Good morning. Well, it's nice to see everyone again. I'm back from Tassajara for a couple of weeks, and then I go back again to finish the practice period. As you may remember, I was invited to do as much of the practice period as I wanted to. period, which is 90 days. So I'm doing something like 45 days or something like that. Last time I came back for two weeks, one week I spent in Japan. So I didn't really have much of a chance to see everyone. But I'll be here a little longer now. But I'm not going to do sashimi here. I haven't been bowing.

[01:03]

Frustration is because my knee is a little sore from work day at Tusajara where I was down on my hands and knees digging holes in the rocks, in the ground, in the rocky ground. So I kind of cut my knee a little bit. But it's getting better. Don't worry about me. So today I'll talk a little bit about the difference for what it means to do monastic practice and what that means for non-monastic practice. I really enjoy going to Tassajara because it's monastic practice and what is that?

[02:05]

Why do we do that? When we do monastic practice, the schedule is pretty much the same every day. Getting up at 3.50 in the morning and going to bed around nine or so, and zazen in the morning mostly, and maybe a talk in the morning, and work in the afternoon, and then more zazen after dinner, and of course there's a study period. And this goes on more or less day after day. There are days which are called personal days, four or nine days, and some work days. But this is a kind of, the schedule, the daily schedule is what our practice, is the thread that runs through the practice.

[03:09]

And so you don't do things that you want to do, you just do things that you commit to. And so you have to want to do what you're doing. which is different than some of the things that you would want to do that you're not doing. So therein is the bind. I remember Suzuki Roshi saying, when what you want to do and what you are doing is the same, then you have your way. So, what this kind of practice does, is kind of, I don't want to say challenge, but makes you aware of your sense of self. It makes you aware of your self-centeredness, which you didn't know you had.

[04:14]

It puts you into a position where, you know, you're not doing any of the things that you were doing that you were doing before, except doesn't. And you leave your musical instruments at home. You leave your poetry at home. You leave your painting at home. You leave your family at home. You leave your friends at home. You leave your car at home. You leave your chewing gum. Well, you can take them. So you're there. with just what you have. Nothing extra. So day after day, you're practicing with nothing extra. So you absorb the practice through your pores, so to speak. You get it into your bones. And then your desires come up.

[05:21]

And you have to deal with that. And, you know, we have our crutches. And we develop our crutches to make life easy for us. Of course, as you know, the more conveniences we have, the more difficult life becomes. Which is true. Every time... you get a new computer program, it just makes life more complicated. And the more gadgetry we have, the more conveniences we have, the more complicated our life becomes. So here, none of that. Nothing's added. You don't get to rely on anything. You don't get to lean on anything. There are no crutches. So you're leaving everything behind and just practicing in bare essentials.

[06:25]

Day after day after day. And so little by little, you wear down your self-centeredness, hopefully. And then you're practicing with the same people, day after day. This becomes your family. I like to talk about this sometimes. a family, we have our blood family, our brothers and sisters, our mother and our father and our cousins, and that goes and ends. This is our blood family, which is our inevitable family. We can't change that karma. We can add to it a little bit, but we can't change it. But then, we have our family of choice. When we become ordained, if you become ordained as a priest, then you're joining your affinity family.

[07:29]

We may or may not have affinity with our blood family. It may be very difficult. But our affinity family are those who practice the same way we do, in various ways. So, when you become a Buddhist priest, or monk, your affinity family becomes your true family. That's controversial in our practice because in America, that practice is ambiguous. Sometimes we say, well, you know, which comes first? blood family or your affinity family. Well, you can't say which comes first, because whichever one you're dealing with comes first.

[08:32]

So, usually, yes, my wife is, you know, second and my practice is first. Well, no, you can't say that. Whichever one You're concentrated on his first, but the other is included. So it's tricky. So these are the kinds of problems that we have given the kind of practice we've chosen or has been handed to us. So anyway, in the monastery, this is our affinity family, and we're practicing with each other all day, all the time, day and night. So you get to know each person's personality, characteristics, quirks, problems, and so forth.

[09:41]

You can't hide in this kind of situation. There's no hiding. even though everyone has some personal thing that they're not quite revealing. But the more you try to not reveal it, the more it's revealed. This is true in most places. So little by little, working with these same people day after day, chanting their long service morning, learning how to do all these positions. Everyone has a position, of course, and so all the positions is like a little city, like a town, because we're not connected to the grid, to the electric grid. We're not connected to the gas grid. Everything is self-contained right there.

[10:45]

So now we have solar panels. We used to have only kerosene lamps. For years and years, it was only kerosene lamps. And when it was raining really hard, when I first went to Tassajar in 1969, for the practice period, it rained steadily for the first three weeks without stopping. And so you'd light a match, but you'd go back into your room, which was not heated and not lit, and you'd try to light a match, but you'd go through the whole matchbook, you know, because everything was so damp, you couldn't light the match. And then when you finally got the match lit, the water from your hat dropped. So we ended up putting rice in the match, So it's just like living underwater.

[11:53]

Anyway, these are the kind of conditions that we have in that. It's much easier now. We have electricity, which is supplied by mostly by the solar panels now and heat from the hot spring. We always wondered about. using the heat, using the hot water from the hot springs. Tassajara is famous for our hot spring. And then finally, this happened. And there's some, like the Zendo, and some of the cabins have heat that heats the floor. Floor heating. And that's very nice, actually. But for many, many years, there was no heat. And snow, sometimes snow at Tassajara, but usually up at the top of the ridge and down.

[13:00]

So it was pretty cold. On breaks, the students would get into their sleeping bags. One time, One time in 1969, it snowed really heavy, heavily. And it was like five feet of snow on the road. And so there was no coming or going. And so there was one fellow who came in who had never been to Tassajara. It was snowing when he came, and he just had heard about this place, and this is a 14-mile road, so nothing but forest and hills. So he started to walk in, and it finally got too cold, and he got into his sleeping bag, and he inched his way, crawled.

[14:11]

I don't know where he started doing that. It seems a little far-fetched, but that's what he said. But at that time, we weren't letting anybody stay overnight. It was not part of the practice period. So the next morning, Rev and I took him out. And Rev got some snowshoes. But this guy and I, there was only one pair of snowshoes. So we made snowshoes. We cut, you know, these square cans. sides, and made snuff shoes by punching holes in the side and putting rope and tying them on our feet. Clunk, clank, clank, all the way out to Jamesburg, which is 14 miles on this virgin snow.

[15:15]

It was beautiful. And then, coming back, we couldn't come back that way. I remember seeing the township truck, just, you can see the top of it, where it got stuck with all the groceries, on the other side. So, we came, you can come around through the, the creek goes all the way down to the Salinas River. And then, we came up And then, you know, when it rains, there is a creek that runs right along Pasajara. When it rains, it's like a river, and it goes all the way up to the road when it's really, really hard. So we had to cross the creek on the way back. So we had to take off all our clothes. And then the rest of us, all their clothes above our heads and walked across the creek to get to the other side so we could go back to Tassajara.

[16:33]

So those were kind of like the conditions that we had back there. We didn't have any food. I mean, we had food, but mostly wheat berries and some other, you know, staples. We went out to the flats every day and collected wild vegetables. Lamb's quarters, lamb's ears, miner's lettuce. You'd be surprised about what you can eat that's just surrounding you that you think are weeds. And those kinds of vegetables have much more vitality than the cultivated ones. because they're wild. So we made these wonderful salads most days, collecting wild vegetables. So something always happens.

[17:46]

Every winter something happens that surprises you. And then you have to suddenly Let go of everything and deal with it. So this kind of practice keeps you on your toes all the time. And it wears down your self-centeredness, even though it doesn't mean that you don't have self-centeredness anymore. But you learn how to deal with your self-centeredness. You learn how to deal with How, when it comes up, what do you do with it? Because when it comes up, there's nothing you can do with it. When your desires come up, there's nothing you can do with them. So how do you deal with that? Finding... This book called The Tiger's Cave, which came out in 1964,

[18:48]

by Abbott Obora, who was a Soto Zen teacher in Japan. He was interviewed by Trevor Leggett, who translated, and it's my favorite book on the Heart Sutra, because he talks about the Heart Sutra as your life. So, when we practice we're practicing the meaning of the Heart Sutra. And so he expresses the meaning of the Heart Sutra in terms of your everyday life, which is, you know, we talk about, we chant the Heart Sutra every day. And often we think, well, why are we doing that? And what's that about? And you can read commentaries which are very intellectual, which are good, but the real meaning is not in the explanation of it in an intellectual way.

[19:59]

The Heart Sutra is the heart of our practice, which means, how do you practice emptiness within your daily life? What does it mean to practice emptiness within your daily life? which is like, how do you have nothing, hold nothing at the bottom of your heart? In other words, there's no self at the bottom of the heart. It's about how to be selfless. But how to be selfless is the happiest state. But we're always trying to make ourselves happy by promoting our ego, which is basing our life on an illusion. The problem that we have mostly is that we base our life, that we build up our life based on an illusion. The illusion is that there is a self, that something substantial called a self.

[21:03]

Until we really understand the meaning of the self and our passions then we can't help but build our life on an illusion. So this is why this Saha world is called the life of illusion. Sometimes we call it delusion. But it is illusory because it's not built on anything substantial. If you look at the state of the world at this moment, you can see It's so obvious that it's all built up on an illusion. The illusion that wealth is stable. The most illusory thing in the world is that wealth is stable. So we keep building up and building up and then it all falls down. And then we build it up and build it up and it all falls down. Ring around the rosie.

[22:16]

So this is called the law of circularity. In Buddhism it's called the law of circularity. That we have this dream and we create a structure. dream is just a dream. And then when the conditions for the dream no longer are substantial, it all falls down. And then we build it up on another dream, and it all falls down. So, this can be very discouraging, you know. In the tiger skin, there's a by Abbot Abora, and he talks about this.

[23:30]

He says, because these worlds stand on illusion, even good is no more than an occasional event caused by associations. And when the associations are bad, the manifestation created by that good entirely disappears. and evil are always appearing and disappearing. A sutra says, though merit be piled up as high as the Himalaya, one flash of anger and it is all consumed. Merits from good deeds, when associations become a little unfavorable, are destroyed with a flaring up of passion. Our life is destruction of what has been built and building up of what has been destroyed. underneath building a destruction and underneath destructing building. I'm repeating again and again the same sort of things.

[24:35]

All worlds of illusory attachment to self are the same. So he says, this pitiable human state is symbolized in the Buddhist I guess, kind of set up, kind of like the Christmas story when you have the lamb and the Jesus and the baby and stuff like that, that kind of instructive set up. In the ruined temple of Daisenji, there is a representation of There is the dry riverbed of the story, and in the middle stands a great stone figure of the Bodhisattva Jizo. Around it have been piled up countless little pagodas. The story is familiar to all Japanese, how those who die in early childhood go to this place and employ themselves in building the pagodas.

[25:45]

They remember their parents in the world and build one for their father and one for their mother, piling up the stones one by one. A demon suddenly rushes in from the side and, whirling an iron pole, smashes down everything they built. The children, terrified, run to the stone Jizo and hide themselves for a while in the long sleeves of his compassion. Jizo is the Bodhisattva who escorts children who have died to some wonderful place. We get the feeling of pointlessness. that it is futile to keep building up the stone towers only to have them smashed down by the demon. If they are always to be destroyed, why build them up? But that will not do, for this is Psy No Co-op, a place where the karma associations find fulfillment. When the demon goes off, the crowds of children come out again and build the pagoda towers.

[26:53]

Just as they think they have finished, out comes the demon and all is destroyed. What was built up is broken down and then what was broken down is rebuilt. Repeating again and again the same task is the state of Sayi no Kawara. It is not our human condition like this also. So he says, in the worlds of relative good and evil, raised up on illusory attachment to self, we may do some good, but then when the karma associations are unfavorable, evil passions arise and destroy it all. We rebuild what was destroyed, and what we build again is destroyed. When we think we have completed something, it disappears, and what has disappeared again comes out. So the endless wheel of life revolves law of circularity.

[28:01]

What a thing to happen to such a splendid man. This is all the shiftings of human nature. From the point of view of spirituality, it is only going round and round in the world of relative good and evil. It is not the profound spirituality. All the worlds of a loser is sticking to self, but the worlds of birth and death. The point of Buddhist practice actually is to see the illusory quality of building up and tearing down. I remember when the Second World War was over, we thought, gosh, now everything can be, you know, wonderful. It just got worse.

[29:03]

Every time... Back when Clinton was president, we had this wonderful surplus of money. And then it all got destroyed. It all got wasted and distributed to the wealthy. That's the law. That's the way it goes. Now we have people camping out. That's the reaction to what's going on. So every time there's something going on, there's a reaction to it. And then it changes. The pendulum swings this way, and then it swings that way, and then it swings this way. Or you can say it goes this way. liberal, conservative.

[30:11]

Liberal, conservative. Jessica's going back and forth. When you think, just when you think everything is going to be fine, it all crashes down. So, right now, it's so obvious. In our world, the whole world is crashing. The whole world is crashing down. So, what are we going to do about that? Where do you find the reality to stand on? Because of the undulation, where is the place where you can stand and find your composure? At the center of the teeter-totter. You know, it's fun doing the teeter-totter, but not in real life.

[31:14]

Not in real life. So, how do you stand in that center where you're not going up and down? But we like going up and down. That's what makes life interesting. But Sanzen is that place where the teeter-totter doesn't go up and down. is where we find our composure. And how do you find that composure wherever you are? Not just in Datsun. How do you find the place that isn't affected by good and bad, right and wrong, this and that, love and hate, where it's not affected by any of those polarities? So, when we go to Tassajara, We let go of all the polarities. We let go of the ups and downs creating that kind of situation.

[32:17]

That monastic practice teaches us about where to stay, where do you live inside without succumbing to the law of circularity and getting caught by it. So instead of putting ourselves in a situation of hopes, we put ourselves in a situation of the bedrock of reality. One of the things that bothers me about monastic practice is that it's not a place where you stay all your life.

[33:25]

Typically, monastic practice has many different modes. Some monastics stay in the monastery their whole life. But for us, we practice for a period of time and then we come out into the world. So, practicing in the world, how do you do that? When I came out of Tassajara for the first time, my vow, I guess you'd call it, or intention, was to adapt that kind of practice to my daily life in society. in the world, because we can't abandon the world, even though the world is just a problem, and the problem of hopes and desires and everything being swept away and rebuilt, unsubstantial.

[34:31]

How do we, our practice is to, within the midst of that, to find our stability, always, moment by moment, So it doesn't matter whether you're practicing in the monastery or in the marketplace. You should learn in the monastery how to practice in the marketplace. So my intention was to sit zazen in the morning and sit zazen in the evening, and the rest was how you practice all day long. And I pretty much maintained that. My life is the life of a dentist. If you feel that your life is the life of a dentist, then that really is the basic life. And the rest is just added on. So we have to do something. You have to be a doctor, lawyer, Indian, or a chief.

[35:34]

But within that, the basic How do you practice your Zen practice within the life of society without being caught by it? That's the test of your practice. So here, we're very blessed to have a practice that allows us to practice in that way, whether you've been to the monastery or not, it doesn't matter. You can practice. bedrock practice all day long, all the time. This is called continuous practice. Dong-In calls it Gyo-Ji. From morning to night, there's nothing but practice. And whatever you engage in, how do I practice in that situation? How do I practice on the phone? How do I practice in the car?

[36:38]

When I start to talk on my cell phone in the car, Do I remember? Oh yeah. This is not practice. So it brings up examining what comes up in our life. We have the six worlds in Buddhism. The six worlds are the heavenly realms. the fighting demons, the animal realm, the human realm, the hell realm, and the hungry ghost realm. And we transmigrate through these realms daily. And in the center is the snake, the rooster, and the pig. This all revolves around the snake, the pig, and the rooster, which are greed, hate, and delusion.

[37:48]

And this is how our life revolves. That's the axis. And the wheel just keeps turning. And it's like, I can't help but think of the mouse and the treadmill. This is our treadmill. delusion. So what else could it be based on? That's the point. What else can we base our life on besides greed, hate and delusion? Well, we base it on practice. Which, when greed, hate and delusion comes up, even though we're being pulled around by it, we realize, I'm being pulled around by this and I can't help it. I can't help it. You know, when anger comes up, I can't help it. I can't help that either, even though I don't want to. Even though I don't want to react, I react. And realizing this, realizing that even though I don't want to react, I react, is practice.

[38:51]

Realizing that I can't help doing what I'm doing, I realize that, and so I want to let go of that. So the wish to let go is practice, is emptiness. That's called practice of emptiness. Form is emptiness. We're stuck in the forms, but the forms themselves are empty. And to realize when these forms arise, and as we course through them, to let go, drop what comes up, not to take up what comes to us, even though we can't help it. The more we allow ourselves to let go, the more we can find a way.

[39:57]

If we're stuck in anger, there really is suffering. If we're stuck in Possessiveness, that's suffering. If we're stuck in envy, jealousy, that's suffering. And also, we have all these conditions that create suffering. The relative that has Alzheimer's creates suffering for everybody. So how can we deal with that? We just have to keep returning to our basic nature. Not get caught up in emotion.

[41:03]

Not that we shouldn't have emotion. But emotion should not be turning us able to handle emotion. We should be able to handle this kind of difficulty. How do we do that? We just keep returning to emptiness. Returning to our fundamental basic bedrock. And it may not look like compassion. It may be compassionate to help somebody to die. when we actually are faced with knowing someone is dying, not to keep pulling them back, but to help them to die, help them to feel comfortable and open about dying, as not as something bad or wrong, but as something inevitable and correct. So how do we allow ourselves to do that without being caught by our

[42:08]

Not that emotion is not there, but emotion is a help rather than a hindrance. How do we turn our anger into energy that is helpful rather than harmful? How do we turn our envy into something helpful rather than something harmful? So it's not a matter of getting rid of anything, not a matter of hopping off one thing and going to another thinking that's going to help. So how do we face what's in front of us now without changing but transforming that energy into something that works instead of something that is a hindrance and creates karma. So Paul is telling me at the time This is our practice, whether we're in the monastery, or here, or wherever.

[43:25]

And this is how we practice the Heart Sutra. And in the near future, I want to talk more about that.

[43:50]

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