Like the pain and the reaction and all that was like one thing, one kind of suffering. But when we kind of meditate and slow things down, we can separate out a little bit. So what I can see now is that there's the physical pain. And then there's the reaction to it, which is very natural. It's what we all do. We don't want to be uncomfortable and we don't want to suffer. And so we kind of try to find ways to push it away or cover it up or hide from it. Just many, many different strategies that we have. And those are all more like what the Buddha is getting at with suffering. He rules out just actual pain because of course, Once you clear up that second kind of suffering, you're in a better position to deal with the physical suffering that might be the source or even the emotional suffering, whatever it is.

[01:02]

So we've got this kind of ball of reaction when something happens that affects us. And the suffering that the Buddha is addressing is a lot about the reaction to what happened. And so he taught suffering and the end of suffering by studying ourselves or our mind-body hearts or heart-mind bodies and to see that they're not quite as they appear. So our Japanese ancestor Dogen says, when you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving, but when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent, but when you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.

[02:09]

So the Buddha's teachings were various ways to look at ourself, to turn the light around. He taught one of the most seminal ones of these scriptures is called the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. And so he taught to look at our physical experience, our bodies, our breath, and our posture, and also to turn our attention to our feelings, all different kinds of feelings, and then to also be able to turn our attention to our mind states, our state of mind, our kinds of thoughts we're having. And then the fourth foundation is mindfulness of dharmas, which you could sort of say, now do all that again, looking through the lens of dharmas, of the Buddha's different systems of categories. So looking at your experience, from and in terms of these different categories of experience that are what the Buddha taught.

[03:19]

So we have the five skandhas, form, feeling, perception, impulses, consciousness, and then there's the 18 dots. So he has all these different systems, the 75 dharmas. But the point of it is, to see that yourself is really made up of these ephemeral kind of moments in time. And the most important thing about that is that it doesn't look like it's that way. It looks more solid than it is. And so this difference between how it looks and how it is, is kind of constantly throwing us off in some way. And that's kind of the suffering, actually, that piece. So, then the second turning is what we call the Mahayana, which means great vehicle. So, this supposedly happened around the first century, common era, and we sort of see it as a kind of reformation.

[04:24]

expansion. And it's hard to know because nothing was written down. So the actual scriptures that we have from the first turning and the second turning aren't that far apart in time. And so right now, I don't know enough about it, but scholars are really questioning, you know, kind of almost like which came first or whether one was after the other. But we think about the second turning as the Mahayana, the great vehicle. And in the second turning, you have to start to engage. Oh, I forgot. One thing I wanted to say about the first turning is that the emphasis is on yourself. You could say saving yourself. And kind of, I think, ideally in the spirit of like put your own oxygen mask on first before you help others. So it's not like completely self-centered, but the emphasis is definitely on what each person has to do.

[05:34]

for themselves with their own suffering. So then the Mahayana kind of starts to engage the idea that, well, if there is no self, then how do you save yourself? And that's a paradox that has to be engaged at some point in our practice. So there's a bunch of more scriptures, lots more scriptures that are part of the Mahayana. And they're kind of amazing and long and more cosmic in some way. But the core issue for the Mahayana, you could still say is suffering and the end of suffering by studying our mind hearts, our heart mind bodies to see that everything is, you know, that things are not as they appear. And in particular, even these categories of Abhidharma that we studied in the first one are not as solid as we thought they were.

[06:44]

And so it's more about exploding the categories or throwing it open to a wider, deeper view. And so in the process of this study, of studying our body, heart, minds, and... reality, we get to more interconnectedness naturally. There's more of a turning towards how connected we all are and how we're connected with everything and we're not separate. So it's the same thing about the self not being as it appears, but with an emphasis on the interconnectedness of all things and especially of you and me being connected to each other. There's an image that's kind of like... the image of the raft, so you could say the first turning teachings are like a raft.

[07:48]

And when you use a raft to go to the other side of a river, you don't take the raft along with you. You leave the raft there and you go on. So the feeling is to not sort of cling to these earlier teachings so much. And we don't know exactly what conditions were. giving rise to that, but we can sort of imagine that there may have been some, just like with anything, you know, a settling down or a rigidity around what had been taught and received 500 years before. And then there's the movement of Reformation to sort of not, you know, to open up some of that rigidity maybe. and more concerned with saving all beings. But we have the Bodhisattva vow, which we'll say at the end of our talk, sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.

[08:48]

And that's kind of the Mahayana expression of our practice. Then, so what Abbess Fu was teaching as the so-called third turning of the wheel, is something that's also called the Yogacara teaching, which was around the fourth or fifth century. So you sort of think like these are all around 400 or 500 years apart, these movements. And apparently that's not what everybody considers the third turning, I found out down there. And I'm going to talk about it that way because that's the way we learned it there. And then it seems like different schools, and it makes sense kind of that things would sort of branch out after the Mahayana and each person would, each school, not each person, but each school would kind of have their thing that felt like the next turning of the wheel. Because really the wheel just keeps turning, we hope, and we're trying to turn the wheel here too.

[09:49]

So I happen to be very fond of our Chinese ancestors. So I think I could make a case for that being the third turning. So I can understand how it is that we don't all agree on this so-called third turning. However, I'm going to tell you about the Yogacara teachings, which is what we were learning about down at Tassajara. And they are basically about suffering and the end of suffering by studying our mind, heart, bodies, to see the basic essential boundlessness and groundlessness of everything. Especially ourselves, because our sense of self is going to keep coming in, you know, and you might have some penetrating insight into impermanence or that there isn't a fixed self, but then it's just going to keep creeping in because you got to get through the day and protect yourself and feed yourself.

[10:56]

So there's always going to be this kind of conversation between the so-called reality, which is hard to get at and impermanent, and then our feeling about ourself, our experience of ourself. And so the yoga, so, and I think that when we first, these yoga chart teachings sort of first surfaced in Western groups quite a while ago, like maybe 10 or 20 years ago, some, some large amount of time. And they seem to be extremely esoteric and difficult to understand. I think like what I remember is it seemed like it was like going further into something esoteric, like the Mahayana is more esoteric than the earlier teachings, and this is like even more esoteric and difficult to understand. But actually, after studying this with Fu, I have a different sense of it, which is, and maybe you already do too, that this is actually more returning to actual things we can do.

[12:03]

So the early teachings of Buddha gave us many, many things we could practice and do, and then the Mahayana kind of explodes everything and says, none of this is real. And the yoga char is like kind of circling back to actual practices that we can do every day to address our suffering and other people's suffering, our mutual, our collective suffering and our individual suffering. And hopefully, so there's a whole new set of categories of experience, the eight consciousnesses and various things like that. And so one of the most accessible of these teachings is something you may have heard about. It's kind of out there, I think, in the general teaching in Buddhism, which is this thing about watering the seeds. So the idea that we have this storehouse consciousness, which is actually very much like the Western psychological idea of the unconscious, and in the storehouse consciousness are stored the seeds of everything that we've ever experienced and, you know, genetics and, you know,

[13:19]

the human race, you know, the human animal and our childhood and our parents' childhood. Everything that has anything to do with influencing our experience is stored in the storehouse consciousness as seeds. And then things that happen and or things that we do water the seeds or don't water them. So certain seeds are getting watered all the time. Other seeds aren't getting watered. depending on what's happening. And as you can imagine, it's really complicated and it's not a thing you can ever get a hold of. But somehow we can influence it for benefit, which is mysterious, you know? Because again, we're not saying there's a self who has any control over anything. Nothing's permanent. But as we learn about how these seeds are and how they work, we can seem to have influence on what's happening. And again, we never get any control, but it matters what we do all the time.

[14:29]

So, if you're wondering how to water seeds, I think we all know that just adding some respect and friendliness into a situation is going to bring benefit most of the time. So there's some simple things we can always do to, you know, and then, you know, as situation, the more you know about a situation, you might know more subtly what's going to contribute benefit. But the idea is that you sort of stop trying to control anything and just jump on the bandwagon of watering seeds all the time, whenever you think of it. Whenever you remember our practice and to do something, water seeds of benefit, friendliness, respect, ease for yourself, non-anxiety for ourselves and others. And you know, the more we know, we can more effectively water seeds, but we're not gonna ever be controlling what's happening.

[15:38]

And so we need to just take our money out of that completely and invest it in this seed watering project. And then, so then another really basic yoga chart teaching, which you've probably heard, which is a little bit harder to wrap our minds around is this idea that everything we experience is being processed through our cognitive apparatus always. So everything we know is known through our cognition process. And there's a lot of neuroscience that corroborates this, you know, and the, the, the undependability in a sense of that. of our cognitive process. Now they understand that eyewitness testimony is flawed and such. But it's really hard to go around. You're still going around looking at things and you're seeing what you're seeing and it seems to be what's happening.

[16:45]

So it's not easy to know how to incorporate this knowledge, even if we all understand for a moment here that we're all having a different experience based on how we're cognizing what's happening, based on what happened before, the way we think and what we know about the world. Another example that I really, that I like from neuroscience is, so we all have this negativity bias. Probably many of you may have heard about this. So they've shown in neuroscience that when we, scan our environment or when we view our world, when we experience our world through our five senses, our attention is going to be drawn to threats and danger more. And then it'll be drawn, you know, maybe like, let's say 60% to threats and 30% to possible rewards, possible good things that are available to us.

[17:54]

And then a little bit to something that has no observable valence one way or the other. And this negativity bias is brought to us by natural selection. I mean, it is the evolutionary advantage. So it's always going to be a factor. And how can we, somehow incorporate that into what we know of what we know. You know, it's really hard to ourselves doing that, I guess, is what's hard. It's hard to see that your mind is averting already before you're even aware of things. The mind is sorting a bunch of stuff out that's happening and fixating on certain things that it has learned through its experience are important either mostly as threats but partly as rewards.

[19:04]

So, you know, just even our meditation practice to be in the present moment is to try to mitigate that somehow. And Thich Nhat Hanh always talks about, can you enjoy your non-toothache? So if tomorrow you have a toothache, you're going to look back at today and think how great today was. because you didn't have a toothache. So can you have that, can you have that greatness, can you experience that greatness now? Can we sort of, you know, without, we're never gonna be able to stop this process because of the evolutionary advantage, I think, but can we find ways to mitigate it? And I think, it seems to me that every wisdom tradition and every spiritual teaching offers antidotes to the negativity bias, you know, positivity, having gratitude practices. And this is, you know, all over Facebook and everything.

[20:07]

Gratitude practices, positivity, having faith, turning things over to a higher power, many, many different ways to phrase something that would bring in water seeds. Again, so this is getting back to the seeds. The negativity bias is always watering seeds of anxiety, right? So how can we water other seeds? We need to bring in the watering consciously and intentionally of other seeds to balance it out. And, you know, I'm just, we should all do daily, we should do daily practices that water seeds of positivity and gratitude. And otherwise you're really getting a skewed take on what's happening. So the Yogacara, And so the way to phrase, so the sixth ancestor of Zen, Hui Neng in China, had his way of phrasing the Bodhisattva vow, which I said before, as sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.

[21:20]

His wording was, sentient beings are numberless, I'm sorry, sentient beings of my mind are numberless. I vow to save them. So that's a kind of Yogachara spin. And then there's a teacher at Tassajara who's been there a long time. She's the abiding teacher of Tassajara, Leslie James. And she's an amazing teacher. At one point, Fu looked to me and said, you know, when Leslie's here, it changes the pH. And she had her own great wording of the four vows, which was sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them from my ideas about them. I vow to save all sentient beings from my ideas about them. And that's a very, Yogachara-informed kind of way of talking about it. Let's see. I've got to switch pages here.

[22:23]

So life at Tusajara, you know, well, we started sitting at 420, and one of the jobs of the shuso was to ring the wake-up bell, so my alarm was set for 340. which is not even, you know, like five o'clock is early. 3.40, it's not even, you can't even talk about it, what 3.40 is, you know? It's ridiculously early, you know? So, but I'm a kind of a morning person, so I was okay with the wake-up bell. And then we sat about six periods of Zazen a day. And my experience was like, we were just always back in there. You know, things would happen and then we'd be back in there. turn around and we'd be back in there. And then, you know, we did services and the meals were also in the Zendo and they were, you know, and then there wasn't any much coming and going of people and you weren't, you weren't really interacting so much.

[23:26]

So, you know, when you met people on the path, you weren't really supposed to make eye contact, but there was this thing you bowed to each other. And that is really a deep practice because there's so many different ways that bowing can happen. You can both stop and bow. If both people are in a hurry, you can just sort of pass by and bow in motion. So you're always kind of trying to read the person for which one they're going to do and meet. So the idea is that you're kind of meeting with the bow. At some point in the bow, you're moving together. And it's nice, but it also kind of turns you back on yourself in a way. So many, many things about life there turn me back on myself. And it really reminded me of this Yogachara teaching because, you know, things would happen, I'd have some train of thought going, and then, you know, back in the Zendo, and it's going like, chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-pfft, and then disappear in a puff of smoke, you know, and then it would happen again.

[24:39]

And it, so I mean, I really started to realize that I was, my whole world was this thing I was thinking about and feeling about, you know, because I think what happens is, Underneath the thoughts are often feelings that seem to be kind of driving it, right? And, you know, as with the negativity bias, often uncomfortable feelings. And feelings are sort of like physical thoughts in a way. You know what I mean? Feelings are in your body, but they have a thought component or something. And, you know, I wasn't that churned up by really strong emotions while I was there, but I had this kind of an underlying anxiety about, you know, about fitting in and whether people liked me and whether I was doing a good job as you so, and just sort of basic underlying anxiety.

[25:44]

And that kind of drove... thoughts of, kind of critical thoughts, I would say. So I would notice like I was constantly critiquing the food there compared to BCC food and the chants there compared to BCC chants and, and, you know, and just all the stuff that we do. What was that look? Does that person like me? You know, what, what was that? What did that mean? It's constant, right? It's just constant. And like I said, underneath those kind of streaming thoughts, if you can sort of get underneath them, there's often a feeling under there. I had this experience that I noticed that I had this wave of homesickness, you know, maybe about a month in or something. maybe even earlier, but a ways in, it wasn't right at the beginning. But, but, and it was more to it, there was more to it than homesickness. There was, you know, things happening there, but that was somehow the thought bubble that went with it.

[26:47]

And it had various thoughts with it, but, you know, I thought, well, I should do what I'm, I should practice what I'm preaching here. So I thought, well, what is, what do I mean by homesickness? So then what is the feeling? And the feeling was just some sensation in this part of my body. And I just kept trying to return to it and just feel it. Just what is this feeling? What is this feeling? Not so much what is the meaning, but what is it feeling like? What is the feeling of the feeling? It kind of just kept returning to it because again, you're back in there, right? You're back in there and there's that feeling again, even if your mind was going somewhere else or you were doing your job or whatever. And so at some point I realized that the feeling had dissipated.

[27:52]

It was over the course of a day, I think. And I almost literally heard a voice say, thank you. That is all I wanted. That's all I wanted. And, you know, it does really feel like the feeling is driving something else. It feels like the feeling wants something else. Mine do anyway. They want a solution or something. They want something. But this feeling, it really felt like, that's all I wanted. Just to be, just be present with me, you know. So it's easy to think we all have an, I think we can, some of us, not all of us, we have an idealized feeling about a monastery, a Zen monastery, like there would be peace and quiet there.

[28:55]

And there isn't because you just end up, so you've gotten rid of all the things you believe are causing your problems. but actually the things that are causing your problems are not those actually, it turns out. We're not exonerating them. There's bad things happening, but still the problems stay with us. And so I have always had this kind of joke, oh yeah, when you go to Tassajara, you start being upset with the person next to you for how they passed the gamashio. And I have to say, I witnessed that exact thing, which stunned me. Across the zendo, I saw two people, they were literally struggling over how they were passing the gamashio. And it went on in the day, like I heard stories about. So it's really true. I would have told you that before, but now I can verify that it's really true. And so I think that I really think doing a practice period is an awesome thing to do for almost anybody.

[30:03]

And I think we should approach it like kind of like a walkabout or a vision quest or an expedition, you know, something that you would have to really muster some inner resolve and strength to do. Because it's amazing to have this, to connect with yourself in this way. You just really have this deep, deep connection with your body, heart, mind. And it's wonderful. And, you know, terrible. But more wonderful than terrible. So at some point, you know, in the middle of there somewhere, I was sitting Zazen again, back in there. And this sort of sentence just floated into my mind, which was, what about letting yourself off the hook and letting everybody else off the hook too?

[31:12]

And I was surprised, you know. And so I'm trying to sort of hear that dharma. And I don't think that it's about sort of like, oh, so I was gonna read you some stuff about the hook. Hook is a great word. It's an evocative word. So the nouns are something curved or bent back at an angle for catching hold of or hanging things on. A thing designed to catch people's attention. A stroke that makes the ball deviate in flight. And the nouns are attach, hitch, fasten, fix, secure, clasp, or captivate. And some of the phrases are by hook or by crook. Get one's hooks into. Get the hook. And then mine, let off the hook, which means free of a difficult situation or let off from blame or trouble.

[32:13]

And so I don't really want to go into one about letting go of accountability. I mean, I think responsibility and accountability are really important issues for our practice. So it's not like letting Hitler off the hook or letting me off the hook for my white privilege or something. I don't think that's the point here. I think that it has something to do with this, the hook of the self, the hook of the misperceived. You know, to paraphrase, so I kind of been paraphrasing Leslie James, you know, to let myself off the hook of my ideas about myself and to let you off the hook of my ideas about you. You know, to let Zazen off the hook of our ideas about Zazen. You know, to let this moment in a way off the hook of my ideas about this moment.

[33:16]

So that's kind of what I've been, you know, returning to since I've been back. And, you know, life is so different here that if everything is conditionality, you know, my mind is so completely different here than it was there because of conditions are so different. But, you know, we're still just, even if it's once a day or once a week, we're back in here. and taking another look, listen, touch. So that's what I had, and I'm happy to answer any questions people may have, practical or philosophical. Yeah.

[34:47]

Well, yeah. And I mean, I think this gets to some of the conversation about the teaching would be, because it's not, it's not like all, uh, whatever happens is fine when you're raising kids. It's not like, um, well, they don't have a self, so it doesn't matter anyway or something, you know? I mean, there's very specific things. babies and children need. And so those are kind of like the laws of gravity, you know, which are maybe different from just the everyday world of our consciousness only, you know? So, I mean, I think it's interesting to look at how we come together. around our beliefs if it's all just consciousness only, you know? So that's where I went with your question.

[35:49]

Yeah. Anybody else? Questions? John? Well, I wanted to say one thing is that negativity, bias, it seems like everything smells like butt. Maybe there's something on your nose. I really wanted to thank you for the idea of letting us off the hook. The concept of just looking and saying we're off the hook and practice that I've done for driving. When somebody does something really stupid, I say that's just once a year. Right. Right. I think it still does raise questions about the accountability, you know, so I think that's always, and if there's no self, what, you know, how does the accountability play in?

[36:54]

I mean, you know, there's the, there's a kind of spectrum from accountability to blame and we know that blame is going too far, but what is, what is responsibility? You know, what are our responsibilities to each other? Jake. Thank you, Valerie. I think I heard you say, not today, but after you got back, that there are a lot of young people practicing in Tosoha. Predominantly young? The new people. So they have this thing called the Tangarios. What they call the Tangarios students were the people who were just there for the first time. So my question is, there's an attraction at Tosoha for young people, and yet we don't Yeah, I mean, I think almost like economics, practically, you know, because you can go to Tassajara and be supported financially. And so you don't have to have a lot of money to go.

[37:57]

Now, I mean, a complicating factor for a lot of people is now, unlike my time, I didn't have any student loans, but people have student loans. So then they still, even if Tassajara supports them for their time there, they still can't necessarily go. So, I mean, there's complications, but I think a lot of them are economic. I think there's a lot of young people who are interested in all sorts of different things. But here, if you live in Berkeley, you're going to have your livelihood is going to be a really important consideration. So I think that's kind of one of the main differences, honestly. It's sort of a full menu of things, you know, you got the work, the zazen and the teaching are all together, you know, and we have that here too. We have little, but I mean, it's almost like hard to ask a young person who's even getting to zendo and then could you do a little job, which is actually the way we manifest our practice, you know? So I think it, you know, it'll, it happened.

[38:59]

It'll happen. If we could figure out a way to support people more, if there were a way to support people more somehow, then it would happen more, I think. Hi. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, thanks. Yeah. It makes it easy sometimes to let go of your ideas about somebody, the love flowing, right? Mm-hmm, the love can flow, yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ideas get in the way. Hi, Judy. It was a really great talk. Thank you, Lori. And I was really glad that you mentioned the term white privilege. I often feel like it's an elephant in the room. I'm so glad that you named it.

[40:03]

One of the things that you had been called to do from that was to work on a form of a repentant ceremony modeled on a Buddhist office. And so that was before you went to Tassantara. And so I'm wondering how you see that integrating about self and other with shining the light on things maybe unseen until this moment through the sound of body having many eyes. How do you meet that now? Well, there's, you know, there's always a lot to learn, especially for people with a white skin privilege about what that is.

[41:23]

There's a lot of good books out there and everything out there. So it's good to avail ourselves. I mean, I kind of, with the repentance ceremony, I'm kind of waiting for someone to get as excited about it as I was, which I didn't experience. I think there's a lot we could do to bring the tools of our practice to that, to the effort to hasten the end of racism. And, you know, maybe it's getting closer. Maybe the tools are getting closer to the problem, but maybe they haven't quite always met. Maybe we're still working on getting them. to meet that. I think, you know, let people of any skin color off the hook of your ideas about what skin color means. I mean, there's no end to the way to apply our practice to this, but yeah, I wish I had, you know, I wish I had a more vigorous answer to that.

[42:29]

But thanks for bringing it up. Hi, Ed. Hi, Ed. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I can't speak for anybody else. I think I was hardly ever tired. I think once during class, I fell asleep during a class. Once during an evening event, I fell asleep. I tried to take naps almost every day, but I didn't always fall asleep. So I think one element was that I might have had some nervous energy, so it may have been completely grounded. I would say that that life was very salubrious, very healthy.

[43:34]

And Zazen itself can be a rest, a different kind of rest. And being away from the internet and being away from news and being away, being in nature, like all those things are factors that make us tired. So I worried about it too because, you know, bad memory is, I mean, they're saying memory loss is, you know, and I worried about that. You know, I had many, many worries about the aging issues that I might run into being there. And so, you know, I hope I didn't do any damage, but I have to say that I did not feel, I did not ever feel pushed in that way. And a lot of people did, other people did, people, and they let you, you know, it was acceptable to write on the, because they keep track, they keep attendance, you know, so there was acceptable to write in their need to sleep, you know, that was an acceptable excuse, which I don't think it was back when I was there. There were many, there were little, a few little ways they had softened it.

[44:39]

And it seemed more sane, I would say, compared to how it was before. It seemed like they'd introduced some basic sanity elements more. It was still an extreme experience, but it was more doable, I think. But yeah, that was not a prevailing feeling I had of being exhausted. So that was nice. How are we doing, Jake? A couple of minutes. One more question. Okay, Charlie. She focused on Hawaiian shirts, and all of a sudden she had this desire.

[46:03]

That's nice. Foo's addressed various issues more than a lot of people have. So listen to her talks too. Yeah. Okay. Thanks everybody.

[46:38]

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