even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. And I wanted to start by just mentioning, I think it's a good idea to be careful about that phrase, because it can be misleading. On the one hand, as an invocation of gratitude, it's quite wonderful. I was thinking if I'd been born 50 years earlier, the chances of my encountering the Dharma would have been pretty slim. We're all very fortunate to be at a time and place where there are forms for practicing the Dharma readily available to us. On the other hand, the phrase can give a mistaken impression that it's hard to find an unsurpassed, complete, penetrating, and perfect Dharma.

[01:04]

That you have to look somewhere for it and search for it, and boy, you know, where is it? Gosh, it's really gonna be hard to find. And the fact is, an unsurpassed, penetrating, and perfect Dharma is right before you every moment. The phrase is still correct when it says is rarely met with. But the problem is we rarely meet it. The problem comes in our being available for the meeting. It's always there. But how do we meet it? Well, one way is coming to Sesshin.

[02:06]

I think we come to Sesshin going, OK, I'll meet it here. And this is the third day of Sesshin. And often by the third day, you're sort of going, oh, did I make a mistake? Of course, Sesshin can be difficult. It's not uncommon that there's a time in session where you sort of go, what am I doing here? Now, for some people, and for some sessions, as session goes on, it just gets easier and easier. And you just slide right into it and it's quite wonderful. And then sometimes it just starts getting very ordinary. And that's nice too. And sometimes it gets very difficult. And I wanted to offer this talk as encouragement.

[03:12]

Whether it's getting difficult or easy or ordinary, some encouragement is always good. So I'm going to begin with a quote from the record of Tungshan. Sojun has given me Tozan, Tungshan's record to be studying this practice period. And I'll read you this case, which is not in the Denko Roku. So the master asked Yunchu, where have you been? Oh, I've been walking the mountains, replied Yunchu. Which mountain was suitable for residing on, asked the master.

[04:19]

None was suitable for residing on, said Yunchu. Oh, in that case, have you been on all the country's mountains, said the master? Oh no, that isn't so, said Yunchu. Then you must have found an entry path, said the Master. No. There is no path, replied Yunchu. If there is a path, I wonder how you have come to lay eyes on this old monk, said the Master. If there were a path, then a mountain would stand between us, Hoshang, said Yunchu. And the master said, henceforth, not by a thousand, not even by 10,000 people will Yunchu be held fast. Well, I really like that case because as I think a lot of you know, I really like walking the mountains. And walking in the mountains is very much like doing Sesshin in many ways.

[05:26]

And much like you go to Sesshin often feeling, oh, okay, wow, this is gonna be something, you sort of go to the mountains that way too. But then you get to the mountains and you find really there's no path. Now, that might be a little confusing because we talk about the way, the path, the Buddha Dharma as the way. But we also in the Heart Sutra talk about no stopping, no path. So how do we put together this, the way but no path? Well in a previous talk I mentioned we create the path as we travel. We lay down a path in walking. So it's not like there's a predetermined path out there that I'll just find that and walk that way. In Sesshin we have this very wonderful form and we're just carried along by it but you know every Sesshin you have to find another path to get through the Sesshin.

[06:44]

But there's another problem besides the fact that the path only arises as you create it and walk on it and that is The Road's Walking Too. Do you know this poem by Jim Harrison? Beware, oh wanderer, the road is walking too, said Rilke one day to no one in particular, as good poets everywhere address the six directions. Ten directions. If you can't bow, you're dead meat. You'll break like uncooked spaghetti. Listen to the gods. They're shouting in your ear every second. Well, I don't know about you, but occasionally I feel a little stiff and dry like uncooked spaghetti.

[07:47]

And bowing is always good. But the fact is, the path is moving along. The Buddha Dharma is not a path which was fixed, and that's it, and you better find it. It's moving. It's changing every moment. It's changing here in America. It's changed in Asia. It's going to keep on changing. What it'll turn into, we don't know. Now, it also stays the same. but that part which stays the same you still have to access by the part which keeps changing by the relative. So the fact is even though we have this wonderful path we also get lost because of the nature of this wandering path and our wandering feet.

[08:54]

And we've talked a lot about faith in the class during this practice period. And it was really good to bring out that side. We didn't talk quite as much about doubt. And Sojin did talk about how doubt and faith are intricately related to each other and each helps the other out. But I thought I would bring up the side of doubt a little bit. Sojin said he's more of a faith type. I am more of a doubt type, so I've had to struggle with that. But doubt can be very helpful. And if you're in a difficult place in Sesshin, I encourage you to go deeply into your doubt. It's very useful. It's very useful. know we seek a path and our natural tendency is to seek a path that is full of light and wonder and spirit but we also talk about the dark.

[10:14]

In the light there's darkness, in the darkness there's light. Well, sometimes doubt feels kind of dark. I don't know where I am. I don't know what to do. I don't know whether what I'm doing is right. And usually doubt arises because we have some idea of how something should be and then it doesn't turn out that way. I might go hiking in the mountains And, oh, you know, I really want someplace beautiful, and it's beautiful, and there's flies all over the place. Or I remember the first trek I took in the Himalayas. We had hiked one or two days, and it was really hot and really humid, and we found this wonderful watering hole. And, oh, good. And, you know, we all took our clothes off, and we went swimming. And as we're swimming, we see these little floating things.

[11:18]

We were swimming in a place where cows came and wallowed, and the cow turds were, and probably human turds as well, since there was a village nearby, were floating along in the water, going, oh, what have we gotten ourselves into, hiding here in this place? I got a very good lesson in doubt and the virtues of not expecting things to be a certain way when I was in my early 20s. I lived in, I was uchideshi, which the person who lives in the house of their teacher, my shakuhachi teacher in Japan, in Tokyo for a while. And as is common in Japan, you know, he was the sixth in the lineage, and his father was the fifth and so forth and so on. And his father was pretty old by that time. He was in his 70s, late 70s.

[12:25]

He didn't give too many concerts. And he was going to give a concert, a public concert. And we all lived in the same area, but I hadn't heard his father play. And so my teacher said, do you want to hear my father play? I went, wow, you don't get to hear Kawase the fourth. Yeah. And so I went to the concert, and his playing was terrible. It was weak, and it was thin, and he didn't have much breath sustaining it, and he'd make some mistakes. And at the end of the concert, my teacher came to me and said, so what did you think of my dad's playing? And so I said, well, I'm very glad to have had a chance to listen to him. And my teacher laughed. He said, ah, you thought that he wasn't playing well. He said, that's because you expected him to play like a young man or like a 40-year-old man.

[13:27]

He played like a 77-year-old man, and his playing for a 77-year-old man was exactly what it should have been. It's a very different conception of how to bring out a sound or the dharma. There's no one right sound of the shakuhachi. There's no one right way of bowing or offering at the altar. And each time it's kind of interesting to have another way of offering and experience it anew. But we tend to look for the obviously good way, the obviously bright way. And so when something is going in a different way, like if we're having some difficulty in Sesshin or in the mountains, we think, well, something's not right.

[14:30]

And so we look for where the rightness is. And it reminds me of the old joke that we sometimes told here. about the drunk who's on the street and he's looking around under the lamp and a person comes up and says, what are you looking for? I'm looking for my keys. I'll help you. And they look and they look and they look. Are you sure you lost your keys here? No, I didn't lose my keys here. I lost them in that dark alley back there. Why are you looking here? The light's much better here. I mean, that's our tendency. It's a natural tendency. We want to look where the light is. But sometimes you have to look where the dark is. There's this wonderful poem by Wendell Berry which says, to go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.

[15:34]

Go without sight. find that the dark too blooms and sings and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings Really like that poem But it's not always easy to go in the dark In a lot of the Judeo-Christian literature, they talk more about this, you know, the dark night of the soul. It's being really important for faith. In the Hasidic literature there's talk all the time about getting up a certain level and then falling back down again and everything's gone. You're in despair. When you're trekking, You set out and you have a kind of idea of where you're going to go and then the path turns out to be different from how you expected.

[16:42]

And there's a kind of interesting process that one often goes through. This last trek that I went on, we got a certain distance and the path was covered with snow. We were going to go up to 20,000 feet and the snow was chin high at 10,000 feet and it was soft and rotten and you just couldn't go any further. So and you know this was you know a lot of planning went into that and basically we had to turn around and come back. So there's a kind of process when you're disappointed or when things aren't going your way. I think And at first you have the honeymoon period, then something happens and you're disillusioned. And disillusionment, we don't like to be disillusioned, but that's what the practice is about. So once you're disillusioned, then often you kind of rationalize it.

[17:51]

You say, well, this ain't so bad. This is okay. Maybe it'll get better. You know, you're sitting there, It's hurting, oh well, this isn't so bad. I'll just sit a little longer. It'll get better. Sometimes it does, but very often it gets worse. When I first started doing Zazen, I was, am a very slow student. Zazen was absolute torture for me for 10 years at least. And And I never liked sessions because, you know, usually by the end of a session I'd be depressed or tense or something had come up, you know, which was, and I'd be, and I'd go home and they'd say, oh, you're all feeling wonderful. And I'd go, oh, well. I remember asking, saying that Sojin once,

[18:55]

I have this problem, I don't like sessions." And Sojin said, don't worry about it, you will. He was right, but it took a while. So you rationalize, it's going to get better. And then it doesn't get better, and then you sort of try to accommodate to it. Well, I'll sit this way, or I'll take some ibuprofen, or I'll retie my boots on the trek, and I'll take more photos, or something like that. And that helps for a while, and at some point that stops working as well, and it gets difficult again. Usually at some point in your life or in your practice you reach a point where you feel you can't stand it. That everything has given way and you feel

[20:06]

I'm failing, I'm failing, I'm really screwing up. And then maybe you go, no, it's the practice is failing or this trip, the people who arranged this trip really screwed it up. Why did they do it now? So you can blame outside or you can blame inside, but sometimes everything gets taken away. I've mentioned in the past that I had a significant period where After I had my stroke in the mountains, I went through periods like this. And it felt like everything had been taken away. My own efforts weren't working. I literally couldn't walk. The Qigong, which was supposed to let me live to 110 in perfect health, hadn't stopped the stroke.

[21:13]

Eating well and exercising hadn't stopped the stroke. Zazen hadn't stopped the stroke. The things outside of me, my work had become, you know, I'd worked at the same place for 20 years and basically they were not treating me very well and not treating a lot of the staff very well. My wife had just left me. It was like, oh, you know, okay, well, what do you do? And it was really useful to stop and say, well, okay, if this is the case, if everything that I rely on can just not come through in the way I want it to, and of course the problem was in my wanting it to come through in a certain way, but we have wants, you know, and you have to face the fact that, you know, things may not turn out the way you want, well then

[22:29]

At that point, you're at the top of the 10-foot pole that we talk about in Zen. You go to the top of the 10-foot pole, and what do you do when you get to the top of the 10-foot pole? Well, you have to go further. You have to go further. You make a choice, and then you throw yourself off. But first you have to feel it's impossible. I think that's an important part of our spiritual development. It's getting to that point. Until you get to that point, how can you throw yourself off the pole? And throwing yourself off the pole, that doubt, leads to a leap of faith. But, and here's one of the central points I'd like to make. Faith is a choice. you can get to the top of the 10 foot pole and you can hold on for dear life and say, um, okay, this is as far as I go.

[23:37]

You can give up and just slide down, you know, but you have a choice at that point. And so I think faith depends on making a choice. So when you're faced with the gateless gate, what's your choice? Because when you reach that point of difficulty in Zazen, in a trip in your life, you've reached the gateless gate. And I'll tell you a story about the gateless gate. Kind of a story, but I'm stretching a little, but I like the story. True story, when I was, some of you have heard this, when I was in India the first time in 1988, I wound up getting assigned to the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore. And so I was scheduled to see Prabhu, the head of the department, for my first appointment at 10 o'clock that day.

[24:46]

So I got to his office at 10 of 10, And the door was shut, and it had a sign on it, please do not knock. Therapist, psychologist, makes sense. So I sat down next to the door. 10.05, 10.10, 10.15, no problem. I figure, well, this is India, I might as well get used to it. Time's flexible here. Around 10.15, Someone comes out of the office, the door closes. I figure, oh, Prabhu will come out and get me now. And someone else just runs in, and the door closes. I think, oh, there must be some kind of crisis or something going on. So it's 10.20, 10.30, 10.35. I'm, OK, this is India. And the door opens, and Prabhu comes out. He's chatting very nicely with this other person. And he looks, and he sees me there. And he goes, oh, Bob, you're here. I say, yes. Oh, when did you get here? Oh, I was, you're about 10 of 10. He says, well, why didn't you let me know?

[25:50]

Well, your door was closed. And it said, you know, please do not knock. And Prabhu looked at me and he said, that means just come in. That's the sign on the gateless gate. It says, please do not knock. Just come in. With every unsurpassed, penetrating, perfect dharma, the invitation is, just come in. Now, you know, don't misinterpret that. That doesn't mean just, you know, run into Melo's office whenever you want. But it does mean be careful not to spend your time knocking on the door or waiting outside. It's easy to fall into that trap.

[26:52]

So here's a koan for you. When you're having dokusan with Mel and you knock on his door and the bell rings inside, which side of the door are you on? Well, just come in. One of the ways to come in is we practice in the body. And there's a case in the Eihei Kodoku where Sazawa Joshi asks Dachi, what's the body of Prajna? And Dachi said, what's the body of Prajna? Next day, Dachi says, Zazu sweeping the ground and asks, what's the body of Prajna? And Joshu throws down his broom, claps his hands, roars with laughter. And Daji goes back to his abbot's quarters. Well, I like Dogen's comment on this.

[27:57]

He says, Daji and Joshu only were able to speak phrases that resembled Prajna. If someone asked me, what's the body of Prajna, I would say to him, just come along and follow it. Just come along and follow it. Let go of worrying about where you're going and whether it's the path. Let go of achieving success or failure. When you just go along and follow it, the truth of the Dharma becomes simple. There's nothing added and there's nothing subtracted. The truth is simple.

[28:59]

Do you know this poem by W.H. Auden? I really like this poem. It's about Dharma calling. Another gate. That's right. Yeah, down the rabbit hole. I'm actually hoping to write something about the Zen of Alice in Wonderland, which I think has a lot in it. Anyway, this poem is about Herman Melville, who most of you know, wrote Moby Dick. It goes, Toward the end, he sailed into an extraordinary mildness and anchored in his home. Goodness existed. That was the new knowledge. His terror had to blow itself quite out to let him see it. But it was the gale had blown him, deafened him with thunder, confused with lightning, hatred for hatred ending in a scream, the unexplained survivor breaking off the nightmare.

[30:07]

All that was intricate and false. The truth was simple. Evil is unspectacular and always human. and shares our bed and eats at our own table, and we are introduced to goodness every day, even in drawing rooms among a crowd of faults. He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect, but wears a stammer like a decoration." So many of us are unhappy with our stammers. You know, if you can think of your faults as your decorations, I think that helps. And what's evil? Evil is not some thing that you can point to. You might just think of it as lack of mindfulness, but certainly

[31:17]

We're all evil. We're all good. And we're beyond good and evil. But we get to those things which bother us. And then what do we do with them? In my eating bowls, the sleeve which holds the spoon and the chopsticks and Setsu, I think it's called. There's something wrong with it, which I've tried to fix many times, but somehow the spoon catches whenever I try to get it out. And although I've tried sewing it and unsewing it and ironing and unironing, it always catches. Evil! But it's quite wonderful because I've had to adapt to it.

[32:22]

And so each time it's, OK, how are we going to do it this time? What are you going to tell me this time? It becomes an interesting interplay. So the poem goes on talking about evil and goodness. Every time they meet, the same thing has to happen. It's the evil that's helpless like a lover. and has to pick a quarrel and succeeds, and both are openly destroyed before our eyes. Good and evil, both destroyed. For now he was awake and knew no one is spared, except in dreams. But there was something else the nightmare had distorted. Even the punishment was human and a form of love. Reborn, he cried in exultation and surrender, the Godhead is broken like bread, we are the pieces, and sat down at his desk and wrote a story. Well, we're sitting down on our Zafu and maybe writing a story or moving beyond a story, but we're just bits and pieces.

[33:35]

Dogen, quote Zen Master Yuan Wu saying, straightforward mind is always bits and pieces. So you need to be kind to the bits and pieces. Be intimate with them. Dogen says, please cherish your skin, flesh, bones, and marrow. Knowing each other, intimate friends grow even more intimate. I mean, that's really our question. How can we, as intimate friends, intimate with the bell, and the zatu, and the floor, and the person next to you, and the person far away from you, intimate, how can we become even more intimate and see that the flaw is an important part of the whole thing.

[34:40]

One of my favorite poems by Dogen says, all my life false and real, right and wrong tangled, playing with the moon, ridiculing wind, listening to birds, many years wasted seeing the mountain covered with snow. This winter I suddenly realize snow makes a mountain. your difficulties which make your practice. And well I want to stop so that we have time for questions and I'll stop with another case from Tung Shan and take us back to the mountains. Sojin was mentioning yesterday how almost all cases start with a question so The first case I read started, where have you been?

[35:46]

In this one, the master asked the monk, where have you come from? And you know, when you go home after Sesshin, someone's going to ask you this. Where you been? What are you going to reply? Well, the monk replies, from wandering in the mountains. Ah, did you get to the top of any mountain? Asked the master. Yep, I did. Monk replied. Was there anyone on the top? Asked the master. No, there wasn't. If there was no one on the top, then you didn't reach the top, said the master. If it were the case that I hadn't gone to the top, how could I know there was no one there? Responded the monk. Well, why didn't you stay a while? Asked the master. I wasn't opposed to staying. But there's one in India who wouldn't permit it. Oh, I've been suspicious of this fellow from the first, the master said.

[36:50]

Throughout the session and after, wherever you get to, whether it's the summit or the valley, don't stay there. If you get to some wonderful experience here in Sesshin, don't stay there. There's a whole world to live in. An unsurpassable, complete, and perfect dharma for us to meet. Maybe you have some questions. Charlie, and then Ross. Sounds like a good idea. Thank you.

[37:55]

Ross. Thank you. Yesterday, I really appreciated your insight and angle to the question of no gaining idea and no gaining mind, no losing mind. So Open completely. And it's not... Don't get stuck on where you go. The question is who you are. How do you express yourself in that situation? Does that answer your question? Thank you.

[39:00]

That, I like that. Or down there. I fall a lot, too. Yeah, I have a question. A few years ago, I kind of went through, I mean, of course, the story was different, but the feeling was the same, the feeling of having lost everything, and feeling that I'd tried everything and it wasn't working. No. No, I don't think it's cheating at all. There, as someone who's very familiar with depression and someone who's taken antidepressants and someone who works in this field, there's a difference between depression and the dark night of the soul. But they both can occur at the same time.

[40:04]

And if they occur at the same time, the depression can actually make it harder to get through the dark night of the soul. And you should take care of the depression. There's really a different feel to it. And I really do think there's a biochemistry to depression which, you know, it changes according to whether we're exercising and the kind of life we're leading, but there are neurotransmitters which do things certain ways. Well, Courtney has been wearing a boot recently because she had surgery on her foot. Some of you know her. So she's sat differently than usual. Is that cheating? I don't think so. I think it's wonderful that she did what she needed to do to practice. And sometimes that involves taking an antidepressant.

[41:09]

Now, you said there was a difference between a dark night in the soul and depression. Yeah. Is there some way to tell? Now, that's a good question. I mean, there's taking antidepressants. There is a way to tell. Unfortunately, the only way I know of and maybe other people know another way is, I mean, I just had to deal with enough episodes of depression that it got very familiar and I could recognize its taste and feel. I can tell you that one of the first things which helped me in dealing with depression was, I remember one day walking along going, oh, I'm depressed. And just stopping and asking myself a question, which was, am I depressed or am I sad?

[42:23]

To go into it and really figure out what exactly is the quality here. because depression has a... I can tell you one way of telling. Depression feels permanent and tries to convince you that it's permanent and this is the way things always are and always will be and always have been, that's a sure sign of depression because it's not true. So that's that mark of pseudo permanence I'd say is a mark of Well, not dealing with the physical things, although I have to say being carried on the back of a porter down steep slopes and realizing that if he slipped, we were gone, certainly was an exercise in both letting go and humility.

[44:06]

I mean, the male ego. It doesn't take well to be incarcerated. But what I did was at a certain point go, okay, I can live any way I want. If I want to, I can be a dirty, rotten scoundrel. I can be a thief. I can be a hedonist. I can do any... I'm going to just start from scratch. what's going to be the life that I want to live. And I gave myself the freedom to just look and say, what's the foundation of my life? And it took six months to a year to come up with things which finally felt, yeah. And of course I talked to people and also I kept on

[45:07]

doing things as much as I could. So, you know, I would do Sazen, I would do Qigong. I wouldn't do it very well, but I'd keep along with that. But with the option of, okay, I could stop this. I could just write it off. So, I don't know if that was non-backsliding faith or not. But somehow it helped clear the field. So especially since I grew up with a feeling of a lot of shoulds, I should do this, I should do that, and it was really such a relief to be rid of the shoulds. How do I want to live my life? That also helps depression.

[46:12]

Linda? You were talking about practice of letting go of success, failure, right, wrong. Gaining, yeah, the gaining mind. I've been looking at that. And out in the In the Zendo, that's the practice. And in the world, it's all about success, failure, getting things done. If I let go of any mind in my worldly life, I would get into trouble. The world isn't set up for that. So is the Zendo different from the world? Well, yes and no. I wouldn't be so sure that if you let go of gaining mind in the world, that you'd get into the kinds of trouble that you think you would.

[47:22]

Now, some people wouldn't like it, but other people might greet you with, in ways that you wouldn't expect of it. This is just so wonderful. Now, that doesn't mean stop doing anything. I mean, so if you have an article that you need to write, you can still write the article. You're just letting go of being invested in whether anybody says, oh, that's a great article. If you're in a position where you have to do a lot of publishing, Well, frankly, a lot of things which are published these days are things which probably the world doesn't need. You know, there's a lot of academic churning in order to get tenure. And I did make a decision at one point that anything that I wrote, I was going to write because I wanted, I felt it was something that would make some contribution and I wasn't going to just generate version 3A, 3A prime, 3A double prime of the same article, which happens a lot.

[48:42]

And yeah, you might not get tenure because of that. But there'll be other people who really appreciate your work. because that work will really come from your heart and those people will find you. They would. They have. They do. How are we on time? One more question from Richard. One more question from Richard and then we'll stop. They keep following me. But much easier to smile at them. It's so much more fulfilling to live a life from meeting things in the way I want to, which usually often corresponds to the way that I should might work.

[50:08]

It doesn't always. When a shoot comes back and is bothering me, I use it as a warning sign. Is something going astray in my practice? And it can be very helpful that way. Okay. Things are numberless.

[50:45]

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