I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good evening. I was looking at this book when it came out, To Shine One Corner. I don't quite understand the title, To Shine One Corner, but it's a collection of stories about Suzuki Roshi, the founder of Tassajara, among other things, by his students.

[01:02]

And one of the stories really touched me, and I wanted to say a few words about that tonight. It goes like this. I went up to Suzuki Roshi's room not long before his death. He was in bed, extremely weak, his skin discolored. He bowed, and I did the same. Then he looked right at me and said, not with a loud voice, but firmly, don't grieve for me, don't worry, I know who I am. Isn't that terrific? The presence of mind to be able to say something like that while you're also dying of cancer?

[02:06]

Astounding. Well, the other part of that story is that I think no self-respecting Buddhist would ever say such a thing. Whenever we talk about self, there's always a be careful, be careful. And the self I'm speaking of is the one that in the West, we use the Latin word ego, meaning I, for me, and probably for you too. In the West, in the East, the Buddha, as he always did, cut right to the chase, and he called the self the no self. The no self. He didn't mince his words. And that's what I want to say a few things about. So, Suzuki Roshi ended his life by saying, I know who I am.

[03:11]

And that reminded me of a Hindu anecdote, an aphorism or something, one of those words, but it goes like this. The child in the womb sings, do not let me forget who I am. But the song after birth becomes, oh, I have forgotten already. So there's something about the self which is elusive. And it seems as though we pop out of the womb knowing exactly who we are and how we're connected to everything. But shortly after, we forget. And I think most of us have come here to find, to remember, to remember. Apparently, Suzuki Roshi remembered. He remembered so much that for him, in the midst of his pain, there was no suffering.

[04:20]

In the midst of his grief, there was no grief. In the midst of his worry, there was no worry. In the midst of chaos, there was only peace. In the midst of dying, there was fullness of life. So how did he remember? How did he not just forget again? I think it was because he had an ongoing spiritual practice. That seems to help. And a practice that's been tried and true for at least 2,500 years. It's, in fact, the same one that we do here. And apparently, the biggest thing that this practice gave him was the ability not to be fooled by his own mind. And he was free of his own mind. So why is it that we forget who we really are?

[05:24]

I think it's because we are looking in the wrong place for it. What we call the self, or what I call I, isn't really a thing, apparently, but only a mental fabrication. That could be good news and bad news. But the good news of it is that we can be free from the thing that gives us the most suffering, that gives us the most mental noise all the time. I think we probably all are aware of that part of the small mind that keeps chattering, [...] and almost it seems as though will never stop. It's the mind that wants to be anywhere but here. It's the mind that comes to practice willing to do anything except upset my own apple cart. The Buddha, when he awakened and saw his true nature

[06:31]

and saw the end of suffering itself, he said, Now I have seen you, architect. This is the mind that builds the self. I have seen you, architect. You shall not build the house again. Your rafters have been broken down and your rich pole has been shattered. That's in the Dhammapada, one of the more gentler sutras. He saw the fabrication of himself by his own mind and once he saw it, he was freed from it. He also went on to say later, or at least was said to have said, in the Diamond Sutra, that we fall into trouble. We fall into that big hole of forgetting who we are whenever we seize upon anything that we call a self or a soul or a being or a person. So there's something about putting ourselves in a little, tiny, well-packed, probably well-decorated box

[07:32]

that seems to give us the most suffering. I'm not sure where, and I can't imagine why, but I was reading something that mentioned David Hume, who's an English, well was, he's dead now, an 18th century English philosopher who, during what we in the West call the Enlightenment, but actually I think a little light shone when he said what he did. He said, The self is nothing but a bundle of collections of different perceptions, including thoughts, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux. That's complicated language. Let me say it again. The self is nothing but a bundle of collections of different perceptions,

[08:33]

including thoughts, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux. In other words, there's nothing solid there. There's nothing we can really grab onto or hold onto or need to defend for all that. In other words, in my mind, he was saying that what we call the self is actually a movie. I like movies very much, and when I was out not too long ago, I saw the new Star Wars, but I'm not going to talk about that, which will surprise, I know, some people, other than to say that, wow, it was almost too much stuff coming at me all the time. But anyway, so a movie, you can forget yourself, you can lose yourself, you forget who you are, because what we're actually looking at is,

[09:33]

isn't it 24 frames per second? Something like that. In other words, it's not real, but when we're watching it, it sure does seem real, if we forget who we are. It's also like, is the word pointillist? It's a method of painting. Pointillist, yes. I was in World Traveller that I am. In the 70s, I was in Paris, and in a building in the Louvre, the Jeu de Palme, where the Impressionist paintings were kept then, they've moved since then. And I never liked Impressionism, I thought it was messy. I thought Vermeer was the better painter, because he made everything look like a photograph. And so I was walking through this place,

[10:38]

and saw, walking suspiciously through this place, and saw over there in the corner, Monet's Japanese bridge over a lily pond. I'm sure you've all known it, or know of it, maybe even seen it. And I looked at it from a distance, and I fell into it. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. I stood there a long, long time, and it was more than a photograph. It had a feeling, a deep feeling. I was shocked. So I went to look closer at this thing, and of course it went out of focus. It was blurry and splotches. And I think that's like ourselves too. Like the Pointillists, for example, what I was going to say. I think this was Chicago, where they had this big, big picture

[11:40]

of women with an umbrella standing by a, was it a lake? Do you know the one? Well, I came upon it turning around a corner, and there it was, and oh, what the hell is this? It was a bunch of dots. Just a bunch of dots. I was this far from it. And oh, dear, this must be modern art. But then, thankfully, I moved away from it, and the same thing happened. This was beautiful. This said much more than a movie, much more than a photograph. But up close, it was actually a collection of many, many, many, probably thousands of dots. Much like what the Buddha and David Hume call the self, just a collection of things. For, in terms of our ego, our self, it's a collection of memories and a collection of habits.

[12:42]

This small mind that creates the self, it collects things, mainly geared towards survival, so that we remember not to put our hand on the hot stove, or we remember not to go near people like that. That sort of thing. It's the fountain of prejudice and preconception, based, of course, on fear and craving. Fear that we might be killed and craving for what we think we don't have or what we need. Just that thing that will make us whole. I had an experience of that this morning. One of the people who is a resident here is staying at Jamesburg. That's the big town you saw just before

[13:45]

the road in here, the dirt road. She was a teacher of philosophy. Whenever I need to know anything, I would always ask Mako. I called up and said, there's only one thing I need to know in my whole life. What are the dates of David Hume? She told me. Then I hung up and went to my room and came back and thought, oh no, oh no, Descartes. I need to know when Descartes was. So I went back and said, well, that wasn't the only thing that I needed in my whole life. I need to know when Descartes is. Then, why is he the father of dualism? Why was that? I forgot. At any rate, we often need more to survive than just one thing. We need many, many things sometimes, it seems. You know that part of the self,

[14:50]

it comes from the past and lives in the past. Prejudice and any conditioning always comes from the past. We learn from the past, so to speak. But also, we get the impression of who we are from the past. Like if a teacher says, you know, you're really stupid. That can last a lifetime. Or, you know, you're my favorite. Norman Fisher, who was a former abbot of Zen Center, he said in a talk once that when his two boys, twins, were young, he would go at night before they went to sleep and he would whisper in each of their ears, you know, you're my favorite. Oh, how marvelous. Well, my mother, I remember, actually I don't know how old I was,

[15:52]

but I was young enough, and she said, you know, you've got your father's bony knees and my nose and my teeth. Which pretty much kiboshed any career I wanted in surfing or modeling. Again, again, pure fabrication. Pure fabrication. My knees are fine. And my teeth I had fixed. And the nose, I don't care. As long as it's in the front. So at any rate, we get this impression of who we are from the past, and where it looks to fulfillment is in the future. You probably know this, that I intend to go after that new job soon. In the future, I will. I'll do it, I'll do it. Or I am going to start practicing

[16:54]

with this later. We look towards our fulfillment in the future, which does hold some promise of fulfillment, but it's a double-edged sword, the future, because it also holds death. We may win, but we'll also lose. And then there's the added thing that there is no past, and there is no future. The past is quite gone, and the future is not there yet. So this is not much to base an idea of who you are on. So where do we find who we are? Well, there's only one place, and it's not what we think. It happens to be in the present moment. I wish it were more interesting than that, but it isn't.

[17:55]

I think the one place we really, really don't like to be most of the time is now, is in the present. And why should we? It has no past, and it has no future, because they don't exist. But I want to back up a bit and talk about this mind that creates who we think we are. It's been called the discriminating mind. It's a very handy tool. It means that when a Benji truck is coming towards you, you'll recognize Benji truck, me, and you move out of the way. It seeks difference. It craves difference. It also hates difference. It is the function that gives us the ideas of right and wrong, up and down, frontward and backward,

[18:56]

them and us, you and me. You know, it separates. It finds, it seeks, it craves difference. Vicki Austin was here and gave a talk here not too long ago, and she was commenting how the guests perceive Tassajara. And pretty much across the board, people said, she asked them, and they said peaceful, calm, restful, spiritual, quiet. And then she asked some of us what our perceptions were of Tassajara. Which were not so peaceful, lots of work, incredibly noisy,

[19:58]

exhausting, and, oh, there was one guest who happened to have been a friend of mine from New York, Manhattan, who came here and stayed on the creek in one of the pine rooms, and the next day I saw him and he said, how do you people sleep here? Trying to sleep next to a constantly flushing toilet, which was how he heard the creek. So, but there's only one Tassajara, but many, many different perceptions of it. Which ones are right? Maybe all, maybe all of them. So, so perception, the way we see things and smell things and hear things, sometimes isn't so reliable. Especially when we make a self out of them. Sometimes, so, our discriminating mind creates and craves difference.

[21:02]

And sometimes that can be really nice. It's like a symphony orchestra. Harmony doesn't mean that everything's on the same pitch. It means that there are different notes coming together and making beauty, or what we judge as beauty. And a symphony doesn't have just one instrument, it has many, well, of course you probably know this, many instruments that don't sound alike at all, but that create exquisite beauty. So our differentiating mind and difference can be very, very positive. It can also be very negative too. That's the other side of the craving, the hating difference. And for us, here, it can show itself through what some people call mistakes. If you're the boss, and somebody makes a mistake,

[22:04]

you can actually get angry at them. But why? Because they did something different than how you thought it should be. Is that fair? Not natural, but maybe not fair. So, difference, of course, the other word for difference is diversity. We talk a lot about diversity at Zen Center, and it's just a long word for different. Just different. So we need it for symphonies, and for cooperation and harmony, and it's also dangerous, because it frightens us. Did you ever try to talk to somebody who couldn't understand you? Oh, let's see. I have a big problem trying to talk to somebody I can't understand, or they can't understand me. It happens like in Japan, actually. I noticed it the most.

[23:07]

I would be talking to this marvelous person, Suzuki Roshi's son, and wanting to share marvelous things with him, and it just wasn't coming through. He was smiling and saying, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. But it was really, no, no, no, no. Don't understand. I found it very difficult, and almost threatening. Dogen Zenji, who is the founder of the school that we are in, the school is Zen Buddhism, put it rather clearly. He said, supreme, perfect enlightenment is bowing to someone and not thinking whether you like them or not. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be nice, to be that free? To be able to just be open, sort of an empty mind and an open heart. That supreme, perfect enlightenment

[24:10]

is somehow when you're free of that discrimination, whether you like them or not. So, back to what Suzuki Roshi said. I know who I am. It comes from the present moment only. And I would guess that he had practiced being in the present moment enough with Zazen, which is meditation practice, that he was able to say that he knew who he was. And it wasn't what he thought. It was much bigger. Much more, much greater. I think the I am that he spoke of was not self-consciousness at all. Do you ever notice that when you're doing something well, you're just doing it completely and fully, and then, all of a sudden, you see yourself doing it and you might say, whoa, I am very good. And that's the point when you drop the book

[25:12]

or you trip over the bowing mat or the top of the cayenne pepper falls off into the soup. So, it's not self-conscious. It's fully alive and vibrant. I wonder if there are any of you who do dangerous sports. I say that because I wouldn't think of doing such a thing. Like rock climbing, for example. I understand you have to be pretty much on your toes, at least on your fingers, too. And you cannot stop for a minute. You have to be completely present at all times or else you're dead. That there is no room for, how am I doing? There's no room for, oh no, did I turn off the stove? There's none of that. You have to be completely, totally present. I have an example and it involves a stick.

[26:18]

This is a stick. You'll notice I have nothing up my sleeve. It's a stick. Sorry to trigger the startle response, but I bet that was a present moment. It was for me. So, anything that brings our attention into the present moment, away from ourselves, who we think we are, to what's actually happening. Here, we do it in a rather calm way. More difficult, I think. We sit and face the wall, as most of you know, and we continually, one moment after the next, try to be present to what's actually happening.

[27:24]

And when we find that we can't stand that and we go somewhere else, then we come right back to our body and our breath, which, after all, is just about all there is in the present moment. So, whenever we notice that this little mind starts trying to entertain itself, we just stop it. We don't really need to exercise that part of us too much, because it's pretty well developed in most of us. But the rest of the mind, big mind, well, let's see. So, little mind is about this size, like an ice cube, and the rest of the mind is everything else. So, that's the one we lose sight of, because that's who we really are. The other property of who I am is complete acceptance. Complete acceptance. No matter what happens, no matter what comes through our head,

[28:26]

no matter what we hear, no matter what we smell, while we're sitting, we accept it all. We try to. Rejecting nothing. My teacher is, by nature, very accepting. Quite beyond me, most of the time. But she has room for everything and everyone. I mean, she has her moments of not that, too. But most of the time, she accepts everything and is open and welcome to everything. And I asked her, how do you do that? How do you be so accepting and inclusive? How are you so inclusive? And she said, oh, but you just don't reject anything. Yeah, I was startled, too.

[29:28]

And of course, that acceptance and that allowing to be what actually is is another way of saying compassion. That's what compassion is. It's allowing to be what is. If you can imagine such a ridiculous thing. We actually think that by not allowing something, we make it cease to exist. In our arrogance. In the arrogance of the little mind. So we sit there, allowing to be whatever arises. And in doing that, the whole business is transformed. The way we see ourselves, the way we see each other, the way we see the wall, the way we taste the food. Everything is opened up. The other thing, briefly, about the present moment is that there are no problems in the present moment.

[30:32]

I think you probably have to see this for yourself, but like right now, for example, if you're just looking at me, and with your eyes open, and you're also aware of your breathing, there's nothing wrong. There's nothing wrong. There's no future. There's nothing that has to be fixed. There's really no past. Nothing to worry about. Or nothing to feel bad about. Or guilty about. There's only right now. Right now is clean. It's clear. Pristine. And beneath that clarity, as one of our teachers has said, is a river of joy. A river of joy. So the idea is that by living in the present moment, you begin to tap that joy. The joy of just being alive. So, Suzuki Roshi said, don't grieve for me, and don't worry. I know who I am.

[31:39]

I hope each one of us one day will be able to say the same. Thank you very much. Thank you.

[31:50]

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