Gutei's finger is raised up in this world in which there is neither foreground nor background. And our understanding is that there is no freedom anywhere except in this world where there is no foreground or background. This morning reading the Diamond Sutra, I read the part which says, Is there some dharma fully known by the Tathagata? dharma of utmost perfect, complete, whatever it is, enlightenment. And, you know, Subuddhi says, well, as far as I understand it, there is no dharma and so forth.

[01:28]

Dharma means no marks, that there is nothing to be grasped, nothing that can be talked about, and so forth. And it ends, that section ends with, because an Absolute exalts holy persons, because an Absolute exalts holy persons. And Dr. Konze says this exalts could be brought forth from, or gains dignity from, or arises from, or gives birth, is given birth from, this Absolute. Because an Absolute exalts holy persons, this no Dharma or no Marx, dharma is likened in that the preceding passage to a raft which we abandon. So no dharma.

[02:38]

So you... you know, dharma is so elusive, but you should be concerned. What is dharma? What is no dharma? And so forth. Why would so much of Buddhism be involved with dharma? Dharma, of course, you know, is translated as the law, and in the sense that dharma means the law or reality, It also means you obey reality or obey the law. You know, remember that poem from that koan I talked about before. The mind turns and works in accordance with 10,000 things and everywhere it turns the world is mysteriously serene. and the Avantamsaka Sutra says, clearly when you see the world is empty, that there is no such thing even as dharma, then you see the tathagata, then you see Vairochana. This sounds rather like

[04:19]

you know, like some equation. I think Dr. Francis Cook says something like, maybe it's like worshipping E equals MC squared. But it's not like this. Even though we say no dharma, and the instructions in breathing are The most common early instructions in breathing are something like, as you're breathing, you say to yourself, calming myself, I breathe out. Calming myself, I breathe in. This statement, we tend to overlook the statement, we breathe in and out. But we overlook that the practice also is to say, Calming myself, I breathe in. Calming myself, I breathe out. Or our way, which is more philosophical, to count one. The counting is part of the breathing, part of the practice. It's not just counting as... You know, you're not just counting to follow your breathing, you're following breathing in order to count also.

[05:51]

Counting is this locating activity of the mind. And it's... In Zen, counting is... We count also because there's that funny play with which one is one. Not that you can't get past one, but why wasn't that one just two? or three, and now you're at five and you lost count, but where did you start? What is one and what is two? Although we're counting and naming it, you're certainly locating it, and three is not four and two, and yet any one of them you can start anywhere. There's no beginning and no end. It's always one, one, one, or two, [...] or whatever. So we look You're consciously locating and even numbering and yet simultaneously you know. You can start with any breath. Any breath can be one. Or calmly I breathe in. Calming myself, I breathe out. But until you trust yourself,

[07:21]

You can't really do that even. The Buddha goes to sign, you know, to have an access sign. It's necessary to trust yourself. When you begin to dream, at the moment you fall asleep, that moment that you fall asleep or a dream begins, or while you're a little bit conscious and a dream begins, and you become subject in the dream, A dream begins, I think, mostly at a moment of egolessness. The dream begins when you forget yourself and your sleep begins when you forget yourself. Sleeping is that necessary time when we forget ourselves, even though our dream may be very involved with ourself. Usually it's objective. We are object in the dream. or as a child, a child's experience, primary experience, or we can call it. When a child first sees something, primary experience, you know, it first sees a rock, and it thinks, a rock! And you feel something, you know. Or the sun, or a flower, or birds singing,

[08:55]

Or crossing a street by yourself, going to school. Something you may remember, it's when you recognized it. Not recognize, actually, in the sense of re-see, re-cognize, but initially cognize. But recognize is also, it has that feeling because It became familiar to us at that moment, like when you recognize someone. So it's locating. That primary experience or the effort of writing a poem or painting a picture is a kind of locating. But it's also non-comparative. So you hear some sound, the stream or airplane, and you just hear the sound without labeling it. But you definitely, fully, clearly hear the sound. This is, we can say, non-comparative locating. This is also no marks. But again,

[10:20]

You can't do that until you trust yourself, until you're willing to work through yourself, through your life experience. You may have some horrible dream or horrible experience in zazen or very uncomfortable, you know. You want to get away from it. or your life may be stifling and you want to do something else. This is seeking the Dharma outside yourself, or this is not using your own experience. If you have some horrible experience, you take it into your heart. You trust that horrible experience, saying, this is the truth of suffering. Without this kind of activity of trusting whatever happens as Buddha, something horrible, some suffering, some stifling life, whatever it is, you don't seek out... you try to... you seek through what you are. You open your heart, you know, we can say. I feel funny saying such a thing, but you open your heart to whatever it is, to suffering, to terrible zazen, to some terrible vision in a dream,

[11:49]

that you don't want to think about? No, this is the truth of suffering. The difference between what we call sudden enlightenment and gradual practice It can be understood from this point of view of trust. You know, the sixth patriarch supposedly heard one line of the Diamond Sutra and he was enlightened on that one line. He must have trusted himself completely to be enlightened on that one line, to know completely what happened to him is enlightenment. If you don't have that trust, it's not enlightenment. It's not self-confidence either or complacency. But it's very profound, deep trust to take everything, to open yourself to everything. When you have this kind of experience, you have egolessness or you can practice actually what Buddhaghosa means by a sign.

[13:14]

Another way to try it is some... You know, if you're sitting zazen, I don't think two periods is probably not long enough. In two periods we barely get settled. But concentration is, or no marks also, is an experience. Experience or no experience, you know. Concentration is a physical, you know, physical experience. So it takes some time, just settling, to sit two periods before you are settled. But you can try it during two periods or during sasheen. Take something… If you're thinking, you know, we count your breath or… and sometimes you start thinking. Instead of counting your breath, try a mathematical problem. Now, just take something like 2432 divided by 71 and try to do it in your head. It has no meaning except it'll kind of engross you.

[14:44]

But there's no ego involved in that. It's very hard to identify with 2,432 divided by 71. This is not different from Buddhaghosa saying, memorize the flower exactly. So sometimes you will find that if you do that, it will trigger you slipping into a much deeper concentration, because you have a moment of egolessness while you're figuring out 2,432 divided by 71, assuming your body is... you're sitting zazen and your body is pretty concentrated. You want me to be accessible to you, available to you, but you also want me to be accessible, or you want me to have my own experience, my own absolute experience. And my experience is your treasure, and your experience is my treasure. And our experience is accessible to us when we are transparent.

[16:01]

when we are egoists. Rinzai, Linji, you know, every Zen master is characterized by, and their usefulness to us in the various stories, is each one has a little different character. And Rinzai, he's very transparent. What Rinzai's outstanding feature is his transparency. You may know the story. Rinzai came to Wangbo, his teacher's… Obaku, his teacher's temple, and came into his teacher's room and found Wangbo reading a sutra. And he says to him, here all this time I thought you were a man, or he means warrior or bodhisattva or something, he says, all this time I thought you were a real being, and I see you're nothing but a bean-eating ho-shang. And

[17:30]

The next day, you know, he's come during the summer practice period, the next day Linji comes to say goodbye. And Wangbo says to him, you come here in the middle of practice period, breaking the rules, and now the very next day you're leaving. And Linji says, I just came here to pay my respects to you, teacher. and Wong Bo hits him, get out of here, and he leaves. And he walks a few miles and he thinks, I was wrong, and he turns around and goes back and joins the practice period and finishes it. Now this is, do you see what I mean? He's very transparent. He just walking along, oh, I, all right, and he went back and finished the practice. if he came in the middle. Or another story, you know, he is… Wang Bo goes into the meditation hall, and there in the meditation hall, on one end of it, is Linji asleep. So Wang Bo goes to the top of the board, you know, and Linji raises up his head, you know, sees that it's his teacher Wang Bo, and puts his head back down.

[19:12]

back to sleep. So Wangbo walks. Wangbo then hits the thing another time. And then he goes down to the end of the meditation hall and there is the head monk sitting in zazen. And he says to him, here you are. fabricating dreams, while that guy down at the other end of the zendo is meditating. But this is what we want you, we want you to be like that. If you're sleeping, whatever you're doing, you just do it. You're transparent, you don't think, oh I shouldn't be sleeping, oh my God. If you decide to sleep there, it's all right. If it's not, you shouldn't be there. But once you've decided to sleep there, if your teacher comes in, you say, oh, hi there. Anyway, Rinzai is very transparent like that. Very egolessness, very egoless. That's very hard to do, you know? Very hard to accept suffering as me.

[20:37]

as you yourself. Very hard to live in the midst of each of our activity, to bow and eat and sleep in the midst of our activity. And our desires too, you know, Buddhism is very sensuous religion, excuse me for saying so, but you don't have, you know, You know the images of Maitreya and Avalokiteshvara. Often they're sitting in some lion pose or one knee up and beautifully formed arms and chest and very luxurious looking with ornaments and, you know, some very grand posture, you know, very sensual body. You don't see that kind of image in Christianity. You know, the saints are portrayed as some gaunt Puritan, serious person. But the Bodhisattvas and Maitreya Buddha and the Buddhas even are often portrayed very luxuriously, sensuously. And we must trust our own desires and own body.

[22:04]

I don't mean you must have a very active sexual life or not. You can certainly be chaste and be completely open to yourself. Most of Buddhism is chaste, in fact. But still, chaste or not, we fully are open to ourselves. we don't deny ourself. We can take or leave things, but we don't deny ourself. Anyway, this is the emphasis of Mahayana Buddhism. To be able to recognize

[23:23]

Buddha as you to so trust yourself. An absolute exalts holy persons. So just to sit. Just to sit means you don't care or nothing is important to you. If I say that it sounds funny but Feeling is whatever happens, it's not important. And you're not seeking to just sit as the experience of to just sit as some accomplishment. You don't care even if you don't sit or even if you're not just sitting. When you don't care whether you're not just sitting or some experience, then you actually just sit. Dharma, you know, what is dharma? What is dharma? Dharma is egolessness. When you see everything in its place, sometimes people say or translate, everything is seen naturally or as natural, but that's not so good, you know, how I feel about that. Maybe everything in its place is better.

[24:43]

So dharma is karma leads to suffering, dharma leads to enlightenment. So dharma has no marks because it means to see everything without any coming or going. Without any coming or going, then there are no marks. Everything in its place, no coming or going. There's even, I guess, a sutra called the Sutra of Not Increasing and Not Decreasing This is no Marx or egolessness. So just to just sit is when finally for you there is no coming and no going. Then you just sit when we can't identify it or you just sleep or you're just a earthworm without the shining countenance of Buddha. Then earthworm's treasure is your treasure. from this egolessness or just city or just Tathagata or Absolute we are born or we come out. We get our dignity or our strength or we are sustained by this and identified or known by this Absolute, neither coming nor going.

[26:25]

And you can find this out in your practice by the activity of trust. Trust, trust, trust, trust, trust. Not discriminating, this is good zazen, this is bad zazen, this is a good experience, I want that, this is... Just trust, trust, trust, trust. Then you can fully engage yourself with everything. Mind turns and works in accordance with 10,000 things. And everywhere it turns the world is mysteriously serene, mysteriously silent, everything in its place. This is also to give permission to yourself too. to be saved by insentient and sentient beings.

[27:43]

Our intimacy and our treasure is this primary experience. Our culture and civilization is this primary experience.

[30:02]

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