Good morning. A monk asked Master Ching-Len, The path diverges and twists. What about sudden enlightenment? Ching-Len said, You face away from the black jewel beneath your own feet toward a sky filled to the moon with anxiety. Two weeks ago, on a Monday, 55 children came to Green Gulch for the day. They were ages 11 to 13, from my daughter's school.

[01:05]

So I wanted to put on a good show for them and asked all of my friends here to please help, which they did. And some of our teachers gave Zazen instruction to them here in this room. Daigon and Arlene and Tayo and Mea Wender taught them about the tea ceremony over in the tea house. And Wendy Johnson took them to the garden. And I was in the Wheelwright Center answering the questions that they had sent to me about Zen. They had come home in my daughter's lunchbox. So I thought today that I would tell you some of the questions and a little bit about the conversation that we had together here at Green Gulch that day. What are your means of revenue and do you divide it up equally?

[02:13]

Some Mill Valley kids, you know. What would you do if your kid didn't want to be a Buddhist? Which is interesting because my daughter has told me that she's actually Jewish. Why would you be a Buddhist monk and not a Christian monk? You know, where is that line that we draw? Was it hard to get used to living in cells and do you ever get lonely? And then finally, I think this one was to tell you to test our sense of humor, do you ever order out? I think we would, but pizza for 50 is kind of hard to...

[03:27]

So the question that I wanted to talk about today that I thought was the most evocative for me was this one. After all your years of study, is there anything you have learned? You know the answer, huh? Okay. Or advice you would give that applies both to life inside and outside of the center. This is an 11 year old, right? Pretty good. So I think that's exactly what we do here on Sunday mornings is to try and find out if there's anything that we're learning here or studying here that is of interest or use to all of you. Or to all of us for that matter. And another reason that I like this question is that

[04:39]

it did make me curious. It awakened my curiosity about what I'm doing. What am I learning? Last Christmas I was visiting a friend who was dying in the hospital up in Portland. And while I was waiting with him, I spent some time watching TV. And there was a show I saw. I've told the people here about this. It was an interview with Stephen Hawking. Is it Hawking or Hawken? Hawken? Hawking. So he's the man, the physicist who has ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, and he's completely paralyzed except for his eyes. And he uses his eyes to activate a sight computer. And then the computer talks for him.

[05:40]

So, you know, I was kind of interested in the interview. He was talking about outer space, which I've always rather liked, and solar systems and that kind of thing. And then at the end of the interview, the man who was asking him questions said, Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? And Stephen Hawking said, That would be fine. And the man said, Are you a happy man? And the computer printed out, Yes, I am. So the interviewer was also surprised. And he said, How is that so? And Stephen Hawking said, Because I'm deeply curious. So it seems to me that he has found the secret to life while looking for the secret of the universe. So I became deeply curious about this question.

[06:48]

What have I learned, or what advice could I give after all my years of study, inside and outside of the center? And so this last question, inside and outside the center, was where my thinking went first. Well, what is the center of Zen center? Or what is Zen center the center of? I used to think it was kind of funny to call it Zen no center, when we were having a lot of trouble here, you know. So when the Buddha looked for the center, what he found, as far as I can understand, was himself. Just this person. But the difference was that he understood that self quite differently.

[07:53]

Instead of an isolated, introverted, kind of snail-like being peering out at the world, what he saw was something more like the intake valve for the universe, or maybe an inversion of the Big Bang. As Dogen says, to carry the self, this little snail self, forward and experience the myriad things is delusion. That the myriad things come forth and realize themselves is awakening. So for the Buddha, inner and outer space conjoined through a deepening of his curiosity. This is a classic Zen question.

[08:59]

What is it that thus comes? What is it that thus comes? Now the secret is the question. And we ask this question with our eyes, with our ears, our nose, our tongue, our entire body, our entire mind. So I think one way of understanding the Buddha is that he was a man who came to his senses. He woke up. Buddha means to wake up. And this isn't the same thing as seeing is believing, you know, the old Lutheran thing, I guess. Seeing is believing. It's more like believing in seeing. It's so simple, even children do it, babies do it.

[10:06]

But we older children, I think we kind of overlook the point, which is looking itself. Seeing. Looking. Hearing. Hearing. Tasting. And this seeing, this awareness, is available to each and every particle of consciousness that's sitting right here in this room today. So this is the center. And this is the center. And this is the center. Center, center, center, center. You know, that's the center of Zen center. Your hand on top of your head. So this is from the Buddha's admonition to Bahiya

[11:09]

from the old wisdom suttas. Then Bahiya, thus must you train yourself. In the seeing, there will just be the seeing. In the heard, just the heard. In the reflected, just the reflected. In the cognized, just the cognized. That is how, Bahiya, you must train yourself. Now, Bahiya, in the seeing, there will be to you just the seeing. In the heard, just the heard. In the reflected, just the reflected. And in the cognized, just the cognized. Then Bahiya, you will not identify yourself with it. And when you do not identify yourself with it, you will not locate yourself therein. When you do not locate yourself therein,

[12:13]

it follows that you will have no here, or there, or midway between. And this would be the end of suffering. So in a way, our sitting practice is basically a celebration of our self-centeredness. With each of us, each self as the center. And I was thinking that this is probably what I thought they meant when I was a child, when they talked about democracy. You know, that all men and women and children and plants and animals are created equal. And that they are endowed with inalienable rights.

[13:14]

You know, rights to life and liberation and the cessation of suffering. And to me, that sounds very much like our foremothers and fathers understood the Buddhist teaching. It's just that we haven't quite realized it yet. There's still a big task for us to do. And that's exactly why we make our vows. I vow to save all beings to the end of time. I once asked my teacher, is Zen fast enough? He didn't answer, he just smiled. So, this last April, after sitting a seven-day session here in this very room with some of you, I'm sure,

[14:18]

I went home to the tiny kitchen of my cell. I actually have a very nice cell, by the way. Thank you all for that. And I wrote down on a post-it three videos that I felt compelled to rent. And I didn't know why, you know, I just wrote them down. One of them I hadn't seen yet, it was called, I didn't know the name, it was an outer space thing. I'll look at almost anything about outer space. When I was young, I told someone, you know, I can't wait until we get into outer space. And my friend said, Nancy, we are in outer space. It's kind of a scary thought, you know. We are aliens. So, anyway, one of them was, I'd read the review,

[15:22]

got a good review, and it was called Vision Quest. No, no, no, no, not Vision Quest. Galaxy Quest. Some of you saw it, didn't you? It's so good. And the other two were ones I had seen. One was Groundhog Day, and the third was Shadowlands. Well, this came in very handy when the kids were here because I could talk about movies, you know. This is their language. In fact, I heard from one of their teachers yesterday that they were absolutely amazed that I had seen and liked Matrix. So, anyway, I very obediently rented these three films and took them home to my cell where I have a small but adequate Sony VCR. And I watched them all in two days.

[16:25]

I had my own little film festival. Which reminds me, I was thinking when I was going to tell you this stuff that I hope I'm not disturbing your projections of how we live here at Green Gulch. I was talking to my therapist. There's another one. I was talking to my therapist and telling him about how difficult it is for us farmers when we are killing all these little animals with our tractors. Here we are, vegetarians and organic farmers and we're ripping up the fields full of gophers and birds and stuff. And I was telling him about the pain of that. And he looked at me and he said, you know, I thought you people plowed with mules. And we kind of looked at each other like, boy, we're really making each other up here, aren't we? So anyway, for all of you who have seen

[17:29]

these three films, maybe you know what they have in common. I didn't know at the time, but I do now. And what it is, it seems to me, is that they're all about the transformation of a human being, much like the Buddha, a transformed human being. And each one is from a little different angle. So in each of the stories, we begin with a human being who is all locked up in himself in their small snail-like self. And they feel kind of safe in there, right? I suppose a snail feels like they're pretty safe in that shell. But I think, as we know or suspect, that this is not our actual self. It's not our true self. And as Reb called it last week, actually, it's a decoy of our self that we stick up there, you know, to see what's going to happen. So, in Galaxy Quest,

[18:35]

they are actually, literally, actors. And it's 20 years down the line, their show's been cancelled, and they make a living by going to kind of Star Trek-like conventions and signing autographs. So what happens at one of these conventions is some very real aliens come and ask them to help them because their planet is under attack from this really mean guy, another kind of alien. And so these aliens think that they're real space rangers. And the space rangers think that they're putting them on, and they end up getting beamed up to real outer space where there's real mortal combat with very real bad guys. So in this process, all of them go through a transformation.

[19:37]

And they find, in their own way, courage and intelligence and compassion, kind of like Dorothy and her friends in The Wizard of Oz. But also what they find is a tremendous respect and love for one another. And I was thinking, you know, imagine how it would be for all of us if we saved the Earth from the aliens. Imagine how we'd feel. Or even if we saved the Earth from the NRA. You know. This would be a wonderful thing. So, which reminds me that I recently saw this ad. I was kind of shocked. Maybe you all knew this was coming. I had hoped. For a new Honda and a new Toyota car that's mostly electric, 70 miles to the gallon. And one of the pictures,

[20:41]

there's a pine cone on the antenna, and the Sierra Club has given them an award for environmental engineering. You know, my little heart skipped a beat for the first time in decades. And I thought, okay, I promise this is the only car I will ever drive. You know, and I thought, I think I should ask some of you to be very careful in your SUVs because, as one of my friends says, I bet that's a tinny little car. And I think it probably is. So please drive carefully when you see the bikers and the electric cars coming by. I thought, well, I guess if I'm going to die a heroic death, I'd rather it was at the wheel of a tinny little electric car than suffocating in the atmosphere with all of you. Now, Groundhog Day

[21:44]

was more about what we call in Buddhist teaching, practicing the way. Did anybody not see Groundhog Day? Did you hear about it? Yeah, okay. That's great, you know. These are universal stories, our kind of fables, our fairy tales. So anyway, I think this is like this. Every morning the wake-up bell rings here or for you the alarm clock goes off and there you are, you wake up in your nice warm bed, conscious, and it's Groundhog Day again. So I was thinking, well, it's not so much, if I look at my own life, it's not so much that every day is identical but certain components of every day are identical, particularly if I notice them. You know, like flossing your teeth. There's no creative way that I've found to do that.

[22:47]

You can start on the right or you can start on the left, you know. Been there and done that. And then I put on my robes, I come here and I sit, I walk home uphill, I make coffee, I try to get my daughter into the bathtub, take her to school, and then there's the grass and the wind and the change of the seasons, you know. And most of all, there's my emotional responses to all of the above. So somewhere in the center of our karmic patternings, what's called the circle of birth and death, there is a transformation of consciousness that may occur, that can occur,

[23:49]

that will bring new life and new color into our daily routine. And for Bill Murray, this process was a very long one. Do you remember? It looked like he was going for about 10 years there. Like every day he got another chance to learn something. So he learned things and then he developed skills and then he failed to learn things and so on and so on until finally, finally, he dropped his self-concern and his concern for the welfare of others was born. No big deal. For the first time, do you remember when he goes up to this cameraman who he'd been treating like a bug and he says to the guy, You take milk in your coffee, don't you? There it was. You know, it's just these thimblefuls

[24:52]

of kindness and generosity. It doesn't have to be some grand gesture to bring this kind of regard and affection to the world into being. So the last of the trilogies that I watched was Shadowlands which once again had me crying my eyeballs out. This one is the C.S. Lewis' story. He's the writer of the Narnia Tales and this man was a man of deep faith. He believed in God and in Christ and I was thinking that, you know, people of deep faith or spiritual seekers have much in common and basically it's this descent into the deepest layers of themselves that they all share. And as far as I can tell, from that place there are no differences.

[25:53]

So C.S. Lewis was an Oxford don and a very learned man. He taught love. He taught philosophy. Love of knowledge. But what he didn't know was love of human beings. His mother had died when he was a little boy and he closed himself off from being hurt again. So when this very lively and beautiful Jewish woman arrived at his citadel with her young son, she was divorced from New York City, you know, kind of blew the windows out of the tower. But he didn't move. He wasn't going to move. He knew she was there but he remained frozen until he found out she was going to die. And then it cracked.

[26:59]

The whole tower collapsed all at once. And what he did was so interesting because all he did was to unshield his attention. The love was already there. You know, it's already here all the time. That's what the Buddha saw when he was enlightened and that's what he tried to teach for 49 years. So, what have I learned that would apply to life both inside and outside of the center? And if I say I've learned something that sounds wrong. And if I say I've learned nothing that sounds wrong. And if I tell you what I've learned that sounds completely wrong. So I thought, well,

[28:01]

I'll just give them another Zen koan. Chaoshan asked Elder D. The Buddha's true reality body is like space. It manifests form in response to beings. The Buddha's true reality body is like space. It manifests form in response to beings like the moon in the water. How do you explain the principle of response? D said, like an ass looking in a well. Chaoshan said, well, you said a lot there indeed but it's only 80%. D said, well, what about you teacher? Chaoshan said, I say it's like the well

[29:02]

looking at the ass. So I want to propose that if there is anything for you to learn in any given moment or to learn in any given lecture or any given lifetime, it's going to come from your proximity to the well. This is a deep well, the well of our experience and the water from this well flows continuously fresh and unique out of the darkness. This is the same very secret way that all of us came into this world in the first place. You know, wet, naked and crying for our mommy. And she came

[30:05]

and he came and they came, again and again and again. And then when we were ready they taught us how to cross the street safely. It's probably the most important thing we ever learned, how to look and listen. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead it recommends for those of us traveling between the worlds to follow the clear light not the ones that are flashing bright and full of color. The clear light is visible to us at all times. It's the light that we see through and that we hear by and it's always on our side. But the path diverges and twists. What about sudden enlightenment? You face away from the black jewel

[31:08]

beneath your own feet toward a sky filled to the moon with anxiety. So please don't do that. Please stay here with all of us. There is lots of work for us to do both inside and outside of the center. And don't worry, at the end of every 40 minutes we'll ring a bell and then we can do something else. Thank you very much.

[31:41]

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