I've been trying to talk with us, this session, about a place and definitions, and how we note our experience to ourselves, and how important that is, and to give you some feeling of the or the connections of the definitions in society and your own definition. I don't think we, I mean, I know we don't, even though it's a commonplace idea, don't the importance of our given language and our given definition. We still have some idea, most of us have more than some idea, very

[01:27]

fixed ideas, embedded ideas of individuality or some independence that is quite unrealistic. I don't I mean this in the very basic sense of the idea of self. Even the Jungian process of individuation means you, when you are most fully adult or most fully individuated, you most fully join the world. emerging definitions of mind and reality, etc., coming up in our society, push people toward practice. And your practice brings them up by your practicing. This is different than ten years ago, say, maybe there's three stages of Bodhidharma. No one knows anything about practice.

[02:59]

and you who are practicing being a Buddhist are a Buddhist in spite of your society. The definition you give to yourself is, you know, you must have a lot of torque to it, some life experience, you know, which gives you some ability to do that, Second stage is your society is a mixture of definitions and many emerging definitions which reinforce and also which draw away Buddhism. And third is society is all the definitions of society and the language of society include

[04:03]

Buddhist assumptions. In this case, only a very clear example, Bodhidharma-type example, is necessary to cross over. And in the second stage, a clear Bodhidharma-type example is necessary too, to bring out the definitions. But in this case, it's more ... Bodhidharma is not such a good example Kamsayon Avalokiteshvara, who takes any form, any form according to people's needs and circumstances. The very first stage is perhaps the stage of Nagarjuna, a person making the definition Someone said to me recently, today or yesterday, that they were practicing... I'll get this a little mixed up. Don't worry. It won't be exactly... I'm making it into an example. It won't be exactly the person's situation. They are practicing X.

[05:34]

and they asked, what isn't the practice of X similar to the practice of Y? That's a natural thing to ask, you know, quite natural thing to ask. But I would rather hear the person say, anything's okay, but I'd rather hear, for the purpose of the point I'm making now, a person say, I practiced X and sometimes I practice Y, or I practiced X and I found it's the same as practicing Y, or I practiced X and Y and they were the same. Do you see the difference? One is an equivocal statement. Is practice X similar to practice Y? Maybe it's answerable, but it's not the same as hearing the voice of each thing, that Earth is down. There's no place that's down. Earth is down. Water is down.

[07:04]

This kind of subtle point is important in practice because one, in the examples I gave, you're making statements that are true. You're only saying something that's true. You know, you can't equivocate about it. I've practiced x and I've practiced y. Well, all right. You know, it's a real statement, it's not just saying nothing. Then I know the person. And by the way, some of you, some of you come to Doksan and say, I can't think of a question, so they have nothing to say. So I said the other day, you don't have to give, it's not question and answer, only Doksan. So now some people came and said, I can only think of questions, so I have nothing to say. You can do anything you want, I'm just sitting there. The most unusual thing someone did is walk in on their hands once.

[08:20]

The door opened, they leaped in the air, landed on their hands and walked over, kicked the door shut with their uplifted foot and stood there talking. So, you know, to say I practice X and I practice Y is helpful to me to share with you or understand what you're doing. And even if I can see what you're doing, you know, and mostly I can see what you're doing, I don't know exactly how you're doing it sometimes, but I can see what you're doing. And it's helpful for me to see the formulation you give it.

[09:31]

Or if you say, I practice X, sometimes I practice Y. This kind of statement is... It means you are relating the two. And by... You know, it may be that X and Y are the same when you practice them on Tuesday, and X and Y are different when you practice them on Wednesday. You're not stretching for a generalization. Is X similar to Y? The point I'm making here is that you can always describe what you're doing in true statements. This is the same practice, really, as the pivotal reason. Do you always know the pivotal reason? Can you describe what you're doing in unequivocal terms? You can say the same thing, but you can say it is true. So it doesn't leave you, you know, you can describe your practice or your life or your situation or your relationship in terms of their truth, not in terms of I'm not good enough or is it like that or is something missing. And this is a practice you can just develop, you know, and if you think it leaves something out that it's really necessary to also say is X like Y, then do it for

[10:59]

A few months, six months, say. Try to do it and see if you find something left out. And if you do, you may find out how to bring in, is X different from Y, or the same as Y, in an unequivocal way or some other way. these definitions of yourself are extremely important, and to practice with them so that they are true. The definitions of yourself are the foundations of yourself. They're also the cause of your anxiety, delusion, general confusion. The definitions are the foundation of your state of mind and your activity. And until you get your definition stable, you know, so we're talking about dharma, dharma is when your definitions are stable, only then can you really move to the point of no definition, to cessation from clear observation. Clear observation would be what you see, you say and do what's true.

[12:32]

This is practicing with form and emptiness. Form, we can say, try out definitions for form. So what you say and do is true. At that point, then you can have, that's clear observation. Then you can begin cessation. Cessation, perceiving the world without characteristics. This is really everything in its own language. There's no comparison at all now. And to change your mental activity, your heights depths of your mental activity into practice. You have to explore thoroughly these fundamental dualisms, up and down, front and back, form and emptiness, here and there. It sounds simple-minded, maybe. Time and space, time and no time,

[14:01]

form and emptiness. What is location? If you're squatting at a bus stop or standing at a bus stop, are you in two different places? When you're squatting at a bus stop for ten minutes and then you stand, are you still standing in the same place? What is place? if we mark an X on the sidewalk there, does that have any reality, that X on the sidewalk? World is turning, you know. Indians supposedly still go to a place in Albuquerque and say, where this drugstore is, there's a spring. Someday the drugstore won't be there. you're sitting on, as I said last night, on your cushion. But where do you think you are? In San Francisco? This used to be a sand pit. I have a diary from my great-great-grandfather who came here in the Gold Rush. He admires the beauties of Larkspur and the gulches of Marin and said, San Francisco is just a sand pit.

[15:32]

There's sand here, nothing but sand. This is a river, I'm told, coming down here where the park is. This is San Francisco, but there's just a building. This is a building, this is a home for Jewish girls away from home. What are you doing here? So, now, where did the new definition come from? So-called Zen Center, which is so hominous to so many of you. How does that definition get going? Squatting. Squatting at Zen Center. I always say, excuse me, I can't resist saying, waiting for the Shakyamuni, which won't come. Excuse me.

[17:01]

When you're sitting you have many ideas about what, I'm sure, I know you do, about it's night time, I'm in a zendo, I'm supposed to be practicing, not following my breathing. So many locations, so many definitions. You're not just sitting on your cushion. And where, if you're just sitting on your cushion, where is that? Someone said to me, they've been practicing Again, it's not exactly what the person said, but something like, they've been practicing a couple of years, and in the whole couple of years, maybe they've counted their breath 20 minutes. Maybe they've concentrated, I bet they haven't concentrated 20 minutes actually. 20 minutes. What a waste, how horrible I am, or how horrible it all is.

[18:33]

Well, I don't know what, you know. We always so often give these definitions which invite fools to rush in, you know, and coddle us, add more to the, you know, tell us if we're all right. You know, they create the need for lots of reassurance. Sort of like we define ourselves with all this, you know, negative territory around us. so two years and not even twenty minutes. I've been sitting, well, just to take sesshins. I guess I've done forty to fifty one-week sesshins. And I do them, of course, now, the way I do a sesshin now is different from a few years ago, but still.

[19:49]

in a nine-year period, more than one year of that time is spent in sasheen for me. So I have to put aside that much time to do almost nothing else but sasheen. And during those 40 or 50 sasheens, I have never counted them. I know it's I don't know if I've concentrated 20 minutes, maybe more than 20 minutes. I'll resign, I'm sorry. I can remember, I can actually remember very clearly the times when there has been concentration, hour after hour, or when I had some concentration or experience which was very significant. Sometimes you may have some experience and nothing turns on it.

[21:19]

I can remember very clearly the times which were turning, turn around on it. Not so many, you know. So you can say, well, you should be making, we should be making a tremendous effort to increase the numbers time that you have some big experience or concentration. And that's partly true, but mostly that's a mistaken idea of practice. For the beginner, with their uneven life, they must see practice as something to do. And by the You know, I've been talking about exclusion and initiation and such things, and it doesn't mean you're excluded or you're left out. Or when I'm talking about various times, beginners and people who are more experienced, it doesn't mean you're left out. Oh, I'm a beginner, I'm more experienced. It's just a matter of emphasis, and at all times all the aspects are there, and by directness they're all there. So I don't mean to worry you, you know.

[22:48]

But to the beginner, we do talk about do zazen, count your breaths, etc. And we must always be making that effort, that's true. But the vision of that effort and the vision of the target changes. You know, it's not... Zen isn't some kung fu, you know, type skill that finally you get so you don't make any mistakes. And parking places appear miraculously whenever you're driving. I know they always appear a few days. You know, in the Zen Dojo, a couple of people have dropped things in the Zen Dojo. Today, even an older student dropped something and he'd get it up before anyone noticed. Maybe he didn't try to get it up before anyone noticed, but I'm saying it that way. Anyway, he reached down to get it. You're not supposed to do that. Just leave it.

[24:13]

Sometimes I'm tempted, when I see Philadelphia, to sort of give my ball a push. Not quite liberated enough yet, or foolish enough. But, you know, human beings make mistakes, and the mistakes have a place in the zendo. I don't mean that... Of course, it is true that you'll feel more comfortable if you don't dump your bowl, so you'll feel like it's a mistake, but we shouldn't try to erase the mistake. So, in the zendo, when you drop something, it's also... I talked about this in one Sashin, here I believe, last time maybe, but you still don't understand it.

[25:17]

completely, that when you drop something it's also part of the ritual. Just as we come in and bow and open our bowls a certain way and fold them up a certain way, when we drop something the soku or someone has to come in and pick it up. Maybe we should make it more formal. The way it's supposed to be done is when you pick it up you take it to the altar and offer it and bring it back to the person. And I haven't done that, but still people want to shortcut it, you know. Just get it up, please Soko, give it to me quickly. But that's trying to erase it, you know. You just did it, that's all. Human beings make mistakes. And it's then something, you know, it's an event, it's a place, it's a location. It's how we transform our karmic mind. You know, sometimes we say true mind and mind of expedient means, and karmic mind. And how you transform karmic mind into dharma, that mistake there is then part of the ritual, part of your life. And let's do it, all right? Let's offer it to the altar now.

[26:43]

Soku must pick it up, take it to the altar, and then go back and offer it to the person. Pretty soon there'll be so many rules, you'll say, oh God. But you can see the point of it, I think. So you don't try to erase or slip past some mistake. And once it's happened, you know, you feel uneasy, I shouldn't, maybe the carelessness was there, you know, when your hand moved too quickly or you thought of your girlfriend or boyfriend or you thought you weren't eating fast enough and something happened to your hand by your thinking. But that moment's over and now it's just a bowl of soup on the floor. And it's no different than the mat on the floor. the cushion on the floor, it's no different. So then it's just you clean it up or have it reached back up to you. And then your state of mind has a chance to return, you know. It's not the whole mistake which you're trying to erase it. State of mind is just what caused it. After that, it's just a cushion on the floor and your state of mind can return to its common. There's a cushion made of soup.

[28:09]

So it gets cleaned up. And so who comes out very stately and cleans it? And offers it. You don't offer the spilled soup. Maybe the bowl. I guess you'd offer the bowl and give it back. Wipe it out. Offer the bowl and give it back. Please don't all try spilling your soup to see how it works. We can do this ritual without rehearsal. So, like in the tea ceremony, when we start to practice the tea ceremony, and some of you aren't practicing the tea ceremony, so I should say it's very closely related to Buddhist ritual ceremonies, and closely related from liberating, even though it's very patterned, it's a method of liberating yourself from physical patterns.

[29:17]

The example I've given you before, but if you walk like this, you know, we don't do it enough here, nor at Tassajara, but you really need to walk like this all the time, you need to be wearing robes and probably, you know, Tassajara doesn't work because it's too much outdoors, where you're going from building to building and things. So it's a practice that we can't really do, but in a monastery in Japan you can do it, because of the kinds of the mode of where you go, etc. But this is what I would call a clear hold. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not causing you any armoring or anything. And if you do that regularly, pretty soon your back kills you. I mean, you really, certain points in your back are just agony and you want to... But if you maintain it, The places where you're armored give way. You can't maintain a clear hold when you have unclear holds or physiological armoring or tightnesses or those things, which in Zazen, Zazen practice is the same thing. Zazen posture is a clear hold, which causes your whole posture, ligaments, tendons, muscles, over a period of time, as you're ready to come undone and

[30:47]

regroup, sort of. And this kind of thing. One reason we walk like this. You're using a description against a description, or a definition against a definition. So in tea ceremony, tea ceremony is a is a highly evolved definition of how you walk into a room, acknowledge the objects and people in the room, walk across the room with an object, maybe full of water and maybe sort of precariously held down like this, and not spill the objects and water and things like that, and how you hold things. For instance, normally we hold things like this. how you can learn to hold things like that, without using the pointer. In other words, we tend to, because we think, as I used Picasso saying, sculpture is flat from all views and painting is three-dimensional, creates the illusion of space, we think in these conceptual modes that go like stills in a movie, and we think that way. So we tend to use our hands, this point to this point, to pick something up, but you have

[32:11]

the entire length of your fingers to pick things up with. Generally, you don't pick things up that way. But that has nothing to do with your hand, that has to do with your conceptual mode. So tea ceremony tries to get you out of conceptualizing physical movement. Do you understand me? So tea ceremony gets you to do things like that, or you can watch Nakamura Sensei, who's so good at it, and Oksan must be too, I haven't watched her do the tea ceremony. of anybody who knows the tea ceremony well, does things like this. She'll move her hand from this point to this point and pick up something and you can't do it. You can't do it without shifting your wrist or something. Somehow she does it and something happens and she's suddenly got the object in her hand and she's holding it and come to it in a way which you can't move to that point. Same way with accents. Your tongue is you know, when your tongue goes from vowel A to consonant something else, vowel 1 to syllable something else, it moves in your mouth, physical space. And some combinations, your tongue will tend to produce one sound going across this way and another sound going across that way, and so accents develop, and different

[33:38]

physiology have different ways of speaking too, because their mouths are shaped differently. But you can, by being conscious in your tongue in the same way, you can see your accents, you can see your tongue move, feel your tongue move from place to place, and how, where the sounds begin, etc. I'm not saying it's something you should do, it's just very similar to the tea ceremony movie. So the attempt in tea ceremony is to create movements which you cannot do as long as your physical movements are conceptual. Are you with me? So when you first start doing the tea ceremony you're trying to find the clarity and the the truth. You're trying to describe, just as I said, describe what you do as true, you're trying to find your movements as true, picking something up as true. It's just there and you have picked it up. There's nothing at it, just you're picking it up and you're picking it up in the most economical way to use your hand, free from conceptual modes. So when you first go into tea ceremony you're trying to learn it and you're

[35:03]

we get it wrong and in general we don't memorize the details. Without thinking, we try to just pick it up by observation, try to pick it up non-conceptually, but you're still making an effort to learn it. At a certain point, a shift occurs, and maybe it's perhaps a similar shift to somebody like Musashi shifting from being a swordsman to a Zen practicer and artist. You shift from trying to do the tea ceremony to trying to do your whole life. So what you're doing in the tea ceremony, maybe your tea ceremony, the rate at which you're learning tea ceremony suddenly slows down dramatically. And that's when tea is a real practice. That's when you don't improve in tea unless your whole life improves.

[36:04]

You don't improve any more in contrast to your life. This is the shift in practice when you're no longer sitting with the same effort always to be concentrated or always doing something like that. You're trying to do it, but you're trying to do it in sitting now with the same kind of effort that you try to do it in your daily life. Now, maybe more, because there's a definite advantage to crystallizing certain experiences. it helps you in your less deafness. So we do do zazen. But the mature student, more and more, is trying equally throughout their life, like they're trying equally the kind of physical trueness or clarity of tea ceremony. When you're trying it throughout everything, how your room is, how you eat in a restaurant, how you stand with someone, how you pick up a coffee then you don't have the same energy going into learning the tea ceremony. It's part and parcel of your whole effort. Now, this is not something you could describe to a new student, because they must learn it by contrast to begin with. But the real depth of practice you can't measure by how many minutes you've been concentrated in zazen, how much zazen you've

[37:36]

how long you've been following your breath. It's the subtle changes in definition, shall I say, today, permeating, and attitudes and effort, permeating everything you do. And that, it's very hard to even see for yourself. Other people can see it. Very hard to see that you're much different after one or two years of practice. but your friends will note it immediately. This is true practice. So, going back to the koan, He says, Know well the meaning on the hook. Know well the meaning on the hook. Don't stand by, don't stay by the zero point on the scale. Know well the meaning on the hook. Hook means form. Also the word include and exclude. Exclude means to be shut out and include means to be shut in.

[39:07]

And the clue part is hook, hook. Now, I should just say, as a matter of, again, going back to initiation and etc., something I've said before, but to practice you must be willing to be excluded. If you're, let's just take an obvious sort of commonplace example again. You're not excluded from a club if you don't even know it exists. But once you know that club exists, you're excluded from it until you're initiated or you get membership, if you want. If I'm with poets, I may be their friend, but I don't write poems the same way they do, at least. And so I'm excluded from certain levels of their familiarity and communication. No matter, we may be very direct, they may be my best friend, or very close relationship. Still, there's certain aspects that I'm excluded from because I don't write poems. And if I want to know a poet in terms of their work, and not just socially, or carpenters, or whoever,

[40:36]

I'm using poets because I've experienced it more precisely with poets. You have to be willing to be counted out. And if you aren't willing to be excluded, you can't even know peers. You'll exclude yourself from your peers if you're not willing to be excluded. if you're not willing to be over your head. And even a peer, because a peer is someone being our equal, who can sometimes say something original, sometimes say something we haven't thought of, so even a peer appears to us as superior. So we so often avoid our peers and avoid being over our head by immersing ourselves in work, by becoming school teachers, so we only meet people who are younger than us, etc. The courage to be over your head in situations, to be over your head in understanding, to, what is our life? That's to be excluded or to be over your head. This is true of all of life, you know, not just Zen practice.

[42:03]

Not just Harry's sixth flower. Some of us bridle at that idea. We just don't like the idea. And there's no response. I mean, you may not like it, but it can't be helped. We can always be direct. Directness excludes exclusion. But there is still difference, and those differences, differences in our own definition, location and place, etc. We should penetrate those differences. This is what it means, clear observation, or know well the meaning on the hook. Don't stay by the zero point on the scale.

[43:05]

Don't play it safe in samadhi. So please try to see the truth, or true mind, or the truth of what you're doing. Express the truth of what you're doing. Say things to yourself, inform, express yourself to yourself in ways that don't have, I wish it were this or I wish it were that, built into it, but just what's true.

[44:12]

and what your intention is. Only by honing in on your own definitions like that can you finally have no definition. You know, if I, in the Zendo, if we bow to each Say John is across, directly in front of me. In the zendo, I finish my cushion and I bow, and John bows. And when I bow, Lucy is sitting here, that's Jisha, she bows when I bow. But the person opposite Lucy doesn't bow. We have to draw a line somewhere. Someone has to be excluded, right? And the person next to Lucy doesn't bow. So you don't bow to secondary bowers, you only bow to primary bowers. But what's the difference between a secondary bow and a primary bow? Some definition you're making.

[45:29]

If we didn't make that definition, the whole Zenda would be constantly bowing. Once it started, you couldn't stop. Pretty soon the whole room would be a tightened knot. Climbing all, rolling all over the place, bowing, bowing, bowing. You know, we have to draw a line somewhere. Everybody would, the ripple effect would go. whole line would bow and everybody across the way would bow and they'd have to bow back. And actually the whole world bows. Everyone in the world would have to bow. That's the mind of expedient me, which permeates everything. Because actually everyone's bowing.

[46:14]

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