Good evening everybody, excuse me for being late, it's not a very good way to start, but I have a very bad tendency, unfortunately, to be late. I've been working on it for 15 years or so, but sometimes I'm on time, but I hope that this will be the last time that I'm late for this class. I'm going to send around a little tablet, so that I can have a list of who's in the class, so that I can take attendance. If you're not a Green Gulch resident, if you would write your phone number down, it would be very helpful in case something should happen, and I get hit by a car, or who knows what, and there's no class, then you can be called, and you don't have to schlep all the way out here. But the rest of the people, you don't need to put your phone number down. And if you can just sort of quietly circulate it through the room as the class goes on.

[01:03]

Now, I would like to go over the... Just to be clear that you and I agree on when it is that we're meeting, you know, like what days and so forth. I think that we're having four classes. Now it's February the 29th, and we're having class tonight, and then next week, March the 7th, and then the week after that, March the 14th. But then we're skipping a week. So March the 21st, no class. Everybody will remember. I would hate for somebody to come far away, you know, thinking there's class. And then we'll have one more class on March the 28th, so four classes.

[02:11]

And my plan is... I'm using this newest second volume of the translation that has been done here at Zen Center, mostly with Kaz Tanahashi's work, Enlightenment Unfolds. And if you're a student of Soto Zen, I think you should get a copy of this book. I think it's in paperback now, no? I think so. Not yet? Not yet? Oh, well, wait a little while. But actually, I appreciate hardback books, some kind of book like this that you... This is not the type of book that you're going to read, and then not read again. You'll read this book many times. So anyway, I recommend it. But we will have Xerox copies of the text that we'll be reading. And what we'll do is...

[03:13]

My plan is that this week we will do Undivided Activity, which is the title of one of the fascicles of Shobo Genzo. We'll do that this week. Next week we'll do Expressing a Dream Within a Dream. And then, in the last two meetings, we will do the first thing that's translated in the book, which is titled Journal of My Study in China. So that's my plan. And I think that we, without being too intent about covering material

[04:15]

or something like that, I think we can actually do that. So that's the plan. Four classes, three different texts of Dogan. So that makes sense? I've cleared everything? Okay. And I usually, lately, I used to have a very elaborate introduction to Dogan, full of details and information, things like that. But in recent years, things are just falling away little by little. I don't really care about that stuff that much. I'm sorry. And usually the people, everybody knows it all anyway, so why repeat it?

[05:20]

But understanding that there probably are some people in the class who are relatively new to Dogan and his works and thought, I thought I would ramble on for just a few minutes, not to bore the people who already know all this, but just a little bit to orient the rest of the people to Dogan's life and thought. So this year is the 800th birthday of Dogan. It's a big year for Dogan, and there was a big conference earlier in the year, or actually late last year, to celebrate. And there's some kind of big ceremonies and stuff that are going to happen in Japan later on in the year. So he was born in 1200 and only lived about 54 years. Seemingly he got pleurisy or something and died quite young.

[06:25]

He was a brilliant person, a really smart guy, and lost his parents at an early age. Came from a very high-born family, probably. His father was one of the emperors, although he was the son of a courtier, so he wasn't in a line of succession or anything like that. But he hobnobbed with the rich and famous and royalty and so forth. But his parents passed away when he was very young, which is not uncommon with religious people. And so at an early age he was shocked into a recognition of impermanence and had made a kind of youthful internal vow to follow the path and was ordained quite young.

[07:27]

Of course, in Japan, as in Europe in those days, it was not unusual for high-born youth to join the church, especially because of circumstances. They were unable to rise to secular power. It was an avenue for people to exercise their brilliance and become educated and achieve some status. So in addition to Dogen's sincere desire to practice the Buddha way, I think there also were social reasons why he would have gone into the Tendai school of Buddhism. His uncle was a very high-ranking priest in Tendai Buddhism and took Dogen under his wing. And Dogen apparently was quite brilliant and mastered all these very complicated texts and practices quite easily and felt, as maybe somebody today might feel,

[08:34]

who had religious yearnings and religious feelings entering conventional religion, not encountering anyone who could meet the kind of inner need that the person had. They might feel dissatisfied. You could imagine that happening nowadays. And this is what happened to Dogen. Although he was very faithful to Buddhism, he didn't have, I think, doubts about Buddhism. He didn't feel that his quest for realization was going to be met by the Tendai tradition or the teachers that he had. So there was a new teaching within the Tendai school that was coming to Japan called Zen. He went and sought out the earliest Japanese Zen masters and right away, easily, within a few years, in his early twenties,

[09:36]

received Dharma transmission and was considered a Zen master in the Rinzai lineage. And he was really sold on the idea of Zen because it had to do with direct experience and it had to do with somehow the communication of the actual ineffable sort of content of Buddha's enlightenment. So he really thought that was the right path, but he felt that he needed to go further. So he made the very difficult journey to China. It's difficult now to go to China, but it was much more difficult then, of course. Taking your life in your hands, going to sea in a little boat to China. But he did that. And in China, after much trials and tribulations, he ran into a monk named Rujing who became his teacher. They had an immediate mutual recognition

[10:37]

and he hung around with Rujing only for a few years and then came back to Japan. And Buddhism was, as it was almost everywhere in Asia, in Japan Buddhism was involved in the politics of the day. And so Dogen, apparently, nobody knows exactly the details of it, but Dogen went through a series of disappointments and difficulties which eventually led him to go from setting up a center open to everyone in the capital, to eventually, at the end of his life, in the last years of his life, setting up a very strict monastic compound in distant mountain tops, and believing at the end of his life that this was the only way. So that there's a great variety in his writings,

[11:43]

reflecting that kind of gradual change in his viewpoint. His writings are extremely, as you'll see in a moment, extremely poetic and linguistically and philosophically sophisticated, so that some people, when first reading Dogen, don't know whether to laugh or cry or run screaming out of the room, or they don't know whether to think Dogen is the most brilliant person and the most profound person they ever met, or is this really a joke? It's the kind of thing that happens when you first start reading Dogen. But after 10 or 20 years you kind of get used to it, and it does sort of make some sense in a Dogen-like way. But the writings of Dogen, because of this, were actually hidden from view for hundreds and hundreds of years.

[12:47]

The writings of Dogen were kind of venerated like Buddha statues, but not really read. They existed and only a few copies were hidden away behind screens. And eventually they made a kind of catechism out of his writings, and they read that. But it wasn't until many hundreds of years, actually, after his death, that people began to read and study his writings. And there are many traditions of interpretation and many complications about which texts are accurate and so forth and so on, as you can imagine. So there was the Dogen of the Soto sect of the last 200 years that really began to honor Dogen and read his writings. And then, curiously enough, in the 20th century, when the Japanese were becoming aware of Western philosophy, and there were many Japanese in the early 20th century

[13:52]

who became philosophers in a Western sense, they were doing a lot of national soul-searching, and they were looking for their own analog to the profound Western thinkers, the Hegels, who were the Japanese Hegels and the Japanese Kants and the Japanese Heideggers and stuff like that. And they stumbled onto Dogen, who was already 750 years before. But they realized that Dogen had that degree of profundity, and so then modern Japanese Western-style scholars began to promote Dogen as not only a religious figure, but a great figure for modern philosophical reasons. So Dogen had this funny kind of double life as a very orthodox Soto priest and simultaneously as a very forward-looking, almost post-modern philosophical writer. So it's a very curious thing.

[14:53]

These sorts of things happen when cultures borrow from one another and relate to one another. The funniest things happen, and something that looks one way in the context of one cultural tradition ends up looking quite different when it goes through another route. So that's what happened to Dogen. So there have been many studies of people comparing Dogen to Heidegger and Dogen to this and Dogen to that, and post-modern kind of analyses of Dogen and so forth and so on, which are kind of interesting in a way. For us, Dogen, of course, is very important because some of the modern Soto Zen practitioners and priests and leaders who were trying to update and revitalize Soto Shu in the present time followed Dogen and found in Dogen something really lively, and one of those people was Suzuki Roshi,

[15:54]

who was, although on the one hand a very conservative Buddhist priest from a medium-sized temple in a fishing village, in a fishing town in Japan, he was also very much a part of the foment that was going on in the early 20th century in Japanese Soto Shu, and he really loved Dogen and studied with some of the experts on Dogen in that day. And Suzuki Roshi, the main themes of Suzuki Roshi's teaching clearly are inspired by and directly relate to Dogen's themes. There's no doubt about it. And Suzuki Roshi often mentions Dogen in his teaching. So what we'll find in the ideas that we'll find in Dogen and the sort of main thrusts of Dogen's practice and thought, I think we will see, are very familiar to us because this is what we, I hope anyway, we still remember what we're doing and we still understand the Dharma in this way

[16:58]

so that you all feel, although the forms of expression may seem exotic and strange, I would imagine that you'll find that when we kind of really get down to what is really being said here, what's the import of this, that it's pretty familiar stuff and it has to do with the way we practice on an everyday basis. And I would like to encourage us to keep coming back to that place because one of the most important ideas of Dogen, and in a way the most radical idea of Dogen, is the fact that enlightenment is manifested through daily practice, that daily practice is not a means to the achievement of enlightenment, it is the manifestation, the realization on a daily basis of the enlightenment of Shakyamuni Buddha. So as we talk about Dogen, we want to keep coming back to our actual practice

[18:02]

and what actually happens to us in the process of practicing Buddhadharma. So that's my little introduction to the thought of Dogen. So with that, why don't we start with the undivided activity. I see that there's a few more copies up here. So what I would like to do as a kind of a rule, if it's okay with you, is just go through the text. In this case, this is pretty short text, so I can go through the whole thing. With longer text, I might go through part of it. And then stop and see what's on people's minds, what questions you have or what dialogue you have. So if that's okay, I'll proceed like that. And then everybody will have the text in front of them,

[19:05]

so that you can see what I'm talking about. So this undivided activity is sometimes translated as the whole works, Zenki. You can see how that makes sense, right? Undivided means whole, and Zenki means activity. Or it could mean work, to work or work. So the whole works is kind of a pun in English, right? Because there's a slang expression, the whole works, and then the whole works undivided activity. And of course, many of you know that that's the name of our senior teacher, the whole works Anderson. So his other name is Tenshin, which he's usually known by, but his actual Dharma name is Tenshin Zenki, which means the whole works. So we all know that name, that word, that phrase of Dogen. A great way of all Buddhas, thoroughly practiced,

[20:09]

is emancipation and realization. Emancipation, freedom, means that in birth you are free of birth, and in death you are free of death. Thus there is detachment from birth and death, and says penetration of birth and death, but I would say embracing of birth and death. Such is the complete practice of the great way. There is letting go of birth and death and vitalizing birth and death. Such is the thorough practice of the great way. So this is a very typical... Dogen has many, as you'll see if you peruse this book,

[21:10]

there are many styles of writing that Dogen has. One of the important things about this particular text and this whole book, the Shobo Genzo, of which it's part, is the fact that it's the first time in the history of Japanese letters that anyone ever wrote an important philosophical religious work in the Japanese language. Before this, just like in the West, same thing. Everybody, if they had anything to say that was at all important, they always wrote it in Latin, even though maybe they spoke Italian or French or Greek or whatever, they would write it in Latin. Same in Japan, they would write it in Chinese, and also all Japanese Buddhist literature was written in Chinese. So Dogen actually was a tremendous innovator. He had to kind of create a Buddhist language in Japanese, and in his more philosophical works, because some of his works are easier, more colloquial, in his philosophical works

[22:11]

he often has a beginning like this, where he sets up almost a mathematically precise dialectic in the beginning of the piece, which he then sort of unravels and unpacks as the essay goes on. So I was marveling today as I was studying this part how beautiful and how intricate and how balanced this passage is and how profound it is, too. He's bringing up, he's talking here, that undivided activity is a very profound thing. It means, sometimes they call it like one-act samadhi, meaning like totally concentrating, not only sort of technically concentrating the mind, but the whole being of a person given to

[23:15]

and fully concentrated on that which you are doing now, that which is occurring now, a complete giving over of your life to your activity. And in the doing of that, finding that everything is there, all of time, all of space, all of realization is right there on every act if you give yourself to it. That is undivided activity. And, of course, usually our activity is not undivided. We're trying to prove how good we are or we're trying to get something out of it or we have an ulterior motive or we're thinking about something else or we're not sure about ourselves or something. But this is a total commitment, a total, almost like a sacrifice of self,

[24:18]

thoroughly and totally on each activity. That's what he's trying to talk about, what that is in terms of Buddhadharma. So he's saying that the great way of all the Buddhas, the way of practice in Buddhism, when it's really thorough, when it's not just a theory, when it's not just a wish, but when it's really actual in your life, it involves two sides. And he's going to later say that those two sides come together in undivided activity. One side is freedom, freedom, letting go. Freedom means like there's nothing. You're just letting go. There's nothing to hold on to. And the other side is realization, meaning making real. So one side is throw it away. The other side is make it so real that it couldn't be thrown away. So this is the practice of Buddhism, he's saying.

[25:23]

First, right off, he says, the practice of Buddhism is on the one hand doing two things that are exactly the opposite. These are by definition opposite things. One thing is throwing everything away because everything's a dream, everything's unreal. Throw it away. So apply this to your life. Throw away your life. Don't think your life's important. Don't think you even exist. Just throw it away. Have that freedom. Can you think about it? How that would be, have the freedom that just every moment, throw it away. It doesn't matter. Everything is just throwing it away. Nothing makes any difference. I don't mean like in a nihilistic sense. Oh my God, nothing makes any difference. But I mean, wow, nothing makes any difference. It's unbelievable, it's wonderful that nothing makes any difference. It's freedom on the one hand. And on the other hand, make of every moment so real and so weighty and so profound that there could be no thought

[26:26]

anybody could even think of throwing anything away. There's no room for that. So these are two opposite things. Can you see that? And they're meant to be. They would be understood by a person steeped in Buddhist lore as opposite terms. So the Buddha way consists when it's thoroughly and most truly practiced consists of these two opposite simultaneously, these two opposite things. Freedom and realization. Now he's going to talk about these terms. So freedom means that in birth you are free from birth. You are in birth, in life, you are alive. And to be free means that within life you are free from life. And in death you are free from death. So now on top of these two opposites

[27:29]

that are unified in undivided activity there's two more opposites now. Birth and death. Birth and death seem like opposites, don't they? So this freedom transcends birth and death. Usually we think about freedom. We think, oh, freedom is in life. But this kind of freedom here is freedom in life. There's freedom in death. So when it's time to live you can live fully and freely. And when it's time to die you just give up the body and that's the end of that. Jump right into it. Dogen's death poem is For fifty-three years I've hung the sky with stars Now I leap through What a shattering! That's Dogen's death poem. So in death you're free

[28:32]

from death. Not attached to death. In life you're free from life. Not attached to life. Thus there is detachment from birth and death and embracing of birth and death. Now, in this sentence, birth and death is one thing. Existence. Actually, that's what existence is, right? Existence is birth and death. If something exists it means that it's contingent. It includes within it the ever-present possibility of its own demise. Everything that exists is that way. That is the nature of existence, right? When you think of existence you think of, oh, things are walking around and doing things and so forth. But actually, the nature of existence is that it is erasable at any moment. In fact, being erased moment by moment. I remember when I was studying Buddhism in college, the professor had a trick

[29:33]

that he did, I'm sure, every year with every class. He would say, according to Buddhism, what is the cause of death? And everybody would raise their hand and say millions of different things. This or this or this. And finally he would say, no, no, it's all wrong. The cause of death, according to Buddhism, is birth. This is the cause of death. There's no birth, no death. If there's birth, there's definitely death. And in the twelvefold chain of causation, this is how it goes. Birth. There's a whole bunch of different things and then there's birth and then there's death right away. Because that's existence, right? So here, before he was separating out these opposites. Birth. Freedom within birth. Freedom within death. Now he says birth and death as one word. Thus there is detachment from birth and death. Freedom. Freedom and detachment. We know what that feels like, right? Detachment. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not stuck on anything.

[30:35]

There's freedom, detachment from birth and death, and at the same time embracing of birth and death. So these two things, again, seem like two opposites joined together, birth and death. And now, again, two opposites. Detachment from birth and death and embracing of birth and death. So we think of detachment and embracing as being two opposite things. If you're detached from something, you don't embrace it. And if you embrace it, you're not detached from it. And here he's saying that, no, with the real practice of the Buddha way, there is detachment from birth and death and embracing, complete embracing of birth and death. And there isn't one without the other. If you have detachment without really embracing, then it's not detachment. It's nihilism. And if you have embracing without detachment, it's not really embracing. It's attachment. Confusion. The only real embracing of life

[31:38]

is in the midst of detachment. And the reverse is also true. So it's kind of an amazing way. And the way he says it, with these little lapidary, almost like mathematical uses of opposing terms. Okay, so, this is the complete practice of the great way. There is letting go of birth and death and vitalizing birth and death. Such is the thorough practice of the great way. Realization. Now he's talking about the other term, the second term, in the beginning paragraph. Realization is birth. Birth is already realization. Because in life, all the reality we could ever want is present, always. So realization is birth. We don't have to make something real. It is real. All we have to do is recognize that things are real. And this is the greatest satisfaction.

[32:40]

I think this is what, you know, I think human beings are the only creatures who talk about whether something is real or not. Because we have a need that things be real, even though everything is real all the time. But somehow, we need them to be real and we have the idea that it might not be. So this is an activity that we actually have to apply ourselves to, is to make our life real. To me, this is what the religious quest, the spiritual path is only and always about, making life real. But then again, life always is real anyway, whether we make it that way or not. The thing is that somehow we have managed to exile ourself from that reality and we have to return to it somehow. So realization is birth and birth is realization. At the time of realization, there is nothing but birth totally actualized

[33:41]

and nothing but death totally actualized. At the same time. So at the time when things are really real in our lives, at that time, there is nothing but life completely real. And also, at that same moment, there is nothing but death completely real. So this maybe gives you the idea that maybe if you haven't integrated somehow into your life a contemplation of death and some appreciation and understanding of what that is, maybe this gives you the idea that maybe that's some work that you should do. Because he seems to be telling us that in order to know and be real and free and embrace our life, we have to understand our life as birth and death, not just birth. So if we don't see the whole picture, we're going to miss out on what's real. So, of course, it's not so easy to recognize

[34:42]

the presence of death in our life every moment. This is maybe a little unpleasant, a little challenging to the sense of who we think we are. Because who we think we are, by and large, doesn't include the death part. That's the part that we eliminate from the consideration of who we think we are. So this is sort of giving us the idea that, well, maybe we need a bigger picture here. Such is the thorough practice of the Great Way. Realization is birth. Birth is realization. At the time of realization, there is nothing but birth, totally actualized, nothing but death, totally actualized. Such activity, this activity of being real with our reality, such activity makes birth, holy birth, death, holy death. Actualized just so at this moment, at this moment, in the present moment.

[35:43]

This activity is neither large nor small, neither immeasurable nor measurable, neither remote nor urgent. Birth in its right nowness is undivided activity. Undivided activity is birth in its immediacy. So this emphasizes the sense of the present moment, the profundity of the present moment, which cannot be measured. It can't be large or small and so forth and so on. And you can't even say it's beyond that. To say that it's beyond that is already to conceptualize. In other words, undivided activity exists in the present moment, in the radical present moment of our existence itself, which can't be really conceptualized. And the thing about our life, if you think about it for a minute, you can recognize that our life is lived pretty much on a conceptual level. We conceptualize

[36:46]

who we think we are, what we think the world is, who we think others are. All of our acts of perception actually are analyzed in Buddhist thought as acts of conception. Data comes into the mind and heart and is interpreted and conceptualized and we say, oh, now I know who I am and I know where I am. But this undivided activity is radically being real in the right now-ness of our life and throwing all those conceptualizations away. Not to say we don't have conceptualizations in our mind, but we don't situate our lives in those conceptualizations. We situate our lives in some radically deeper and more real place. So, I wish I could share with you the way that I was marveling over this today. I just was thinking this is the most wonderful thing I ever heard in my life. It's the greatest thing. I was just, I can't explain

[37:48]

how I was feeling about it because what this means is, to me anyway, how I understand this, is that it means that everybody here, without exception, like we think, you know, that the Pope is important. We think that the President's phone calls matter, you know. But, there isn't anybody that matters in this world more than each person here. And each one of your acts has that kind of decisive, profound quality that you would think, like the quality of John Kennedy when he was figuring out the Cuban Missile Crisis. We think, oh, that was really important. That was really a big... Well, it was. It was very important. And every moment of your life is exactly like that. It's just that important. And just as much as riding on it, this is the amazing thing,

[38:48]

just as much as riding on it, each moment of your life has those moments in that man's life. If only we would settle down and let go of our ideas and just situate ourselves within our lives completely, make our lives real. So, the Buddha way is really the practice of the intensity of our acts. It's really, in a way, an ethical... I've come to feel that practicing Buddhadharma is basically a question of ethics in the sense of it's about action. It's about what we do. And I don't mean what we do that you can write down in a book or narrate, but I mean what we do on an intimate, present moment basis, moment after moment after moment. And that ethical journey is also simultaneously a spiritual journey because it's not just about... I mean, what we do is spiritual. How we move, how we speak,

[39:50]

how we act, how we think is a matter of the deepest concern for our own lives and for the whole world. So, that's what I was thinking about today and I think that's wonderful. Don't you think? Because it means that your external... the conceptualization of your life... Conceptually, your life doesn't measure up to anything. Whose life does? Who can say, Oh, my life was very good. You know, look at all the wonderful... Nobody's life. Conceptually, is that big a deal? But on an intimate level, everyone's life, actualized and activated in this way, is extremely a great moment to the whole universe. In our moment-by-moment acts, the whole universe is created. The whole universe is created for you. And you hold up the whole universe on every one of your intimate acts. Oh, I'm getting too enthusiastic. I don't want to be carried away.

[40:51]

But this is what I was thinking about. And this, I think, is what Dogen is talking about. And this is what undivided activity is really about. So, where was I? Goodness. Yeah, it's neither large nor small. Birth neither comes nor goes. Birth neither appears nor is already existing. Thus, birth is totally manifested and death is totally manifested. Know that there are innumerable beings in yourself. Also, there is birth. And there is death. Quietly think over whether birth and all things that arise together with birth are inseparable or not. There is neither a moment nor a thing that is apart from birth. There is neither an object nor a mind that is apart from birth. So, the background of a passage like this

[41:59]

is the teaching in Buddhism of emptiness. Did you ever think about this? How could something that one minute wasn't the next minute, how could that thing be? If it wasn't, how could it leap into existence out of nowhere? How would it get there? You always have to get there from somewhere, right? So, if something was nowhere, how could it get there? How could something that wasn't be? Well, it can't, really, because the category... Basically, when you think about our common sense, everyday notions of being and non-being and life and death and so forth, if you actually were to analyze them as the great sage Nagarjuna did, you would find that they don't hold up. They don't make sense. Actually, life is

[43:00]

logically impossible. It can't be. That's true. So, that's what he's saying here. We think birth comes. There was no birth, then something is born. But it neither comes nor goes, actually. It's a miracle. It's a miracle. I'm amused. I was listening to the television and this guy wrote a book about the genome, the mapping of the genes. Soon they're going to figure out life. I got news for you. They won't figure it out. They'll figure out a lot of things. They'll have a lot of data. They're going to have a lot of data, much data, many things they'll know that they don't now know. But how come life comes when there's no life? This they won't figure out because it's not conceptual and it doesn't make sense. So, that's what he's saying here in a word. Because of that, birth is totally manifested on each moment.

[44:01]

Every moment. And death is totally manifested on each moment. And you think that you're so-and-so and such-and-so, but actually you are innumerable creatures, innumerable beings. And I think this one thing, you do zazen long enough and you will know this, that this is so. And so, many of the things that you're now worried about you really don't have to worry about because all the things, not all the things, but many of the things that you're worried about that are so worrisome and troublesome about being the person that you are and being that person and not somebody else, you easily aren't worried about when you realize that you're really everybody and nobody. You know what I mean? Like there's all these things going on. Right? Did you notice? So, you have a very small category, a container, you know, and you put these marbles

[45:03]

and you say, inside these marbles, these little marbles inside the container, that's me. But then you sit there long enough and you realize, oh, I'm losing my marbles. Laughter Or there's so many marbles that I don't know whose they are. Yeah. So you're getting the idea. You know what I'm talking about. So there are innumerable beings in yourself. And in your life, all of birth is there and all of death is there. Think about that. You think, probably you think, like most people think. Fortunately, now I'm alive and death is coming later. But I don't have to think about that because it's really a long time from now. Even old people, despite the logic of it, think that they have many years. If you ask them, they'll say, oh, I'm old, you know, I'm old. But then, you know, the next minute they look in the mirror and they think, I'm really, I'll probably live forever. Laughter Death will never come. Which is true, of course.

[46:03]

But at the same time, death is here right now. Really, it's not far away and it's not later. Death isn't later. This is really the truth. Death isn't later. So, quietly think this over. Quietly think over whether birth and all things that arise together with birth are inseparable or not. Well, they are. They're inseparable. All things that arise together are inseparable. There is neither a moment nor a thing that is apart from birth. There is neither a moment nor a thing that is apart from death. That's why undivided activity is in effect because all of our acts completely connect us everywhere and to everything. In each moment of your life, all of life is there. And to experience this and to live in that way, wouldn't that be wonderful? Instead of living as a poor little soul over there in the corner, wishing that they, I don't know what, were better looking or something.

[47:04]

Right? This is different from that. This is like completely connected, knowing that all of reality flows through your fingers moment by moment. Birth is just like riding in a boat. This is one of my favorite passages in the program. I'm always quoting it. Birth is like riding in a boat. You raise the sails and row with the pole. Although you row, the boat gives you a ride and without the boat, you couldn't ride. But you are the undivided activity of the boat. The entire earth and the entire sky are both the undivided activity of the boat. Thus, birth is nothing but you. And you are nothing but birth. So, this is a beautiful metaphor about our life. No matter what we do, we're in the ocean

[48:08]

of life. And all the water of life flows through us. No matter what we do. But, our responsibility in being alive is to row the boat, to make effort in our life, to stand up and be a person, act out the karma of our lives. But, we're doing that in cooperation with the ocean of life. If we think that I'm rowing the boat, I'm in charge here. We're sadly mistaken. The boat's in charge, the ocean's in charge, the wind and the waves are in charge. On the other hand, if we don't row, the boat doesn't go. So, it's kind of a cooperative venture. Being alive is a cooperative venture between your own activity and the whole universe. Norman, this part particularly

[49:08]

sounded like a direct echo of the similar passages in Genji's poem. Yeah, he uses the same metaphor there too, doesn't he? Right. Well, like all good writers, he recycles material. Yeah, he uses it there too. But, I often use a metaphor like this, this metaphor, to think about on a more, even on a more everyday level, to think about how we live our lives and how we make decisions and how we negotiate our way through life's confusions and difficulties. The sense that on the one hand, we have to make effort. It's that you can't live without taking responsibility completely for your life and making effort. On the other hand, if you think that you're going to make something happen and you're going to be controlling your life and steering it in a particular direction as if you could control it,

[50:09]

well, it doesn't really work that way. And your life can become... I mean, you can try to do things that way, but then that's like narrowing down your life, becoming very narrow, and more narrow as it goes along. Well, is the metaphor of a bird such a good one? Because one puts up the sails, uses the sails, uses the oars. You can go in any direction you like. Say that again. You can or can't? You can. Well, but not without the cooperation of the elements. You're not... You see what I mean? If you weren't on the ocean, you would go nowhere. Pardon me? You can even sail against the wind. Yes. Let's not get too exacting with these metaphors. I think this is what Dogen is saying to us, is that this dynamic cooperation... Yes, of course, we can do many things, but we're in a dynamic cooperation with the elements. This is the idea. We have to recognize and

[51:10]

be open to the whole wind and the whole ocean. And in that case, we can sail our boat very successfully. It doesn't have to tip over. It doesn't have to tip over. Yeah, and we have some control, but that's only because we're in cooperation. And we know we're in cooperation with the elements. This is the idea. And I'm saying that in the living of our lives, we should live our lives in that way, just on an everyday practical level. Some flexibility. Like when you're sailing a boat, the wind changes, everything changes, right? You don't say, wait a minute, I had it set up that way, I don't care where the wind is going. No, you don't do that. And who's in charge? You or the wind. You cooperate with the wind. I don't know how to sail, so I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I would imagine that if you're sailing a boat, you're not going to say, here's the kind of wind we're going to have, and we're going to do it this way. I don't think you do that. I think that you very sensitively react to the wind. And if you react with enough sensitivity

[52:11]

and enough skill, then you can go the way you want to go. But only because you're open to surprise, and open to shifting and changing. So that's how I think we have to live our lives, is that one could, I think, seemingly, in the case of our life, one could say, I'm doing this, and [...] I'm putting my blinders on, and I'm not going to be swerved from that. One could do that, I think, and stay alive. But, in my opinion, that would not be so much like real living. That would be like controlling our destiny in some way. But I think that that path, as I'm saying, is narrow. I think better to remain open to the changes that life brings, and the situations that we find ourselves in, and cooperate with them in some way. Just like sailing a boat. Anyway, I think in this case, though, Dogen is using the metaphor in a more profound sense than that one. And talking about the sort of existential

[53:12]

nature of human being is always that kind of cooperative working with the conditions of our lives. And that when we do that, all of existence flows through our every act and our every gesture. Then he now reveals to us that he got the idea for this chapter from an earlier Zen master who had made the statement, birth is undivided activity, and death is undivided activity. And his chapter here is a comment on that old saying. Clarify and investigate these words. What you should investigate is the following. While the undivided activity of birth has no beginning or end and covers the entire earth and the entire sky, it hinders neither birth's undivided activity nor death's undivided activity. While the undivided

[54:14]

activity of birth has no beginning or end and covers the entire sky and the entire earth, this undivided activity hinders neither birth's undivided, in other words, itself. It doesn't hinder itself nor does it hinder death's undivided activity. So that your complete commitment to every moment of your life is an opening. It's not a shutting down. It's an opening. Nothing is hindered. You yourself are not hindered, your life is not hindered, and death is not hindered. At the moment of death's undivided activity, while death covers the entire earth and the entire sky, it hinders neither death's undivided activity nor birth's undivided activity. This being so, birth does not hinder death and death does not hinder birth. So,

[55:14]

another way of saying this is to say, each one of you completely includes the whole universe and all of the past and future. And somehow, each one of you is able to do that without hindering the person sitting next to you from doing exactly the same thing. Because logically, if you have the whole birth and death and all time inside of you, then what's about the rest of us? Right? How come you're grabbing everything? What's the matter? But, somehow, you're able to do that in such a way that it absolutely does not hinder the rest of us from having exactly the same experience. We also include the entire universe in all of our acts. That's why when Buddha was awakened in the Mahayana scriptures, it says that his first thing that he said was, I alone am the world-honored one. I, only me. You think, what an arrogant kid,

[56:18]

you know. He gets born, he takes a few steps along, and then he says, I alone am the world-honored one. Only me. Nobody else. Only me. But this is true for all of us. Each one of us, alone, includes the whole universe. Think what it would be like. What would your life be like if you lived that way? Suppose you took that seriously, and you felt that. Suppose you felt in every moment of your life that you completely were in charge and all of existence had only been occurring because of you, and for you. How would you live your life in that case? If you really understood that. This is how it is for all of us. And yet, for each one of us, we don't hinder each other in that. So, our birth and our death don't hinder each other. Each one completely covers, and when

[57:19]

we breathe in, think about it, when we breathe in, we bring the whole universe alive. And when we breathe out, we die with the whole universe. It just goes away. We let it all go. And actually, this is really the truth. It's literally so. That in each inhalation and exhalation, we wake up our life, and we let go of our life. And this is going on all the time, 24 hours a day. And if you can have the experience just for a minute, never mind a minute, 20 seconds or 10 seconds, in your zazen practice, of unimpededly and without hindrance, just breathing in and breathing out freely with that sense of life coming and going in you, your life will be changed forever. Just with 10 or maybe 20 seconds, that kind of breathing in and breathing out,

[58:22]

letting everything else go, and just being all of life, and being all of death at that time in an unhindered rhythm. Both the entire earth and the entire sky appear in birth as well as in death. However, it is not that one and the same entire earth and sky are fully manifested in birth, and also fully manifested in death. Although not one, although they're not one, not the same, they're also not different. And although they're not different, they're also not the same. Although not the same, not one, they're also not many. So again, all our conceptions, you know, the effect of our conceptual way of approaching our life is basically to reduce, limit, and make everything pale. This is what we do.

[59:23]

We make a very small world that's very confined and then is nipping at our heels like a dog trying to bite us. This is the world we live in because we've created it. Here, he's saying, all those categories of conceptualization that shrink our life and our world and end up eating us up alive, literally, are simply not the way our life is. See that. And when your mind makes conceptualizations, don't be so serious about it. Recognize them as conceptualizations and let them go. Similarly, in birth there is undivided activity of all things, and in death there is undivided activity of all things. There is undivided activity in what is not birth and not death. There is birth and there is death in undivided activity. This being so, the undivided activity of birth and death is like

[60:24]

a young man or woman bending and stretching the arm like that. In other words, very natural action. Or like someone asleep searching with his hand behind his back for the pillow. This is realization in vast, wondrous light. So this profound undivided activity that he's speaking about is the most natural thing in the world. And, uh, I had many thoughts about this arm, which is often used, the image of the arm, and of course we know the koan about reaching back for your pillow in the dark as being an image that suggests an image of compassion, the bodhisattva of compassion. And this is the idea that undivided activity is the pattern, the working through of existence.

[61:26]

Existence is activity, right? Natural unfolding, moment after moment after moment, just like stretching out an arm. And an arm stretching out is like, you know, we say, reach out to someone. You know, we talk like that. Reach out to someone. And I've always been fascinated in the Bible. It says at the time of the Exodus, the most mysterious thing that I ever heard of in the Bible. There's a lot of mysterious things in the Bible. Somebody ought to read that thing sometime. Like me, I should read that. I never read it really. But there's one part in there that says when God frees the Israelites, it says, he freed them with an outstretched arm. It's interesting, like he reached out. Why did they use that? And it made me think of this. That's how... So this is what all activity in this world is, is an outstretched arm. It's a beautiful thought, don't you think?

[62:27]

Are you getting what I'm saying? I'm not too articulate tonight. I'm still on the airplane, flying over. I was in Miami this morning. Oh my gosh. It was nice in Miami. Nice and warm. Very pleasant. So all of... So we've had all this philosophical discussion about undivided activity. Now, the other side is it's activity. It's activity, and activity is always a reaching out. It's always a connection. It's always warm. All activity. There isn't special activity that's compassionate activity. It's one of Dogen's main ideas. There isn't... Compassion isn't something special that we do. Like, you know, give somebody money when they need it or something like that. Of course we do those things. We should certainly do that.

[63:29]

But it's not like that's compassion. And standing up or stretching your arm is not compassion. Or painting the walls is compassion. Or anything that you do. Eating a meal and so forth. Everything that you do. That's the whole basis, really, of our practice, right? Bow to your cushion. I don't know if they explain to you bow to your cushion. But if you bow to your cushion, the feeling is that when you bow to your cushion, you know, before you sit down for Zazen, you're bowing to the whole universe. And you're bowing to the universe as like stretching out your arm toward the universe. Hi. It's so good to see you, you know. And then the universe stretches out its arm to you, and you hold hands with the universe, bowing to your cushion. So that kind of thing. So everything's like that. You know, when you wipe the meal board, you know, when you clean the Zabatons in the Zendo, you clean a Zabaton. You're not really cleaning a Zabaton.

[64:31]

I mean, you are, but also you're eliminating defilements from the entire universe. If you can just get that one Zabaton clean during the Soji, this means that you've purified a Buddha land and a whole world. That's the feeling. See what I mean? That's the idea. That's why we do that stuff in that way. So all activity is this kind of thing, of reaching out an arm and being reached out toward. It's kind of a beautiful thing to think about this more, but I think it's really good. This is realization in vast, wondrous light. And then, this is a paragraph where Dogen does this quite often. He... I think that it's hard to appreciate this in English language. I don't really know Chinese, Japanese, but I have a sort of intuitive sense that because of the way the language works, it's more like spatially oriented. So you have a bunch

[65:34]

of characters, you know, and at a certain point, especially when you're writing about such an abstruse and impossible to speak about thing, as Dogen is writing here, and especially when what you're trying to say is, don't conceptualize reality. Don't be... Words are conceptions. So then you might say, well, let's take this character over here and just stick it over there. Take this one and put it over there, and then put this one over here. And he does that sometimes. And so you get paragraphs like this, where he's actually transposing all the characters spatially on the page, and coming up with a kind of, a little bit like gobbledygook. But you can see in this passage, I don't want to go through it, but basically that's what he's doing. And he does this. It's kind of a technique. It's a literary technique of Dogen's. Kind of like Finnegan's Wake type of thing, you know, that he does once in a while. Which paragraph are you talking about? The one that begins similarly in breath. Yeah. I think that's what you mean.

[66:34]

Yeah. And then he finishes. About just such a moment, you may suppose, that because Realization is manifested in undivided activity, there was no Realization prior to this. You might think that, you know, when you season yourself in Zen practice, and you... This is the thing. I remember one of the things that impressed me most, early on in my practice, I was reading this something or someplace. And I remember... I'll never forget this. Somebody was writing. They were... This person went to Japan. And they visited some Zen teacher. And they said that they didn't know him. Just he invited tea or something. And the Zen teacher, they said, greeted them and was with them as if they were the best friend and the most precious person to this Zen teacher. That's how they felt.

[67:37]

They didn't even know the guy, you know. But they said, ah, I feel like I'm the most precious person. And then they said goodbye. And this is the part that I remember. Then the Zen teacher turned around and walked away. You know, goodbye, right? Turned around and walked away. And then the person who wrote this said, and I felt as if when he walked away, he had utterly and completely forgotten the whole thing. That there was some kind of like... In other words, he was completely then, at that time, into the walking away. And what had just happened didn't exist anymore at all. So, in other words, undivided activity. When he was with me, I felt his undivided love and attention. When he was gone, I felt that he was now doing the next thing in an undivided way. I could feel it in the way he walked away. Isn't that a nice way to live, you know? But also, you should send a card, too. How are you? So we think.

[68:43]

So after we become like that Zen master, and we're living in that way, you know, this whole sense of the profound sense of every moment of our lives. After we become like that, we might think, well, before I got all this good Zen stuff, before that, I wasn't practicing undivided activity. But now, wow, my activity is really undivided. Don't you think? That doesn't sound right. Because it's not really true. The undivided activity, that would be a kind of conceptualization of undivided activity. That would be like, oh, look at my nice undivided activity. Well, there isn't any such thing as undivided activity that wasn't there in the beginning, and always there, everywhere, all the time. You might think that it didn't exist prior, but it was there all the time. However, prior to this realization, undivided activity was already manifested. But the undivided activity manifested previously does not hinder

[69:44]

the present realization of undivided activity. Because of this, your understanding can be manifested moment after moment. In other words, moment after moment, you don't know anything you're doing. You don't know what you're doing. Experience, you know, is a terrible thing. Because, oh, it happened that way yesterday, so today maybe it'll be the same way. So I'm planning on that. Which is how we live, right? Oh, you were my wife yesterday. You must be the same wife. But not so, you know. Not at all. So, every moment is a surprise. Every moment is fresh. Every moment is undivided activity, completely unknown previously, even though it was already there all along. So, anyway, this is just an impressionistic little discussion of this fascicle. But, think about it. Think about making

[70:46]

your activity undivided activity. And the beautiful thing about our life here is that relatively speaking, it's pretty simple. Of course, undivided activity can be manifested in the most complicated situations. It doesn't have to be a simple situation. But it's just easier to appreciate it and to train in it when things are simple. So those of you who have the opportunity in this short time to be in the practice period or to be in residence at Green Gulch, otherwise, please think about making all of your activity from the time that you wake up in the morning and find the earth again with your body to the time that you go to sleep at night and let go of everything. Each moment, try to appreciate how undivided activity is really right there all the time. All you have to do is open yourself to it. This is the way to live.

[71:47]

That way, there's never anything to worry about. There really isn't. And everything that happens, absolutely everything that happens, opens up the opportunity for undivided activity and a profound sense of happiness and gratitude. So, please, good luck with that. So, excuse me, I went on too long, but we do have a few minutes if anybody has any comments or questions. Yes? I still remember from back in the beginning and when you were talking about the enormity of the impact that our actions can have if we think about it that way, it seemed to me that that could be a little intimidating to think about in one way, and, you know, I mean, it could... Could make you uptight or something, right? You might just want to put it out of your mind, you know,

[72:49]

because if you had to think about the effect that you were constantly, the effect that you were having in the world or even in your immediate surroundings, then, you know, that might, you know, you might feel as if that would have to change the way that you were doing things, you know, or anyways. All kinds of ramifications. Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up, because, yeah, if you think about this like that, then it could be like a, you could say, well, I was going along fine before, then I went to this class, this guy got up and said this thing, now I'm totally paralyzed. I can't do anything. I can't even, like, I can't get out of bed anymore. I don't know what to have for breakfast, because, my God, the whole world might fall apart because I ordered the wrong thing in the restaurant. So that's very logical, you know, makes sense what you say. So, yes. So undivided activity is not the concept of undivided activity that we may have. A concept of undivided activity like that, that we may have,

[73:50]

could certainly be very inhibiting and put a lot of pressure. Like, oh boy, you know, I had certain things that I felt pressured about. Now I feel pressured about everything. I'm going crazy. No, it's a way of being. It's not a way of conceptualizing. It's a way of being. It has to do with just the opposite of conceptualizing the idea of undivided activity. It has to do with the offering up moment after moment of our conceptualizing mind and not being, not letting it be where we situate ourselves in our lives. I guess the way I try to think about it is and for me this kind of makes sense sort of like in a body way. I don't know if it communicates anything to other people, but the way I think about it is it's like you drop below your usual way

[74:52]

of moving through the world, which is really up here somewhere. You drop below it. You just go, and you plunk yourself down in the middle of your life. And then the fact that the entire universe is depending on your every gesture is not something that makes you worried because it isn't that kind of thing. It isn't like that. It's free and easy, just like stretching out an arm. Just something very natural. But I'm glad you brought that up because it could easily seem like added pressure and added difficulty. But the beauty of it is that with undivided activity there never can be any pressure. Everything is always working together. You're always connected. You're always being guided. So that's true, but is it just a matter of

[75:53]

certain people realize it, that you're always undivided? Is it just a matter of realizing or seeing the undivided self or activity? As opposed to what? As opposed to some people not... Everyone's always doing undivided activity. There can't be people who do and people who don't. So it seems like it would be just a matter of whether or not you realize it. Yes, but what do you mean by realize? That makes it sound like now I'm self-conscious about it. It's not a matter of being self-conscious about it. It's a matter of realizing it literally, making it real. So this is what practice is about, right? Practice is about the daily effort over time of training ourselves to make our lives real. But that isn't necessarily a kind of self-consciousness or a knowledge or something. In fact, quite the opposite. I think that a person who is doing undivided activity doesn't see that they're

[76:54]

doing undivided activity. They don't say, like I was saying before, look, I'm doing undivided activity. Isn't that really good? I'm doing more undivided activity today than I was a week ago. In fact, I have a huge undivided activity chart in my room. I can see it's going up. There are some downs, but it's not like that. It is realization, but not realization in the sense of self-consciousness. Realization in the sense of just like making it real for yourself. Anyway, it's interesting. People think that when people get older, they look worse. Like I was just with relatives, a lot of relatives. It was kind of funny. My son and I, when I visited these different relatives and friends, we were in a room, a small room with a group of people, and they were all over 85. You would think that they would look worse. In a way, I mean, externally, they look worse than they did before. Actually, they don't look worse because

[77:56]

the way that they look is the result of their entire lives, right there. You know, 85 years of living is right there, and that's a profound thing. So, over time, we make our lives real. And it's not a question of being self-conscious of that. It's a question of doing it. So practice is going in that way, going along that path of making your life real in that way. And you always are, though. And you always are anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a conventional reality in which the President's actions are more important than our actions? Of course there is. You don't read about me in the newspaper. Besides, I never had an aide like that. Yeah, no, of course. And we recognize that as something real in its way. But you could, if this is your whole... I mean, imagine... To me, I can't imagine a worse fate

[78:58]

than to sort of believe what you read in the newspapers as if that was what was important. Think about how awful that would be. That's my life. I only follow what I read in the papers, and that's my life. No, that's not your life. So then, the idea of democracy comes from this... not from the conventional level, really, although it involves elements of that in its application. Well, in a way, this... what Dogen is saying here is democracy ends degree, right? It's really democracy. What we have as a system, a political system, has many problems, I think. But on a profound level, there is true democracy, which is the real worth of every individual and the dignity of every person in the possibility of their recognition of who they are.

[79:59]

But, yeah, there's a whole... Certainly, in practice, we don't say that we don't deny conventional reality, nor do we have a hierarchy of realities in which we say that the reality Dogen speaks of here is higher than conventional reality. No, we recognize multiple realities as all equally real. But we know that there are multiple realities. We don't limit ourselves to a conventional reality. Where does planning come into undivided activity? People always ask about that, you know. Planning. What about planning? Well, you just do the undivided activity of planning. Even though it's not in the present moment? Well, it is in the present moment. Of course it is. When else do you plan?

[81:02]

When you're conceptualizing, you're into the future. Well, you might think so, but actually you're into the present. You're presently now writing down things and thinking things and so on into the present. I mean, I know about this because that's all I do. I spend all my days I have my calendar on my computer because there's so many things shifting and changing and so forth that I have to have it on the computer because I'd be constantly erasing and throwing. For many years I hated it, actually. I really don't like planning, but now I've sort of released myself to my fate and all I do really, I never do anything. I only plan. But I accept planning as a present activity. So I sit there on the computer and I'm planning away. Who knows if any of these things will actually happen or not. And who cares? You have to plan.

[82:07]

That's my job, of planning the calendar and scheduling and what time does the airplane arrive and all this. You see, this is the thing. If you think of it as planning for the future it does drive you a little bit nuts. But if you think of it as right now, this is what I'm doing it's fine. It's really not that different from anything else. I mean, I'm typing characters in the typewriter on the computer, right? It just happens to be dates and things. It could be something else. So that's planning. Like I say, you don't think of it as the future, you just think now, here I am, I'm breathing, I'm alive. This is what I'm thinking right now. And then if a so-called future moment would arrive and you would actually get on the airplane, then that would be the present. And you would do that. It's a sense of a soft mind and a flexible mind.

[83:08]

A mind that's not worried. A mind that doesn't think that there's a past, a present, a future. So, planning is no problem. Like I say, that's my favorite thing. So what software do you use for it? Palm Pilot. It has some problems, but it works fairly well. Unless you work with other people. Like if you're in a work group and everybody wants to be able to see the calendar at the same time and add to it and subtract from it, which to me seems like the worst nightmare I can imagine. But then you can't use the Palm Pilot because it only works individually. But that's what I use. You can choose whatever color background you want. Maybe the next generation will have an AV jack that you can plug into. AV projected on the wall. Oh yeah, that'd be good perhaps.

[84:10]

We can talk to the people. It's a good stock to buy. Palm Pilot? Oh yes, it's very popular. Earlier you talked about something and you said you were too excited about it. It was one of the metaphors for undivided activity and that surprised me because I was thinking how could you be too excited about undivided activity? To be in undivided activity. Well, if you were really in undivided activity you wouldn't be excited, right? If I get excited then I want to calm myself down a little bit. A little excitement is good. Otherwise you'd be dead, I suppose. But I think that one doesn't want to get entirely carried away because then attachment and confusion take over. The undivided activity chart.

[85:10]

Yeah, right. Undivided activity is not excitableness. It's just being there completely, like that Zen master. You know? But I find that it is interesting that the fact that we do have this word, people say, this very positive word, oh, I'm so excited about that. Actually, excitement is a little uncomfortable. But nowadays because everybody is so juiced up and everybody has to be juiced up in order to make more money and everything so that we should get ahead and so forth. Everybody should be excited. It's very exciting. Everybody is very excited all the time. But I think it's a little nuts and we'll get over it eventually. But in the meantime... Now, it's five after nine and we do have to end, right? So, I'm sorry. Next time we'll have more chance for discussion.

[86:12]

But I was kind of like excited about the idea of getting through this. Through this fascicle. Now, do we have the custom now in the practice period going to the Zen Dojo to bow out at the end of the day? Oh, I see. Some of them are in the Zen Dojo doing it at a certain time. I see. I see.

[86:42]

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