Good evening. As you may have noticed... I am not Linda Ruth Cutts. I am Linda Ruth Cutts. I asked Tova if I looked like Linda Ruth Cutts earlier, and she said no. Then she said yes. Linda is ill, not seriously ill, but she's been fighting something off the last few days.

[01:02]

When I got back from being away, Linda and I are married, and when I got back from being away in the middle of the afternoon, she was struggling with her sincere desire to come and give a talk against her feeling awful. So I volunteered to take her place. And as often is the case, as is usually the case, I was struck with a quality of Linda's practice that I greatly admire and I think is central to our practice, to our way, which is her deep sincerity.

[02:11]

her sincere effort. Amazingly, at different times, I've been amazed by it. And as some of you know, I'm sure, in Dogen's work, the Fukan Zazengi, one of the things he emphasizes is sincere effort. He says that our single-minded way, our sincere practice, is itself negotiating the way. Our sincerity is itself so-called enlightenment, realizations. Our sincere effort is that.

[03:23]

And I'm saying this, obviously emphasizing this, repeating it. I'll repeat it a few more times. Because it's so hard for us to get this. into the old noggin, you know, and into our heart. It's so hard for us to understand that he really does mean that. He ain't kidding around. Our sincere effort is in itself the negotiation of the way. Not something else. Not someplace else. Not something further. Not something exalted, beautiful, beautiful, really jazzy, blissful, not that. One time Suzuki Roshi said, and it's in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, he said, enlightenment is not so special, but even if you go to lecture, even if you're sleepy and you don't really want to go on a Wednesday night, he doesn't say Wednesday night.

[05:08]

I'm adding that part. Even if you're sleepy and you don't want to go, but you go to hear the Dharma talk, he says, this is enlightenment. Isn't that extraordinary? It sure doesn't look like enlightenment, does it? You know, it's like, oh God, I've got to go there. And then you go and you fall asleep or you're struggling or, you know, many things happen. He says, this is enlightenment to go to a lecture at night and fall asleep because you're tired. It's pretty extraordinary. And very different from some idea that's popular, popular in our culture and popular among us practitioners, that enlightenment and awakening and realization is some special state of mind. And that Zen practice is about figuring out, it's the technique, the methodology of getting to this special state of mind.

[06:17]

realization. And then everything is going to be really groovy after that. It seems like simple to say, oh no, that's not true. But it actually takes us a long, long time to settle on our miraculous ordinary, dumb life. To settle on that. To settle in that. To settle the self on the self. So I felt, I want to tell you about an experience I had where this came up.

[07:38]

Namely, a few weeks ago, there was a, at the very end of July, early August, there was a special kind of teaching sesshin that happened at Green Gulch Farm that I participated in, led by Sho Haku Okamura, who is a, many of you know him, a Japanese Zen teacher, Roshi, master. who also exemplified this quality of sincerity. Very . It wasn't that way. It wasn't . It was just without . You know what I mean? It was like . So strong.

[08:41]

So this kind of sesshin, this teaching sesshin, is a special name to it called Genzo A. The Genzo refers to Shobo Genzo, which is this gigantic work of Ndogen Zenji that he wrote in the first half of the 13th century. And it has... there's scholarly arguments about how many parts it has to it, but roughly he wrote about, Dogen wrote about 75 small essays called fascicles. Each one is only two or three pages, like the Fukan Zazangi that I was just mentioning, in which he says, our sincere practice is in itself negotiating the way like Genjo Koan, the actualization of the fundamental point, and many other things.

[09:49]

So he wrote 75 of them. So the story goes that he wanted to write 100, rounded off to 100. So he started on that project, but he died after writing 12. So there are only 87. According to some counts, there are only 87. chapters, fascicles of the Shobo Genzo, and the Genzoe Sashin is a sashin where you do a fair amount of sitting, but also there are these classes during the day, two one-and-a-half-hour classes each day, in which Shohaku Okamura, line by line, character by character, word by word, explicates the meaning of a given fascicle. So this time, we studied a work of dogens called Yui Butsu Yo Butsu. Butsu means Buddha.

[10:58]

Yui Butsu Yo Butsu means only a Buddha and a Buddha or sometimes it's translated as only a Buddha together with a Buddha. This is a partial, this title is a partial quotation from a sentence in chapter two of the Lotus Sutra. You with me on this? So in chapter two, which is the chapter on skillful means, that's the subject of skillful the second chapter of the Lotus Sutra, which is a magnificent explication of the universe, the Lotus Sutra, that is. So in Chapter 2 is skillful means, and one of the sentences in Chapter 2 is, only a Buddha, together with a Buddha, can fully comprehend the true reality of all beings.

[12:06]

the true reality of all being. So Dogen loved this sentence so much that he wrote two whole chapters of the Shobo Genzo, two fascicles of the Shobo Genzo, based on this one sentence. One is Yui Butsu, Yo Butsu, only a Buddha and a Buddha, and the other is Shou Ho Ji So, which is the true reality of all beings. Only a Buddha, together with a Buddha, can realize the true reality of all beings. So Dogen, as you may know, is, if you've ever tried to negotiate your way through any Dogen, he can be very difficult, obscure, like, what is he talking about? This is a frequent experience for people who study Dogen.

[13:12]

And I was thinking, you know, I did this Kenzo Isashin with Shohaku Okamura about yoi butsu yobutsu, but I still don't know what it means. What does it mean, yoi butsu yobutsu? What does it mean, only a Buddha and a Buddha? I don't know if I know what it means or if I don't know what it means. Actually, I think I have a feeling for what it means. It means... that our practice is our own sincere effort. That's only a Buddha part. And together with a Buddha. But it doesn't just mean together with a Buddha. It means together with others. It means together with a Sangha. It means together with our fellow practitioners. It means together with the guy on the bus. It means together with everyone. So our practice takes place in the realm of our own individual work, our own individual effort.

[14:24]

Hearing the teaching, thinking about the teaching, practicing the teaching, realizing the teaching. Those are the four stages of our effort. It takes place in the realm of our effort and in the realm of our relationship with another Buddha or another person or a tatami mat or our emotional upset following talking with our mother or someone. Ha! So again and again in Okamura Roshi's explication of yui butsu, yo butsu, again and again he came back to the same fundamental understanding, fundamental ground of our practice, the ground out of which our practice grows.

[15:58]

And I want to try to express that in some way to you this evening. So, one way that we see our life, that we see our practice, and that we experience our life is in some narrow way, some more narrow, partial way. So this world of narrow, partial view is the world of separation. We separate things out.

[17:02]

And this whole understanding of the way things are is very obvious. It's very straightforward and simple. So we separate things out. This is from this narrow perspective. And then kind of the next step or another part of that is a subject and object, right? So there's this thing here, you know, bounded by skin, a subject, and then everything that's not within the skin is the object. And we separate those out. It's really clear to me that everything not within this skin is not me. Just that it is to you. And, oh, so then, so then we separate things out and then we discriminate among them.

[18:08]

You know, there's this, there's that, there's this, there's that, there's high, there's low, there's good, there's bad, there's, you know, what I like, what I don't like, and so on. We discriminate among them and then we, again, this very logical progression coming out of the way our life is from this narrow perspective, then we hold on to some and we push away others. The usual way, the traditional way this is understood is grasping and aversion. The traditional way this is understood is that we grab a hold of what we like and we push away what we don't like in its most severe form, Good evening, Vicki. Vicki and I have been spending a lot of time together because we just participated in a very gigantically long ceremony called Dharma Transmission that Vicki was a very integral part of.

[19:22]

So then we finished the ceremony. This took days and days and days to finish the ceremony. We finished this afternoon And that was in Berkeley Zen Center. And then I drove home to Green Gulch. And I drive into the parking lot, and there's Vicky. There's Vicky again. This is Vicky as Vyrochana. She is everywhere. He covers the universe. Then she said to me, oh, I'm sorry. I'll miss Linda's talk tonight. I said, oh. But here she is. Anyway. Oh, so in its most severe form, this kind of grabbing hold of things and pushing things away is called the three poisons. Greed, hate, and delusion.

[20:24]

Greed, hate, and delusion. Delusion is some combination of greed and hate. Or you don't even know if it's greed or hate. And as many of you know, each month or every two weeks or even more frequently than that, we avow our tendency to grab a hold of things and push things away. We acknowledge that. I now fully avow. One time, Fu Schrader, Fu Ryu, Nancy Schrader, was giving a talk at Green Gulch, and she was talking about this very thing, and she was saying, grab a hold, you know, we shouldn't grab a hold of things.

[21:25]

This is a paraphrase, so you may not get the feeling of it, but she said something like, well, we shouldn't grab a hold of things. But actually, it would be more accurate to say, it would be nice to figure out a way to get things not to grab a hold of us. And I think that that's very accurate. And in passing, I would also, I wanted to make this point, which is an important point for me. in my life, and maybe it is or can be for you, which is kind of another misunderstanding of Zen practice from my perspective, or a way that it can be understood that I don't think is quite right. Oh, it's like, you know how people say a wolf in sheep's clothing, you know, from Little Red Riding Hood, a wolf in sheep's clothing. I think that's where it's from. No?

[22:29]

Another story, okay. But anyway, you're familiar with that phrase, a wolf in sheep's clothing? So this is kind of like a psychological guilt wolf in Buddhist teaching sheep's clothing. And it goes like See, I'm just selfish. That's the problem. If I wasn't so selfish and grabbing a hold of things and pushing other things away, I wouldn't have made such a mess of things. So this selfishness is what I need to eradicate in my practice, and I'm going to do it by sitting still for many long, long hours and punishing myself severely for my selfishness. We have this kind of idea. This is psychological guilt wolf in sheep's clothing. And we can spend a long time doing that, but I don't think that's accurate.

[23:41]

I don't think it does justice to the complexity of our emotional life, particularly our traumatic emotional life, that is, difficulties. to put it more simply, are difficult, where we have had difficult experiences, usually particularly with other people. They're always the most difficult. Oh my goodness. Okay, moving on. So this is this narrow view. This is called mountains are mountains. then practice, our Zen practice, our meditation practice, is where we get a bigger view. We encourage a larger view. We encourage a big perspective, which is called mountains are no longer mountains.

[24:47]

The way we do that is by doing nothing. That's the essential method. That's the essential method of our practice is doing nothing. It's, you know, pretty straightforward. If we do something, then immediately we're involved in that same world. Separation, subject-object, I like it, I don't like it, this is not good, this is bad, etc., etc., etc. We're immediately involved in that. So... We do nothing. This is, so Dogen says, in the same Fukanzazengi, Dogen says, to, what does he say? He says, cease all, cast aside. Cast aside all involvements and cease all affairs. Do not think good or bad. Do not administer pros and cons. Cease all the movements of the conscious mind, the gauging of all thoughts and views, all the measuring of our, all the discriminating of our thoughts and views.

[25:59]

Cease the discriminating thoughts and views and cease even discriminating between discriminating and non-discriminating, even that discrimination. That's why it's just sincere effort because we don't know. Our practice is just sincere effort. We don't know what the result is. Somebody else has to figure out the result. Somebody else has to figure out whether this is discriminating mind or not discriminating mind. Because if we try to discriminate, oh, that was discriminating mind. That was good zazen. That was bad zazen. This is good. This is bad. Where are we? We're back in the same place that we're trying to free up. That's why sincere effort is negotiating the way. Or as Uchiyama Roshi said, you shoot for the target, but you don't know if you ever hit it or not. But you shoot an arrow.

[27:00]

You aim at the target, but it doesn't matter whether you hit the target or not. It's another very difficult point, that it doesn't matter. a very difficult point for us to get used to that. We're very sure it matters a great deal. We like hitting that target and we don't like not hitting it. But we can't know. And that's not exactly right. Knowing just is more of the same. So that's the second step. Mountains are mountains. Mountains are no longer mountains.

[28:01]

Then, so that means nothing. Zero. Zero. just sitting in the complete calmness of our mind and body, even when our mind and body is not calm at all. Then the third aspect is, where does this take place? Where this takes place is variously our everyday life. This takes place in our everyday life or we could say our karmic life or we could say delusion. Again, Dogen in Genjo Koan says that Buddhas are those who have great realization and

[29:14]

of delusion. It's the same thing. It's not going somewhere else. Buddhas are the ones who have great realization of delusion. That's very accessible to us. We know a lot about delusion. That's where, that's the location of realization. The location of realization is delusion. when we get with that, that's a Buddha. That's Buddha activity. Which is, so mountains are mountains, mountains are no longer mountains, mountains are mountains again. The difference between mountains are mountains, number one, and mountains are mountains, number three, is that mountains are mountains, number three, has Mountains are no longer mountains in it.

[30:15]

This is called liberation. That means that in our life, we're completely discriminating and liking this and not liking that and getting confused and being deluded. And in delusion, We shouldn't be deluded by our delusion. We shouldn't be fooled by our delusion. We have to live in delusion. There ain't no other place. In fact, the sure sign of delusion is someone saying, let me tell you about where there is no delusion. Then you're going to just hear a lot of delusion after that. There is no other place, so to realize deeply that there is no other place is another place.

[31:20]

So in the 32nd chapter of the Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Roshi says, quoting a poem, he says... because of the singing bird, I find the mountain calmness. Translation, because of delusion, I find realization. Realization needs delusion to be there. But, That doesn't mean to simply be lost in delusion. Delusion needs to be, oh boy, I don't know if this is a good way to say it, but I'll go ahead. Delusion needs to be leavened.

[32:31]

You know what leavening is? When you put leaven in a bread, leaven the bread, you're putting air in there. If the bread is not leavened, It's very, very flat. I used to make here, when we first moved here in 1969 and in 1970, on the weekends I would make gruel bread. And I wouldn't use any yeast. And it would be kind of leftovers from the refrigerator mixed in with flour. But I would knead it. I would knead it for like 45 minutes and then let it sit. for six hours, and then knead it again for 45 minutes. And kneading is another way of getting air in there. It was still very, it was very dead spread, but it was a little leavened, but it didn't have any leavening agent in it other than my elbow grease. So we need to leaven our delusion, to be free of our delusion.

[33:40]

That doesn't mean someplace else. There ain't no other place but to be free within it. This is the track, the track that we follow. and we make our best effort to follow that line of sincerity. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[34:46]

For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:56]

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