Thou couldst taste the truth and learn to tell it to us first. The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax of cabbages and kings. Alas, I don't know anything about cabbages and kings and very little about shoes and sealing wax. Which means I have to talk about the Dharma. The Dharma.

[01:00]

The problem is no one knows what the Dharma is, ultimately. At least I don't. Last night I had a dream. And I don't usually dream about this place, about my life here, the life of practice that I've been involved in for the last 20 or more years. But I did last night. And I have a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with this talk. Because in the dream, I was with some other people whom I seem to know in the dream, but I can't recognize when I woke up, except for our senior Dharma teacher, Tenzin Reb Anderson.

[02:05]

And we were on our way to this place, or a place like it, in some sort of unknown country, and stopped to have something to eat together. And suddenly I realized that while he was all dressed up in his full Buddhist regalia, I wasn't. And I said to him, or to somebody who was hovering about us, I've got to go back and get my robes. And they said, too late. Now, there may be some of you out there who are analysists or analyzers of dreams, and maybe later you can tell me what you think that means. I think what it means is that when one comes, at least this one comes to sit up before you, one feels abandoned

[03:13]

by any sure footing in something called the Dharma. We sit up here naked. And, of course, that is the Zen way. Many people are fortunate enough to sit down and write out their talks ahead of time. To think clearly about a subject and to ponder it, and to bring it to fruition as their moment of truth comes up. But I seem to be unable to do that. I try. But as I think about a subject, lo and behold, it keeps changing. So that I finally have to wait to the moment of truth, to the moment I sit down in front of you, to spring into action.

[04:15]

Now, there's a way to hear talks like this. There's a way to listen to Dharma talks, which is not the same as going to a class. A so-called Dharma talk, anyway. In a situation like this. And what is that way? That way is to listen to a Dharma talk the same way you'd listen to the wind in the trees. Or to water flowing by in a stream outside. Or leaves skittering across the rooftop as you're sitting, waiting for something to happen. That is to say, you hear it, but you make no effort to grasp it. Not that you're in any danger of doing that today. I don't mean that. Too often we come to practice,

[05:25]

we come to talks, to classes, well, to classes, to talks, particularly to our meditation, in some sense, whether really or metaphorically, with a pencil and pen in hand, ready to take notes, to bring something home and to ponder it, to grasp it, to laminate it and put it in our wallet, to put it up on the wall to study it. But if I understand Zen right, if I understand this teaching right, the teacher gives us something so that we can throw it away, and not to add it to our collection of things. And I think the word things is going to be the subject of this talk. But before I talk about things, there's another thing I want to mention, and that is that today is the second day

[06:27]

of our seven or eight week spring practice period. So we have some, not quite 30 people, who are here with us today, many of them anyway, and people who come to study and to have the intensive practice for a number of weeks together come for all kinds of reasons, I think. Some come because they're recovering from some particular problem in their life, some shock, some upset, the loss of someone or something, a job, a person, a place. Some come out of curiosity. They've heard about the Buddha, they've heard about Zen as a religion that is a non-religion with a teaching outside of scriptures.

[07:30]

Its spontaneity might appeal to them, and they think, ah, that sounds like something I could get into. Some people come because they really want, we have been here before, we have people who are new, some who have been here many times, and some who have been here for some time and are coming back to practice with us from the outside, and then some within our community itself who are enjoying their first practice period, who have been here a number of months and have worked up to this point where they are offered this opportunity for extensive sitting and practice. And some are coming because they actually want to make a career out of this life, way of living. So, it's a kind of stew with a lot of different ingredients. But I think we all come, it would seem that we all come because we are motivated primarily

[08:34]

by some dissatisfaction with the way things are, either personally or socially in our interactions with the world, with ourselves, with our history. And although we've heard many times that we should practice with no gaining idea, we must admit that we have a gaining idea. It's all right to have a gaining idea, we want to improve ourselves, we want the quality of our life, maybe, you know, how we function with people and so on. So we come to study something called the Dharma. Incidentally, the word Dharma, as you know, is an Indian word. Dharma really just means a way of life. One is born into a certain class of people, one followed one's Dharma,

[09:35]

one's place in the world. There's the Dharma of being a cook, there's the Dharma of being a filling station attendant, a Dharma of being a financial expert, a Dharma of being a teacher, a doctor, and so on. These are ways, small d, a way of being in the world, a way of functioning with others. And then there's the Dharma with a large d, and that, of course, refers to the Buddha Dharma, or the Dharma that we study here called the teachings of the Buddha and all the ancestors and those who have practiced over the millennia. But is it a thing? Is the Dharma something that we can acquire, or is it something that we already are? So that the practice is not a matter of accumulating more knowledge, more information.

[10:40]

It is a matter of uncovering. What is already always the case. The word klesha or what's the word I'm looking for? Defilement. Defilement, klesha, means covering. We come here to uncover. Maybe that's something the dream had to say. Maybe we're coming here to uncover ourselves. Try to get down to some kind of essence. Quotation marks. Now one of the things that we practice with, of course, is sitting meditation. But it's very interesting that in sitting meditation

[11:44]

we're given all sorts of practices to do in order to let go, in order to uncover something, or to find out whether or not there is anything ultimately to be uncovered. In other words, we come with a set of strategies. Ways of getting at ourselves. And all too often we find that we become more and more dissatisfied as we practice with our strategies. Following the breath. Watching the mind. Trying to surrender. Trying to let thoughts go. Always trying to do something or trying to do nothing, but simply sit. Sit and let things be what they are. Wherever they are, in their own way. So we try to do that. And then when we get up and turn away from the wall,

[12:47]

I say we, when one, let's use the universal one, when one gets up from the mat and turns away and puts one's foot down, one picks up the Zafu and fluffs it up a certain way, puts it down a certain way, bows a certain way, turns away a certain way, leaves the Zendo, follows a certain way of leaving the Zendo, putting one's feet down in a certain way, going out the door a certain way, and so forth. And all these forms that we learn to practice here are forms that help us, in a sense, to get in touch with the first level of our entanglement, which is, of course, the so-called material level. This is particularly true, and becomes even truer as we get into the practice, because the more we get into learning about the non-materiality of material, the insubstantiality of being itself, the more layers of material we put on.

[13:48]

Have you noticed? Have you ever tried to run for a bus in something like this? We have a layer underneath, of course, the American layer, a T-shirt. Maybe it's something embossed on it. In the next layer we have a Japanese layer, the Jibo. And the Chinese layer, the Japanese layer, the Koromo, or, no, the next layer is the Kimono, Japanese, underneath that. And on top of that, the Koromo, which was actually originally a Confucian robe, Chinese. And then on top of that, we have these funny little, strange little objects that we wear called Rakusus, Buddhist robe,

[14:51]

and then also the one in priest training, or priest ordination, which is called the Okesa. So we have several layers already of ways to become entangled, and very cunningly, the teachers have found over the years that by putting all this stuff on and then trying to follow prescribed ways of bowing, for example, putting something else in your hand at the same time, to try to do that gracefully, mindfully, without getting all tangled up and making a spectacle of oneself, leads into very interesting mindsets, reactive patterns. You know, when you first get your robes, that is the priest robe, they don't tell you much about it, how to put it on and so on. And the next morning, maybe someone will say, I want you to be, well, they don't say this, but actually, maybe you have to make a circumambulation,

[15:55]

or at least I did, because I was leaving. The day after I got my priest robe, a dozen years ago or so, I had to make a circumambulation around this zindo, bowing to everybody, because I was leaving to go to Tassajara to be the head cook. And I had never put on a priest robe before, and I had practiced a little bit. But as I put it on this morning, that morning, of course, I got entirely tangled up in it. As I tried to bow, I stumbled and so on. It was humiliating. Maybe that's another reason I dreamt I didn't have it with me. So much easier to bow in street clothes. At any rate, the thingness, you see, the interesting thing that we study about materiality is that the material world is non-material, but at this level, it is definitely very material. At the dimension in which we are practicing, we are practicing with materials. So we have all these forms

[16:56]

to help us to become sensitized or sensitive to exactly the way we touch the world, the way we manipulate things. Just stop for a moment to think about the thingness in your life. There's not a person sitting in this room who doesn't know where everything is in your house, almost. And when you do mislay something, you become quite upset. Honey, where's the... Well, I think it's in the bottom drawer. But isn't it amazing the relationships that we have with things, the thousands of things that we have touched in our lives, and that we have taken for granted? Now, this is an interesting point, because at some place in his teaching, that is, say, exactly in the Genjo Koan

[17:57]

that we practice here, that we chant here every week, from Dogen Zenji, our 13th century founder in Japan, he says, to go forward and experience the myriad things is delusion. To go forward and experience the myriad things is delusion. That all things come forward to experience themselves is enlightenment. What does that mean? To go forward and experience things is delusion. That all things come forward to experience themselves is enlightenment. That's a conundrum. One of the reasons that we learn mindfulness practice, that we become more sensitive, the reason that we are given a nest of bowls wrapped up in a certain way, tied a certain way, with

[18:58]

utensils a certain way, that when we have our meals here are opened in a certain way, the bowls are picked up in a certain way, the spoons are put in a certain way, and so forth, is to bring to consciousness the rituals that we take for granted in life in our functional day-to-day activities, that they are rituals, and that the things that are coming forward, that the thingness in our life tells us who we are and what we are. That indeed when you look for oneself, all you can find is otherness. But how do we go through a doorway? Somebody said, what is Zen? Pick up your clothes, hang them up. How you keep your room, that's the first teaching. The thing about monastic practice is to have everything prescribed into detail to bring us into consciousness about those things in our life, shoes and ships and ceiling wax,

[20:03]

that we never think about particularly. Now of course, this is a big problem, things, because particularly in our culture, which is about things, getting more and more things, in fact somebody once said, I probably told you this before, there's only four questions in life, what thing do I want, how do I get it, when I get it, what I do with it, when I don't want it anymore, how do I get rid of it? One of the reasons people became monks, or do become monks, is to get rid of all this stuff. Was it a George Carlin who talked about stuff, remember George Carlin? He had some kind of rap about it, I remember it's very funny. But it was very poignantly pointed because he said, when I don't want my stuff anymore, I say, how do I get rid of my shit? And the question is, is there anything so small that is not worthy of our respect or

[21:13]

our attention? Is there anything so small that is not worthy of our respect? And I don't mean ideas, I'm talking about stuff, things. Vis-a-vis that, there's an interesting story that someone here told me just recently, and I think it'll resonate with all of you, her mother had passed away and she was obliged to go and take care of her mother's things. Well that's a very touching thing to have to do, to go through a departed loved one's things. We begin to realize that these are invested by us, that is to say, they don't intrinsically have this, but we invest into things our life. And they feed back to us who we are. And she went through her mother's things and she said, my sister and I and others I guess

[22:14]

in the family decided which things would go to the church, which things we would take home to remember mother by. And at the end there was a pile on the floor of things. And she said something like, I was touched to see all of mother's things that were discarded, unwanted now, unwanted things. She said, I started to pick them up and put them all on hangers and put them in a special place. All at once it was very important for me to do that, to take those things and pay some attention to those things that we don't need anymore. And I told her, you know, I had the same experience recently. We had this heater in my room, our room, and the heater had burned out. It didn't work anymore. So we said, well we'll just go and there's a dumpster up there, I guess we can't use it, we'll have to get rid of it, put it in the dumpster. Maybe it can be recycled. Anyway, let's get rid of it. Well, as I took it out, tried to carry it up there, it felt like, here is something

[23:19]

that had given service, here is something that had made us warm for long winters, and I was just going to take it away. A thing, it's just a thing, its usefulness is over, goodbye. And there was a moment at least where I stopped and I felt this poignancy again. And I realized one of the reasons why one divests oneself of things when they come into religious practice, is that those things that come into our life, as it's been said in the scriptures, come as guests. But before long they become our host. In other words, our possessions begin to also possess us. That things come forward and experience themselves as us, is enlightenment. I think it was Diogenes, wasn't it, who said, I possess not in order not to be possessed?

[24:22]

To finally get down to one begging bowl and one robe and a pair of straw sandals and to wander from place to place, looking for the Dharma. But even then, Ryokan writes about, great Japanese poet, Zen poet Ryokan writes about, oh today I left my begging bowl someplace, it's out there tonight, lonely under the moonlight. He misses his begging bowl, not because it is only functional, because there is a relationship with it. Mitaku yasin, all my relationships, say the Yokota, Yokota Indian, American natives. Mitaku yasin, all my relations, not just to people, all my relations to all the things in this world that come forward to confirm themselves as you and me. What a problem, when we're deluged with things that we think will make us happy.

[25:32]

So the relationship is tricky, there is nothing so small that we should not have respect for it, but at the same time, the things that come into our life, have you ever noticed you have a flat table, you've cleaned it all off on Monday afternoon, by Wednesday afternoon it's growing all kinds of stuff. Always picking up things, always touching the world, how do we do that? How do we open a door, how do we pick up a teacup? You're taught here to pick up the teacup with two hands, Japanese style. It doesn't have that. Drink it with two hands, not because you need two hands to do it, put it down a certain way. How we come in contact and how we structure our lives around things and how things become in our masters, that relationship, that tension, we're working with that all the time like

[26:40]

it or not, and not just those functional things that we take care of, our cars, our dishes, those things that we need day to day, but all the little stuff, all the trinkets. When I think of my parents and all the things that they had over the years, they've been dead over 30 some years, one thing has come down through all those years to me, of all the things they had, they had beautiful things, they loved beautiful things, wall hangings and pictures and paintings, nice furniture, etc., etc. Because they were coming out of the depression, they had never had nice things and because they got some money during the war, suddenly having nice things was who they were. That was an extinction of themselves. Little by little after they died, all those things disappeared except for one. Of all the things that came down to me, I still have it I think somewhere, it's this

[27:42]

kind of Mickey Mouse pencil holder. You know the kind of things you put, like a kind of phony leather covering, you know. Amazing. But because I impute, because I project onto that thing those times with them, it has its sentimental value, you see. It's hard to appreciate the world when it's so filled with so many things. It's one of the interesting, I want to say things, but this word thing is getting a little out of hand here. Aspects, one of the interesting aspects about Japanese culture and one of the things we love about and appreciate about Japanese culture is their great attention to the way they

[28:45]

handle things. It came out of a sense, originally I think of a sense of poverty, a sense of having not a lot in life, but what you had was enough and those things had spirit, kami. They were invested with power. So you treated them with great respect. I always noticed that when Katagiri Roshi was here, he never just pulled a chair out and scraped it across the floor. He always picked it up, took it back and put it down. So, I thought, wow, just the way he touched it, took care of it. That respect, that attention to detail is what our practice is also about. It's not a fancy thing. It doesn't have anything to do with philosophy. It doesn't have anything to do with Nargajuna, particularly, or the Buddhist teaching or

[29:48]

the precepts. Although there is a precept, the eighth precept of the grave precepts, a disciple of the Buddha is not possessive of anything. And it's often added, including the Dharma. So I think this practice and that this practice periods and what we learn in practice periods is to pay closer and closer and closer and ever closer attention to the things in our life. And, of course, you can extrapolate that to mental objects as well, naturally. But the first level, this level, we can practice with that, everybody can practice with that all the time. It's interesting, isn't it? To do this, because I can talk about this and I can go home and be thinking about this, pick up a bowl with some leftover food in it, stand at the window or maybe a piece of

[30:51]

sari, that's my thing, put some salt on it, be thinking of something else and put the salt shaker down, bang, and not even hear it. But, you know, the so-called awakening and enlightenment is often happened through just that moment. When caught up in some mindset, the monk sweeping stone hits a piece of bamboo or one turns one's face and sees in a stream one's reflection. At that moment, that attention, the world coming back, the so-called world, you realize that the two of you arise together, one thing, two sides and one thing. Boom. And you wake up. All things come forward to confirm who we are. And all people. That's a marvelous thing to realize.

[31:53]

And yet, at the same time, we can't get to the bottom, ultimately, of anything. When we begin to study, and what the senior Dharma teacher will be talking about, Rev Anderson, is the ultimate unknowability of what anything is, only it's conventional, functional, conceptual understanding. We call this piece of wood, for example, a kotsu or a nyoi. And it's given to us when we have Dharma transmission by our teachers. And my teacher very generously made this himself. And in some sense, you see, it kind of looks like a, some people say it looks like a backbone, like a spine. Something. Some people say it's to pull down the Dharma. Or to pull it up, maybe. Or to scratch your back.

[32:56]

You see, it can become many functions, you see. Or if you imagine it as a weapon. Depends on the function, what a thing is. And it changes from moment to moment according to its functionality and how it is used. That is also what is called dependent co-arising or ultimate emptiness of the thing itself. What is it in itself? Molecules, atoms, so forth. You never get to the bottom of it. So in some sense, we start with the first material layer and pay close attention to the world as it is, as it presents itself. And little by little, we deconstruct it with our practice, with our sitting. Until we get down to the place that there is nothing that can be held on to. Nothing can we claim as our own. Or maybe, as Shakespeare said, that small parcel of the earth that will serve as paste and cover to our bones.

[34:05]

Maybe we can call that our own. Otherwise, it slips through our fingers, through our minds. We can't bring the wind home with us. We can't bring the moonlight home with us, the sunlight into the room with us, and even the teachings we cannot hold on to. Muso Soseki, a famous Japanese monk of the 14th century, I believe. Famous now, even today in Japan, for his gardens, temple gardens. Wrote a poem. And the first part of the poem, in practice period, students, be alert. Year after year, I dug in the earth, looking for the blue of heaven.

[35:06]

Year after year, I dug in the earth, how material can you be? Looking for the blue of heaven, how immaterial can you be? Only to feel the pile of dirt choking me. Until once, in the dead of night, I tripped on a broken brick and kicked it into the air and saw that I had, without a thought, smashed the bones of the empty sky. He woke up. He tripped on something and broke his toe. You say that things are nothing? Ouch! Materiality, nothingness, hurts a lot, feels a lot. He's saying we pay feeling attention to our life. Bring feeling attention into it. The roughness of the material.

[36:09]

I remember at Tassajara, where it was so icy cold in the mornings, in the wintertime, the sun, you'd be sitting for six hours before you'd ever get light, almost. You finally come out of the zendo, after a lecture, maybe around 10 o'clock, and there'd be little patches, the sun would be just breaking through, a little patch of sunlight on the deck, on the Angawa. You put your foot down in that suddenly, after being cold, and all at once that warmth. Oh, at that moment, that warmth was like, it was like the whole earth coming forward and saying, warm up, here I am, sun. The sense of appreciation, the sense of enjoyment in that simple moment. So again, one of the ideas of monastic practice is to strip down our life. And as we strip it down to the essentials, those essentials become bottomless, endless. And we appreciate them because all of that is what supports us.

[37:14]

Makes sense, I guess. But finally, when we go away to the place where we have to go to do the things we have to do, we go empty-handed. We give it up, we let go, constantly let go. thingness. I think that's going to be my mantra this practice period. I want others to help me to pay attention to the way I treat things. My clothes, dishes we wash. You know, we want to get done with the dishes, you know, get to the next thing. I got a lot of things to do today.

[38:19]

And once I get those things out of the way, we'll get together and we'll really sit down and get this thing worked out. We're always on the way to the next thing. Meantime, everything is passing by so fast we can't catch it. So again, practice is to help us slow down. You don't have to worry about making a living now, folks. You don't have to worry about cooking the food. All you have to do is be here. And finally, the other thing about thingness is how we become, our ego becomes invested in how we relate to the thing. Do you notice how well I laid out my bowls? How delicately I picked up my teacup. How perfectly I bow. How I pick up my zagu. So those things can also come in, you see, and we notice that. I'm no longer so much interested.

[39:20]

I mean, I'm interested, but the big questions of the world and so on. I'm going to bring world peace and so on. Well, that's a very important question. But meantime, how do I pick up my zagu? And what is my, or hold this stick. What is my relationship? What is my relationship with it? This. When I can find out my relationship with this, I'll be in a better place to deal with all of that. Those things. At least I hope so. That's the practice. To keep trying that over and [...] over again. Interestingly enough, by doing things over and over again, you know, you've been reading all these things about Buddhism and the tricycle and the other magazines. You know, there's all this scientific inquiring into the brain now. And they've discovered that by, people who sit very, start very young in their lives to do meditation practices and so on.

[40:23]

There are changes that actually occur in the brain. In other words, neural pattern, new neural patterns and so on. So I don't know even the nomenclature for it. I can't talk knowledgeably about it. But soon it's to be broadcast that science has found evidence for the reality of God. And we'll all be happy because at last it's proven that we aren't just what we think, but that, you know, there's infinite information about the practice, new books, publications, constantly coming, new things are constantly coming forward, get on the internet. There's no end to the information about how to practice, no end to the information about Buddhism and so on. But when you sit down to the computer, when you open the door, when you get up from the computer, things come forward to confirm themselves. The teaching is also there. The real teaching is there. We can go to the universities and learn everything.

[41:23]

We can go to schools and learn. But our day-to-day life with thingness is our practice, our mindfulness that way. Well, you see, I came here thinking I didn't have anything to talk about. But get an old man started and they become garrulous as hell. Long-winded. I think there's something else I wanted to say. I can't remember it. But it has to do with our already being perfect. And the world is already, just as it is in all of its horror, perfect.

[42:25]

It can't be so. If we work really hard tomorrow, the next day, the next year, a millennia from now, maybe the world would be perfect, huh? Let's hurry up and get there. Forget this world. Year after year, I dug in the earth, looking for the blue of heaven, only to feel the pile of dirt choking me. Only until once in the dead of night, I tripped on a broken brick and kicked it into the air and saw that it had, without a thought, in the dead of night, everything in darkness, not knowing a thing, not seeing a thing, I smashed the bones of the empty sky. And I was happy. How many people are happy?

[43:31]

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