This is the pure and simple practice of a true mind of faith, a true body of faith. Good morning. This is our last full day of the session. Tomorrow is Sunday and there are visitors who come for the morning meditation instruction

[01:05]

and the Dharma talk. We won't come together in this way again for a Dharma talk because visitors will be here. And the rest of the day is a little different too. People who are in the guest house have to put their room back the way it was before they came and the whole day tomorrow feels slightly different and of course the session ends at four. So today is our last full day and tonight is our last night. And sometimes there's a tendency to kind of leap forward and to think, I did it, I did it. It's the sixth day. I can't believe it. I actually got this far and a kind of excitement and less interest and dedication to maintaining

[02:14]

silence and eyes cast down and all the different admonitions. So I just wanted to bring this up and to ask everyone to please remain, remain within the session forms, the session feeling atmosphere of the Zen Do and walking around because it really depends on all of us doing that for the session to come to its natural close tomorrow. We'll feel like we lost somehow the sixth day. So just watch, just watch and see and help each other, please help each other. There is a session that Suzuki Roshi led and I think it was on the sixth day he said something

[03:14]

like I know many of you are very sad that the session is almost ending and you'll be going back to your jobs and work and now some people in the session thought that's right. They were feeling the sadness and how wonderful the week had been. Other people in the session just couldn't wait for it to be done already so they could leave. So don't assume however it is you're feeling, what your relationship is to the session that others necessarily share that. The person who told me about this couldn't believe he was saying that. She was in so much pain, so agitated, so couldn't wait for it to be over. She thought he was just kidding, you know, that people were sad that it was going to end. There's also another Suzuki Roshi story about Sesshin where he said someone in the Sesshin

[04:22]

has realized enlightenment except they don't know who they are. So sit with that one for a while. Which is, you know, feels like the family feeling of Soto Wei, you know, enlightenment, well, maybe it's me, I don't know. Since I feel like on the sixth day your ears are as, you know, they get more and more, what's the word, acute, I guess, one's hearing. You can hear, I know from my own experience I feel like I can hear an instruction in a new way. And I wanted to talk a little bit since you're all here together about Gassho, the practice

[05:29]

of Gassho, Gassho meaning the mudra of palms pressed together in the bow. This is one of these forms that you come upon at, well, I think in Eastern culture in general palms pressed together is very everyday, not so unusual. But for Western culture, except in like praying or something, I don't, you know, we use, we shake hands, you know, the hand goes out, boom, boom, boom. When we greet others we don't, I guess we incline the head, there's a kind of bow like that. But palms pressed together is not in Western culture something people are familiar with. So and there's, and even in the Eastern culture there's different forms of it. So in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition they do palms pressed together making a lotus bud,

[06:33]

which is this kind of shape. The palms aren't actually touching, it's more like this, the fingers. There's lotus bud and you see, you know, this kind of thing. But our family way is, I thought we could all practice this, the mudra, the word mudra means it's a yogic practice. All the different hand postures are yogic positions. They're not just some, you know, way to keep your hands out of your pockets. It's an actual yogic position, a seal, it's sometimes called a seal, mudra means a seal, like the last bow in oryoki is palms pressed together, a kind of seal. So for our tradition it's palms pressed together with the palms even with your nose, you can

[07:38]

try this, and your own, they're always based on your own body dimension, so your own fists width apart from your nose. So if you've got a big fist, if you measured it, it'd be different from someone with a little fist, right? Your own fists width apart from the nose, and then there's no air there, it's not lotus bud, it's actually palm to palm, you can feel all the fingers and the warmth of the hands, and then the arms are parallel to the ground, rather than like this, or drawn in, it's parallel to the ground, and there's this space in here under the arms, and in this area there's spaciousness. And if one has a tendency to protect this area, you may have your mudra in like that, you know, it's kind of open hearted here.

[08:41]

And then when you bow, the fists width is kept, so it's not boom boom, or down and up, you keep the fists width and just incline down, and back. Now, but also, if you looked at it from the side, the thumbs and the fingers are not apart like this, they're all touching and the thumb is in, and the thumb is, I remember after being at Tussar for four years, maybe, someone said, they mentioned that my thumb was always like this, rather than like this, and I, I couldn't believe it. Where had I been all those years? How could I not have noticed that my thumb was like that? And so when I straightened it out, it was like the world kind of flipped upside down. So in practicing this mudra of palms pressed together, if you place it this way, each time,

[09:49]

each time, and how many bows do we do a day? Countless, right? To and from, to and from the cushion, and before meal, after meal, in the Zen Dojo, after the gamashio, I mean, it's, I don't know how many we do. Now, just like in tea ceremony, there's certain levels of formality of bows. There's the shin bow, it's very formal, and then I can't remember the other names, may or Fu can help me, but, so in certain, like passing the gamashio, you wouldn't do it like very formal, you know, reverent, you know, it's just acknowledging that you're passing someone and receiving something. So there's a whole language of the bows also within the awareness of placing the hands. So, you know, it's the end of the practice period, we've got, for those of us in practice

[10:51]

period, why did we wait so long to talk about gassho? But I actually feel it's sometimes hard to hear, there's so many details, and with this acute hearing we have right now, I think I wanted to offer the practice of gassho now for your, for everyone to take up, and then for you to see what happens when you do it each time. And is there habit energy to collapse down, or to not fully bring yourself there? So, for me, I guess maybe I bring it up because for me it's been a very important practice, and was very inspiring when I first came, seeing the teachers practice

[11:51]

this way. And then as you get older, I mean, Suzuki Roshi had a broken finger, right? So his gassho looked different, you know, it had a kind of thing like that. In Page Street, there's stained glass windows between the dining room and the kitchen. Those of you who know San Francisco Zen Center building know it's Katagiri Roshi's gassho, which is, you know, just perfectly straight and pressed together. And then this Suzuki Roshi, the broken finger. So the two together, it's important to keep the two together because we do have our broken fingers and our dislocated thumbs and our stumps, right? And we make full effort with whatever we have. So, our uniqueness, our unique breeze of reality.

[12:58]

So yesterday, we were talking a little bit about the second and third ancestor, Taiso Eka, or Hueka, and Kanchi Sosan, and their practice together. I felt there was something that I had left unsaid that I wanted to clarify. So just to remind you, Taiso Eka was Bodhidharma's disciple. And he met Kanchi Sosan, who had leprosy, remember? It was over 40, and Kanchi Sosan asked him to cleanse me. My body is infected with leprosy. I beg you, oh priest, to cleanse me of my wrongdoing. Bring me your wrongdoing and I will cleanse you.

[14:07]

And the master paused a while, the master meaning Kanchi Sosan. When I look for my wrongdoing, I cannot find it. And then Taiso Eka replied, I have already cleansed you of your wrongdoing. You must rely on Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And then they say the master, but I want to distinguish. Then Kanchi Sosan said, seeing you, meaning to his teacher, I already know what a monk is, but I still do not know what you mean by Dharma and community. And Hueka said, mind is Buddha, mind is Dharma. The Dharma and the Buddha are not two, and the treasure of the community is the same. So this karma, and our ancient twisted karma,

[15:11]

seeing the, you know, not being able to find it, and being cleansed of it, in that inability to actually find it, seeing its emptiness, is not the end of the story. It's not, okay, that's like the story of Baizhang and the fox, you know, where someone said after, you know, after enlightenment is, is someone, is cause and effect, do they have to worry about cause and effect, in essence? And they said, and the person answered, no, and was reborn as a fox for 500 years. So it's not that the seeing, seeing through the ancient twisted karma is the end of the story. It's, you have to bear it in mind, you have to deal with it. And so he says, you know, join the community of monks,

[16:16]

receive the triple treasure, which is practice. It's not, it's not enough to say it's all one man, it's all empty, babe, I'm, I can do anything now, I'm, I'm free. There is what we sometimes call habit energy, habitual way of dealing with the world that comes up, even so, even with seeing the emptiness or not being able to find the wrongdoing. And Huika actually had his own karmic debt to repay, you might say. And after he transmitted to Kanchi Sosan, he said, I have a lot of karma from past. This is after he's the second ancestor. And so he leaves teaching formally and goes into the town and, and later on he ends up teaching some more and he is denounced as

[17:26]

teaching false teachings and actually condemned and executed. That's what happened to Huika. So, the, so to take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, upon, it's not that I want to take refuge in order to have something see into the nature of reality, although that's okay too. But what, even upon seeing, we observe the precepts, we make amends, we repent and confess, even after attaining Buddhahood, will you observe these precepts? Yes, I will. So it's not the end of the story. And another way of talking about what we've been saying, habitual

[18:27]

responses, habit energy, routinized thinking, bondage, you know, another way that Buddhism talks about this is the six realms. The habitual energy is sometimes talked about as the six realms, which we allude to all the time in our meal chant and so forth, the beings in the sixth realms, six realms, which are the realm of animals, hungry ghosts, hell realms, fighting titans or, not demons, but gods or the fighting, the Asuras, Asuras, the heavenly realm, and then the realm of the gods or the devas, the heavenly realms, and the human realm. Did I miss that? Is there six? Did I do one, twice? So human, animal, hungry ghosts or pretas,

[19:30]

gods, fighting demons, and what did I miss now? Hell. And hell. So each one of these has a particular characterization of habit energy, you might say. Now in Sashin, we learn quite a bit about our habit energy. We're sitting there, we're within the schedule, practice period also, but Sashin, and what comes up is habit energy. Like we're sitting there and we want to do those things that we usually do that bind our anxiety, you might say. It's a psychological way of thinking of it. We have anxiety that arises, and so there's certain things we do that we've done for a long time that binds the anxiety, that kind of quiets it. And there is this book by this person with a long, long name about flow,

[20:44]

maybe you've read it, I think he's Czechoslovakian, and his name just flows on forever, I can't pronounce it. And there were, I was talking about this with someone, there have been studies done where people, they do just little micro-movements, little things that we do all day long. Tapping our pencil, and twirling our hair, or sucking our thumb, maybe when we're little, maybe when we're older. Certain way we, you know, kind of tap our foot, do our shoulders, that it's just our own micro-movements that, and each person has, and you know them, you know them about your friends and your family, certain little things they do, right? And these are soothing, what they did in this test was they had a little test,

[21:47]

had people not do their micro-movements, and then they studied what happened, and the people became very anxious, very uncomfortable, when they couldn't twirl their hair or whatever. So these micro-movements are ways, pretty benign usually, you know, in the usual sense of not harming others, just ways we have of soothing ourselves, self-care, binding the anxiety. And there's nothing wrong, you know, I can't emphasize that enough, there's nothing wrong with those ways. That's our way, that's our unique way. Now there's, you could say there's a continuum of self-soothing, and it can go into, you know, addictive behavior, compulsory behavior, or obsessive,

[22:51]

you know, like we maybe know people who have to wash their hands all the time. I have a friend who's, they have a relative who can't eat off of plates or go to a restaurant, she has to have paper plates that have come out of plastic coverings that have been, that are clean. And so when she comes to their home, they buy plastic, you know, picnic sets and paper plates, because it's the anxiety around, what is it, microbes or, you know, so this is on one end of this kind of activity, which can go all the way into obsessive compulsive behavior, neurosis or whatever. And then there's just the small things, the way we shrug our shoulders or raise our eyebrows and those kinds of things. So then, then Sashin comes along, or practice period, but Sashin,

[23:53]

and we're asked to, we, oh, not we're asked to, we sign up, you know, we call the office and pay the money and say, I want to do this, you know, this. This is something that's drawing me. And there we are sitting, and there's all sorts of admonitions, eyes cast down, no talking, da da da, and then we begin to feel our habitual way, right? Our habit energy, we can really feel it. And we, you know, we're sitting there and it's don't move, you know, total devotion to a mobile sitting. And yet the anxiety maybe begins to arise, and we may feel restless or restive. By the way, someone misunderstood me yesterday. It's not never give away a restive horse, but never give a lady a restive horse. Someone thought it was never give away a restive horse,

[24:57]

and they were contemplating, how come? Because a restive horse might be rather spirited and, you know, never give a lady a restive horse. I'll find out where that comes from someday. So where was I? Yes, so there we are sitting, and the horse becomes restive when there's restriction, right? And delay and some kind of pressure that you begin to feel, and it begins to mount, and you just want to go and make yourself a peanut butter sandwich and relax, you know? Because you know how that always feels when, you know, you've got that good food, and especially peanut butter is very stick to the ribs, a lot of ballast. But, you know, it's don't move and eat what's offered, and there's the snack area has been put away somewhere. Where have they hidden it?

[25:58]

And the anxiety begins to mount, you know? And then often what comes with that is, well, this is really... What are they doing? You know, why are they... What do you mean I can't scratch and fidget? That's the natural way. If I want to scratch, I'm going to scratch. And some anger about, you know, this is perverse, you know? Forgetting that we signed up for it, we paid. We wanted to put ourselves right there. So there's anger and ill will, and also this Zen stuff is really nuts, you know? This is... Isn't Zen about being natural? You know, when tired, sleep. When hungry, eat. Draw water, carry wood. And they say, you know, they're telling me I can't operate naturally. So this is...

[27:03]

I don't know what realm that would be. I guess all of them. There's the animal realm is characterized by fear, you know? Fear, something's going to... Some... You know how animals are very fearful? And Rozzy, you know, he's always very anxious and fearful. Rozzy's a particular dog, but all animals. For those of you who don't know Rozzy, she's a little Jack... Daniels? No. She's a Jack Russell terrier. Actually, I thought it was just Rozzy, but someone else has a Jack Russell. They said, no, they're all like that. But all animals, you know, are skittish. And the deer around, and the rabbits. And, you know, so fear is what characterizes the fear realm.

[28:05]

Then we have the pretas, the hungry ghosts. They look a little like George. They have a very small neck and a big belly, because they are constantly insatiable. They can't get enough. They can't get nurturingness in, in the form of food. Food and drink turns to terrible things, inedible things. But they try over and over again. And even if food is offered, they can't get it. And there's never enough. This is hungry ghosts. This is, you know, eating disorder. This is addictive. This is compulsion, you know. And we feel that, you know, this is a realm. This is, you know, you can think of these as our own psychological realms. You can think of moments going from hungry ghost to animal realm. You can think of it as actual people that you know that are like that,

[29:06]

that are caught in a world that is characterized by insatiability and craving, and never being fed, never being felt that they've been fed. And the fighting gods, the Asuras, are competitive, aggressive, angry. You know, you say, I can't fidget. Well, I'll give you fidgeting there. We'll do, [...] do. Some feeling like that. Some, you know, anger at the schedule and the leaders of the practice period. And, you know, I know what's good for me. And like that, that's the kind of Asura, competitive, aggressive thing. The hell realms are just basically pain. There's different kinds of hell realms, hot and cold. Just, and you can't move, you can't do much in the hell realms. Supposedly, you just, whatever you do, it's just more pain.

[30:10]

You know, you try to move yourself a little bit. Oh, I'll just arrange a little bit. That'll help. No, it's just worse. Why did I ever even try, you know? So the only way to be in the hell realms is to stay completely still and just experience, experience, experience, because any effort to get it better worsens it. So that's a realm we're familiar with. The deva realm, the heavenly realms, the suffering of the heavenly realms, you don't have suffering of, you know, things are pretty good. Got enough to eat and you're comfortable and nice people around you and a good job and a good place in the Zen, you know, right by the window. You really like that and you love your job. You didn't want to serve. Doing dishes is great. Your roommate doesn't snore. You know, it's really great. And the problem with the heavenly realms is that there's not very much compassion for anybody else.

[31:15]

What's the problem? What are they so annoyed about? This is so groovy. I'm so happy here. So no compassion for anybody else. And that sometimes in talking about the bondage side, the deva realm, they don't include, because you don't feel the bondage in the same way as the other ones. But the thing about the deva realm is when you come out, because it's just a realm on the wheel, when you come out of the deva realm, you go immediately to hell without passing go. You go right to hell. That's how it goes. So there may be good karma, let's say, that the fruit of that being this deva realm, but that karma will just run out because you're not creating the seeing through karma.

[32:16]

You're just resting on your laurels or kind of floating through. And when that runs out, you're right into hell. And you can see this over and over again. A classic example is Lenora Helmsley, is that her name? Lenora Helmsley, all her advertisements for all those hotels, she was the queen, just the queen of New York. Come visit the palace or whatever, do you remember? And wealthy and da, da, da. And then, I don't know if she's in jail or not, but kind of right down into hell. And what happened with President Clinton, from most powerful man in the world down to having to, over on the internet, the most intimate details of one's life, and this kind of from deva realm down. And those are kind of gross levels I'm talking about in the public arena,

[33:22]

but in our own lives, you can see how that happens. Because we lose touch in those heavenly realms. But anyway, the bondage is the bondage of not practicing, not feeling suffering so that our practice, we let go of wanting to practice. Why practice? And then the human realm is characterized by desire, it's the desire realm and suffering. And it's just enough, it's not so much like in the hell realms that we can't, we're just blotto, we just can't do anything. Nor is it so wonderful that we can't practice. It's the middle way, it's the human. So when we're sitting, these characteristic habitual ways we have of dealing with our suffering will arise.

[34:25]

And if we're sincerely giving it a go, trying to practice the teachings, the kind of form that the created, you know, satsang is a created form offered to people to be able to very deeply encounter ourselves. And these very habits that are sometimes so hard to even bring into view because they're so normal, normal meaning it's just who we are. We don't get a taste of them, but when we put ourselves in this kind of situation, we can taste it. And we can taste the suffering that's there. And then we can actually find maybe another way, another way. So it's some vow to study ourselves, even with the pain and the suffering or not even,

[35:33]

but through the pain and through the suffering, the truth of suffering. So just to emphasize again, these ways we have, they're not bad or something in and of themselves, but they may be covering over something that's there that we can't get to. We buffer ourselves and keep ourselves from actually feeling the true pain and anxiety and what's there. That has to be examined. It must be examined to actually settle. We settle ourselves in a very, or soothe ourselves in a very temporary, temporally fleeting way, just for a moment. While you're eating, it feels okay, I'm okay, I'm okay.

[36:34]

And then pretty soon after, there it is again. So you have to have more food or cigarettes. You know, cigarettes is a great, you know, I remember Ed Brown giving a lecture about smoking cigarettes. And it does temporarily, we feel, whew, you know. And he said, what about doing that without a cigarette? How about a deep breath, you know, filling your lungs and just letting it out without the cigarette? Can you, you know, we have the capacity to take care of ourselves in many different ways. And we can find out about that when we let go of our habitual ways. And I guess AA, you know, people who go, they make a vow of some sort that they're going to let go of

[37:40]

those ways that have been self-soothing, you know. You must admit. And yet the self-destruction is, you know, there's a decision to not do self-destructive things anymore. And it may be all sorts of addictions, including love addictions and all different things we can use. And when we actually see how they're covering over what we really want to get to, because the true pacifying the mind is to stop trying to pacify the mind. You know, please pacify my mind for me. Please remove my wrongdoing, please. And to actually stop trying to pacify the mind is the pacifying of the mind. It's like resting in the nature of mind,

[38:42]

which doesn't need pacifying. It is naturally at rest. It is naturally peaceful, tranquil. And, you know, the transformation of the suffering into the path is not trying to make the anxiety go away. Resting in the anxiety. Let the anxiety be the anxiety. Let the pain be just the pain. There is a pacification. There's a peacefulness right there. But usually we think I have to get it away and then I will feel peaceful. If I could just get this feeling away, then there's peace under there. But it's not under there. It's there. And we maybe have discovered this when we sit. There may have been times when you have just let the pain be the pain.

[39:47]

Let it come. Let it be. Leaving it as it is. And you may have found, much to your surprise, that it's completely okay. And maybe even the pain has vanished somehow. Maybe not. Maybe it's like in childbirth, you know, the... I think Steve might have brought this up in a lecture a couple weeks ago. Letting the pain be the pain, but being with, being with our whole body and breath and mind. It's not letting it be and trying to get away or soothe it or make it anything other than it is. Just being with. And it doesn't take it away. It's just okay the way it is. It's tranquil. So when the eight winds come,

[40:58]

this habit energy arises. The eight winds are... Or when we're influenced by the eight winds, you know, the word influence is this... It comes from flowing. When there's a flowing into us of the... Or flowing out to the objects, a shrava flowing out, oozing out, going out to the objects, getting involved. And the eight winds of profit and loss, pain and pleasure, honor and censure, and praise and blame. These winds, they're winds because they blow us around. No, I don't want that. Yes, I want this one. Oh good, it's profit. Oh no, it's loss. And the habitual ways we try to deal and mend and put our finger in the dike. And this is franticness. So finding this settled,

[42:01]

and being willing to let it be as it is. Profit comes, pain comes, loss comes, good luck, bad luck. It's just all the same. So with this karmic, working with our karma, seeing the ungraspableness of it, I can't find it, doesn't mean that there is not going to be, just like with taiso eka, you know, there is karma that comes to fruit in your life. So we continue to repent and we continue to work with it and take refuge, taking refuge. The kitchen left a while ago.

[43:08]

I've been carrying this around to every lecture, wanting to read it to you. It's something someone sent to me from Tassajara. And I thought with our acute hearing, we could hear it. It's Rilke from the Duino Elegies, the ninth. So make yourself comfortable so you can hear. Sometimes you'll fight the poem because you want me to stop talking and I want you to hear it. This unique breeze of reality that we are and the, you know, in the Fukanza Zengi, like a dart of lightning or a spark from the flintstone, you know, don't waste this human life, your uniqueness. This is you are only you once, once and only is you. And Rilke, and it talks about this,

[44:11]

this, the way he wrote this out was in excerpts. So it's not the full poem. And I hope that's all right, Rilke. I'm sorry, but here we go. So we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it, trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands, in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart, trying to become it. Whom can we give it to? We would hold onto it all forever. Ah, but what can we take from the other realm? Not the art of looking, which is learned so slowly and nothing that happened here, nothing. The suffering then and above all, the heaviness and the long experience of love. Just what is wholly unsayable. But later among the stars, what good is it?

[45:13]

They are better as they are, unsayable. For when the traveler returns from the mountain slopes into the valley, he brings not a handful of earth unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window. Here's the time for the sayable. Here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness. More than ever, the things that we might experience are vanishing, for what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act, an act under a shell, which easily cracks open

[46:14]

as soon as the business inside outgrows it and seems new and sees new limits. Between the hammers, our heart endures just as the tongue does between the teeth and despite that, still is able to praise. And these things which live by perishing, know you are praising them. Transient, they look to us for deliverance, us, the most transient of all. They want us to change them utterly in our invisible heart within, oh, endlessly within us, whoever we may be at last. Earth, isn't this what you want? To arise within us, invisible? Isn't it your dream to be wholly invisible someday? Oh, Earth, invisible.

[47:16]

What, if not transformation, is your urgent command? Earth, my dearest, I will, oh, believe me. You no longer need your springtimes to win me over. One of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably, I have belonged to you from the first. Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future grows any smaller. Superabundant being wells up in my heart. Thank you. May I?

[48:17]

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