Good morning. Suzuki Roshi said one time, don't sacrifice this moment for the future. And don't be bound by your past or try to escape from it either. The most important thing is to accept yourself, to have true subjectivity in each moment. You should think This is the only reality.

[01:05]

The only Buddha. I can see. I can experience. I can have. I can worship. At that time, you are Buddha. Buddha. So these are just a few lines actually in response to a question that Suzuki Roshi was asked. But as is sometimes not infrequently the case, just these few lines from Suzuki Roshi kind of encapsulate all of Buddhist teaching right there. the essence of Buddha's practice, how to be a Buddha, how to follow the Buddha way.

[02:18]

At that time, you are Buddha. And in another way, he is telling us how to be present. how to be present in our life, how to be fully in our life, how to have a fulfilled life where we are fully filled up, fully filled up life. I order stamps on the telephone from the U.S.

[03:23]

Postal Service. But when they answer the phone, they don't say, hello, this is the U.S. Postal Service. They say, this is the philatelic fulfillment services. You can be philatelically fulfilled. by conversing with them and getting their products. The forever stamp or other things. So how do we have a fulfilled life? How are we present for our life in each moment? And I was studying this passage, just four or five sentences, and found it quite delightful, actually, to follow Suzuki Roshi's train of thought.

[04:32]

You can, you know, he was just speaking extemporaneously. He was just talking, you know. But you can see exactly... how should we be present? Don't sacrifice this moment for the future. Then when he said future, he must have thought of the past. Then he said, and don't be bound by your past. Then knowing that he was talking to young people in the late 60s, He knew that if he said, don't be bound by your past, they would think that meant you could do whatever you wanted and it wouldn't matter, as though there were no karmic consequences. So then he added, don't be bound by your past and don't try to escape from it either. So that's quite complete.

[05:35]

Then from another direction, kind of a... I don't know if it's deeper or different or what, the most important point is to accept yourself. How to live a fulfilled life, a life where you're fully filling up, fully feeling and fully filling up. Fully filling up often has to do with fully feeling, actually. And we'll see if we can get a good tongue twister out of this. Anyway, the most important thing is to accept yourself, which means to have true subjectivity in each moment, which means you should think.

[06:42]

This is the only reality, the only Buddha I can have, I can experience, I can see, I can worship. At that time, you are Buddha. At that time, you are Buddha. So I want with you to listen, listen to what he's telling us here. It's very, I think, very unusual. Not go somewhere else, not go to the dusty realms of other lands, not accomplish some particular thing, not some particular state of mind. This is the only reality. This. This. This.

[07:45]

This one right here, okay? Wherever this is, whatever this is, this is the only reality. So this is about what he's telling us about is how to be in our life, how to fully be in our life. To accept yourself should not be misunderstood as some kind of passivity, quiescence, anything is okay, it doesn't matter what happens to me. No, not like that. It's not some prescription for not acting in the world. To accept yourself is to have true subjectivity.

[08:51]

true subjectivity means not to see our life objectively. I was speaking with someone a few months ago and he was telling me a very successful, a person who in the world is very successful by the usual by the usual measures of such things. And he was telling me about relationships that he has in his family with his wife and his children and so on. And he said, I know how to manage my relationships very well, but I don't know how to be in them. That's the difference between... Objective and subjective.

[09:57]

He's operating his life as though it were an object. And managing quite well. Case management, his case management is quite good. He's managing his own case. But he's having trouble being inside his life. Sitting inside of his life. Someone else told me about a dream they had, quite enjoyable. The person is, she's walking through these very large, in the dream, walking through these very large spaces, like Grand Central Station, those kinds of big, big spaces, and there are lots of people, and they're all very purposefully going. moving someplace. And the dreamer, I've forgotten exactly how she said it, she wants something or she knows she needs something, but she's not clear about what.

[11:10]

So she's walking along and along the walls of various places are various acronyms. She doesn't understand any of the acronyms. So finally she walks through a number of these halls and finally she gets to this desk and there's a man and a woman at the desk. It's a help desk. And she pulls out from her pocket, she pulls out a map and points on the map to show the man and the woman and says, I am here. but I don't know where here is. She wanted help in finding out where here is. I think that's a very common feeling.

[12:14]

I am here, but I don't know where here is. So being present for our life, being in our life, this is the only reality, is going further and further into where here is. Fully appreciating where here is. Not so much emphasis on going there. Staying here. Uchiyama Roshi calls this living out the reality of our life. Living out the reality of our life. And on the surface of it, you say, well, yeah.

[13:18]

That doesn't sound like much, you know. What else are you going to do, you know? But live out the reality of your life. But he means this kind of... He really means living out the reality of your life. Living here. Being rooted in... This is the only reality. To me, it's kind of extraordinary. This is the only reality. This is the only Buddha I can see, experience, have, worship. This? You know, Jack Nicholson, when he went into the psychiatrist's waiting room, he said, is this as good as it gets? Is this as good as it gets? The answer is yes. This is as good as it gets. And then, in the movie, you know, his life opened up. He opened up his life by... It looked like he went out and did things, but actually it had to do with being more in himself.

[14:33]

So the emphasis is staying here. Oh, the emphasis is not on control and strategy. The emphasis is on living our life fully from a subjective perspective, from inside our life. Some of you may have been here a few weeks ago when Ed Brown spoke and he was speaking, as he often does, very humorously and very deeply about how afraid we are

[15:42]

have the experience that we have. You know, he was talking about going to the Mac store up in Corte Madera and feeling overwhelmed. And then the person, the counter person said, oh, have you tried meditations? She thinks meditation is how you get from overwhelmed to not overwhelmed. She thinks meditation, Zen, is how you get out of being where you are and get to some other much better place called not overwhelmed and calm and beautiful, young, and I don't know what else. Like years ago, my sister's boyfriend thought that because I was a Zen practitioner, when we went out to lunch, a parking space would open up near the restaurant.

[17:00]

It didn't. So Suzuki Roshi's encouragement is wherever the parking space is, is good enough. just like Winnicott said, good enough. Our culture does not help so much in this way. Our culture, because we're individually anxious and afraid and insecure, and our culture is anxious and afraid and insecure, So we have symptomatic eruptions of what happens when we're not encouraged to live deeply in our life.

[18:07]

Symptomatic eruptions like distraction, [...] distraction. Or now it's like when you watch the TV, the image changes every second, two seconds. So we get attention deficit disorder. These are symptomatic eruptions. Or the person, us, you, me. So we've got our cell phones and our this and our... Someone told me the other day, I went into Rainbow Grocery, which is a grocery store in San Francisco, looking for the thing that would change my life. And I found it. But I didn't find it in the Rainbow Grocery store. And then she reached into her purse, iPod Touch.

[19:10]

So we've got our iPod touches and our cell phones and our this and our that, our different things we're connected to. And then when we get unplugged, it's like, well, what do I do now? We're unplugged. I have no email to answer. What is the purpose of my life? And then on the political scene, I think a symptomatic eruption, I believe, of this same phenomena. this wrong-headedness or unfortunate lack of wisdom is fundamentalistic thinking, fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, Buddhist fundamentalism, This is the way we retreat from our experience due to the fear that we have of having the experience that we have, due to the fear of being in our life, which Suzuki Roshi is encouraging us to find our home in.

[20:29]

This well-known psychologist, Winnicott, called it the fear of breakdown. We're afraid of breaking down. Because if we break down who's going to hold us up, what's going to hold us up? Buddha, Dharma and Sangha holds us up, contains us. There's a Zen story, I think, that is illustrative of this point that I want to bring in, which is from a collection of Zen stories, a collection of koans called Mumongkan.

[21:45]

Some of you are very familiar with it. This is the ninth story. in that collection, case number nine from the Mumongkan. Mumongkan, the title is relevant to what I'm talking about. It's translated as gateless barrier. Mu is no, mon is gate, and kan means barrier or checkpoint. no gate checkpoint, no gate barrier, sometimes no gate gate, gateless gate, the gateless barrier or the gateless gate. So sometimes we have a gate. Oh, oh, let's see here.

[22:46]

So this gateless gate has a number of different interpretations. One is, it turns, so one of them is just that Mumon is the name of the man who, that happened to be the name of the guy who compiled these stories. So one understanding of the title is that these are the barriers that this fellow Mumon set up and see if you can get through these barriers into, you know, understanding. So it's Mumon's Gate. Mumon's barrier. Does that make sense? So that's one way. Then another way is usually at a gate or at a barrier, at a checkpoint, there's a gate and you go through the gate and then you go from this side of the gate to the other side of the gate. You go from here to there. But gateless gate, gateless barrier means you get to the barrier

[23:48]

No gate. Gateless. Like a wall. You know, like walking up to a wall and saying, okay, let's go through the gate. Now, there is no gate. It's just a wall. So, that's the second meaning. And then the third meaning, simultaneously, is gateless no gate, barrier, in the sense that you get to the barrier, you get to the checkpoint, and there's no gate there. You just walk through. No door at all. Do you understand that different way? So the second way and the third way are kind of like opposite. The second way is there's no way through. And the third way is it's completely through. Every way is a way through. This every way is a way through, which is the same place as there is no way through, is this is the only reality.

[24:58]

This is the only Buddha I can see, I can experience, I can have, I can worship. That's the same thing. Speaking about our life, our life as it is at any given moment. There's no way through and it's completely free and open at the same time. So this is case number nine in the Mumonkan, and it's just a very brief interchange between a student and a teacher. And the student is asking a question. He asks a question, the teacher answers. He asks another question, the teacher answers. That's the whole thing. That's the whole story. The student is asking a question about a Buddha whose name is supremely pervading, surpassing wisdom. That's his name. When I was studying it, I got tired of saying to myself, supremely, it's kind of another tongue twister, supremely pervading surpassing wisdom.

[26:10]

So I was just SPSW for short. Which has the further advantage that the last two letters are the same as my initials. Supremely pervading Steve Weintraub. So he's asking a question about this Buddha. So the student says, the Buddha, supremely pervading, surpassing wisdom, sat on the Bodhi seat for 10 kalpas. But the Dharma of the Buddhas was not manifest and he did not attain Buddhahood. Why is this? The teacher says, your question, is exactly to the point. They always say things like that. You can't get any satisfaction from these people.

[27:14]

Thanks a lot. Your question is exactly to the point. Then the student says, Then the student says, but he sat on the Bodhi seat for 10 kalpas. Why couldn't he attain Buddhahood? And the teacher says, it's not really a joke. The teacher says, because he is a non-attained Buddha. So. We're going to get to that in a minute. The non-attained Buddha. So this Buddha, supremely pervading surpassing wisdom, apparently is first mentioned in the Lotus Sutra in Chapter 7.

[28:24]

I don't know how extensively he is mentioned there. But then also in our... chanting here that we do at Green Gulch. In the morning, one of the things that we chant is called the Hokyo Zammai, the Jeweled Mirror Samadhi. And in the Jeweled Mirror Samadhi, we say, if you want to conform to the ancient way, please observe the sages of former times. When about to fulfill the way of Buddhahood, one gazed at a tree for ten eons. That's the same guy. They're talking about the same fellow. In the Ogyazama, he says, gazed at a tree. And in this story, he says, he sat on the Bodhi seat, which means under the Bodhi tree, which is where Shakyamuni Buddha attained enlightenment. So, gazed at the tree. He sat under the Bodhi tree and was looking at and was doing zazen under the Bodhi tree. which is a very propitious place.

[29:27]

It's a very good place to do zazen because, after all, Shakyamuni Buddha attained enlightenment there. But our guy, supremely pervading, surpassing wisdom, sat there for ten kalpas. Ten kalpas. Also in the commentary, it clarifies that kalpas actually come in three sizes. Short, medium, and long. Like espresso drinks, right? A grande and a calpa. So it's not clear whether this, but a calpa is a really long time. A calpa, it takes, one calpa is you've got a mountain that's a mile high and a mile wide made out of solid iron. And every three years, a bird comes down and brushes her wing against the mountain.

[30:27]

A calpit is the amount of time it takes for that mountain to erode down to nothing. Those Indians had a really good imaginative way of talking about things. Actually, it's a very subjective way of talking about it. It's not, you know, X billion numbers of, you know, measured with an atomic clock and so on and so forth. Every three years. So, so he sat there for a long, long, long, long time. And so I was thinking, well, what did he do while he was there sitting under the Bodhi seat for 10 kalpas, sat there and I was imagining that, you know, occasionally he would get up, have lunch, go for a walk, talk to people, get on the bus, get off the bus, whatever.

[31:36]

It's a long, long, long, long time. Whatever he did, he was inside his life. His name is supremely pervading, surpassing wisdom. It means the wisdom we're talking about pervades, pervades enlightenment and non-enlightenment, attainment and non-attainment. It supremely pervades all over. Supremely pervading all over means this is the only reality. Same thing. That's why the teacher says, your question is exactly to the point. The student is asking about some objective. He sat there for ten kalpas. Why didn't he attain enlightenment?

[32:38]

It's a very good objective question. The teacher is saying, never mind objective. Just never mind him even. Just objective. Your question, your life is exactly to the point. That's what you should be thinking about, buddy. Never mind this other person. That's you. You are the other person. Ask from that perspective. Ask from the subjective perspective. I don't know if the student heard that response at all. Because then he says, You know, in Shakespeare's plays, there's very few stage directions. And occasionally there'll be parenthesis, he dies, end parenthesis, you know, just a little bit, you know. It's a lot of he dies or she dies in various plays. But there's not much in the way, or exit, or exhumed, the plural of exit, right?

[33:41]

But not much in the way of stage directions, but apparently... Shakespearean actors, if you're a good actor, from the words you get the stage directions. You understand what the stage directions are. So I was kind of imagining the stage directions for this little conversation. So the teacher says, your question is exactly to the point. My imagination is that the student that says, but, [...] What? You know, with increasing hysteria. That's the stage direction. But he sat on the seat for ten kalpas. Why couldn't he attain Buddhahood? And then the teacher kind of caps it with, because he's a non-attained Buddha. So non-attained Buddha again kind of goes against our, it's oxymoronic, right?

[34:54]

We think Buddha means you attain Buddhahood. How could you have a Buddha without attaining Buddhahood? But apparently Buddhahood, Buddha, is not conditioned by attainment. It's not dependent on attainment the way we usually think. So again, to translate it into English, we can take our Buddhahood and put in fulfilled life. Our fulfilled life is not dependent on some particular purpose place to go, place to be, you know, there-ness that we have to get to. Our fulfilled life is different than that.

[35:55]

It's for ten kalpas being inside our life. And of course, from a subjective point of view, ten kalpas doesn't mean anything. Ten kalpas or ten seconds or ten billion years or it has no meaning anymore. It doesn't have the same meaning, let's put it that way, as an objective, so-called objective assessment. We don't take refuge in the objective assessment. We take refuge in being, as Suzuki Roshi said, how did he say it? Accept yourself to have true subjectivity in each moment. That's the refuge of practice. A similar instance that happened to me many years ago, I was meeting with Sojin Mel Weitzman.

[36:59]

We used to meet at that time, this is 20, 25 years ago, we used to meet at that time every week. You know, you say, hello, how are you? Good, you know, how are you? And then we study something together. So he said, well, how are you? And I said, pretty wobbly. And I felt pretty wobbly. I felt insecure and unclear and lacking in confidence. Not a puffed up kind of confidence, just regular old confidence. And upset. Lost. So I said, pretty wobbly.

[38:01]

And he said, wobbly Buddha. Same thing. I don't think he had just read this koan either. That's what he said, wobbly Buddha. Again, that same kind of, how could that be? So no matter what adjective we put next to Buddha, Buddha stays Buddha. Wobbly Buddha, calm Buddha, confident Buddha, lacking in confident Buddha, depressed Buddha, anxious Buddha. All our Buddhas, from a subjective perspective, we practice from the place of the Buddhahood of the current moment. of where we are. Which is different than... This is like going through...

[39:20]

a gateless gate. This is like different than going from here to there. It's more like baseball, right, where you come home. That's the home run. It's when you come home. So in this way, our Zen practice, Zazen, and Zen practice is an encouragement to us, an encouragement toward presence, being present, being stable, being patient.

[40:27]

presence, stability, and patience. Suzuki Roshi had various phrases and sometimes words that he would like, that he used often. One of them was composure. To meet our life with composure. To meet the circumstances of our life with presence, stability and patience. These are the elements of composure. In the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. So you may... have worked very hard in your life, very sincerely, but the world does not reciprocate, does not recognize, reward that very sincere, hard work.

[41:50]

Or you may have been very loyal to your friends or people you work with. And then when push comes to shove and you need their help, they don't help. They don't return the loyalty that you extended to them. Or you may be born into a family that's very troubled. And then you have to, and then you have been, then you experience, you take in that trouble. And it may take a long time to work it out. you may you may be just fine and everything is just rolling along just very nicely and then suddenly inexplicably senselessly some terrible tragedy happens to someone who you love traumatic

[43:27]

and tragic. These things are very difficult. These slings and arrows are very difficult to meet with composure. We usually either freak out or deny, avoid, denial and avoidance, distraction, etc. Those are useful sometimes, but maybe not so much ongoingly. Composure is neither, neither of those. Very difficult to do in certain circumstances and very fundamental.

[44:32]

to Buddhist teaching. This is, so to speak, an area of our specialty, living our life with composure, particularly in the face of difficulty. Shakyamuni Buddha said, It may be historically said, but mythically said, archetypally said, I teach dukkha and the release from dukkha. That's all I do. I teach only dukkha and the release from dukkha. I'm using the Sanskrit because dukkha is the Sanskrit word which usually is translated as suffering. I teach suffering and the release from suffering. But I think suffering can be confusing.

[45:35]

Can be confusing. I think more specifically what is being referred to is that kind of suffering that results from things that are beyond our control and not amenable to our strategy. So Some way to, oh, a one-worder that I think carries that is unsatisfactoriness. This is a long word. So as a phrase, it would be, I teach about how things don't work out the way we want them to. That's dukkha. And if you look at the main examples, In the Dharma Chakra Pravartana Sutra, the main examples that he gives right away are old age, sickness, and death.

[46:41]

That we have no control over. Despite whatever strategy we... You know, we can strategize. And we do. But it's pretty clear. Our strategies certainly have no effect on one of those three, right? And can have some effect on old age and sickness. Old age, sickness and death, and then very common human experiences being separated from those we love. And situations we enjoy. And being stuck with people who we don't like. And situations we don't like. I teach only dukkha and the release from dukkha.

[47:51]

I teach only... I teach particularly about those situations that are beyond our control and not amenable to our strategy and how to respond to those in a wise way. What is the wisest response we can have? I was thinking there are two kinds of problems. Problems we can solve and problems we can't solve. If you can solve them, then we should solve them.

[48:55]

We should go through the gate and we're on the other side of the gate in solution land. We're there. We've solved them. But there are other ones that you are not, they don't have any gate. There's no gate there. There's no gate, it's a gateless gate. There's a gate, but it's not a gate. There's a way through, but it's not some usual way through. So, in that circumstance, when it's that way, we can hear Suzuki Roshi

[50:05]

same the most important thing is to accept yourself to have true subjectivity in each moment you should think this is the only reality the only Buddha I can see experience have worship at that time you are a Buddha Thank you.

[50:43]

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