Good morning. It brings me pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Yakuso Ryushin, Andrea Thatch. And her Dharma name means Healing Source Dragon Heart. She's a transmitted priest, class coordinator, Zen teacher, physician, dog whisperer. Thank you, Ryushin. Thank you, Karen. Welcome, everyone. It's so good to see the zendo almost full. Old friends and new friends, particularly welcome to people who are newer in practice or here for the first time. And to everyone, old friends, and maybe some new friends, lots of old friends.

[01:02]

It's great to see you too. There's still room. So the lovely feel of being here together in the Zendo is unsurpassable and quite precious. Please come on Saturday mornings into Morning Zazen when you can. So we're in the third week of our Aspects of Practice, practice period. So we're simmering along, and again, it's great to see so many people here as a part of Aspects. We have been walking along the Eightfold Noble Path and have talked about the practices of wisdom and the practices of the inner world, or meditation, with the exception of effort.

[02:05]

We discussed that in our class this week. Lozon's Waking Seeking Mind focused on that. And that's the topic for today. Next week, we'll finish up with the activity, the outer world activity of our lives. This gets taught in two different ways. The traditional teachings are to go through the development to realization. So often this is taught the opposite direction of what we're doing. There's a discussion about right speech, right action and right livelihood. And then we settle into meditation and have our enlightenment. But the Mahayana, we start from enlightenment and realize how to live out our lives. When I put together this talk, when I finished kind of sketching it out and I thought, well, that's pretty good, but it's really missing something.

[03:06]

And I panicked a little bit because I feel like, you know, in aspects, we talk in a really straightforward way about some of the basic tenants of Buddhism as a grounding. That's what the senior students tend to focus on. But I feel like it has been missing the life of the Mahayana. So I decided that I would do this talk a little in an unusual way. I'm going to start with the prologue. And the prologue is just like a prologue. It sets a certain spirit or tone before I go into the talk and we'll see how this works. So when I realized that, I thought about a really wonderful little book called The Eightfold Numbered Path, which was published by Temple Ground Press up in Olympia, Washington. So it was written with entries from eight different contemporary women teachers.

[04:06]

And Tejal Munich is the one who wrote a section on right effort. And she starts about it by talking about how she's working on this the material for her book chapter during a time when many people are dying in her life. And her question to herself is, what is the right effort when people are dying? I'm not saying this because I do that kind of work, but I'm saying it because it was very alive for her. And I do think that when we get the most real, when our lives are very real. So I really appreciated her asking the question, what is right effort here? What is right effort now in the middle of what I'm doing? I slept on that and I woke up with a particular person in my mind. And I want to tell you a little bit about her because surprisingly, in a certain way, I think her life really was about right effort.

[05:14]

in a way that I think all of our lives can be about right effort. This is a person who was born in an Asian country. She married a man of her country who came back from Alaska where he had a business, met her, married her. They had a daughter together and she followed him to Alaska to Anchorage two years later. It turned out he wasn't quite who he seemed to be. He ran a casino and a bar and life was not what she thought it would be. So she left and decided to start her own tavern and compete with him. She out-competed him. She was so successful. I may be embellishing a little bit, but he went under and she succeeded. At which point she came, worked her way down and came to the Bay Area where she used that same energy to parlay a very successful business and to buy an apartment building, a nice home, to really make a very solid life for herself.

[06:37]

Kind of amazing. People told me who knew her, that she was not an easy person. In fact, she was a really hard person to do business with, you might imagine. And I certainly felt that at times when she was displeased with something, she would explode. When she was diagnosed with advanced cancer, she exploded and fell apart. It wasn't supposed to be that way. And through her, but you know, she pulled herself back together within a short period of time, and she just did what she had to do. Sometimes she stopped, she didn't like it, she had better things to do, but she went back to it. I'll tell you a little bit more about the details of the end of that part of her life when we get there. But let's say that she was amazing. As time got closer, she lived so much longer than any of us thought she would.

[07:43]

When time got closer, she dropped from over 100 pounds into her low 80s. I remember happening to chance behind this little woman who was all bent over and skinny as a rail carrying two huge packages. And I had no idea who it was because this did not look like anyone I knew from behind. I picked up the eye, offered to carry them from behind, and she turned around, saw who I was, and just directed me where to go. That was her energy. When she could no longer stand in her restaurant and work, And when she could no longer cross the street from her apartment into the restaurant that she owned, she checked herself in to get admitted to hospice. And when I saw her the last time, she said to me, with total peace, with total peace in her eyes and brightness in the way that when you've finished something,

[08:58]

And you know that you've done a good job and you've kind of, you've played it out the best you can. With total brightness, she said, did I just lose this? Did the battery just? Battery, Yoni, or what? I'll miss the battery out. We'll get another battery. Okay. Do I need to unplug this for you? What can we do under your voice? Yeah, let me, should I keep going here, do you think? I did get her daughter's permission to tell this story here. She may actually want to hear it. The Jisha gets to do whatever's needed, and he does an admirable job.

[10:04]

Thank you. Ryushin, this is over down in the Zoom land. We actually can hear you a little bit better without the mic. Amazing. Can you in the back hear me without the mic? You should use the mic. Okay. How's this? Is this better? Is this okay? Can everyone thumbs up everyone? Diane, are we all right? Okay, great. Thank you. So with total peace and ease, This big, bright smile, she could light up a room. She said, don't worry about me. I'm not afraid to die. My life has been difficult. It's okay.

[11:08]

So think of her, and I just want to encourage you to sit with that question about what right effort is. in your life. What's right effort in your life? Now the rest of the talk, chapter one. So effort is usually paired with concentration and mindfulness as the meditation part of the Eightfold Noble Path. They're the inner practices. I just wanted to touch lightly on Ron and Heron's comments from last week and make a few of my own. What are concentration and mindfulness? Concentration or Samadhi is that one pointed attention to focus, to see deeply into. It's like the ocean floor that we sit on when we sit in Zazen.

[12:13]

So I feel like there is a concentration component that's embedded in how we Sit, Zazen. Mindfulness is noticing what is. The awareness, the full awareness of what is. Aware of breath in the body, aware of the posture. Awareness has the potential for insight, but it's not necessarily a cognitive process. It's an availability. Sojin used to talk about, I think Suzuki Roshi used to talk about the frog on the lily pad. When you're settled in Zazen, when you have that concentration, there's an awareness and availability to see what is. Effort is included here because I think it's the necessary energize to catalyze the fruit of sitting

[13:18]

If you just try and sit with awareness without a focus, nothing happens. You have to apply your attention and your energy in order to get this all to function. That's my experience anyway. Maybe there'll be comments about that later or other experiences. And so I think of Shikantaza as being the dynamic functioning of all three together, concentration, which provides a base, the awareness that takes in, and the energy to actualize it. I also wanted to make a comment about right, the use of right in the Eightfold Noble Path. And I think it's great we're kind of layering on different perspectives of ways of seeing that word. So here's my perspective.

[14:21]

Right is, as we've said, not an answer, an arrival or a goal, but it's a direction. It's what points us in our path as bodhisattvas. The Buddha made a prescription. The Eightfold Noble Path is our prescription, but we're the ones who have to take the medicine, follow the diet, do the exercise. You know, we're the ones who have to live out our life using it. So we're finding our way with it and opening out the Eightfold Noble Path together. The Eightfold Noble Path is about how to live a life of generally increasing freedom from the suffering of life caused by the karmic functioning of a human consciousness. That is the idea that we're a separate and fixed entity. It's not a moral exactitude, but a direction of how to cultivate a way of thinking that aligns with the natural harmony of things as it is.

[15:31]

and moves us towards freedom. So right means that which aligns with wholesomeness and moves away from unwholesomeness. Are we making choices that support the intention to live a wise and compassionate way of life or not? That's the question. Like turning right to stay on the path of freedom instead of turning wrong into the telephone pole of suffering. It's like that. It's like any skill. It takes time to get facile at it. You have to repeat it over and over again every time you sit down, every time you open your mouth, every time the path is always right there. It's not a destination. It's an ongoing process. And those of us who are sitting here,

[16:32]

have been blessed and cursed with the affinity to wake up. And so this is our way of life. Last week in her talk, Karen talked about the Heart Sutra. I have resonance with that. The idea of the perfection of our activities on the Eightfold Mobile Path, meaning not being perfect, but being beyond the ideas of good and bad. Everything is included. There is a functioning of everything. What do you do? How do you see that? How do you move with that? The perfection of effort is what a bodhisattva does to awaken with everyone because everything is included in this right. It's the perfect effort for every being. I gravitate even more to the word pure. And I like that word in part because I heard Sojin use it in different contexts and it fit for me.

[17:41]

Purity for me is the idea of nothing extra added. There's nothing added to things as they are, not my idea of things. That's been my tall mountain I continue to climb. Not my idea of things, not my self-centered view, not my perspective that I'm the center of the world. It's pure. Nothing, things as it is, is pure with nothing extra added. So that's another way to think about it. So effort, we know the effort is a word that I think many people kind of grown at a little bit, right? Oh God, how hard is it gonna be? How tired am I going to be at the end of this talk listening to this? Effort, by definition, that requires great mental or physical energy. I'm someone who's always been drawn to effort as a kind of karmic formation.

[18:45]

When I was in high school, I started running. I started running not because anyone was running at that time. Hardly anyone did back in the early 1970s. And there certainly was no women's sports program anywhere where I lived. But a friend had moved to Minnesota and she had started running cross country. So I thought that sounded pretty interesting and different. So I started running. And before too long, I was running five miles a day on the streets around my house, around busy streets. I don't know why I chose that, but around busy streets most days of the week. And I did that for three years. At one point, I realized I ran in my school shoes. You know, no one had specialized shoes in that way, and we couldn't afford two pairs of shoes. So at one point, my shoes had holes in the bottom of them. I realized because my feet were getting cold and I was running for the snow.

[19:49]

But you know, that's just how things were. And it felt so good as a woman at a time where women were waking up to what it meant to, what it means to be a woman. So always a particularly sensitive person. I think for me for a variety variety of reasons, including my gender orientation. And so it felt super to be in my body, to feel my legs strong and toned, and it really gave me joy. And it probably helped me deal with a pretty deep depression that I lived with, but didn't realize. So when I went to college, I picked a college where someone with no athletic talent could do sports. In fact, the day after I unpacked, I walked into the women's athletic director's office and asked if we could start a softball team. And we did. The next year, a freshman and I started the cross-country team.

[20:59]

And that was really great. We ran our practices together in the morning. And at some point we decided that we would do a 24-hour relay. Now, probably no one knows what that is anymore, but for many years, Reverend's World magazine sponsored a 24 hour relay where people would take turns running a mile for 24 hours. And there were teams from two to 10 people. Karen had done one in high school and she thought it would be a really neat idea for two women to do it. And why not? And we decided we wanted to do this to promote women in sports. Title IX was still, the ink was hardly dry on Title IX's pages at that point in time. So we thought that would be a great thing to do to promote the growing women's sports program at our university. So we arranged that, just she and I, with the permission of the high school track people, I'm going on too long with this story, but the point is,

[21:59]

We did this. We ran 24 hours all night. A few people came and ran with us. TV cameras came and went briefly. It was not a big deal, except it was probably, next to a Genzoe Sashim, the hardest thing I've ever done in my, I should say it in Taiji Sashim, the hardest thing I've ever done physically in my life. At the end of it, 62 and a quarter miles later on my half, I was totally exhausted. There was nothing we were both, and still are, so idealistic. It felt like it was about an ideal, a principle, and not about anything about ourselves, that we did this. And yet, there was something about that effort that was pretty appealing to me. In fact, that's enough on this.

[23:00]

It was pretty appealing to me. So effort in the Dharma doesn't have to use up all your ATP and it doesn't need to exhaust you so it's hard to walk for a week. Effort in the Dharma is a lifetime of effort. In our practice, the effort is about how we practice Zazen. We give effort by giving attention to the posture and the breath. Attention to the breath with your full devotion. Robert Aiken says, give your full devotion to the breath. That has a strong appeal because it's really about giving yourself over to your breath, a total surrender as well as a one-pointed kind of focus.

[24:05]

So we cultivate concentration in part by giving a complete total focus to the breath in and out, especially on the out breath. We settle when we sit zazen a period by counting breaths. And we don't really have a breath practice. We don't really have a concentration practice. But I think that's what we're really doing. We're cultivating a kind of settledness. And we do it by coming into our body, by coming into our body completely. When we focus on the posture, we give ourselves as an instruction over and over again. Anytime we feel like we're really, our mind is really wandering or unsettled, or we find that we're slumping or that the body is tense in some way, we give ourselves as an instruction.

[25:09]

What a wonderful practice of tuning into exactly where you are in space. And what's happening in your body, the areas of tension or tightness or laxness or mudras falling into your lap, you've slouched off to one side, whatever it is, giving attention cultivates an awareness of physical sensitivity and awareness. And you start to also notice when I'm tense, when my mind is chattering about something that's irritating or something that's gorgeous i'm looking forward to or whatever you notice in your body what those sensations are what your posture is doing and you begin to have some kind of bigger awareness and you settle back in it starts to work on a deeper level a deeper kind of intuitive becoming aware of your self as a changing sensate reactive responsive

[26:17]

I've recently been putting a lot of attention onto my mudra and I find it incredibly powerful. You know, the mudra are the fingers pointed up with pressure, they've fallen apart. When I hold my hands really open so that the thumb and the index fingers are in alignment, the whole world opens. My axilla open. Katagiri Roshi used to say that you sit zazen like there's an egg under your armpits. This opens. The chest opens. The breath opens. There's a kind of movement and alignment that is different. So the postures are very, very important to build a physical, intuitive sensitivity to just where this moment is for us in time and space. We get good at this over time. If you sit enough Zazen, and particularly if you sit enough Sashins, you get to be pretty facile at feeling comfortable.

[27:25]

The periods aren't so painful. You can sit 30 or 40 minutes and string some of them together and feel a real sense of being stable in your body. And that's really nice. It's kind of easy. to get caught there sometimes. It's easy to plop down on the cushion and sit zazen or think you are, but the attention isn't necessarily still there in the same way. You might be able to reach always using use, but forgive me for that. I feel like I'm talking about us in our practice. There's a possibility perhaps of having some light states, some joyful and blissful states, the jhanas sitting in this way, it's also possible to sit and not really notice, because there's a way of just being in the body and breath, but not necessarily tuning in and continuing to exert an effort.

[28:28]

Sometimes that's called Zen sickness. So right effort, the Buddha, Are we on the next page? Good. Suzuki Roshi said, your efforts in Zazen should not take place outside your mind. Right effort means that all the difficulties should be kept in your mind. Oh, isn't this so very important? Right effort means that all the difficulties should be kept in your mind. In other words, you have to accept the difficulty as being none other than what you are. So it's, I think, not always pleasant to realize that those mind states or physical discomforts that you have, that we have, that I have when I sit, are related to the difficulties of my mind.

[29:29]

And my work is to keep turning and opening to that in my zazen. We probably will talk a bit in Q&A if we have time about what that might look like, the kind of mechanics of it. But the point is not to turn away from that. It means whatever difficulties, even the concept of difficult is primarily in your mind, in our minds. Of course, I'm not talking about the hurricanes of homelessness after a drought or an earthquake or the violence and difficulties that are perpetrated by institutions and individuals and others as a result of, well, for any reason, but as a result of race or class or gender. I'm not talking about that kind of difficulty. I'm talking about the difficulty that Buddha was talking about when he was teaching about the Eightfold Noble Path.

[30:31]

The difficulties of our mind in greed, hate, and delusion in the way it manifests in protean and subtle, in my experience, ways. That's the difficulty that should be kept in my zazen. It's not someone else's problem. What's my work there? That's what right effort is about. So the Buddha taught in very simple ways to break habits and build wholesomeness. If you read the Polly Canon, he's actually a wonderful psychologist and teacher. He did this to allow the enlightened nature within us to arise. Right effort is how we direct our attention. Right effort is how we direct our attention. We notice whether we're whipping around, multitasking, or arrive somewhere, or at the end of the day, exhausted. Huh, that's interesting.

[31:36]

Is what we're doing adding to our sense of freedom or is it diminishing it? What do we do about that? Well, Buddha had a prescription for this and it's one of the teachings in the Theravadan tradition. We don't talk so much about it, but I think it's really important because believe it or not, we actually do these things. This is called the four exertions. So the four exertions of right effort are how to avoid unwholesomeness and how to build wholesomeness. Is anyone in here familiar with them? It was in some of the readings. Okay, great. So four exertions to avoid wholesomeness are preventing and refraining, I'm sorry, preventing and abandoning. So preventing is trying not for unwholesome mind states to arise, or you could say behavior to arise.

[32:39]

So that would mean things like, in the active world, if you're a gambler, don't go into a casino. If you like to buy too many things, don't go out shopping or have only one credit card for emergencies. It may mean not getting into a conversation. If you know that friends who hang out tend to gossip, not getting into conversations with them around topics where that may come up. Or if you know that there's something in your mind that is bothering you, where you're more irritated or jangled or Don't put yourself in situations where those are apt to manifest. On the cushion, for me, it has meant when I know that my mind is in a particular hindrance state, whether it's annoyance or fatigue, I notice it.

[33:52]

I notice that anything that comes up that I will have a tendency to have a certain energy or a certain storyline. And so I'm aware of that. I'm vigilant, if you will. And I'm particularly vigilant to not allow it to stop or to turn away from it. So to prevent, there's avoiding and refraining from. There's also abandoning. We know this so well. It's a basic instruction. Let go. Just let go. Just let go. If you're lost in thought or story no problem just return to the breath you all know that instruction precisely it's hard to do right some of them are very seductive oh just just to just a little more i'm going to balance my checkbook right now don't even do that

[34:55]

Is it building wholesome ways of thinking? Is it watering wholesome seeds? Or is it diminishing and detracting from your attention, from your awareness? To build wholesome effort and wholesome practice, you cultivate or nourish. That can be bringing the energy of one of the factors of enlightenment to your practice, maybe even making a practice of studying and working with it for a period of time. Mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, all of the factors of enlightenment, all seven of the factors of enlightenment, or just noticing them in your practice, noticing them when they arise, and appreciating and putting attention to them helps propagate them. The same can be true for the Brahmaviharas, the sympathetic joy, equanimity, compassion, and loving kindness at different times in my life.

[36:09]

Both loving kindness and equanimity practice have been very, very helpful for times when my mental states were really hard around particular issues. And then the last one of the four exertion is to maintain an ongoing, continuous renunciation. People don't like the word renunciation, but I really love it because for me, it's like, this is bigger than me. What I'm doing is bigger than me. This is bigger than my small life and my small ideas. And okay, I'm in, I want to participate in that. So keep going. At times there'll be insight, and sometimes it's easier to see our tendencies, our more subtle hindrance, tendencies, covetedness, pride, comparative mind, too small, too big. And times it will seem like, hasn't anything changed here?

[37:17]

Am I really still doing the same things? Keep going. That's part of our practice. Keep going. So I may have told the story here once before, but it fits in this talk. So I'm going to do it a little bit again. Keep going. So I had been practicing here probably for close to a decade. And I was like really all in. I had found what I had been looking for my whole life. It was such a relief. And with great, joy and a lot of enthusiasm i did everything and somehow i got asked to do everything i'm not sure people didn't regret that but i did all the positions i made a bunch and i did everything kind of with a lot of detail i cooked off them the meals were complicated, but it was so creative and so much fun.

[38:21]

I really was having so much fun doing this that I didn't see what else it looked and felt like. So at some point, Sojin started telling me that I didn't try. Well, you can imagine the button that that pushed in this person all my life. You try too hard. just relax don't worry so much you try to and so i would come back to him and say what do you mean first he wouldn't tell me and he'd say you don't try and so we would often accelerate truly we often accelerate into shouting matches you don't try what do you mean i try too hard you don't try one time we were at tasahara doing this And the abbot's hut and Greg Fane was on the other side of the wall and started pounding. So it was like a heavy iron ball.

[39:24]

You know that in the koan? He kept throwing it at me and it kept knocking me over and backwards until one day I was walking out my little porch of my little house in Oakland. to probably walk the dog with nothing in my mind, and it hit me like a ton of bricks, what he was talking about. Thinking about right effort, for me, it has a number of different qualities to it. So these are factors of right effort that I don't think you'd find in any list, but maybe similar to your own experiences. Right effort includes diligence. That's another term for effort, but what I like about this particularly is it means careful and persistent. So right effort is holding the teacup with your two hands. It's churning your zagatan with your hands and not your feet.

[40:30]

It's paying full attention to what it is that you're doing physically. as well as mentally, not allowing yourself to stray off. It also means not missing anything because you're turning away. This is in the mind. I remember one time years ago, I was driving my car and some news came on about something catastrophic that was happening in East Africa. And my hand just reflexively moved to turn the radio off in my car. And I thought, what's that about? You know, sometimes we can't take in everything. We need to stop. But sometimes it's like swatting flies and that's not okay. That's not helpful. That's not wholesome. That's not like paying attention to what's going on in this person and this person and

[41:34]

The anxiety, fears, hopelessness, fatigue, whatever it was, that's important information. Pay attention. That's part of diligence. Try not to miss things. Of course you're going to miss sometimes. Don't think I'm thinking that kind of perfect. But diligence means noticing when you turn away. Noticing when you hear things that you don't like. about yourself, what does that mean? Curiosity. Another aspect of right effort is continuous practice. It's all about continuous practice. Enlightenment is always happening if we show up for it. It's always right there. And the way we become a part of that world, way of being is by continuing to refocus our attention and body and breath and mind to what is right here.

[42:43]

Dogen's longest fascicle is two parts. It's called Gyoji and Gyoji is really basically stories of some of the ancestors that he particularly had affinity for in great detail about how they lived their lives. It's not a fascicle about honoring our ancestors. It's a fascicle about how they practiced, how they lived their lives, what their continuous practice was really all about. That's our encouragement. We have this practice because of them and how they practice. That's our work too. That's our work too. In case 16 of the Mumong Khan, Master Uman says, The world is wide. Why when the bell rings do the monks put on the robes? Why do you put on your robes? Why do we sit zazen? What is this continuous practice?

[43:44]

Wake up, wake up, wake up. There's the responsibility. I think bright effort is also for me, at least, has a component of a sense of responsibility. It's this idea that all the difficulties are in my mind. It's up to me to take care of the world. It's up to me to take care of my own world and the working of my own mind. So I'm the one who needs to apply the effort. Dogen, Dogen was, in his formative years, you know, he spent them in Japan and he had two very important interactions with two different tenzos. And what he took away from that was the quality of their applied, continuous, responsible action.

[44:48]

The old man who's on the hillside harvesting from the garden and weeding in the midday sun at age 60. Tenzo, Tenzo, why are you doing that? He says, if not me, who? That's right effort. Another quality is sincerity. Suzuki Roshi said the most important thing, granted he said this 45 different times in his in his years of teaching. But the most important thing is to have sincere practice. Sincere practice means it's not yours. Sincere practice means you offer it up completely. You don't hold anything back. Dogen called that wholehearted practice. You're free from pretense or deceit and proceeding from genuine feelings.

[45:53]

They're your genuine feelings. I think as we get, as I got further into practice, more and more out of a sense of gratitude, more and more I practiced out of a sense of deep gratitude for this practice, for our teachers' continuous effort of being here six days a week. sitting sushines every month with us for many years, not at the very end. So that sense of acting also from our inmost request, I meant to say this earlier on, I feel like in this study, time studying through the Eightfold Noble Path, I feel like intention and effort are the two places where we manifest our individuality, that we bring ourselves most and concentration is concentration mindfulness is mindfulness but what's your intention why are you sitting why are you practicing and um to bring that forward in our thought in our heart in our mind when we practice is really very helpful it's so much bigger than we are this practices and effort is kind of the again the catalyst the effort that we've got the energy that we bring

[47:17]

Another quality of right effort is the right amount. So the right amount is sometimes it takes a lot of energy and sometimes it takes just a touch and a noting and a presence and knowing what's right. I've talked a little bit about gratitude. That's a really helpful aspect of right effort and i believe my experience is that with time that sense of gratitude blossoms into joy an impersonal kind of joy perhaps but this person feels it and that joy is again something that fuels continued practice a continued sense of commitment and responsibility and an openness and lightness that we don't usually ascribe to effort.

[48:20]

This story bears repeating because it was so helpful and I've shared it with many people I've talked with some years ago. There were many things I was engaged in here, both on the board and in the Zendo. And I was also with Okamura Roshi at his place, very involved with things. And I got asked to do a lot of things there. And I really wanted to because he is my heart teacher. I feel like I owe him so much, but I just felt like I had too much and I didn't know how I would manage. So I went to him and I asked, what do I do? It's too hard to say no. And he said, only do what you can do with a joyful mind. Only do what you can do with a joyful mind. That's right effort. That's right effort. Anything else is not in harmony with your life.

[49:21]

Oh, this is where I wanted to put in another piece of the story of the woman. And so her daughter confided at one point in me that she wasn't a very good, oh, how much time? It's 11.15. Oh, no. Well, I'll tell this, and I'll point you to Suzuki Roshi's last quote, and we'll leave it there. Okay, thank you, Karen, for that time out. I should have asked Gepo. Thank you for your attention and for bearing my long-windedness. So her daughter confided. She wasn't a very good mother. You can imagine she got farmed out to being raised while mom was busy taking on the big boys in business. But towards the end of her mother's life, she begged her mother to move to Denver where she was a successful lawyer and let her take care of her.

[50:33]

And her mother wouldn't do it. She said, my life is here in the restaurant. working in the restaurant. She even had a place to lie down when she was too exhausted to stand. So at the end, the daughter and the son-in-law came every other weekend for months and cooked with her in the restaurant. They cooked together. They had such a good time. Everyone was so happy. Isn't that what an effort? All right. I'll have to stop there. Thank you again very much. I'm sorry I didn't leave time for questions. I don't know if there's time for Hozon to say anything if you would like to. And we can go outside. And although we can't have a cup of tea, we can have a taste of company there.

[51:30]

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