This is a peculiar kind of bliss, sitting here talking to you. I'm speaking of something that we all share, not that something I possess. Practicing together with people is one of my favorite things in spite of very deeply ingrained laziness that I seem to have wound up with. So for me, Zen was pretty good because there's not a lot of opportunity to be lazy.

[01:01]

Or if you are, someone will come along and prod you. Don't be lazy. So I benefited from that. But for me, one challenge was how to avoid laziness without getting onto a kind of trip about it. It might be a little better to go from being on a laziness trip to a not-laziness trip, but they're both kind of trippy. And our teachers usually say, you know, don't trip out on stuff. Don't trip out on, you know, oryoki eating. Don't trip out on your clothes. Don't trip out on your breathing.

[02:05]

Don't trip out on the great Tassajara Zendo. So it's kind of ironic that to remind ourselves how ordinary things are. We surround ourselves with a lot of unordinariness. In order to teach ourselves, or again, remember or remind ourselves how close a kind of bliss is, we sometimes twist ourselves into a very tight little package. Day three of sashim.

[03:16]

And then at some point, you know, we kind of notice that even in the tight little package, there's a kind of room. This is very helpful because all of us, sooner or later, get into a tight little package somewhere in life. Some of those corners can be kind of nasty. So it's very helpful to have studied a little bit this life and this body-mind and to develop a non-grasping, non-proprietary sense of its profound resources. And some of us are so lazy that in order to do that, we have to go to like Zen boot camp. hang out for a while. I did, anyway.

[04:18]

Or maybe I should say, I do. Along these lines, we're told that there are billions of samadhis. Do you know that word, samadhi? A Sanskrit word. related in its root to the word dhyana, which many of you will have heard of the Sanskrit word. The root, dhyaya, means to, well, various things, but to reflect or ponder or concentrate. So this is the dhyana school. As you probably know, Zen, Japanese pronunciation, goes back to the Chinese Chana, which was their way of pronouncing Dhyana.

[05:27]

So we wound up in the Dhyana school. So we reflect and ponder and concentrate. And... Samadhi has these two prefixes, sam, which means together, and ah, which kind of means at or onto. So samadhi is, according to various people, is a state of the body-mind which is very, very collected and settled. Some would say that one-pointedness of mind is is the dominant feature. But as the Buddhist enterprise unfolded over the centuries, the number of samadhis seems to have increased.

[06:33]

And when those Mahayanist types got a hold of it, suddenly there were billions of samadhis with all these remarkable names. provoking colors and jewels and little tinkling bells and soaring phoenixes and stuff. So, I noticed that there were all these billions of samadhis and I began to get a little suspicious about this proliferating tendency. And... Then there's our friend Dogen, right? You know Dogen, the Japanese founder of, or you might say, importer of Soto Zen into Japan from China. And so he comes along and he says, really, if you're really serious about the Buddha way, there's really only one Samadhi.

[07:44]

You heard that? So suddenly we've gone from billions to one. And I would suggest that all of us are partaking of that samadhi right now. And that if we want, we could just sit here and enjoy that. Now, one tendency will be a quite natural one, would be to kind of go look for it. So here's our lecturer who's telling us that there's this samadhi here somewhere, and that we can enjoy it, so I better go find it. But this will probably not be very helpful. The samadhis that you can go and look for and then generate by marshalling your psychophysical resources in certain ways, those are kind of from that list of billions.

[08:58]

And there's nothing wrong with those, where by a dint of tremendous effort, you can produce an interesting state of the body-mind. After all, practice is all about effort, right? So, what's the trick there? If, as I said, the Buddhism ancestors, and I really think they mean all of them, weren't trying to deceive us, Sometimes they seem to be talking at cross purposes. One ancestor may say, you must summon effort such that you would consume all of heaven and earth and grind your own bones to powder to achieve the way.

[10:14]

others say, well, you know, just sit there. Just sit there and try to let your grasping, karmically impelled mind stop latching on to stuff. Sit naked in the universe. You see those bumper stickers? Ski bear. First it was B-E-A-R. I think that's a skiing place. Then somebody changed that to B-A-R-E. So this is kind of like that. It's like sit naked. A wandering orphan in the universe. A penniless orphan.

[11:18]

homeless and unconcerned. Now, that actually requires a great effort. Why? Because we're constantly, constantly fiddling. At least I am. I was holed up in my cabin over there, waiting for the talk, and... I kind of wanted to read my mystery novel, but I thought, you can't read a mystery novel before you give a darn talk. So I was sitting on my bed, and at some point I noticed I was actually doing this. It's really embarrassing, you know, Zen priest twiddling his thumbs. But we do that a lot, you know. And even if our actual thumbs are still, there may be a great deal of twiddling going on, you know. And it's not so easy to give that up. You don't want to kill it.

[12:22]

You want to let it subside. And in order to do that, we have to have this tremendous trust, like a child. You see, there's some kids here right now, and I noticed there's one little kid who often shows up on her father's shoulders. She looks very happy. She has total trust. Total trust. kind of like, that's our practice. Total trust, total samadhi. Even if we don't like its looks, even if it is day three, sashin, and the world is looking kind of gnarly, it's all right. I can not fiddle. I can make this, as we say, pure effort, which means, as Tolkien says, gozu gozu chi. doing anything.

[13:24]

I'm just sitting here. I asked Huitzu Roshi, he went, what does that mean, gozu gozu chi? He giggled, and he was standing there, and he put one foot up on one thigh and went, gozu gozu chi. Okay, I get it. Gozu gozu chi. So he was kind of demonstrating that close samadhi always is. And how really defeating it becomes to do what Suzuki Roshi called sightseeing zazen. You do zazen to see the sights. Oh, cool. Look at that. Wow. Did that really happen? Or am I hallucinating? Or like during seshin. Well, you can't really, it's like you can't talk to your sashin partners and say, did you see what I did day four?

[14:30]

Wasn't that cool? I was like, no, actually I didn't. You were just sitting there. Oh, well, it was really cool. It was like the heavens were like unrolling, you know. Okay. All right. Very nice. But were you still, you know, letting yourself be embraced by the king of samadhis or the queen of samadhis? Or are you sightseeing? I find this teaching of one's samadhi tremendously encouraging. in a way that you can't really mess with it.

[15:31]

You can't really take it and twist it and make it look like something you want to put on a shelf and keep. You actually can't do that. So that means There is no escape from transcending the whole universe at once and living a great and valuable life in the house of the Buddhas and ancestors. What I observe is that nobody really wants anything else. who really wants anything else. You may not be aware of that on any given day, but it really looks that way to me.

[16:34]

Recently, somebody asked me to go to an interfaith gathering. I don't usually do that, but I went because it was kind of novel, and the djent I spoke with Reverend Lang, Perry Lang, a nice guy. So I was in the Buddhist part of the program. But I felt really impelled to start my very short talk with a quote from the Bible, which goes... Maybe some of you know this... There is one thing I ask of the Lord, for this I long, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may savor the sweetness of the Lord, gazing on him in his temple.

[17:46]

That is Psalm 27, I believe. And as so often is the case with the psalmist, I think it just gives voice to this profoundly, acutely human sentiment. Everyone wants to live there. Everything else is a false substitute. This samadhi of one taste is the true nourishment. We don't need anything else So our teachers have helped introduce this to us. Made us aware of, as Pema Chodron says, the wisdom of no escape. Or was that Alan Watts? I can't remember. Anyway, somebody. Wisdom of no escape.

[18:49]

The samadhi of no escape. This is the... quiet and often unguessed at, unrecognized splendor of this human life. So I strongly recommend this practice, And I wish us all the joy of it. And if we should meet from time to time in those gnarly corners, that's okay.

[19:58]

Even there, each other in this ungraspable samadhi. Do you have some question or comment? Yes. What has How do you use the word splendor? Well, there's such a thing as terrible beauty or awful splendor or splendid awfulness. You don't have to change anything to reveal that face of something awful going on

[21:07]

You just have to be home. In February, I was dashing for a BART train in the rain. It slipped and snapped my wrist. I broke it in two places. That was fairly horrible, actually. I was all wet. My wrist was like this. I broke this wrist when I was seven, so I immediately knew what I'd done. I was kind of looking around. Help! And one BART employee saw me and kind of went, oh, and kind of ran away. It was kind of awful, but it was also kind of okay. It had inarguable integrity, that whole situation. And I wouldn't choose to hang out with my broken wrist, particularly, if I could do something else. But the fact that practice was there... was tremendously encouraging.

[22:10]

So even when things look awful, you know, just quote Huitzu Roshi, you know, whatever this is, you know, whatever's going on, that's home. And there may still be plenty of feelings like, I don't really like this. That's not a problem. Yes? What are you doing when you get there? Get where? Home. Let's see, what are you doing when you get home? Well, you could twiddle your thumbs. or eat lunch, or go to bed, or walk the dog, or break your wrist. I don't mean to make light of our suffering and difficulties, but our teachers, the Buddhas and ancestors, keep urging us not to be...

[23:34]

This led by what looks like the narrow horizon. All of our experience is against the background of vastness. And they keep saying, just, you know, the habit is to close down. Even though it's not really possible, that's the inclination. But teachers say, you don't need to do that. Even if you think you're doing that, You're not doing that. So don't worry. Gotsugotsuchi is always right where you are, not someplace you get to. Yes? What would you say the difference is between the sightseeing you described Yeah, exactly.

[24:47]

Sightseeing Zazen is kind of a collecting mind. No offense to bird watchers, but some bird watchers have these big books in which they write down every bird that they've seen ever. That's okay for bird watching, but for Zazen, it's not such a great idea. So sightseeing in that way is sort of like, you know, okay, there's that. Oh, I saw that one too. That was great. It's more baggage. So whatever arises, however fantastic or hideous. Thank you very much. Now the next thing's arising already. So you're right. It's kind of an attitude difference. Does that make sense? Dittanto Sama informed me this ends at 9.20.

[26:00]

It's now 9.19 and a half. So there's maybe one more question. Otherwise, yes, over there. Well, we're all kind of doing it now. And I could grandstand a little bit by being very still and silent. But it's not so different from what you're doing. Samadhi. Sam means kind of like together. Ah means kind of like at. And he comes from this root meaning to reflect or consider or contemplate. So usually it's thought to mean something like a very collected, settled state of mind.

[27:03]

But it's amazing how collected and settled your state of mind can be any moment you look. Thank you very much for your patience. It's great meeting you in Samadhi land here. Very nice. Thank you.

[27:35]

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