Good morning. What I'd like to talk about this morning is a quotation from Suzuki Roshi, a short passage from Not Always So, which is the compilation of his talks that was edited by Ed Brown.

[01:08]

So I'd like to give you this quotation and then discuss it, elucidate it, and think about it with you. Right at the beginning of the quotation, Suzuki Roshi refers to Dogen Zenji. So many of you know who Dogen Zenji is. Zenji means, Zenji is an honorific, that means honored Zen teacher, revered Zen teacher. And Dogen was the founder of the lineage, the Japanese founder of the lineage of Zen teachers that Suzuki Roshi was a descendant of. Dogen lived in the first half of the 13th century.

[02:20]

So Suzuki Roshi says, Dogen Zenji talks about practice not as something special, but something continuous, something mixed up with everything. He says, so this is Suzuki Roshi paraphrasing Dogen, He says, if you fall on the ground, stand up by the ground. Does it make sense? If you fall on the ground, you stand up by the ground in that place. Also, he says, if you fall on the ground, stand up by emptiness, by nothing.

[03:46]

Without discussing why this is so, we cannot have a complete understanding of our teaching. Dogen Zenji talks about practice not as something special, but something continuous, something mixed up with everything. He says, if you fall on the ground, stand up by the ground. Does it make sense? Suzuki Roshi wasn't always sure that his English was up to the task. If you fall on the ground, you stand up by the ground in that place. Also, Dogen says, if you fall on the ground, stand up by emptiness, by nothing. without discussing why this is so, we cannot have a complete understanding of our teaching.

[04:58]

So in order to have a complete understanding, a full understanding, a both-sides understanding of our teaching, we need to know why, if we fall on the ground, we stand up by the ground, what that means to stand up by the ground that we fall on, and why, how, what it means that if we fall on the ground, we stand up by emptiness. These are the two sides, the ground and emptiness, form and emptiness, the absolute and the relative. These are the two sides that comprise a complete understanding, a full understanding. And right away, I think, Suzuki Roshi kind of points us in a certain direction, very characteristic of his own way of expressing things as well.

[06:05]

When he says how Dogen speaks of practice not as something special, not special but something continuous, something that continues along with our life, something that's mixed up with everything. mixed up with our life. So in this way, our way, our practice, our method of spiritual development, our practice, our way, our Buddha way, is not transcendent. We're not trying to transcend our situation. Transcend, the definition of transcend is to go beyond the limit.

[07:06]

We don't try to go beyond the limit of the current moment. We don't try to go beyond the limit of the current moment because Already the current moment is limitless within the limit of the current moment. Simultaneous with the limit of the current moment is the limitlessness of the current moment. This is a complete understanding. Limit, limitless. That's the full understanding. So the definition of transcend is to go beyond the limit, and then the etymology is the T-R-A-N-S part, trans, is over or beyond. And the ascendant part comes from skandere, which means to climb.

[08:14]

So etymologically, transcend means to climb over, to climb beyond. So our practice, which is to stand up, if you fall on the ground, stand up by the ground, is not climbing over. We're not climbing over, climbing beyond our current situation. This, however, should not be misunderstood, because sometimes people think, oh, that means I'm supposed to just accept everything the way it is, and Even if I'm in a bad situation, I should just accept it because that's the Buddhist way. No, that's not exactly it. Sometimes we do need to change our situation. We need change we can believe in.

[09:16]

This is change we can believe in. though it may not enter directly into the national political dialogue. So it's not a matter of not changing what isn't working or not working with our situation or somehow passively allowing things to happen that are not good to happen. No, it's not that kind of not climbing over. If that number of negatives makes any sense to you, not climb over means not go beyond means what is referred to there is not go whoosh up into the air.

[10:19]

Oh, I'm above this. It doesn't matter. I don't care. life, our practice life is totally involved with caring, with devotion, with relationship. So it's not a matter of somehow, it doesn't matter to me anymore, I've gone beyond that. That's the kind of transcendence that the practice is not. if you fall on the ground, stand up by the ground, means that our practice, our way, our way of, for lack of a better term, of spiritual development, our way is founded on, is built on, is built in, is established on our everyday life.

[11:33]

even our delusion, especially our delusion. So in another work of Dogen's, many of you know, he says, those who have great realization of delusion, emphasis added, Those who have great realization of delusion are Buddhas. Those who have great realization of delusion are Buddhas. Those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings. He liked that kind of turning of the phrase, turning of the words. So that's us. Both parts complete.

[12:38]

Buddhas, sentient beings. It may be more obvious to you the sentient being part. But both parts are there. We have Buddha moments when we have great realization of delusion. When we stand up by the ground that we fall on. When we stand up by emptiness. We have moments of great realization, and those are Buddha moments. And then sometimes we're greatly deluded about realization. I'm not sure what he meant about greatly deluded about realization. But I think he meant that when we think realization is transcending the moment, when we think we can go some other place, some other place where it's really much better than this place, where the difficulties that we have, we don't have anymore.

[13:42]

This is a deluded idea of realization. So there are three ways that I understood. If you fall on the ground, stand up by the ground. The first is this way that I was just talking about, which is there's no place else to go. This is your life. That was the title of a television program back in the 50s. This is your life. As far as I recall, they didn't include the emptiness portion of the person's life. Of course, it's hard to include emptiness because it's empty. But anyway, this is your life. There's just one life.

[14:51]

We only have one life. Fortunately, it's big enough. Our one life is very, very big. So it's okay that it's just one. So the metaphor, I take it as a metaphor, if you fall on the ground, stand up by the ground, is very communicative. It really carries the sense of what's going on. If you fall down, well, where else are you gonna stand up? If you fall down, you stand up. You push against the ground that you fall down on. That's exactly where we stand up. So this second aspect of this teaching is that, it's actually the same as the first, said a little bit differently, is that our practice, our way, is immediately available.

[15:55]

Just like when you fall on the ground, the ground is immediately, it's immediately available. It's what's there to push up on. So immediately available means we don't have to wait until we're enlightened. We don't have to wait until things are better than they are now. Admittedly, they ain't so good. And we'd like them to be better. And maybe they will be better. But we don't have to wait to practice until that time. until some future time. It's immediately available. Dogen, in yet a different place, in the Fukanzazengi, says, if you want to attain suchness, practice suchness without delay.

[17:07]

Suchness is a whole other story that I'm not going to get into, what he means by suchness. I think we could translate it into more ordinary language. If you want to fully, completely appreciate your life, fully and completely appreciate your life right now, don't wait. This is the time to do it. We don't have to wait until things are better, until I've attained enlightenment, even if I haven't attained enlightenment, even if I'm deluded, even if I'm upset, even if I'm angry, even if I'm afraid, even if whatever. This current situation is completely... on which we can stand up whatever it is so this is the list ain't no place else to go

[18:41]

immediately available. And the third aspect has to do with falling. If you fall on the ground, stand up by the ground. So in some way, in some way that I've been speaking about, it means any moment, any moment, Any karmic moment, any conditioned moment is the moment of falling. But falling also has a feeling to it. Falling is like a mistake, like this is not what we want to happen. So I think that Suzuki Roshi and Dogen via Suzuki Roshi is also... at some particular particular particular kind of moment particular aspect called dukkha in Sanskrit dukkha dukkha is a

[20:08]

the first of the Four Noble Truths, often translated as, used to be translated as suffering. Suffering is not quite, suffering isn't quite the same thing. If you were going to translate dukkha into one word, then maybe unsatisfactory would be the word, rather than suffering. And unsatisfactory is more in the right direction, but it really means that things don't turn out the way we want them to. That's what dukkha refers to. I believe that Mick Jagger said, you can't always get what you want. He was referring to dukkha. He was, again, he didn't necessarily have the technical terminology.

[21:10]

But that is the essence of the first noble truth. You can't always get what you want. Sometimes you can. Sometimes we do get what we want. And that's a very happy situation. We like that as well we should. But it doesn't always happen that way. So in the mythic story of not the pilgrim's progress, but Shakyamuni Buddha's progress, the life of Shakyamuni Buddha as we generally tell it is a myth. And as any good myth, it is our story, your story and my story. So in the mythic story of Shakyamuni Buddha's life, there's initially a period of his life where he's protected.

[22:19]

In the story, it's that he lives and his father didn't want to expose him to any... anything negative, so he lives in a very constrained environment, very lovely environment where there are only beautiful things, beautiful people, young people, et cetera, you know, who go cavorting about and having a good time all the time in the story, in the myth. Then he decides to go with his charioteer Chanda. Is that the name of his charioteer? Chanda. I think it's Chanda. It's either his horse or his charioteer. One or the other is Chanda. I haven't read the story recently. Anyway, he decides to go with his charioteer into the city because he heard about there's lots of stuff going on in the city. So he goes to the city three times, three nights in a row.

[23:29]

The first night, he sees... a sick person. The second night, he sees an old person. The third night, he sees a funeral procession, a dead person. The fourth night, he cuts off all of his hair, leaves the palace, and begins his spiritual journey. This is the mythic story. In this story, old age, sickness, and death are what turn him into the spiritual path. This is the falling. He's falling on the ground of old age, sickness, and death. And he's pushing himself. The rest of his life story is pushing himself up.

[24:33]

by the ground that he's fallen on. Old age, sickness, and death are the universal things we don't like. We can work with them, and practice indeed is working with our... of dukkha with our life of unsatisfactoriness. But initially, we don't like it. I was thinking, I work, I live here at Green Gulch Farm and I work in San Francisco. And over the last few years, I've developed a an addiction to bicycling.

[25:33]

So I bicycle from here to San Francisco and back. Not every day, but most days. And I leave at about six o'clock in the morning. And it's just beautiful. It is just really beautiful. Up until October 30th, if you leave at 6 o'clock in the morning from Green Gulch Farm on a bicycle, it's nighttime. It's nighttime, basically, you know. And then I have my headlight, which I like a lot, my headlight, you know, so I can see the road. And then sometimes if it's foggy, being here at Green Gulch, often foggy, you see all of the, it's not rain, it's whatever that's called, mist, fog water. going through the light of the headlight. Very little traffic.

[26:38]

Then, after daylight savings, since then, now at six o'clock in the morning, it's early dawn, and the line of the hills, and the, you know, Homer called it the rosy-fingered dawn, you know, the light beginning to come behind the hills. Not even dawn yet, not even sunlight yet, but just an intimation of it. I don't want that to stop me. I don't want to get so old and so sick and die that I can't ride from Green Gulch in the morning at six o'clock in the morning and look at the hills and the sky and see the dawn dawning. Who would want that to stop? You must have something in your life that's like that.

[27:40]

Maybe many things. There are many things. We don't want this to end. Quite understandably, that's the way we're built as humans. But nevertheless, it will end. I was thinking, old age, sickness, and death, you can skip one. You might even be able to skip two, but the death one, you cannot skip. You can't skip that one. So how we practice with that is that we stand up on the ground that we fall on.

[28:46]

And I would offer that in this context, what that means is we stay close to our suffering. This is an unusual feature of Buddhist practice because many practices and many articles in magazines will tell you how to escape your suffering, how to leave, usually in five or ten easy steps. Just do this and this and this, you know. Oh, you can... exercise and have a good diet and meditate and then you'll be happy. How to leave. But this way that I'm talking about is not leaving.

[29:49]

Continuous. Mixed up with everything. Staying with our not going somewhere else. Recently, or actually not so recently, a couple of years ago, I came upon a book, the title of which I think conveys this. The book is by Miriam Greenspan, a psychotherapist. And the title of the book is Healing Through the Dark Emotions. The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Through them, we go through them. We stay with the dark emotions.

[30:55]

We stay with our karmic life. We stay with our deluded delusions. We're not interested in eliminating them, hitting the eject button like James Bond and getting the heck out of there. We'd like to get out of there. That's part of the thing. We'd like to get out. We'd like to figure out, how do I get out of this? How do I go to a place where there isn't hot or cold is the way it's told in the koan, or we could say where there isn't dukkha, but there is no place where there isn't hot or cold. So the healing comes through with, along with, continuous with, grief and fear and despair and upset of various and sundry kinds.

[32:17]

Comes through that, with that. So that's, if you fall on the ground, stand up by the ground in that place. The other part is, if you fall on the ground, stand up by emptiness. So some of you know there's a particular way that this word emptiness is being used, and it is not mysterious anymore. It's not, you know, mystical, some mystical thing, wah, [...] like that emptiness.

[33:19]

It's not that way. Emptiness is very straightforward. Emptiness... Sunyata is... Pratitya Samadpada. See? See how simple it is? So, emptiness, oh, emptiness in Sanskrit, emptiness refers to svabhava-shunya. Sva is on, bhava is being, shunya is empty. On, being, empty. Things are empty of their own being. So I'll explain what this means. Some of you have heard this explanation before. Please bear with me. Stick. This stick is empty of its own being.

[34:25]

What that means is this stick is made from, obviously, a tree. There's a tree in this stick. This stick is made of But also, it was carved by someone into this shape. This is called a kotsu, teaching stick. Very beautiful thing. So, This stick is composed of a piece of wood, it's composed of its component parts, how it got to be here. How it manifested is that a tree grew up, somebody cut it down, somebody carved it into this shape, somebody gave it to me, I carried it here. Without those conditions,

[35:28]

that's the pratitya part, without those conditions, there ain't no stick, right? No tree, no stick. No carver, no stick. No me carrying it here, no stick. It goes on and [...] on like that. Like, you know, the mother of the guy who carved this stick, when she woke up on one morning, she went left instead of right, and she bumped into the guy who was going to be the father of the guy who carved this stick. If she would have gone right, she wouldn't have met him. If she didn't meet him, he wouldn't have been born. If that guy wouldn't have been born, he wouldn't have carved this stick. I'd be out of a stick. No stick. the stick wouldn't be here. It wouldn't exist, right? Something else might exist. But this particular thing, this particular thing is completely composed of nothing but infinite, infinite causes that go back in time.

[36:33]

That's all that this stick is. Currently, it's a stick. but it's a current manifestation of the crest of infinite causation. So it's empty of stickness. The other reason it's empty of stickness is, so that's the, I think of that as the vertical direction, the vertical direction of history. The horizontal direction is it's only a stick because of all of us and everything else at this moment in the universe converging to call it a stick. It's only its relationship with everything else that makes it a kotsu. If I, you know, chopped it up,

[37:39]

into toothpicks, it wouldn't be a kotsu anymore. It'd be, you know, 942 toothpicks. So there's that part of it too. Pratitya Samadpada means conditioned co-production. The conditions come together to create this thing. And the co-part refers to the fact that we all agree to it. So the way they talk about this in teaching is they say the provisional name of this is stick. The temporary name of this is stick. The relative name of this is kotsu. That's the relative. The absolute is everything that this isn't which makes it what it is.

[38:40]

Everything that this isn't is what makes it what it is. If I can get all of those straight, lined up there. That's the absolute nature. The relative nature and the absolute nature. That's the two sides. That's standing up by the ground and standing up by emptiness. The conditioned nature and the unconditioned nature. So Reb Tenshin Roshi, as many of you know who have been here, has been talking in his Dharma talks about the last couple of Dharma talks that I've attended, public ones, and maybe he's given you folks in the practice period even a bigger hit of the same stuff. But what he's been talking about has been enlightenment,

[39:43]

is helping others. And helping others is when you realize others are me. Just before the election, he said, if I remember correctly, paraphrasing, Barack Obama is me. He might have said it that way. He might have said, I am. I am Barack Obama. That was, more controversial was, I am John McCain. You see the direction this is going. More controversial was, I am Sarah Palin. And then I think he said, me, next. I am Steve Weintraub. I am Steve Weintraub. Anyway... You wonder what was going on in his mind that he went from Sarah Palin to me.

[40:45]

I have not asked him about that. Anyway, what he's referring to when he says, I am Sarah Palin, is the absolute unconditioned world. I am me. You are you. That's the relative world. Just as this stick is here due to infinite causation, so you are, and me too, and the cushions and the floor and the air we breathe. Just happens to happen the way it's happening. It happened to happen this way. And because it happened to happen this way, you're here with ears that can hear things that I'm doing that are called noises, sounds, words. teaching. The happen to happen part is the relative part. And it's also the, and recognizing that it just happened to happen that way, that it could have happened some other way, is the absolute part.

[41:56]

Is the unconditioned part. So. So that's what emptiness means. But we want to know, so that's the big long explanation of emptiness. But in Zen practice, we're never so interested in explanations. What we want to know is, what is that as practice mixed up with everything? You know, Otherwise, it's just a fancy idea. It is a beautiful idea. It's very beautiful when you think about it, this notion of the absolute and the unconditioned nature of things. Being completely the relationship of each thing to everything else. It is a beautiful concept. But being practitioners, we also say,

[43:05]

Well, what does that look like? How do you mix that up with your everyday life? What does that look like in the karmic world? So what that looks like in the karmic world, oh, and by karmic, I don't mean anything other than the world, what I was just talking about, the conditioned world, the world by which You're you and I, me. If you fall on the ground, stand up by emptiness. Emptiness as mixed up with everything means means the inclination toward freedom, toward not being stuck.

[44:23]

Because if I only believe I'm me and you're you, if I'm really stuck in that idea, then it leads to I want to get stuff for this me, this me person, and not give any to you, person. It gets stuck in various ways. If we just have the relative, the absolute frees us from that because we recognize, oh yes, this is the way things are, but we also recognize this just happens to be the way things happen to be. It frees us from that and inclines us toward open, expansive, liberative mind, thinking, attitude, feeling.

[45:33]

So I wanted to give an example of this. And soon after that I'll be coming to my concluding remarks. I don't know if I've been going on for too long here. So the example is from the field of Western psychology. A field I'm somewhat familiar with. And... Before I give you the example, I'll mention that Freud said something similar. Before I say that, Buddhist practice and psychology, Western psychology, there are many of us who are interested in this kind of relationship between Buddhist practice and Western psychology, psychotherapy, psychotherapeutic psychology.

[46:46]

So these are not the same thing. They are different things. But there are places where there's a kind of a resonance, where they resonate the way, you know, in music, there's resonance, you know, between instruments. It's not the same, but it kind of resonates back and forth from one to the other. So I think this area of this way, this thing, this movement toward freedom, freeing oneself from places where you're caught. So, right, in common parlance, hang up, your hang-ups, right? How do you get rid of your hang-ups? This is one of these resonant areas. So Freud said, the role of, no, this is a paraphrase, he said, The purpose of psychoanalysis, because that was the kind of psychology that he practiced, the purpose of psychoanalysis is that the doctor, he was always talking about the doctor, the doctor removes the distortion from the patient.

[48:05]

And then the patient is then free to experience the Normal human unhappiness. That's very wonderful. Normal human unhappiness. That's great. So anyway, so the language is a little, you know, he's always, you know, it's very hierarchical and you can bet your boots that the doctor was a male, right? Right. Victorian, et cetera. But anyway, that notion of removing the distortion, you remove the distortion to free the person from some distorted perspective. It also is laden with a kind of blaming feeling to it, which ain't so good. But that's kind of resonant with this idea of stand up by emptiness.

[49:10]

So let me give you an example. And it's not a... Anyway. So as I grow up, I come upon various developmental stages where I move out into the world and naturally leave my parental home and become more independent and do independent things. Now... if, for example, every time I do one of those independent, leaning kind of things, someone who I care about a great deal, like my mother or my father, gets sick. You know, I go off on the first Boy Scout week-long adventure,

[50:15]

And I come back and I found out my mother just got terribly sick while I was away. I go off to college, and a week after I go off to college, my father's in a terrible car accident and dies. So this is kind of a hokey example, but maybe you get the idea. What happens if you have that kind of experience is... you come to believe that my going forward in life is harmful to people who I care a lot about. Fast forward 20 or 30 years and I'm 55 and I don't have, you know, I worked in various places but I haven't really had a career, you know. And I've had lots of relationships but I haven't had an enduring relationship. So, Working with someone like that, one may come to discover that there is an unconscious, stuck belief that for me to move forward in my life and have a career and have a relationship that lasts for years and years and years or whatever, it hurts.

[51:29]

I believe that it hurts. That's a kind of stuck idea. Am I getting that across? Are you getting the sense of that? That's the kind of distortion that... Freud was referring to. And by working on it, then the person can get up by emptiness and recognize that they feel that way, but that their feeling is very conditioned, conditioned on the conditions that produced it. This doesn't automatically free the person from those conditions, but it helps to move in that direction. It helps moving in that direction rather than not having no idea whatsoever what's going on. So to stand up by emptiness when it gets mixed up with everything means wide, expansive, big mind

[52:38]

big mind, open mind, which is at the other end of the spectrum, so to speak, than something that's compelled, locked in, restrictive. This is being free of the moment in the moment. The method for doing this, the method for practicing this, the method for practicing the practice that's mixed up with everything. Excuse me. The method in Zen is... relentless encouragement.

[53:45]

Relentless encouragement via Buddha Dharma Sangha. In Buddha, we see the example of this complete understanding. not someone who's left the world, someone who's in the world, but is inclined toward freedom in the world. And we have, I'll just mention this in passing, we have an unobjectionable idealizing transference With the Buddha. We admire the Buddha or Buddhas.

[54:53]

Buddha is not some particular person. Buddha is whoever. Buddha is our friend who does something. Is Buddha then. Like earlier. Buddha moment, sentient being moment. But anyway, we admire the Buddha. We admire our teacher. We admire Suzuki Roshi. We look up to them. We idealize them. What we're idealized, the idealization is our own Buddha nature transferred to the person. Then, like the prodigal son, after a while, we can say, oh, I see, that's actually me. It's okay to say that's me. At first we think, oh no, that's somebody else. Somebody else is Buddha, not me. That couldn't be me. I'm just Shlomil.

[55:55]

But eventually, we can come to that feeling. So Buddha is very encouraging. And Dharma is very encouraging because all we ever hear in Dharma is the same teaching. It's always the same. Lots of different ways to talk about it, but it's the same. And Sangha is our friends who encourage us. So some people here are in a practice period. This is a struggle. This is a particularly potent, intensified form of Sangha. Because everybody is here, and what are we here to do? We're here to stand up by where we fall down and stand up by emptiness. That's all that people are here to do. We also do farming and conferences and bake bread and all that stuff. Got to keep busy, right?

[57:01]

But that's the main thing that's being done here in practice period and in practice in general. So we can encourage each other in that way. Finally, I'd say the reason why this works, the reason why relentless encouragement works is because we understand that practice is wisdom seeking wisdom. That was Suzuki Roshi's phrase, wisdom seeking wisdom. And I came up with a new word that describes wisdom seeking wisdom, which is, do you know tropism? Do you know that word tropism? Tropism means when something has a natural inclination toward. So for example, plants are heliotropic. They naturally go toward, you know, if you put the plant here and the sun is here, the plant will naturally lean over toward the sun.

[58:13]

So we are wisdom-tropic. We are sophia-tropic, prajna-tropic. We have a tropism toward the sun. You don't believe me? We have a tropism. Please believe me. We have a tropism toward the truth, toward this complete understanding, toward the understanding of the relative and the absolute. There are various other things that we also have inclinations toward, but this is part of our innate nature. Because we are sophiotropic, relentless encouragement works. We just have to say, oh yeah, you want to do this anyway, so go ahead. We want to be wise and kind, so please go ahead, do it.

[59:18]

Okay, thank you.

[59:21]

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