I vow to taste the truth of the Tathāgata's words. Good morning. A particularly warm welcome to the children who've come and brought your parents here today. It's nice to see you all. I knew you were coming today. Sorry for this big thing here. And I was thinking about you, and also I started thinking about other children who used to live here in this valley a long, long time ago. In fact, for thousands and thousands of years children have lived here in this valley. And those children long ago were from a tribe of Indian people. Do you know the name of those people that lived in this valley? Anybody know? The Miwok. Miwok. Actually, I thought of them one day when I was up on the ridge,

[01:04]

and I was walking and I thought, Miwok. What a perfect name. So I got very interested in the children of long ago, and I read something about them, and what they ate, and how they dressed, and what kind of houses they lived in. And at that time, all of the buildings that are here now, this big building and the one where you're going to have your class later, none of those buildings were here. In fact, there were no roads, no cars, no televisions, no supermarkets, no Mill Valley, no San Rafael. Just a lot of land with lots of animals and plants and the people. So I was wondering if any of you could imagine what the people, when their children got hungry, gave them to eat. Any ideas? What do you think?

[02:07]

Apples. That's a good idea. Apples. Anybody else? Any moms or dads? Fish. Sprouts. That's right. Sprouts. What do you think? Strawberries. Fish. More fish. Nuts. Acorns. Yeah, acorns. That was the most important food. It was like their bread. They ate acorns. There were lots of acorns, and they could store them and eat them all year round. But there's some other things that maybe you didn't think of that I read about. Hazelnuts and buckeye. Miner's lettuce. Deer. Rabbits. Nettles. Rabbits. They ate rabbits. And nettles and clover. And they ate crabs and scallops and abalone. Salmon. Trout. Kind of yummy.

[03:10]

Kind of yummy out there. Huh? And honey. They had candy made from honey. And they told stories to their children, just like I'm going to tell you a story now. And this story is about an elder of the tribe whose name was Grandmother. And Grandmother would take all the children for a walk into the woods and into the hills and tell them about the food and what was good to eat and what was poison. And so one day, she took the kids up into the hill and they got very tired at some point, so she sat them down for a rest. And she began to tell them the story about creation. How the world, how all the plants and animals came to be. So here's what she said. Long ago, there was a tiny little hut made of tule grass.

[04:14]

And inside the hut were all of the animals and plants, the sun and the moon and the stars, all of them living together in this tiny little grass hut. And it was so crowded in there that nobody could move and everyone had to be very, very quiet. But one day, Coyote had an itch on his nose. And Coyote tried very hard to keep that itch where it was. But pretty soon, his lungs filled with air, and you know what he did? Achoo! He sneezed. And when Coyote sneezed, all of the stars and the planets and the sun and moon and the animals and trees and everything, the people flew out into space. Fortunately, the earth landed on a great big turtle that happened to be walking along.

[05:16]

And then all the plants and animals and people landed on top of the earth. And that's why, when we look in the sky, we see the stars and planets moving slowly along, because the earth is riding on the back of the turtle. Makes sense, doesn't it? Good sense. However, one of the little girls, whose name was Always Asks Questions, raised her hand and she said, Grandmother, if the earth is riding on a turtle, what is the turtle riding on? And Grandmother said, On a bigger turtle. And Always Asks Questions raised her hand again and said, But Grandmother, then what is that turtle riding on? And Grandmother said, An even bigger turtle. But before the little girl could raise her hand again, Grandmother looked at her rather sternly and said, Now listen, it's just turtles all the way down. So, that's it.

[06:27]

So you all, all you children, can go outside. And I thought it would be great if you could spot any food out there that Indian children might eat. You might tell the people in your program that you saw something that looks good. And maybe they'll point some things out to you too. Vegetables. We've got some vegetables on the farm. Well, thank you for coming. I hope you don't get too wet out there. Please come back. Ask questions. Thank you.

[07:40]

Thank you. Have you managed not to get the cold? No? No, us either. Excuse me. Well, Happy New Year to all of you. We've just finished a three-week intensive here at Green Gulch. And it's become a kind of template that we use to reassemble and launch our new calendar year. But it's also become an opportunity for many of us, for me in particular, to look again into the various dark corners of my household and of my mind. So I used this opportunity to do some housekeeping.

[09:11]

And every day of the practice period, I made a little list of cabinets and shelves in my house that I wanted to get into and rationalize. And then every night I'd check them off. So as of last week, the only thing left was the drawer of my desk, which has finally also succumbed to rationality. So this is what I want to talk about today, is housekeeping. Interestingly, in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, a layperson who receives the Bodhisattva precepts does so in a ceremony that's called Staying Home and Accomplishing the Way. It's called Zayakei Tokudo. And for the priests in our tradition, who receive the same sixteen Bodhisattva precepts,

[10:14]

the ceremony is called Shutkei Tokudo, leaving home and accomplishing the way. So it seems to me that this relationship to home is deeply embedded in our effort to understand and to live by what the Buddha had to say. I actually remember feeling years ago when I left residency at Tassajara, our Zen Mountain Monastery, that this is what it means to be leaving home, to be leaving the home of my heart and of my practice. But what I seem to have discovered in the years in between is that finding my heart and finding my home, finding my practice again and again, is the actual winding path of the Buddha way. So the cleansing project in my home

[11:16]

began the day after New Year when my family got together and decided to take an inventory of the objects that had mysteriously accumulated in my daughter's bedroom. So the sorting began in what I think in the medical profession is called triage, where you take all the most severely damaged objects and place them over here, and then the middling ones are over there, and those with any life to them at all go back on the shelves. So this is what we did. And finally at the end we had this one giant swollen black bag that was full of outgrown toys and books and ballerina dresses, Legos, Hot Wheels, all of it just waiting for another coyote sneeze. Hopefully these objects will land in the arms of children

[12:20]

who at least for a while could use or need them. So I found this lightening of objects, person-object ratio in my daughter's room to be very satisfying, and that's what began my effort in my own side of the house to relook at the things that I had tucked away into dark corners. At the same time that I was enjoying this exercise of housekeeping, I realized that there was some potential danger in revealing some deep hidden rossis of mine for order. I don't know how many of you have seen this TV detective Adrian Monk, but he binds his anxiety by counting fence posts and wiping invisible germs from his hand and so on.

[13:20]

So there's always a possibility for us. But actually it turned out I really didn't care because I was having a very good time, and as a result of my efforts, my well-ordered house is a reminder now of some deep inner wish I have to live and think in a simple and orderly way. So I recognize in myself that when I'm not confined to my quarters as I was during January practice period, I'm less likely to take the time to care for my things and for myself. And so I also wanted to use this review as an opportunity to evoke in myself a promise to not let things go, whether it's my exercising or my health, my study, my housekeeping.

[14:21]

And I also wanted to use this time to recommit myself to the other half of this promise of this housekeeping, which is to the care of my mind and my thoughts, how I see the world. Now these two halves together, mind and the object of mind, is really all we have of what we call reality. In the Buddha's teaching, each and every point of contact between these two halves, what I call the world and what I call myself, is supremely worthy of our attention and of our ability to respond, our responsibility. But it's also profoundly important for us to know that this point of contact between ourselves and the world, between the eye and what's visible, between the ear and sound,

[15:26]

the nose and smell, tongue and taste, all of these points of contact are separated by an imaginary gate, a gateway of our imagination. And this gateway serves both to connect us to the world but also to separate us into isolated selves. So this imaginary gate has been the focal point of Buddhist meditators and philosophers for several thousands of years. On the occasion of his enlightenment, the young prince, Shakyamuni, announced that the gate had a twin face. On one side, our bondage, when the gate is closed, and on the other side, our freedom, when the gate is open. Now you see it, now you don't. Kind of like that.

[16:26]

So that's also what I want to talk about today, about this subtle and invisible gateway into the household of enlightened compassion, wisdom, and true human freedom. This is the Buddha's house. It's the ultimate inheritance of our human life, where a hair's breadth's difference is as the distance between heaven and earth. I'm hoping that this metaphor of the house would be a useful way of understanding the approaches that meditators have taken over the centuries in attempting to recreate the Buddha's enlightened insight within themselves. Just let's clean the house. Sounds simple. So as a result of the effort that sincere disciples made to understand the Buddha's teaching, by pouring over his lifelong series of lectures

[17:31]

and sorting it into various categories for understanding, the early meditators came up with a map of the mind of reality. It was a rather wonderful map, actually. And they divided this map into discrete elements or parts that they called dharmas, dharmas with a small d. In one chart there are 75 such dharmas. And you'd be hard-pressed to find something that you've experienced in your life that's not on the list. Hatred, lust, sight, sound, greed, boredom. It's all there. And then the meditators sorted these dharmas into categories, the wholesome categories, unwholesome, and the neutrals. And their effort in practice was, as with housekeeping, we'll put the wholesome ones over here, the unwholesome over there,

[18:33]

and the neutrals, not quite sure, but basically at the end of the day we'll download the unwholesome ones in the big black bag. And we'll be done with it. Sounds reasonable. But unfortunately, even if I get rid of that overstuffed black bag, there's still my noisy neighbors, my pesky daughter, and my irritable cat. What are we going to do with them? It's very tempting to get rid of them as well. Kind of quiet it down. So right there at the very aspiration for enlightenment or for the ultimate good life lies the dilemma for any of us seeking to live a spiritual life. It's the ever-present problem of me. Whatever notions of accomplishment or of achievement or of perfection

[19:39]

that I might wish to accumulate for myself at once closes the gate. And when the gate is closed, I'm trapped on one side and all of my accomplishments as well as my failures are trapped on the other. And this is due to the persistent fantasy of separation between mind and objects of mind. Now fortunately, I think many of you have heard the teachings of the Heart Sutra or heard them recited. There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, and therefore no gate. In fact, there is no gate to be opened or closed. It doesn't really exist. Reality itself cannot be cut into pieces. Like the baby fish who asks his mother,

[20:41]

Where is the ocean, mommy? Reality is everywhere, throughout, both sides of the gate. Self and other, eyes and sights, ears and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes, are dependently co-arisen and will never be apart one from the other. No sights, no eyes. No sounds, no ears. No tongue, no tastes. You can't have one without the other. But unfortunately, we do create a fantasy, and a fantasy that sees things in the opposite way. And that fantasy is what isolates the imagined inside, namely me, from all that gives it life.

[21:42]

So in the next stage of Buddhist practice, meditators came to an understanding of non-duality and of non-separation between self and others. So this was a pretty good next step. But unfortunately, sometimes, in place of an imagined separate self, they imagined a separate no-self. Now you see it, now you don't. This tendency to obliterate the person is called nihilism, and it's a great big mistake. And I think many of you might know such people who basically do not consider themselves to be part of the problem. I'm really sorry that you're upset with me. That's your problem. This is particularly rampant in the subspecies of humans called teenagers.

[22:46]

And as we all know, it's quite possible to get stuck in such a fantasy. And in the practice world, we call this fantasy the Zen sickness. I'm okay, and the problem is yours. So this is a very tricky business that we're into here. It's a windy road up the mountain, and the mountain is shrouded in fog. And unless we reach the summit, then such fantasies as self and other, of road and mountain and summits as well, will continue to block our way. According to the Buddha, this entire problem surrounding our lives is simply caused and therefore can be resolved by how we think. As I tell my daughter quite often, the problem is in your noodle. So it's within our thinking that the twin faces of bondage and liberation

[23:54]

have come to reside. And as subtle and ephemeral as thinking itself may be, it's also quite persistent and quite empowered by its own appearances, like poor narcissist at the well. So we keep on talking about it in all these different ways, telling stories to each other, and looking deeply into the dark corners out of which our imagination is born. While the young prince, Shakyamuni Buddha, was seated under the Bodhi tree on the eve of his enlightenment, Mara, the evil one, came and whispered to him, suggesting that he would be much happier if he would get up from that seat. When the prince remained seated, Mara, in a frenzy, sent an army of orcs and goblins to drive him from this valley, from this place.

[24:55]

But when the military assault began to fail, Mara brought forth his daughters, Lust, Boredom, and Delight, to try and seduce the young man away from his resolve. But still the prince remained at his seat. Then Mara himself appeared, his face a foggy haze at the edge of a clearing. The prince said with a commanding voice, I now know who you are, deceiver. Mara laughed, No you don't, you don't know who I am. This time, in a gentle voice, the prince responded again, Yes, I do know who you are. And with those words, Mara became visibly frightened. Liar, he hissed. You are myself, the prince declared. And with that, Mara vanished, leaving the young Buddha alone in the peaceful forest

[25:58]

beneath the tree of his own awakening. The initial step that each of us took in setting up of a household in the first place is what we call birth, taking birth in the human realm. Now you see it. And we do see it. There does appear to be a multitude of objects in a variety of colors at any given moment in this great household of the human mind. Right now, for example, there appears before my senses a large number of what I take to be people sitting in chairs and on cushions and all of you are appearing to be facing me. I remember very well the first time I sat in this seat and I faced out on a room full of people.

[27:00]

It was an experience very similar to standing at the beach alone on a stormy day. It was rather overwhelming, the rising and falling of impressions, particularly when you laugh. So when the gateway between the imagined self and the other feels quite vulnerable at times such as these, we can watch how fearfulness arises quite naturally within us. A fear, perhaps, that the subtle barrier of separation might give way or even break. And in which case, we then imagine that the Great Mother or the Great Ocean or the universe, when pitted against the small self, hands down, will win the game. From the point of view of the imagined self,

[28:05]

that winning is what we call death. From the Buddha's point of view, on the other hand, the death of the small self is called a good thing. But it takes us a while to see how that might be so. In the meantime, what I do as the imaginary person will focus on, rather than what's appearing before my eyes and my senses, in my ears, with the sound of the rain right now, which I just heard for the first time. What I do is focus on what I'm thinking. And, in fact, what I'm thinking doesn't really matter. Any old thing will do, in face of this ungraspable appearance of reality. In my case this morning, I have prepared a little lifeboat here

[29:10]

of notes and prior thoughts for traveling on this sensory ocean that's appearing before me right now. And we humans put a great deal of effort into such vessels. Health insurance policies, mortgages, marriage and employment contracts. These are all familiar techniques in our so-called modern world for binding our anxiety. When caught in the world of appearances, we can choose a simple sequence of thoughts or images. In the case of freeway traffic, there's the five car-length distances to focus on, or those nice dotted lines between ourselves and the cars that are zooming all around us. We create these signs and concepts in order to feel safe and well-adjusted. And as useful as these things may be, at the same time, they are precisely what makes us

[30:12]

into separate and isolated individuals. Myself, my car, my daughter, my house, my rights, and my country. So where do we begin to undertake this radical shift in our perceptions of reality? It's not in order to break down these ancient barriers that we look and we study, but rather to see them for what they really are, to disempower the fantasy and the lifestyles that are born from this dream of separation. I know who you are. You are myself. This is a dream of love. So we begin by listening to the teachings of the ancient ones, to their advice, their consultations, and their suggestions. In other words, we open the gate and we ask for help.

[31:15]

In the famous Zen story, when the emperor of China meets Zen Master Bodhidharma, he asks him, what is the highest meaning of the holy truths? And the master replies, vast emptiness, nothing holy. The emperor then says, then who is this facing me? Bodhidharma responds, don't know. Perhaps you can see in this exchange between the self and the other, how the gates both open and close. When the emperor asks, what is the highest meaning of the holy truths? The gate is open. Vast emptiness, nothing holy. The gate opens even wider. Who is this facing me? The gate starts to close. To which Bodhidharma replies, don't know. To the emperor of China, no less,

[32:18]

the biggest sense of a self that any of us can possibly imagine. I am the emperor of China. I know who I am. But even so, fearlessly, Bodhidharma holds the gate open in welcome. Yes, we all understand that you are the emperor of China, but aren't you don't know, too? Unfortunately, the emperor couldn't respond. In the face of don't know, he had chosen to close the gate, at least for the time being. In every moment, we have another chance. A little bit like Las Vegas. So, Bodhidharma, which simply means the teaching of awakening, Bodhidharma, the teaching of awakening, sits in a cave facing the wall or closed like a long forgotten book on the shelf

[33:21]

until the gateway is tested again. And the test must come through the inquiring impulses of a living disciple, through the one who always is asking questions. And perhaps you yourselves might consider dropping by old Bodhidharma's house for tea. In the Zen tradition, Bodhidharma's not knowing is considered to be nearest to the summit, where self and summit both disappear. We as Zen students enact the teaching of not knowing pretty much as our daily grind through the practice of upright sitting, the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. The practice of upright sitting is a kind of doing thing. There is utterly no way to approach the source of creation

[34:22]

by simply talking our way into it. In fact, thinking and talking are highly suspect as the very causes of the gateways closing in the first place. In the beginning was the word, and the word separated human life from its creator, or so it seems. And yet, I do know how hard it is for people to imagine when I tell them about getting out of bed at 4.40 in the morning and sitting twice for 40 minutes while facing a blank white wall. But that's exactly the point. 4.40 in the morning and upright sitting while facing a blank wall is not something that we can imagine. Our power to imagine or fantasize can never reach reality. On the other hand, being reality or just sitting

[35:23]

is not a problem at all. We're always right on time. It's only the words that never make it through the door. Although we humans are simply not equipped with the capacity to capture creation through the power of thinking, through words and phrases are perfectly okay for pointing ourselves in the right direction. And the simpler the words, the better for us. Words like upright sitting, right straight on, don't know, or do good, avoid evil, and save all beings. The Buddha, by example, led a simple life, a life of voluntary poverty in an era of relative abundance. He dressed modestly, refrained from intoxicants. He honored his sexuality and that of his students through abstinence. He told the truth, shared freely of his understanding.

[36:27]

He renounced violence, slander, egotism, and possessiveness. So that all in all, in the house of the Buddha, life was free-flowing, an easy exchange between himself and the others. Passing through the gate into the Buddha's house is called entering the realm of the precepts. Staying home or leaving home and practicing the precepts, we accomplish the way. Zai Kei Toku Do, Shu Kei Toku Do. At first, our vows and our promises, like my New Year's resolutions, are in the spirit of self-improvement. I promise not to kill you. I promise not to steal from you. I promise not to lie to you. At this level of our understanding, our practice is still based

[37:28]

in the fundamental affliction of ignorance, on imagining the separation between oneself and the other. But we do it anyway, in this new year and in every new year. And then we sit like fools on a ledge by the sea, until little by little, the thinning wisps of fog break away into sunlight. And when that time comes, we know at a glance that it's time to go home. Thank you very much.

[38:05]

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