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. Morning, everybody. You can all hear me. Yes? Yes. Louder, like this. That's good. Well, the first thing is to thank John and Robin and me and Chris for those awesome dharma talks.

[01:00]

They were really floored me. Each one of them was the ultimate dharma talk. At the end you thought, there cannot be another dharma talk after this. And then another one came and you thought the same thing. There could not be, after this, another dharma talk. It's impossible. And I think we all saw, with our eyes, we saw their true nature shining through. And we all could understand it. Here are four true disciples of the Buddha. So thank you. It was pretty great. to go through all this and receive Shiho becoming a fully ordained priest in the Soto tradition in the lineage of Suzuki Shinryu is a tremendous blessing.

[02:22]

After one of the ceremonies, I don't remember when exactly, but Robin said to me, how do I deserve this? And I said, right, you don't deserve it. And none of us do. Somehow it happens, we receive Shiho, we don't really know how, and we know we don't deserve it, and yet we are given to occupy this blessed position. If you don't care about Soto Zen or Buddhism, maybe you would see all this going on and you would think that receiving Shiho is a lot of trouble for nothing. Some kind of odd medieval Asian trip, which it is. But if you have a high regard for our practice traditions,

[03:32]

then you really appreciate what a blessing it is receiving Shiho and even though you know that they don't deserve it you will have a high respect for all those who have received it because they are our elders and if you yourself are a newly minted elder you will at first be a little bit shaken by the weight of your responsibility to represent and protect the Dharma. Because after all, who are you? You are no one special. And nobody knows this better than you. And yet, despite this, you do have the responsibility and so you have to conduct yourself. accordingly not once in a while or in public or when you have your robe on but all the time even when you're alone maybe especially when you're all alone because you are a disciple of the Buddha and that's the main thing to accept that you are truly a disciple of Buddha

[05:02]

And then the next job is to be yourself, really and truly yourself. Not some idea of yourself, not some self somebody else sometimes wanted you to be, or not some self the tradition seems to want you to be, not some self to protect and be proud of or embarrassed about. but your real self, who you really are, and who you have always been, as you are. And that was the thing that was so awesome, I think, about these four talks we heard. Because all four of these awesome women ancestors showed us their true selves. And seeing that, I think we were all blown away. So thanks to all four for your eloquence, each one totally different from the other, and more than this, for your faith, your love, your devotion over many, many years of practice.

[06:19]

I didn't total it up. Later on, we'll total it up, but I'm sure that these four women represent well over 100 years of Dharma practice, no doubt. I personally feel like one lucky guy to have such awesome ancestors in my life as dear friends, companions of the way, and it gives me a lot of confidence for my own practice going forward. Without saying all the words that they say, I just want to borrow their words and echo their thanks to all of you for this practice period. I told maybe one or two of you that I was quite worried coming down for the practice period because my teacher cursed me. You would appreciate, Greg, yeah. He cursed me. So when I told him that we were coming down to lead practice period and that we were going to do four shiho ceremonies, he really got mad.

[07:30]

And he said, Don't you remember the last time you did this? In 1999, when we were there together at Tassajara? What a disaster it was. You abandoned the practice period to do the Shiho ceremonies, and then you abandoned the Shiho ceremonies to take care of the practice period, and you totally botched both jobs, leaving me to pick up the pieces. You don't remember that? Do not do that again. I didn't remember it that way. But then again, I have a way of forgetting things. So the fact that I don't remember it that way doesn't mean it wasn't that way. Certainly for him, it was that way. And he said, don't do it again. And by the time he said, don't do it again, it was too late. Too many people had made too many arrangements and moved heaven and earth. And it was too late.

[08:33]

So I felt, oh, no, I'm cursed. And when I went up in February, you know, when I was gone, many of you told me, oh, you hated us for going away. Sorry, we went away. I remember that. hating the abbot when the abbot would go away. He gets to go away, and you probably have wine and nice meals, and we're down here struggling, you know, what the hell is... I remember that well, so I just assumed that you all felt that way. LAUGHTER But anyway, when I was there in February, we had an elegant, fancy dinner together. Sorry. LAUGHTER because Kathy and Liz share pretty much the same birthday, one day apart. So every year we go out. And I told him, I said, we're going back to Tassajara, we're starting the ceremonies and I'm so upset about it. You cursed me.

[09:36]

You cursed me. He thought this was amusing. I did not think it was that amusing. However, thanks to everyone's help and goodwill, most especially Rick, who was a tireless and enormous help, it didn't seem all that disastrous. It seemed to go okay. And perhaps all of you are too polite to tell me otherwise, which is fine with me, by the way. But anyway, Thanks everybody for being willing to tolerate all these extra complications. And as we all saw in the last few days, it was totally worth it. So today is the third day of our final session.

[10:47]

and everybody is pretty settled and pretty ready for it and I think many of us are feeling and I know many of you have told me this the special joy that we've accomplished together during this very special practice period and some of you are even feeling a little sorrow that in days that we can count on our fingers, it will be over and we will part ways and this community will never again exist. Which makes this session all the more precious because it's our last opportunity of this practice period to realize what we have not yet realized and to understand what we have not yet understood. The point of our practice is liberation.

[11:54]

To break out of our self-clinging into a life of compassion and love. As Ami reminded us, the world needs bodhisattvas, perhaps more than ever. The world needs bodhisattvas desperately. Because human beings are so terrible. Terrible. We have done so much harm to one another forever. We are all traumatized, thoughtless, damaged children. And we're going to keep on going that way unless some of us will finally grow up, get over ourselves, and take loving responsibility for one another and for this world.

[13:04]

And you can't do that without waking up to who you really are and what this world really is. We have to go beyond ourselves. We have to become Buddha. And this is what Sashin is for. So, in the spirit of a deeper investigation, perhaps than we've made before, I bring up a story from the Blue Cliff Record, the 94th story. This is the introduction to the story. The one phrase before sound is not transmitted. Sorry. The one phrase before sound is not transmitted by a thousand sages. The single thread before our eyes is forever without a gap.

[14:09]

Pure and naked, bare and clean, the white ox on open ground. Eyes alert, ears alert, the golden-haired lion. Leaving this aside for a moment, tell me, what is the white ox on open ground? So here's the story. The Shurangama Sutra says, When I do not see, why do you not see my not-seeing? If you see my not seeing, naturally that is not the characteristic of not seeing. If you don't see my not seeing, naturally it's not a thing. How could it not be you? So that's the 94th story in the Blue Cliff Record.

[15:16]

It's just that simple quotation from the Sri Rangama Sutras. So the story is about the nature of consciousness, which is imaged as the white ox on open ground. Consciousness as it manifests through our six senses. This is the major theme of the Shurangama Sutra, which was of enormous importance in Chinese Buddhism, although not so important for some reason in Indian Buddhism. Over and over again, in different ways, using different metaphors, the Shurangama Sutra discusses this question. And here it uses sight as an example of all the senses. So what is it saying? So we're all sitting here. The altar is in the middle of the room. If we all look at the altar,

[16:17]

We all think that seeing is actually something, because we all would agree, the altar is certainly there and we're all seeing it. And we all assume we know what each other is seeing, as if the seeing were a real and objective something. This is our shared world. This is the field in which we can meet one another We can find love and hate and lots of problems to solve. But if for some reason some like I had a stroke or some weird neurological thing happened and all of a sudden I couldn't see anymore even though my eyes are open and we're all looking at the altar and I'm not seeing the altar You won't be able to tell I'm not seeing it.

[17:24]

In other words, you are not able to see my not seeing. Even if you look at me and you look at my eyes and you say, something's weird about his eyes. That's my eyes you're seeing, not my actual non seeing. You can't see my non seeing, just like the quotation says. But if you think about this a little more, you realize you also can't see my seeing either. Even though you think you can, because we agree we see the same altar, but actually you cannot see my seeing. You don't know, really, whether or not I'm seeing or exactly what I'm seeing because you can't see my seeing. So what this amounts to is the fact that seeing or hearing or smelling or any of the senses is actually not a definite something.

[18:35]

The altar appears to be a definite something. We know who made it and we know they spent many hours in the shop making it and so on. The altar is a definite something, perhaps. But the seeing of the altar, that seeing isn't anything. And this is not that there's no seeing. There certainly is a function that we call seeing. It's just that the actual nature of that function isn't something that we can grasp. It's also clearly not nothing either. You can look up and down all over the place. You can find lots of altars, but you will not find anywhere seeing or hearing itself, because these things aren't anything. And that's why the sutra says, if you could see my not seeing, then how could it be not seeing? That's the point.

[19:38]

You can't see not seeing. So it's not anything. And the conclusion drawn? How could it not be you? What? That makes sense? How could it not be you? What the sutra means by this, I think, is that since the operation of the senses isn't something, it's not a thing, it's not graspable, It's not an object. Of course it's purely subjective. In other words, it's consciousness. Of course it's consciousness, which is the opposite of something. Consciousness is boundless and unlimited. It neither appears nor disappears.

[20:39]

It's neither permanent nor temporary. It's neither here nor there. It's indefinable, illimitable. And this is our actual self that we are actually living and functioning through every single day through the operation of our senses. This is our actual self. This is our truest, most fundamental self. All our other selves are stories built on this truest self. Everything else in our lives are stories and feelings, which of course we need and we have to recognize. And the whole world itself is a story, a feeling. All these stories and all these feelings are based on our senses, including the mind as a sense organ that cognizes thoughts and sensations.

[21:44]

And all of this is nothing but consciousness which we don't even know what it is. Because consciousness is not something you can grasp or understand or measure or study or pin down in any way. And this is what you are. Of course, we're occupied with our various stories of the world and self. We study these stories. We think about them. We have to. But when we think that these various stories are actually firmly true, as we tell them, and that they actually do describe the full measure of what we are,

[22:44]

we will suffer because all these stories are tragic and incomplete and full of trouble. One of the things we're doing in this Dharma study is expanding our repertoire of stories. We will always have our family story. We will always have our personal story, our story of woe and difficulty. And we can't pretend somehow that that story didn't happen or isn't so. But if we limit ourselves to that story, this is too small for who you are. It's like a shoe, too tight, that pinches. And we feel the pinch. To study the Dharma is to expand the range of our stories. Now, besides our family story and our personal story, we have sacred stories that are also our stories.

[23:52]

We have stories of the ancestors, stories of the Buddhas that are also our stories. We are me and you. Of course we are ordinary shmoes. But we are also bodhisattvas. We are also Buddhas. We are also ancestors. And our life's journey is bigger and more inspiring than we thought. And now we have room to move around. We all live in what we assume to be an objective world of stuff and institutions and other actual people. How do we know that world? Only by means of our senses. Only by means of our senses. So there's an object over there, the world, a subject over here, the supposed owner of the consciousness of the senses, the knowing or the knower.

[24:54]

Since we cannot see the senses themselves, but only the world, which is produced by these senses, we assume by analogy that our sense consciousness is an object just as the world is. So then we imagine... that we ourselves are objects. We are always objectifying ourselves. And we believe it. We believe in this object called myself. Any time you judge yourself or worry about yourself or love yourself or hate yourself or are disappointed in yourself or congratulate yourself or get mad at someone else because they did something to you, The only way any of that makes any sense is because you assume an object called yourself. And since there's a yourself there must be the other guy. And if you didn't assume that none of these emotions would hold up.

[25:58]

They would never even occur to you. But the truth is fundamentally you are not an object. You are a subject. You are consciousness. It's not something. And therefore you cannot limit it and you cannot define it. Elsewhere in the sutra they give the example of a square box filled up with empty space. And now you're going to take the empty space out of the square box and you're going to put it into a round box. And the sutra asks, now do you have to change the empty space from being square to round so that it'll fit into the round box? Maybe take a hammer to it or heat it up with a Bunsen burner so you can get it in the right shape? No, you don't have to do that. Because the empty space has never changed its shape. We think that it's square or round because the box is square or round, but the space is not square or round.

[27:07]

It's easy to mistake its nature. And this is our human problem, deeply ingrained in who we are, that we sell ourselves short, time and time again. We trade in what a bad deal. We trade in our noble Buddha nature. for some very limited and unsatisfactory sense of ourselves and a world. So in sitting practice, we can train in understanding ourselves in this way. We can personally see this. Sitting practice is inherently very intimate and very warm, which is to say, you know, you can't really explain it. even to yourself, you can't really explain it.

[28:10]

It's not that it's profound and beyond words. It's almost the opposite. It's not anything. So you can't delineate it in any way. And as soon as you try to delineate it, you realize, well, it's not exactly the feeling. The Sharingama Sutra gives many logical explanations about this, but really... they all amount to the fact that in the face of what we really are, our actual experience of our lives, if we could get close enough to it, common sense and the usual stories simply don't hold up. And we realize that all of our naming is ultimately fake, just dust in the air. And all the distinctions we make, practically and of necessity, that cause us to suffer, like me and you, good and bad, success, failure, and so on.

[29:16]

All these distinctions, practical, necessary, but provisional. And if we really, really got it, that they were provisional, we wouldn't be suffering so much at their hands. In reality, the world comes to us whole, It comes to us warm. But we, because of our beginningless ignorance and because of the conditioning of our lifetime, persist in adding frost on top of snow, as they say, making something that is distant from us, when in reality our life is as close as our own eyeballs. So we can take advantage of this session to practice with this teaching so it becomes something we know for ourselves rather than a nice piece of philosophy. The Buddha had various ideas.

[30:18]

You know, you hear that Zen is not intellectual. But the Buddhism is full of ideas and concepts about the mind and about life that the Buddha wanted us to be aware of. but he meant these concepts to be transformative and personal rather than merely philosophical. So there are tons of ideas in Buddhism, like the idea of consciousness that I'm talking about in the Shurangama Sutra, but the point of the ideas is to use them to confirm and verify our actual lives so that we can know how to live them, so we can practice with our sensory experiences. So we can turn the mind around and realize, feel, how it is that we're subjects, not objects. When we stop seeing ourselves as objects, we stop seeing the world as objects. And the world becomes, right before our eyes, warm and pliable, instead of threatening and hard-edged.

[31:25]

So we can pay attention in sitting to the elements of the body. the four great elements that we chant about. We can be with our breathing and our posture always as a foundation, attention to breath in the belly, in and out. That becomes our basis. Then we can pay attention to the many sensations. For instance, you can pay attention to this really quite remarkable experience of the hardness of the teeth in the mouth, the gateway to which is the lips, which are so soft. It's amazing, you know? You can meditate on your lips, and you can feel the moisture between your lips, and you can feel the subtle pressure of the lips

[32:32]

touching one another. Very delicate, beautiful thing. Even though you're paying attention to the breathing in the belly, you can also feel the coolness of the breathing at the nostrils. And especially, you can feel the delicate, delicate softness of the skin of the face. Dogen writes about this. The face, the skin, of the face, and you can feel the air touching the face, the human face. Wow. What an enormous experience. So expressive, so soft, so alive, registering every single thought and feeling somewhere in its topography.

[33:38]

And when the air touches the face, it literally mixes itself with the face skin. Air molecules and skin molecules mingling as the air is kissing your face and softening it. And you can pay attention to the movement of the blood in your body. Especially you can feel it in your hands, in your mudra. You can pay very close attention to your thumbtips as your thumbtips touch one another. So many things to appreciate. And you do this not to make note of all these things and check them off your list. bullet points, got that, got that, figured that one out. No. The point is not to do this. I did it. No.

[34:40]

The point is to merge with these things, become these things, so that you are turning around the consciousness of that sense, turning off the distancing and the flowing out and the objectification of your life. This is not something to write home about and report to your friends. If you can report it to your friends and write home about it, you can rest assured it's something else. Hearing. Probably already I must have said something about hearing because hearing is so great. Even if you can't hear very well, it's even better, right? You really know how precious hearing is. That poem I often quote from, it wasn't a poem, my poem from a Dharma talk of Huitzu Roshi, where he says, I'm losing my hearing.

[35:42]

I'm getting old, I'm losing my hearing. Now my hearing is more mine than it ever was before. I understand that. So hearing, you can, again, breathing, belly, posture, setting the foundation, and then you listen. to sound. And if you listen fully enough, you can hear the silence in the middle of every sound. I'll never forget once doing a poetry workshop in San Jose in the traffic, you know, all around the San Jose Poetry Center. I was doing it with Gary Snyder and he said, listen to the traffic, hear the sound of the silence in the traffic. And we all listened and you could hear the sound. silence in the middle of sound if you really listen. Because you're hearing, hearing itself. And how could it not be you?

[36:43]

Very intimate. And you don't say, oh, I'm hearing that. Or this. There's no hearing. Or you can hear your own body. Your heartbeat. which is the pulse of the world. So anyway, that's a few suggestions. You've got many more you thought of yourself, I know. So I do not want to make too much of this or make big claims for it. This is not the point of our practice, is to sit and hear hearing, you know. And it's certainly not the case that if you can do this wonderful thing, your problems of your life will now be over and you're now from now on immune. No. This is not practice.

[37:48]

Practice has many, many dimensions, including, for instance, the skill of everyday living, working with afflictive emotions, learning how to get used to yourself and not be so stuck on yourself, Stuff like loving kindness, compassion, mindfulness, skillful means. Knowing how to just walk side by side with another person. Patience, energy, precepts, a lot of practices. But the basis, the inspiration for all these practices is the wisdom that knows who you really are. the wisdom that knows the nature of mind that you experience firsthand and personally. And we can train ourselves in this experience on our cushions. And that's what Sashin is good for.

[38:49]

And having trained ourselves in this experience, we can build our conduct around it. So this practice is very, very basic for us and necessary. And without it, the edifice of Buddhadharma is just self-help and concepts. And this is very good. Self-help is really good. And concepts are really good. Because they really help. It all helps. The trouble is, it's still shaky. And it will still be rocked by life's catastrophes. in order to be really free and really be able to appreciate your life as it is, no matter what happens, you have to know the nature of your mind for yourself. And you have to have no doubt about it.

[39:51]

Suedo's poem on this case says, the whole elephant, the whole ox, both are blinding Cataracts, like cataracts on the eye. Both are blinding cataracts. Adepts of all time have together been naming and describing. If you want to see the yellow-faced fellow right now, each atom of every land lies halfway there. So this is a nice poem about the case, the story. The whole elephant and the white ox are two very famous stories about seeing. And I'm sure everybody here knows the famous elephant story. It's already in the earliest sutras and before the Buddhist time, the story about inaccurate partial seeing.

[40:57]

So there's a bunch of blind people and they come upon an elephant. And one grabs a hold of the elephant's legs and says, oh, an elephant. I know what an elephant is like. It's like a sewer pipe. Another person feels the tail and says, no, no, you're wrong. An elephant is basically like a rope. Another one feels the tusks and says, no, you people are totally crazy. An elephant is like a curved spear. And on and on each one telling the other one that they're wrong. And this is what an elephant is really like. Each one is right and wrong. So this is going on every day, right? Have you noticed? It goes on every day, especially here at Tassajara where hardly anything is happening and there's only a few people around to think they know what's happening. You can sort of tell, right?

[42:00]

Everyone sees a different elephant part And everyone is sure that they know what the elephant is like. Everybody's right. But everybody's only seeing a part. And nobody can see the whole picture. Because as Dogen teaches us, we're all only seeing as far as our eye of practice can reach. And we're conditioned by everything that's ever happened to us. and by our certainty that we know who we are and we see what we see and that our perceptions and judgments, of course, are based on the facts, the truth. And we're right, you know, what we see may quite well be true, but it's never entirely true. So, I would recommend to all of us, myself included, an extra dose of humility

[43:07]

and doubtfulness when you are completely sure that you are right and she is wrong you're on the good side and he's on the bad side and things happen the way you think they did when you find your mind in that state please think again there is always more to every situation than what you are seeing. And the great master of this teaching and why he is so beloved is Suzuki Roshi, who would always say, maybe so, maybe, maybe so, and if so, not always so. So the other story, the one about the whole ox, this one is from the Taoist text, the Zhuangzi. And this is one about a famous butcher.

[44:13]

Usually butchers don't appear as heroes in the Buddhist stories, but in a Taoist story there's a butcher. And this butcher is like the greatest butcher who ever lived. He could cleave an ox up into perfect cuts of meat. with one amazing swift blow. He didn't have to think. Right away he could size up the ox, whack, and before you know it there's a whole stack of like different T-bone steaks and this kind of meat all stacked up neatly. Zip, zip, zip. Perfect. In a minute. And his cutting was so perfect that it says for 19 years he never had to sharpen his knife because his knife did not meet any resistance. So this sounds like an image of true seeing, right? Seeing the whole thing. Seeing perfectly. This is what we imagine, how we're going to see when we're Buddhas. You know, everything, we see everything, we know everything.

[45:16]

But the poem says, no, this is another cataract over the eyes. It's blindness. Because beautiful as it seems, it is still something. Something to be known. something to be mastered. All the adepts of all time have been naming and describing these things that are limited in that way. And all the sutras, all the jabbering, endless jabbering of the Zen teachers up to and including this very moment of jabbering. is useless. Because how could it possibly be right, what we're all talking about? What is really, really true is just too intimate to be described.

[46:20]

It just takes your breath away. It just floors you. It reminds me of somehow Keats' line at the end of Ode, to Aggression Earn where he says, very famously, beauty is truth. Truth, beauty. And that is all ye know on earth and all you need to know. Because truth is beautiful. And what is beautiful is the truth. The truth we are looking for in our practice is not some sort of mathematical or logical, descriptive proposition. It's not some kind of flashing spiritual insight. It isn't even some kind of wise skill in living. It is simply seeing with our eyes and ears and our whole heart the world as it is.

[47:27]

Partial though our seeing will always be. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Feeling the world and all its suffering, including our own, as poignant and beautiful and true. Knowing for yourself that your life is real. And this is the only thing we want, isn't it? That our life be real. So, that's why there actually isn't any Zen teaching. I hate that idea, you know.

[48:29]

Teaching Zen, to me it's like an oxymoron, you know, teaching Zen? What? How could that be? And a Dharma talk in Zen is not like a teaching thing. You're teaching somebody something or explaining something. It's actually called a tesho, meaning presenting the shout, singing and dancing, ascending the seat. That's the Dharma talk. The ritual of ascending the seat and getting off the seat. That's the main talk. That's why in the Shorya Roku, the case is that Buddha gets up on the seat and gets off the seat. That's all you need to do. In Zen, there are all kinds of dire warnings against explaining stuff. If you explain stuff in a Zen talk, your eyebrows will fall off. Which I guess... means you'll be like those Theravada monastics who shave their eyebrows, those Theravada monastics who think they have things figured out, you know, practice nirvana.

[49:34]

No, no, no. Your eyeballs will fall off, eyebrows will fall off, and you'll be like them if you explain too much. Or as Guishan says, if you explain too much, you're going to grow horns on your head, which is probably why Guishan later said, I will be reborn as a water buffalo, because he probably said way too much. So I feel sorry for myself. Think of my fate, you know. I don't know what's going to happen to me. I think, I'm hoping, my hope is that I will be reborn as a mule deer with really big ears. I don't think I'll be reborn as a monk. I don't think so. But a mule deer, maybe. Because they can leap up, you know, steep. Isn't it amazing how deer can, how do they do that? They leap up steep, steep. I would like to be able to do that, so I have my hopes. Certainly, there's no doubt that I've said too much.

[50:40]

Long ago, long ago, said too much. If you want to see the yellow-faced fellow right now, Every atom of every land lies halfway there. The yellow-faced fellow, of course, is the Buddha. And this is what we're trying to do. See the Buddha, the yellow-faced fellow, right now. Now that finally it occurs to us that we should be thinking about race and racism and its many, many, many implications and complications and tragedies. It's kind of interesting to hear that our Chinese Chan ancestors speak of the Indian, a foreigner, right, Shakyamuni Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, as being yellow-faced, or maybe they meant brown-faced. I don't know what the word actually means.

[51:43]

Just like us, our Chinese Zen ancestors, many of whom were Han Chinese, which was like normal to be Han Chinese, even though a lot of them weren't Han Chinese. That was the normal race that the normal people were supposed to be. In other words, they were white. They thought the Buddha was different. He was yellow-faced. So yes, let's see our yellow-faced, our brown-faced, our black-faced one. Let's really, really see her face to face as much as we can without our cultural biases. And let's also see our cultural biases too face to face. Because to really see means to love. You can't really see without sympathy. So let's see the Buddha in others.

[52:48]

Always. Where else are you going to see the Buddha if not there? And let's remember that we are not normal. Nobody is normal. That's a kind of like fiction. To see the brown-faced one, we don't have to look very far. Every atom everywhere is the path to him. Suedo says, halfway there. This means you're always trying to get there and you never do. Although in all other schools of Buddhism, the Buddha is the one who knows, the complete one, the perfect one, the one beyond further learning, the omniscient one. In Zen, we make fun of the Buddha and we say, well, the Buddha's still working on his practice. He's maybe about halfway. Because we're the Buddha. And we're maybe not quite halfway, maybe 1 4th, 1 8th, 1 10th.

[53:51]

Even the Buddha up ahead of us is always working on his practice. When we work on ours, the Buddha works on his. So we're sitting to meet our teacher Shakyamuni Buddha in our own body, sitting under the Bodhi tree. A human being who was determined to cut through his own confusion and face his own life unflinchingly. And in doing that, to overcome suffering and fear. And even though he knew perfectly well that explanations don't explain anything and teachings don't teach anything, for 45 years, he shared his practice with everyone who came. because he passionately believed that what was possible for him was possible for every other human being he ever met.

[54:57]

And this Buddha mind has been handed down, hand to hand, warm hand to warm hand, through 92 generations to the present. not a fantasy. It's not from long ago. It's here. So please, drop your preconceptions and assumptions about anything and just sit and do realize Buddha's heart. So this evening, I think we all know we're having Shukai ceremony. And it's perfect timing. Exactly what we need to do tonight. Because what we learned, the more we practice, is that there's only one practice, actually.

[56:10]

It all comes down to one thing. It's not about zazen, really, you know. No. It's about precepts. How we live. Buddha's life. So this is a perfect time for all of us tonight, with Joe, to receive the 16 Bodhisattva precepts, which are not little rules of conduct for living. They are Buddha's conduct, Buddha's life. So let's all, every one of us, receive the precepts tonight with Joe. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[57:19]

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