Tomorrow we have the Juso entering ceremony. Is that right? Where is it? There it is. It's about time. Tomorrow we rename him, you know, Shusup. Someone in Zen Center's relative, a rather young person, maybe, I don't know, forty-five or so, maybe forty, anyway, he has cancer.

[01:21]

the grandmother and mother and... wife and grandmother and a little... a child, three years old, were at the hospital and they're going... you know, I guess it was a tumor or something had to be removed and everyone was... trying to make the best of it for this little girl, three-year-old girl. And so she's drawing and fooling around and smiling with people and the grandmother's kind of upset. The mother's trying to keep everything cool and the various complications and the doctors are coming down and speaking to her and going back upstairs somewhere. The little girl is saying, what shall I do, what shall I do?

[02:28]

And the mother says, oh, I think I should go to the toilet. She says, come with me to the toilet. She grabs her mom, takes her mom into the toilet, and then says to her, what's going on here? And the mother says, what do you mean, what's going on? You're coloring and everything. And she said, I mean, what's really going on here? So the mother had to explain to this three-year-old girl that her father has cancer. There's an older student in center who isn't clear about, you know, how or why he's here practicing.

[03:47]

And I think he would say practice, in his particular case, practice has saved his life. But now it's saved, he wants to know what to do with it. And he has various plans, you know. So I told him he should leave. So it's rather abrupt to leave right away. I said, just plan to leave one year from now. between now and then, just get ready to leave. Planning what to do, but finish your job here." So he's doing that. And the other day I talked with him again, and he's told me,

[05:01]

He's figured out several alternatives. One is to go do this and that, do some kind of good works, and the other is to make money, and the other is to do something else. So he's planning to do one of those things. But you know, actually, secretly, he thinks he's going to stay at Zen Center. So it becomes an excuse to fool around for a year. Do you understand what I mean? So I said to him, that he should really leave, not plan these alternatives, but secretly think, well, I'll probably stay, so this year I can not be so serious.

[06:18]

I'd rather he, while he's here, really just be here, do it the way we're doing it, and then leave. That's much better. I don't mean there shouldn't be some transitional time for all of us to try on things, but I'm talking about a measurement or a naming today. I'm always struck by what Picasso says about art. One place, someone's painter said to him, I paint what I can paint, you know, what I can. And Picasso said, I paint what I want. And he said, I must name, it's necessary to name things.

[07:27]

When he paints, he means he names a foot or names a eye or hand. or he names his, he says, his dog's head on someone's knees, and he names knees. Another place he wrote, swan on a lake is a scorpion in my hand. And a friend asked him, what do you mean, a swan on a lake is a scorpion in my hand? And so he drew on the envelope a swan on a lake and the shadow of the swan very clear on the water. And I guess, I don't know exactly, but from the way it was written, I guess it looked like a scorpion, when you took the shadow and the swan together.

[08:33]

This is naming, too. I always appreciated, for some reason, a person who becomes a... You know, I was thinking of it yesterday, watching people sew, how difficult it is to actually make a Raksha, to take the measurements to all the sewing, and it makes you appreciate the clothes you wear, you know, that we take for granted. How much simple measurement or skill or work goes into just what you wear.

[09:49]

And as I started to say, I've always appreciated people who from childhood are just interested in hair, you know, maybe grow up to be a hairdresser, just interested in clothes, you know. Usually we have somebody, oh, men don't do that, or that's not a real profession or something, but right in front of your eyes are your clothes. everyone's hair. Artists often are quite interested, you know, even though they may be a painter or a poet, they're often quite interested in things like how we dress or hair, the look of things. They see, you know, just what's before your eyes from childhood up, and you're interested in just what's in front of you, not some idea of profession. It always seems to me to be a kind of courage or freshness to be able to be interested in things, even, to have the courage of your interest.

[11:06]

You need to start out with, in the sense of naming, to name your language, to name your words, to name your sentences. Measure your words. I've always been fascinated by those from the time I was a child by drawing, you know, some drawing which you look at it one way and it's one thing and another way it's something else, you know, depending on how you adjust your mind to it, it appears one way or the other. It always seems like a secret how our mind works. The other day I saw one where you put a If you put a group of dots together, two at a time, people perceive them as pairs, they don't perceive them as dots, separate dots.

[12:30]

Then if you put a line of dots like this, dot, [...] and you put a dot very close, next to that line, but a little out of order, people don't perceive it as belonging to this line, even though it's much closer than the other dots. Particularly if you then add some dots going off this direction, even pace, it looks like this line ran into that line and doesn't look like this dot belongs to those dots. But it's very close, almost touching. All the other dots are quite spaced. But we perceive the measurement of it, or the rhythm of it, or the relationship of it, much more than we perceive. closeness or even its singularity. One thing that always strikes me again is, you know, one of the most interesting things to do with someone is to be a jesha and a doshi together.

[13:43]

Doshi is the person who leads the service, or anja. to work with someone like that, or just to work with the dawns. You know, the altar is very... it's just an arrangement of stuff, you know. But how we name it or put it, you know, is very interesting. And almost everybody in Zen Center, in all three places, when they line things up, they line them up by the edges. Most people don't – I don't know who, because I don't know who does which job – but you don't center it. For instance, this mat tends to be to that side. People don't tend to center it with the center of the Buddha, but you put it because I guess the sticks are over there, so the two edges you line up, it's over that side, you know, because the sticks are over this line.

[14:55]

And the incense box, the line down the middle, the line down the… it's not in the middle, between the two sides. We don't have a word for it, not in the middle. Sort of in the middle, but to the right of it. People line up that thing with the center of the Buddha, you know, instead of taking the center of the box and lining it up. So you take some line and line it up. And I noticed in Nenju the other day, We did it much better this time. I have some more changes in store. But you did one thing I didn't imagine, you know, this time. Which is, I guess, perfectly natural, because everyone did it.

[16:01]

Or maybe that's the instructions that, you know, gave you. I finally wanted to check it out hours before the ceremony and I wouldn't let him, I just told him a few minutes before the ceremony. So maybe he instructed you this way but in any case it's the same. When you came in and you went around, we did the jhunda. When you finished, when you'd completed the whole Jundo, you stopped bowing and stood up and walked back to your seats. And that's what I didn't expect, you know. Is that what you instructed? It was like you were supposed to complete the room, like there was some magic in completing the room, then you could just stand up and walk back to your seat.

[17:05]

For me there's no magic, you know, I don't care whether you go around the room four or five times or once, it's just, we're in the room so we might as well go around once, and then you go to your seat but you just, it's just, the ceremony is just some politeness, we've cleaned this end up and so we re-enter it, you know. Again, a very typically Buddhist thing, to give something, to name it, you know. some kind of meaningless thing to do. So I would have thought, you know, you just, when you had gone around, why don't you just join the line and sort of continue around, you know, until you got your seat. Now maybe you're supposed to do it that way, the way you did it. I don't know exactly. I forget how it went at AHA when I was there, but I think

[18:09]

I don't know which way, I just ... my feeling is you just continue. In any case, you know, there's no magic, you know, to it. And I think we do, psychologically, we get into a kind of magic, like whether you bump something once, twice or three times. You bump it twice, you may feel uneasy, I should have bumped it three times. If I don't do something a certain way, something will happen. But you know, if you speak English poorly, nothing happens to you. You may not get the form just right, but as soon as you make a double negative, a bolt of lightning doesn't strike you. So you can do the ceremonies anyway. It doesn't make any difference.

[19:10]

There's no magic to it, but there's form to it, and giving form. To know the form or ceremony or ritual of your life, and there is a ritual to your life. Again, I've always been interested in how important it is in other cultures, Chinese culture, for example, how important ritual is, one of the most important things, the whole book of ritual. And the other day I saw on television Ron Eyre's program. You know Ron Eyre, some of you remember, was here and did that Time-Life Xerox program BBC, which, as you may remember, he was going to film us and then decided he'd rather come here and practice so he wouldn't film us.

[20:16]

And he went to, one of his programs, this last one was on India, called 600,000 Gods or 300,000 Gods or something like that. And there was an Indian man in it, a Cambridge professor, who went with Ron back to India to visit his family and the village he grew up in. And they showed a ceremony in which they make a kind of clay god of the school, and everybody chants and so forth, and afterwards they throw the god into the river. Because it's just clay, you know? But for that time they use it, the clay. And the Indian man, you know, was saying… Ron was asking… Ron always asks Castaneda-type questions, you know, kind of ingenuous questions about ceremony and so forth, and he says,

[21:36]

There must be some meaning. He says, I don't know what it means or if anyone believes in it. We don't believe in it exactly. It's just this clay thing we made, you know. But I remember, he said, as a boy going to the ceremonies, and at first there's some resistance or you feel a little funny, and then there's a bump, he says, and you're transported and you're mumbling away. doing something bigger than you. How seldom we say words nowadays intended for one other person But this is a distinction of Buddhism, you know, too.

[22:43]

Words intended just for yourself, words intended for one other person, words intended for many people, and words intended for the gods. And words intended for the gods and words intended just for you are really the same The sutras are organized that way too. Teaching of Buddha that he just spoke to himself. Teaching of Buddha for you, particular disciples. Teaching of Buddha intended for many people. And then, of course, teaching of Buddha intended only for himself, not for gods.

[23:50]

So, can you read the sutras? Do you? You must find it sometimes. So, that you read the sutras and they snap into place, sort of, so that it's It's as they were written, knowing your particular experience. In fact, your experience, very recent experience, very particular, something known only to you. This is one of the important ways to be able to read the sutras, and also important to be able to speak to others this way. I notice in doing the dawns, doing the chanting. Some dawns, you know, sometimes are very good at chanting, and their chanting is at the right tone.

[25:40]

Some people chant at a tone which no one else can enter, but some people chant at just the very good sound and at the right tone, but they still don't know how to let people enter. They don't know how to make little doorways in their chanting by which people can enter. So still people don't join them, even though the tone, the level is right. It's a kind of ability, you know, to open a door in your chanting so everyone enters. And in the ritual of your life, you know, each of us, whether we like it or not, does have a ... Whatever you do, just like those dots, your actions group together and line up

[26:44]

And you can project, you know, anyone who sees your actions over even a few moments, a few successive acts, you can draw lines right into this ceremonial point or ritual point, projection point by which you are making your future. There's tracings, your actions are a kind of tracings. So we may not do ceremonies, you know. So much, you know. Tomorrow we do a naming ceremony. And Mike Jambo will not be just Mike Jambo, not just Shungo, but Shuso. Something he hasn't been. He's not just Mike Jambo called Shuso. I hope not, we'll see tomorrow.

[27:52]

And tomorrow night we have, I think, don't we have mid-practice period Halloween flicks, celebrations, skits? Hmm? Hoopla. Hoopla? Oh. No. That name. But usually mid-practice, where we're in a practice where there's so much naming, getting on to the activity of naming, seeing how we name, whether we like it or not. The practice of spirit ceremony in Zen temples traditionally is rather an unnaming, when you sort of play with the names of things. I don't think it's intended to be that way but it usually turns out to be. And Zhaozhou, Zhaozhou was asked by a monk, when all things return to the One, where does the One return to?

[29:07]

And you know, Zhaozhou said, when I was in Jingzhou I had a shirt made, or a robe made, it weighed exactly seven pounds. And a man named Cao Fang, I was practicing with this, when all things return to the one, what does the one return to? And this is also just to name something, to care about, to care about. What is the form of our life? You begin to see it. You stop walking with a board on your shoulder. to mention that. Most people walk with a board on their shoulder so they can't see to one side. You're involved in a ceremony. Your real life is in it. It's not just a staged performance.

[30:11]

So I've been wondering, what kind of ceremonies could we do yearly? Harvest, something like that, or we do the memorial service for Sukhya Rishi once a year, which I think is important to do. But I was thinking maybe we should do a fire ceremony, perhaps at Green Gulch, once a year. We'd have a big fire and we'd all sit around mumbling in front of it, and you can burn your things. I think you could get into that. You could write down the names of whatever on a piece of paper. Or you could take love letters, old love letters. The Diamond Sutra. To burn it.

[31:13]

I think we could get into that. Maybe I'm planning to do it, actually. we should do it for a few hours, good to fire and... What would you remember? Anyway, cow thing was Practicing will all things return to the One. What is the relationship? It means, what is the relationship? What is the form of your life? What underlies the form of your life? Does something underlie? What's really going on here? Why are you here for one year? Again, Picasso says, you know, he painted a whole landscape and finally

[32:15]

After painting a whole landscape he got to the stream and finally painted a fish. And it turns out, he said, I found out what I wanted to do was paint the fish. But I had to paint the whole landscape to find the fish. I think that's why we practice Buddhism. We need to paint, you actually need to paint this life with some definite strokes to find out, to name it actually. real-life ceremony, name it, to find out your fish, find out Zhao Zhou's seven-pound shirt. So, anyway, Gao Feng is working with all things return to the One. What is relationship? So then what does the One all think, what is the one, what does the one turn to, what is this one? So he doesn't, you can't make sense of it, so he's just saying it and saying it.

[33:26]

And one day everything lined up, so everything was very clear and precise and there was no effort in keeping it in front of him. Everything was one-to-one. Each word was named, each word was… everything was intended directly for one other person or for you yourself. Then one day he was chanting and a poem came to mind, Who carries this lifeless corpse around? and at that moment he understood who carries this lifeless corpse around what carries this lifeless corpse around and he said even space broke up into pieces and everything was wiped away so he went to see his teacher and his teacher said to him

[34:41]

who carries this lifeless corpse around?" And he shouted, and his teacher raised his stick and he took hold of the stick and said, you can't use that today, you can't hit me today. And his teacher said, why not? And he walked out. Gao Feng just walked away. The next day his teacher said to him, All things return to the One. Where does the One return to? Gao Feng said, I hear a dog lapping boiling water from the cauldron. And his teacher said, Who taught you this nonsense? And he says, You better ask yourself. A dog is lapping boiling water from the cauldron.

[35:47]

You could say just a dog is lapping water. But maybe we understand it better, we say, a dog is lapping boiling water So again, we need to do something bigger than ourselves, or act. Kind of, maybe, like poetry. The words are... We know the words, but we don't know the poem. Your life should be the poem. Rinzai, you know, Linji, he says, he always was… maybe he's the clearest Zen teacher.

[37:08]

It's interesting, you know, he didn't have… we don't know so much about his disciples and they… the continuation of his teaching is more through the clarity of what he said and was written down. He was very clear, That's true of Dogen too. Usually to write something down is not successful. Even the disciple of the man who compiled Bluetooth records burned it. Almost all the copies were destroyed for a while. But some people, their teaching is so clear, it comes through. And Linji always was pointing out to see what's really going on if the person, when they speak to you, what is the real subject of what they're talking about?

[38:17]

Are they attached to object or subject? And he said, sometimes you show form to adapt to a person, sometimes you use your whole body sometimes you use the situation or express the situation through joy or anger you use situational joy or anger sometimes you show half your body sometimes you ride on a lion sometimes you may ride on elephant to name dog's head on

[39:34]

someone's knees. Okay. So we have a kind of pact or we've made a kind of agreement among ourselves to act out something that we didn't plan on.

[40:53]

Something that we don't control ourselves. And we don't know just what will happen. And we turn to the Shuso now. And Shuso turns to us not as Michael Jambo, but as Shuso. And you each too as Shuso. It's strange but to name, to know when we are riding on tiger or elephant or when we're showing whole body, what are tracings or ritual point of your actions

[42:05]

to know, a measure of your life is to really know it, to see it, to see the preciseness of everything, not to be so fuzzy. You know, it's funny, electrons, very small electrons are quite precise and immutable, almost immutable, and galaxies are Astrology seems quite astronomy, quite precise. But somewhere in between we are very funky and fuzzy. We are made up of atoms and electrons but somehow we fuzz them all up, you know. Or our mind fuzz them up. Somebody like Linji can see clearly you are almost as precise as an electron. But your greed, hate, and delusion, or desire, or ego, are like a board carrying a board.

[43:28]

So you always are leaving tracing, not like, Dogen says, no trace continuing endlessly. So the effort of our practice is to really be able to do something. It's like I notice the way people work. Some people work they have a job and they do it like they barely fill the outline of it.

[44:36]

And then a better worker fills the outline and adds things, does more, thinks of things to do, is more creative, will do more than just the outline of the job. But still, it's a job they are doing. A third kind is a person that just has their own time And their job is their own time. Such a person gets the job done so quickly. It doesn't fill up the day, something you fill up your life with. Your time, there's no time outside of you. Everything is your time and you just do things. This is what the koan of Zhao Zhou's road is about, one continuous road. He emits one continuous road, it says, or his actions are like flint and spark.

[45:45]

When he speaks, he speaks. Which means when he speaks, what he says is very precise. We find that of preciseness, by which we can find all things return to the One. Like Gao Feng, everything's suddenly lined up by his effort. What is it? What's really going on? Like the little kid saying, I mean, what's really going on? We think kids don't know, what they know. And kids participate in our fuzziness. They learn pretty rapidly. I have to fuzz things up for the parents and adults. And a lot of us get quite confused by it and stay fuzzy.

[46:48]

Bright kids have… and all kids are pretty bright, terrible time with it. It takes so many years for you to uncover your brightness. Anyway, so that's our experiment here, to uncover our brightness, to find a shuso or true monk of no rank in each of you, fish of each of you. So tomorrow please let's do

[47:58]

naming ceremony of naming new shiso.

[48:05]

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