Hi, everybody. Nice to see you again. This is our last meeting together, I guess, at least this time around. And if you don't mind, my talk might be a little on the long side, so I'd like to give the talk first, then take a break. And then afterward, probably we have some leftover business from last time and maybe some new questions raised. with my talk tonight. So would that be okay? And then that will leave us time for discussion afterward. So this is on case 14, Nanchuan's cat. The case, Nanchuan saw the monks of the Eastern and Western halls fighting over a cat. He seized the cat, pulled out a sharp knife and told the monks, if anyone can say a word of Zen, you save the cat.

[01:06]

No one answered. So, Nanchuan cut the cat in two. That evening, Zhaozhou returned to the monastery and Nanchuan told him what had happened. Zhaozhou removed his sandals and placing them on his head, walked out. Nanchuan said, if you had been there, you would have saved the cat. Mumon's comment. Why did Zhaozhou put his sandal on his head? If you can answer this question, you will understand exactly that Nanchuan's action was not in vain, if not danger. Poem. Had Zhaozhou been there, he would have taken charge. Zhaozhou snatches the sword, Nanjuan begs for his life. So that's our subject for tonight. Nanjuan and Zhaozhou, the two main characters in this case, are really important and wonderful Zen teachers who set the style for the tradition.

[02:19]

The story goes of their meeting, Nanchuan was the master and Zhaozhou was a young student, he was 20 years old, just had completed his full ordination and he went and visited Zhaozhou and Zhaozhou was lying down at the time, taking a nap or something. I mean, Nanchuan, he visited Nanchuan, Nanchuan was lying down taking a nap and so Zhaozhou came in and Nanchuan said, where are you from? Zazho said, I come from Standing Buddha Temple. Nanchuan said, are there any Standing Buddhas there? Zazho said, here I see a reclining Buddha, like this. There's one right there. So that's the story of their meeting. And they were very close, and Zazho remained with Nanchuan for 40 years.

[03:26]

And even though, in fact, if you kind of look at the different stories of the Zen teachers, including Dogen, they usually didn't actually spend all that long with their teachers, but Zhaozhou did. And so the two of them were very well loved for this. They kind of created this wonderful ideal of someone who remains 40 years with the teacher. Just before you wrote the poem, there was some noise and I missed the last line of the commentary before the poem. Of the commentary before the poem. Muwan's comment, why did Zhaozhou put his sandals on his head? If you can answer this question, you will understand exactly that Nanchuan's action was not in vain, if not, danger. Then you all know the rest of the story of Zhaozhou.

[04:30]

After Nanchuan died, Zhaozhou by then is 60, right? Because he came when he was 20. So he's 60 years old when his teacher dies. And he says, I don't understand anything, so I'm going to go on pilgrimage to try to hone my understanding. And he goes on pilgrimage for 20 years. And then when he goes out, he says, If in my travels I meet a young girl of eight years old who understands more Dharma than me, I will sit at her feet and learn. And if I meet an old sage of 100 years who needs to learn from me, I will teach him. So that's his spirit, kind of a great spirit, the ideal spirit, I suppose, for testing oneself, and 20 years that way, and then he finally settled down and taught when he was 80 years old, and the story goes he lived 40 more years. It's possible.

[05:30]

So that's the story of Zazho, and he was a favorite of Suzuki Roshi, and also known for being a very, I think like Suzuki Roshi, a very unassuming plain person, not like some of the other Masters who were very severe and spectacular in their expressions and in their kind of presentation. He was very plain, to the point even where one of the koans about him has a monk showing up to see him, and the monk saying, gee, what a disappointment. I came all this way to see the great Master Zhaozhou, and this is what I'm looking at? That's one koan. more or less to that effect. Anyway, you know, the little organization that I started when I retired from Zen Center is called Everyday Zen, you might know that, and it gets its name from a dialogue between these two teachers, Nanchuan and Zhaozhou, the same pair.

[06:38]

It's also a very famous case of the Mumonkan Zhaozhou says to Nanchuan, what is the way? What is the path? And Zhaozhou says, everyday mind is the way. Zhaozhou says, if everyday mind is the way, how can I aim for it? How can I, if it's just everyday mind, what am I going to do about it? Zhaozhou, Nanchuan said, if you aim for it, you will be going in the opposite direction. Zhaozhou, then how can I know it? Nanchuan. It isn't a matter of knowing or not knowing. The way is vast and indefinable. How could you reduce it to knowing or not knowing? To me that's the most beautiful case in all of the Zen Koan literature. So this case that we're on now is also...

[07:43]

I believe it's 19. Yeah, I believe it's 19. So this case is also very well known and it's very disturbing of course. Probably this is the reason why if you go to a faraway city and say you're holding a Vipassana retreat, 150 people will come. If you go to the same city and say you're holding a Zen retreat, a dozen will come. It's because of stories like this that that is the case. We could compare this story of Nanchuan and Zhaozhou to another story, which is actually in a way very similar in the Bible, where King Solomon holds up a baby because two women are arguing over a baby, and holds up the baby and says, I'll cut the baby in two, and that way it'll be fair, each one will get half.

[08:51]

One of the women, of course, immediately speaks up and says, no, no, no, I'm not the mother, give the baby to her. And that's how Solomon knows which one is the mother, because the one who speaks up and says, I'm not the mother, is the mother of the baby. So this story in the Bible is much tidier and nicer than our Zen story. Zen monks seem to become immediately confused and upset when someone challenges them by saying, say a true word of Zen. Being good Zen monks, they think that there is something to this question and they become immediately paralyzed. They can't say anything. They think to themselves, do I really understand Zen? And then they think, no, I really don't understand Zen, so I guess I can't say a word of Zen. And then they fall mute. So this tells us that your average Zen monk is not half as smart as your average mother.

[09:56]

who has already a powerful understanding of love and devotion and is therefore, on the strength of this, never speechless when it comes to the welfare of her child and always knows exactly what to say, even if what's to be said is an out-and-out lie. And it's possible that what we're doing in our practice is trying to reach to this level of devotion and love that is commonplace for your average mother in this world. It's possible that this is actually our goal. But in this case, the monks have not reached this goal. They are speechless, and their speechlessness results in the death of a cat, it seems. Had one of these mothers in the story had been there, she would have simply probably said, please, dear Master Nanchuan, don't kill this cat.

[10:59]

You know, you're a Zen priest after all, and you've taken precepts, and you're not supposed to kill things. So, you know, please don't kill the cat. And I'm sure that had one of the mothers spoken up in this way, Nanchuan would have immediately released the cat. And if the monks had been less Zen monks and more just human beings, they also would have spoken up in this way. Or maybe they would have been more playful and more energetic and grabbed the cat, snatched the cat out of Nanchuan's hands. But no, they couldn't do it. Dogen commented on this case, as he does on many koans. It's interesting. sometimes to look in Dogen and see what does he say about it. And here he says, he said, if I were Nanchuan, I would say, if you cannot say a true word of Zen, I will cut the cat. And if you can say a true word of Zen, I will also cut the cat.

[12:05]

That's what Dogen says. And this would have been a much less misleading challenge than the one posed by Nanchuan. Now if I were there, and I were the monks, I would say, you're right, Master, we can't answer. Go ahead and cut the cat in two if you can. Or I might otherwise say, Nanchuan, it is easy to cut a cat in two. So could you please show us how to cut a cat in one? Dogen also said, if I were an Anjouan and the monks could not answer, I would say, too bad, you can't answer, and I would release the cat. That's what Dogen said. I would have said, Master,

[13:09]

the cat is already cut in two. And then I would grab the cat and say to Master Nanchuan, now it looks like you're cut in two. And this is pretty much the meaning of what happens when Zazho comes back later and puts a sandal on his head, which to us seems like this strange, absurd, Zen-like thing, but actually it really is not what it seems to be, because although commentators on this koan don't like to mention this, the truth is that in ancient China, as in other cultures for some reason, and I'm not sure why, but putting sandals on your head was a sign of mourning, just like renting your clothing and throwing ashes on yourself in the biblical world was a sign of mourning. So when Zhaozhou puts the sandal on his head, this is what I would have done if I was there.

[14:15]

What he's expressing is, teacher, don't fool me with your pantomime about the cat. You and I both know that this cat is already dead, that you and I are already dead, that all disputes are already settled, that all things are empty of coming and going. This is the real nature of things. Everything is already at peace. Everyday mind is vast and wide. Every gesture is complete. Nothing is as we think it is in this relative world. And this is how it is all the time, only we don't know it. By the way, I should mention at this point that this same koan also appears in the Blue Cliff Record and in Shoyu Roku, and although it doesn't say so here in Mumonkan, because Master Mumon is such a kind of hard-ass type of guy, in the Blue Cliff Record and the Book of Serenity it is mentioned in both places that of course Master Nanchuan did not cut a cat in two, that Zen masters don't go around killing living beings

[15:33]

to be provocative or even to make a good Dharma point that this was a pantomime. He may have done this, but he did it and it may have been quite shocking, but there was no cat actually killed except in Master Mumon's imagination. In Zen precepts study, It is always noted, and I'm sure if you've read anything about precepts you know this teaching, that there are three levels of precept practice that are practiced simultaneously. They're not three different things, but they're three different ways of understanding and appreciating precepts, and there's different terms for these three levels, but let's just use the literal level the compassion level and the ultimate level. So on the literal level we follow the precept according to its explicit meaning.

[16:38]

The precept against killing means don't kill anything, not even a bug. On the compassion level we recognize that life is very complex and interrelated that there's no way to be pure, that sometimes not to kill one thing is to kill something else. For instance, if you think that by being a vegetarian you escape killing living beings, this isn't true, because some people think, well, a carrot is a living being, a vegetable is a living being, but never mind about that. just think about how there's no way to farm and grow vegetables without killing creatures. And I remember one time at Green Gulch, we were having a series of talks by the different priests there on the precepts.

[17:46]

And the precept against killing, the head of the farm gave a talk on that precept. Now, Green Gulch is a very pure organic farm. We don't trap gophers and kill them. We don't kill the quail that eat the lettuce plants. I mean, we lose a lot of crop so as not to kill anything intentionally. So you can hardly imagine a more pure organic farm than Green Gulch. And so the head of the farm said, well, this morning, I was mowing because we have cover crop, you know, mow it and turn it under. And then I was driving my tractor down the road and the first thing that happened was I sliced through a snake with the mower, you know, and I killed this snake. And then the next thing that happened was you can't stop the tractor. You leap off the tractor and stop it on a dime. So the next thing that happened was I ran over. a kill-deer nest and killed all the baby kill-deer, you know, as the mother bird was running away.

[18:51]

And these are only the things that happened in the first 20 minutes and they were only the things that I noticed I killed. I don't know how many other things I killed in this morning's mowing without knowing about it. So, you know, anything that one eats involves killing. There's no way to avoid it and one knows that on the compassion level, one recognizes this is the case, that the network of life is vast and wide and complex and we can't escape the tragedy of it. So we know that precepts will be broken sometimes and the only thing we can do is affirm our commitment to let compassion be our guide and do our best. So that's the compassion level. On the ultimate level, we recognize through deep contemplation that there is no, just as there are no real keeping precepts perfectly, there also is no real breaking of precepts.

[19:56]

It's impossible to break precepts. So in this case, the ultimate level of precept practice is being raised up here. the recognition that Nanchuan has, and Zhaozhou has, but that the monks lack, and if only they had this realization, they would have been able to speak up, that there is no killing, that life can never be killed. Or another way of saying the same thing is, we're already dead. So what does this mean, we're already dead? Well, that's what time is, isn't it? birth and death are of the essence of every moment. If we don't die to this moment, how do we make room for the next moment? That's what the passing of time is after all, is the instantaneous and constant alternation of birth and death.

[20:57]

Our so-called death is not something that's coming later, it's the death of each passing moment, we're practicing up, we're dying a little bit, every moment, and at the end it's only another moment of dying, another moment of death. Looking at it in another way, which is really not a different way at all, we could also say our death never comes, what we call death never comes. When we die, what we call die, the we that we think we are does melt away, but the we that we always were and always will be remains as ever unmoving, flowing on with life, life after life.

[22:05]

So when we die, it's true that our appearance is gone, but our fundamental actuality is not gone. This is obviously a very mysterious and deep teaching, and it's not a philosophy or an abstraction. It's not just thinking, it's the texture of our life, the way that we feel. about our life every moment, and this is why we do our work on the cushion, to have some sense of what this teaching means, and to clarify that as we go on. And that's why I think our practice, little by little, makes us feel the depth and the uncanniness that's always present in our living. But let's back up from this great mysterious teaching for a moment, because there's another thing about the case that I think is important to bring up.

[23:14]

So remember, the monks in the East Hall and in the West Hall were having an argument about a cat, and nothing further is said about this, but it's actually quite an important part of the case. In most monasteries in all China, the community was divided. There were some monks who lived in the meditation hall and they devoted themselves full-time to meditation practice. And other monks were support monks, working monks. They did the cooking and the cleaning and kept the accounts and ministered the monastery lands. And these two monks probably lived in two different halls, the East Hall and the West Hall. They have the same system in Korea now, and in our Zen centers in America, we didn't establish that tradition. Everybody, more or less, is in the same boat. But in old China, it was very distinct.

[24:20]

And as soon as you set up two distinct functions, different from one another, it seems to be a deep feature of human nature that there are then going to be different ideologies and different viewpoints, and then when there's different ideologies and different viewpoints, somebody decides that one is superior to the other and there's going to be a fight. And this would happen all the time in the Zen Center, even though we didn't have In the many years I was at the Zen Center, even though we didn't have the community divided in that way, there were people who tended to be more focused on and specializing in work, and other people who were more focused on and specializing in the meditation hall, and the ones who specialized in work Basically, although they never came out and said this in so many words, their view was that the monks who were meditating all the time and running around in their robes and doing rituals were basically slackers, fooling around and doing this stuff.

[25:26]

The ones who were doing the meditation practice looked at the working monks and thought, these people are just worldly, they don't even know what the practice is all about. So even though none of this was ever exactly mentioned to each other, things would come up, like what to do about a cat, for instance, and there would be a conflict. And the conflict wouldn't really have to do with the cat, it would have to do with these opposing ideologies. So I can understand this story very well. And this is not only in Zen, it's also in virtually every monastic tradition that I know about, exactly the same kind of conflict comes up. I remember reading about this, and with the Catholics, they had a tradition for many generations, and the Trappist monasteries had lay brothers and choir monks, and it was the same distinction, and that was one really good reason why the Trappists had a rule of silence. Because the choir monks and the lay brothers had such deep animosity and hatred for one another, the only way that they survived all those centuries was because they couldn't talk to one another.

[26:35]

And the whole thing got so bad that that distinction was abolished. They abolished, you know, there's no such thing anymore in Catholicism as lay brothers. And even though they still have the same conflict, they just, now they're all choir monks, but just like in Zen Center, They just sort of naturally fall into these categories. And consider the possibility that exactly the same conflict exists within each one of us. Within one person, the same sort of conflict exists. So we can have a chuckle about this when we're talking about the religious life, because although there may be animosity and arguments, it's rare that anybody beats anybody up over it or kills anybody over it, but it's not so humorous when we realize that these same kinds of conflicting viewpoints also exist in the world at large and do often lead to tragedies.

[27:41]

Take for instance the Middle East in Israel. The Jews look at that place and they think, this is our place. We were here first, we were exiled for centuries, but now we're back. And so we're generous and nice, but this is our place and our customs, our traditions, our view should prevail. And the Palestinians think precisely the same thing. It's their place and their customs and their traditions should prevail. This is why, if you ever are lost in Jerusalem and you ask for directions, it's very confusing, because the Palestinians, who you might meet on the street, and the Israeli citizens, Jewish-Israeli citizens, who you might meet on the street, will tell you different... If you ask for, where's Ben Yehuda Street, you ask a Palestinian, they'll say, I never heard of it, even though it's one block away, because they don't call it Ben Yehuda Street. They have another name for it. because that reality doesn't apply.

[28:46]

And on both sides there is this firm belief, not in this is how we prefer to look at it, but in what is believed to be absolutely the truth and absolutely the right view that will redeem history and solidify identity. So this kind of viewpoint becomes something very hard and very significant and literally, to some people, literally worth dying for and worth killing for. Now in Nanchuan's monastery, maybe the working monks thought that this cat would be a really good mouser in the kitchen because there are some mice getting into the grain and it would really be good to have this cat in the kitchen. Maybe the meditating monks, whose minds were subtle and pure as a result of their many hours of meditation, couldn't even bear the fact that in a monastery you would have a cat in the kitchen killing mice, give me a break.

[29:57]

So this was a serious fight. So when there is this kind of difference, and the real unity that underlies all difference is not understood and appreciated, then there's going to be fighting. And we have this too, all of us have this blind spot. We have our own viewpoint. So how do we handle this kind of situation? What do you do? Which side are you on? The Nanchuan demonstrates. We could also investigate this case symbolically. What does the cat stand for? What does the knife stand for? What does cutting mean? In Zen, whenever there's a knife or any reference to cutting, it always evokes Manjushri's sword, the sword of wisdom, that cuts through duality, slices through duality, and cuts in one, into unity, sees that life and death are intertwined, good and bad are mutually

[31:08]

dependent on each other that there can't be Israelis without Palestinians. Manjushri's sword cuts right through attachment to view, attachment to difference and shows that difference and sameness interpenetrate and all views are in fact compatible and require one another. the truth is beyond attachment to views, the truth includes all views in harmony, because that's how life really is. That's what makes life so rich and so paradoxical and so wonderful, is that all views in their difference are compatible. So Nanchuan wants to show this to the monks. So he does a little bit of Zen non-violent street theater. He shocks the monks, brings them up short, and he wants them to take their dispute to another level.

[32:10]

So he's saying to them, never mind the cat. What are you here for? What is life? What is death? What are we doing here? What's our spiritual devotion all about? Well, the cat, maybe the cat is the monks themselves. Or maybe the cat is this world. You monks are arguing about something very silly. And look all around you, the world is about to be cut in half right in front of your eyes. You don't have the luxury to fool around over trivialities. Don't waste your time And I often felt this way, you know, in the Zen Center when I would see people arguing over a cat. And it so often happens, I'm sure it happens in the Sangha here, when you see like-minded people who are good friends making each other miserable and getting stuck over things that there's no use arguing about.

[33:23]

You know, it's hard to understand. We should be working together to help this world and we're arguing with one another. narrowly focused on our little concerns. I have the same problem when I see people from different religious traditions arguing with one another, failing to appreciate each other's religious traditions. I think to myself, how could this be possible? If someone is truly practicing their religious tradition, how could they be so intolerant? It amazes me. And yet, experience tells me that it always happens. Good people can't get along and they fight with one another and there's nothing that you can do about it. Think about it. There are problems in this world that none of us can do anything about. When the earth decides that it's going to have an earthquake, there's an earthquake and there's nothing that anybody can do about that except pick up the pieces afterward. But the truth of the matter is, the earthquakes of the world and the storms and the disasters of the world are a very small part of why people are dying on the planet.

[34:34]

Basically, people are dying on the planet mostly because you and I can't get along, because we can't harmonize our views and recognize that we are more alike than different and that what we're fighting about is not worth fighting about. Actually, that's really what it comes down to. People are dying every day for lack of this gut connection that we all have with one another and we should recognize on every occasion. So, for me, the perspective brought up by Nanchuan strikes to the heart of what it means to be a monk. what I would call the way we are practicing as monks in this world. And this is really our challenge as Dharma students, living as we do, practicing as we do. How can we be fully committed to our practice?

[35:36]

And I feel that even living in the world as we do, we can be fully and completely committed to our practice, making our practice 100% of what it is that we're doing in our lives. And yet at the same time, honor and deal with the daily issues that come up. How can we do this? To me that's what Nanchuan is bringing up. How can we not get caught? Because all of us, think about it, we're all at the same time monks of the West Hall and monks of the East Hall. We're all activists and we're all quietists. How are we going to put that together into a life? When I think of what is a monk in the world, I can't help but think of Thomas Merton, who wrote about, so beautifully for our time, about what it means to be a monk in the widest sense of that word.

[36:38]

Merton thought that there was a very special function in this world, a place in this world for a monk. He thought that a monk is someone who is inherently a radical, apart from the world, doesn't go the worldly way even if it looks like she does. So therefore, monks are very unusual people. In a sense, they're outsiders, which means they're not on any one side. Their commitment is not to one side or another side, but to truth, which means love, so that monk's first commitment is to non-hatred. You can't be a monk and be full of hatred, and you can't be a monk and justify your particular viewpoint as being absolutely right. Monks are those people who always come back to the center, always come back to zero, come back to the present moment, the in-between moment, which is always beyond viewpoint.

[37:42]

So although monks may live harmoniously in the middle of society, as we do, and they may look to the outward eye, as we do, no different from anybody else in the society, actually they're deeply subversive because they're working internally and externally against the dominant modes of greed, hate, and delusion that make the world go round. Monks are living examples of an alternative to the self-centered ways of the world. Secret agents of a foreign power. The power of selfless love. Not that monks have a superior attitude about this. In fact, if they did, they would lose their membership card in the monk kingdom because part of what it takes to be a monk is to practice humility. to be aware of your own mind and all the selfishness that's always arising in it, and to understand that for what it is and try to let go.

[38:51]

So to me, a monk is someone who, imperfect though he or she may be, is dedicated to holding up this greatest of all human possibilities, that we could be loving, kind people. who are always for everyone. Monks are people who are willing to receive suffering, bear witness to suffering, understand the emptiness of suffering, desire, and all forms of winning. The life of monks is a life of commitment to the cultivation and encouragement and sharing of clarity and goodness. So to me, that's my kind of ideal of spiritual practice that I think is, while it's not an ideal that we could think that we're going to realize anytime too soon, I think it is a worthy ideal to actually work toward, to actually feel this is a vision that is doable, that I can aim toward, that I can dedicate myself to.

[40:03]

I think that's really possible and I feel like that is the vision of a Bodhisattva, what our practice provides, a vision for us like that. One of my heroes in this regard is a wonderful Catholic mystic by the name of Simone Weil, maybe some of you know about her. She was an amazing person actually, one of the most amazing figures of the 20th century. She was a Jew who was the greatest Catholic mystic in the 20th century and she was also a fierce political activist and she was one who really did bring together in an amazing way the unity of a deeply contemplative mysticism at the same time a passionate political activism. Her mystical writings are as deep as any you'll find in any tradition and yet

[41:08]

Almost all of her days were spent in extreme forms of political activism. She went to the Spanish Civil War as a witness for peace. She worked in vineyards picking grapes and in factories to have solidarity with workers. She worked for a worker's newspaper and wrote lots of social theory. She died at the age of 34 years. because she was in the hospital and she was only thinking about, this was in London and she was French, she was only thinking about the French resistance fighters who were living on very limited rations. So while she was in the hospital she refused to eat any more than the French resistance fighters would eat and probably that's probably the reason why she died. Some people think she was maybe a little crazy and that her death should be considered a suicide.

[42:12]

Well, maybe, I don't know. She did seem to have this passion, as sometimes Christian mystics do, to imitate Christ and die a martyred death, which, from my point of view, seems like a pretty bad idea. I don't get why anybody would think that would be a good idea, because I think that the thing to do is live as long as you are alive. And then, when there's no other choice, you should die. I don't think it's a good idea to say, I think I'll die now, you know. Although, I also know that there are sometimes, there are conditions in a person's life so horrendous that one could never argue with that choice. Anyway, think about whether it's possible that many people in this world who are diagnosed by the professionals as anorexic or alcoholic or narcissistic or schizophrenic or psychotic of whatever stripe, perhaps many of these people are underneath that diagnosis or perhaps as a function of it, they're actually true monks who cannot bear

[43:34]

to live in this world as the world goes, but they just couldn't find a vehicle to get in touch with that. Maybe we should view people with these serious problems not as poor unfortunates, but as people who maybe just need to clarify their ailments and raise them up instead of being embarrassed by them or ashamed of them. One of Simone Weil's great notions, great ideas was something she called attention. She thought that the most important thing was to cultivate attention and she defined attention as a point of eternity in the soul. Attention was this little point of eternity in every human soul and that the idea that practice was a matter of finding that point of eternity and illuminating it.

[44:36]

And at one point, among all these other things she did, she worked in a school on the theory that if she could teach children to find this point of attention, she could change the world. So if you practice paying attention, just that, just paying attention, you'll see that cutting the cat in two is cutting the cat in one, because the cat is already cut in two, because we are all different. We're all already one. So you're not out there trying to be a politician and to win something or be engaged in disputes. Your goal is to appreciate and understand and weep with the suffering of the world. And far from running away from disputes, you want to be like Nanchuan. You want to put yourself right in the middle of the dispute. Not that you're going to solve it or that you have the right idea, but you just want to be there saying, look everybody, wake up.

[45:46]

Let's take a look at this thing together. Let's see what we're really all about as human beings. How To say this is not so obvious sometimes. Nanchuan hit his way on that occasion. So it's not obvious how to do that, but I think that's our job. And as we work on our practice on the cushion, we will discover that it is really necessary to get up from the cushion. and get involved in this world in the spirit of oneness and renunciation like that monk I was talking about. And although we don't know what to do, we know we have to try to do whatever we can. So that's my talk on the 14th Kesa, Mumonkan, and maybe now we take a little break and then

[46:49]

discuss whatever's on your mind, especially I want to start with where we left off last week. Thank you. Well, last time in discussing the twelfth case about Master Uriyan, or Zuigan, calling out to himself, remember that? There were two points I raised. as possible avenues for exploration. One was I gave a whole bunch of techniques for reminding yourself of your practice during the day and I was inviting people to take up one or more of those techniques or make up your own. And then the other less concrete avenue for exploration was to consider very closely and intimately your sense of subjectivity, your sense of who is the subject here in the middle of your life.

[47:59]

See if you could question that issue. Do you remember that? Who is this? Who is it? Who is calling who? When you talk to yourself, who's talking and who's listening? Can you tell who is really there? So I wonder if anybody made use of those suggestions and what your experiences were. You told me about your glaucoma exam. And it was very satisfying.

[49:06]

I had time to really open up. And last night, I particularly enjoyed dropping that practice altogether. Well, that's wonderful. You're kind of extending the idea of walking into a door to any time you're opening or closing anything. Anybody else have any? I can't say that I developed this practice very much, but when I was doing my morning zazen, At some point I would remember that, and so I would do the out loud callings at my home.

[50:07]

is that how do you say, can, yes, or you can say it in a more sort of flat way, can, yes. And the strange thing is it occurred to me that to be really sincere way or a fool way or something like that, you would have to act really. In other words, in a sense, it's playing a game. There's nothing real about it at all. You have to believe it. Paradoxically, you would have to develop your sort of acting faculties in order to cut beyond that kind of thing. I noticed when you said it, it sounded pretty natural.

[51:33]

You know, Master, yes. I don't know whether you developed that over time. Anyway, I don't know where this leads, but it just occurred to me that it was a kind of odd situation where often we would think if you wanted to get beyond the self or something, You would do it in a kind of flat way or an emphatic way or something, but in this case it would seem like to really make it go, you would really have to project out. No, I won't. I'm seriously schizophrenic. Yeah, well, it's funny what you say, because we think of acting as being false. you're just acting, but in a way it's the opposite. If you're really acting, you're really acting.

[52:36]

Do you know what I mean? Acting, to act, to really act, that's something very lively to that and something that requires a kind of commitment to the project of fully engaging this moment. So it was funny that just the use of the word acting is funny. But I know what you mean. And it's true that it does require that sense of suspension of self-consciousness, suspension of disbelief, and really acting, exactly. And that would be a good way to live, too, I think. Because I think a lot of times we're really inhibited by our sense of who the subject is, from committing ourselves to what we're doing, from acting. And of course, many things that we do in the forums are kind of like that.

[53:40]

A person may say, well, I'm bowing to this, you know, whatever. you know, like put myself into it. Exactly, that's right, exactly. Just to completely in the same way act when you when you bow or offer incense. I find that and I find those things to be very satisfying practices for that reason. I find, for example, how bowing really changes my mind, changes my mood and my whole sensibility. Like when I first started giving talks years ago, I thought, wow, it's really a good thing that you get to bow before you give the talk. Because otherwise, I would never have started doing that in the first place.

[54:42]

Because if I was supposed to give a talk and now I'm going to show all that I know and my brilliant understanding and so forth and so on, I would have quit before I started. But when you bow, it's sort of like you're saying, well, I'm offering myself in this gesture, committing myself to giving myself to Buddha, and hoping for the best when something would come out of my mouth, out of respect, through that gesture, that something would be beneficial. So it's a whole different thing from performing personally. So I think, and similarly, any time in which you acted fully in that way, it would be a liberating moment. So I think you raise a very profound point. Thank you for that. What else? Yes? I have been, through the years, really interested in the vast kind of quality of mind.

[55:47]

I've used a technique, I haven't seen this in Zen, but I got it from the Tibetans basically. What they say is that when you're sitting, you can multiply yourself 100,000 times. So when you're walking or bowing, it's 100,000 of you that's bowing. I never heard of that, that's great. It's an incredible practice, because even if you can't quite conceptualize what 100,000 of you is like, just the effort of making 100,000 people walk down the street, makes you very present. And it uses kind of an imagination faculty of mine. It brings in a little bit more of the right brain side just to be able to do it. So I've been going back to that practice and find it really helpful. I don't find it good for writing. Anything else?

[56:54]

I work at home, so that makes it easy to engage in these practices overtly. Although then I was just thinking maybe it's easier to get distracted when you're at home too, because you're not in an atmosphere where you're being watched. But I find it's very helpful to sort of associate certain practices with the transitions. room or activity to another, like we were talking about last week. And that the pitfalls are, one, to get sort of compulsive and erotic about it. And then the other is to think that you're doing something. You're doing something special and that therefore you get proud of yourself. Look how spiritual I am. Right, I think I mentioned that last week in my talk about the case, yeah. Well, stay with it, you know, and avoid those extremes, but stay with it, yeah.

[58:01]

That's great. Yeah? You know, in my work I do the same as many people do, I do the same thing over and over again, but always in a different context, in a different place. And so sometimes I think of when I do what I do, it's just sort of like a period of zazen. It's a ritual. So I start, for example, when I start, I turn to the right. I'm going to look at a roof. So I get on the roof and I go to the left and then turn to the right. Sort of like when you get on your cushion. I'm actually thinking it that way. I did that years ago and then this last week started to sort of think about it again. Sort of an interesting way to sort of ritualize what you do and make it just to make it just like a period of Zazen.

[59:05]

Yeah. Yeah, things like that. I mean it's interesting that, you know, I mean this is craft that you learned from hanging around zendos and It's a kind of way, first of all, it's the idea of practice, like you say, which we can learn that idea, we can learn that sort of template, and then the craft and the specifics of it. But what it really is, isn't it, is focusing on time and the way you do things, rather than, in your case, well, this is all about coming up with this report and getting paid. in which case you kind of lose all the stuff in between the time that you show up and the time that that happens, like it doesn't exist. This way every moment exists and the moment when you hand in the report and get paid is another moment, no more or less significant than anything else.

[60:07]

And I think that's a whole different way of living a life, right? When you are paying attention to everything that you're doing as an important moment, you know. And a lot of times people don't, you know. Yeah. And sometimes it just becomes, here it is, hey. Yeah. Well, it would be no good if they didn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've been thinking that these cases have a kind of an obvious How do you understand duality and non-duality? And so the obvious question on the surface, I'm unclear with the Zweigin case. What do you think is the obvious, not the deeper question, but what's the obvious question that you would read this case and say, huh? What do you think that is in Zweigin's case?

[61:10]

Well, to me that case doesn't feel like there's a question I think that case is really presenting this practice and the question really is what is this practice and how do you do it? Because I don't think, the cases are different and there are cases in which obviously a question is being posed and without any clear sense of what the answer is. That's the challenge. How do you present a response to this question? But in Zwiegand's case, I think it's not that. I think it's more, can you make this practice your own? Do you know what this practice is and can you make it your own? That's how I look at it anyway. that there isn't, you know, in that sense, I mean it does sort of by implication bring up the same issues like you say of duality and non-duality in that then you ask yourself the deeper question, who is calling who?

[62:12]

But on the surface level I don't think it presents a question so much as just can you practice this or how would you practice this? Not offhand. I can't think of another case that's quite like that one. But yeah, go ahead. And coming to tonight, you said that you made reference to this custom of mourning, putting your sandals on your head was custom of mourning. And in the four main commentaries that you mentioned, which I have copies of, I think one, it may have been Aiken,

[63:21]

or she mentions that, but the other three don't mention that. And none of them really say that when he put his hand, even the one that mentions it, just sort of does it as an interesting reference. But none of them say, he was mourning all of our death, or he was making reference to all of our death. It's more like what they tended to say was he was letting go of all viewpoints, just the whole viewpoint of what you wear your sandals on your feet, this, you do that. It's like dropping viewpoint. Yeah. Well, I think that my intention in these talks that I'm giving on the Mumonkan are somewhat different. I think I might have spoken to this point in the beginning of the class that I'm sort of consciously working with the cases in a slightly different way because all the commentaries in English of Mumonkan that we have are all given by Zen teachers who are working in the Koan tradition

[64:41]

of, you know, frequent sashaying, doksan, answering koans. And so, when they give their commentaries, they really don't want to give it away. But I don't care if I give it away. See, I'm happy to give it away, you know, I'm not worried about that. I'm trying to read the case to have it yield stuff that is understandable and usable for us in our practice. I hope not to reduce it to something simple-minded and superficial, but how to bring out the koan points in a way that you can use them without the frequency machine and the answering of koans. It's a more self-directed kind of practice. What I've done in using the sandal the way I've used it is kind of give it away, give the point away, and they don't want to do that. And there are many other things too where I'm not following.

[65:48]

In commenting on the koans within that system, there is only one understanding. This is it. And I'm not limiting myself to that. I usually know what that understanding is, but I'm thinking to myself, okay, what can I find that people can actually make use of in this way? So I've got a different intention. And if I ever get around to, well, I guess some of these have been published, like in Shambhala Sun, one or two of them have. And so far I haven't had anybody complaining. But I'm thinking that Someday, if anybody's interested, and if I live long enough to do it, to see if I can publish the entire 48 cases of Mumenkhan, and then it would be interesting to see what happens. If any of these old Zen masters are still alive at the time, or not, there's plenty of Zen guys who do this tradition that are younger than I am that probably will be alive, so whether they'll get mad about it and say, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, or what they'll say will be kind of interesting to see.

[66:53]

Looking forward to that day, should it ever come. Yeah? there is an answer or a particularly sharp answer or something that I have the sense that they're not just being coy to keep it away. No, no, no. It would muddle things up if they sort of gave us kind of half-assed rough answers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. struggled with Mu for five years or something, you know, but then when he really got, you know, thanking the teacher for not having given it away, so to speak.

[68:10]

I mean, I don't know if that's a good thing, but apparently many of these people have this idea that there is, that you are doing them a disservice. Yes, yes. you know, not go that route. Yeah, well, no, that's true, that's true. And I think, but it's true within that system. In other words, if that's your frame of reference, that system, if I were teaching these things in the context of that system, I would do the same thing. And it's a good system. It's not that it's... it's a good system that produces strong results, but what happens is that if you're not operating in that system, then basically you end up not really being able to get any good out of these cases and feeling mystified by them and intimidated by them. And I don't see any virtue in that. And so I'm working with these cases in a situation in which I'm not operating within that system.

[69:13]

And so I'm trying to figure out, I don't think I'm going to hurt anybody who does operate within that system, because I'm not giving away responses that are honored in that system. I mean, I've studied in that system, but only this much, you know, so I'm not an expert on that system, and I'm not giving away, I'm not going into my notes, you know, from when In fact, I never look at my notes, which I took when I was studying in that system. I mean, but I'm sure that if there is a concern, that will be the concern. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I doubt if it's a question that you're not giving. No, or the concern would be that I'm misunderstanding the cases because I'm not understanding them according to that system. I think that one tends to forget that all expressions of truth are expressions within a system and a context, so that I think that there are people who work within that system who don't see it as a system, see it as the truth.

[70:32]

It is the truth. It's the truth within a system. So they might complain, but who knows? So far nobody's complained yet, so why should I think that they will? Maybe they won't. I mean there's the other issue that even supposing there is a right answer, I think it's probably very evident that when somebody gives the answer, they say, well, you don't really understand. You can go on to refine it and say, well, you're just spouting that word. There's a famous book with the answers to all the koans. I've intentionally not looked at it. That book was written a long time ago, actually. I think it might have been in the 19th century or very early 20th century by a Japanese Rinzai monk who was so disgusted with the corruption and stupidity of the system in that place at that time that he decided to blow the whole thing by writing the answers to the Koan. But actually, it doesn't do you any good anyway.

[71:35]

Because he's writing only in that system, and the current systems in operation in the United States don't have the same answers. So it doesn't make any difference. Read the book. It's actually not that good. I was kind of wondering, even if you give it away, can you really give it away? Yeah, right. It's not about the answer, it's about the reflection of your life. Well, that's what I think. That's right. It's about some real understanding. And that's the trouble with that system, is that it degenerates into not that, but just, did I get the answer right so I can move on to the next one, so I can get my diploma? And that's what usually happens. And that's why that book was written. Yeah. Can you put these up on your website, your lectures? There are some. Did you look? Are they on? No, I haven't looked.

[72:35]

Yeah, some of them. Three of the four that I gave are there. Oh, really? How do you like that? Well, there you go. Yeah, and I think there's some records, some Blue Cliff Record talks on there as well. So yeah, some of them are already up there. OK. Yeah. That's a good resource. Yeah. We would encourage you to put more up, though. Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit of work, though. But I'll put more up. I actually have talks on all 48 cases of mu'min khan that are written. So I could put more up, and I'll try to do that. Well, it's about 9 o'clock. Last word? Yeah. On your website, I found it was often difficult to find them because they don't all indicate that they're from mu'min khan. So they're not organized in a way that is easy to find them. Oh, you mean it just gives the title of the case? It doesn't say Moomincon? It doesn't give the number of the case? Sometimes in the body of it.

[73:38]

Oh, really? The titles, if you put M01, M07, and so on, for some of them. Oh, I didn't know that. I only found one of them that actually explicitly gave the title of the case. How did you find them? You just knew the titles? I just read everything on your website. Well, at the moment I can't get on my website so I can't tell what's going on. I don't really know what goes on on my website to tell you the truth. Anyway, well I'll try to do that. I'll try to put some other ones on there and I will make a mental note of trying to get the Moomin Khan case number on there so people can reference them. I know the Blue Cliff Record, it says that, but oh well. Thanks a lot for being so friendly and kind. And I hope that we should all live long enough that I could come back and give another class in the Berkley Zen Center and that we would all still be alive and enjoying our practice between now and then.

[74:47]

Please take care of yourselves. Thanks.

[74:49]

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