and is now sort of freelancing for the future, as well as a grandfather, and lots of questions. Thank you. Good morning. When Bailey told me that there was going to be a Bodhisattva ceremony this morning, I had to come. I've never done a Bodhisattva ceremony. I've practiced for probably 25 years now. But my teacher took what he considered to be the necessary stuff from Japan, from AHE Teaching, and didn't tell us the rest of it.

[01:06]

Sometimes I would go to him and say, Oh, Colman, please tell me how to do this. And he would say, Make it up. So in the last ten years or so I've been making up a lot. Weddings, funerals, based actually on what we just did this morning. That was the essence of our practice, really. That one piece of paper written on two sides is a kind of summing up of all the teaching and all the practice. It's not very complicated, really. It's not very difficult or fancy. And yet, as you can see in such a condensed form, you can spend your whole life and always feel that there will be more and more and more to do because it opens up

[02:24]

and as our life opens up, our practice opens up in infinite complexity out of that simplicity. Meili wanted me to explain what being a lay priest is and I'm not sure I can do that. I did not wear my okesa this morning Sorry, Kathleen. I have it on always. Thank you, Dolly. The okesa is the robe. Buddha is wearing an okesa up there. It's a robe that goes over one shoulder and keeps the other shoulder bare. was originated with Shakyamuni Buddha, who had his followers pick up scraps, the dirtiest, most useless scraps of fabric that they could find in the dumps and in the charnel grounds.

[03:39]

and wash them in the river, and then dye them all some dark color, and sew them together, he said, in the pattern of the fields that you can see. When you look down on the fields from a height, he was talking about Vulture Peak, which is where he loved to hang out. It's a high place, and you can look down on all the fields, it seems, of Bihar all these little strips of different kinds of things growing with different colors. So if you see, even with this, this is a kind of, instead of a robe, instead of an okesa, it has that same kind of, they're big rectangles and little tiny ones, and some going in one direction and some another. It's as if you put on the whole world, the whole rich growing world of all beings when this comes to you usually if you become a priest the lay part of it is somehow eliminated from the understanding and I've never quite seen how that works at least in Japanese Zen

[05:07]

because most priests are married in Japanese Zen and have families and so it's very hard to see any kind of actual distinction between lay and what's the opposite of lay? Monastic, I suppose. But since most of us are living in the so-called world, or the Saha world, the world of suffering, that kind of distinction is difficult to make in America, in American Zen. And I think my teacher is bending over backward not to make too many distinctions, at least now, and at least letting us grow our practice out of our own soil and our own life and roots rather than imposing too much from the outside.

[06:11]

It makes it difficult sometimes and awkward. I went to Japan a few years ago. Meili was a part of that group. Big reason I went, and Kathleen was too, was that I thought I would learn how to do things better instead of just making them up. And I found when we got to Rinzō-in, Suzuki Roshi's temple, we gathered around the altar and we were going to do the service. Suzuki Roshi, who was Batman's son, and a monk that he had asked to come and help him with these 12 American ladies who had come to practice for a month, and Blanche Hartman, who was the one who was leading us, and then various people in our group who had trained at Tassajara and had trained here and et cetera, et cetera.

[07:21]

stood around the altar and could not agree on what the right way to do it was. It was a tremendous relief to me. The Bodhisattva vows that we took this morning are the essence of Mahayana kind of great embrace kind of practice. We very seldom even talked about Bodhisattva vows during my training period, we had one little series when Kobin gave a few lectures about it, and then that was all we ever heard about it.

[08:28]

A lot of our study had to be done on our own, but at one point Blanche Hartman, Shunpo, came to a Sashin at Jikoji and gave a way-seeking mind kind of talk at Coben's request, telling her story of how she came to practice. I think some of you might know that story. She was a businesswoman with kids in college when San Francisco State started having a lot of contention with, was it Hayakawa? And her son was trying to help, he was part of the student rebellion really, and she wanted to stand by him. So she would go at her lunch hour with her gloves and hat and suit and high-heeled shoes and confront the police who were in riot gear.

[09:41]

the kids would be yelling and the police would be pushing with their batons and they were pushing and pulling and at one point she was full of emotion and full of intensity and full of determination about what she was doing there and she looked up into the eyes of the policeman who was pushing against her and she saw him as a human being and more than a human being as what he really is. And everything changed for her. She went around San Francisco for a long time trying to find somebody who would understand what that experience was for her. and eventually met Suzuki Roshi, and he understood.

[10:50]

After she told that story in Narasashin, we chanted the Bodhisattva vows every single night for seven nights. And I always think with gratitude blanching to those vows and to the whole teaching that comes out of a simple story like that. The thing to know about the vows are like any vows, they already happen. If you're going to take marriage vows, for instance, you're already married before you stand up in front of everybody. In some sense, you have to have already been married, and that determination is your vow. And then to make it public is another step in that process.

[12:02]

But the first thing is already done, invisibly. Bodhisattva vows are like that also. And our Dzogzen practice is like that also. Dogen always says, you don't sit to get enlightened. There's no need for that kind of ambitious mind. Because if you're sitting, Enlightenment is already there. If you think about your own life every one of us has had some kind of experience often many experiences that bring us to the cushion.

[13:06]

that make it clear what sitting is. In a zendo in which you don't do any talking, in Japan they separate the zendo and the place for talks like this and the place for ceremony also. And the reason they don't have a Buddha in the Zazen hall is because each one who's sitting is considered to be Buddha. It's important to remember this. It's so easy to get caught up in the idea of sitting and the idea of zeniness for all that, it becomes... ideas are kind of like hula hoops you know, we get enthusiastic about one and we play with it a while and then we put it down and then pick up some new enthusiasm that isn't the point of what we do here that isn't the point of Zazen or the point of the Bodhisattva vows either

[14:29]

it's really putting down all the hula hoops, all the toys all the fancy ideas about things in order to be truly present and in order to truly see who each one is to be able to truly meet each one even if it's a policeman in riot gear Thich Nhat Hanh had that same kind of wonderful insight during the Rodney King thing when everybody was so upset about how horrible the police were beating up that guy. And he said, it is horrible, it is horrible. And poor policemen, those poor policemen, how horrible for them as well. We can say that today about O.J.

[15:34]

Simpson as well. It isn't easy. It sounds so nice to say, well, let's just be present and everything will be fine, but being present means being present with all the pain in the world all the difficulty, all the suffering, actually embracing it and opening our hearts to it, and giving into it. In the vows we say, I vow, the English translation, and I've often messed around with that translation trying to make it closer to how it really comes to us in the Japanese.

[16:43]

Seigan doesn't mean I vow. Seigan really just means vowing. The personal I isn't part of that. The precepts are the same. You can say, I vow not to kill. I vow not to steal. But Bodhidharma's whole exposition of the precepts is no stealing, no killing. It's turning everything around so that the two sides, the two ways that our mind works can both be a part of it. A part of our mind likes to cut everything up into little pieces. The vijnana mind, it means knife, it means cutting. We say things are good and bad and high and low and that kind of distinction we love to make and we need to make.

[17:45]

And then the prajna mind which embraces all of that. The Bodhisattva vow is really about prajna mind. embracing everything. In all its horror, Martin Buber says, we can embrace everything in all its horror. Hands will find our hands. Cogan sometimes translates the last vow Buddha's way is unsurpassable. How do you say it here, I vow? To become it. That's a new translation. Did Mel do that? A lot of what we chant was translated by Suzuki Roshi and Richard Baker and Kobun together in Tassajara many years ago.

[18:53]

And then we've all been playing around with those translations ever since. The original translation that came out of Tassajara was, Buddha's way is unsurpassable, I vow to attain it. Which again gets that ambitious mind at work, saying, oh boy, now I'm going to get better. Coven's translation was, Buddha's way is unsurpassable, I vow to maintain it. It's sort of like Caltrans. It puts it in the field of work, and I like that, the joy of work, of what we're doing and having to do every single day and every moment.

[19:55]

The biggest thing to remember, probably the most important thing of all, I always feel very awkward talking because words are so far off the mark. And the main thing to remember is that all of these words, the vows and the intentions and determinations, all arise out of the Satsang practice itself. and are secondary and if we think that there's something imposed on us and trying to sort of shore us up and straighten us out that's helpful but the most helpful thing is to go back to your cushion and to be with these words in silence to bring it back into your own life, into your own practice.

[21:09]

I think that's all I have to say. I'd love to have a discussion, some kind of talk, some questions. We have some time for that. the eye out of the glen. In fact, we Coven students take the precepts that way and how do we say it? No killing life, no stealing, no sexual misconduct. We were in a place on the north coast and we discovered, we think they're mice, I hope they're just not mice and not something larger. But they're likely to feel It seemed to be walls. I don't know. And there's even a hole in the ceiling.

[22:16]

And my George is, you know, beside himself. He really doesn't want to kill, but when he ate the top off of the honey, we decided we're going to have to do something about this. And, you know, it's a real dilemma. It's a real dilemma. And I was thinking, gee, I'm going to go take these, retake the precepts again today, and then I'll be taking It's so hard. It's a very profound question. because on that level, that precept is, all of them actually, you cannot keep.

[23:26]

As soon as you wipe your eyebrow with your hand, whole cities are being demolished. There are people living in our eyebrows and eyelashes, truly. We can't see them except with a microscope, but they're there. Every time we pull a carrot out of the ground, if we're nice vegetarians and we vow not to kill anything, we're just going to eat carrots. We're killing something every time we do that. Chewing down on oatmeal is just as bad, in a way. And there are all kinds of ways of slicing that up and balancing it and weighing it, and there's great wisdom in all of that also. But in the end, you just have to choose where you're going to draw your line and always express to the world and to yourself your regret and your gratitude. Now, one way of seeing no-killing life is that life continues.

[24:32]

Whatever we do, it continues. That's what saving all sentient beings is. It's our life. I do have a question. How has being a lay priest affected you? What kind of changes has it brought to your life? What kind of gifts has it brought to your life? How have you grown as a lay priest? I have no idea. Frankly, I don't think about it very much. And when I do think about it, it's in order to do something like this.

[25:38]

The father of the bride came up to me the last wedding I did. confronted me and said, on what authority do you have to do this wedding? He was very worried. And in that case, then I suddenly sort of pull myself up by my bootstraps and think, oh, yes, well, I have authority to do this. So it has, in that sense of being in the world being able to say yes to doing something as tender and deep and important as a wedding. Otherwise, it's just the same world, same life. I don't even see my teacher anymore.

[26:46]

I'm not at Chikoji, and he's been all over the world, really, for the last year. I haven't seen him since I left Chikoji more than a year ago. So... It was like a big present he gave me, just to be and do what means the most to me. And I find out every day what that is, from what I say yes to and what I say no to. When Maylee called me, I said, yes. Maybe that's the difference. I appreciate your talk very much. I found a lot of what you said ringing deeply inside me. What you said about the marriage vows being already present was very true for me.

[27:49]

that I got married to Gordon because that seemed to be the appropriate expression of what already existed. And I'm looking at the precepts in view of taking lay ordination. And I find that a lot of that rings in me. And also the idea that I can't live up to that ever. Both of those seem to exist at the same time. But I also hear what you say about somehow making it your own. And a lot of what I'm reading in the precepts is now becoming what the Doshi says, the Doshi's part of it, has been very distant for me. It's like a cloud going by. I have no connection with that and it's becoming more mine. But I have, I noticed today, there's like a pitfall for me in that, that I make it my own, and I've noticed some arrogance about it, I'm not sure what to do about it, that if it's not ringing for me, if my mind's wandering, or I don't understand it, I dismiss it.

[29:12]

And I noticed that that's a problem, I think that's a problem. It seems like when it's not, something I'm connecting to, to make it mine is not dismiss it, throw it away, or assume it's not worth my time, but to say, to look and see how it can be mine, rather than just feeling resentful or guilty about it. And I just wondered how you look at things that you don't understand Shakyamuni Buddha said, and the Dalai Lama repeats it, take what means something and sounds right to you and don't accept what doesn't sound right. But it's important to really be able to listen and to listen with more than intellect.

[30:14]

This part is a wonderful tool But unless all of us, all of our body is involved in understanding and hearing what's being said we aren't equipped to decide because we aren't truly experiencing it. It's necessary to hear with our heart and with our hara. The Japanese always say our wisdom lies here. And if we read the sutras, for instance, with our hara, they have a completely different sound from being read in an academic and an intellectual way. And certainly the precepts are that way too. But if your heart and your hara say no, that's what you believe.

[31:17]

That's all you have, really. True wisdom, prajna, is found there. And it may be that you're not ready. It may be that it isn't right. The Dalai Lama always says, if science proves that something in the Dharma is really wrong, we'll go with science. But it takes long, long study, not the kind of burning the midnight oil on thinking about things, but sitting with it, walking with it, going to the grocery store with it, seeing what the world is with it, how it fits from here. I find myself, even though the precepts about stealing and stinginess can sort of be expanded, I find myself sometimes wanting something that more explicitly addresses issues we face in terms of consumption and living in a consumer society.

[32:52]

That's a wonderful question. What's come up for you guys in terms of making things open to precepts? I've never thought of it in just those terms, but it's a wonderful suggestion. We should do it. I vow to recycle. Yeah. Good. Number one. I vow to recycle. What else? Oh yes, he redoes them practically every five minutes. It's interesting, that's a good point. Thich Nhat Hanh is very concerned about what he sees as terrific immorality in Western culture, having come from this, seems like idyllic little country of Vietnam before all the fighting began. where they were all living in the country and cultivating the land.

[33:56]

And he tells stories of going out in a boat in the morning as the lotuses are opening up on the river, putting the tea in the lotus, and then when it closes up it infuses the tea with its scent, and then paddling back and getting the tea out and making it on the shore. You know, the kind of poetic life that just with a very strict kind of simple, caring morality, where everybody knew what they were supposed to do, and almost everybody did it. And if they didn't do it, there were ways of taking care of that. And they had a whole monastic situation where the monks lived with the villagers and helped in every way. coming to America and France and all the other places. He lives in France and spends a great deal of time in other countries, including ours. He's been horrified by the kind of freewheeling amorality that he sees here that is so radically different from what he ever knew.

[35:07]

On top of the terrible thing of the war in the first place, And he was involved in both sides of the war. He can't go back to Vietnam because he tried to get the two sides to agree. He wanted the communists and the Americans to talk to each other and he came to the UN. And then he couldn't go back to Vietnam because they said you're a traitor. And he couldn't come to America because they said you're a traitor. So he went to France and sees people drinking, having freewheeling sex, all the things that we take for granted, all the violence and craziness that we read in the newspapers every day. So he's been desperately writing and rewriting the precepts in very interesting ways, trying to get some kind of handle on how we are and how we can be.

[36:11]

So that's something that you could really look into. There are lots of versions of the precepts that he's done. And it's also, I'm very grateful to you for bringing that up, because it's important for all of us to think about that, and all of us to rewrite them every day, every single day. of one's own and other people's psychological truth, may be more significant than killing a thousand microorganisms. I wonder if you could comment on that. That's certainly a very big part of it, isn't it? Killing life is what we say, and so you're redefining life not as life in the body only, but the life of the mind especially.

[37:19]

And certainly that's true. And certainly the violence that we do to each other and that is done to us is often of that kind of violence of the mind. Don't do this and closing up the doors and the windows of our Buddha nature. One of the very most important reasons to practice is that practice is opening up those doors and windows or seeing that in reality nothing gets closed. Sitting is a kind of empowerment and we can sit just as well in a jail cell or in a tyrannical situation and better we do that to continually connect with our own nature and see that there is no way no real way just as we say no killing life of the body there is no killing life of the mind

[38:46]

We come and we go. We come and we go. I understand. So I won't get in a caboodle. T. Koji is a little retreat center on Skyline Boulevard.

[39:57]

It's nowhere, actually. It's on the very tip of Santa Cruz County. Santa Cruz County comes to a point. where San Mateo and Santa Clara also come to a point. So they're three counties all together. Highway 9 is not far from there. If you go down one direction, you come to Boulder Creek. If you go down another direction, you come to Saratoga. So it's up in the Boonies. It's 13 acres with a little pond and four buildings and a beautiful little sendo, wonderful little sendo. It started out as an alternative high school in the 60s, built by the Quakers, Palo Alto, mostly people from Palo Alto. And then in the 70s, during the Great Rebellion, the Quakers left to deal with the Vietnam War, and the kids fired the teachers, and the school went from bad to worse, as you can imagine. And eventually, the IRS caught them laundering their money by using their non-profit status to sell vegetables and fruits in the markets.

[41:16]

It has a very checkered history, as you can imagine. After the school went broke, they had to sell it. And we bought it. And in the meantime, about 60 people who had set up a house, actually built little houses for themselves a few miles down the road, had been thrown out. The sheriff came and brought bulldozers and just knocked everything down in one afternoon and kicked them out. So they said, well, shoot, here are all these empty school buildings. We'll just move in and have our little what they called an anarchistic commune. It was more anarchy than communal. They stole from each other and beat each other up and it was quite a crazy scene. And we bought this place. Corbin came to America from Aheiji

[42:20]

the Great Monastery, sort of like Rome, the Zen Rome. And Suzuki Roshi chose him specially to help set up Tassajara. And so he spent the first couple of years setting up Tassajara and doing all those translations and everything else that needed to be done. And then he took over the Los Altos Zendo that Suzuki Roshi had established, Haiku Zendo, A little two-car garage with 17 cushions. That's why it was Haiku Zendo. And that's how I met Kobin, was at Haiku Zendo. I was one of the first inadvertent guests at Tassahara. We just took that road to see where it ended. And it ended in June when they'd first opened their guest season. and they welcomed us with open arms and said, come in, you can be our guest, and we thought that was cool. They taught us how to sit, and Suzuki Roshi was there and gave the Saturday evening lecture.

[43:28]

So for me, it was a very big surprise, because I'd spent my whole life looking for that. was very surprised to find it at the end of that long road. Eventually they sent, after we kept coming back there year after year, do you realize that a very fine Zen teacher lives just a couple of miles from your house? And I said no. So they sent me to Haiku Zendo, and that's how I met Kobin. And it took me a long time to get up enough courage to walk in. I was really terrified. I was terrified anyway of practically everything. And to think of walking into a little Zen dojo like that with a real Zen master in it was just almost more than I could manage. And I didn't say anything to anybody for about a year. An old friend teased me about that the other day.

[44:31]

I never knew who you were or what you were doing there. You just came in and sat. And eventually we began to, as I became more part of that group, began to look for a place where we could do sashim. We used to rent a hostel, a youth hostel, and then we'd have to move all the furniture out and turn the whole thing into a zendo. with mats on the floor and cushions and the whole thing. Then we'd sit for a week and then it would be this enormous labor to put it all back together again and store all the stuff. So we kept thinking, wouldn't it be great to have a place where you could have orioke right there where you needed it and just be able to sit anytime. So we bought some property. That's how we came to buy this place. That, too, has a very dramatic history, but I won't go into it for you now. And we had a lot to deal with, because Coban, who takes the Bodhisattva vow extremely seriously, made it very clear that these 60 people who lived on the land already had to be included in the practice.

[45:46]

That we were not going to call the sheriff and the bulldozers and kick everybody out. He said, we will fix up a zendo and invite everyone in. That was wonderful training for me. It took the training out of the preciousness of the zendo, although the zendo was the essence of it, but it made the whole thing have to work on the ground, and in a very, very, what turned out to be an extremely difficult situation. Some of those people loved to come and sit. It wasn't just wild, drug-crazed hippies, though there were some who were quite drug-crazed, and some who were just plain crazed. But there were, oh, ex-Catholic nun was there, a nurse was there, very interesting people also. And many of them felt a big connection with what we were doing.

[46:51]

There were a lot of runaway kids. You know, that's when all the kids started running away from home. And a lot of them came to California. So there were lots of 14 and 15 year old kids. We eventually closed it all down because of the kids. It was a too potent a combination of drugs and children and crazy people. It didn't work in the end, even with the zendo and the practice. But it was a wonderful training for all of us, wonderful training. We had to meet with each one eye to eye and belly to belly and really be with them. And some of them were really difficult people. You know, they would walk by the Zendo farting loudly, you know. Turn up the rock music and blast it during Sashin, you know, we would sit with this purple music flowing through the Zendo.

[47:55]

It was very, very difficult and cultivating patience, all the things that you read about in Zen practice, we did. Eventually we did an eviction. And it became a very quiet place and a very beautiful place, and I encourage you to go. It's open all the time. The Zen Dojo is always open. There are caretakers there, and everyone is welcome. They have a Saturday program with a talk, and Kobin's not there, usually, but two of his monks are there. So, Larry and Michael, and several other caretakers. All are certainly very welcome there. It's a beautiful place and it's surrounded by hundreds of acres of hiking trails all through those mountains. It's 11 o'clock and I promised I would be done by now. Thank you very much.

[48:53]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ