working for the good of others, this seduction of perfection.

[21:38]

And I'd like to remind you that even Mary Poppins claimed to be practically perfect in every way. And you can't get much better than Mary Poppins. So she didn't claim to be entirely perfect. I'd like to read a couple of selections from Suzuki Roshi, some paragraphs. Suzuki Roshi, as most of you probably know, was the fellow who founded Zen Center. This is the book that Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, available in the bookstore after lecture. According to the traditional Buddhist understanding, our human nature is without ego. When we have no idea of ego, we have Buddha's view of life. Our egoistic ideas are delusion, covering our Buddha nature. We are always creating and following them, and in repeating this process over and over again, our lives become completely occupied by ego-centered ideas.

[22:42]

This is called karmic life or karma. The Buddhist life should not be karmic life. The purpose of our practice is to cut off the karmic spinning mind. If you are trying to attain enlightenment, that is a part of karma. You are creating and being driven by karma, and you are wasting your time on your black cushion. According to Bodhidharma's understanding, practice based on any gaining idea is just a repetition of your karma. Now, this can sound sort of scary, like, oh, okay, so I'm supposed to get rid of my gaining idea now. That will be another step toward perfection. You know, I think the idea is just relax. Just try to relax. See how that works. And that's really hard to do, relaxing, I find. And then again, he says, we should find perfect existence through imperfect existence. We should find perfection in imperfection.

[23:44]

For us, complete perfection is not different from imperfection. The eternal exists because of non-eternal existence. In Buddhism, it is heretical It is a heretical view to expect something outside this world. We do not seek for something besides ourselves. We should find the truth in this world through our difficulties, through our suffering. This is the basic teaching of Buddhism. Pleasure is not different from difficulty. Good is not different from bad. Bad is good, good is bad. There are two sides of one coin. So enlightenment should be in practice. This is the right understanding of life. of practice and the right understanding of our life. So to find pleasure in suffering is the only way to accept the truth of transiency." So that's pretty much what he was saying is pretty much what I'm trying to say and to put it more in a way that we can use, perhaps.

[24:49]

So in ways that we can use this teaching, our story, our minds are always, as I said, making up concepts and making up stories, and our busy minds are trying to explain the world, and that's kind of what they're for. So we can use our story-making mind to liberate us from our story-making mind by making up as many possible stories as we can again and again until we understand the nature of story. So what that means is to take something that you see and see how many different stories you can make up about it that still explains all the facts. And then we begin to see what the nature of story is. We have a few facts, we see some behaviors, and we make up a story to explain it. Well, can you take that same set of facts and make up a different story that will explain it just as well? Can you explain... Can you make a third set of facts to explain that story just as well?

[25:53]

And I think that we can. We can start right here. One of the stories we can make about right now is that what we have right here is a box full of animals making noise, which to some extent is true, right? That would be one story about what's going on. Another story about what's going on is there's a room full of men and women. trying their very best to live their lives in a way that is respectful and that fulfills their potential as human beings. I really believe that that's a true story. And another story that we can make up about what's going on is that we are sitting in the midst of a vast Buddha field surrounded by great bodhisattvas shining in glory. And all of those stories are true. All of those stories are true. And, of course, none of those stories are true because whatever is examined closely breaks into nothing.

[26:54]

And we always end up here, which, of course, is also nowhere. I was talking to a friend the other day who had just come back from a trip to Australia. And he was talking about the aboriginal people who live in Australia. And he said, you know, it's really weird. They've lived that way for 40,000 years. I don't know where he got 40,000 years, but, you know, a long time for 40,000 years. And they've lived exactly the same way. And it's like, you know, they've never sort of progressed, you know, beyond, you know, Neolithic technology. And I said, well, gee, if they lived that way for 40,000 years, maybe they liked it. Maybe it worked. You know, it probably wasn't because they were stupid. It probably wasn't because, you know, like, boy, this is really awful and they couldn't figure out a way to change. You know, something worked. And, you know, this was a really good reminder for me of the impossibility of being able to judge the life and experience of another person.

[28:04]

I can't even judge my own life and experience because I have no outside standard to judge it by. You know, Einstein said that there is no absolute framework for for space or time. And things are all relative to each other in space and time. And it's sort of like this in our lives as well. There's no absolute standard from which we can judge another person's experience. And what would be the basis anyway? Would it be money? How much they have? Would it be fame, love, accomplishment? Would it be enlightenment? The only thing, the only rule really, is karma. And karma is cause and effect. And it's said that only a Buddha can fully fathom its workings. So in one of the famous stories from our koan collection, the Buddha came in to give a lecture and sat down and held up a flower and Mahakashyapa smiled.

[29:10]

How can you judge such a thing? How can you conceptualize such a thing? And like it or not, we always return to here, to this flower, to the raw, naked, empty, and inexplicable life that we have. And I think we impoverish ourselves in our lives if we try to too narrowly define them, too narrowly conceptualize them, and to judge them at all. We don't know. We don't know what our lives are. So I'd like to end with a quote from one of my favorite contemporary Zen masters who said, to live outside the law, you must be honest. Some of you will recognize that. So thank you all for coming and don't forget your pennies.

[30:02]

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