I think it's in the Mu Monk on the Gateless Gate collection, the fourth case or fifth case that has the metaphor or the image of the monk hanging from a branch with his teeth over a precipice or sometimes it's a man-eating, person-eating tiger, anyway there's a dangerous situation below and the question is that another monk or a student is asking, hanging by his or her teeth, why did Bodhidharma come from the West? Of course, if he hangs on, he can't answer the question and if he lets go, he loses his life. We know what the answer to

[01:08]

that metaphor is, of course, he has to let go. There comes a time when a question is asked of us, what is better, to hang on with our teeth for dear life or whatever it is that keeps us alive or to let go and to have free fall into the ongoing? And that, in my opinion, or in my view, kind of sums up what our practice is about. And of course, not just once, but over and over and over again at certain junctures of our life. That rather than hang on to what is secure and what is known, that we have to give up any sort of pretension of knowing what's going to happen to us and fall into open space. And this can

[02:12]

come, you know, this is what our study of the Kesan Jokin, Dinko Roku, or the transmission of light is about, those particular moments in which we have to awaken to the possibilities of letting go and to surrendering and to giving up. What has impressed me over the years in our practice, and I bring this up again and again, is actually the importance of metaphor in our life. The importance not only of language as we use it in the day-to-day sense, but in the heightened and deepened sense of the poetic in our life, which means the reaching down into a more profound level, but coming forth with whole new ways of glimpsing our world and ourselves in the world.

[03:18]

And in view of that feeling, I thought I would like to share some poems with you tonight, and a paper that was given by a professor from Occidental College that was given here, incidentally, and it was found in the library, called Metaphor and Theory of Cultural Change in Search of Skillful Means for Understanding Buddhism. And just the other day, well it's like this, you're sitting in, you sit down at a chair and your eyes glance out the window like they have a thousand times, and you see the play of shadows on the wall in the late afternoon sun. But this time, there's something that transfixes your gaze.

[04:22]

And when your gaze turns away, and you return to what you're doing, you might not exactly know yet, but you feel as you have just been witnessed to an occasion that answers what it is to be a human being. You don't know quite why. Have you had that experience? There is that moment of seeing something. Once it was, in Japan, it was the sound of a noodle. In Japan, they play flutes at night, when the noodle vendors push their carts through the streets. And I remember waking up one night and hearing that, and having the same feeling that my life was being turned on its face by that sound, and didn't know why. And the smell can do it, and of course, as we know from reading Proust, that a taste can do it, and bring forth the whole world for us,

[05:27]

the whole universe for us. Just one moment that we're not, we haven't planned it, we're not looking for any answers in particular at that moment, but there will come a moment when this occasion arises, and that occasion gives, gives, that occasion provides the opportunity for a new metaphor in our life, for a new sense of understanding, for a new turn on language. So what Professor Wright is talking about in this paper, and I'm not going to certainly read it all, but just a couple of a couple of things, a couple of paragraphs from it, so you get the drift of what he's talking about. He says that in an earlier era, intellectuals would have maintained a strict separation between the ideas or beliefs of a religion and the language in which they happen to be expressed. But he says, language theory in our time raises doubts about the validity of making such a distinction, concluding instead that language and concepts are for all practical purposes

[06:33]

inseparable. The, quote, linguistic turn, unquote, in contemporary thought, invites us to reconsider language as the very fabric of meaning, rather than as its incidental cover or medium. While our earlier conference colleagues might have talked about how language, quote, clothes or, quote, conveys meaning, we're more likely to take an interest in how it structures and constitutes meaning itself. One reason why metaphor has received so little attention in the last few decades of cultural theory is the realization that metaphor is the place within language where language expands and grows, thus making possible new forms of culture that come to articulation within it. The realization, this realization, is itself, is itself a cultural change of significant proportions

[07:38]

and its ramifications are only now beginning to be felt in a variety of fields. For the most part in the history of Western culture, metaphor has been relegated to the domain of linguistic ornamentation as one means among several to bring greater beauty into one's speech or writing. Metaphor thus was a poetic or imaginative device, a tool of rhetorical flourish. I think I'm leading to quite something with this, but we'll find out. First, by way of definition, metaphor is the prototypical way in which we understand one kind of thing in terms of another. So when we say that time is money or God is love or life is suffering or form is emptiness, we have, evoking the linguistic power of metaphor, understood one thing in light of another quite different thing. Are those metaphors? Yeah. Metaphor is the dream

[08:51]

work of language, somebody said, the unconscious productive activity that extends the workings of the mind. It is in this sense that we call metaphor the spark of imagination and intrusion upon language demanding novel interpretation and requiring us to think what has not yet been thought. There is an important sense in which metaphors are not consciously made or created. This is what I was trying to get to before about this thing of looking up or hearing something or tasting something. And the other thing about this is that as I'm thinking about this very thing, of course, because of this serendipity or what we call synchronicity concept, the very thing I'm thinking about, I go in the library and it comes into my hands. There is an important sense in which metaphors are not consciously made or created. Instead, they occur to us, dawn on us, pop out of or into our minds. Metaphor shows us clearly the freedom of language to develop in unlimited and unforeseeable ways. It makes imagination or

[09:56]

creativity rather than truth as correspondence or accuracy, the primary locus of our attention. Let me get some examples here. Something that's kind of interesting I thought I'd like to share before I get deep. He says that cultural changes of magnitude are not so much the results of debates and the influence of arguments as they are linguistic sea changes that gradually sink in and sweep through language practices as a society as a whole. He talks about China in the Confucian periods when Confucianism swept through China and also in the case of Muhammad in the Muslim world where those teachings suddenly almost overnight changed the whole view of who a people thought they think of themselves as. And one of the questions I wanted to bring up or one of the sentences I wanted to reiterate

[11:01]

tonight, you've heard me say it before, is something again from Dale Wright's writings on Zen Buddhism is the sentence I've memorized I think enough now that I can repeat it correctly. Anything not experienced as something is not experienced at all. Anything not experienced as something cannot be said to be experienced. The most powerful and provocative metaphors develop in a systematic way spinning off ever more extensive uses of the root metaphor. Systemic metaphors are therefore well worth special attentiveness in studying historical texts or historical periods. Let me provide an example in modern English. While many of us might react negatively to the metaphor time is money, time is money, denying that we do in fact conceive of time as though it's analogous

[12:07]

just to our financial world, a study of our everyday linguistic practices would belie that denial. All of us think in terms of wasting time and saving time, giving our time and spending our time, investing our time, running out of time, budgeting our time. We borrow time, we use time profitably, and think hard about whether our activity is worth our time. Time is a valuable commodity, a limited resource, something that we ought not to squander. We get paid hourly or weekly or monthly or annually. Our film or film bill comes in units of time and we pay our mortgage over set periods of time. When our ill-conceived deeds cost society, we repay the debt by serving time. We could extend these conceptions almost indefinitely because the metaphor time is money is now so deeply pervading our mind and language that it is hard to imagine it as being otherwise,

[13:11]

but it was indeed otherwise. It has been in other historical epics and in other cultures. The idea that time is money would make no sense whatsoever. He also goes on to talk about our own Buddhist language. Says, Confucian familial metaphor structured thinking about dimensions of East Asian society. For example, he talks about for Buddhists, the root metaphor came over time to be the Sangha as a family. Once this was fully established, it became natural to understand every dimension of monastic social life in terms of clan changes. The relations of uncles and cousins and nephews between monks and their patterns of interaction were modeled over these in traditional Chinese family. And then he says, Agricultural metaphors can be found throughout Kamakura Buddhist texts as well as other East Asian texts. For example, given the sophistication of this vocabulary in East Asia, a wide variety for the words cultivating, tending and nurturing can be found

[14:16]

in Buddhist discourse. Drawing upon earlier Indian uses of the image of seeds or bija, we find a wide range of references to seeds planted in the mind or heart, seeds of virtue or merit that are properly cultivated could be expected to grow and to yield spiritual nourishment and wealth. So, in fact, he says here, Nichiren, for example, thought of the daimoku, that is the practice of reciting just the name of the Lotus Sutra, as a seed requiring disciplined cultivation to be sure. The concept of roots, the root of virtue, to root. Also, economic metaphors, the images of debt and reward abundantly used, such as saving or salvation, merit gained and lost, and so on, continue to proliferate. Finally, the overall view of language presupposed in this way of looking at

[15:18]

metaphors stands in contrast to the opposite one that conceives language as a barrier interceding between self and the world. Now, this is particularly of interest to me in our practice, since we are taught in Buddhism again and again that direct perception of something is the only way we can understand truth. That is a perception unmediated by our conceptual projections. And this is what is being now disputed in circles, uh, concerned with language as part of our perceptual equipment, rising concurrently, uh, concept to perception and not sequentially. So, he says, this latter view is very common, however, and is worth our characterizing the difference briefly. Wherever language is imagined as a medium of communication which applies categories and concepts to the experienced world that is otherwise encountered directly and on its own, a kind of dualism is posited that cannot help but cast a negative light on language in two

[16:24]

respects. The first is that language is located in the limited role as a medium for communication, but not in the more pervasive dimension of perception and conception. The second is that the metaphors for language that develop in this vein cast it in the role of intermediary, an obstacle to direct and true experience. Language is thus in this respect a, quote, veil, a lens, a filter, a reflection of what can otherwise be experienced directly and without mediation. The modern image of this is the veil of appearance, so natural and obvious a metaphor that it captivated the minds of early Greek philosophers and Indian gurus alike. But anti-essentialist and non-duistic ways of thinking and contemporary thought, as well as in some forms of Buddhist thought, offer another way in which to conceive of the role of language as an enabling rather than as an obstructing factor. Language makes possible not just communication about the world as we experience, but also experience itself in both perception and

[17:29]

conception. We perceive that world already in language and understand our perceptions in terms of concepts that are also already linguistically structured. On this model, language is not simply a means of communication. It enables or makes possible the kinds of complex experience that we have and distinguishes the way we understand any kind of thing from the way that, say, animals do. The contemporary realization that language is historical, that it changes continually through time, opens up the possibility for us to recognize that modes of experience, understanding, and culture are more thoroughly impermanent than our Buddhist ancestors could have ever recognized. This would be to say that as language changes, so do the possibilities of the way of living. And if my thesis that metaphor is the place where language undergoes its most radical and creative change is correct, the metaphor is where we might expect new forms of understanding and enlightenment to appear, just as it did in the Japanese language for the Kamakura Buddhism.

[18:34]

Well, I bring that up because one who's always enjoyed poetry and the power of language in our lives not only enjoyed it, but felt the essential or root radical nature of language in the form and the way it has changed my life, that at certain junctures, at certain turning points in life, in my life in particular, there's always come forth the need for a new metaphor, a new way of seeing my life in terms of language, a new way to hang meaning before me in my life. And by extension, I think that as Buddhists, this is my thesis in a nutshell, in America at this time, practicing Buddhists and so on, what we need to do or what we are unconsciously looking to do is create these new metaphors that work for us in America in terms of our heritage as Buddhists, particularly Zen Buddhist practitioners.

[19:38]

Now that I got that off my chest, we'll switch to a Polish writer. Do you know the Vistala? Vistala Zymborska? No, it's Vistala… Vistala Zymborska. Yeah, thank you. Say it again. Say it again. Vistala Zymborska. Say it once more. Vistala Zymborska. That's who this is. Thank you. This is a wonderful, wonderful poetess. And I would like to, if you're not already acquainted with some of her work, and of course it's in translationist, marvelous, marvelous power of the way language came. This poem is called Life While You Wait. Life while you wait, performance without rehearsal, body without alterations, head without premeditation. I know nothing of the role I play. I only know it's mine.

[20:46]

I can't exchange it. I have to guess on the spot just what this play's all about. Ill-prepared for the privilege of living. I love that line. Ill-prepared for the privilege of living. I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands. I improvise, although I loathe improvisation. I trip at every step over my own ignorance. I can't conceal my hasty manners. My instincts are for hammy histrionics. Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more. Extensuating circumstances strike me as cruel. Words and impulses you can't take back. Stars you'll never get counted. Your character like a raincoat you button on the run. The pitiful results of all this unexpectedness. If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance, or repeat a single Thursday that has passed. But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.

[21:50]

Is it fair I ask? My voice a little hoarse since I couldn't even clear my throat off stage. You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no. I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is. The props are surprisingly precise. The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer. The farthest galaxies have been turned on. Oh no. There's no question. This must be the premiere. And whatever I do will become forever what I've done. Wonderful piece of work. You ever have the feeling that you wish you wrote that? Very glad that somebody did. This is called Some People Like Poetry. Some people, that means not everyone. Not even most of them. Only a few. Not counting school of course where

[22:54]

you have to, and poets themselves. You might end up with something like two per thousand. Like, but then you can like chicken noodle soup or compliments or the color blue, your old scarf, your own way, petting the dog. Poetry? But what is poetry anyway? More than one rickety answer has tumbled since that question first was raised. But I just keep on not knowing and I cling to that like a redemptive handrail. That's very Buddhist, isn't it? And this is called The Three Oddest Words. The three O-D-D-E-S-T. Oddest. That's an odd word to pronounce. Oddest. My mother's name was Audrey. They always said you're very odd.

[23:54]

I didn't get it till I was about 10. I thought they meant it literally. It's so odd about my mother. And then one day it hit me. Odd. Audrey. Odd. No, here they are. When I pronounce the word future, that first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word nothing, I make something no non-being can hold. When I pronounce the word nothing, I make something no non-being can hold. She doesn't know how good she is, does she? Is she still alive? Yeah. Well, we have poets in our own midst

[24:56]

and good ones. And recently, using the power of language, we put together our own little book called Too Green to Burn. And some of the people are sitting in this room who wrote some of these words. We know the power of language and we know that we're looking for new metaphors. And here's one called demolition. Once it just took a strong wind, just the regular rotation of seasons to uproot a thatched hut and be done with it. Today, the monuments we build are designed to withstand just about anything except maybe our karmic return. Here, this roof and these walls were pieced together with careful attention. These were designed to grow higher and stronger. So it makes sense that seams rip a bit with the widening. It makes sense that the beams of the frame

[26:01]

moan as they give for a mind full of smashing things. What is the tool that takes down without destroying? Herein lies the mystery. Like those incubating chicken eggs in third grade, the miracle wasn't just that the yolk and whites had dried up and turned into volition. Setsho says the chick and mother hen don't know each other. But is this just a favor between friends? The point is, in this business of emerging, the question is first, who is pecking out? Then, if there's a knock and response from outside, the question is, who is pecking in? And then, if a hole is bored wide enough for the gods to offer flowers and the rain to soak through, when the effort meets beak to beak, the last question is, who is left standing? Herein lies the revolution. That was a poem by somebody sitting in this room. I don't know if I'm

[27:08]

embarrassed to say who it is, but that's Sarah Emerson. I could almost pick any one of these. Too green to burn, they say. I wait, slowly drying, gathering patience, getting ready for the fire. Many of these don't have names. They're anonymous. Too green to burn, try a didactic poem, turn 360 degrees and see what the mind picks up. And this class helped bring the immediate into focus. Somebody took the exact words that I was speaking and turned it into a poem. Too green to burn, eyes bright, heart warming, this dove's gonna fly.

[28:24]

Too green to burn, too red, yellow, blue, purple, too damn plastic to burn. Picking up litter at Mere Beach, recalling the 50s, Lake Erie, bits of smooth translucent stone, deep red stone, green and amber and clear, light transmitting stone and smooth rounded stone, long pieces of wood, lumber, brick, broken glass, all became part of it, joined with sand, shells, rocks and driftwood. Can you remember life before plastic? Everybody can write poems. These are good poems. Too green to burn. No, not me. A bonfire blazing 16 foot flames me on the beach. Come on up and warm yourselves, gather around and dance and sing. And if you get too close to too green, clean up your act and sit right down, sit right down and sit right down and sit right down and watch the flames consume this night, this day, this morning, just like any other day.

[29:26]

You wake up and you sit right down. You just sit right down next to the fire. But it's fading. It's fading. Jukai procession in San Quentin Chapel yard, moon, palm trees, deep sky. Lay Bodhisattva Zazen, praying for the period to end, the pain and suffering I felt to be delivered to myriads of courtesans of distractions, a good book, a movie or a chat with friends, practice period Zazen. Praying Zazen will never end, despite the pain I feel, only to be delivered to myriads of courtesans on onions to slice and then to pass with no poem to read. There's one here that's so funny.

[30:27]

Cats on it, going inside, going outside, fur moving around. Wind blows in from the Great Pacific, paws lined up neatly, sharpening claws on a log, an entrance mat, a Turkish rug, no distinctions. Nine inches of rain in many days, waiting inside, tail curved like a sickle. Sitting not inside, not outside the door, late winter sun. This is all about cats, right? Lowering the head to sense it, then a little more, the tongue finds water. Stitched up and hemmed in, the new priest tries to bow. Soji sent a goodwill again to refold the same old shirt.

[31:46]

I think so. Yeah. Not many people would get this. Dancing with demons, Mick hits the drum. Boom, boom, boom. Kumbaya, my lord. Daughters of Marov, from far or near, tempting me, flaming Samadhi. Early spring, white blossoms everywhere, couldn't give a damn. Fess up, monk. You must be happier than you look. In the walled city, there is a sign that reads, too green to burn,

[33:24]

but so far the flames haven't learned how to read. Where's the one that... Anyway, I'm going to make some copies of this, this little anthology of ours and put them in the library and send some people that were here. I bring up this question of metaphor tonight and have a kind of loose meeting because a new metaphor has come into my life, into Arlene's life, since in the last 24 hours. It's finally come to a head that we have decided to leave and are looking for a new life. I think if the Sangha doesn't already know it, it's a good time

[34:27]

to just announce that. It won't happen overnight, but it's in the works. I wanted to say it because for a number of years now, I've lived here and thrived and benefited deeply from the practice and from my life with the Sangha and so forth. Then I had this heart condition and I felt kind of weak and I was getting old and I thought, well, I'll just end my days and my life is pretty much over. But then, lo and behold, I got a new heart, as it were, after the operation and with it, an abundant new energy. So with another possibility of another 10 years ahead of me, maybe, you know, I felt that I've kind of reached the end of my monastic days or the more formal aspects of practice, those things that we adopt in this practice, the robes and the formalities of it.

[35:33]

And maybe now it's time to kind of broaden out and open up in a more direct way, find a new metaphor of using what I have learned and benefited from it to take it out into the world in some way. And Arni feels the same way about herself. So we had a long discussion about this last night. And also I tend to, every time I shave, look in the mirror and time is passing. And I didn't think I could live here just to survive. In other words, hanging by the branch with my teeth, picking up space and not really feeling that it's a viable life for me anymore when there's a possibility of now taking what I've learned here out and opening some space for others to come into where we are. And in consequence of that, after much soul searching and agonizing and so forth, certain events bring these things to the fore, but it's really a dependently co-arisen event

[36:33]

and we become who we are from these events. And there's neither praise nor blame in the midst of it. It's just how things come about. And so I'm very grateful for all of you that have brought me to this and Arlene, too, to this place and given me a chance to sit up here and hold forth in different times and ways and learn about myself in doing so. Well, I would like to recite one more poem because I wrote it, of course, and because it has some bearing on what I started to speak tonight about language and metaphor. And it's kind of a, you know, if I could really do it, it'd be like a slam, one of those slam poems, you know, we've gone real fast, but I can't do it that way. But maybe someday I'll learn how. Anyway, it's called As, and I based it on the fact that anything not experienced as something is not experienced at all and as such, so here it is anyway.

[37:34]

And I stare in the mirror, I stare in the mirror on the bathroom wall and see there an old guy, hairless with jowls and all, staring gray-eyed back at me with a rather fierce glare as though he was some stranger, which is kind of weird when you consider that we passed these last 26,000 days and nights together, that's 26,000 days and nights in each other's company. And so I say to him, so I say to him, to my reflection and out loud too, because there is no one nearby to hear, I say, as Rumi might have, well, tell me, friend, tell me nothing I've done was ever really lost or won, or has ever been saved or salvaged, but simply given, as in given up or given in, or words to that effect. And he arches a brow as if to say, why, heck yes, pal, you mean all those long-lost places and far-gone spaces and love-begotten faces, all that good old stuff, once too green to burn, now all changed and turned as if from cash to ashes? And sure enough, I see

[38:41]

that laugh in his eye that warns me that what this is is narcissus, dreaming up some once-upon-a-time somebody daddy who sat so tall between the stick and the wall that you just knew he'd have to free-fall or end up as Humpty Dumpty. And staring at this mole on his jaw that is my very own, I make up jokes about how we're rounding third base and puffing for home to make the final score, with such expressions as thus and so, not to mention those more common ones, oh boy, oh man, oh gosh, golly gee whiz, and of course, goddamn. Or as a this-a or that-a, such fascinating data as appear in pairs used for compare, like, you know, win-lose, loss-found, praise-blame, guest-host, or poetically as king or clown, or as a blind pinch-hitter in the game of our darkest, most intimate shudders. Maybe it's best to drop it, friend, I say. Let it go and leave it for a rainy day, bid each other fare-thee-well, adieu, hi-ho, silver away, and drop our momentary

[39:46]

hesitations about mere conventional designations, and go to turn yet another page on which is written the inscrutable inscriptions of time and age. Leave the mirror empty now on the bathroom wall and smile, friend, smile, for next time we come around here we'll stare each other down again with eyes past weeping and too dry for leaking sentiment from twenty-six thousand days and nights and permanent spent and what they might have meant. That's my speech for tonight and how I feel about my life at this time with you guys and but what I what I want to leave with us is this idea about finding a new way to appreciate our language and and to be sensitive to the metaphors that you as practitioners will and I and all of us

[40:47]

will develop in this time and place for realizing and expanding the heritage of the buddhadharma that it's not some timeless identity that has come down from buddha to us but that identity is us and that we will expand upon it as we find both the practice and the language with which to embrace and express it. Any questions? Now you know the metaphor is for something. Is the metaphor for something? I mean by making the metaphor. I want to know how you have a metaphor without having a narrative and how you have a narrative without becoming like the hero of your own story. I can't see how you just don't start. I don't think you can make it up. I think the point is if I understand your question is that it will happen spontaneous. Well I think in that paper for example he said that it happens without deciding or it happens that may happen

[41:50]

unconsciously you might have to control it but once you have it how do you how do you not stick to it? How do you not grasp it? Because once you grasp it you'll have trouble. Well you first have to grasp it but you don't have to cling to it. You know we are the primates that we have evolved from went through the trees like this right? I mean they didn't fly from branch to branch they grabbed branches but in order to keep moving you have to let go of the branch. We have to find the new branch to get higher in the tree but then we have to let it go so there's not another one. That's a metaphor. What if I'm mishearing you then? Are you saying you're seeking a new metaphor or suggesting that you're seeking a new metaphor? Both. Both. You're seeking I mean we're all seeking even though we say we're seeking non-seeking we're all looking for a way in which we can broaden our perspective. But the chimpanzee isn't seeking the next branch. No the chimpanzee isn't but as

[42:51]

advanced I mean consciously the chimpanzee is but I feel that we are as advanced chimpanzees seeking the next branch. You know willy-nilly that we actually as human beings have no choice but when we look up and see the shadows on the wall hear the flute in the night hear the hear the bamboo see the morning star see our face in the stream it comes alive to us because we've prepared because we're hungry to know what we are. And we do that with our linguistics with our language it comes finally it comes forward in full expression and that's as human beings that's the poetry of our life. But there's a very big difference between the poem for example about the unscripted life right and the unscripted life I mean so this poet has access to that somehow and is able to write it down but then you know when Friday comes around it's not

[43:51]

just go you know read the poem and think oh okay now I'm ready. So what does it mean to seek a metaphor? Well that's let me say what the metaphor is and find out the answer to that question for yourself. I don't have an answer for that. I just think that that's what we do you know that's that's part of rather than get caught in what I'm suggesting that rather get caught in old metaphors old forms of the cultural past and out of that we as a living practice we're always looking for a new dimension and that will finally be expressed in a new way and then that will become the status quo that will become the old thing that this is a living process of constantly expanding our knowledge of ourselves. That's my delusion. That's my metaphor. I'm not saying that's the truth I'm just presenting that's my story. I feel we tell these other stories

[44:54]

and we use the language and we have these stories about how we should be in the world or how we want to be in the world and we put that into words but that story is always changing to some extent. I don't think that you know any of us here conceive of ourselves as 13th century buddhists and that that the dharma is something like a Toyota that we're going to drive away and and but that we're discovering it for ourselves from moment to moment and day to day over and over again. Isn't that Dogen Zenji's teaching? At each moment we've discovered the dharma. Anyway that's how I feel about it. Tonight. Tomorrow I don't know what I'll feel but at this moment that's who I am and in this sitting at this moment with these words this is how I express who I am.

[45:57]

But I'm not saying it's going to be like that necessarily tomorrow. General? I'm along with Jane I think still a little disturbed by you're saying or he is saying that form is emptiness is the metaphor along the lines of time is money. How about form is form? Well. That's the way to understand the is a metaphor. Yeah. That's a totally new concept. Yeah it is a new conception actually. It's a metaphor. Life is metaphor. What this thesis is is that we expand our life through by a sudden new metaphor. A sudden new image comes forward in our consciousness. Maybe from the collective unconscious who knows where it comes from. As you said it kind of pops up and then it makes what was not possible yesterday suddenly very near not remote any longer but at

[46:59]

our fingertips. And that's how I felt about my life. I mean for a long time. Maybe no according to some language. Absolutely not. Language is actually all metaphor. As is all conception. Yeah. That's the state like that state when you say if you don't experience something as something you experienced. Yeah. That's that is a kind of new way of looking at language in practice. And it excites me. Obviously. So I mean you only experience something as basically what you already know. Yeah. But you can experience something as you already know that you don't know. No not necessarily. I think actually you can have a whole new experience of what you weren't yesterday. That's what awakening is. That would be the new direct experience. But it would have to come into the form that is knowable. In fact Chandrakirti says or is it Dharmakirti. I think Dharmakirti says that a raw perception itself cannot articulate realization. It is not until

[48:04]

it is linguistically designated that the realization can be articulated. That it can come forward as such. So I feel that that's when you actually when you say I can't quite put it into words. We have some kind of inkling you know. But all at once there's a way of grasping it in terms of language. And then I can communicate it. And then of course it is old already. It's not a new thing. And then we find it's gone from that and find a new step. A new language. And that constant self-renewing process. But I don't want to you know I don't want to try to reify this into a whole new thing that we have to grasp and try to digest. I just find it very kind of exciting in my own life because it seems the living. Everything's context instead of the living context of my being right now. It interests me because we have a priest meeting every Monday morning. And we go into the library. Filled with thousands of books around us.

[49:08]

Millions of words. We sit down with dictionaries. And we puzzle over the meanings of words. And we try to decipher what the language is all about. Only to get to the position where we must finally drop concept in order to understand what reality is. It does it strikes me as if nothing else than quite ironic. That we do this. That we have to do this. That this is the way we work as people. As beings. So I don't know. I mean that's my delusion perhaps. But one day I just started laughing at ourselves in there working very hard to get to a realization that's going to step out of language. That's not what poetry is about. Stepping out of language? Yeah. Using language to step out of language. Yeah but you can't. You have to use the language to do that. To point to a dimension that is

[50:11]

unutterable. But as soon as I say it's unutterable I've used the language to describe that dimension. Anyway. It's 8.30 here almost. So I feel like I like to call it quits. How about you?

[50:27]

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