I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. So, Genroshi was scheduled to speak this morning, but he is not feeling well at all, so he stayed home and I came. Also, I wanted to express my appreciation for this practice period and everyone showing up so much. We had Bonsang yesterday, and the teas, and the class, and everybody is expressing such sincere practice and energy and dedication. It's really wonderful. There's just so many teachers here, so many people expressing their practice. It's really great. And an announcement that Ross may give at the end, I'm not sure, but I don't think there was a sign up.

[01:09]

Next Saturday is a little different schedule and there's a work day. And it's a really great day and we get to eat lunch together and then work all day. If you're not going to be here again until next Saturday and you think you want to come and there's no sign up, just leave a note in my box and I'll sign you up. I think there's informal Zazen at 6, but then there'll be Zazen at 9.30 and lecture at 10, 10. Yes. So I have a title for my talk, and the title is, Anger, Failure, and Pure Existence.

[02:11]

And we can start with pure existence and sort of work backwards. So we are given in Buddhism these ideas of Buddha nature and human nature. And we're told that, you know, that we're both, that we have Buddha nature or we are Buddha nature. and that we are aligned with all the Buddhas. We already possess the Dharma, the truth. We're already liberated. And this is an idea that I have sort of let in over the years, but I don't really feel, I don't exactly act that way, but it's the truth they tell us nonetheless.

[03:24]

So regardless of my experience, it's the way it is. I've spent a lot of my life really embroiled in my human nature and really not very happy about it because what my human nature looked like to me wasn't very close to any idea of Buddha nature. So I had these warring ideas. So in fact, I couldn't experience or believe that I had Buddha nature. And what I had of human nature didn't look too good either. So like a lot of us, I have suffered a lot and really been looking a lot for some way to feel free or feel some ease or harmonize with the truth so that I wouldn't suffer, so that I could help other people.

[04:37]

And in the past year or so, this interesting thing happened to me, which I'm still very grateful for, and that is I gathered together some deep appreciation for human nature. The phrase, that's the way it is, or that's the way things are, started to actually feel like a bit of a comfort to me, like things are okay as they are. I'm okay as I am. Situations are okay as they are. This is Buddha nature expressing itself through human nature. And so I've been practicing quite a bit with this sort of, it's okay. Like, I'm okay, I don't need to change, I don't need to improve.

[05:43]

Whatever's coming up is what's coming up. And actually feeling or experiencing some unity with that, whatever comes up, I'm there with it. And I felt a new kind of compassion not the kind of, oh, you're suffering, I feel with you, I wish you felt better, here, let me extend myself beyond all reason to help you. I noticed that more, but I started to come up with a sort of more quiet compassion, a sort of acceptance for my predicament, being in my body and mind and having this be, well, this is it, this is it, this is what I got, you know, even with changes, it's not going to sort of magically feel great.

[06:50]

And if it did, great, but to count on that, seemed beside the point, seems beside the point. I sort of, in the past year, have maybe overindulged in this celebration of human nature. And what I mean by that is I got really lazy about practice. I sort of coasted on this sort of wimpy little realization, kind of went, well, that's good enough. That's good. I've got some compassion for myself. I'm not judging others so harshly. You know, I'm not freaking out about the forms in the zendo anymore. I'm not correcting every little thing that goes, you know, it's like, it's okay. And I kind of like my lower back slumped and my breath got less shallow and, oh, I don't follow my breath.

[07:53]

You guys that were here two weeks ago, I don't follow my, it's okay. I got my posture, what's left of it, you know? And I've only noticed that since practice period started. And practice period started in this sort of fierce thing that we're all bringing to it, this commitment and this dedication and this relentless schedule to me. I'm squirming. I'm really squirming. And human nature is great, but somehow, you know, Where's the original nature? So I got reminded in my Wednesday night group again, reading Suzuki Roshi about Buddha nature, original nature. And in the precepts class, Sojin Roshi spoke about

[08:56]

fish nature or the nature of any world. There's so many worlds. There's billions of worlds. There are sutras dedicated to elaborating upon these worlds and reminding us that no matter how magical or degrading the world is, they're worlds. They're worlds and worlds arise and pass away and The human world is where we are and it feels very real and it feels really important to take care of it and to, you know, do it really well, be a really effective human or be really good at being human. Sometimes when I would be filled with a human reaction, you know, you've had a few, right? Like greed, hate, and delusion, hunger, appetite, severe anger, complete confusion, resistance, depression.

[10:04]

It happens, I don't know, 50 times an hour, whatever. If you stay with it, it's kind of happening all the time. Being with it, being with it was good. letting that be enough, letting that be all there was, somehow missed the mark. Like, oh, I'm angry. Like, I'm just human. This is Buddha in a human world, so I'm angry. So I was kind of using it a little bit to justify my grabbiness around my experience, or my grabbiness around my feeling state. It's a little tiny justification going on, or maybe a great big justification, like being human is all I really need to do. Well, Suzuki Roshi reminds us that our original nature is where this all comes from.

[11:15]

And I can't say that I know what that means, but it's like, I don't know if there's form and emptiness. It's to me like the chicken and the egg. And yet sometimes we just want to say, well, the chicken laid the egg, God damn it. You know, one of them came first. Out of emptiness, out of the original nature arises all these worlds. Now, whether it really happens that way or not, almost doesn't matter. The fact is, worlds arise and they arise from a source, and that source seems to me to be what I'm yearning for. That when in the class the other night, or I think it was, we were speaking about this void that wants to be filled, we keep feeling like We want to fill it with something in this world, like I'm missing a relationship or meaningful work or, you know, I'm not connecting somehow in the human world with something that I want in the human world.

[12:32]

And if I just sort of get it lined up right, things will settle down or I'll be happy or whatever. And it occurs to me and it occurs to a lot of us that chasing this fulfillment seems to make it worse, seems to create more and more self, more and more human nature. Now without denying human nature, I really feel like it's important for me not to get away from being Karen and like be a different personality or have a different set of karma. I don't, I want, I want to embrace all that. My karma, my personality, this is what's here. And yet, my yearning to really take that yearning and go back to original nature. Behave like a Buddha is what Suzuki Roshi said in the book.

[13:37]

Behave like a Buddha. And that makes me think of the precepts. I mean, how do we know how to behave like a Buddha? How does Buddha act? I mean, how do we know? I don't know, but the precepts seem to be like this way in, behaving like a Buddha. So I realized that I have been sort of hiding either hiding from my original nature or hiding my original nature away from me because I was elevating myself. In the effort to sort of allow human nature to be not separate from Buddha nature.

[14:41]

It can't be separate from Buddha nature. It arises out of it. It has to be aligned with it. And yet, it's this amazing paradox. It also contains the seeds of so much suffering, so much karma, We hurt each other, we hurt ourselves. I mean, this world is, as you know, filled with great distress and great joys that lead to more clinging and more separation. So, I feel like I have a new relationship to the not two, not one, or two and one of Buddha nature and self-nature or human nature. As I've been waking up to this, I have been waking up to it through feelings and experiences of failing.

[15:51]

I've been failing in a lot of different ways. Yesterday at tea, Kathy Steingruth listened to a lot of us talking about managing our time and all the achievement we were engaged with and she said, I feel like we're at an overachiever's anonymous meeting and what's wrong with a little failing? What's so bad about failing? So this really struck me and this is what I sort of entered into and wanting to share with you on how I'm doing in practice period. Now, I have this little phrase that I wanted to remember. Waking up can feel like total failure. That's sort of what's going on right now. And I'll give you two examples that maybe you've heard before.

[16:53]

You know when your leg falls asleep? And then you stretch it out and the blood goes rushing into it and it like really feels intense and kind of painful, but kind of like a relief, but you don't want it to feel that way for very long. That's your leg waking up. That's what waking up can feel like. You know how in the morning when the alarm clock goes off, Need I say more? Waking up can feel really awful. It can feel like, no, no, I don't want this. I'm not ready. Wow, it's very real. It feels, I feel it. It's waking up. I'm having an experience and I don't know what I think about it. Or I know I have some thought about it or some feeling about it. So, just want to remind us all in our yearning to wake up. So I would say that practice period's really getting to me, and it's getting to me

[18:07]

I don't know exactly why, but what's happening is I'm sitting a lot more zazen than I have been the past year. Maybe that's why I kind of went to sleep the past year. I was working really hard, and as I said, I was kind of like just dwelling in human nature and this sort of newfound liberation that I didn't have to be Buddha. I could be human, and that was Buddha. But I didn't sit a lot of zazen. I haven't been around here so much the past year. Now I'm here a lot, and I'm sitting a lot, and a lot's coming up. And I thought all this Zazen would provide, you know, this really big container for all the stuff that's coming up. And I think my container's growing, and like this world,

[19:11]

things rush in to fill it. So I'm always working at capacity. Things arise and just, well, you got a little more room in there, here, remember this? Oh, and this old trip. And don't forget, you want to be the queen. That's my, that's the trip that really came up that brought up the feeling, oh, I'm a Zen failure. I have two domains where my failure is really working. Here, with you, in the Zendo, and in my classroom. Which, yes, I'm going to torture you with one or two more stories about my classroom. But the point is not the actual situation, the point is whatever situation arises in my life. For instance, giving a talk, I get pretty nervous. You might think I want to give a nice talk and have you like me.

[20:16]

I want to give an incredible talk and have you adore me. Just to give you some perspective where, you know, the clinging and desire is coming up. It's like severe. It's, you know. So if this talk were to be a failure, If I weren't clear, if I bored you, if I missed the point, which hopefully I am because if this is the point and we're all just sitting here like a bunch of lumps, this is not so good. But this would be really good for me to fail. Because what does failure mean after all? What does it mean to fail at something? Well, I had my ideas of what I thought it meant to fail. I still have them. I mean, I'm really in the middle of this. But I know a little bit about what failure isn't, and that's what I've been doing.

[21:25]

It's a lot extra. Failure is not the judgment I have about what it means to fail. Failure is not this permanent condition that means something about my original nature. Failure is not failure. Failure is like everything else in the phenomenal world. It arises out of conditions that meet other conditions it gets born, we perceive it, we do our little number with it, we attach to it or whatever we do with it, it lives and then it goes away. It's a phenomenal thing. Like success. Like getting everything right. I got this done. I made that person happy. It's going great.

[22:27]

Another phenomenal thing. So a lot of you, probably work with this idea that success and failure are intimately related. We have experiences of each and yet it's this phenomenon like good and bad or love and hate or openness and resistance. It's just dwelling in that world. And you enter that world, and that world is like this, you know, you're moving along horizontally, just da, [...] da. And you enter the world of success and failure. And it's its own karmic reality that comes from beginningless beginning to endless end. It's just like, and you meet it. And you can swim in it as long as you want. And some of us need to swim in these things a really long time to get a taste of our being in bondage.

[23:30]

And then we get lots of help or lots of explanation or lots of practice and like the binding sort of starts to unravel and then we see, oh, this is my path and I intersected with this other path I got all entangled. And what is it to untangle? So, you know, avoiding failure is a lot more work than being with failure. So I have been And I don't, okay, I was about to say, I don't mean to be overly dramatic, but that's like the biggest lie. I think I must mean to be overly dramatic because I am. So I mean to be overly dramatic here and tell you that my day is like, it's undoable. It's undoable. Miriam asked me yesterday, Karen, I heard you were going to be the shuso, and I know you teach, and like, how did you think you could do this?

[24:38]

And she said it, and it was like, I thought I thought that, but I didn't think it the way I needed to have thought it, given where I am right now. Because I wake up, come to Zazen, I have exactly like 18 minutes for breakfast, I have to get to my classroom from quarter to eight until 5.15. I am embroiled in this world that is full of children. And some of these things came up after I agreed to do this. I'm putting on plays with my children. Well, if you want to create chaos, do theater. Like, that's what life is. Like, get 60 kids, because I and the other fifth grade teacher are putting on plays. So every afternoon, it's like, the two of us and 60 kids, you know? OK, we're going to rehearse this scene, and you're going to paint this flat, and you're going to, you know. And the kids that rise to it do, and the ones that are going to,

[25:44]

do what they, you know, it's like, it's like, okay, everybody return to your original nature. They're expressing themselves. And I have an idea of what it's supposed to look like. In addition to that, some of the schools in Oakland have to pack up their classroom down to the last pencil and piece of paper and book. Everything has to be off the shelves the last day of school. Like the kids leave, the boxes have to be packed. Well, now, it doesn't take a lot of math to figure out, well, when's that gonna happen? You know, when the kids are there after school, the principal's being really gracious and saying, well, I'll stay late some days. And it's like, well, great, I have to go to Zendo. I want to go to the Zendo. Get me out of here. So, and then, graduation. For the first year, the fifth graders are also graduating because schools are reconfiguring.

[26:45]

So we have now not just the sixth grade, but the fifth and sixth grade. So it's something like, I don't know, 150 kids graduating. And they're all hitting puberty. And it's spring. So I mean, I like I barely breathe during the day. I barely breathe. And this has been a source of a lot of pain for me because of this notion of what it means to look like Buddha. It looks like, and sometimes I do actually stop and I have to chuckle and really enjoy it because within, I don't know, two seconds, It goes, Miss Dakotas, [...] all around the room. And it's like, and they all need me. And I want to save them all. So it's, I just feel like that person who's keeping all the plates in the air. But I get really embroiled in it. I want it to work, and I want it to work like every kid's happy, every kid's engaged, the play is going well, my desk doesn't look like a tornado hit it, I get a meal, you know, I have all these expectations for what a successful day looks like.

[28:03]

Well, I'm telling you, I'm failing. I'm completely failing. And, you know, I, It's getting to where I'm not just mean to the kids who are messing up. I'm taking the sweetest little girls and like just laying them out flat. And I just, like, I just, you know, oh, what is that? This anger's coming up. Now I have had my share of delusion and I've walked around in my life thinking I've had more of my share of delusion and suffering in fact, because I have a kind of personality that It's not that I don't contain it well, it's just that I also express it. I seem to not be able or not be willing or something about my particular karma. It reads on me. I'm not what you call the inscrutable type. And that's okay with me. It wasn't okay, but now it is because, you know, pick your battles, right?

[29:06]

What's worth improving? So I've had lots of depression, lots of hysteria, lots of grief, lots of greed. And anger, it's not that I've never been angry. It's more like it's all come down to this. And it's freaking me out because it doesn't feel like anything I'm familiar with. It's like, I don't feel bad about things. I'm furious, you know? And walking around all day, having a queen complex at the Zen center and then being like an angry tyrant at school. Well, you wouldn't feel very good when the alarm went off either. It's like, oh, another day of being a total jerk. So, um, So instead of just failing at it, the drama I create around failing looks like... Give me a moment to remember.

[30:15]

No, I wrote down what I wanted to say and it's not on this piece of paper. I failed! Pretty good, huh? It's... Such a good point, and I know you were all going to attain liberation when I said it too. It has something to do with, you know, if I judge my failure, if I get freaked out by my failure, if I need you to come rescue me from my failure, that's all great drama, but it's not being with failure. It's all these heads on top of my head. It's reaction. It's reaction to the experience. It's also, yeah, maybe that's just enough. I have just been given this opportunity to wake up by being with my failure, by being with my anger.

[31:26]

In the classroom, And I have some successes too. Some kid comes at me and before he or she gets out the message, I've created all sorts of things, like way more than is needed. And sometimes I actually go, wow, my lower back is like clenching my kidneys. I'm not breathing. I'm in a sweat and I want to smash this child and myself Like, and just realizing the only thing I can do if I get this much awareness is stop and take a breath and slow down and look at this child and receive this child. And of course, in a classroom, this is not the norm. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to be present with the amount of stuff that's coming up for me.

[32:29]

So the kids are like, Mr. Kotis, like, you know, and then sometimes it slows us all down and sometimes it's an opening and they go even more crazy. But it's the risk I have to take in that moment to save myself. So maybe I failed from Maybe I failed from getting Corey not to be really mean to Annika. I've probably failed at that. I probably, in that moment, haven't instilled great social values in Corey that makes him go, oh, I think I want to be like Mr. Kotis and treat Annika with, you know, probably that's not happening. So that might be a failure. But to react to that and to make a huge drama on top of that is what I'm returning from.

[33:31]

That's what I'm coming back from into, wow, this is the way things are. It's me and 30 kids. It's not just about me. This is not my show. This is not about me getting it right. This is an actual situation. And there's a little more than my own karma at play here. So stepping down off the throne of I run the world and participating in it and somehow just being with the failure is new. It's like being with the anger. These are new for me because I've spent so long gesturing around them, avoiding them. I've made my life so much more difficult by having this harder work to do when in my original nature is only human nature meeting itself. Oh, anger. How to be with anger.

[34:35]

Failure. I feel like this is failing. Or I can see, I taught this lesson Nobody gets it. They don't know how to compute the volume of a rectangular solid. They didn't succeed at teaching it for 50% of the class. Does it mean I spin out? Or does it mean I stand on my feet? This is what's happening. Nobody died. They're probably going to encounter this again. It's like, there's renewal, there's renewal. So, I think I'll stop there and have some time. Charlie. Oh god, be careful what you want!

[35:46]

What? Say it again. Will you say a little more? Okay, thank you. Sue? Thank you for your passionate failure. It really touched my heart, as always. I kept thinking of, with nothing to attain, Thank you, Sue.

[36:52]

Mark Boydston isn't here today, but often we meet in the community room for breakfast after morning Zazen and he whizzed by the other morning and said, you know, one of the four perverted views is thinking that you can attain material ease in this life. And that really struck me because sometimes I think in my classroom or in Zazen, I'm striving for material ease, and even if you get it, you don't keep it. Is that the same as mental and physical comfort? That's what I'm imagining. Does anyone know? It sounds, yeah, that sort of, that sense of well-being in the physical world. I mean, I think you have that experience, but attaining it as sort of like a permanent state is a perverted view. It is, and it is also Yeah, I think the ease is there in being with a messy desk.

[38:08]

Eric? Can you clarify, earlier on you said something to the effect of you hope this is not it because we're all sitting here like lumps of something and that would be terrible. My friend Lisa assured me that if I breathed and then say what came up, it would be okay, so. In that moment I thought, oh my God, if what I'm saying is the truth, it felt insufficient, and I would expect that should I actually hit the mark, we would all fly off our cushion in a flurry of beneficial action for all beings. which I'm sure will happen any moment. So I just sort of said it. I don't know if this is going to quite hit the mark, but thank you for speaking. It reminds me of something, one of the tales we heard when we were all listening, during the Life of Buddha class that I took.

[39:20]

suffered a lot if the stories are true. Even though nothing was written about him for several centuries, he became very thin and he was struggling very much. Finally, frankly I forget exactly how it came about, but he decided to eat some rice. he began to gain weight, and some of his followers were rather irritated at that, that he would relax, and so he had some flack about it, but then he became more heavy set, I don't know, and relaxed, and it just reminded me, somehow, does that communicate anything to you? Who knows? You can allow yourself.

[40:25]

Even Buddha allowed himself. And also he was surrounded by deities, pesky ones as well as helpful ones. It reminds me of your children that you deal with. It's like that. What you say makes me think of the relaxation part, sort of coming more toward the middle and not ascribing to an idea. I hear it, the middle way, the middle way. This is what Nancy's comment made me think. And then another part for me is yesterday at tea it came up for me and that is I guess it was fortuitous that you were the doshi this morning in the bodhisattva ceremony, because as all of us, we're on the path and then we fall off.

[41:30]

and falling off and that would return. Even if it is cultural and sort of like our particular flavor, it's just suffering. And if we didn't have this, we'd probably have something else, some other thing. Right. We just find some other way to suffer. So. In the Bodhisattva ceremony, the thing that really stood out for me was originally pure, don't defile. That human nature, I don't know if it has or is, but there is defilement. But what we're asking by returning to the path over and over again is remembering originally pure, don't make it worse. It can be bad, be with the badness, but don't add on. Yeah. Right. a big lesson for me. Ann? I really appreciated your talk and it brought back to me the days when I was a teacher, which was in the late 60s and early 70s.

[43:04]

I taught a lot of 9th grade and older kids, but especially my first couple years, a lot of 9th graders. And I think people who've never done it have absolutely no conception of what a difficult, incredibly difficult job it is. Especially if you open yourself up emotionally to the kids and you allow them to make their emotional needs known to you. I mean, I would go home at the end of the day feeling like Barbarella in that silly movie where, you know, whatever it was, those little dolls or something were just I wanted to do and I didn't resent it, I just felt so hopelessly inadequate to deal with it. The guy who was my mentor used to say to me, if you're reaching 10% of the kids, you're doing well, if that's any solace to you.

[44:14]

And I think you just have to, I taught for eight years and believe me, being a lawyer is a snap. You just, you know, each one of these kids is a life. They're a separate life, and they come into your life, and you're one of the innumerable labors that create their ultimate life. You're a little piece, and you do what you can. And in the moment, you feel like this huge thing. That's right. That's right. It's one thing. You have to save them. That's where not clinging to self is really helpful where the activity is in front of you instead of the notion Karen as whatever like really just entering the activity and do it.

[45:25]

And it's a great place to practice that. I just want to say to end up about around teaching, it is a fairly unique situation, although many of us do it. It's pretty wonderful and intense and it's set up. so that a teacher feels failure a lot. It's the way it's set up. But my situation is not unique in that it's my field where I create my delusion and attach to myself. So we all have that opportunity. You know, we all have our suffering. If I wasn't there, if I weren't there, I would probably be acting this out in some other way. Although the situation is unique, it's not special in its intensity. We all are at that edge. So I think we stop and I'll be outside too.

[46:33]

Thank you.

[46:34]

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