Good morning. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. And this morning, for my talk, I would like to talk about something which is a habit. It's almost unusual to talk about it here. Especially since lately it seems like you're hearing me talk about Zen and Buddhism. And what interests me... I was trying to prepare for what I'm going to say this morning.

[01:05]

I thought about why we come here. As you call it, intention, which is one of the folds of the Eightfold Path, right intention. Sometimes it's said right thought. I often wonder about such a beautiful day right now, and I see all you folks coming here Well, why? Why do you come here? So I was trying to prepare. I looked in the dictionary. What is intention? Is that the reason why you're coming? That means intention. I intend to come here for something. So intention says to have in mind a plan. to design for a specific purpose, to mean, to stretch toward, I like that one, to stretch toward, and to direct one's mind to.

[02:11]

Okay. So, what are you stretching for? Can I hear it for you? I thought of my own reasons for coming here years ago. It was pretty specific. Suzuki Roshi's book had just come out. And I had read a blurb from it, and I said, I want to get this book. At that time, I had been practicing yoga-type meditation. And so I came over here, and I was just living up the street in Waller. And I came down, knocked on the door. It was on a Saturday morning. Someone opened it and said, I want to buy the book. Well, the bookstore is not open yet, but it will be in about an hour. And right now we're having Zazen instruction. Would you like, would you care to attend that? At first that's all right. That's okay.

[03:15]

So I came to that. And then after that the bookstore was open, I bought the book and left. I liked the Zazen instruction very much because I liked the book. I read the book on a weekend and came back. I guess it was Monday then. Maybe I had Zazen on Sunday that time. I came back very enthusiastic and continued to attend the sessions of Zazen. But at that time I knew what my intention was. And it was basically to see if I could sit one period of Zazen without shifting my legs. That was a pretty good reason. So that kept me coming back. I said, I just want to do one. One forty minutes, you know, without shifting. I went on and on and on. I don't know if I still can do it. So that kept me going for quite a few years. And I said, well,

[04:17]

But, you know, what is the intention? What do I have in mind of doing this all these years? Because then I was able to sit a little longer and, you know, seem pretty good. Then I thought, oh, I'm going to get something. You read these books and, you know, enlightenment. So that kept me going for a while until I grew up on that. After a few sessions and nothing happened. But I kept coming back. I kept coming back. I would look at it occasionally and say, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? Yeah. And I said, well, there seems to be something missing. This is a good thing to do. Keeps me out of trouble. We have this...

[05:19]

a dedication that we do. It's called an echo, a Japanese word. If you go to evening service, you'd hear it. Kokyo, the chant leader, after we do the sutra or the dharani, will say, may our intention equally penetrate all being in place with the true merit of Buddha's way. I don't know if I got that right. Sometimes I make up the translations. All being equally penetrate all being in place. Every being. All being. I get in trouble sometimes. I make up my own translations. So that's saying what the intention of our chanting that Dharani or the sutra we get merit for that, according to Buddhist tradition. Or even coming here and listening to the garbage I'm saying.

[06:23]

Supposedly I'm supposed to be talking about the Dharma. So when you come to hear the Dharma, you get merit for that. You get like, you know, reward. You're good. You went over to that place, or you went to this service and you chanted the Dharani, you get merit. So what we do in the Mahayana is that we take this merit and we give it back, we give it away. So we say, may the Samarit equally penetrate all, every being in place. That's not bad. So is that why I'm coming here? As you go along, when you start coming here, start doing Zazen, and you get interested in what is this Buddhism, what is this all about, So then you might start reading, and you get to the basics, you know, the Four Noble Truths. And it's about suffering, and it's about a cause of suffering.

[07:26]

And that there's a way out of suffering, and that's the path. So one part of the path is right intention. So are we intending to do away with suffering by coming here? We'd like to have the world be a better place. Is that why we come here? If we can do away with suffering for ourselves, maybe that would spread out and alleviate suffering for others. I don't know. But we keep coming. It's probably a good idea to look at that, why we come here.

[08:34]

There's some dissatisfaction, curiosity. I can understand that people come to the Zazen instruction. It's quite clear, quite obvious. But then you keep coming back, if you come back. I see familiar faces and I see new faces. Keep coming. Sojin Sensei, just I think last week, he gave a talk and he mentioned about reexamining why we do this. It's a pretty good thing to do, even if you might have been doing it for 20 years. You start to look at it again. I was talking to someone just this morning about that, and it's kind of interesting.

[09:38]

All of a sudden you go, whoa, why am I doing this? Myself, I'm, you know, as my doctor said, I saw recently, he said, he looks at his patients in decades. And I'm in the decade that is entering the Medicare decade. And he said, He says, you know, we don't count you, you're not old yet. We mean, I guess, the medical profession, you have to be about 80 or 85. Then you got old age. Then you got something else to think about, you know. Then we talked a little bit about that. And he said, you just got to be able to do that, get old, accept it. And one of the things that seems to be most difficult to do is to accept people helping you. When you reach this old stage, there's things you just can't do anymore.

[10:43]

And people will be around, if you're lucky, and who want to help you. And one of the most difficult things is to accept the help. And he said, I think I could accept people helping me. I said, maybe I could. Because I recently had a, what do you call it, an accident. In other words, a stroke. And I lost the, it's come back, but a lot of the use of my left hand. And that made me realize that when I did, people were coming in, because I'm fortunate enough to live in this community, there's a lot of people to help me. And I was like, And I would try to do it, then I'd get angry because I couldn't do it. But it was the idea, I felt that I didn't really want people to help me. I mean, I can do it. But then what's that? That's accepting. Accepting what's happening, what is. So, anyway, during these sort of things, as you get older and you've been doing this practice for all these years, and then you look at it and say, well, what am I intending to do with this?

[11:57]

Why am I doing this? all these years and of course you say well we take the bodhisattva vow we're going to save all beings so what we do we do this for is for others and over the years it's been kind of difficult uh You know, when all the trouble's going on, like Vietnam and other things, and all this sort of stuff. So it's sitting on this cushion, helping that. Yeah. I know when I first started this practice way back, I had a friend who was a poet, kind of an anarchist, you know, atheist and all that. And he found out I was doing this, and he thought it was kind of weird. But then he finally said, he says, I'll never do that.

[13:00]

I'll never go over there and do that. But he says, you know, I'm kind of happy to find out that someone like you is over there doing it. I thought that was really great that he gave in. He was really kind of putting down people with Buddhist smiles on their face and all this kind of stuff, looking happy and they weren't happy. Anyway, I still remember that. He was happy that there was somebody like me and others over here during that sitting. It made him feel a little bit better. So, oh, that's a pretty good reason for doing it. So right intention or right thought. What's in it for me? I don't know. What's in it for you?

[14:02]

I can do something for you? Okay. Sounds kind of pretentious. Do good, stay out of trouble. Well, if you have any questions, we can have it later in the dining room. I think I need help on this. I'd just like you to think about why we come here. And I found a couple of poems. I always like to read poems, as some of you know.

[15:02]

This is by Musou Soseki. He's a 12th century Zen master, studied with a Chinese teacher who came to Kamakura. His name was Isan. His teacher's name was Isan. But Musou is remembered today, not just for his teaching, but also for he was kind of the gardening genius of Japan, rock gardens and things like that. But he has a couple of poems about old, getting old, which I thought it might be appropriate for me to read. It's called Old Man to the Point. No inheritance is like that from a true heir of the Dharma, and there is no other school or different sect with which to quarrel in your old age and have gone deeper into the truth under everything and your eyebrows have grown down over your chin. You ever see any photographs of D.T.

[16:10]

Suzuki in his last year? There's one downstairs in the bookstore on the cover of his last book, or the book about him. Incredible. Another one is called Old Man Advancing. Beyond the point where the rivers end and mountains vanish, you have kept on walking originally. You have kept on walking. Originally, the treasure lies just under one's feet. You made the mistake of thinking that now you would be able to retire in peace. Look, in your own hut, the meditation mat has never been warm. Chilling thought. So you go all these years, and the mat's not even ever been warmed up.

[17:12]

But they kept doing it, over and over again. A lot of the times in the, sort of the, I don't know what the word to call it, but you say, you know, it's failure after failure. I like this, it's named Kodo, that monk, And people ask him, what's the purpose of Zazen? And he said, it's no purpose, it's a waste of time. I've always kind of liked that. I said that to somebody one time and they got mad at me and walked away. I said, what did you do? You've been practicing all these years. So what happened to you? I said, nothing. That's it. But he got really upset. He said, if you're going to go practice Theravada... I'll have another little longer poem.

[18:18]

This is by Miyasawa Kenji, a poet of the 30s in Japan who died young. I've read him before. I like him very much. He's kind of a... Today, the people who are into ecology in Japan, he's kind of their hero, because he worked with farmers, trying to help them develop better rice production. He was very close to the farmers and the land. So... This poem is called Spring and Asura. Now, asuras are these sort of jealous gods, they're called. They inhabit one of the six realms of existence, which I don't want to go into now, but it's part of Buddhist cosmology. And there's a human realm and an animal realm. Anyway, this other realm is the Asura realm. And these are gods.

[19:20]

They're also devas who are gods. And the Asuras are jealous because they're jealous of the other gods. And they're always kind of angry. And one of the reasons they're angry is that they have a tree, so the story goes, that grows in their heaven part. But the tree goes up into the other realm, the deva realm, and the fruit, the devas take the fruit off the tree. So that's one reason they're mad. They're always kind of fighting it. Anyway, they're angry gods. And this is called Spring and Asura. Out of the gray steel of imagination, Acabee vines entwine the spider web. Wild rosebush, humus marsh, everywhere, everywhere, such designs of arrogance. When more busily than noon, woodwind music, amber fragments pour down. How bitter, how blue is the anger. At the bottom of the light in April's atmospheric strata, spitting, gnashing, pacing back and forth,

[20:28]

I am a surer incarnate. The landscape sways in my tears, shattered clouds to the limit of visibility. In heaven's sea of splendor, sacred crystalline winds sweep spring's royal cypresses, absorbs ether, black, all its dark feet, the snow ridge of Tien Shan glitters. waves of heat haze and white polarization yet the two words are lost the clouds torn fly through the sky ah at the bottom of the brilliant april gnashing burning going back and forth i am a sir incarnate shall seed in this clouds flow where does he sing the spring bird the sun shimmers blue a sewer and forest, one music, and from heaven's bowl that caves in and dazzles, throngs of clouds like calamites extend, branches sadly proliferating, all landscapes twofold, treetops faint, and from them a crow flashes up.

[21:37]

when the atmospheric strata becomes clearer and cypresses hush, rise in heaven, someone coming through the gold of grassland, someone casually assuming a human form in rags and looking at me, a farmer. Does he really see me? At the bottom of the sea of blinding atmospheric strata, the sorrow blue, blue and deep. Cypresses sway gently. The bird suffers the blue sky again. The true words are not here. The surf's tears fall on the earth. As I breathe the sky anew, lungs contract faintly white, bodies scatter in the dust of the sky, the top of the ginkgo tree glitters again, in cypress and darker, sparks of the clouds pour down. April 8th, 1922. I was wondering why I wanted to read that poem.

[22:42]

I started out with this intention, and I kept saying, read this poem. And I still haven't figured out exactly why, but it feels right. And so, may our attention equally penetrate it.

[22:59]

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