We don't really know what's going on. Why? As someone said to me today, after six years or more of practicing, they don't know why they're here. Anyway, we don't know why, what we're doing exactly. If you think you do, you're mistaken. It's nice to be able to not know and yet be mistaken. Sounds contradictory. Anyway, since we don't know what we're doing, it's, I think, obvious to anybody who looks carefully that we don't know what we're doing, or who's controlling what, or how we got here, or what's going to happen.

[01:06]

or what life is, we don't know. So since we don't know, we'd be well advised to be more playful and experimental in how you identify with things. Insanity, which is, other than our life, the only thing we have to gain or lose, is characterized usually by a rigid grip on reality or on something. Not by playfulness, but by heavy belief in symbolic meanings.

[02:07]

But we tend to fear playfulness as not serious enough. It's interesting, in recent years, Some of the most productive thinking has been done by religious people, especially by Catholics. Or coming up with ideas that startle us, at least. Like Ivan Ilyich, or Marshall McLuhan, or Dr. Schumacher. And maybe we could include Governor Brown, the present governor. It's in some contrast to what we have been taught about rationality and scientific thinking, etc.

[03:42]

But it's as it should be, I think. I would say that philosophical thinking is characterized by describing things. Religious thinking is characterized by affirming things, without denying a descriptive side, you know, but there's a moral or life or some positive aspect to it that affirms at the same time as describes And religious thinking is more integrated. And there's more conviction. There's more that sense of permission I was talking about yesterday.

[05:14]

And this Zen has some problem, because Zen can easily emphasize self-power, or we did it, you know. There's nothing in us that does it, and by my great willpower, doubt, etc. You lose permission, in this way, and conviction. Like snowing a boyfriend or a girlfriend. You wonder if they like you for yourself or could you snow them? If you did it yourself, this practice. And yet you must be apparent that you don't know. We live in the great realm of not knowing. So you doubt.

[06:20]

you'll doubt your practice. So faith schools of Buddhism and Christianity have this advantage over Zen. Humility is easier and humility is the agent of wisdom. If you are trying to build some reputation, if someone like Ivan Ilyich is trying to build some reputation as a philosopher, or Dr. Schumacher, his thinking will collapse. I think so. Or become nihilistic. you have to remain the agent of unknowing to have permission, or to say things, or act on things that are out of control, or out of our control. So, if you have that confidence, you can come up with something new, some new idea, or you can have the confidence

[08:12]

that it seems Governor Brown exhibits to say in the face of the energy situation. We don't need just more energy to continue our way of life, we have to change our way of life. Nobody almost has the Who's in a position to do anything about it has the courage, ability, confidence to say such a thing. And religion also Catholicism or Buddhism has, and Judaism, has enormous survival instinct or value that I have seen by knowing Catholics and Jews and Buddhists who were really Catholics, Jews or Buddhists.

[09:41]

much more survival value than philosophy. Many... Since I had such a good time with Dr. Schumacher, I'm using him for an example. Many times in our discussion why to do such a thing, or what is the advantage of doing such a thing. He, from Catholicism, although he's inherently a Buddhist, he lived in Burma, I think Burma, quite a while with Buddhist monks, but from Catholicism he would come up with some kind of adage which, based on long experience of Catholics, which is extremely subtle, like to affirm what to do in a situation. Did you attack this? Did you criticize this? No, you don't bother to criticize at all. You just affirm this.

[11:18]

patriarchal Zen, which you're practicing. There's various kinds of Zen, Tathagata Zen and patriarchal Zen. Sometimes I'm talking about one and sometimes the other. But our transmission is patriarchal Zen. And it means the craft of our existence, how we do things. Someone said to me, I believe that Tadagiri Roshi said, an apple, how you put down an apple, the apple knows it. I think that's

[12:31]

I was told. Or the moon is used often in Buddhism. Is the light you see in the sky the moon? Is the light you see reflected in the water the moon? when you are at Dasahara and you hear the stream. The stream is the main fact of the valley, you know, other than the smell. Philip calls Dasahara camp smelly water because of the sulfur smell. But the main fact, you know, is the stream. And yet, What is the stream? Is the water the stream? Or is the bank the stream? Are the stones going over the stream? The bed of the stream is necessary for the stream. Is the splashing the stream? Or the sound the stream? The sound going over you.

[14:03]

Are you the bed of the stream? When you hear the stream, are you the stream just as the rock is the stream? What constitutes being the stream or being one with the stream or part of the stream. Do we have to think about the moon in the water? Is the moon, are the tides of ocean and blood the moon? What do we mean by our common distinction of subject and object? I would say, when you sit sasan, be, sit with your whole being, be completely subject, no subject-object, just be completely subject, sitting with your whole being. When you're acting, be completely object.

[15:39]

You know, you need applied attention first, to applied attention, and then later you just have mirror-like attention. We can lead our life without effort at all, but we have to first make a tremendous effort, you know. Like applied attention takes quite an effort for a while. Now, some forms of Buddhism emphasize performance or drama. Zen more, though, emphasizes craft. We don't imagine a deity. But actually we view the whole world as a deity that we imagine. You know, the world is your lover and your craft is

[16:59]

How you touch things, how you bow, how you walk around. Your mind is, you must know now, your mind is not inside you. Your state of mind is not inside you. Your state of mind includes the apple and the moon and the stream. and isn't separate from your activity. One thing you'll find out, and that will be quite persistent for you, I think, at various stages of your practice, is the degree to which the emotional need for another person is very similar to bodhicitta, or the religious instinct. And at every stage of our life, as it gets better,

[18:36]

We have this tendency to want to create another person. Or create ourselves in another person. I don't just mean making a baby or something like that. But we want some other person to understand us. We want to find our realization in some, you know, anima, as Jungians talk about. Pretty persistent. One way to practice with this is to transform the person, transform people into Deities. So this is

[19:56]

But Zen emphasizes more something like each thing in itself. And although you may try and your relationships may get better and better, and as you practice there's a new stage of success and your relationships may occur. So that hope will come up again to have some realization in another person. And again you'll find out it doesn't work. It won't work. Second marriages work better than first marriages for that reason. Because usually the person may have enough experience to know it won't work. So they make do. Second marriages are make-do marriages. I know this person isn't so good, but I'll do the best I can with it. But you don't expect the person anymore to be better than make-do. They're so grateful, they're willing to put up with you.

[21:23]

So this impulse is transferred, literally practically transferred to the bow. And then the bow is, has a very wide meaning in Zen. First of all, the vow means our sureness or conviction that we can make such a vow. It means you have to have investigated reality with some intensity. It doesn't matter. It's not sort of like Rambo. You have to have tried everything. That's not necessary. But if you actually... What you do is very experimental. You actually see what happens. You don't have to have so much experience. Thoroughly enough, one event includes everything. So you have the conviction to

[23:03]

vow, and to vow to be one with the make-do world. This is a pretty subtle point, too, about patriarchal Zen, because the emphasis, and this is, you know, there are various choices Buddhism can make to try to teach you. I'm trying to point out now some of the choices Zen makes, So Zen doesn't emphasize oneness so much, unifying things, trying to get rid of the make-do, maybe. Make-do is okay, but Zen emphasizes Everything is on the make-do. The make-do includes everything. This is YM philosophy, as I've talked about before. We don't, as I said in a lecture, we don't study X to know X. We study X to know the whole alphabet. X includes the whole, all alphabets.

[24:29]

So in Zen, we choose something. Don't just stand there and choose something. That kind of feeling. It doesn't matter so much what you choose. Actually, if you vow completely, it's Buddhism. It doesn't matter whether you vow to be a Buddhist or not. If you vow to be one with the make-do world, you're a Buddhist. Zen Buddhism. So the conviction that you've come to, that you have no choice but to bow, to settle yourself on yourself, to recognize that what you're doing is what you're doing, and all your thoughts about trying something else, first of all, even if you tried, it's a waste of time.

[25:46]

But mostly you're not going to do them, so why do you do them? Zen means you get tired of all that and you say, okay, this. I don't care what it is, it doesn't have to be Zen. Second, you know, with sureness, that kind of sureness which is necessary, is will. the ability to maintain the vow once you've done it, to hold the vow. This is very closely related to the vow though and to affirmation. It requires that conviction to do something completely. And third, to do something with your stomach. When you're breathing, you're breathing.

[27:17]

Not doing something else. And third is emptiness. The vowel means emptiness because the vowel cuts through your past life. It means you've wiped, you've returned to zero. You've wiped the mirror clean. So again, if you know this, you know, now you're not going to be able to later to adjust anything. You start out from zero and you can't adjust it, you know. So you have no choice but to affirm what you're doing.

[28:21]

So emptiness also means affirmation. Each moment is your only chance. And by these three aspects of the vow, we have composure and calmness. So I think it's a mistake if you are practicing and you think, by Zazen I'm getting composure. That composure will be easily upset, unless it is the composure based on vow. As many of you who've been practicing quite a while realize how fragile your composure is if you haven't vowed yet. By the conviction, strength and emptiness of the vow, you have composure.

[29:40]

you So if you're concerned about your state of mind, if you see what happens when you sacrifice your state of mind, you see how intimate everything you do is with your state of mind. There's no thought.

[31:18]

There's no action, no matter how teeny, that escapes your state of mind. So Zen is a... The transmission of Zen is a craft of how we take care of things. As if, at first, as if they were our mind, eventually recognizing there are a mind. You have found out there's no individual mind or even individual identity except

[32:18]

in the oneness of subject and object. It means you have to give up your usual thinking about differences. The difference is only the other side of oneness. Give up the idea that there's an inside and outside.

[33:32]

a society that's bad or good, and you. There's no need. Let's just look at it just as an experiment. There's no need to identify yourself as separate. And you can try various things, as I said in the beginning. Shift the identity of you to the apple.

[35:13]

We don't know how we exist, so when you bow, feel. If you're going to have a topic in your mind, you know, play with the topic. Feel. Now I'm bowing toward myself. But the cushion or the tatami is you. This kind of experimentation has great survival value. You'll find out that things begin to work for you much better. I've been talking to you all week and I haven't given you a chance to ask any questions or discuss anything yourself. Do you have something We should talk about some question about anything. Yes. My effort feels really coarse. I don't know whether to exert myself back or let it go.

[37:03]

It seems like it's kind of another attempt to sabotage my mind. I don't know what to do. Do you have a more refined effort available? Sometimes. Well, when you have a more refined effort, use it. When you have only coarse effort, you have to use it. As I've been saying, I think slouch is a nice idea. Slouch is our affection for each other, and slouch is our sabotage of ourselves and each other. It's both at the same time. So you have no choice but to sabotage and be affectionate at once. Do you have any choice? If you have coarse effort, you have to have coarse effort. You can't say, I won't make any effort until my effort gets more refined. It's good, everything is very simple. Our mind produces all these instant replays which

[38:37]

We believe in it. It always makes me think of that joke, which isn't very funny, but it's how we exist, you know, winning a bet twice in the instant replay, in sports, television. We're always doing something like that. I thought it was more visible work. If you commit, well, it seems that, I mean, Buddhist have done visible work. It seems awesome. It seems like that work is not visible work. Visible work? Visible work. Awesome. Yeah. I was thinking that once you commit yourself to some visible work,

[39:38]

especially if it's a lot, it becomes almost invisible the way you treat it. For example? For example, if you'd like to have a shield of cabbage or something, and if you don't go out every day and take a little bit of a break or do whatever's necessary, I think you're making, I made a mistake in using the word visible and invisible. I guess I used that because of our tendency to describe a value. But of course, I mean, let's take Tassajara. Tassajara did not exist. I mean, it was a valley there, but it didn't exist as a Zen practice place. And it's quite different, it's interesting. People who come down there just for the valley, not for Zen Buddhism at all. It looks different and feels different.

[41:08]

And they feel differently about the trees and everything. That's quite interesting. But we started Tassajara. That was something, shall we say, visible work. But since then it's been all invisible work. And there's a tendency to say, well, we should go on for people in their life to say, we should go on to another tassara and another this and another that. And it's not necessary to ever do tassara. Maybe it's not sad for the people who have to create tassara. It's much better. Now tassara should exist for 1,000 years. So most things exist like that. In fact, there's some danger in trying to make it visible, to try to talk about it, or explain it to a friend or something.

[42:39]

The power, you know, I'm trying to emphasize, the power of just breathing. If you vow, you know, if you really have taken that kind of vow, where you're just where you are, vowing to be one with the make-do, your breathing itself becomes joyous. It's the work you're always doing, breathing and heart beating. And usually we don't enjoy it, as I've said. Breathing is one of the great pleasures. It feels so wonderful. It goes in, goes out. It has coolness and warmness associated with it, and various odors. Various people are on it. You can smell people. It goes everywhere and affects our state of mind. It's like some athletic event. People who run, jog, you know, get very excited about that breathing. They get pretty stoned, you know. I've talked to a number of athletes who talk about how

[44:14]

Not till they started to do zazen did they ever feel like they did on a football field after they passed a certain point and their body and breathing took over. I think that's true. Our existence is a kind of athletic event, if you are present in it. Yes. Yeah. I think literally, the vow, I vow to save all sentient beings, literally translated is something like, means something like, all sentient beings vow to save all sentient beings. Or all sentient beings, by being all sentient beings, are saving all sentient beings. It's very, you know, it's just a mirror.

[46:09]

But the fact that anyone bothers to say it then presupposes some relationship in there, some activity, some relative and fundamental densities. So it means, I vow to save all sentient beings, but it can also be all sentient beings. vow to save me or give me permission to exist. That expresses part of what I mean, but what I mean exactly is that permission and vow are the same thing. I use permission to emphasize the degree to which you live exists, really exists, by the will of others, by the willingness of others, by the whim even of others. And yet that does not rob us of the

[47:41]

responsibility of being completely individual. I think my example of we don't get up because the sun gets up, we get up because we get up, the sun gets up because it gets up, is what I mean. Just because we can say interdependency, sun and moon, doesn't mean we don't have equal responsibility with the sun to come up in the morning. So it's a vow to save at the same time as the permission. Yes? What is Buddhist faith? because there's nothing to have faith in, but can faith be in Buddhism? No. If I had to fill out a blank on an application that said religion, the thing that would pop into my mind would not necessarily be Buddhism, nothing in particular would come to mind. What would you put down?

[49:06]

or something like that. That means you're a Buddhist. It's the secret sign. You mentioned people who are really Catholics, who are really Buddhists, who really have this survival quality. It's possible to be a person to whom Shikzazen is fundamentally absorbing and important, but what is Buddhist in the sense that you use that term? I've got to give you a talk about Buddhist faith. I didn't understand what he said. That wasn't Category's fault. I'll try to do as well as Category. I'm trying to imagine what the Buddhists should put in a form for his talk.

[50:17]

Maybe not applicable. Maybe an atheist would put, you know, a line too, but only a Buddhist would put not applicable. Well, there's two questions there, at least on the words. One is, you know, what is a real Buddhist? And the other is, what is faith in Buddhism? A rather hard question to answer, particularly if you compare it to what is a real Catholic or what is a real Jew.

[51:39]

in the sense of a religious way. I suppose we can say that, first of all, a religion usually has an overall description or non-description Buddhism is a kind of overall non-description of reality, an enormous attempt to point out that you can't describe it, to avoid being in the position of describing. But given the description or non-description, within the range of Buddhism itself are not different than, I think, being Catholic or practicing Orthodox Jew or Hasidic Jew or something.

[53:10]

The great body, you know, description or non-description, isn't very useful to you. We have to take some pivotal point in it that's realizable, able you can act on it in your life. You know, some people, some persons, have worked out what happens within the context of this larger description or non-description, what happens if you use this pivot, okay? Zen, I've been talking about now, uses certain pivots. Others can be used, but You know, let me use the example of marriage. If you have one boyfriend or girlfriend after another, it's rather like, throughout your life, it's rather like airports all over the world, they're the same. If you want to find out about Burma

[54:48]

Japan or America or France. You have to leave the airport and live in the country for a while. You have to live in one place for a while. And there's no way on the planet to meet your mate that you know after five years without going through five years. See what I mean? The person you marry at point zero and the person you're married to after five years are two different people, more different than one new person after another, by far. And there's no way to meet that five-year maturity of being with someone five years. You can't meet such a person. The only way you can meet such a person is to stay with someone five years. There's no other way. So, practice is much like that. the pivot of a particular... The reason we can't jump from one school of Buddhism to another is the pivot that you use in your practice is different after five years than one Sazen after five years, or the craft of practice is different.

[56:18]

Someone who, by a real Catholic, I mean someone who has chosen, usually because of their school or teacher or tradition, some pivot or group of pivots that they work with. And they actually are present in everything they do. They stay with it over a long period of time. But reality is different by staying with things, and it's the same by skipping around. the depth of things comes out by repetition. And when you realize, as I've said, how infinite and beyond our knowing everything is, you know that you can't skip around because the degree to which you can try this and that is so infinitesimal. But if you did everything every day, you did a different thing, it would still be, you know, equivalent to doing starting one thing once in the vast scale. I've tried to talk about this by talking about restaurants in Kyoto, if you remember. How there are more and more restaurants. And they're great. None of them are trying to be Ernie's, you know.

[57:47]

That's the restaurant. They don't have some idea. They don't think I should be on top because they realize it's so vast that there's no top. So you can just be a superb French restaurant on the corner here. We may have one, I hope. I'm a vegetarian. I'll lose my point if I keep going. So, to stay with one thing is where you find difference. And you don't stay with one thing by trying to make it interesting. You know, to find variety in that, you just do it. Anyway, a person who does this is... everything becomes... it seems it's very easy for them to find the wisdom in things. And in this sense, Buddhist practice and Buddhist or Christian are very similar.

[59:20]

practice among many religions. Very similar, not much difference in my experience. As for faith in Buddhism, I think I'd like to make it as simple as saying there's no alternative. There's no alternative to trusting. You don't, as I've often said, even if someone's conning you, You don't have any alternative but to trust the person, trust them to con you. That's not what I mean. You hardly notice the conning going on, you are affirming them. I think that's enough.

[60:29]

So you have, as I always say, everything you need. There's nothing lacking. And if you think, oh, there's something lacking or my zazen isn't so good, remind yourself there's nothing lacking. And don't worry about whether you're going to convince yourself whether it's true or not. Just say it. It's like Dogon says, a bird doesn't fly from knowing the limits of the sky or after knowing the limits of the sky a bird doesn't fly. A bird just flies. If you try to make sure there's nothing lacking before you believe that, you won't fly.

[61:56]

That's what affirmation means. Okay, but because of emptiness, there's doubt, but because you always return to emptiness, there's doubt, but there's affirmation. Faith and doubt are the same activity. I don't want to give a whole lecture, so I won't say so much. So you're able to just say, doubting or not, you're able to try on. and say nothing is lacking, you sit with your whole being, being, as I said, completely subject. Effort means when you find yourself turning into subject and object, you find out by your own craft of your own being how to return to being just subject.

[63:18]

That continuous effort, isn't it? I would like to come to Sashin and hound you. I'd like to wander up and down the aisles and poking you. And whenever I saw, I could see it immediately, you know, when you're a subject and object. I'd be exhausted, and you'd be exhausted, and most of you wouldn't come back. So, I more or less leave the session up to you. And I'll get you later. I'm lying in wait. Sometimes it does arra, sometimes where you don't expect it.

[64:21]

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