I find I'm speaking again and again about the same thing. I did it again yesterday. What I'm saying may be different each time, but what I'm trying to convey to you is nearly the same. Recently, the last six weeks or so, And I've been talking about, as I did last time I spoke here at Greenbelt, about Ryutan's meeting with Toksan. I think everyone knows the story. I can tell it a little differently each time, so I'll tell it, end part. Rutan came, when Tokson was sent by the woman at the cake shop to see Rutan. Ryu, you know, means dragon in Tan Lake, so...

[01:32]

Tokusan came in and said, although Ryutan is very well known, I don't see dragon or lake. And Ryutan was coming in the room and he said, haven't you seen it? Or the way I described it yesterday, he said, you are meeting Ryutan in person. So what is this in person is what I've been trying to talk about. And I've been speaking about trying to awaken a sense of being rather than subject-object relationships. For example, last time here at Green Gulch, I spoke about how Tokson, when he was carrying the Diamond Sutra, felt he was carrying truth on his back, you know, but he wasn't carrying trust when he met the tea shop lady, cake, rice cake shop lady.

[02:53]

And in the same way, we talk philosophically about, as we talk about truth, we talk about change, everything changes. But that's not exactly right, everything changes. It's maybe more accurate to say giving and receiving. Everything is giving and receiving. What is ryutan and toksan, giving and receiving? Where does your life happen? I think newspaper reporters are supposed to ask in every story, five W's, isn't that it? Where, what, why, when, and who. Is that right? Oh, seems pretty good. I don't think we need why in Buddhism. Why are we going to eliminate? But you might ask yourself, where does your life happen? Who happens it? What happens? When does it happen? Where? We think it happens. Most of us think it happens where it doesn't. I don't know, in our room or some place we think it happens.

[04:24]

So I've been speaking about the precepts in this context. Do not kill. But let's, you know, one of the things we talk about in Buddhism is don't think. Don't think so much. Don't think. So we can take this phrase, don't think, and apply it to the precepts. Instead of, do not kill something, we can say, do not think you can kill something. The precepts can be understood in many and many ways, and we can take all the precepts and understand them from various points of view. So in this way, I'm speaking about it. Do not think you can kill something. Actually, you can't kill something. There's no way to remove some obstacle in your life. Something interfering with you. If you kill it, by some standard, it doesn't go away. There's nothing you can kill, actually.

[06:10]

When you know where your life actually happens, there's nothing you can kill, nothing you can take away. And likewise, the second precept is, do not steal or do not take what is not given. But we can say, do not think you can steal something. How can you steal something? How can you add something? Do not kill. How can you take something away? How can you add something? Do not steal. You can't steal something if you know where your life actually happens. Try to figure out where your life actually happens and the life of someone you meet. I remember in Japan there was a woman. I lived, you know, and we lived in Gary Snyder's house. Before that, it had been some other person's house. We'd fixed it up for Nakamura Sensei, and he'd passed it to Gary, and Gary passed it to us, and we lived there for about four years. And one of the reasons, Gary, when we moved there, it was still countryside.

[07:34]

But one of the reasons Gary left is because the landlord had built five, maybe, very narrow houses. Five houses that maybe reach from this door to that door. Maybe they're longer, let's see. Maybe somewhat longer than that. Not much longer, another 15 feet or so. Five houses in a row. And in the front, if this is the front of the houses, there was a garden about as big as that space where Lucy is. A little bigger. And then the dirt street. And this woman always, as she did her laundry on the back little tiny two-by-four porch on the back of this narrow house, row house, And she had a kind of faulty drainpipe, and the water would overflow all over the place. We tried to adjust her drainpipe or talk her into pouring it in the drainpipe. She wouldn't. It would overflow everywhere. And the posts holding up the porch were completely rotted out and covered with growth. And the porch collapsed from her dumping the water all over. And she would take the pail of water

[09:00]

When she finished, she had a pail of water where she's rinsing clothes, separate from this little tiny washing machine. She dumped it into our garden, just all over the plants and moss. And so the garden would be covered with soapy detergent water, right? So I used to go and I'd say to her, you know, But, well, I don't remember her name now. Something's on. And I would say, but can't you, couldn't we... And she'd say, she'd got the ganai, which means it can't be helped. And she would throw another pail of water. Sorry, it can't be helped. And it would go all over the garden. I sometimes, when I first got there, felt like scooping it all up and pouring it back on her porch, and saying, shikate ganai, can't be helped. But I resisted. But for her, there was no way to meet her there, because that's not where her life happened.

[10:15]

For her, it couldn't be helped. That's the way she threw her water. That was all there was to it. And she was quite a nice woman. Other than that, she seemed to take good care of her life. So there are many, many things that happen in our life that disturb us because we don't know where to meet people, how to meet people. We don't know what can't be helped. I don't know if my example makes sense to you, but... Anyway. So another next precept is I translate it in the recent windbill, do not misuse the senses. And that's one way to understand it. But we could say, do not think you can misuse the senses.

[11:39]

But in this case, the translation, do not commit adultery, is better. Do not think you can commit adultery. And I spoke about this a little yesterday, but Tsukiroshi's interpretation of this precept, from this point of view, was, of course, we try not to do things which entangle us and we can discriminate between various things. This one is too entangling, this one is not so entangling. This way we create karma, this way we don't create karma, not so much. The effects of our actions don't accumulate in the same way. But we can also say, do not think you can create karma. You should be able to forget what's happened to you, what you did, like the blink of an eye. You should be able to do things like that, in the blink of an eye. So your past or your karma is not brought to the situation either.

[13:17]

You don't try to remove it, you don't try to add anything, and you don't bring your history to it. You take responsibility for what's beginning to happen, not what's happened. Some of you may Most of you, in fact, may be finding that you have a very strange relationship to Buddhism. You were born, and you found yourself with a body, and parents, and some kind of life, and you begin to take that for granted. Then, for some reason or other, you find your life comes in contact with Buddhism. And you haven't made a decision to study Buddhism. It's sort of creeping up on you. And, in fact, the decision doesn't seem to be coming from you, it seems to be coming from Buddhism. The decision seems to be being made for you.

[14:36]

we find ourselves, whether we like it or not, practicing Buddhism or having some kind of marriage to Buddhism. It calls something forth from us. And you don't understand it because Buddhism wasn't something you expected to be part of your life, this ancient, old way of practice. But how to be open to this mysterious involvement? How to be open to someone you meet, to any situation, in the same way, is do not commit adultery. In this way Suzuki Roshi interpreted. Do not think you have control over your karma, or do not think you know what your karma is.

[16:13]

And in the same way, do not lie. Do not think you can tell a lie. You actually can't tell a lie. Everything you say reveals you. The problem is that you think you can tell a lie, not that you tell a lie. You can tell lies all you want. Everyone knows they're true. Everyone knows what's going on. You can't fool people, actually. They just wonder why you think you can fool them, why you're fooling yourself. So the problem is your motivation. So in our practice, our motivation is important, and renewing our motivation, and being able actually to receive from others, to receive from Buddhism,

[17:26]

to receive from each encounter and to give, you know, in each encounter, to turn toward just what happens. This is very simple, you know, I'm talking about it so much, but if you can actually practice it, you know, it will change your life. But it means you have to begin to have confidence in where your life happens, in your own mind, in your true mind, in your zazen mind. You know, recently some people have been trying to photograph auras. I think it's a very interesting idea to photograph an aura. But it also seems rather silly, you know, to me. An aura is to see something. Maybe we can photograph a person or a thing, and maybe we can have a camera which can see more than just the usual outlines of the physical body. But actually,

[18:55]

If we see something essential about another person, I don't mean something magical, but just really see somebody. As I was saying yesterday when Bala Saraswati and Lakshmi, her daughter and disciple, student, looked at each other. That is some creation between the two of them, active creation. And if you see some radiance you together, the two of you, are creating the opportunity for that intense looking. There's no way for a camera to be involved. There's no observer possible in this world where your life actually happens. You can't observe it, a camera can't observe it, it doesn't exist in the subject-object world. You can photograph somebody's face and

[20:15]

categorize their emotional feelings. But that's something for maybe a disturbed person having a fantasy with themselves. But you can't photograph a relationship. If you know that thoroughly, you won't any longer try to record your life to get verification for your life or for your experience. And when you come to your teacher to seek some kind of verification, if you need verification, you won't get it. If you're coming to give and receive, to share something, open to receive something unexpected. That's verification. If there's no openness, you know it's not verification.

[21:29]

As I said, your past and future lives are all around you, and you're always involved in transmission. This is the meaning of the meditation school in Zen and in China and Japan and in Tibet. And that we are always giving and receiving. Everything is changing and we are... for us it means giving and receiving. And we acknowledge where our life actually exists, where it actually happened by practicing meditation.

[23:40]

recognizing this luminous column. This is the practice of the second paramita, conduct. The first paramita is giving and the second is conduct. Conduct is, as I said yesterday, just now, just as you do it, just this, just being, the dharmakaya.

[24:47]

without any karma, without adding anything, without subtracting anything, without any alternatives, lying. Just this is the law. Haven't you seen it? Right now you meet everything in person. I think you can find this truth out when you don't care so much anymore, when you give up your life.

[26:08]

When we can meet everything in this way, when you can meet someone in this way, there's a tremendous wink, a tremendous flow, some satisfaction of not being there, maybe. I don't know how to express it. Not knowing you're there anyway, not thinking. It's not so difficult, just willingness. And to try on each opportunity. One million times you don't have an opportunity, but when you notice an opportunity,

[28:00]

Don't hesitate. Don't worry about the consequences. Try what you think to your utmost you should do. Do you want to talk about something? Do you care whether it is or not? In what way do you value your memory? No, I don't think it's affected. I think as we get older, our memory becomes more and more our pleasure. Not that you're so old, but I think that's true. As we get older, memory becomes some kind of pleasure.

[29:52]

What I'm speaking about actually has no characteristics, or I can say maybe space, positive space, as I talked about yesterday. Not that this is positive and that's just something for us to walk through. It's a very dead idea. Something is here and something is over there and I'm going to get from here to there. If something is right there and right there... Sometimes we think, of course, about some problem, but the more we do not try to think about things, to organize our Thinking. But to take each opportunity, right now, a myriad of associations are there. Memory, future, actually, too. And many things called forth that we didn't know. Memory is there, associations are there. And yet we don't

[31:26]

I don't know what to say. Record it. We just... we don't... stop to enjoy it. There's some... totally relaxed feeling, as everything is happening just right. And it's unfolding and you're participating in what you don't know what will happen. So what I've been trying to do is to talk about the same thing for your time in person. still you can abandon yourself to the situation and trust exactly what comes up. And it starts by trusting, at first in some inadequate way. I don't know if I'm answering what you mean. You had something?

[33:06]

You often quote Castaneda's books, and one of the things Don Wong tells Castaneda in those books is to break up his routines. He tells him, for example, not even to eat at the same time each day, to constantly break up his routine. What would you say about that? You know, there are many ways to go about that. That's his way, his one way, and that's, if you know, how he suggested it in his book. And you can experiment with that yourself. In fact, you can do it in just five minutes. If you see your routine in only five minutes. At Tassahara, or in a Zen monastery, they do the same thing. Tassahara, we don't do it as strictly as they do it in Japan. But in a monastery in Japan, all of your routines, including the way you urinate, are altered. So you have to do it differently. And it's quite disturbing to have very simple physical acts that you've always done changed. And you can do it also by creating other routines.

[34:34]

Part of it is to create a common ground with others, which is very helpful. But we can, you know, I was saying yesterday about conduct, you know, we can... Our back is... most people's back is quite tied up. And you can swing your arms as freely as you want, trying to break the routine of your arms, say. doing different things all day, and that will have some effect, that's one way to do it, to move your arms in ways you wouldn't otherwise, and see what happens. But also, to try to do that, unless you really are quite alert, is also just to allow the holes, H-O-L-D-S, already in your back to just guide your so-called natural action. You have no conflict. So sometimes it's necessary to create conflict. If you do, like they do in a monastery in Japan, if you use shashu all the time, you know, and put your hand slightly up, this is quite comfortable if your back isn't tied up.

[35:54]

You can do it, it's just quite easy, you know, if you do it equally, quite easy. But if your back is tied up, after about two or three weeks you feel like there's a dagger in your back, exactly where you have your hole. So to do it this way is another way to break routines in your life or physical routines. And you find, oh my God! This is terrible posture, it's killing me!" But you just didn't notice what was already there. So by doing this you can come to find that spot and bring your consciousness to it and change it. Sometimes I think you're all crazy to sit here and listen to this. I don't know if it can mean anything to you. I'm trying to convey to you my feeling for practice in some way that's accessible to you through your own language and experience.

[37:28]

So I talk about just being the Dharmakaya, or what being the Tathagata. But I talk too much, you know. There's a saying in Zen, if you talk too much your eyebrows get very long. My eyebrows are already pretty long. But please forgive me, should keep trying. If you try, we might understand each other. Peace.

[38:44]

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