This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good afternoon. I'm Charlie, and I live at Tulsa Heart and Green Gulch. 94 to 2006. And now I live in Sebastopol, about an hour north of San Francisco. And Sarah and I teach at a Zen center there, a Stone Creek Zen center. And I also teach graduate classes at a Buddhist seminary in Berkeley, the Institute of Buddhist Studies. And last fall, in this coming fall, the class I'm teaching is on ritual practice in East Asian Buddhism. So I've been kind of working with ritual quite a bit for that class.

[01:03]

And so I just wanted to kind of try and bring some of that and relate it to Zazen and Soto Zen. Because that class is very broad, kind of looking at China, Korea, Japan, all the traditions. And it was something that I would hear Tassajara from time to time, like that, that Zazen is a ritual, and that for Dogen, Zazen was a ritual performance or a ritual enactment of awakening. And I would hear this, and it didn't do a lot for me. And it sounded kind of thin, but I kept hearing it. And over the years, other things happened. And... And I didn't come to Zen for ritual practice. And I was actually kind of, it was really surprising to me the first time I was in San Francisco Zen Center and all of a sudden there's all this bowing happening and I was like, okay, I guess I'll try this.

[02:15]

I wasn't prepared for that at all. So I want to kind of talk a bit about, well, some about just how we understand ritual practice. because I think that's an important piece. And then also, in particular, zazen as a ritual enactment of awakening. And, you know, for me, this is now kind of a very alive and deep way to work with zazen, look at zazen. And kind of in keeping with Dogen, you know, in his approach. And so one thing just to bring up is that we have a cultural tendency. So this just seems to be like a general tendency to view ritual and meditation as a kind of dichotomy. And almost like in oppositional terms, where like ritual has kind of is externally oriented.

[03:19]

Ritual involves like mediation. Ritual is looking for external results. And meditation is inward. Meditation's unmediated. And it's about an inward result. And so then, you know, and then when we come to, like, kind of, like, you know, post-Enlightenment, you know, American culture, meditation's kind of all right. And ritual looks pretty bad. It just looks like superstition or, you know, kind of magical thinking. And meditation is kind of rational. You can change the way you experience things by doing some kind of inward work. And when you have an experience, so far, experience is sort of like... Having big experiences is kind of basically okay with rational thought. They might be irrational experiences, but it's not...

[04:24]

it's not irrational to say that these experiences happen and that they're happening to us sometimes and that they're important. And then this dichotomy of ritual and meditation, before meditation, it was ritual and prayer. But certain kinds of prayer are very close to meditation. But it also relates to thought and action. And also you could say mind and body. And so... we have tendencies that dichotomize these and see them as in some ways oppositional, or at least in terms of thought and action. It's a dichotomy and kind of privileged thought is more important. Action comes out of thought, you know, and leads the way. And so basically like the early writings on Zen in the West, in the English language, they were aware of these tendencies in Western culture, and they kind of played into them.

[05:33]

So early books on Zen don't talk about ritual. And some of them don't talk about practice, actually. You can read books on Zen that don't talk about practice. It's just about awakening and just like, you know, the stories of Zen masters, and they're kind of great stories. But, you know, you would have no idea what the practice was. what these people's daily lives were like in the monastery. And then this kind of goes along with, and Zen is like this essence of religion, a pure essence. And it's dynamic and free, whereas ritual is kind of formulaic, repetitive, and for people who aren't awake. And so those are some of the books I read. So I was surprised that there was ritual here. And actually, there is discourse in Zen that's either anti-ritualistic or critical of ritual.

[06:33]

But the context of that discourse was doing lots of ritual practice. And so when they said stuff that sounds anti-ritualistic, it wasn't actually saying stop doing ritual practice. It was more like a a critique of a deluded approach to ritual practice, because they were doing a lot of ritual. And so turning to Zazen, so Zazen, basically, it's a ritual practice, and we've set it up as a ritual practice. We have a ritual space, we have forms for entering the space, forms for taking our seat, We have a ritual opening of the period of zazen, a ritual closing. And then the posture itself, you can say, is a ritual practice. It's a ritual enactment of what the Buddha did under the Bodhi tree.

[07:36]

We're performing what the Buddha did every time we sit. And so if we have that strong dichotomy between ritual and meditation, We could look, well, all that stuff, those are just like little ornaments pinned on top of meditation, which is interior and not ritual. But I would say that, you know, if we don't, if we kind of set aside projecting this dichotomy onto the tradition, Zazen's a ritual practice. And that's how it's practiced in Soto Zen. And I think we find this in Dogen. And so just to be careful about how we have a cultural condition dichotomy or dichotomies that seem really true and to try to see those and see how are we putting them on the tradition and be willing to kind of have them be questioned and loosened up because, you know, 800 years ago in Japan, they definitely didn't think like we think.

[08:47]

2000 years ago in India, they didn't think like we think. Their understandings of mind, body, thought, action, ritual and meditation were definitely different. And so, you know, what seems obvious to us would just not have been the case. That would not have been how these things were looked at. And so kind of the really basic thing, a really basic essential thing in Dogen is practice based on realization or practice realization. And so for Dogen, it was really important for him that, you know, if we're engaging practice as something to get to realization, that this was a kind of basically a deluded approach to practice. And that we're kind of, we're putting awakening out there somewhere, and then we're putting this practice that's gonna get us there in between us and awakening. And so that basically is just an enactment of delusion And for Dogen, it was just going to lead to more delusion.

[09:54]

And so this practice based on realization is like awakening is here. It's our nature. And we don't have to do anything to get it. But rather, the question is, how do we live it? Or how is it lived through us? How do we express it? How do we embody it? And so Zazen, as this ritual enactment of awakening, is a way of embracing this approach of practice realization as a meditation practice. And so Zazen, in these terms, is not a tool or a device or a kind of a means to change our experience or to change our mental state. But you could say what's happening is a realization of this mental state, realization of this experience, and where realization is that you're realizing this experience is happening with everything.

[10:59]

This mental state is happening with everything. And having some other experience doesn't happen more or less with everything than this one. And, you know, so Dogen says, like, you know, what you think one way or another is not really a help for realization. Because every thought is happening with everything, just like everything. So then, to kind of just take up ritual practice, So there's kind of many ways that ritual practice has been kind of framed or understood. And I just want to bring up a few of these. So what is ritual practice? So one tendency in Western scholarship that's very strong is to look at ritual basically as a text.

[12:03]

And I think this is also, and I think we have this tendency generally too. So like... The early studies of ritual, kind of like, well, you could look at doctrine or you could look at ritual. What did you do if you studied ritual? You studied ritual texts. You didn't go to temples and watch what people did and how they did it. You looked at texts. And texts tell you what they do. People do what the texts say. And if you did go and watch someone, you would write down what they did and then you'd have your text. So that's kind of one way to approach what ritual is. There's like a script. And there's also teachings. So if we chant, we're chanting teachings. So that's something that's textual. It's a textual event. And there might be actions, but the actions are symbolic. They have a... You could gloss the meaning of the actions with ideas, concepts. Another approach is to... That ritual is basically...

[13:08]

We could basically look at ritual in terms of like, well, how does it change our experience? What does it do to us? How does it feel? What's our experience of it? And so there's all sorts of stuff happening in a ritual. There's rhythm that affects us, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile events. All these things have an impact on our experience. And ritual is kind of about creating an experience for the ritual participants. And this is kind of a psychological approach. And this is also a way that people approach meditation. Meditation is about getting a certain experience, producing some kind of experience or a different experience than this. And a third approach to ritual studies that's kind of come up kind of in contrast with those or kind of... Maybe not, it's not necessarily opposed to them, but it just sees them as reductive, both of them.

[14:12]

And that is that ritual is actually performance. Ritual is something we actually do with our bodies and our lives. And you can't reduce it to some textual or conceptual or symbolic content, and nor can you reduce it just to your experience of it, because there's your doing of it, and your doing of it is shared with others, and it's a shared event. And we're all experiencing it together, but it's not just experience. And being embodied, it's actually, it's kind of the performance is filled with our embodied experience in this moment, what we bring to it this day. And it comes with all the kind of limitations and vulnerabilities and pains and joys of being embodied and how those change from day to day. And those are not kind of like peripheral to the practice in ritual or in meditation then.

[15:17]

Those are like the body of the practice, the substance of what's happening. And, you know, embodied ritual practice, has its own ways of learning that aren't necessarily, you know, like text learning, its own kind of skills, its own kind of knowing, own kind of intelligence, and its own kind of transformative potential. You know, so if a ritual is just the text or the script or kind of a description of what is done in the ritual, then it is totally repetitive. And it's kind of criticized, you know, then for being routine or habitual and so on. And purely formal. And kind of where is the vitality of awakening and doing the same thing over and over again.

[16:21]

But in terms of performance, you know, each performance is unique. the performance that's unique to this person doing the ritual today, with these other people doing the ritual at this time. You know, and so this is part of this ritual performance studies, and it was strongly influenced by theater studies, but also, you know, theater, music, dance. You know, so there's like scores, but there's actual, a music performance is much different than the score. Same thing with a play. or, you know, a dance. And so, you know, there's a score or a script, but the performance is a living creation. And you could say in the same way, like every period of Zazen as ritual performance is a living creation. You know, and the performance is, the quality of the performance is imbued with our intention

[17:30]

our aspirations, our inspirations, the qualities of our attention, the quality of our engagement. It's imbued with whether we're concentrated or dispersed, open-hearted or closed off, settled, ungrounded, awake or asleep. These are all in the performance. You know, like when we have this ritual here, a ritual practice, maybe, maybe not called a whole ritual, of bowing to each other when we pass on a path. So there's actually, every time we do that ritual, there's a lot there. You're expressing a lot about, like, are you rushed? Are you settled? Are you, you know, mindful? And also your relationship with this person. And this is a mutual exchange.

[18:32]

There's mutual expression, and whether you realize it or not, it's also a mutual enactment of awakening. You're bowing to each other as the nature of awakening. And then also to say that this approach to ritual practice, our critical engagement is part of it. Our emotional and creative engagement are part of how we engage a performance. We can each do the same act over and over, we can each recite the same phrase, but how we do it the quality of it will be particular to this individual at this time.

[19:36]

And also to say that Dogen, over and over, he really encourages a spirit of inquiry. So I think part of how we engage Zazen should have a spirit of inquiry. and an inquiry into like this performance of awakening. And that also there's a, you know, in terms of like this thought action dichotomy, we kind of think, you know, what we do will express what we think. And we tend to maybe not pay attention, it tends to obscure that what we do shapes what we think, shapes what we feel. And so, you know, so sometimes people might feel like, well, you know, I'm not gonna do a full prostration until I know what I'm bowing to, know why I'm bowing and what's going on with that.

[20:47]

And so they might wait until those questions are all answered and then they'll start bowing. But even if they got all those answers, it's still gonna, they're gonna get new answers. when you start bowing. So it's like, and same thing with sitting. So you can think about Zazen forever, and you could ask many questions about it, but once you start doing it, something else happens. So the doing of it with our body is really, it's essential to what it is and how it actually lives. And so in Soto Zen, we put a lot of emphasis, just meditate, just go to the Zendo and do Zazen. Basically, you know, kind of no matter what, you know. And also to say that the quality of performance and how we do something is kind of really important part of how the tradition actually is conveyed, how it's passed on.

[21:52]

and how it can be inspiring, or what brings us to practice, what keeps us involved in practice, can be in this kind of, in this how, rather than the kind of the what. And, you know, we have these, ritual gives us, ritual practice gives us these ways to embody wisdom and compassion and enthusiasm, and that By performing these embodied things, those are a way of working wisdom, compassion, enthusiasm, and so on, into our lives. And then, you know, and then eventually extending that into informal realms. It's not just meant to be formal, but like, you know, ritual is a kind of training that is for our whole life. Another thing about performance, sometimes we hear, sometimes performance has kind of a bad reputation in Western religious thought.

[23:02]

And we might actually, you know, hear like performance and sort of like, well, are we, so when we sit, are we just like pretending to be Buddhas? And isn't this kind of like... kind of inherent, isn't there some kind of false or insincere about that? Unless we really think we're a Buddha, but that's probably a different problem. And so one of the things that kind of performance theory looks at is that, you know, well, you could say something that's not true, but also you could say alternate realities or alternate truths or truths that we don't understand yet. And that... You know, part of actually, part of a general, one of the general theories of religion right now is like, well, what is religion about? And one of the, and certain answers don't work. You know, to just say that the supernatural or a gods doesn't work for all the religions.

[24:08]

So one of the ideas is, well, something counterintuitive. You know, religions, they always involve something that's kind of not a normal way of thinking about what a person is or what the world is or what our relation is, what events are. And so part of what a performance can be is kind of working with something that's counterintuitive or something that, you know, in the case of Zen, actually is inconceivable. And how do we relate to that? And if we had a way of embodying an inconceivable truth, that could be a way of, you know, actually... concretely working with something that we cannot grasp. You know, and alternate realities and truths, you know, they can be subversive. And so that's, you know, it's part of the, you know, Western institutional dis-ease with, you know, performance, I think. And, you know, this is something that generally, this performance is something we associate more with art, you know.

[25:14]

But from ritual theory, from the perspective of ritual theory, if there's performance, you know, it involves this subversive element. You know, it involves a kind of, it's subverting kind of the status quo, you know, structure, whether it's in an individual, communal, or social level. So, you know, universal Buddha nature, or our nature's awakening. Um... You know, sometimes that sounds like pretty easy to accept. It has a kind of humanistic quality that's easy to embrace. But actually, I would say that the real depths of it are counterintuitive or actually inconceivable. Like we can't actually grasp what Buddha nature is. And so it's not in our ordinary frame of what a person is. or what our relationships are. And so, you know, with zazen or with bowing to each other on the path or doing, you know, morning service, these are all kind of concrete ways to work with this inconceivable truth of our nature.

[26:38]

And then another thing about this kind of idea of pretending... So if we engage zazen as this ritual performance of awakening, this is not to kind of think, okay, now I'm performing awakening. And you could think that, but that's not the performance. The performance is you're putting your body in an upright posture and just wholeheartedly being there. That's the performance. And you're not... denying or suppressing, basically, you know, any kind of suffering, delusion, greed, hatred, and so on that's here. That's all part of the performance. And I think initially, this could strike as kind of dissonant. You know, it's like a jewel near Samadhi says, arguably still while inwardly moving, like a tethered cult or a trapped rat. You know, sometimes we might feel like that. Like we've got this practice of stillness. Meditation is about being still and calm and awakened, and inside we're churning and suffering.

[27:52]

And just to say that, I think part of what the spirit of practice awakening, practice realization is about, or this idea of enacting awakening, is that this isn't dissonance. And again, this isn't this kind of... Because our practice is realisational. So it's not like we need to get to some other experience for realization. Dogen says, Buddhas have great realization of delusion. So it's only Buddhas get rid of delusion and then have realization. That's not what he's saying. And so there's a... It's a kind of a juxtaposition of this enactment with our subjective state. And that is a way to kind of help us work with this truth in our actual life, our embodied, expressed life in this moment.

[28:59]

I'm going to stop talking pretty soon, seeing what else in here I really want to say. Well, just, and also to say that in this context, again, you know, so if we look at ritual in terms of how it affects our experience, if we look at meditation in terms of how it affects our experience, we may look at awakening as a kind of experience, a special kind of experience. And that I would say that this is not how awakening lives in Soto Zen as a tradition. Awakening is not a mental state. And it's not an interior event. Awakening is a truth of our whole being. So it's whole body, whole mind, inside, outside. Material and spiritual. There isn't a big division there. And this goes along with emptiness. Thoughts are empty.

[30:11]

Tables are empty. They are equally empty of existing by themselves. So everything's happening in relationship, and this doesn't leave a lot of ground for any kind of real dichotomy of material, spiritual, or body and mind. Well, the kind of last kind of point I want to make is that it's also, it's a communal ritual. So it's a ritual we do together. We express awakening together. And again, you know, it could be contrast ritual and meditation, and then the kind of normal idea of meditation is, well, I can go do meditation by myself.

[31:16]

And... And kind of the way Zazen is held in Soto Zen is Zazen is something we do together. And this is also part of this, Zazen is not, it doesn't necessarily have this interior orientation. There's no orientation, it's open inside and out. And it's not something that, you know, our, dream of a separate self does. So Zazen is always relational. Or you could also say sitting is always sitting with. And again, because awakening is, our awakened nature is this total relatedness that we happen with everything. And so this is expressed in our practice and our kind of communal approach. meditation.

[32:18]

All right. So, any comments, thoughts, questions? Partially we have rituals to help us see when we're mindful or mindless, and those can be part of ritual practice. Mindless ritual practice won't help us very much.

[33:26]

But, you know, it is an issue with ritual practice. It's not without its dangers that you could just mindlessly perform rituals over and over again without actually being there for what is the performance of today. How am I here today with this ritual? So our wholehearted engagement is called for. And I think this is true of Zazen, too. It's like we don't just kind of sit there and just like, okay, it's going to happen, you know. We have to show up. And so this is kind of emphasizing that quality of our practice. I play in my house so many times. And to learn, I walk my dog. It helps us take my fingers to be It's a ritual that you guys have so engaged in, you know, daily rituals, repetitive rituals, and then there's a lot of things, but these magical rituals that when you get married, it's a ritual, and it makes something happen.

[34:53]

They say that we pray those moments like having other men on ritual. Yeah. And then cultures have that. Anyway, so I just thought you might have some thought about that transformative once-in-a-lifetime ritual versus the ritual. Well, yeah. Yeah. Well, ritual, it's a very broad category. So it can be like formal stuff that we do every day in the Zendo. It can be also stuff, you know, we do throughout the day, like bowing to each other. And then there's also these, you know, well, then there can be calendrical rituals that we do like once a year. And then it can be once in a lifetime, basically rituals, like ordination, marriage, funeral, baby blessing, things like that. Oh, I think we need them. I think they're really important for us. And I think when we're going through a big transition, to do something with our bodies in this way, even if it's really a boring or a really hot day, helps us digest that transition is happening.

[36:12]

Yeah. And there's a lot of thought, there's a lot of theories in ritual studies about what the differences are between these kinds of rituals and so on. And trying to characterize what are the different kind of transformations and different processes that are happening in daily versus once-in-a-lifetime rituals. And the once-in-a-lifetime rituals... It's a different kind of recall, actually. Usually you can remember lots of details of what happened that day because it just happened once. Whereas the daily ritual, it's like, what happened three years ago? I have no idea that would happen that day. It was just the same as all the other days. But there's this other kind of learning that's happening that's going very deep into you by doing it every day. So there are different psychophysical events, I think, for our being. And you could say for all of them that you can engage in this ritual practice of awakening in the context of Soto Zen.

[37:16]

And we might feel like, well, Zazen, where is ethics in Zazen? Well, we have precept ceremonies. And if those are both performances of awakening, then that could be a way of understanding, okay, we do have ethics in our Zazen. It's just expressed in this other kind of a performance of Awakening called precept ceremonies and ordinations. Well, Siobhan and Bing. We've been through a lot of rituals, shall we? Yeah. How many years? We've been through a really great ritual, and I'm wondering if you could say something about the different meanings that show the rituals have meant to be when that's come back to you today. Well, I think my favorite thing about ritual practice is that the meaning keeps evolving. I mean, it keeps changing. I mean, that's my... So I kind of like... So I did Dharma Transmission in May.

[38:24]

There's a lot of prostrations in Dharma Transmission. Like a couple hundred a day. I mean, a lot for me. I mean, some traditions do much more prostrations. And so prostrations really... that was like, I, you know, kind of fell in love with prostrations again. They became really alive for me and expressing, you know, hierarchy, but also expressing equality. Um, uh, just a way of, um, they felt to me like intimate meeting. Um, they felt like, uh, touching my head to the ground. I mean, I, it was just, it just, they were just totally fulfilling. And, you know, and I think, you know, Zazen, too. I think it can be, you know, if it was just a text, it would have a fixed meaning. And so I think part of what this performance piece is about is, like, there isn't a fixed meaning to our Zazen or our bowing.

[39:26]

It's actually alive. It's alive or not alive. But our engagement brings it to life, and our engagement brings it... We actually... we give new value and new meaning to the forms by practicing it. And so we keep awakening a lot. Awakening isn't this thing that we'll just kind of live in the world without us doing anything. And so we sit and take care of awakening. We bow and take care of awakening. And then hopefully we take care of awakening in everything we do. I was working with a group of teenagers at Green Colch, and one of them asked me, what's all this bowing about? And of course I said, what do you think it's about? And he said, is it kind of like the Buddha in me, this bowing to the Buddha in you? And I thought that was really beautiful. He had no experience with Buddhism before that. So when we stop and bow to one another, it costs our doing practice period, that's one thing.

[40:31]

But I always feel a little funny during the summertime, that we found each other, we know what we've got to choose, but we don't have a guess. If we did, it might start a band, but it might not know what to be. Yeah. But it feels slightly exclusive. I've got the secret color on it. I don't know, it just feels a little bit exclusive for you. I wonder if you have a thought. Well, I don't know if there's a way around it. I mean, I think, I think, I think, I don't think we can ask the guests to start doing, to bow into each other and us. And, and I think I would not want, I think for me, it's like one of the, it was such a thing I love about Tassara practice. And, um, so I don't know. I mean, I mean, I kind of feel we might be stuck. I don't have a resolution. Yeah. Yeah. Don't you think ritual is universal? Yeah.

[41:32]

That's the kind of general perspective of ritual studies, that ritual is actually really basic to human behavior. And maybe more, even in cultures where we can't see something we call religion, there's still ritual. And some researchers find ritual practice in animal behaviors, and that's a little controversial, whether animals are doing rituals or not. But the research goes there. And what are they doing? Because it also connects to play, animals play. children play and play is a kind of ritual or has visual elements of ritual performance in itself is theatrical like you're pretending you're taking on roles and and there's there's there's kind of there are things that animals do that they have symbolic meaning so they're doing something they're doing an aggressive act but it's not actually they're not going to attack this they're not going to attack the other male it's a show and there's a display and And the animals clearly understand that.

[42:33]

They know it's not an occasion of violence. It's a display. So there are things like that, you know. But I think ritual is really basic and very powerful and can be used well and can be also, as something powerful, can be misused and it's dangerous. So, first, I've got ideas sometimes And, you know, like Peter said and Wendy, they come all the time, kids are local, and the kids come, and now the kids bow. The kids bow to me. I thought of them. They bow to each other. He's catching up. Rachel Maddow. But I wanted to talk about the script. You talked about the script. You know, he's sitting next to me. I have the script, you know, Because I always say to Enos, let's look at the script and then let's see what changes.

[43:38]

Because leaders of practice periods, they're going to say, yeah, Enos, I don't want to do this problem. Can we get this? When we get to the end of the ceremony, can we actually, can we just do the refugees anyway? And just be like, okay. Okay. And then we all say, you know, if possible, if you remember making note of that, to save this version, and then you just put all this crap. So there's little changes. And I feel like it evolves. And can you say anything about that? Like the talus and folk in Canada? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that rituals are... There's a kind of... Rituals... have some kind of pretense of, like, they've always been done this way forever. It's kind of like a little secret idea they have, and it's part of their power. But, you know, they were invented and evolved over time, and it is like, and they have a life.

[44:41]

I mean, for me, part of what comes up also is, like, we make mistakes. And so if we think the script is essential, if we've made a mistake, we could feel like, oh, you know, I've really messed up this ritual... you know whereas I think if we're looking at the performance like well it's just like it's going to be it's going to involve more adaptation and improvisation than normal you know but it's still like it can be totally fulfilling embodied performance with lots of mistakes and things going wrong and that's and that's um that's anyway I don't I don't you know not care about doing the ritual in the kind of prescribed way but for me that's that's That's a much more fulfilling way to approach. Koso's doctor, he's a former Episcopalian priest. And he said, he said, he's doing this whenever it was, mass or something. And they spilled the wine all over the altar.

[45:42]

And the celebrants just moved very slowly. Got towels. It was completely hard for the cell. Because it was in their bodies, you know, and there was no pain. So, continuing on with sort of that idea of the ceremony, obviously, as Zen came to America, there might be a lot of choices made about it. Again, we didn't practice together for what we should have an English community. So, take the Japanese, you know, what we need to do, and so on. And so all of your time and all of your lectures studying these theories, is there something about the spiritual practice that you need to create a magic box, you need to want it out, either if you try to say it's missing, or believe in a cowboy, or fake out, because yeah, that's not busy.

[46:48]

what the theory says, you know? Is there stuff from that intellectual side, that theory side that you suggest in the future? Um, I actually feel like, uh, for me, Tatsahara, like, works. Like, it works. So I don't want, so I actually feel like, you know, I kind of feel like, as far as I'm concerned, like, the theories should, like, just check out what's happening with Tatsahara. And, um, But then for people who Tossar is not working, well, then how come it's not working? So they might be better people to ask. But as Greg said, I think there's adjustments. And so I think hopefully there's a conversation of like, well, what's working? What's not working? And I feel like Tossar is pretty conservative in a way. And like, well, how long are we going to use chopsticks in Oreo? A thousand years? Yeah. Or, you know, like, or like, or tan, you know?

[47:48]

Or, you know, yeah. Because, like, even, it's not really our culture to use chopsticks. I mean, some people really love them, and it's like, okay, you know? And, but that could change, you know? Some habits in a meeting could change that, you know? It could be forced, you know? I don't think, I think a conversation. And conversation is a better gauge. So I think having a conversation, having conversations, which hopefully are happening, you know, the whole group or individually about how the practice is living for people. And then conversations about conversations. Because, I mean, I think, you know, the people who have been working with the forums for... 20 or 30 years. Anyway, I think their perspectives have a different weight than someone who's just shown up and they might need to kind of do the practice more before they understand it.

[48:51]

Like, I don't know if they, you know, it's sometimes, you know, that's, you know, this is thing, you know, do you need, do you need to have all the answers before you start doing it? And can you do it enough until like, well, either, either it works for you or it doesn't. And, you know, I'm thinking right now that putting full prostrations probably work for enough people after like a certain number of years at Tatsahara that we keep doing it. We keep doing full prostrations. I think it works for us. But if, you know, but if the scales started tipping and enough people who'd really been around a long time saying, I hate prostrations. Feels really dualistic. Feels subservient. I don't like it. You know, as opposed to like, I love it. It's like gratitude and humility and aspiration. You know, it's all there. It's non-dualistic. I just remember one time when I told my son, I was mad at him.

[49:53]

I'm not going to... I'm not going to do anything. [...] well this is this is one of these places well ritual has these um Where you demarcate ritual, it tends to be fuzzy boundaries, I would say, like birthday parties, you know, or like reading a story every night. When is it a ritual or ceremony and when is it something else or is it just fuzzy? Oh, rhythm.

[51:00]

Well, yeah, rhythm, I think is very grounding for, especially for children and Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I mean, there might be people for whom it's not. I'll leave it open. Yeah. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

[52:02]

Well, I think there's, like, I think there could be certain, like, you know, fundamental gestures that are going across cultures, because I'm okay with that. And I think there is this thing about stuff we do with our bodies, stuff we do in relation to, you know, big events, that it becomes, it has its own kind of life, you know, that's really important to honor. And I think, you know, and that can... they can cut across traditions very easily because they're not necessarily tied to doctrine. In Japan, Buddhism is very sectarian. There's a number of different Buddhist sects. They have their own ordinations, their own monasteries, temples, training, everything. And most of them perform funeral ceremonies. And they have very different ideas about what's happening in these funeral ceremonies, depending on the doctrine of the sect.

[53:06]

And so Pure Land, you know, it's about going to the Pure Land. Zen is kind of about basically being ordained and becoming a Buddha. And there's other things in Esoteric and Nichiren and so on, very different ideas about the funeral. They all basically do very similar things in terms of the funeral ceremony itself and then a series of memorial services. And I think that, you know, I think they basically... there's this recognition of, like, well, whatever you say, we need to honor that this has happened, and we need to kind of have a way of processing it over a period of time with memorial services, and that, you know, the grief process doesn't really care about adoption. So everybody kind of does, everybody's going to take care of grief, you know, and has his own life. You said earlier adoption of communal practice? Well, I think in some monasteries in Japan, you couldn't.

[54:11]

Or, well, you could sit in your own space. You could call it whatever you wanted to call it. But I think you would not necessarily be welcome to go to the zendo in some monasteries and sit by yourself. That might be looked as kind of like... You're outside of the monastic practice. You're not actually following the form. The fire wash is going. You're in bed now. We don't actually have a rule like that here. It's okay to sit up late here. But I would say that when we do sit by ourselves, I think it's a good question to have. Are we sitting with everyone in the We're sitting with all beings. Or are we doing something on our own? And that's a good inquiry for Zazen.

[55:16]

It's four minutes. I thought that, like, the ritual that we do, to some version of life, about our brother, and trust and intention, bringing them together, it's not really, it is isolated from something else, but it doesn't mean that that life that's brought to ritual is separate from people. And I think I can speak to myself probably from an active background where I didn't understand religion when I felt very separate from what was happening. That my first experience of religion in time, that was good, like, no.

[56:19]

And it's later that it's, it made me realize that the life that I bring to that is life that I bring to all. Yeah. So, it's a locker, it's not sleeping, but it's not that right. So, I really, I just really appreciate the perspective of bringing it into, it do not be something that's... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're welcome. And I think ritual and exhaustion are, they're dedicated to taking care of awakening. Whereas other activities are not explicitly dedicated to that. But they could be. But I think it's really hard to just dedicate your life to awakening. And while you have to do the dishes and cook dinner and work and take care of everything, and then nobody's saying to you and reminding you, are you taking care of awakening?

[57:23]

So we have these times where we say, we're just... You don't have to do the dishes. You don't have to do anything. It's totally unproductive. You're just going to go to the Zendo and just take care of awakening for a while and not get anything done except that, you know. But that, yeah, that's for our whole life and our whole life together with all beings. One more minute. I don't know. Well, I was and continue to be fulfilled and helped by this practice.

[58:25]

I guess, is fulfilled, helps, encouraged, and encouraged to continue, and want to encourage others to engage as practice, work with our life in this way. Yeah, because I don't really think about what my life would be if I didn't come here, but... I guess if I did, I'd be like, well, you know, I was saved. Well, yeah, to have dialogue. Confession can evoke associations. that are, you know, cultural associations that are pretty unhelpful for us.

[59:28]

And, you know, we can have different ideas about confession. Or we do. Buddhism has different ideas about confession. We have different ideas about confession. And which don't have to do with, well, basically don't involve punishment, guilt, self-beating. but let's shine a light on our actions, and especially the ones where we're causing ourselves or others lots of suffering. Oh, that's the most important place to bring light to, and what's one way to do that? Well, confess it. Confess it to yourself. Confess it to another person. Confess it to your community. And in the spirit of, like, we're going to wake up together. It's not we're going to beat this out of you. Thank you very much.

[60:52]

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