Good morning. I think that most Zen students know the koan of Zui Gan from Mumon Kan. Zui Gan was a well-known teacher in the Tang Dynasty in China. And when he got lost, he would say to himself, Master, and then he would answer, Yes. And then he would say, Wake up. And then he would answer, yes.

[01:02]

And then he would say, don't be fooled by anything. And then he would say, okay. So whether he was with people or alone, he would do the same thing. If he was alone in his little temple, and his mind was straying, he would wake himself up by calling to himself. So he was very careful because he knew that it's easy to get lost. And he knew what it meant to get lost. So he would always bring himself back. Most of us don't know when we're lost, is one of the big problems that we have.

[02:15]

So we don't have a way of finding ourself after we're lost. because often, or mostly, we don't know that we are lost when we're lost. So, Zuigan's practice was a practice of awareness, a practice of constantly waking up, which is the epitome of Zen practice. This little koan epitomizes Zen practice. Zen practice is not so difficult. It's actually quite simple. It's so simple that we stumble past very easily looking for it. We can wander around for 20 years looking for it, but it's really quite simple. Just continually wake up. So, Zuligan's wonderful koan, when he would get lost, he would say, Master, or if you're a woman, you can say Mistress, but Master covers both genders, so I'll use the word Master.

[03:46]

Who is asking and who is answering? After all, Zui Gon says, Master. And then he answers himself, calling himself and answering himself. So in this koan, who is calling and who is answering? That's a great question for all of us. Who is the master? This by itself is the koan that we should all be dealing with. Where does my authority come from? Where is the root of myself? Where does my yes and my no come from? How do I know what to do? What's the purpose of this life?

[04:53]

All questions, actually, ultimately come down to this one question. And then he says, wake up, be aware. And then he answers himself. Okay, okay, I will. This is the question that, this is what all Zen students should keep in their mind at all times. This is called 24-hour practice. It's also called the practice of turning the Dharma, turning the 24 hours. to constantly be aware the 24 hours of reality without being turned by the 24 hours.

[06:00]

Master Joshu says to a student, the problem with you is that you are turned by the 24 hours while I turn the 24 hours. And then Zui Gan says to himself, don't be fooled by anything. Don't let yourself be fooled by anything. How are we fooled by things? And what is there to be fooled by? This is a great question. So, how do we have our own authority?

[07:03]

How do we know what's right and what's wrong? How do we know who to follow and who not to follow? Or what to believe and what not to believe? And where does this authority come from? So this question, this koan has three koans within it, and they're all related. Yesterday was my 64th birthday, and Rev's birthday, well actually it was Friday, And Reb's birthday was his 50th yesterday, and so we had a birthday party down the road at the beach, our annual Abbott's birthday party. So every year, you know, we had another one.

[08:15]

Last year it was 63. This year it's 64. And people are beginning to treat me a little bit like an old man sometimes, which feels a little strange to me. But I must admit that the older you get, the less age pairs you have. When I think about my experience of 64 years, I was born in 1929, the year of the Great Depression. And my mother said that I brought on the depression. At least I brought on her depression. But she was very forgiving. But those were very difficult times that I was born into.

[09:20]

The Great Depression was through the first half of the 30s. Everybody was very poor. And it was a terrible time in that people didn't have much. My mother said that she would send me to the butcher shop for a bone for the dog and then she would put it in the soup. People were that desperate in those days. I remember growing up without any money. I never had any money when I was a kid. And to this day, I really don't understand it. But those days were very hard on people, but they were also, in another sense, very good, because it kind of brought the country together in a common way.

[10:30]

Everybody was poor. There were some people that weren't poor, most everybody was poor and it kind of united the country. People helped each other and felt more interdependent than they do nowadays. So there was this feeling of or incentive for everybody to help everybody else and the country started to pick itself up little by little and make a kind of common effort toward prosperity. And then came the Second World War, and that continued to unite the country. That really united the country behind a common cause. And then after the war, everything changed. After the war, people started to, the men got out of the army and the women got out of the army and the navy.

[11:47]

There was a great effort toward building the country toward prosperity. But one of the problems that arose out of this was that people were working toward prosperity, but they sacrificed quality of life in order to do it. And if you're only 20 or 30 or 40, you maybe didn't experience the loss of quality of life. Nowadays, if you're 20 years old, you just take the way things are now for granted, that that's the way things are. But you don't realize, may not realize, how low the quality of life has become in the last 40 years.

[12:55]

It looks like prosperity is going this way, but the quality of life is going this way. So, they used to make cars. When I was a kid, the headlights and the bumpers were nickel-plated. And then, after the war, they became chrome-plated. And now, they're made out of cardboard. You can take a look at your bumper on your new car, and you'll see that it's made out of cardboard. And you'll see that the grill is made out of tinfoil. I was shocked the other day when I was fixing my wife's headlight, and you have to take off the whole bumper in order to change the headlight, the whole grill in order to change the headlight. And the grill is made out of tinfoil, stamped tinfoil. So the quality goes down, and proportionately, the price rises.

[14:05]

So you get less and less, and then you'd be charged more and more. This is not a soapbox for something, but I'm really talking about the quality of life, the deterioration of the quality of life everywhere. So instead of, at some point, this spirit of mutual trust changed, turned, and in order to pursue this ideal of prosperity, the quality of life has been sacrificed. in order to really become prosperous, people began to feel justified in cheating each other. It became very common at some point for people to say, just get yours, doesn't matter how you do it, and wink.

[15:19]

Cheating has become the norm. This is very shocking to someone at 64. To me, my most shocking thing in our society is that cheating on each other has become the normal way to do business. And so people don't trust each other anymore. And you see the results all around us. So in the last 15 years or so, 12 years, the famous 12 years, the treasury was opened up and those who could were allowed to just steal everything in the treasury. That's where it came to. And the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

[16:27]

After the war, during the war, we had built up this tremendous war machine. And that was part of our prosperity. And so we decided to continue this machine after the war. Until finally, most of our money and resources had been going into continuing the armament spilled up. And you have to use that stuff. Once you spend 20, 30 years building it up, it doesn't make sense not to use it. So it's very difficult. And it trickles down. The real trickle down is that people are shooting each other in the streets because We have gun fever.

[17:32]

We've built up this tremendous psychological state of gun fever, where we solve all our problems shooting each other. And it's really scary, as you know. All you have to do is pick up the paper, and it's there every day. And it's getting closer. And it's really getting scary. I didn't used to be scared. When I was living in the Mission District during the 50s, I was living at 23rd and South Van Ness, and I used to leave my door wide open all night. I mean, not just unlocked. I had a dog, and I wanted the dog to go out. I didn't want to have to get up and walk the dog, so I just left the door open to let the dog go in and out. And the door was wide open all night. We used to be able to walk around anywhere in the city without any apprehension at all.

[18:39]

Men, women, everybody, children. Now, you can't even let your children go out to play in certain places. We've become the slaves of our children, taking them here and taking them there. They can't even go around town by themselves. When I was a kid, I was all over town by the time I was 10 years old. Anyway, we have to ask ourselves this question, you know. What's going on? How do we deal with it? We can't wait for somebody to take care of it. In Buddhism, we have Maitreya Buddha.

[19:44]

Maitreya Buddha will appear sometime as the next Buddhist savior, just like the Jewish and Christian messiah. The names sound very close, Messiah and Maitreya. Maitreya means love, Maitri. So the Maitreya Buddha will usher in the era of loving kindness, but we can't wait for Maitreya. Every one of us has to find Maitreya within us. I think this is the true era of Maitreya will be when we all start realizing ourself and taking care of ourself.

[20:47]

Taking care of really getting down to finding out what our life is about and not being fooled. Like Zui Gan says, don't be fooled. Don't let anything fool you. When each one of us wakes up to don't be fooled by anything, then things will start to change. But we just get fooled. We allow things to go on and on. and we lose our sense of value so easily, we play into delusion. And everyone does. It's really hard not to. Really hard not to. There's so much temptation to just go along with things.

[21:52]

It's hard to turn things around. But in Iowa and Missouri, the dikes are breaking, the levees are, and the water's coming close up to everybody's house. So in the same way, the evils of civilization are lapping at our feet. And I think it's time to really take it seriously, but we wait until the last minute. It's human nature. Human nature is to wait until the last moment and then realize there's something wrong. And I do it too. So I just wanted to bring up, somehow today, I felt a need to address this question.

[23:27]

Of course, the world goes through many cycles. The world goes through, human civilization goes through many cycles, and as we know, civilizations have come and gone. And one thing that comes to my mind is that people don't live long enough to be able to really change things. You know, we live actually a very short life, and although there's an accumulated body of knowledge which informs us of how to live, even though we may think that's good, we don't pay so much attention to it. And each one of us has to experience our own life. Each one of us has to learn the lessons of life by ourself. This is the problem, I think.

[24:55]

No matter how much accumulated knowledge we have, each one of us has to learn these lessons by ourself. So you could say that life is a testing ground for our character. We kind of wonder, well, what's life about anyway? Civilization? I don't know, people are born all over the world in different civilizations, into different circumstances. Some are very primitive and some are very sophisticated, but each one has the same problems. Whether you're born into a tribe of pygmies in Africa or in the middle of London, we all have the same problems, basically, and the problem is problem of how we learn what is noble character. And you find noble and ignoble folks all over the world.

[26:01]

And whether we have automobiles or bows and arrows, it doesn't matter. It really makes absolutely no difference. The problem is, what's real in our life? What's the real purpose of our life? The toys of childhood are not the same toys of old age. But we tend to think that the toys are somehow what our life is about. But when we look through the toys, the satisfaction is not so great.

[27:10]

There's something else, always something else, something bothering us, something unsatisfying. So we go through one toy after another, looking for the ultimate toy, but we don't find it. Can't find the ultimate toy, the ultimate distraction. At some time, we have to address this question. Master? Yes. Who is the master? And who am I? And how do I stay awake? And how do I not get fooled? And how do I turn this thing around? And if I can't turn it around, how do I deal with it?

[28:11]

I think this is the problem that most of us have. Frustration. and anxiety, and even though it may not be direct, it influences our life all around us. So, problem of our life is when we get lost, how do we come back? we're constantly getting lost, constantly coming back. When we sit Zazen, we sit very still and very concentrated, but at the same time, we get lost. And over and over, we have to continually wake up and come back, bring ourself back. This is what Zazen is. Zazen is continuously getting lost and continuously finding ourself. And in our daily life, it's the same way, except that we don't realize it.

[29:16]

When you sit in zazen, you realize it. You understand that the fundamental thing about our life is that we're constantly getting lost and constantly coming back. This is called, in the Theravada tradition, the practice of recollection. When you get up in the morning, you know that your feet are on the floor. And when you go to the bathroom, you know that that's what you're doing. When you brush your teeth, you're just brushing the teeth. And when you walk from one place to another, just walking. You know, when we go from one place to another, the idea is to get there. We think, well, I'm here and I'm going to get there. So we put all our attention into getting there, but we don't pay attention so much to walking.

[30:19]

What are the feet doing? What is the breath doing? So mostly we judge the activity of our life by the big events. And the small events, what we consider the small events, don't seem so significant. But if you think about it, if you are aware, you know that walking from the kitchen to the bathroom is a great event. Each step is your life. Each breath is your life. it's important to pay attention to your life. Otherwise, we waste a lot of time only thinking about our ideals, or where we're going, or the main event. But each one of these small events is, at this moment, the main event.

[31:21]

Each step of our life is the main event at that time. This is called living your life completely and thoroughly and returning, constantly returning to ourself. Easy to do, but easier to forget. We really get caught up up here. In Zen practice, we maybe don't think so much. This is a kind of stereotype of Zen students. The Zen student doesn't think so much, which is not true. The Zen student is thinking all the time. When you bring your attention to this moment's activity, it's called not thinking.

[32:34]

Thinking's going on all the time, but it's called not thinking. It's the thought and the activity are not separate. It's called not thinking. When the thought and the activity are separated, then we call it thinking. So Zuigan, always waking himself up, always coming back, he realizes when his mind is straying, he realizes when he's lost. Most of us don't realize when we're lost. We try to think our way out. But actually, the more we try to think our way out, the more we get lost. the less connected we are.

[33:43]

Thinking is wonderful, philosophy is great, but look where we are. Technology is wonderful, science is great, but look where we are. Anyway, I think that my feeling is that through practice, I don't say that you should be a Buddhist. You don't have to be, but I'm not a Buddhist. But through practice, we can start to trust ourself and trust those people around us and bring some loving kindness into the world unconditionally and usher in a new era right around ourself.

[35:04]

We don't have to save the world. just light up our own area, just light up our own life with each other, with awareness and trust and love, and not be so concerned about ourselves. not be so concerned about our own prosperity. Prosperity is a big trap. As soon as someone has something a little bit more than we do, we get very anxious. And when we want something badly enough, we'll do anything to get it. This is where prosperity leads us.

[36:07]

So be very careful. I used to think that my parents were awful because we didn't have anything when I was a kid. But now I really appreciate the fact that I had that training and not needing so much. So we take this prosperity for granted, but it's just a flash, just a drop in the bucket of time. At some point, we'll all be poor again, and then we'll all have to do something to unite ourselves and help each other. Anyway, Thanks for listening.

[37:10]

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