Good morning. Is this on? Is this on? I have a desk job with a handsless headset for the phone, and I always have it on this ear, so I was hoping to put myself in familiar territory. That's okay. As long as this works. Okay. Anyway, let me know. I was just talking to the Eno about this stick, the kosu, teaching stick, traditional in our school. Suzuki Roshi, who founded this temple, I think used to hit people with it sometimes. It's a strong tradition. And also, I wanted to bring, I mentioned to Kodo, the Eno, that our former abbot, Steve Stuckey, used to do this when he gave Dharma talks. And I think of that, I was like, I wonder if they're going to give me a stick today, and then I can do this.

[01:06]

I wanted to bring him into the room for two reasons. One, because he died on New Year's Eve six years ago, on December 31st, 2013. And I miss him a lot. And also because I think he... Well, there are many great teachers that exemplify the wisdom of ordinary mind is the way, but I think he was definitely... one of the greats in that regard. And that's what I want to talk about. There's these things called koans. Maybe you all understand Zen better than I do. I don't know. So there's multiple schools of Zen. Rinzai is one of them. That's the one that has a real koan curriculum. And you are meant to be given a koan, and then you... work on it with a master and you can pass or fail. And these are these, koans are these stories with very oblique wisdom. So an oblique articulation.

[02:10]

I don't know if there's a word for something that you can only see in your peripheral vision and when you look right at it, it vanishes. That's kind of the wisdom of our practice. And so koans try and meet it in that way. And so does working on them with a teacher. We don't work on them with a teacher in our school of Zen. but koans are still extremely important. And the founder of Soto Zen, our school of Zen in Japan, had a book of 300 koans from the Chinese tradition that he kept. And if you read his major book, which is a book of 95 essays, that's maybe the most important text in our tradition, you can almost read, each one is almost... a commentary on a koan. Each one brings up a koan in full. And so you can tell he was actually extremely moved by these stories and thought they were worth considering, just in a different way than the other schools of Zen might have.

[03:11]

So I want to bring up the koan. Each koan has a punchline. There's a several-line story, but the punchline usually becomes the title, and it's in many ways, all you need. This one is called ordinary mind is the way. And so I don't know if anybody here thinks they are not experiencing ordinary mind. Great. So... What is it? To those who do not know, any explanation is impossible. And to those who know, any explanation is unnecessary. So... Thank you for coming. And good morning. Happy New Year. The donation basket's right outside. Ordinary mind is the way. I don't know what else I could say. But there's a whole story, I guess, that I can tell the story. Oh, the way I like to get into these koans is it's usually a student talking to a teacher.

[04:15]

Sometimes it's people on the same level of seniority talking to each other, but there's usually almost kind of Those can be kind of fun, but the ones where there's a wise person and an ignorant person, I like to really put myself in the shoes of the ignorant person. I think that's the point of them. And they really come alive for me when I do that. So I offer that to you. A student asked Nanshuang, what is the way? And Nanshuang said, ordinary mind is the way. And the student said... how can I get that? And Nanshuwan said, if you turn toward it, you turn away from it. Another way of saying it is, seeking it is the only way to lose it. Standard stuff. But the student persists and says, how will I know if I don't try?

[05:16]

And Nanshuwan says... It's not a matter of knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion. Knowing is deluding yourself. Not knowing is willful ignorance. When you truly attain the way, it is like great emptiness, vast and clear. How can that be an issue of affirmation or negation, or yes or no? or this or that, or this or not this, which is kind of how we all operate, right? So it's kind of interesting. Right off the bat, our ordinary mind, it's either this or not this. And he's saying, how could ordinary mind be an issue of this or not this? So there's some invitation to go beyond

[06:19]

the only thing that we cannot go beyond. And that is quite a challenge. I think so, but he did talk a lot. And it's funny, there's this guy, John Dido Laurie, he passed away a few years as well. He was an American Zen teacher. And he gave, he wrote commentaries on all these 300 koans. And it's a great book. And here's what he said about Nanshuang. So Nanshuang kept talking. You notice he kept talking. And it's like, ordinary mind is the way. That's really all you need to know. You could practice with that for the rest of your life. So here's what John Donnelly said about Nanshuang. Why is he being so kind? Let the student chase his tail for the rest of his life. What is he doing? He's trying to explain the Dharma. Where is all this leading? The old monk talks too much.

[07:20]

So with that encouragement, I'm going to give a half-hour talk. So a student asked Nanchuan, what is the way? Nanchuan said, ordinary mind is the way. Now I know some people might think that we should stick to Buddhism. on this seat, and we shouldn't talk about current events or social issues, but sometimes something happens that's too important to let go. So I'm going to talk about Star Wars, because it just came out, and it's an incredible cultural event. Okay, if you go back to 1977, this movie came out called Star Wars. It's still the second biggest movie of all time. Behind Gone with the Wind. And it actually changed the way people watch movies.

[08:26]

And they didn't realize that until 20 years later when they came out with a new batch of movies after 16 years of not making any. People didn't even know how important that they actually wanted the movie to not just be about the movie, but they wanted it to be about their experience watching the movie. Yeah. No one really understood that until these new movies came out in 1999 and 2002, and they were objectively mediocre, but people acted like they were the worst thing that had ever happened to anyone ever because their sense of self-meaning was tied up in what they were watching, and so they lost their minds, and no one was able to make a movie for 10 years after that. And then after that had settled and a multinational takeover happened, now they started making new movies. But with this knowledge that what you're watching is not just what's happening on the screen, you're watching kind of a mirror of your experience watching the movie.

[09:34]

And the first one was, to that extent, not at all unsatisfying. but also deeply uninteresting for that very reason. And the second one decided to actively challenge the audience and say, okay, here's what's happening in the movie, but you people, if you're all here to watch yourselves, Jedi masters aren't real. Superheroes do not exist. All we have are the relationships around us. that tie us together, and our ability to take care of each other is the only thing we can rely on. Alone, you are no one. Your parents are nobodies. And to think that one certain class of people has a special relationship to the wonders of reality is vanity and hubris.

[10:40]

And people lost their minds, extremely angry, violently angry, in such a way that the movie that just came out, I haven't seen it, I'm probably not going to, but the movie that just came out actively denies all of that stuff, all of those aspects of the second film. And the funny thing is people are still angry, but I didn't bring this up so I could talk about how people were angry when they... didn't get what they wanted and they were angry when they got what they wanted, although shout out to the first noble truth. I bring it up because people were presented with the truth and they demanded a fantasy. And that is breathtakingly human. I'm not even singling these people out. I think that's our everyone's story. our assumptions about the world are deeply disturbed by reality, and it's extremely human to not want to deal with that.

[11:52]

The main character of these movies is a woman named Rae. and she's an orphan, and there's a lot of orphans, and the assumption was that she would come from royalty or some majorly important family, right? But she's told that her parents were these drunks who just left her to fend for herself because they couldn't afford her and they weren't good parents. And here is what the director of that movie had to say about that because I really, let's see, appreciate it. If someone had told her, yes, Here's the answer. You are so-and-so's daughter. Here's your place in this world. Here you go. That would be the easiest thing she and the audience could hear. It would hand her, on a silver platter, her place in all this. The hardest thing for all of us to hear, and the thing that she doesn't want to hear, maybe we don't either, is that no, this is not going to be something that's going to define you.

[12:59]

And the fact that you don't have this... He didn't say this. I'm editorializing here. This refers not just to power and royal status, but also to a clearly defined identity and the ability to assert herself as that clearly defined identity. She loses that. And the fact that you don't have this... is going to be used against you by people who want to manipulate you and pull you into their orbit. This is going to be hard, and you're going to have to stand on your own two feet and define yourself in this life. How Zen? I really think that's basically where Zen begins. And... How human that it's so difficult. I think what you hear, ordinary mind is the way. And the first thing the student says is, how can I get that?

[14:01]

What can I change about myself to have ordinariness? It's so human that the most ordinary thing is to want to be extraordinary. And that's kind of the paradox that we have to deal with on this path. The constant disappointment of it that... The one thing we... I don't know if this is true, but I was going to say, the one thing we don't want to do is the one thing we have to do, but it's actually impossible to do, so I probably shouldn't have said anything. Shall I seek after it? If you seek... after it. That's the only way to lose it. Turn towards it and you turn away from it. So we're all experiencing this same weird reality.

[15:07]

Let's see, where am I? Sorry. Yeah, I think going after it, there's this weird sense... It's the way ignorance works. In this world, it's sort of like... It's very hard to talk about. The teaching is that you don't have a clearly defined identity. You don't have a self. And... There's this great line in one of our sutras called the Diamond Sutra, and the line is, perception of a self as no perception.

[16:09]

That's how the Buddhas understand it. And then they say over and over again, it's like a magic trick. It's like a mirage. And they say it over and over again. It must be really important. It must be the best way. These people came to offer some semblance of what it means to practice with this self that doesn't exist. And here's how I understand it. One time, my brother and I went to a magic show in Las Vegas, one of those big magic shows, and I swear we were in the third row. And this guy, the magician, brought a helicopter on stage, full-size helicopter, and then he made it disappear. He made a helicopter disappear!

[17:14]

We all knew it was gone, but we all knew it didn't really disappear. But he made the helicopter disappear. The perception of a self as no perception, this is how it should be understood. At no point did it seem like there was still a helicopter there. I wonder if people come to this religion and they think, oh, this no-self is something I have to get, or even this ordinary mind is something extraordinary that I have to get. And it's, no matter how many times they keep saying, it's nothing different than what you're experiencing, it's still, what you're experiencing is this need for it to be different than what's happening right now. I really think that's a crucial point. You know, but the Buddha, I... firmly believe the Buddha did not have an experience that I'm not having, that any of us are not having right now.

[18:25]

The Buddha experienced sense organs and a human consciousness and the world of cause and effect, both physical and moral. And that's all we're experiencing as well. I think the only difference is that, if there is one, is that he seemed to understand the way in which it wasn't happening, even though it never stopped to feel like it was happening. They also say it's like a mirage. Again, a mirage looks like a lake on the distance, and there's two ways to interact with that. One is what this tradition calls delusion throughout delusion. You see the water on the horizon and you think, great, it's such a hot day. I'm thirsty. I want to take a swim. It's going to be great once we get there. Another way is what we call great realization of delusion.

[19:30]

And that is when you still see the lake, but you understand it's a lake that cannot quench your thirst. It's a lake that you cannot cool down in. It's... but it still looks like a body of water. It's not like, oh, I have comprehended the molecular structure of these heat waves and the way the eye works. Like, who has ever done that? And I really think it's the way the student... And again, I'm confessing, right? Dharma talks are dispatches from the ideal self. I wanted to say that at the beginning, actually. These are dispatches from my ideal self. I am not my ideal self. My ideal self is the inclusion, I guess, of my limitations and my potential. So I still want to know... the molecular structure of the heat waves and how the eye works and why I'm being tricked and exactly what the reality of the situation is.

[20:37]

But this tradition over and over again, I believe, continues to keep saying that the way you're not getting it is your role in all of this, in the perfection of all of this that's happening. So... But I am the student. I am the student that says, how can I get that? And I also am the student that says, if I don't try, how will I know? And that's actually, I think, a deeply wise thing to ask, even though the student's in kind of the down position in this story. And so I'm going to tell you my path, which is one of mistakes. And I've never heard anyone say this. So I'm in a unique position of not knowing if I'm the only one who gets it or the only one who doesn't. But somebody asked me, they said, can you practice incorrectly?

[21:44]

Is there any way, you know, sort of to do something to just reinforce bad habits in meditation? And it can really seem that way, like for decades. because I have felt that way for decades. And what I found myself saying to him was, if you're sitting still, if you're actually sitting still and not, you know, it's not like watching a movie, but if you're sitting still and in a bare room, it's almost impossible to mistakenly do this. It just might take... decades to actually pay attention, to actually accidentally pay attention to what you're doing and what you're doing to yourself and how long you've been doing to yourself and why. And there's this image that's used. I was saying, you know, it's like you dig a well, you dig 10 feet and you give up because you haven't hit water, then you go over here and you dig 10 feet and you go over here.

[22:46]

You could dig 10 10-foot wells and not hit anything, but you dig 100-foot well and that's how you get the water. I feel like no matter what, if you're always digging, if you get to a point where you're going to strike water, like at this point, I've dug in the wrong spots for so many years. I'm now so good at digging that if I ever get to the right spot, I'm going to hit water everywhere I break ground. And that's ordinary mind is the way. That's what this tradition is saying. And... I think the practice of this tradition, again, I've never heard anyone else say this, so I could be totally wrong, but the practice of this tradition is not directed. It is just sitting. That's the name of it, just sitting, TM. It is just sitting. You don't do anything else. There's no further instruction. You want to be upright and still. And not distracted, but even if you're mentally distracting yourself, as long as you are physically still, my faith, well, you could do any practice.

[23:53]

You could do concentration practice, loving kindness practice. You can pray to contemplative prayer. You can do any practice. But I think Dogen Zenji, the founder of this tradition in Japan, he said, doing one practice is practicing completely. he also said, when you fully engage body and mind, you grasp things directly. So my feeling is that if you just completely commit to one practice until you so thoroughly understand that it's not going to work, then you're there. And I think the practice of this tradition, just sitting, is like the fastest path to uselessness. It's so obviously not going to work.

[24:55]

We chant Dogen's instructions for meditation called Fukanza Zengi, but we use a newer tradition that says Sanzen has nothing whatever to do with sitting or lying down. But the old tradition is amazing. It says, have no designs on becoming enlightened. How could that be contingent on sitting down? You've sat down your whole life. If it was going to happen, it would have happened already. I think that's such a beautiful way to phrase it. And so I've spent 16 years doing this practice, and I'm finally getting to that point, I think. And I would have gotten there sooner. But I kept abandoning it for practices that were less obviously useless. I kept really wanting something that would work. But I'm finally getting to this point where the uselessness of it is the point. Because then I'm thrown back on myself.

[25:56]

And like the director of this movie said, I have to define myself in this life every single moment. So... How will I know if I don't try? I think that's my sense of right effort. And Nan Chuan gives his short encouragement. It's not about knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion. So we've been there before, right, with the... the helicopter and the mirage. Thinking you understand is delusion. That's a really tough spot to be in. I've had recently, I've been coming to have these moments that are like the Diamond Sutra phrase that I quoted, the perception of a self as no perception.

[27:05]

The other night I was getting into bed, like in the warm, cozy covers, and it was like just a pleasant experience. That's all it was. There wasn't me, there was kind of me having the pleasant experience because sort of the limitations of my perceptual apparatus didn't explode. But I saw the way in which this pleasurable experience was a makeup of all these things that are not me. And how the combination of all the things that are not me, somehow the result of that thinks it's me. If that makes any sense. That's all the self is. The self is the way everything that's not you comes together in such a way that the bizarre result is that it thinks it's you.

[28:13]

And I keep having these experiences because it's sort of the Buddha... Let's see, I kind of wrote this down. I want to get it right because I don't want to slander anyone. Okay. The Buddha taught that we should examine pleasant experiences as impermanent and not self. Like getting into a nice warm bed that's not self because it's impermanent and made up of compound phenomena, the Buddha might say. But Dogen, I think that what's unique about this tradition is Dogen was very clear about what the experience of no self is. It's an experience of a self in such a way that no self is confirmed.

[29:17]

I don't think I have the ability to say it more clearly. Thanks, that's my note to myself. It is an experience of a self as this weird byproduct of everything that's not a self or not the self. And I think it's, I don't know, the fact that it's more confusing to me than this desirable attainment or this kind of attainment worth bragging about, that seems more real to me, actually. It just seems like something that's happening as a result of all these years of sitting still and paying attention to myself. So thinking you know is delusion.

[30:24]

Not knowing is willful ignorance, kind of willful ignorance, and I think of that as just kind of disengaging from the whole process, right? So you have to do the decades of useless practice, I'm sorry to say. You can't just say, well, all right then. Ordinary mind, that's me. I'm out. you actually have to do the decades of useless practice. And then he says, you know, so yeah, it's not about knowing and it's not about not knowing. How could, oh, that's what he says, the great way, I don't know if I wrote anything about this, the great way, when you attain the great way, let's see, if you truly arrive at the great way of no trying, It will be like great emptiness, vast and clear. How can this be a matter of yes and no?

[31:35]

Ten minutes early, but... I think I've said all I can say. I wish you all the best in the coming decade. And please take heart at experiencing yourself as you are, not as you would like to be, which is to experience yourself as somebody who's angry that they're not as they'd like to be. Thank you very much.

[32:30]

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