After Sesshin I'd like to talk with all of you about – can you hear me in the back okay? – I'd like to talk with all of you about some of the things that came up during Sesshin Basically, what I did talk about is very simple. That Buddha, supposedly one of the last things Buddha said to his disciples was, you must be a refuge unto yourself, you must work out your own salvation, and if there's no God, or cosmic spirit, or something like that, which you can take refuge in.

[01:09]

In Zen, especially this emphasis, you can only take refuge in yourself. And you have to work out your own freedom. And you can't depend, really. on me or Suzuki Roshi or Zen Center, you must do it. So we do have some aids or tradition which you can make use of and of course Zen Center is such an aid and we're going to have a yearly general meeting this afternoon to talk about how we continue this aid to our practice and what its limits and directions should be. Basically, your salvation or your freedom is your own responsibility, your own working

[02:27]

But, of course, when you look at yourself closely and you look at your experience closely, it's not separate from others' experience. As I said, even if you go to the top of a mountain by yourself, you will be thinking, how do other people see it or feel, or if I wrote a poem or painted this? Many aspects of others' experience will be in you. and in fact you are the creation of several generations. Basho has a line which I always think of, the magnificence of three generations gone as in a single night's dream. Anyway, you are two or three generations, anyway. This is the meaning of son or daughter of good family.

[03:38]

It means you have some experience, not just from your parents, but where your parents came from, has been given to you. And you bring that to practice. So Zen is very simple, you know. Buddha not knowing what to do, having tried everything, he went and sat down under the bow tree. What to do? I think the only idea he supposedly had is, why do I have to suffer, or why does practice have to be ascetic? Perhaps it's okay to feel all right. People say he said something, felt something. So I think he sat down without any idea of actually feeling all right or torturing himself.

[04:40]

At some point we come to our wit's end, hopefully. And not knowing what to do, you sit down. Running doesn't do it. Activity doesn't do it, so you sit down. And the first thing you find out, of course, is you bring a lot to when you sit down. You sit down and then there's all of this stuff, your own understanding, your own experience, your own several generations of accumulation. So, the first direction in practice is right effort. And right effort means to get rid of or examine the understanding you bring when you get here. So, first of all, a place like Zen Center is just to have a place out of the traffic where you can sit down with relatives

[05:56]

relatively free of disturbance. And, see, what kind of understanding you have brought to this place. Suzuki Roshi talks about the worldly street and religious street. And worldly street is, if students come to Zen Center because of how beautiful the farming is at Green Gulp, or because of the grocery store or some reason. This is for worldly, from worldly street. And we should be cautious in what we create to support ourselves. That it isn't a kind of attractive makes them attractive. You should come from the religious street, which Suzuki Roshi meant by that, from your own experience, from coming to your wit's end. You finally, not knowing what to do, say, I'll just sit down and see what happens, see what's there.

[07:05]

Some extremity, you know. The more it's an extremity and the more you are able to not hold back and just give, in fact, give your body to the sitting. And as I said last week at Green Gulch too, It's rather like your parents gave you a body and then you give your body to your parents. They change your diapers and wash your butt and spank you or whatever is done and you, you know, or play with your foot, you know. And in a similar way, when we practice, we give our body to Zazen. and in fact sitting with others, to the person carrying the stick, to someone straightening your posture. There's no longer a feeling of hands off my body. You have come to your wit's end and you're willing to try anything.

[08:15]

I shouldn't say try anything, because One of the spirits of Buddhism is, you know, one of the philosophical backgrounds of Buddhism is going through a lot of reasoning, coming to the conclusion that you have to assume you have everything you need. So you don't try anything in the sense of adding things. In fact, practice a lot is to cut away, to get rid of extraneous things. So one assumption in Buddhism, of course, is everything changes. Another assumption is you have everything you need, but if you examine the universe carefully you can't find where is the center, where is something that's less important. This is carried out to such a point in our practice that we talked about the meal ceremony

[09:24]

And Zen practice, you know, we are given two things in addition by Zen practice. One is the lineage and the other is the sangha or tradition of how to practice. And this is the more characteristic of Zen than any other kind of Buddhism, I think. Lineage and a practice, a way of life together. Some other schools emphasize philosophy or a particular practice you can do anywhere but Zen emphasizes a way of life and lineage as the way to give you a sense of how radical this sitting down is, just sitting. So the meal, simple things of our daily life, eating and bathing and etc., become the ceremonies in Buddhist monastic practice.

[10:37]

And the meal ceremony is particularly interesting. We do many small things in it, you know, how we do the bowls, how we dump out the water the fact that we drink the dishwater, we wash the bowls with water and then we drink some of it and we offer some of it to the cosmos and we touch the side of the garbage dishwater pail with the bowl. All of this is kind of mutual inner penetration, no contamination. an identity of you and the macrocosm and the microcosm. This is the kind of thing that's trying to be expressed here. And it's not an expression like somebody philosophically sat down and figured out, let's do the meal ceremony, according to Huayen philosophy, the most developed, sophisticated Buddhist philosophy, probably.

[11:41]

But rather, from the experience of Zen, When you look at something carefully, doing it just one thing at a time, the clarity of the meal ceremony as a practice comes out. So one of the things we do is, if someone drops something, we don't do the full ceremony, grab your chopstick or a spoon up and hope no one noticed. It makes, particularly when we eat on the tan, it makes quite a clatter, you know. You know, you're sitting there and everybody's silent and everybody's serving the meal and suddenly, blam, blam, blam, blam across the floor and you would love to get it and hope no one noticed, you know. It's quite a natural feeling, you know. But in Zen,

[12:44]

you have to sit and wait and in the traditional way everyone in the zendo stops. And from the back room somewhere someone comes out and comes and picks up your spoon and carries it over to the altar and offers it to you. While you're sitting there mortified. And maybe the more compassionate types are wanting to push their own bowls off just so they can join you in mortification. Hundreds of bowls being offered. So they pick it up and offer it to the altar and bring it over to you and offer it to you And then everyone can start again. But the idea behind this is not punishment.

[13:48]

Though it's very interesting to get at the meaning of this, you have to go through the feeling of being punished or you've made a big fool of, you know, dropping your spoon. Dame. Dame is a Japanese word which means naughty, which is used in monasteries. Dame, dame. But the meaning of it is that everything has equal value. That when we do this ceremony, doing everything one thing at a time, serving in a bowl, eating bowl, first bowl first and second bowl and third bowl, and there's a certain way we use the spoon in the first bowl and the chopsticks in the second and third bowl, etc. everything has a great preciseness and you know exactly what to do and it's worked out quite closely to what is the actually easiest way to do it. When you separate out everything into its units.

[14:51]

So it's natural sometimes people will drop their bowl or their chopstick So it shouldn't be something which is suddenly brushed aside, or I hope no one noticed. It should have equal value with everything else. So, oh, I dropped it, that's all. And you have it brought back to you. someone I know had tea with Mumon Roshi in Japan a while ago. And after spending, I don't know, one day or something with him, or more or less, they had a wonderful time and he got up and said goodbye and walked away.

[16:00]

And this person's feeling was that it all disappeared suddenly. And he wanted to run after Mumon Roshi and tap him on the shoulder and say, Mumon Roshi, don't you remember we just had tea? Maybe would you sign this book or something? To have some evidence that something happened. But this ability to turn away like this comes from this practice, you know, to just, now you're doing this, next time you're doing something else, that's all. This comes from this practice of equal value, everything of equal value, including what you think is wrong. Now, so you dropped your spoon, it becomes just part of the way we eat. So you sit down on your cushion with this feeling of equal value, that you can't find something more valuable over there or in your past or in your future,

[17:06]

you give up some hierarchy of values which railroad you from childhood to old age along some course of life that our culture and parents suggest to us. We are more outlaws than that in Buddhism. So you sit down and bring your body to your practice and bring your personal history to your practice. And right effort then is how to see. You know, the first thing that will come, if you try to give everything equal value, you find out. It's very difficult to do. You have some hierarchy of values, you have some preferences, some

[18:08]

way you think things should be. So next practice then is mindfulness. If you're going to sit down and see what's going on, someone has to be there to see what's going on. You notice you are thinking about this and that. So, sitting zazen without mindfulness is just like riding on a bus. There's no point to zazen unless you make some effort to stay with your experience. So, of course, again, you know, you have a body. You're at your wit's end and you have a body, so you offer your body to the sitting. Then you sit down and you find out your mind is just completely, you know, fluid everywhere.

[19:10]

And often rather disturbing and very comparative. This and that and always some values involved. Who is this person? What is this person's experience? So you start to, what can I, what can I do sitting here? to bring myself back to this thing sitting here. So naturally we count our breathing. That's the simplest thing to do. You find out I'm breathing. Your heartbeat is too complicated to count. So I have an image of everybody sitting wrist-linked. Probably all the hearts would start racing so much, you couldn't do it that way.

[20:14]

So you count your breathing and you see immediately your breath and your mind are very one. So you also can ask yourself questions. What am I doing here? Why am I sitting? What is here? Who is here? What is this experience? It's the other alternative you have to counting your breath, is to ask, what is it? If you say, it is something, you're not sure. And even if you examine, begin to examine your senses, you find out the sound object. What is that sound object? You can't grasp it. All you know is your ear did something. So you begin to extend this mindfulness from your Zazen practice to your daily life.

[21:16]

And again, here again Buddhism gives you some secret. It says, look, you have six senses. mind and taste and seeing and hearing. But what are those six senses? They are constantly caught by endpoints. You know, when you look at it carefully, you think you see something and you recognize it and there's these two endpoints of what you see, the sight object and the sight perception. So the shift in Buddhism is to suggest to you First, you should know your senses themselves. Before you deal with the information they bring you, you better know what is bringing you the information. So we emphasize our sight. Seeing, seeing. Hearing, hearing, etc. And you try to drop the contact with the sense object itself.

[22:23]

And you have more a field or element of hearing, sound in its own element, seeing in its own element. So you find the five skandhas or six sense consciousnesses, you find how you perceive things, how you know the world. when you can again radically, significantly free yourself from the endpoints you are developing the I which reads the sutras outside the scriptures or it says the teaching outside the scriptures. The teaching outside the scriptures is when you begin to find the world through your sense fields rather than the sense objects. So mindfulness becomes not the continual mindfulness of being in contact with things, that too, but the mindfulness of the element of seeing itself, the field of seeing itself.

[23:44]

Your senses, in a sense, fill up. When you do this really, things don't threaten you so much anymore. Your identity doesn't go from this sight object to that sight object to that sight object, this one's good and that one's bad, but it's continual with the sight seeing itself. And whether it takes the form of this object or that object, you don't worry too much about it. So more and more you can have the calmness of everything has equal value. The Abhidharma starts out with, you know, when you have a healthy conscious attitude and the sensuousness of relatedness permeated or characterized by a calmness

[24:55]

and knowledge, then your actual experience of the world can unfold. So, when is first very important. The when means when you're at your wit's end and somehow have the innate wit to sit down So you sit down. What's going on here? I better take stock of what's going on here. Healthy means... Healthy is a very big idea. I can't give you all the feelings of healthy, but basically it's when you come to the idea that you have everything you need, and you can't blame anyone else.

[26:01]

This is a healthy attitude. And conscious means mindfulness. And sensuous relatedness means if you have everything you need and you stop all the extrapolation and you're involved in the sense fields themselves, you're dealing with what's right in front in a very tangible way, not just some idea. And if you have anxiety, if you can shift to this, it's very, very helpful. Well, what is it I'm afraid of? Look, I'm right here. It's very simple-minded, you know. But when you accept it completely, your life will be different. I'm right here on my cushion. What is all this anxiety? folding me. So, we have this kind of experience, very tangible experience of our senses free from influence.

[27:24]

And then, of course, you have this calmness. Next is a concentration, you know, which means really the entrance to concentration is discriminative awareness. And discriminative awareness, you still make distinctions, you know, but the distinctions join things rather than separating things. This is how you begin to practice with discriminative Discriminative awareness. I use the word durnsasheen, looking at how beautiful the sun and green leaves were. Some feeling of congratulation. And the word congratulation means to grasp both sides or warmly some song of praise in Sanskrit. So appreciative discrimination means when you know the value of both sides.

[28:37]

Again, this comes from the radical acceptance of everything of equal value. There's no center in some area that's less important. Given this, you can again look at your own experience with more depth. What is this experience and where does it go or how do I develop? And you begin to be able to because you are free from endpoints. At least the endpoints are loosened up. You can loosen up ego. If you don't get free of endpoints, loosen up endpoints in this way, the idea of no ego is rather dangerous. Some attack on yourself. but it's quite natural, loosening up end points, it becomes difficult to find your ego, to grasp the sense, the sound object.

[29:42]

The idea we have of ourselves, I tried to express it yesterday, as a kind of soup, maybe minestrone soup, and we have these ingredients in the soup, and the soup that you have won't change much, you know, maybe you can add more beans or more tomatoes and it'll be more one kind of soup than another. But there's a sense of, if I'm this kind of person now, probably I was repressing some aspect of myself earlier, there's some sense of sea level or something like that, or some, again, from the three successive generations or from astrology or the stars or something, you have some stencil, some pattern, which affects everything, some destiny. In Buddhism we don't have this kind of emphasis. The emphasis is much, much, much more on new material.

[30:46]

So that, you know, we see the world in Buddhism, if you look either from how we find our own experience or you intellectually try to work it out. All you can say is it's momentary flashing, as Luthier, she said, momentary flashings into the void or into the utter darkness, momentary independent flashing. So when you, the right effort of beginning practice is to see your stencil, the stencil and begin to see the cutouts could be anywhere. So you begin to alter the cutouts. And again, this is one of the reasons we have a place like Zen Center. It's a chance to experience, to experiment with your stencil. And it's a chance to have the reinforcement of other people in the small details of how you stand, how you walk, how you continue yourself through your physical habits.

[32:01]

And as you find out that you barely get along with yourself, you start getting along, trying to get along with yourself, being less ambivalent, and less ambivalent is also appreciative discrimination. And out of appreciative discrimination real concentration can come where there's no ambivalence, no two sides. So finding out your stencil can be changed. You begin to have many different experiences. And each moment you change, like Mumon Roshi. Next moment he is characterized by the particular situation he's in. Sometimes, as I said, you're a husband or wife. Sometimes you're a student or bus rider or shopper.

[33:10]

And this isn't just something simple, you know. It becomes more and more pronounced, you know, that you find yourself on each occasion. The new material, because your stencil has been gotten rid of. So, first getting along with yourself, you begin to try seeing your experiences not separated from others. You experiment with perfecting your personality. It means you get along with others. Why should there be some interference? It doesn't mean you have to be some charming personality who everybody likes, but just why should there be some interference? We ask ourselves that question. So it gives us a chance to find out how our experience is not separated from others. But then, in a more profound way, this freedom from a particular stencil, you find you are a multiple person, that you don't need to anymore try to hang together to a particular package, and when there's something outside that package you get nervous.

[34:27]

Sometimes you'll be this person's friend, and sometimes that person's friend, and people may be angry at you sometimes, because how can he not have the proper political allegiances to Republican or Democrat or hippie or something. So we develop this ability to recognize in ourselves and others multiple personalities, pluralistic flashings into the voice. So, in this sense, your life is thought of as a development which isn't based on your previous history or your particular psychology, so much as your openness to the sensuousness of relatedness, moment after moment. And you find out the person you want to be, the person you could be,

[35:36]

the person you are, the person you were, and then the person you just become on each moment, and you more and more let yourself become on each moment. And of course, this immediately opens you up to other people who are becoming on each moment. They may be resisting, but they are also becoming, and if you are becoming on each moment, they they become becoming on each moment. So that's enough, you know, that's really what I want to say. We start out coming here with our own experience at our wit's end, you know, and we have this karma. And karma, you know, is characterized by two aspects, at least. One is that your karma is its own reward.

[36:43]

You don't have to go around getting the other guy. One of the precepts is, do not harbor ill will. And it means you don't have to worry about it because the other guy's karma is his own or her own reward. and your karma is your own reward. But so many of us are carriers of ill-will from childhood. In fact, the whole constant thought, you know, I've talked about continual thought as mindfulness, which is, you know, fighting fire with fire, because normally we have this constant thought of, what do I do, or what do I think, or how does it affect me, or I'm not good enough, or so-and-so is better, or whatever. That kind of constant thought, by concentration, we try to break. If you can, again, this is getting free of the end points.

[37:47]

So one sense of karma is this, you have your own karma and you don't have to bear the weight of others. And the other sense is that karma is found in your acts and it can be chained by your acts. So you come here again at your wit's end, you sit down and you find your own experience, your own karma. And you see how by constant thought, kind of ill will, you bear it against yourself always. And by concentration you attempt to penetrate it and you try to get rid of your extraneous material. But by, after a few years, you find your experience is no longer tied to what you brought, but is constantly being awakened by the people around you.

[38:51]

And ultimately it means being awakened as Buddha. Among these many personalities of who you could be, who you want to be, who you are, who you were, is also Sambhogakaya Buddha, Nirmanakaya Buddha, Dharmakaya Buddha. And in this way you are each Buddha. And your awakening awakens others. Your becoming on each moment becomes others. and they awaken you and you awaken them. This is the process of Zen practice. And this is the process we try to get started here by our common effort. And about its fruits, we don't know much.

[39:56]

Wherever you go in the world or whatever you do, you have your freedom. Anyway, this much Buddhism tried to do. As I said in session two, you know, we're not so good, you know. Tsukiyoshi was an extraordinary person who came here from Japan by chance, you know. And it wasn't just an ordinary tourist. he brought a great gift to us. And maybe the stream, we can say, tradition he brought to us is rather narrow now. But we are still continuing it, and someone, man or woman, will come along if we continue this stream.

[40:58]

And they will be awakened by it, and maybe they can widen it out again, the likes of the Jewish. And many people can be awakened to this possibility that you can, from your wits' end, find your perfect freedom and your perfect personality, perfected personality. It doesn't mean you never make a mistake. It means your personality is awake with others. So we can do it, and this is what we are trying to do. And we should continue to try. It seems silly, just washing dishes and working in the neighborhood and farming. But these places we meet people, so our activity should be limited

[42:06]

to those things by which we meet people, finding each moment, if possible, our freedom with these circumstances.

[42:20]

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