Good evening, and welcome to another Wednesday stroll through the twilight labyrinths of the mind. If there is such a thing as the mind, Year after year, I dug in the earth, looking for the blue of heaven, only to feel the pile of dirt choking me, until once, in the dead of night, I tripped over a broken brick and kicked it into the air

[01:06]

and saw that I had, without a thought, smashed the bones of the empty sky. Year after year I dug in the earth, looking for the blue of heaven, only to feel the pile of dirt choking me. Until once, in the dead of night, I tripped on a broken brick and kicked it into the air, That's all that I had without a thought smashed the bones of the empty sky. We're told that's the enlightenment poem of a famous Buddhist priest named Muso Soseki. Lived in the 13th century. Born a few years after Dogen died actually. Very tempestuous time in Japan.

[02:10]

Soseki's famous for his gardens, Japanese gardens. Even to this day, people revere his name. I think it's a... What is it pronounced? Kokidera? Kokidera? Kokidera. It's a moss garden in Kyoto. Favorite spot for tourists to go to, and locals too, the garden that he planted. Year after year I dug in the earth looking for the blue of heaven, only to feel the pile of dirt choking me. Year after year, we, I'll say we. It's a generic we. It probably doesn't necessarily have anything to do with you, but let's just use we.

[03:16]

I've been called to task for using various pronouns. And so we tonight will be just wherever the glove fits. This talk is supposedly about wisdom, paramita. What is wisdom, after all, in the Buddhist tradition, in the Mahayana tradition? Well, if you're talking about it, we have been talking about it since, until we're blue in the face, digging in the earth and looking for the blue of heaven by talking about it. But we have to say something. We have to use words, even though the very teaching itself tells us, with words, the thought and language. What is it that the third patriarch of Chinese Zen said?

[04:21]

The more you think about it and talk about it, the further you go from the truth. we will think about it and talk about it anyway, since that's what we love to do. Anyway, I like that poem, you know, smash the bones of the empty sky. This verb is very powerful. It reminds me of Dogen's death poem, which goes, 54 years, 54 years lighting up the sky, a quivering leap, smashes a billion worlds. A quivering leap smashes a billion worlds. Ha! Entire body looks for nothing. Living, I plunge into the yellow streams. The yellow springs is, as you know, another way of saying death. Smashed through...

[05:29]

I think, you know, we're just already buried under too much information. We should have a Wednesday night where we come here and open up a little spigot and all this eons of stuff that we put in there that has told us who and what we think we are to be drained out. That's supposedly what Zazen does, you know. It opens up a little spigot in the head and outflows all of the stuff that we have been stuffing it with since before we can remember even. With descriptions and explanations and explications of all kinds. Hoping by digging in the earth, by digging into the books, by Getting some explanation, we're finally going to get there.

[06:38]

We've got this questing mind, don't we? The human being has this questing mind. Individuals have it. Nations have it. Always setting off for the voyage to far horizon to get to that place that's across that street. We even have that metaphor here. Paramita is going to take us across The stream, what stream, you know? What ocean are we going to cross anyway? We're told again and again, just this is it. All you have to do is eat, sleep, drink some water, move your bowels, maybe have a friend or two, and that's it. You don't need anything else but that. But, you know, we don't believe that. We really just don't believe that. Well, it doesn't sound like life's much fun that way. And what we want, above all else, is to be entertained by the force of our experience.

[07:43]

So we set out like the conquistadores, you know, looking for the fountain of youth, the fountain of realization and knowledge. The elixir, the golden city. the enlightened place to be. I'm not saying, you know, I'm not even suggesting that there aren't, that what these poems are, what these poems are suggesting is that, and I like that verb, is smashing through this usual mindset that we have, by which we try to grasp some understanding, rather, that's going to free us. And that we don't seem to realize that very desire, that very grasping is the problem. And of course, if someone tells us to just give it up, that's just another instruction, you see. So we're kind of caught in this dilemma, I feel.

[08:43]

We're caught in a... We're hoisted on the card of our own mind, hoping to get free that by talking about it, by enumerating the various techniques and strategies by which to manipulate ourselves and our minds that we can get somewhere. other than where we are. We want to get value for our efforts. And even in spite of the fact we've read and hear day after day that Dogen says, what is it Dogen says? Zazen is not a matter of intellectual understanding. It is the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. not a matter of trying to grasp some idea rather it's a matter of letting that all go the question is how do we let it go you see and there's nothing you can do to make it go because the more you try to get rid of it or drop it off or not think about it and just busy yourself in it or ordinary activities a day the more you're haunted by this feeling that somewhere just over the horizon

[10:02]

is this Eldorado called freedom or enlightenment or happiness, as if we knew even what happiness is. The age of, you know, in the East, they never had an age of enlightenment or renaissance like we have. Because in the Middle Ages, I'm told, if I remember my history lessons correctly, Middle Ages, there wasn't, people do not think of the self the way we do. You were a soul undergoing a kind of test in this world under the auspices of the authority of the church, whether or not you're going to make it into a better life after you die. They only had half the picture that the East had it. When you're born, you're just born.

[11:03]

You're not talking about where you might have come from. But when you die, apparently you're going to go on forever somewhere. And you want to go on in a place that's better than this world. And if you follow these proscriptions, and proscriptions, and prescriptions, you will by chance arrive there. But at some point, you know, when was it? Around the 12th century that the first Renaissance happened, the kind of architecture, the Gothic age. Gothic architecture and Aquinas. Aquinas, wasn't it Aquinas who wrote about the tabula rasa? That you're born with a soul that is imprinted with all of the information. And that inspiration and that information is the spirit of God. And so on. That's not so different from what they were saying in the East in some sense. But at some point, you know, because of conditions, actually a rising middle class, more wealth for people, people didn't no longer necessarily believe there was this way you had to be in the world.

[12:19]

By the time you get to the Italian Renaissance, which is what, 14th century, the 16th or 17th, then what is it? Man becomes man. The human being becomes the measure of all things. Not God, not the afterlife, not the transformation, but life on earth here in a more secular emphasis. And of course after that there was as technology grew and knowledge grew and a whole new set of reference points about who and what we think we are, that we begin to free ourselves from the bindings of authority, sacred authority, so-called. And we could depend on our minds, our rationality, reason, the age of reason, you know, before the revolutions in France,

[13:29]

And they said that God died. God was dead then. And we're stuck with ourselves. And nobody seems to be very happy with that either ever since. Ever since we lost God, we've gone back looking for him, even if we have to go to the Far East to find it or him somehow. I just find this whole business very curious. That this seems to be part of our human condition to do this. and the need to do this I don't believe we can make realization happen I believe we can set conditions but I think the very effort to make something like

[14:37]

that happened to us becomes part of the problem, be part of the problem for us. We have a tremendous interest and investment in our thinking, minds, ever since the age of enlightenment, so to speak. That if we read enough books and study enough, we're going to get somewhere. Scholasticism. even though most of the poems by these ancestors, we call them, try to tell us that that is not the way. What is it? I got the Xing Xing Ming here. The Xing Xing Ming, the faith in our natural, the way we just are. I had it in here somewhere. anyway as you know the opening line is the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences it only excludes picking and choosing once you stop loving and hating enlightenment or the way will enlighten itself is one translation

[16:26]

You stop picking and choosing. It's going to be one of those kind of nights for me, I guess. I'm looking for what I owe. I thought I had my papers in order. Sorry about that. At the end of this poem it says emptiness here, emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes. Infinitely large, infinitely small, no difference for definitions. Definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen. Now that's what these poems suggest to me. You're breaking through the definitions all at once. Smashing all those definitions.

[17:34]

Including this stuff, of course. So too with being and non-being. Don't waste time and doubt and arguments that have nothing to do with this. One thing, all things move among and intermingle without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. Now we're getting closer to home. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. I don't know about you folks sitting in this room, but I would gather, I would wager, I should say, that at least half of the people sitting in this room feel or have felt They're not good enough. Not smart enough. On some account. Basically, you know.

[18:38]

We have anxiety about who we are and how we are in the world. And if we can just get on the right ship, the good ship enlightenment that will take us to the new world somewhere, we will be okay. Even though I know that by doing that, I'm probably going to get eaten by cannibals somewhere. The cannibal of the mind. The cannibal of my thinking. There's always more information. There's always another thing to learn. Trapped in my thinking. Trapped in our thinking. It always sits us and that loosens up somewhat, doesn't it? It does loosen up, but... We get kind of tranquilized for about 40 minutes, a little bit, or 50 minutes, and it kind of settles down. And then as soon as we step off the tan and get back into our shoes and go outside, it all speeds up again and once more.

[19:41]

And what we fall back on then is our thinking minds. I should be doing this, I shouldn't be doing that, I have this cold, I have these forms. But it sounds like in these poems that somehow certain individuals at some time and place have broken through that whole ceremony, that whole affair. And we can't help but wishing, I guess, even though we know the wish is part of the problem, that that could happen to us. Here's a modern poet, Japanese poet, died recently, Shin Kichi Takahashi, he... He hasn't had an interesting life. He's very famous in Japan, and he's probably the most celebrated among modern Zen practitioners who are interested in poetry as being the best, the most superior of modern poets that have gone through some sort of transformation.

[20:48]

In a long period of training, he was a poet before he got in trouble. He got in trouble because he was a poet in Japan. He was a nonconformist and he got thrown in jail and so on. He seems to have had somewhat of a difficult time as a young man. He was lucky to meet a particular Zen priest who took him under his wing and during his first seishin he passed out. Fell down on the floor and for the next three years they had to lock him up. his people, his home. He was locked up, actually, as he went through, I don't know what kind of hell realm, but it must have been pretty horrendous. At the end of that, he came out of it with some kind of amazing clarity. And this book is called The Triumph of the Sparrow. It's in poems of the Shinkichi Takahashi, translated by Lucian Strike. And it's very interesting.

[21:51]

Here is a So here's his particular poem that I think is interesting. This was his, like his enlightenment poem. Beyond words, this no thingness within, which I've become. So to remain only one thing's needed. Sitting, I think. Breathe with my whole body, marvelous. The joy is so pure. It's beyond lovemaking. Anything. I can see. I can see. I can live anywhere. Everywhere. I need nothing. Not even life. Imagine that kind of sense. No anxiety at all anymore. It's just this feeling of total. Now this. Now this. This flow. Beyond words. There's no thingness.

[22:53]

You know... If you read a lot of these people, and I'm sure all of you have or we have, they all talk about your body and mind dropping away. Actually, I read recently on the internet about this fellow who suddenly discovered he had no body. Actually, he realized body was just another thought. It wasn't anything even called a thought. There was not even consciousness. There was nothing, but in that nothingness was filled with vitality and power. It was just a life force, I guess you might say. He wouldn't say what it was, but he said from that moment on he realized this was all a mirage. Then what is it that bleeds and suffers? Here's another one. The earth broke into pieces.

[23:57]

Here it is again. Smash broke. These mindsets, finally something smashes through. And bricks are through. Crack. The earth broke into pieces like dew drops, like beads. Sitting to one side, umbrella in hand as if to voyage. The devil told innumerable lies. Mankind dead and gone. Existed in some legend. Stars pattered, hailstones, rocks, suddenly unmasked, at last, God, devil that he was, disintegrated, into the shadows of the earth, like the engine of a crashed plane. Now those are really strong, almost violent images. All of these poems have that smashing through. Maybe we should get the kiyosaku back in order. You know what the kiyosaku is?

[25:00]

Good for the shoulders. I always hoped that would happen. Every time they came around with the kiyosaku behind me, I hoped, give me a good crack and they don't wake up. Instead, they'd hit my shoulder bone or something. I secretly cursed them for being a bad at-bat. But you see, I've set myself up that way. I stretch my hand. Everything disappears. I saw in the snake head my dead mother's face. In ragged clouds grief of my dead father. Snap my finger. Time's no more. My hand's the universe. It can do anything. Well, sounds like a lot of authority in these poems to me. Meanwhile, we dig in the earth looking for the blue of heaven.

[26:06]

Any comments? Ray Ren. I'm just curious. In Japanese, are there two words like heaven and sky? Because in German, it's only himmel. It's one word for sky and for heaven. Is it the same in Japanese? There's a word for sky, heaven, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, heaven is, Shikoku's hell and heaven is, what? Yeah. But does this skip the Japanese? No, it doesn't. Because I also was wondering if he, what is being translated, if he actually talks about God and devils. Well, I remember that Maezumi Roshi once gave a talk here. It was doing what you call Togo Besa Sesheen from people coming all over the world, monks from all over the world. And Maizumi Roshi one day gave a talk about God. And everybody was like, God? Where's God in Buddhism?

[27:17]

I thought we were non-theists. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, God is very important. Next day, somebody talked about God. We don't believe in God. There's no God. And then everybody's very confused, but you could see what he was doing. What the teacher was doing was, as soon as we grab at this thought, oh, there's no God in Buddhism. We were sure of that. You see, already the mind has set up that little trap. And the next day he disabuses us of that notion. And the next day, another thing, until you don't know what to believe in, and that's from the beginning now. But, yeah. Somebody else had their hand up, I think. Oh, really? Rocky. What has this to do with Prajna? Well, Prajna is that of which there is no witcher.

[28:18]

Of which there is no... Witcher. If I could tell you what Prajna was, then... Prajna is another word for our basic reality. It's that energy that some schools say we already are. Other schools seem to say we have to acquire it. Dogen says you are already that. But prajna is an energy. Prajna is a dynamic force that is alive in the universe. But it is empty of any characteristics. But now we've already, you see what we've done? You see how we've, huh? Blah, blah, blah. We've just attributed all kinds of characteristics to something that can't be characterized. Other than indirectly, like poetry gets close to it. Because poetry is performative rather than explanatory or expressive.

[29:27]

Zen, in its best forms, I think, is performative. in this koan study and so on, and in this way of addressing these things, in order to do again, in order to break through the need to have a definition that will sum up the universe for you. The universe can't be summed up. Why do you even want it to be? Rather than ask what is prajna, ask why do I want to know? And who is it that wants to know? That's a good question. What do you care what prajne is? Somebody explain. I'm not saying you, Rocky. I'm not saying anybody. What do I care that prajne is? What do we care what prajne is, what enlightenment is? Somebody's told us. Somebody's told us about all of this stuff. We're trying to get to that place where we can finally cut off all the information that we had to pass and leap into... I won't say it, you know? No.

[30:28]

Wondering why it's expressed with such violence. Maybe it's much more mundane, and that's why we miss... Well, it isn't always expressed that way. Oh, we did tonight. Some of these poems are that way, but it's not always like that. There are a lot of very poetic ways of expressing it. If you read the Blue Cliff Record or any one of those, you know, koan studies, the poetry is quite lovely in it. I can't quote one off the top of my head right now, but... I thought you were making a point, though, that, you know, the sound, the words of crash and breaking through and shouts, that was the point. It shatters the old mindsets. And it's true. It's true that some people say it's very, very frightening for some people for this experience to happen. I've actually heard some people say that the difference between a saint... or I should say a realized person and a madman is very small.

[31:36]

Except that this person like Dogen and others, they could function. Apparently, they function very well. But they function from a new disposition that was not part of their lexicon that they had been taught before. It came from that space, that place. That isn't a place. I just hate talking about this stuff. But when you get to this, when you get to talking about this paramita, you know, the wisdom paramita, you know, every morning form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form. That all of these, this whole wheel of causation and all of the skandhas and all are nothing more than what we call conventional designations language. And, of course, we do know that we have to, thus have I heard, we have to hear about it, we have to study it for a while, we have to meditate on it, and then, hopefully, we can let it go.

[32:39]

And we do every night. Actually, in deep sleep, we let it go every night. The people that you talked about, like Dogen and the other... They read extensively and studied extensively. People, they came to that point where they say, there's no sense in reading extensively. There's no sense in studying extensively. I wonder, could they get to that point without having studied and without having read? It seems like nearly any time we hear it, we hear it from people who have studied extensively. Yeah, well, I've heard there's two styles, as it were. One is that we just keep building and building and building, building this whole edifice of learning and so on, like a big house of cars until finally it collapses under its own weight.

[33:51]

And then the other way is, you know, there's some who don't go that direction at all. You know, like layman ping-pong-ping-ping. Pong? Pong. Pong? Ping-pong. Pang. Layman ping-pong. He and his family, you know, they were peasants and so on. They were very simple people. They were not bookish. They had no formal learning, and that seems to be... The whole shamanistic tradition kind of comes out of that. They don't really read. It gets passed on orally. Well, we are conditioned. Our minds are conditioned. But within that conditioning, there is some truth passed along that we have to break out of our conditioning however we acquire it. But it's true that some people seem to have to build up and up and up. And it seems in the Western traditions, we are literate, and particularly this group of people here, usually pretty well educated, you know, kind of, yeah, people who have gone most of their life to school, and they're still going to school, still reading books, still piling in the information, and that's how we come to it.

[35:08]

But that doesn't mean that that's the only, I think that a lot of people probably, and there's no doubt that there are many people who are free of some of this conditioning, that we're talking about who are walking the earth right now, how could it not be so? That we never know about. They don't broadcast themselves, they don't set themselves up as teachers, they just are. They're not on Oprah or somebody, you know. Which is not anything against Eckhart Tolle. I don't know, really, I'm not trying to... Who told me that she met a man who was a truck driver and he had Obviously, it was very clear that he was enlightened through an accident. And he didn't know what to do with it. It was totally lost. And I think if we study or have a practice, it will keep us from going crazy. Yeah. I think there's some truth in what you say.

[36:11]

One of the reasons that you try to get grounded first and clean up your act have some ethical conduct in your life, you know, don't exploit other people, and so on, just trying to live a conventional life with some normal decency, and then have a practice, a kind of strong practice, then when this flip happens, you will have some support for it. I had a girl, a woman, come to me in a practice session once, She was a woman in her 60s, and she said when she was six, I think, six or seven. She said, I came to my mother and said, she told me what the words were, and I can't remember the words. I've been trying to for years, but it essentially was, Mommy, we don't exist. We're not here. Actually, and of course, her mother immediately called the doctor. They killed her up with Prozac and everything, you know, up.

[37:13]

And she was in a state of deep depression for the next 40 years of her life. She was crazy. Now, if that had happened in India in a different context, congratulations, now you know, now go to school and do what you have to do. But in our, you know, the kid would come up to you and say, hey, mommy, we're not really here. What did I give, what did I, what's wrong with my child? called the Doctrine. Somebody else had to say, yes? Yeah, you answered part of my question. I was just wondering, it seems as if it's not about the old, it's not about studying, it's not about grasping, defining, attaining, still isn't it? It's not practiced by the project and practice. What was that?

[38:14]

Would that mean that not practicing would be better practice, as paradoxical, but not seemly? Would it be better practice than practicing? Yeah, well, it is a paradox, isn't it? Yes, it is a paradox. Think of non-thinking. How do you think of not thinking, non-thinking? What is that? Yeah. So isn't it... Isn't it that somebody who does not know about Zen? What? Isn't it that somebody who does not know about Zen and does not try what we are closer to what we are trying, what we are desperately trying to practice for us? That can well be, yeah. Probably somebody working in Denny's right now, serving coffee was... And here we sit desperately trying, as you say, digging in the earth for the blue of heaven, but not necessarily.

[39:19]

I don't think, you know, I don't know that this line of questioning helps us because we have to do what we think we have to do in order to practice. And we're also practicing with other people on a psychological level to learn just how to get along, you know, with one another in a fairly compassionate way. way or at least by rubbing up together in monastic practice it brings forth both the best in us and the very worst in us if you want to use those distinctions if there is such a thing as best and worst so that we can see it we are selfish we are grasping you know and I think that what Then she says, you know, just, as I said where I began, Rinzai, he just told his students, you know, I don't have any special practice at all.

[40:21]

I don't believe in Buddha or Dharma and Sangha. I don't do any of those things. I've let all that go, he's telling his students, in effect. But you don't believe me. I try to tell you these things, and instead of throwing away what I tell you and just standing on your own two feet, you go and meditate on it and make it into something, essentially. And that is a paradox in a way, you see. I actually had his words here somewhere. And then she... Somebody else? Is that, you know? Yeah. People that Jawa asked about, who study and study, and then come to the realization that there's no help in studying. They continue to study after that revelation, too. Some do. Some do. Some don't.

[41:22]

As far as I know. I mean, some of them burn the books. They tell their students to study. They tell their students who stuff, yeah. Well, if you're going to run a monastery in a school, you get 24 hours a day to fill some way. You know, essentially, life is boring. Life is very, very boring if you don't fill it up. Well, isn't it? We're always grasping at some kind of entertainment. And this can be just another form of entertainment, folks. Just another way to fill up our minds in time. There's no better or worse than doing anything else we do in our life with this. In my view, there is no Buddha or sentient being, no past or present. There is nothing to study or attain, no loss or gain. Time is not necessary for waking up from delusional mind. That's Rinzai. Why do you hurriedly travel around wearing down the soles of your shoes? What are you looking for? There is no Buddha to seek, no way to attain, no Dharma to possess.

[42:25]

It is wrong to seek the Buddha with an actual body. Dogen said more or less the same thing, you know. There is no person to seek. You think there's this person seeking, but when you study, you finally get to a place, who's doing the seeking? If you wish to know your true mind, you should know that it does not stay with you nor stay away from you. The true Buddha has no figure. The true way has no form. The true Dharma has no phase. These three are mixed and melted into one. Well, that's a little extreme. No, I wouldn't say that. You have to wear clothes. You know, if you want to put yourself in a school that talks about these things, then there are forms in which to do it. And one of the reasons to have the forms is to bring up your resistance and to ask that very question.

[43:29]

At some point, you should actually look in the mirror and say, look at what happened to Mrs. So-and-so's little boy. You know, I was a nice little Catholic or Jew or something. And look what's happened to me. You know, I'm worrying, how did I get in Japan? You know, how did I get to this place? We should go through that. We should actually go through that, I think. But I wouldn't denigrate it by calling it bullshit. Or horseshit, sorry. I mean, we're trying to pay respect to, you know, everything we do has, you know, we pay respect to it because it's human effort. But it's no more or less important than any other uniform. You might wear a suit and a tie or whatever. It's just to remind us, as a part of our practice, when you put on those robes. One of the reasons you put on the robe, as somebody said, you can't run for a subway very easily.

[44:30]

They slow you down. And if we really had the long, really long sleeves, you have to hold your hands. I think these robes were... Confucian ropes, weren't you, originally? So they had to hold their arms way up here. Sha-sha. What? Somebody had an arm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that kind of like a tone of disappointment can easily come in and I think, as it's right to come in, I think very much appreciate that point you're making of disappointment is a path, and you have to be disappointed in our ideas of what enlightenment is. And on the other side, I appreciate what Dogen is saying of we are seeking enlightenment for others, and seeking enlightenment for others is the only thought that we can hold in our heart and mind that really actually brings enlightenment.

[45:34]

So there's this kind of constant for others, for others, which is not for me. If it's for me, then it has this kind of stale taste in our tongue that kind of brings a heaviness with it. Well, I don't want this evening to stop this evening and for you to think that I am asserting that there is such a thing as enlightenment. I think for us to believe that there is such a thing as enlightenment would be to miss the point that I'm suggesting. To assert that there's anything other than what is arising right this moment to grasp that, I think would be to miss the point of what this Prajna Paramita is about. This Prajnaparamita is saying in some sense this is always already the case and why are you trying to put on another suit of clothes? It's more about taking off everything.

[46:37]

Spiritual practice is about taking off things, taking off the layers rather than assuming another and yet another identity and yet another one. But we do assume identities and we reify our identities and we get stuck in our identities. I appear before you tonight As a talker, as a speaker. The important word in that sentence is as. I appear before you as in a function. I appear before my wife as a husband. I appear. We're always appearing to people in terms of social functions. But will the real you stand up in the midst of that? What is that real you, you see? But we take our functions as for the reality of who we are. Somebody else had just handed up her hand up. Yes. You know what you mentioned earlier about society that we live in, the one that brought to you upon Prozac if you say that you don't exist?

[47:47]

I blame that sometimes for my feeling of lacking. Yeah. But that's, there's no that that I can blame, though. But sometimes I feel like I blame the society that I live in for the lacking that I feel. Well, we're programmed, you know. It's called premature cognitive commitment. Premature cognitive commitment. They put two cats in a room in Harvard study. Two kittens. Kittens. Newborn kittens. Another two in another room. One room had all vertical lines. One room had all horizontal lines. The kittens that were in the room with all horizontal lines could see nothing vertical. Anything that was vertical, they'd bump into it.

[48:49]

It did not exist. Those in horizontal only saw that. The horizontal world. What that suggests to us is that when we get imprinted by the value systems of our society, that's already in place. And everything is placed on top of those unexamined assumptions about what the world is. And what practice in some sense is about is undoing that. That commitment that we've made in our minds. That this is the way, you know, so that we want to be on the right side. You know, we try not to be duistic, but we always want to, we think that we're living a good life versus those people who are not living a good life. We always want to be, you know, we want to be nice, good people. Too much, I think. Because we've been taught that way. And those people who are ready to throw a bomb at us also have the same feelings.

[49:52]

And we're doing that with one another. I know what the truth is, but you don't. So is it even possible to talk to each other, actually? There is a school of thought that says we don't talk to each other. It's impossible to talk to each other. All you're talking to and really hearing is what is already there being projected and bouncing back. That's some truth in that maybe. that we can't really hear one another because of our own program, personal program. Family program, personal program, country program, national program, you know, language programs, school programs, class programs. And we're stuck in that. Now, this is an interesting country because we've got people from many different places with the program differently coming together. And... You go to Bali, for example, I was in Bali. Bali's a very unified culture, you know. Everybody does the same thing.

[50:54]

You don't step out. Here we have diversity. There's no diversity there. In some ways, it's a wonderful thing to see. I mean, the reverence for life, life as ritual, life as celebration of some eternal ideal. life as living by the lamp of karma, which is, and as a celebration. But if you step out of that form, out of that conditioning, you're non-persona god. And that's true of a lot of, well, most of the old cultures, but our culture is this multifaceted, mixture of many cultures coming together, lots of different ideas and so on. So we have different conditions. Right now we're being conditioned by something called the Buddha Dharma. We didn't come up with that.

[51:56]

That comes from some other place. And we actually, when we first hear it, believe there's such a thing as the Buddha Dharma. I want that. It seems like the The accounts you were reading of Dogen and his poet and some of the others were, it's kind of like a very dramatic transformative experience. And I was wondering how that relates to the teaching, on the other hand, that practice itself is civilization. Well, that was their awakening poem. But Dogen, when he woke up, realized that practice or live in this moment, this covers everything. Whatever you're doing covers everything. Mind and body, birth and death are Buddhadharma. Totally. The whole universe is nothing else but Buddhadharma at this moment. Self-receiving and fulfilling samadhi is just... But that was a deep realization for him.

[53:06]

It wasn't something he heard. Was it something he practiced though? It was something that when he said, Shinju Datsaraku, mind and body dropped off. Mind and body dropped off. That was not the old Dogen anymore from that moment on. There was a functional Dogen. There was a history Dogen. He had stuff to work out probably in his own life. He liked to write too much for one thing. I don't know. How could Dogen have sat very much? He was writing all the time. He didn't have to anymore. He had that opening experience. But that opening experience, once you have that opening experience, who is it? You see, the person you thought you were drops away. They're talking about there is nobody there. There is nobody here. It's kind of like that. But as soon as I say it or you say it, it sounds like nonsense. But he came from that place where this is the whole moment.

[54:13]

All of being, past, present, future. It's all now. This. And you can't find now. No today, no tomorrow. No yesterday. And you're understanding whatever it is, he says. This is interesting about Dogen. You think that the ocean... It's round. The ocean is not round or square any other way. It's as much as your eye can see. The height of the moon is the depth of the dewdrop is the height of the moon. Each person has some understanding of this. And that understanding totally fills their life. Even if it's a dewdrop or an ocean. Yeah. Well, I would just say the question was, do they practice like that? Was that the question? It was the realization of practice. Yeah. I mean, because he also said things like, you know, how to wash your hands, you know, how to walk, how to, when to enter the Zendo, you know, very specific instructions for practice.

[55:19]

So I think that's how he expressed his realization in the way that he practiced, you know, how do you eat a meal? What do you do with your goals? Everything in Gogan preaches the Dharma. Everything is preaching Dharma all the time. Your practice and realization were two different things, he says, you know, but they're not. Two different things. And it doesn't necessarily, he says, appear in your consciousness. That's why he's saying you're already enlightened, but you don't know it. Anyway, it's 8.15 and it's time. when we're stuck in the middle of the labyrinth and this will be continued tomorrow oh dear one night I was up when I first came here I was very really gung-ho about

[56:32]

And we had the whole cottage up there. But in those days, they kind of fall into disrepair. And the window had a big piece of plywood on it. But during the holiday break, I asked if I could go up and stay there. And they said, sure, you can go up there. I said, a lot of people do that. So I went up and stayed during the holidays up there. And I was sitting in there. And she had a little Coke stove and one little table. And I was sitting on where the fireplace is. It was midnight or something. And then I decided I'd get up and do Kenyan. And there's one little kerosene lamp over here. And I happened to look up at the one window on the side, and I saw this person. Whoa! It was my own reflection. And when I did that, suddenly the pan on the wall fell, clank, in the morning. And my expression was, my God, if Mother could see her little boy now. You know? So that was my enlightenment experience.

[57:34]

Look at what I've come to. But my own reflection, unlike seeing my face in the stream and becoming, I saw my face in the window and it scared the hell out of me.

[57:55]

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