So this is a new kind of microphone that goes over the ear instead of attaching to your clothing. So if I scratch, you'll know. I thought it was okay. It's a little loud. A little loud. Yeah. So, last Saturday, Isho Fujita-sensei, a Japanese priest who is the current head of the education center for the Japanese shumucho in San Francisco, gave a very nice talk. And he talked about teaching from the top, or not just teaching, but I won't maybe call it a manipulation from the top down.

[01:19]

how we instruct people from the top down, and then how we allow our Buddha nature to arise from the bottom up. So he was emphasizing letting our Buddha nature arise from the bottom up instead of instructing from the top down, as I remember. And then at the end, I said, I asked him about, what about, why does one cancel out the other? Why is one preferable to the other? So, I want to continue with my question and my response to that question. Not all of you were here then, but it doesn't matter. So bottom up, you know, where's the bottom that comes up?

[02:29]

The bottom actually is bottomless. So that's why we talk about the bottom being, or the hara, so the hara is this place of intuition. Intuition means understanding or knowing without going through the process of thinking. Directly touching, in other words. So this is the seed of vitality. Thinking is a way of using that vitality for various purposes. So when thinking becomes too dominant, then it becomes repressive. So it covers intuition.

[03:29]

So when we let go of thinking, intuition, it takes the cover off. It takes the cover off of intuition. so that intuition can arise. So intuition is like a raw vitality. It's like fire. As a matter of fact, this is the seat of fire right here. And fire, in order to be effective, needs control. Suzuki Roshi used to talk about control. Our life is like a fire, like the stove, and you have this little control button that you turn the fire up and down, so we have this possibility of controlling the fire, and we should always be controlling the fire.

[04:35]

so that it cooks the rice just right. If the fire is too hot, the rice boils over, and if it's not enough, it doesn't get cooked. So how do we cook the rice so that it comes out just right? What is the balance between hot and cold? this place down here, the seat of heat needs to be controlled by cold. And the mind is able to have a cool environment, to create a cool environment. So we say, Nirvana is the cool place.

[05:41]

The cool mind is the mind of nirvana. Not the cold mind, but the cool mind. The mind which is continually adjusting the heat. so that the heat becomes effective and doesn't burn everything up. So intuition is wonderful. It's our true aspect, is the heat. When you go to the North Pole and it gets very cold, the first things that becomes affected by the cold are your extremities. And when it's really cold, all the heat goes to the solar plexus, to the hara, because that's the place where it needs the most vitality. So this is the most vital place.

[06:46]

We have the head. and the heart and the solar plexus. I call it the solar plexus, it means the sunspot, the place of heat. So, there's some reason why we have a head. Nature has evolved, you know, in order to create a place of control. some means of control for our intuition. Intuition includes everything. There's no bottom to intuition. But there is a limitation to thinking, even though we think there's no limitation to thinking. It's not like, you know, certain various societies have different processes.

[08:00]

America, individualism is our, you know, our thing, right? To promote our individual, we think of freedom as being able to do whatever we want. But in other countries, it's not. We call that repression. People learn to live under that, are brought up under certain limitations, and they know how to deal with that. So when someone from America is put into a country that has a lot of limitations, and this is controlled from the top down too much, we feel restricted. So when our teachers came from Japan, they brought us, they taught us how to practice through limitation.

[09:08]

If you want your intuition to be effective, there has to be some limitations. So the most effective limitation for the greatest freedom is Zazen. Zazen is called the place of great unlimited freedom. through the most restrictive limitation, sitting like a pretzel without moving. That's where you find your greatest freedom. But it's hard. So, we have to be able to go through the difficulty before we actually understand how it works. So I want to talk a little bit about history. Back in the 50s and 60s, there was interest in Zen, Z-E-N.

[10:19]

And so we had a kind of Zen At that time, there were three kinds of Zen. One was beat Zen, the other was square Zen, and the other was just Zen. Beat square, beat Zen, square Zen, and Zen. So Beat Zen was Jack Kerouac and the boys and girls who, you know, were kind of reaching out and searching for what they felt was Zen. And it was all about intuition.

[11:21]

There was no, it was not about discipline. It was just about intuition. So there was that side. And people liked that side because it speaks of freedom. And people were getting kind of choked in those days because our society was about security and money and all kinds of stuff that was choking the youth who were yearning for some kind of vitality. Their vitality was being restricted. So it was the beat generation, right? The beatniks. And then some teachers came from Asia. and introduced square Zen. Square Zen was monastic Zen, Zen that had been thoroughly vetted and developed and had the limitations that were able to bring forth

[12:41]

the intuition in a way that without limitation doesn't work. Without limitation, intuition doesn't work. It needs a limitation in order to understand itself. So it's like if you light a match outside, It doesn't add much to the daylight. But if you go into the closet and you light a match, it lights up the whole closet. So, that's limitation. Limitation is needed for the light to be understood and expressed. And Suzuki Roshi always talked about, without limitation, you think you have freedom. It's not the freedom to do whatever you want. means the freedom to express yourself completely within a limitation.

[13:46]

So, he characterized it as, if you chase the tail of a comet, people will pity you because it's like lighting a match outside. But if you want to be effective, you light up one corner of your world. Just to light up one corner of the world, your world, your surroundings, is to be effective. It's something that you can touch and work with. So that was square zen. with the Zen that we practice, the square Zen. And then there's Zen, whatever that is. It's neither square nor round nor beat.

[14:53]

In other words, just The problem with beats then is that there was no structure for it. And the problem with squares then is that it can easily be topped down and restrict your intuition. So how do you find the balance between beat and square between allowing your intuition to have its free expression within the limitation of parameters. So, that's zen. Zen zen. So we've developed a—over, I don't know how long it's been, 60 years since 19—how long it's been since 1960.

[16:09]

I can't count very well. But we've developed a kind, hopefully, a kind of practice that, because our practice is not restricted in some way, to find our way in ways that are an extension of our Asian roots, and finding how to deal with new paradigms that were never addressed in the East. Men and women practicing together, that's really a big, big change, and no precedent for that at all.

[17:19]

Absolutely very little precedent. Men and women are always separated in Asia. different styles from Asia. Our Japanese style is very structured and strict, and in Southeast Asia, it's very loose and open. So, the Zen from Japan is somewhat like ours. but much more strict, restricted and sculpted. From Southeast Asia, more like forest practice and monk practice. And this is the practice that the Vipassana people who went to

[18:25]

Southeast Asia to learn their Buddhism came back, and so their practice is much less structured than ours because of the influence of Southeast Asia, which is not very well structured. Not structured. So, these are different styles, and so we have all these different styles, Korean styles and Chinese style, and how this is kind of interplaying and interacting in America. And because all of these various styles have centered somewhat in the Bay Area, We have this interactive kind of Tibetan style, yes, amalgamation, so we can see what these styles have been in the past, and kind of like what some of the mistakes have been that have been carried over.

[19:34]

and what has been emphasized in the various practices. So it's very interesting. I read in this little article in the paper about Wynton Marsalis talking about jazz. There's a jazz, what would you call it, in New York, some music. No, no, it's a conservatory.

[20:36]

Yeah, conservatory-like. And they have a part of that, right? And he was saying that jazz has its bottom line, what it's about, and its ancestors and contributors. And there's this tendency to want to disperse it, so that it blends in with everything else and doesn't maintain its integrity as jazz, what the actual parameters are that make it what it is. And he fears losing that kind of integrity so that it just becomes a blended with everything else. And so, I have a similar feeling about what our practice is, that it doesn't get dispersed or watered down and blends with everything else.

[21:44]

But at the same time, it also has that quality. I remember Suzuki Ryoji saying that, he walked up to me one day and he said, You know, it's just Buddhism." And then Karagiri Roshi walked up to me and said, you know, it's just Buddhism. I think they were talking to each other, had been talking to each other, and said, you know, we shouldn't, we should be careful that our students don't think that Zen is something special. So, yes, it's nothing special, it's just Buddhism. But at the same time, it is something that has a special quality that I think is important. And to know what that quality is and what those limitations are is important to maintain.

[22:54]

You know, balance of qualities, everything has its opposite. This is what's hard for us when we are looking at what's important. We tend to easily fall into one side or another. If you feel a lot of repression from the top down, then at some point you discover The other side, which is, you know, our intuition is not letting us, giving us the freedom that we need. So then you start emphasizing that side and you forget about the other side. So the balance of factors is always the most important thing. Always the most important thing is the balancing of factors. Heat and cold. is that maybe it's too cold, so then you turn on the heat, and maybe it's too hot, you turn on the cold, and then you find the exact place where you want to be.

[24:08]

If you're driving in your car and you feel tired, oh yeah, turn on the air, right? I'm always surprised that people don't adjust the air in their cars. Anyway, so that you find the right atmosphere. So in our practice, sometimes it becomes too top-down. We're demanding too much or saying it should be this way, should be that way. And then people are kind of repressed by should be, should be, right? And then you have to ease up a little bit so that you're not repressing the spirit of practice. If you have too much control, then you repress, you're putting too much of a damper on your intuition.

[25:10]

And if you don't have enough control, you just kind of your intuition is freed, but you don't know what to do with it. So, when we hear about the Zen stories of the masters, you know, who suddenly had this great insight of intuition, which is called enlightenment, that's great to have that. But then, What's the most important thing is what do you do with it? You just strut around like an enlightened person? So, enlightenment should be offered, not as enlightenment, but simply how you, it's like you just let it flow without making a fuss.

[26:18]

So we should be enlightened moment by moment. Enlightened activity means that you don't separate enlightenment from activity. You don't separate your great insight or make a fuss about it or hang it out as a sign, you know, look at me. but you allow it to flow through the sangha so that unnoticed. We say you should hide your insight in the dust so that people feel supported, but they don't know why. They don't understand why that is, but they do feel it. So, you know, the purpose of practice is to not be caught by our ego or our self-centeredness.

[27:45]

It's not hard to tell somebody's realization because they have no sense of ego. When you see people advertising, you know there's some problem. You know if somebody wants something, you know there's some problem. If you think that people don't love you enough, You probably don't love them enough or you love them too much and there's no balance. If we go around telling everybody we love you too much, there's some problem of not really loving people. So, finding our balance on each moment.

[28:56]

Suzuki Roshi talked about every moment. The world, you and the world, are falling out of balance. Everything is falling out of balance continuously, and finding our balance is our practice. So it's very easy to let our intuition come up without control, without some kind of mindfulness. Mindfulness actually is how we control our intuition. Then It's easy to let the, because we want the intuition to be expressed, it's easily expressed through anger, because anger frees us for a moment. Anger frees us for a moment, but then it captures us.

[30:01]

We don't realize that we're caught by it. So what do we do with anger? And what is the root of, We do feel emotions. Emotions are usually based on intuition. Emotion, that's why people love their, that's why we love our emotions, because the source is very deep and free. Emotion is free. But the problem is, without direction from our cool head, the heat of emotion creates havoc. So again, back to the fire. Love is fire. Hate is fire. All these emotions are fire and need some kind of balance in order to be effective.

[31:03]

So when people come to a Zen center, they say, oh, everybody's so cool. There's no emotion. It's not that there's no emotion. It's that the emotions hopefully are not repressed, but are balanced. So the whole atmosphere of our practice is balancing our emotions and our thinking. so that we don't create havoc. So we're all emotional people. Some people say, well, I am so emotional as if, you know, I'm great because I have more emotion than anybody else. I don't think that's true. I think people who are the most calm often are most emotional.

[32:08]

So you can't look at the Japanese and we say, oh, they're so controlled, you know, they're not emotional. They're the most really emotional people. They're emotional. You know, strong emotion takes strong control. But it's not a matter of strength. It's really not a matter of strength. If you try to control through strength, that's okay sometimes. There's a place for that. But actually, the balance rather than control. How do you find balance rather than trying to control? And that's the practice, is to find the balance rather than the suppression or the control. So when we talk about control, what are we talking about?

[33:15]

Actually, intuition, if a person Intuition can control itself, but we need training. In a perfect world, where we are all innocent, so to speak, there's no need for control. Because intuition can control without needing outside control. That's kind of like Taoism. But unfortunately, it's not a perfect world, and we're not that innocent.

[34:25]

But, you know, children have innocence. And as we grow older, because we create a self, we need to control it. So at the end, old people and children Children have natural innocence and older people hopefully have learned innocence. So you can't go back to being a child, but you can go forward to being unencumbered, hopefully. So my point here in all this is how we balance our head and our heart and our hara so that we don't fall out of balance.

[35:53]

Instead of using force, how we use balance. When you sit zazen and you have a lot of pain, automatically we go to resistance, which is totally the opposite of what we should be doing. When we have pain, we let go. Not trying to force anything. Not trying to get rid of anything. Not trying to conquer. You can't conquer your pain. No way you can do that. It always wins. You just simply accept and let go, and the pain goes away.

[36:58]

Not everybody learns this. And sometimes we forget. Goes away means that it doesn't become the subject. It's no longer the subject. It's just another thing that's there. What about all the rest? Why is that so important? We give it undue importance. And this is the same for all the pain in our mind, which is where it is. Emotional pain as well. So when we have emotional pain, someone insults us. Whole societies can be destroyed when the king is insulted. And that's the same with ourselves.

[38:00]

The mind king and the rest. When the mind king is insulted, what do we do? Buddha rises above it. Does Buddha get upset when someone insults Buddha? I don't think so. I don't think so. Thank you, Sojin. My heart is thumping. I feel like often when you talk, I am either reminded of something that I've already learned or something that I've forgotten. Right now my compulsive, relentless thinking mind is really compelled by how you talk.

[39:03]

my intuition and what I'm wondering is I spend so much time trying to quell my relentless mind and what I think I got out of this is that maybe sort of pulling the damper on my mind just for a little bit and it's not so much about managing that or controlling that but sort of letting my intuition meet my mind, and then the two of them come up with a socially acceptable response to my emotional whatever it was. Well, we're social beings. We are, yes, socially acceptable. That's more of, it sounds like that's more of what it is, is just more of what you always talk about, just get out of the way and let... Yes, get out of the way.

[40:10]

Yes. You know, I was walking down, when I take a walk at night, which I do every night, I know pretty much the street, but I was walking down during the winter when it was so heavy with rain, and I walked on exactly the same street and I hit myself on a big branch that was right there in front of my head, which I didn't see because I always walk there, but the branch had sagged during the wet weather and just knocked me down. So what am I supposed to think? You know, am I supposed to get mad at the branch? Yes. It's okay to get mad at the branch, you know, but then to realize this is just, you know, what's there to get angry at?

[41:19]

And so I saved myself from getting angry at the branch. One more, and it's Ross. I read the same article, and Marcel was talking about jazz as classical music. Yeah, as classical music, right. And that people were experimenting, and he still was oriented toward the roots, which is New Orleans music. But music has evolved over the years, and I don't know enough about music to see what the thread is, where it's sort of I heard it said once that if it doesn't swing, it's not jazz. So there's something about the intuitiveness of the movement in the body that is being expressed. It doesn't have to sound like a funeral march in New Orleans. It could be different generations. So my question is, if fundamentally the classic teaching of Buddha is zazen, and then as we are evolving in this era of beats where zen zen and whatever's next,

[42:27]

What would you say is the force that is riding through it as we continue to evolve, to stay rooted to the classic teaching, without being too restrictive? I don't know what you mean by the force, but you mean the foundation? Yeah, if we're rooted in our gut, then no matter what we do, No self. Which doesn't mean not a self. I think the main thing would be non-duality. So we should maybe question our intention if we want to stretch the parameters of what we are comfortable with and say, is this non-duality? Am I still feeling, or is this something that I want to impose?

[43:28]

which is more dualistic. Well, yes. Well, something that makes me feel comfortable, you know, why do we have to sit so much? You know, we could do other things. Yeah. And then pretty soon you forget all about what the basis is. That tendency is always there. It's always there. So that's, The purpose of our succession is that the successors maintain the essence of the practice. Like Marsalis, he wants to maintain the essence of what jazz is and not let it get lost. So it's classical in that sense. that it has a root and it has a, and he's not complaining about the flowering in different venues, but that they should all be aware, they should all come from the root, from the same root.

[44:49]

Thank you for this talk. You said something about intuition. Yes. Knowing without thinking. Beyond thinking. It doesn't, without going through the process of thinking. In other words, it's direct, right? Like if you burn yourself with a match, you don't think about it. You just experience it, right? Yeah. You experience, ouch. So it's direct. You don't have to go through thinking. Is that part of Buddha nature, or is it just Buddha nature? Everything is Buddha nature. When you start saying, this is Buddha nature, this is not Buddha nature, that's duality. Thinking is Buddha nature. Yes, thinking is Buddha nature.

[45:49]

Buddha nature just is. Everything is an expression of Buddha nature, including Adolf Hitler. Sorry. We want to separate the good from the bad. That's our tendency, and that's dualistic. I'm not saying dualistic is good. I mean, not good. It's just what, you know, the way things really are is really hard to maintain because we want things to be the way we want them to be or the way we think they should be, which is okay, but it's not the way things really are. And so that's why it's called bias or, you know, Delusion, delusion is a little bit strong for that, but it's our biases that create our problems.

[46:54]

And we should, this doesn't mean we should not think about what is good and what is bad, but it's our human, good and bad are human tendencies. It's not there in nature. that people think in terms of that, because these are thoughts. And animals do think in terms of good or bad, but they don't express it in language. But animate beings, good and bad, right and wrong, are expressions of animate beings. So that's one truth, is the truth of duality. And the other truth is the truth of non-duality. And the truth of non-duality includes the truth of duality. So it's complex.

[48:01]

But if we only understand the truth of duality, we're missing our basis, which is non-duality. It's just like the paradigm of the music. If we don't relate everything that happens to things happen for a reason, which we don't necessarily know what that is, this is why people just give up and say, well, it's God's will, right? Which is true. It's true, it's not false. At some point, yeah, you let yourself understand that it's the way the universe works. And we're all subject to the way the universe works, regardless of how we would like it to be.

[49:05]

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