I am proud to face the fears of the starless course. Good morning. Good morning. Last time I talked about self-nature and true nature. True self and no self. Selflessness. And I talked about the difference between Buddha's experience of being one with everything and a problem so many of us have with interpersonal boundaries and setting limits and not having a cohesive sense of self.

[01:01]

But don't worry if you weren't here or you don't remember that talk, because I don't remember it either. But I think this talk is maybe an extension of it. And also, I apologize if some of it may be a rerun of it. I'm beginning to understand why so many teachers have only one talk. There are a lot of famous Zen teachers famous for one finger or saying the same thing over and over again. And a lot of people, you know, famous people who write books, you go hear them talk and they say the same thing they wrote in their book, and you only have one talk. So some of this is maybe laziness, but I think partly it has to do with the nature of how things are. If we want to know, essentially, how things are.

[02:03]

We want to understand the essence. There are a few basic questions that we have to ask, and each of us probably asks those questions in our own way, but for those of us for whom this kind of fundamental inquiry is central, we may have a few questions that dominate our lives, a few recurring questions. So this kind of recurring question, or the individual expression of these recurring questions, is immortalized in our koan collections. And some of these questions and dialogues about them may seem a little obscure nowadays, but that's okay, because their purpose is to arouse our questions, and we get to put it in our own words. And we have to investigate our questions with our own body, with our own breath, and with our own attention.

[03:12]

So I'll tell you a little bit about the questions which have been questioning me for most of my adult life. About 25 years ago, when I'd been practicing for not very long, I was a graduate student in anthropology at Stanford and the question that I was interested in, a question I wanted to investigate from my dissertation was, what is the universal nature of the human mind? Independent of culture, what is the universal nature of mind? Well, my professors despaired of me because this is not research of a quest. And they were interested in numbers, quantifiable things. You know, like if you remember the story of the Little Prince. The Little Prince goes around to various planets and meets all these different characters.

[04:19]

And there's the accountant who's only interested in numbers. Those were my professors. They wanted quantitative data and statistical significance and stuff like that. So I didn't get very far with that. Every time I narrowed the question down to something that was getting small enough, it seemed very trivial. I had one other question, one other interest, and that was how people learn, especially how people learn values. And so I did do a study of the transmission of values in an elementary school. And I didn't realize actually until last night how closely linked those two questions were the question of how we learn values and what is the universal nature of mind.

[05:21]

I've been reading the book called The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lash And he reminded me that every society reproduces its culture, its underlying assumptions about things, and its norms about behavior in the form of personality. And our socialization at home, at school, and with our friends modifies human nature to conform to the prevailing norms of the culture. So what I must have dimly sensed at the age of 21 was that I didn't know who I was. That in fact, none of us really has a clue because my human nature, my basic nature had been so twisted by my upbringing. And I must have had a sense that there was something universal

[06:29]

that we were all made of. That whatever shape we were twisted into that we were all made of the same basic stuff. And of course that's true not just of people. But I want to talk about people today because I want to talk about culture in Buddhist practice. And this is an important subject for us as first and second and third generation students of Dharma in America. One of the things we have to figure out is what is the Dharma, what's true nature, what's truth, independent of the cultural forms, the cultural forms through which the Dharma is being transmitted to us. We know that over the last 2,500 years, there have been lots of different specific forms of Buddhist practice, lots of different practices and rituals, lots of different teachings.

[07:37]

And we know that Buddhism changed its shape to conform to the cultures, the norms of the cultures that it lived in. And it took different shape in India, and in China, Tibet, Japan. Of course it also changed the cultures as well as being changed by the cultures. But I want to talk about the relationship between form and substance, between form and essence, form and emptiness. We practice to understand, to realize, to investigate, to reveal true nature, which is no nature no particular, specific, enduring thing. We practice to arouse the mind that abides nowhere, the universal mind, to bring it forth.

[08:41]

And we in Zen enter this formlessness through very strict, very ancient, oriental forms. And we impose on them a great many often unconscious American meanings and cultural assumptions. And I found it important to be as conscious as possible about my assumptions in order to see what's really going on here. We spent quite a bit of time at the recent conference of Western Buddhist teachers talking about the issue of Dharma and culture. And one of the most striking things for me in that discussion was how much we all agreed on what was basic, what was Dharma. We were from lots of different Buddhist traditions.

[09:46]

But our common roots and basic understanding were very much one and very obvious. We didn't have to discuss it very much. At the end of the conference I had a chance to teach a retreat with about 15 other teachers from various places and most of them were Vipassana teachers. I think I was the only Zen person there. couple from the Tibetan tradition and we were at Spirit Rock and there were about 70 or 75 students and 15 teachers and nobody told us what to do. We had to figure it out and it all just happened. It was very smooth and it went very easily. But one thing we didn't have to deal with was ritual kinds of forms.

[10:56]

And if we'd been 15 Zen teachers from different places, we might still be there trying to figure out how to do morning service or serve the meal. Rituals and specific practice forms are where we tend to get caught in Zen. Soto Zen practice is very rich in ritual. So we can be used by it, or we can use it. We can use it to put ourselves to sleep, or we can use it to wake up with. A ritual is like a boat, a vessel, to take us to the other shore. from the personal to the universal.

[11:58]

Ken MacLeod, who was a Vajrayana teacher at the meeting, described the relationship between dharma and ritual really beautifully, and I don't think I can do justice to his, the way he put it, He talked about understanding and about how having some deep sense of how things really are, one needs to express it somehow. One needs to celebrate, share it. And the celebration becomes elaborated as practice, and practice established becomes a way of life. And over time, celebration becomes a ritual, becomes done the same way, and practice becomes teaching, and a way of life gets articulated as precepts.

[13:13]

And they're alive and they're awake, as long as they're flowing from the deep heart of personal, individual understanding. But if understanding and connection doesn't pervade every practice, moment after moment, ritual becomes just form, and teaching turns into dogma. And precepts become a kind of a moral code that's imposed from above, that somehow external, doesn't arise from our understanding. When Buddha had his great awakening he immediately began to look for ways to express it, to share it. And that's true for everyone. Realization can't be actualized in a vacuum.

[14:20]

Essentially, the understanding that we're all made of the same stuff, impermanence, we're all breathing the same breath, temporarily, has to be expressed somehow with other people. And we as Americans tend to have a lot of baggage about being in groups together. We live in a culture which is highly individualistic, on the one hand, and rather intolerant of diversity, on the other hand. And most of us come from families which have mirrored and transmitted this double bond in various ways. How many of us didn't fit into our families, feel like misfits in our own culture?

[15:26]

How much does our weariness of being misfits, our hunger for belonging, our longing to have the long unmet needs for nurturance and guidance and closeness, how much does all of that feed our fascination our attraction to Japanese culture. We can intellectualize about this a lot, but actually I sometimes feel that the robe is like a bandage binding my woundedness, and that bowing is partly an intrigue finally to be permitted into the fold. And if I can be aware of these feelings and tolerate the pain and the confusion that they bring, I can begin to use Japanese forms of practice or other forms to wake up.

[16:48]

An example, attending the teacher. I think I've talked about this before. Traditionally, Zen teachers have various attendants. A jisha who carries the incense and has various other duties in a monastic setting, kind of a personal secretary. sometimes confidant, arranging appointments, writing letters, getting the teacher where they need to go, finding their shoes. I remember when Mel first started using it, Jisha, and I was one of the first people he tried this out on. And we'd practiced together with Suzuki Roshi, and so I'd watched him do that. And so I sort of knew what to do. But this was a very different situation.

[17:56]

Mel and I were old friends and he'd been my music teacher. We had a rather informal relationship. And we also had a strong Dharma connection. So one morning, During Sashin, the first time I was his Jusha, he slept in because he didn't feel well. And so I went upstairs and asked him if he wanted breakfast. And he said, yes, please. And would I bring some food for Liz and Daniel? And Liz, his wife, got furious and gave him a lecture about how dare he be a step and fetch at Roshi, and how dare you pull a number like that on an old friend?"

[18:58]

And Mel was very confused, and he thought that he was just trying to provide me with an opportunity to understand the meaning of service. And I'm not saying that it was completely pure or free, from desire for power or the kind of thing that Liz was talking about. But partly because the shadow side was named, and because the process was open and witnessed, we could use our kind of clumsy attempt preserving this old form of the Jisha student thing, to wake up. We were watching what we were doing.

[20:03]

So, I could use that form to strengthen my feeling of connection, not just to my personal teacher, but to all the teachers and all the students throughout history. And my idealization could be tempered by an appreciation of my teacher's humanness and his frailties. And I wrote a poem about Jisha practice which went something like this, I bring you breakfast to nourish truth. It's not for you, it's not for me. We do this so everyone can see there is no you, there is no me." In his new book, Encouraging Words, Akin Roshi says,

[21:19]

is the instrument of the hidden life. The Buddhists who perform the pageants of enlightenment and its rigors and joys each moment are seen and heard and felt, and their stories become ours as we bow, recite sutras, sit at Zazen, and walk at Qinhuang. We're all Buddhists. bowing together and chanting. Before lecture we had this little ritual of offering incense and bowing. It's one of my favorite rituals. I think they invented it to calm the nerves of the speakers. It gives one a chance to appreciate the support of all the ancestors who've gone before.

[22:27]

Bowing together, chanting about how rare it is to hear the Dharma, true Dharma. All together, a big line of us, past, present and future. The hidden life that Akinroshi talks about is our essence, our core. Life is basically mysterious. We tell the famous story over and over again about Bodhidharma and the emperor. The emperor asked Bodhidharma, who's confronting me?

[23:32]

Bodhidharma said, I don't know. Akinroshi says, another name for not knowing is mystery. Bodhidharma is expressing this mystery. And Akinroshi says, our practice is not to clear up the mystery, it's to reveal the mystery clearly. And mystification is the exploitation of mystery. So it's important that we don't exploit the mystery by mystifying the Japanese forms, by idealizing them, by romanticizing them, by feeling proud when we master one of them and somebody else is fumbling around with it. We mystify and cloud the process

[24:37]

when we hide out in practice or use it to transcend or leap over our psychological pain and our personal confusion. But if we can use the forms of practice as flashlights, torches, to illuminate what's actually happening, then we can be enlightened by anything, by chanting in Japanese, by blowing a nose, picking up a baby, Whatever it is we're doing. Akin Roshi says, maturity is not the individual in control, but rather it is fundamental harmony made real. I recently went to a talk given by one of my first anthropology professors, Laura Nader, she was one of my heroes in college, And she talked about harmony and harmony ideology.

[25:47]

And by harmony she meant what Akinroshi means, the fundamental harmony, our understanding, our deep interconnectedness. And harmony ideology is a forced kind of harmony that is based on limiting legitimate conflict and devaluing individual differences and discouraging discourse. And it's a tool. Harmony ideology is a tool, a political tool for consolidating power. And she talked a lot about how it operates in this culture. And I think that Buddhism, has been used as a harmony ideology in many sanghas.

[26:50]

And that leads to abuses of power and secrecy about the flaws of the teacher. And it helps people use the Oriental tradition as a way of mystifying practice and mystifying what is. But the Dharma isn't, it isn't a man-made law, even though in the history of Buddhism and the Japanese practice that we've inherited, the teacher was kind of like a Japanese warlord who kind of made the law and operated outside of it or above it. And so our challenge is to find a way to respect understanding and attend to it

[28:08]

And that's what having an attendant is for, so that a student has an opportunity to listen very carefully to the teacher when the teacher's not saying anything. I remember at Zen Center years ago, there was this kind of precocious little kid who asked one of the priests, he said, hey, you there in robes, What's the sound of one hand clapping?" And Silas, who was very sharp, said, you have to listen very carefully to hear it. So you have to find a way to listen very carefully without adding a lot of ideas about it.

[29:14]

Because the Dharma that we're listening to, it's not made up by anybody. It wasn't made up by Buddha, it's not made up by anybody. It's like the law of gravity, something that we observe. and the great teachers of the past, what we appreciate about them is what keen observers they were, how well they managed to clear away their assumptions and their ideas and their desires, and managed to see what actually is underneath all that. So maybe you have something you'd like to talk about.

[30:22]

When you're in the midst of great confusion, mental, emotional confusion, how can one know one's essence? That's it. That confusion, that's it. It's no different. Really be with it. What's hard is to really be with it. You want it to go away. Because it hurts. Yeah, it hurts. This business with the knees, sitting still, this is just a matter It's also pain.

[32:11]

I mean a real physical palpable, it may indeed be metaphorical for more subtle pain and fear and desire to bolt away, but it also is very real physical discomfort that can be extremely, make a person nauseous. It's real, that's all I'm trying to say, in the moment that you're with it. Yeah, and Suzuki Roshi felt it was really a great benefit to have that kind of reciprocal time to bring you into the present. I think it's important not to to turn the pain of sitting itself into an ascetic practice.

[33:14]

Say not to do that? Not to do it. I don't think this is supposed to be an ascetic practice. I think that's a place where there is a lot of confusion and I don't have a lot of... I don't have an answer. But I think that the physical pain, which is very real and can be very helpful, can also be a hindrance and may not always be necessary or certainly isn't to be cultivated. When in Suzuki Roshi's day, you know, we always believed and he encouraged us to believe that if your heart was pure and your practice was sincere, you could sit this way and not get hurt, not damage your body.

[34:24]

And that's simply not true. And we loved him so much that we ignored the messages of our own body and a lot of us did irreparable physical harm to our bodies from trying to sit this way without adequate physical training and with bodies that weren't ready to do this. So I think we have to be very, very careful. There's a lot of trial and error involved, but not to Not to get caught by this. I don't think I... I haven't completely digested or understood what you've been talking about.

[35:29]

It seems to me that it's a... there's a serious admonition in it today. And this may not be quite a fair question, but could you say something about the role of joy? I'm not sure I understand the question of what the relationship between joy and the admonition. What admonition are you hearing? Well, that's what I'm... I'm not sure. I'm not sure what the admonition... Perhaps the admonition is, look very carefully at what you're doing and accept nothing on faith. That may be... That's just what comes up at the moment. But I guess, I'll say my own piece, which is that

[36:36]

I feel the joy has to keep you going. The joy of doing a practice like this has to keep you going. Without it, you can have very deep and unsettling self-examination. but that you don't want to be intoxicated by the joy, because you can't be. You have to look at that. I guess I don't know so much about joy, actually. I don't have so much experience with joy, actually.

[37:39]

I find myself still quite new to all this, sort of without thinking to carrying it out into the rest of my life, because it helps me to remember how to try to live with intention every moment. that can help to support. There's so much about our culture and our lives that's directed at deadening rather than living in one fashion or another, be it pain or pursuit of happiness to escape something else or whatever. So for some reason, my point of work lately has been a place of great conflict, winnowing away at ego in some sense. I find myself now carrying a fighting incense each morning as I go into my office to confront my day and somehow I don't quite understand why it is that the forms seem to support that.

[39:01]

Well, it's also, another way to look at it is that your understanding gives rise to some form. You're expressing something that needs to be expressed, and it's your particular form, and there's incense, and you've seen it here, but that's how it starts. And so it's like You know, on one hand it's something that's, you know, maybe you've got a glimpse of here and you carried it out. On the other hand, you're also independently inventing it as you go. And that's what keeps it alive, is that kind of independent invention. I used to do that a lot when I was home with small children.

[40:15]

I find myself inventing these little rituals to sort of plug the leaks in the vessel and give my life some shape. Well, there's two things I've noticed about Ritual One is that in America, the Japanese teachers seem to have been very careful to keep and transmit everything they learned. And I have always been grateful for their doing that, because there's a kind of capability on their part that I think is good. They're probably not sure what it is that works.

[41:18]

But the package worked for them. And so in coming to America, it seems to me that most of them have been very conscious of wanting to be sure to bring the whole package, not knowing, sure, what needed to stay. And I think that was really wise in moving from one country to another, to take whole packages so that you can be examined really carefully to be sure of what it was that really needed to be kept or maybe didn't need to be kept. The only way to find out was to read more. Even though I personally have a lot of problems with ritual, I'm so and I resist it so it's probably fair I certainly agree with Kate about feeling gratitude that the teachers who came from Japan transmitted and taught one-on-one and with various students everything every

[42:37]

every aspect of the ritual in particular, even though most Americans are indeed one of the cultural assumptions, I think, that we bring to this practice or almost any religious practice is that ritual is something to be suspicious of. Nobody lowers themselves in this country. equally good and equally worthy. So what is this bowing business? You know, well, that's the way the Japanese do it. Well, why should we do things the way the Japanese do it? I mean, who are they to teach us or who are they that we should follow what they do? These are, I think, cultural assumptions that each of us brings more or less to being a student of Zen here on the West Coast in the 20th century.

[43:42]

Although I think, though I have not been a witness, I suspect that we have, we Americans, have already changed. And maybe not outwardly with definite, you know, now we're going to do it differently. But we, being Westerners and from a very, yes, I would say a very different culture, we necessarily do it our way, even though we're trying to do it somebody else's way. And I think when the Japanese teachers come here and see us, they may even feel scandalized that we're doing this stuff in this peculiar barbarian way. I'm not sure, but just to reiterate my agreement with Kate, I'm very glad that we are I haven't always felt this way, but I do now. Very glad that we try to, out of our own sincerity and observation, emulate our teachers, who are in turn, such as you and Mel, emulating Suzuki Roshi, who is emulating his teacher and echoing back, all the way back and all the way out.

[45:01]

it soon in the context of Buddhist evolution, it will change and it will be quite different from what we have learned from Suzuki Roshi. But one by one, I just esteem the ritual that I have learned and attempt to carry out with the same humility. sincerity as I see it done for me. slender readings of Dogen says that he was very clear that it should not be a Chinese form that was brought to Japan.

[46:16]

Very determined to make it an indigenous thing. My understanding of what's happening today in this discussion is that there's more of a defense of it than an examination of it. a real determined defense, rather like the examination of what we're really getting. Well, I guess that's why I wanted to talk about it. I think there is that tendency, and what I've noticed is that there seem to be kind of two trends in American Buddhism. There's the let's get rid of it all, and the let's keep it all.

[47:18]

And the Vipassana teachers brought no ritual from India. And they're now trying to create something, but they were taught various things, but they didn't bring it, they just brought meditation. And some of the Zen teachers, notably the good women teachers like Joko Beck and Tony Packer, have ditched it all, pretty much. And so that makes me really think about it. I used to hate the Japanese forms. I grew to love them. I find that very confusing. Some of the teachers who I respect the most don't do any of it.

[48:26]

My understanding of their not doing any of it is that their experiences of people kind of getting caught by it and idealizing it and not being able to examine their experience through it, not being able to use it in the way that it was intended to be used. So I think it's very tricky to know where our reverence and respect is coming from, and whether it is just another form of preference. Yeah. I'd like to return to the subject of joy. But also, I do want to say that the Japanese teachers that I've seen are watching us in our various attempts of the Founding Movement, that may just be the ones I've come across, But Mel has, I was just reading the little teaching from Mel in the newsletter talking about whether we conform to form or manifest form.

[49:48]

And when we begin anything, we have to conform in order to learn it. But Marjorie's remark about lighting incense before she comes to work, I used to learn the chance when I first came to work, like for the first five minutes. And I think our experience is that when we really begin to take the form out and find our own form, that joy arises in that. It's a wonderful feeling to just kind of find that habit. Is there time for another question? I have my own... I can't say that I'm wrestling with form, and I'm not speaking about Japanese form particularly. But this is in... Well, I've heard Mel say, and it makes a lot of sense, that freedom comes from becoming free from some form.

[50:57]

Otherwise, I mean, the implication of freedom is that there was some limitation before and freedom arises from that previous containment or limitation. And I've been thinking myself that trying to be mindful of the way I talk, the way I move, and so it's very difficult because I tend to move, to feel dispersed. most of the time. And I like to have sort of an athletic gait or something like that, which actually generally makes me too spread out or something, you know. And I've considered, sometimes I've had rare moments of having a sense of just

[51:59]

a sense of harmony in certain moments in behaving. Like everything came together and there was a sense of joy or harmony or something special that I don't usually feel in my sort of scattered behavior. And I'm thinking, maybe should I as a invent as a practice for myself, sort of moving slightly differently from the way I do, at least for a few minutes on every day, sort of maybe instead of taking a long stride, taking a shorter stride, or something where I can sense my body better, or have a sense of containment. And I've been, which would go in the direction of creating some kind of form as a form of practice, personal practice for myself.

[53:04]

Different behavior that would create certain limitations I'm not used to. Just to remind me to be present and to sense something different. So I've been wrestling with that. through thinking about maybe starting to behave differently. You know, as I walk, at least a few minutes of every day or something. So I have a sense of the importance of form as a reminder. By just bumping against the form, because I just But you're also talking about training. Yeah. You know, like, you know, during practice period or sashimi, people walk all the time, like in kin-hyen, with eyes closed and slowly. Not with hands, but up.

[54:07]

So you're talking about training yourself. Right. Sounds like it would be worth trying. Let's see what happens. We should stop. Thank you very much.

[54:28]

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