Why can't this where I am right now be my field of practice? Why do I want to be somewhere else? That's a perfect illustration, actually, because you're describing so clearly and with such vivid awareness, not wanting to be how and where you are. Completely in that experience. Right. But knowing that I have to, you know, that's what I have to work with. Because this is where I am, not anywhere else. Exactly. Yeah. Great. Sarah. Well, today, my day was interrupted by my car not functioning. And I had to take it to the shop, which was hard to get it to the shop. And it's the fifth time that I've had this problem that should not really be a problem. It has to do with the manufacturer.

[01:00]

And I've been exasperated in the past by having this, you know, incident recur. But for some reason, it happened and I just said to myself, well, now I have to deal with this, you know. I had to take it to the shop. The whole ordeal took hours. But, you know, typically I could get in a bit of a state about why this keeps happening and it costs money and, you know. But it was just another thing that had to be taken care of. So I didn't complain so much or. Thank you very much. These are all beautiful examples, both on the pleasant valence and the less pleasant valence.

[02:04]

And it's like, just this. The text starts out, As all things are Buddhadharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, birth and death, and there are Buddhas and sentient beings. In most translations, it's not as, it's when. They have the same meaning, but functionally. It's like when this is happening. When we're seeing through the lens of Buddha Dharma, of the Buddha's teachings, when we're looking through that lens, when we're experiencing all things as Buddha Dharma, what we see is delusion and realization. Oh, I'm deluded now. Oh, I'm having a moment of realization. This is practice, or I'm definitely not practicing. Birth and death, which is a way of talking about arising and passing.

[03:06]

And there are Buddhas and sentient beings. And I'm usually one and not the other. So I'm a sentient being and there are other Buddhas, not me. So we have this discerning, discriminating mind. And the next one is, as the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no Buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death. So there's no fixed or inherent self, and the absence of this is one of the three marks of all existence, that there is impermanence, no self, and either dukkha or nirvana, depending on how we're relating with it, suffering or nirvana, which is our response to the fact that there is no thing there that, you know, this book is trees and sun and process and all of those things and will eventually no longer be this book.

[04:21]

It will go back into some other form. And this is the Heart Sutra, right? No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue. So that is negating like so many, the Heart Sutra negates so many parts of the Buddhadharma, the Buddhadharma as it's taught. The Buddha way is basically leaping clear of the many and the one. Thus there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and Buddhas. So this leaping clear of the many and the one is transcending or going beyond duality and non-duality. And it's reaffirming. It's not saying that there is nothing. It's like when you know that you can see things as individual things,

[05:21]

as individual objects. We can relate to them that way. And we can also see that there is the mycelium or whatever Indra's net that weaves everything together, that we are not separate from this. So the individuality and the interconnectedness of everything, we're reaffirming both of these. But as human beings, we're reaffirming the profound value of existence itself. Things exist. How amazing that they exist, as does time and space and all that we experience. All of this is a genuine experience that we're having. So I was thinking it's kind of like instead of, I mean, we do have these, well, you could say that These three statements are developmental.

[06:25]

They're linear. The first is kind of a naive point of view. There's, you know, there's tables and chairs and me and you, and that's, you know, that's kind of ordinary mind. And that, you know, we practice and then, or we have experiences that just arise on their own. And in that state, we're like, oh... this isn't all there is. There is something else here that I am becoming awake and alert to. And this has so much more of a sense of immediacy. This is real reality and the other is not really reality. That's kind of ordinary reality. That's less than. I want to get out of that because there's a lot of suffering and I want to get to the juicy cart, which is awakening, which can... be a wonderful impetus to practice, but that's not what Dogen's saying, actually. He's saying, you can view the world this way, as individual beings and existences.

[07:31]

You can view it as completely interconnected, that there is no abiding self. And you can also leap clear of both and reaffirm, thus, There are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and Buddhas. So we can come back and act in the world from this wider perception of how things really are, that we can act from a sense of interconnectedness and interdependence and seeing as clearly as possible how to be of benefit to the world. It does matter what we do, and this is this is like the heart of bodhisattva practice. It's not just to wake up, it's how we are in the world, how we're being of benefit to the world, to ourselves and to each other. I wanted to read a little bit from...

[08:41]

Meeting the Myriad Things, Shinshu's book. This is Shinshu's writing, not Dogen. The question of time in Dogen's work, this is the when, is important because it is only within the context of a specific being time, a specific being in time, or Dharma position, that we enact our understanding. It doesn't happen somewhere outside of that. It happens in a moment, in a place in time. That's where we enact it. This response cannot happen in some unspecific future or past. The past may inform the present, as may our future desires, but our life can only be lived and expressed in the present moments unfolding. Sometimes it is helpful to relate to the delusions of realization, the labels of delusion and realization, birth and death, Buddhas and sentient beings.

[09:48]

Sometimes we must let go of these categories, resulting in the mind of no delusion and no realization and so on. So when could you imagine that it would be helpful to look through the lens of, for example, delusion and realization? And when would you want to let that go? Maddy? It's been helping me a lot lately to keep that duality in mind when I'm trying to separate my existence and attitude, emotions in the moment from the reality of what I think is more of like my samsaric life, which is like... my mortgage and all of my financial obligations right now. I can't discount those things. And if I'm in just the moment, there's a tension between compartmentalizing too much to the point where I'm ignoring those things versus being able to sit with them and sit with the idea that, yes, we live in

[10:58]

sort of a delusional society in that way where there are all these abstractions that are constantly beating us into suffering. And we must relate to them, but we don't have to let them affect us in the moment. Great. Thank you. So Maddie was saying that it helps her to navigate going between a realm of practice and a realm of everyday life where there are things like a job and a mortgage and everyday things to handle that need that mind of discriminating this and that. And one more thing. When I got home from Saturday, after our talk on Saturday morning, when I got out of the car, I just sighed and I said, well, back to the world of death and taxes. And that was how I got home. She said after the Dharma talk on Saturday, she got home, got out of the car and said, okay, back to the realm of death and taxes.

[12:02]

The inescapable, right? Ellen, did you have your hand up? Yeah, I was, this I've told many people. I used to sit with Joko Depp and at the end position, she would say, okay, go out in the world and don't get hit by a bus. You know, the Lord is real. You know, it's like real. Yes. You have to function. You know, it's our survival. We need it. We need that perspective. Yes. As R.H. Blight said, if you persist in the belief that there is nothing there and there are no walls, you will run into one. The world's kind of relentless in that way. She also said, it is helpful to be clear about Dogen's belief in the efficacy of your life in all of its complexity.

[13:05]

Just as it is, it has total efficacy for your practice, despite what it may look or feel like in any given moment. In Birth and Death, another classical, Shoji, Dogen writes, Your present birth and death itself is the life of Buddha. If you attempt to reject it with aversion, you thereby lose the life of Buddha. If you abide in it, attaching to birth and death, you also lose the life of Buddha and are left with only its outward appearance. You attain the mind of Buddha only when there is no hating of birth and death and no desiring of nirvana. You attain the mind of Buddha only when there is no hating of birth and death and no desiring of nirvana. I personally have found it periodically very helpful if I'm actually hating birth and death to just completely be honest and say I'm hating my current birth and death.

[14:11]

And then I'm completely in the present moment and things start to change. When I'm not being upright about acknowledging that I'm hating it, It tends to persist because then I'm trying not to have that feeling, which can last a very long time. So there's just being with what is and then getting to the point of can I let go? Can I let go of the resistance? Can I let go of the clinging? Both ways. There's so many good bits of this. Okay, let's see.

[15:21]

Okay, so the fourth part, the fourth sentence is yet an attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion, weeds spread. In the Soto Zen text project, which is, it's like a, it's a bridge between, it's kind of a translation tool, because it has all these footnotes and what the Chinese, you know, the kanji characters are, so it's very direct. And they translate, yet in attachment, blossoms fall, And in aversion, weeds spread as, and yet, while this is so, it is simply flowers falling when we cherish them, weeds growing when we despise them. Which I really like. It's like, that's it. That's our life. You know? We don't want something to change, and it changes.

[16:21]

And we're sad. We have attachment. And we're... We have aversion to something, and it happens, and we're unhappy about it. And this too is our life. This feeling too is our life. All of it. There's nothing left out. And this, the nice thing about the SOTAS and text project, that's the one in eight volumes. It's not quite that big. It's only this big. But it's on reserve, so you can just look it up, which is very fun. And Genjo Cohen's the first thing in the first volume. So that phrase, flowers falling when we cherish them, weeds growing when we despise them, is actually a quote from, I think it's an 8th century Chinese master, Jing, where a monk asks, what is the reverend's house style? Which, you know, in Soto's end, we often say, what is the wind of the family house?

[17:25]

You know, what's... Yeah, what's your style? What's the flavor of what you do? And yeah, what makes you you? And that was his response, was flowers fall from my love for them. Weeds grow from my hatred of them. Otherwise, it's just flowers doing their thing or weeds doing their thing. but they become flowers falling in sadness because I love them. I love them in this moment where they're like this and not like that. I love this perfectly cleared path, not with the weeds growing in it. Dogen is radically all-inclusive. Like there is literally nothing left out of our experience, of practice, of reality.

[18:26]

And he reaffirms that over and over and over again. Nothing is other than ourselves. Nothing is other than reality. So there is nothing other than awakening itself. It doesn't look like something else. It just looks like... waking up to this moment as it is and saying basically, yes. Yes. You gave the example of when you hate something, you say, OK, I hate something. And then that's being in that experience. Am I repeating this? Yes, yes, because I'm actually having the experience that I'm having rather than doing this. That's what's happening. There's this. So I was thinking about that and how that would relate to my life and practice. And if I hate something or have some violent thought or something that seems unwholesome,

[19:37]

just to say this is happening doesn't get me necessarily into that zone of liberation because the energy of hate, just using hate as an example, would include an impulse to destroy something, to hurt something. Yes. So in order to have the benefit of experiencing it as it is, I'll have to refrain from that action. Yes. Darn. I'm saying that you made it sound pretty simple. Of course it is simple. It's extremely difficult. It is extremely difficult. Yes, yes. And there's... It's not a trick exactly, but it's a skill. It's a sort of a knack to shifting out of... our ideas about something, our thoughts about something, well, depending on where you're getting caught.

[20:47]

We can get caught in thoughts and we can get caught in the body. So if you're caught in the thoughts, it can be very helpful to be in the body and be like, okay, so what is my felt experience? What's happening? Am I having, like, are there images that are coming up? Are my ears ringing? What is the felt experience of having this big hate, this no, this difficulty? And as always, be safe with it. Maybe you just need to go for a run and not try to be present with it. Maybe it's just like changing, getting yourself in a place where you can meet that in a wholesome way. But... To be present within the body when that is accessible in a way that's not overwhelming, that's when you start noticing that things change. It's like, oh, this shoulder is way up here and this one's doing this.

[21:49]

That's like, oh, that's interesting. And then often just with that awareness, things can start to let go somewhat. Or that's when the emptiness side comes in. It's... Sensations in the body, it's particular thoughts, it's the way we're holding ourselves. And to start feeling into another way of being can loosen that. It's not instantaneous, but it can provide an opening. You need to refrain from acting it out. Totally. Linda's point is you need to, you can feel it that you need to refrain from acting out hating something, especially when it's hating violently. Questions and comments on mine? And then if you do act it out, you can still practice with that. Yes, and if you do act it out, you can still practice with that, but we try not to.

[22:54]

But yeah, sometimes it just has, it goes there and then it's like, okay, I see how that is. Okay. A few people online, Michael and then Sue, and then we're going to do breakout groups. I always, the, when attachment blossoms fall in an aversion, weed spread has always been my favorite line from this. Oh, can you hear me okay? I'm just turning up your volume in the room here. Sure. But I always kind of took it from the gardening metaphor of taking the middle way and recognizing impermanence. Like somebody gave me a really lovely plant for my yard and I loved it so much, I overwatered it and drowned it. And so attachment blossoms are falling, like I'm so attached to this. But then also this other part of my yard, I kind of, it's like, well, I don't really go over there. And I just turned my back and now it seems like it is covered with weeds. But it seems like it's kind of a good metaphor for our lives, too, of these things I'm really attached to, this relationship.

[23:56]

It just clings so tightly, it's like it's going to scare the other person off. It seems to be kind of begging for us to follow the middle way. Great. Thank you. So... You gave us some homework to memorize things, you know, and I at one time did memorize a section of the Genjo Kanga. It was the first thing, aside from the Heart Sutra, that just struck me so strongly. And what I found out is that the universe is sort of reminding me about it. drove me down to a doctor's appointment in San Jose. And I was terrified for some reason, a number of reasons. I'm really anxious about what's going on and not finding my way and not being in control.

[25:02]

And Sabrina drove my car with me in it. And it was a very kind author. And after I got over a little bit of a, oops, You could go a little slower, which I never said. We got there. She found it. Her GPS told us how to get there, which wouldn't have been the way I would have gone. It worked just great. We got there in plenty of time. But she's sort of aware. I had mentioned I was really anxious about this, scared. And she said, you know, do you ever memorize things? Jeez. She said, you know, that could really help. So I thought, oh, yeah, right. We memorized different things, but it was like putting, I did have, took photos of the book, and I could open that up and read the chapter to myself, or the first lines.

[26:05]

And it just shifted. It really, you know, it's like it took the fist down or the aversion posture down. I just appreciated her effort and help. And it was very wonderful. So, yeah. We can think, oh, we should never apply an antidote. We should never try to feel better than we're... struggling with because that's avoiding it or trying to control it or whatever. And you can definitely fall into that, but it doesn't have to be that. It can just be also, oh, look how empty it is, how everything is emptiness. I do this and now I'm in a different state of mind. That's fascinating. I can't see your name. Riluja? Riluja, hi. Riluja, hi. Hi. This is about the last line.

[27:08]

And I felt that in aversion we've spread, I felt it differently that even if I might hate things, like in this week, I've been struggling and I've been feeling like, why is my mom like this? Like only if she was different. And I'm just, it's difficult for me to detach from this thought. And I just want her to change. This line makes me feel that you might not like it, but it's going to go on, Rukja. Just accept it. You can't do anything about it. The first line really seeped into me. I'm afraid of my husband dying one day, who is way older than me. And I love him. I just want him to be around all the time. But you can't do anything about it. But I think the second part, hating something not changing is, I think, it's way harder for me to just accept it.

[28:16]

And it's similar to the world not changing, but it's really just hard to let go of that position. And for me, it just seeped in that in small things also, you can't control necessarily anything. I think it can be, I have found that it can be very helpful in learning to let go of those things, to notice how I'm suffering when I'm trying to hold on to them or make someone be otherwise, that I'm the one who suffers. Right. But despite my suffering, it was really hard for me to let go. But I think I also needed like a conceptual framework, that in that framework, it is encompassing. It's going to be taken care of. I'm just learning Dugan, and this is my first class on Dugan, but I'm just totally sold on him. Thank you. Thank you.

[29:16]

In person here, and then we're going to go to breakout rooms. So sorry we won't get to you right now. I can talk about in the breakout room, but we're going to go to Colleen. Oh, I'm just, it's, if I heard you correctly, it sounded like the implication was, You have to go in the body too. I mean, knowing you, I'm not surprised, but like it can just be up here. If you really want to acknowledge whatever is happening for you, it has to also be a body practice. For me, the body is where things are really alive and the head is where I can be kind of gone or not connected with the rest of it. I think everyone has a somewhat different take. Some people are like, just very much in their body and wanting their, like they're very good at making their body, like actualizing in their body. And maybe their concepts are not so strong, being able to think through things. So I think in a way it's, it's, it's like, what's your Dharma gate?

[30:18]

What's your recipe for complete awareness? Yes. And it's going to differ from person to person, but it does seem like it does need to be, I mean, you're seeking both to be involved. Yes. I think more globally, we could talk about it's experiential. It's not just conceptual. It's not just ideas, even though ideas have effects. They have impact, actually. Your mom says things, and then you're like, ah, so this is just words, right? But it comes as a whole package that is way beyond just words. So we're going to do breakout groups now, and we're going to go for 10 minutes and groups of four. So that's, yeah, 10 minutes for four here. Let's see.

[31:22]

Yeah. So the prompts are broad. It's like whatever resonates for you in this. But here's... Here's what I would suggest. What do these first four statements look like in your own life and practice? Any one of them or all four. So, yeah, give examples from your life, and the more concrete and specific, the better. This is where we live, in the concrete and specific. Not all the details of what happened, but of your experience. And many of the people who spoke did that very nicely. It's like, oh, here's the general thing, and here's what it was like. So these different ways of seeing and perceiving, where do you see this operating? Is it helpful or not, and how? And so the first part is like, where do you already see this operating? This is evident to you. It's apparent.

[32:23]

And are there any ideas, I'm sorry, any areas of your life where you would like to bring more of the light of awareness of looking through this lens to kind of, you know, something that you haven't thought about? It's like, oh, I might think about like driving to work. That's just kind of a throwaway part of my life. You know, I'd kind of get through it or whatever. So. Yeah, so those are prompts for reflection and for dialogue. Any questions? Is that clear enough to let you jump in? The first four sentences. No, the first box, upper left box. That one. Just those four sentences, not the four paragraphs. What a lively conversation in here, and I hope online also. Any questions or anything you'd like to share that came out of the conversations?

[33:27]

Helen? We're having a very difficult time hearing you I didn't do anything different. It's original sound for musicians is on. I turned the audio back. You can hear me some, but not well. We can hear you not very well, but we couldn't hear. No, you won't be able to hear Ellen.

[34:33]

I'll say what she said. So she's going to tell the group in here and I'm going to repeat it for all of you. So she's going to say the general theme of her group. Yeah, there were four of us. Yeah, I'm going to be serious about it. Yeah, I'm okay, but I'm going to be, um, I'm going to be, um, I'm going to be able to help. I'm not going to be able to do it. This is all I'm going to say. I'm going to be able to do it. Well, in Ellen's group, the four of them shared experiences of very difficult situations without the hope of it changing. What was your experience with that? Jeff said his group was the same thing, but with lower stakes. Cars were involved. Cars were involved. I think more minor damage.

[35:38]

Major wreckage. We kind of both talked about times in which we put expectations on other things or other people to make us happy or to soothe us and how that might be inappropriate. To have an expectation of a thing to make me so happy or of a person to soothe me. If it's going on inside here, I have to take responsibility for what's going on in here and shouldn't ask you to soothe me. And Daniel was talking about, and I might be not saying what he was actually trying to say, but you're putting expectations on things, not exactly people, but on things to help us Feel great. So this is so interesting because that was a great question, Alan, because it's like you can imagine people going in different directions.

[36:44]

Like once someone brings something forward, it's like, oh, that brings forth a whole world right there. You know, your own experience with that. And then that's the direction things go. And this is happening all the time. Yeah, it's. It's fascinating how both single-minded we are and how infinitely fluid and wandering around in the universe. Any other comments or things that you noticed in yourself, in your life, in your group? Questions? I have a question. I was just wondering, I've done some reading. The question was about the meaning of the word suchness.

[37:53]

It's a kind of a pointing word, like just so you could say suchness or Buddha nature. But it's basically pointing to beyond the transcending the duality of the many and the one. So you're holding this in all of its ordinary profundity in that moment with some capacity to be with that and to still be in the world. You were nodding, Linda. Do you have anything to... Oh, I was approving of what you said. I wonder if you had anything else to add to that about how suchness might be defined, so to speak. It's indefinable, and yet over and over again, it's just this is it, that it.

[38:55]

It's it, but it's... not an it, it's just this. Yeah, right. But I do feel that we all have some, if we haven't had some experience of that, direct experience in some way or another, that we have enough of an intuition in that that it got us here to grapple with it. So I think there's some inner sense or inner knowing And I think many, if not most, young children have that feeling. I remember distinctly when I was about five telling my mother that God was in trees, that God was in everything. I mean, that was God. And I was gently, kindly, but very distinctly corrected. about the correct location of God. Fortunately, not the appearance.

[39:59]

But, yeah, so this felt sense of the world being alive and not thinking as much as all being. So I think, you know, and, you know, the whole thing about Adam and Eve and the apple of knowledge is I think it's something about that, our basic instinctual knowing and then becoming separated from that. Because to survive, we, you know, and our minds are just amazing. I mean, they literally make a lot visual, accentuate visual edges so that we can see them more clearly. They've done studies, which are fascinating, that are like... Yeah, that's actually, there's no differentiation that I can see at all in this panel of gray, but it's against other shades on the edges, and it shades that way. Like we see it, literally see that it's shaded, that it's not.

[41:04]

So our minds are doing a lot of work to keep it alive, to survive, to be in relationship, and all of this is... restrict the availability of the possible world. So it's not to make it go right. It's just to be able to live in the whole world. To online. Online. And then we'll close with Libby. Thank you. So I'm still trying to understand suchness and I've been reading Shenshu Roberts and also on the Uji, which I gather she says is basically the Genjo Koan, where Dogen says, the horses and sheep now arrayed throughout the world are each Dharma stages dwelling in their suchness, which I understood her to be saying dwelling in things as they are, so that perhaps one understood. I'm asking you if this is the right track.

[42:07]

Suchness is things as they are, which is all beings. being interdependent throughout the matrix of all time and all space. Yes. Suzuki Roshi used to say things as it is. And I guess for many years, people thought that he didn't have terribly good English and he was saying things as it is. And I started realizing, oh, I think that was quite deliberate, you know, playing with the singular and the plural. Thank you. William. Yes, this is more of a housekeeping question, but I think last week you said something about sending out an email with different translations of the Genjo Koan. Did you do that? I did not get them, and I could email you and ask, but I'm thinking other people also didn't get them as well. I'm sorry, I didn't hear that.

[43:12]

on the class list that I had that showed everyone who had signed up. And I sent it an email. What's your last name, William? Gordon. G-O-R-G-O-N. Okay. Thank you all very much. And we'll... Chant the four vows.

[43:48]

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