I vow to face the truth with the darkest words. I'd like to introduce Kathy Fisher, who is a priest. She's a mother to two boys. She's a school teacher. I've known him for a few years. He's a big part of my sense of humor. And I'm like, okay, I'm just going to go to sleep. Good morning. There's a poem which impressed me when I heard it many years ago, maybe 12, 13, 14 years ago, and which I remember, and which I'll tell you.

[01:32]

I'll tell you now. It goes like this. It starts this way. The inner tangle and the outer tangle, this generation, is entangled and entangled. The inner tangle and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled and entangled. The inner tangle and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled and entangled. These are the first two lines of a four-line verse that was spoken by a deva. A deva is kind of an angel which used to live in India.

[02:34]

It is reported that this deva visited Gautama the Buddha in the night to ask a question. And the question comes with the second two lines of this verse. The inner tangle and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled in a tangle. So I ask Gotanga this question. Who succeeds in disentangling this tangle? So I ask the ponderer this question. Who succeeds in disentangling this tangle? Who succeeds in disentangling this tangle?

[03:35]

The two lines are, so I ask Gautama this question, who succeeds in disentangling this animal? This verse is at least 1,500 years old. And of course, it is reported that Buddha answered this question with a four-line verse, And this four-line verse, which was Gautama's answer to the question, was then the inspiration for a commentary. And this commentary is this book in two volumes, written by Buddha Gosha. in something like 400 A.D.

[04:39]

The book is called the Visuddhimagga, or the Path of Purification, and it's an early Buddhist terrified meditation manual. So, I'll turn it over to you. all on the edges of your zafirs, I'll tell you what he said in his four-line verse, the Buddha. This was Buddha's, you can put it, gotama, his answer. When a wise man, established well in virtue, develops consciousness and understanding, then as a bhikkhu, ardent and sagacious, he succeeds in disentangling this tangled.

[05:51]

When a wise man, established well in virtue, develops consciousness and understanding, then as a bhikkhu, ardent and sagacious, he succeeds in disentangling his tangle. When a wise man, established well in virtue, develops consciousness and understanding, then as a bhikkhu, Ardent and sagacious, he succeeds in disentangling this tangle. One thing that's interesting to me about this, bringing these two verses, the question and answer verses today, is the interaction of all the time periods, all the periods of time,

[06:57]

that this verse includes. First of all, Buddhaghosa wrote this commentary in 400-something AD, but these two verses, it's very possible, even likely, dated back to the Buddhist time in some form or other. And of course, the words the words that were spoken during the Buddha's time, the Buddha's teaching, was not written down during the Buddha's life. So we have the spoken words of these verses, and then we have the time when they were written down, some hundreds, I'm not sure, a couple hundred years later at least. And then we have 900 years after Buddha's death, in 400, 900-something years after Buddha's death, in 400-something AD, Buddhaghosa used those verses to write an entire, long, detailed commentary on it.

[08:14]

So, by 400 AD, we already had three time periods in Janaka. And then, And it says 1956. This was translated from Pali by a Biku by the name of, well, Biku Nyanamoli. And that was in 1956, so we have a 1956 kind of language. And then, of course, it comes around again in 1991 in this room. And what interests me about that, among other things, is that it's not just the time periods that we're looking at.

[09:18]

It's the life's work of all these different people who into this room, the life's energy and the life's work. And I'm sure that it's occurring to some of you that especially the answer to this question could use a little work. The verse starts out with, what a man, what a wise man. And I chose to read it exactly how it appears in the book, Because not knowing Pali, I don't know if it says man or if it says person, considering the sexist tendencies of the cultures in which Buddhism grew, there's no reason to think that it didn't say man or Pali, whatsoever.

[10:20]

But now that we've inherited this text, it's our life's work and our life's energy Bring it alive for us such that we can offer it to them. And also we have language in the answer like, succeeds, you know, in Zen in 1991. in the Bay Area and said, Buddhism, we have trouble with words, don't succeed. There's a meaning for this. So we inherit a text like that with some little barbs and it's our life's work that can adapt it for its present environment.

[11:25]

What especially impresses me about these verses are, in her question especially, the simplicity and how contemporary it sounds. The inner tangle and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled. It's perhaps 25 years old, 2500 years old. It sounds as though The commentary itself is not the subject of what was on my mind for today, but just to give you a brief outline of the commentary. It's a very lengthy discussion on the term race. in Buddhist answer and verse. And the three terms that it especially discusses are virtue, and consciousness, and understanding.

[12:38]

Virtue, consciousness it calls concentration. So this is the Buddhist meditation manual which discusses the levels of the different levels of meditation and how one gets from one to the other and so on. A meditation manual for us, it doesn't have the same function for us in Zen that it did for those monks at that time, for a variety of reasons. It still is a wonderful thing to read. We have a little different slumet, shall we say. The discussion of virtue is interesting.

[13:41]

I think that virtue functions for a monk entering meditation the way that for us, We don't have as much rapport with the word like virtue these days. We have some, but maybe not as much. But words like self-esteem, which you hear a lot about today, I think functions in the same way for a meditator that virtue does. And what I mean by that is that There's a story in the virtue section that says, that reports, that a person who is not well established in virtue can enter deeper levels of meditation, but won't stay, will just simply enter and immediately leave. So it's by being established in virtue that a practitioner can enter a deeper level of meditation.

[14:46]

and rest and stay there. So that, as we know, a person who we would say lacks self-esteem is someone who maybe can't let things work out well. and it has to go into a situation and look for the glitch in the situation and grow in the glitch. Or a person who lacks self-esteem tries something whatever I'm going to say, doesn't have, is lacking the kind of confidence that would allow a full experience.

[15:57]

I'm not quite saying I'm going to say, so I may be wrong. Anyway, virtue is the work that needs to be done before a person can really enter meditation. And of course what we, practitioners such as ourselves, are constantly, simultaneously working on virtue, as well as on meditation. Virtue and meditation go hand in hand. And one purifies, we purify one, and the other naturally is purified. I think that for meditators it's a familiar phenomenon that when we enter a deeper level of meditation, a big, huge, much stronger distraction

[16:59]

arises along with it. And in our lives, sometimes we have, things are going really well, and all of a sudden something big happens to come and mess it up. So, that's a familiar phenomenon, I think, to us personally, in meditation, in our lives, in our society, that along with along with greater wisdom or concentration comes greater hindrances. It's the hindrance of excitement. And this comes from not being well-established enough in virtue, or if you want to say, self-esteem, not having the confidence to allow ourselves to enter a deep place and stay there. And then comes the discussion of concentration and understanding.

[18:04]

The concentration section is by far the longest section, and it has to do with the various meditative states, their characteristics, and how one gets home to the other. But for me, the question verse is It's very powerful for me. It's moving to me that this question, you know, is the cause, is the reason why we have this teaching, this meditation. It's because the Deva showed up in the night and asked Gautama this question, but he answered the question and thrust, caused this thrust of teaching to come into our lives. So this question, the inner tangle and the outer tangle, that is a very perceptive statement, the inner tangle and the outer tangle.

[19:16]

And it comes as the result of courageous and sincere meditation practice. it's a great accomplishment to notice the parallel of the inner tangle and the outer tangle. It's not very obvious. Sometimes we get a glimpse of it, but almost none of us, almost all of us, I should say, forget about the parallel between the inner tangle and the outer tangle. And I don't mean directly parallel, everything that's happening inner is simultaneously happening in the outer, but the connection between them, how it is that one can't really, when it's impossible to withdraw and work on our own meditation without impacting on those around us.

[20:19]

And likewise, it's impossible for our world not to have an impact on us because we are, that's what we are. So this beautiful simple statement of realization, the inner tangle and the outer tangle, is what the Deva brought to the Buddha. And then the second statement, this generation is entangled in a tangle. It's kind of like a plea. The inner tangle, the outer tangle. Everywhere I look, I see a huge messed up tangle. It has more of an emotional tone, at least to me. And the word generation I like, because not only does it mean everyone who is alive today, or everyone on the Davis generation, but it also means each one of us is a generation.

[21:24]

Each one of us generates. which moment is a generation. So the word generation includes the inner and the outer. And then the question. The question. So I ask the Tantra this question. I mean, why is that line Indian? Why isn't it just, you know, this generation is entangled in a tangle. Who succeeds in disentangling in a tangle? 25% of this verse is. So I ask Gotama this question. In Zazen, bringing the power of inquiry into our sitting, and bringing the power of inquiry into our sitting while not obsessing

[22:25]

on it is truly one of the arts that we're involved in. It's the power of this question, the realization and the power of the question itself that has thrust these words forward 2,500 years in so many different languages. In Zazen, on, we have a lot of different terms, like, I don't know if this is an Auslan term, but we think a lot in art about negative space. Oriental art, there's the the scroll where the calligrapher makes three or four little pick lines and suddenly there's mountains and there's a river and there's a little guy in a boat and there's palm trees and a whole world appears.

[23:33]

And when we read up on our Oriental art, we always read that the negative space, the white space around these lines is equal in power in creating this world for us. So when we sit in zazen, this kind of negative space, that is, what's not on the agenda, is very powerful. And one of the things we do in zazen is to reside in this negative space. I don't want to say it's the negative space, it's our negative space. Each one of us is a little different, I think. In residing in this negative space, bringing to power this negative space.

[24:35]

I'm not sure if negative space is the best term, but I'm going to go with it for today, excuse me. Residing in this negative space and bringing it to power, without bringing it to our agenda is quite a trick. And that's one of the things we're involved into. It takes our utmost sincerity to do it. It takes our utmost sincerity to leave it alone at the same time honor and empower it. Because our inclination is to wallow in it or create a plan, the negative space plan, or somehow write it on a list.

[25:39]

It's such a strong inclination. And we do it over and over again, that's what we do. But once again, returning back to our breath, returning to our breath, not in a passive way, in an active way, while not making our breath a contortion, a mental construction. It reminds me of two things. One is nematodes. Does anyone know what nematodes are? Platinums. I just learned about nematodes a few weeks ago after I just saw one. A few weeks ago. I'm taking a workshop this summer for teachers through Lawrence Hall of Science, and the workshop is on science, so I drive over to Berkeley every day and learn about science, which is nothing that I've ever done before, anyway.

[26:59]

So, one day we got to go to the Lawrence Berkeley labs, you know, where the guys, the guard at the gate, We got to go in there and visit the labs and one of the lab projects that's going on right now. it involves nematodes. And nematodes are these insignificant worms that are great for turning up, possibly great for research, because one generation of nematode is four days. So you can track the effect on generations in a fairly short period of time. So they're being used for cancer research and for toxology research. The person that we met was planning to use them for selenium research, to track the effect of the toxic selenium on subsequent generations.

[28:01]

So anyway, here are these nematodes. And the one striking statement that the researcher uttered, which made an impression on me was that some people think that if everything on Earth disappeared except for nematodes, there would be a ghostly image of everything that is now present on Earth made out of nematodes. And I suppose that's what negative space is. Nematode space. Of course, from the nematode's point of view, we're in the negative space. But I'm sure that most of us rarely think about nematodes. You know, Zazen. You might. That's like saying,

[29:02]

Don't think about me, which I would have to answer. The other thing that reminds me of is tea ceremony. At Green Gulch, we have this tea teacher who is now 91, almost 92, a Japanese lady. She's been living at Green Gulch for, I believe, 17, 18 years, teaching tea. Recently, she stopped teaching tea because she has such a hard time sitting on the floor. it's painful to her. So we have another tea teacher who comes from the Urasenke school in San Francisco. Urasenke is a very big tea school in Japan and in certain places in this country. Hi! Or being behind the post. We had a Earlier this summer we had a three-day-long tea ceremony, intensive sort of thing.

[30:23]

The tea teacher who comes from the Ura Sengei School from Ai, and some of the people who signed up for it. And we had a wonderful time traipsing around to the beach and to the hill and all over the place doing tea ceremony in a variety of ways. And of course, tea ceremony, I think of as a commentary to this verse. one possible commentary to this verse. In fact, the whole, for me, I can't easily think of the whole collection of writings on Buddhism as a commentary to this verse that I've told you about. In tea ceremony, the aesthetic is very important. One comes into the tea room in a certain way.

[31:24]

The tea room is a certain way. The host, considering the complexity of the culture and history, The tea ceremony itself is extremely simple. The host chooses certain utensils. There's a cold water container, and there's the bowl, and there's the tea container, and various other things. And the host chooses these utensils so that they interact with each other, but they don't match. Each utensil is very, very different and very distinct, very individual. And they somehow create a relationship among themselves. So you would have a very, maybe a rusted, rough tea bowl and a very beautiful lacquer, gold, black and red or something lacquer tea container.

[32:26]

And somehow the interaction of those two utensils is part of what is created in the tea ceremonies, and you wouldn't have things that match. So there's this aesthetic, and the tea room is very spare, and each thing is very carefully noticed and discussed. And the guests come in and they are, there's certain things that they do and there's times that they do it and there's things that they say and there's ways they say it and there's things, extra things that they can say and extra things that they cannot say. And of course, if they do say the things that they cannot say, it just becomes part of the tea ceremony. It just, you know, because it happened. And it's wonderful. And oftentimes people love the tea ceremony or think they love the tea ceremony because of the presence of negative space in the aesthetic sense.

[33:30]

The tea room is very simple and the utensils are simply sitting on the tatami along with the host, along with the guests. There aren't tables in there as usual. So everything is on the floor, you know, explores is a beautiful thing. And it also makes one think that the guests and the host and the utensils are all equal beings. The guests are utensils also. But few people know that the real negative space of tea ceremony at least for me and anyone I've ever spoken to, is the incredible pain in your legs while you sit there. You sit in Seiza in tea ceremony, which is much more difficult than sitting cross-legged.

[34:33]

And of course, you are in what is considered to be a social situation, although for us it seems very similar. It's a social situation in that people are interacting with each other, discussing art and discussing this and that, and noticing the sound of the birds and discussing that, and speaking lines of ancient poetry and discussing that, when actually the whole time, everyone is screaming out with pain inside and trying to keep this peace ceremony going in some semblance of something. So those are, that's what I was thinking about with negative space, that it's not something abstract, it's something very concrete and it's something that

[35:37]

is right with us. The nematodes and the pain in our legs are right with us. It's not an aesthetic. It's not an idea. And it's easy to overlook. So in Zazen, What I wanted to bring up today was residing in this negative space, residing in it, empowering our negative space. The power of inquiry, which, for example, thrusts this verse into our lives, comes from this negative space. And that's where That's where we can find our power.

[36:50]

Like gravity, the earth's gravity. Or like, when we're not self-exhausting, when we're not in pain, are we experiencing our absence of pain? Or have we simply left it behind and we're dwelling 100% or 95% in our agendas? What do we have when we're experiencing pain? What do we have when our negative space is not screaming out at us? Have we just gone to sleep or have we just fallen headlong into our agendas? So in Zazen, Zazen gives us the chance to wake up and empower our negative space. So, I'd like to say the verse again, and then if you have any comments or contributions or words or stories,

[38:08]

The verse is, that you entangle and the other entangle. This generation is entangling and entangling. So I ask the tongue of the Buddha, who succeeds in disentangling and disentangling? I thought it was very instructive that David ask a question. to a question.

[39:24]

And for me that illuminates the most powerful aspect of Buddhism. It is, it does arise Try it out. Find the answer to the question. I was also reminded, at the same time thinking about Davis and Angels, about the movie Wings of Desire. My understanding of Buddhism, Buddhist cosmology such as it is, which is essentially a pragmatic cosmology,

[40:49]

That is, Buddhists would prefer to change the cosmology of the world. It wasn't benefiting humanity, rather than change the humanity through the cosmology. There are parallel worlds, and the deities is one of the worlds. It's not... It's not exactly a better world. It's not a superior world. It's just a parallel world. So the devas do have their problems. It's kind of more like the world of the Greek gods, you know, when they're always fighting and having little tiffs, you know. And they have their little tiffs, and it causes earthquakes on Earth, and they have their little tiffs, and it starts to rain, whatever. Somebody cries up in the world of the gods, and that's why it's been made.

[41:52]

That kind of parallel world, I think, is more the sense that we get from Buddhist cosmology. One word that I really like in that verse is Gotama. I mean, we almost never think of Buddha as a guy with a name, Gotama. You don't think of Buddha that way so much. But I really enjoy thinking of Buddha as a human being who lived on the face of the earth and had a face and a voice and a lot of feelings and all of that. inspiration was moved to do what he did. And he was moved to do it by people like the Davis.

[42:55]

Now, we don't know if it was really a Davis who asked that question. We don't know. We don't have information yet. I remember that question. Wasn't that a question during the session? I'm not walking into that one. Sajid makes a distinction between the two. Uh-huh. I remember. Yeah, I remember that discussion. And also the distinction between suffering and the general view of suffering. Well, I would have to think through and study the words pain and suffering as used in Buddhist sutras before I would feel that I could answer that question from any other point of view than just a personal, off-the-cuff response.

[44:12]

Then there are Sanskrit words that mean certain things, and some translator way back in 1956 decided to use this English word rather than that one. And so we have to remember that we've inherited a lot of thinking of English translators. A lot of translation work is done by English scholars. And who knows what their agendas were? Who knows what our agendas are? So I, without a lot of preparation and thought, I would rather not get into defining English words in reference to their Buddhist meaning. But what I mean is, for example, when we sit in zazen, when we start to sit in zazen, Two of the things that many of us notice when we first start sitting is pain, right?

[45:22]

And a sort of flood, a flooded agenda. Oftentimes we sit down and that's the time when we start to obsess about how we forgot to feed the cat and how, you know, we have to write into our, you know, whatever we forgot and whatever we're supposed to do. It's called my mother. I've got to get my lesson plans written up. I mean, it's often when we sit down that all that explodes in our mind and in our body. And what I meant to say about pain as a negative space is that I'm going to say, we have much more success in dealing with our pain if we don't make it an agenda item.

[46:24]

In other words, if we allow our pain to reside rather than try to do something about it. When we try to do something about our pain, usually what we're... the first thing... when we don't try to do something about our pain, the first thing we do is we tighten our muscles to resist the pain. And at some point we figure out that the tightening of the muscles to resist the pain is making the pain worse. First of all, it's making us breathe in our chest in a very shallow way, and so we're probably going to feel faint and nauseous. or because our circulation and our respiration is not freely flowing through our whole body, the pain is just getting worse and worse. That's maybe one of the things we lose, hopefully, when we let it all ebb and on. And so we somehow figure out how to relax into the pain.

[47:28]

And that's kind of what I mean, that's kind of a nuts and bolts explanation of what I mean by taking the pain off of our agenda. Because our lifelong agenda with regards to pain has to do with avoiding it, right? yet no reasonable person on the face of the earth could say that they've successfully managed that. So obviously that doesn't work very well. So that's what I mean by paying on and off the agenda. Does that make sense? And as for suffering, like I said, I don't feel like, I don't know, do you have anything to say about that? Do you have any, I think that, you know, I just have this sense, and I can't express it very well at this point, that, you know, when you made the distinction between pain and agenda, and then you just explained it further, I had the sense that things on our agenda are the source of suffering.

[48:48]

that there's a difference between having pain, and sometimes I do something bad, sometimes I don't. Also, there's an element of suffering. It's just a distinction that I'm coming to. I guess what I'm thinking that might off the cuff is when I think of this verse, and the deva that spoke this verse, the sincerity and the clarity of perception that's in this verse, to me this verse, I wouldn't say that this verse has pain, but I would say that it's a really clear and moving expression of suffering. I mean, you used the phrase wallowing, and I think that's another way of looking at it. I think you were saying entanglement. It's a style of entanglement, yeah. So we have, you know, the inner tangle, the outer tangle.

[49:56]

There's whole generations of entanglement and entanglement. What does it take to disentangle the tangle? I mean, that's a really, that is a statement, a plea for suffering. I thought it was interesting that, you know, one of the key words in the column was generation and that, you know, you had the experience with nematodes and one of the major features of the nematodes, I often miss, because I did a science project, so I had this amazing knowledge of science. I did a science project probably in the 9th grade on nematodes, particularly planaria. And the thing that's really neat about it, not only is the thing I think I remember that. The new regeneration idea is, you know, illustrated not on the negative space, but on the regenerational idea, by using a platen.

[50:58]

I just saw that there was a platen to get it in, and I just stopped it. It's cutting the head in half and having it grow to a head. of the world of nematodes. I sat my family down. I'm driving my family crazy with my little science talks. So I sat them down and told them about nematodes. And we came up with a nematode song, which is in process. I'm not going to say it. It's about time. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure.

[51:54]

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