I vow to chase the truth of the characters. through use of the doors. Oh, and this is very fragrant and scents this way. Well, here we are in the second day of Sashin.

[01:03]

This is usually a place where, for me, I'm kind of nailed to the present moment with physical and or mental pain. I don't know how all of you are doing. It's usually a point which is, why did I do this? somehow yesterday or before yesterday is already kind of lost in the mists of memory. It might as well be some other geological era. And Sunday is way too far ahead to look forward to. In fact, it's a lot better if we don't. So we're just sort of right here in the present with whatever pain or enjoyment that we're having.

[02:07]

So as a shuso, I sit out, which is kind of an interesting experience, and I can see that some of us are in this sort of same predicament and sometimes watch you sway slowly in your seats, like trees in a very slow, hot wind. So I don't feel alone in this. But actually, having gone through, at this point, quite a few sachins, I have some faith that my present difficulty, at least, I can't speak for yours, is going to change. It'll turn in some direction. or other. Of course, I have no way of predicting which of countless possible directions it will turn. It's never the same.

[03:09]

But I'm really glad to be sitting here with all of you. We have quite a crowd for a long session, and it's going to build in the course of the next few days until There'll be people sitting on the windowsills and ledges. But many of us have been sitting here for these last very sort of sudden six weeks. They've gone by very quickly. We've been sitting here together for the practice period. just like Bodhidharma sat in front of the wall and like all the Buddha ancestors sat for 2,500 years before that. So it feels really good and close to be sitting and talking with you here today. The sasheen itself, some of you probably know sasheen.

[04:14]

The word means to touch or collect the mind. Actually, the word shin is something, it's often translated as mind, but it's something a lot larger than our brains. It's sort of like heart-mind. It combines both those aspects, encompassing body and consciousness together. So the practice of Sashin is to collect the mind, or to touch your mind, to touch our collective mind in Zazen, whether that's sitting, or chanting, or bowing, or eating, or shitting, whatever we're doing, sleeping,

[05:16]

is continuously and continually returning to our body and our breath. So it's with this mind that we experience everything. And we gain absolutely no merit for ourselves in doing it. You're doing it because you want to do it. And right now you may wonder why. But you're doing it just because you said you're going to. And that helps all the rest of us do it together. So in this wonderful zendo of cedar and fir and pine, we actually sit like trees. independent, but rooted in the same soil, upright, sometimes bending, but completely flexible.

[06:27]

The trees actually make a wonderful example for us. For some reason, I'm not sure why, I've been thinking a lot about trees lately. I have no idea why, but last night in bed I was kind of playing with the metaphor. And it occurred to me that, well, for instance, you never read sensational stories about killer trees. It just doesn't happen. I've never met a mean tree or a tree that woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but possibly Susan or Karen or some of the others of you who garden, who are more intimate with trees, probably have. But for the most part, they're pretty even-tempered. certainly they have a lot of drive for existence and to live and to be upright.

[07:35]

And they're prone to old age, sickness and death. But they live their lives, their lives sort of express this complete dignity and equanimity. And also, just in the act of living, they purify the air, They purify the water. You usually don't find them wandering very far from home or lost at night or anything. And in death, they take countless forms. Sometimes they'll decay completely to become food for other beings. They make windows. papers, there's actually hardly any place you can look that isn't touched by their presence. And it's interesting, I don't know why this comes to awareness for me, because usually I don't think about them so much.

[08:41]

Growing up in the city, you know, I can't even tell one tree from the other. You know, it's embarrassing. But for some reason, with the Sashin, they've been very much on my mind. As I said, there's hardly a place you can look that isn't graced by their presence in one form or another. And I think that's why the Buddhist ancestors always practiced in the forest. In the forest there's a great silent population of Bodhisattvas to practice with. So actually some of us even go to forest monastery. If we go to Tassajara or we'll go to forest monasteries in other countries to study ourselves intensely in that atmosphere. And then the rest of us for this week we study ourselves in this kind of wooden palace here where we sit with these

[09:52]

We sit with these great beings. I was thinking of these four pine posts that are holding up the whole structure, that are still even pretty much in the form of trees. And are they living or are they dead? They're not growing anymore. If they were growing, we'd be in big trouble, actually, with making this end up. but still they're giving life to our own questioning of birth and death. So you have birth and death, actually giving birth to birth and death. That's sort of the miracle of living in this kind of environment. It's much more miraculous than, in a way, than if we were practicing in some kind of castle in the air.

[11:02]

It's pretty astonishing to me. So in the Fukan Zazenbi, we sort of... Mel has been studying and translating Dogen, and his other lectures will be about that, and we always seem to return to Dogen. For those of you who don't know, that's Dogen, this kind of smooth-faced and austere-looking fellow. Anyway, Dogen Zenji in the Fukan Zazengi says, the Zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the dharma gate of repose and bliss, the practice realization of totally culminated enlightenment, the manifestation of ultimate reality. Traps and snares can never reach it, and once its heart is grasped, you are like the dragon when it gains the water, the tiger when she enters the mountain.

[12:10]

or maybe you're like an ancient sequoia bestowing shelter and shade on all the sentient and non-sentient beings under its canopy. Unfortunately, this is the point that Emperor Wu missed entirely when he met Bodhidharma. Most of you have been here through some of these talks that I've been giving on the dialogue between Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu. The actual questions that Emperor Wu asked are quite perfect. They couldn't be more to the point of our practice. He asked, what's the highest meaning of the holy truths? And who is standing before me? And our ancestors tell us that not knowing Not knowing the answers to these questions is most intimate, but the intimacy depends on turning our attention inward and asking ourselves hard questions that put us right back in the moment.

[13:27]

That's what we do here for five days. So we can phrase these questions in a number of ways. We can simplify them to say, just, what is it? Where am I right now? Or, who wants to know? Who's asking? Right. Who's asking? That's right. Now, what? What's it to you? That's right. Well, that's another one. That's when you study in New York. Now, you could ask Mel these questions, as Emperor Wu asked Bodhidharma. Probably some of you do ask him these questions. He might even give you an answer. Possibly it's a helpful answer. But the process of Seshin is, the work of Zazen is to collect one's own mind.

[14:29]

It's totally necessary to, in order to face reality, to answer your own questions. not relying on anything or anyone outside, any experience but your own, because it won't do you any good. In fact, usually we don't even ask these questions for their own sake, or for the sake of the, rather, we don't ask them for the sake of the answers, because the answers themselves are only temporary. They're only answers of the moment. there's some glass beings going on to become other kinds of glass beings. We ask who or what or where to bring us back, back home to our bodies and to the present moment. Then, when we've sat, when we sit for a long time, without picking or choosing, we gain some confidence and that's when we

[15:42]

can become like the dragon when he gains the water, or like the tiger when she enters the mountain. So, I've been telling various old stories here during the practice period. I thought that somehow with my mind on trees, and some desire to stay a little closer to the present, I'd tell you about a more recent Buddha ancestor. He's not an ancestor yet, because he's still alive. I thought I would talk about someone that I met when I went to Thailand two years ago. I went to, for the last couple of years, to the conference of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, and I met quite an unusual Theravada monk, And I was immediately drawn to him, which doesn't actually happen to me very often.

[16:53]

I mean, there are people, I see people that I admire, many people that I admire, but there's, sometimes you feel something, just something very close with somebody. And it just doesn't happen very often. I don't think it happens very often for anyone. He sort of, Prabhupāda, sort of carries himself with the ease and the strength of an old tree, which is kind of the way I sometimes think of milk, just very straightforward and solid, being exactly what it seems to be. In fact, with proper chalk, at least, there is something to this tree image, a particular affinity of his.

[17:57]

Some of you might know his name as a monk who set out to save a forest in northern Thailand from illegal logging, and he did this by ordaining the trees. He literally performs a ceremony and ties a sacred thread around the whole area and then puts saffron robes on the trees, which hopefully protects them. It renders them visibly sacred as apart from them being actually sacred, which they are without the ropes. But some people don't, some people need the signs to be able to

[19:07]

to value the sacredness of another being. So tying orange robes around a tree makes it pretty conspicuous. Anyway, he's been doing that for a couple of years and has gotten into quite a bit of trouble for doing that and for basically resisting the decimation of his forest. So Prabhupada was born in a poor family in the northeast of Thailand, and he barely finished primary school before he took up a life of day labor and road building. His nights were filled with gambling and heavy drinking, even after he had taken up the responsibilities of marriage and a family. And at age 36, he was lying on his deathbed from a gunshot, a wound following some kind of altercation in a bar.

[20:24]

And somehow, right there, at this kind of ragged edge of his life, he woke up and vowed that if he recovered, he would enter the monkhood for at least for three months, which is kind of traditional in Thai society. He made a vow he felt he could keep, limit it to this three-month period. But actually, he's been a monk ever since. It's been about 20 years now. and a very ordinary kind of working class monk, what our Zen ancestors might call a patchwork monk. Most of the there's a system to the Theravadin, particularly the Thai Theravadin school. You take examinations and add titles to your name.

[21:27]

After you pass this level of examination, instead of being pra, which means venerable or respected, instead of being just pra prachak, you'd be pra maha. could be Prah, Great Prachak, which means that you could pass an examination in these Pali scriptures. But Prah Prachak is very ordinary. He actually has no ... he can't read Pali. He has no particular scriptural mastery, no titles. And this kind of leaves him as sort of an outsider in the monastic system of Thailand, anyway, which is very hierarchical. But he has this incredible confidence, confidence which I've seen him with in a number of different situations, both sort of

[22:39]

in the forest and in the highly political world of the monastic order. And everywhere he walks, he meets things with the same confidence. He will meet a tree the same way that he will meet a monk. I mean, well, sort of literally, sort of figuratively. He can't tell the difference, I guess. This confidence that he has is rooted in what we would call zazen. Most of his meditation is just sitting upright and following his breath in very much the same way that we do. There are other practices that people do in other forms of Buddhism, and in the Theravadan tradition there are different mindfulness practices which he practices and has done.

[23:44]

But the fundamental thing is just breathing. And when I went to a meditation instruction with him at the Inev conference, and that was all that he taught us. And then I was pretty astonished, because on another day of the conference, I led a morning of Zazen instruction and meditation, and he came. And afterwards, when I was talking to him, I said, well, How is this like what you practice?" And he says, the same dharma. So it's very close. And both his meditation and mindfulness give him a very intimate feeling of interdependence, an intimate experience of interdependence.

[24:48]

So for 12 years, he wandered in the forest, mostly barefoot from place to place. He traveled really great distances down south to Malaysia, up north into Burma. And in these walks, he would talk to termites, he would talk to wild pigs. He had from time to time he would sleep in a coffin to experience, to have some taste of what it was like to be dead and to have some sense of what his own fear was. But mostly during the day, after walking, he would find a place to sit And he would sit under a tree, just following his breath, much as we do, and then actually remaining upright to sleep when night came, which, fortunately, we don't.

[25:59]

But in some places, that's the practice. Never lie down. Some of us are learning how to sleep sitting up. It's not a required practice here. So walking in the forest, as he walked, he would ask himself, how is my body composed? What's the function of bones, of saliva? He would ask himself, if we cut off the head and have only arms and legs and trunk left, does this thing have a soul? He wanted to learn, in his words, how each part of the body, how each thing functions and harmonizes with nature. And that led him to want to know what to do to help others. So he said, by making this kind of inquiry, we develop the wisdom to see that things are always changing.

[27:09]

If we understand impermanence, we can reduce our greed. but one needs to practice to develop wisdom. As we practice, we can see that by feeding good food to the trees, they will go on cleaning the bad air and circulating pure water. I feel like this is exactly what Dogen talks about when he, what he would call raising the thought of enlightenment. It's the mind that looks into impermanence into the uncertain world of birth and death. So, as we're sitting in Seshin, sitting like trees in a forest grove, this mind is something that we have in common with Prabhupada and with all the Buddha ancestors. So after 12 years in robes, Prabhupada came to the Dongyai Forest Preserve in, I think, 1988.

[28:12]

And he was invited by the villagers there to stay and take care of the vacant temple that they had, and to start a small monastery for monks and nuns. And he agreed to do that on the condition that the local people and the monks together would help take care of the forest. Again, there's a name for this kind of practice. It's a Bodhisattva practice, one of the Bodhisattva's methods of guidance known as beneficial action. which is rooted in interdependence. So again, Dogen says, if you have this mind, even beneficial action for the sake of grasses, trees and water is spontaneous and unremitting.

[29:16]

So even without, certainly without studying Dogen, which he had never studied, this came just from his experience. But he soon found himself in the middle of a conflict with the Thai military, who administer state lands and forest preserves. The government had one policy in name, and the local officials of the government had another policy in fact. They were selling off sort of choice forest lands and supposedly protected timber to make money. And they were kind of hooking the villagers into this system by getting them to cut the trees, paying them a price for each tree cut. And as the trees were cut, the lands were then converted to sort of single crop farming for cash.

[30:26]

And since they were already degraded, they were no longer useful as a forest preserve. And so they would be converted, the government would have to reclassify them. And that really destroys the kind of harmony that there exists between the farmers and the forest. And there's very little such forest left in Thailand. So in April of 91, Prabhupada met with local military officers, and they were discussing the return of three vehicles that had been confiscated from the villagers who had been farming nearby. An argument ensued, and as a step towards cooling off things, Prabhupada stepped back and offered a full bow to the soldiers. Now, in our tradition, this doesn't sound so unusual. But in the Thai tradition, it was a sincere and very instinctual act on his part.

[31:32]

But it's something that is never, ever done between monks and laypeople. Laypeople bow to monks. Monks don't bow to laypeople. And it was very shocking. And it really confused and disturbed the officers. And after returning home a day or two later, Prabhupada was arrested on charges of disturbing the civil order. And he was just expressing himself. But it was more that kind of honest expression and the kind of passion that he had for taking care of the forest was more, he was disturbing the civil order. There's no doubt about it. And then the following September, he was leading a group of monks and local villagers to a place where government troops had

[32:45]

destroyed a tapioca crop that the villagers were growing and had driven the villagers from the land. And along the way, the group was stopped by soldiers and some kind of melee ensued. And, you know, as best I can get it, soldiers with rifles and batons attacked the unarmed villagers and then blamed the villagers and Prabhupada for instigating this attack. So again, he was arrested. And later this year, he was convicted on these two trials, this time for undermining the authority of the state and initiating violence. And these arrests actually mark the first time in memory that a Thai monk actually wearing his robes had been held in custody.

[33:56]

Usually they're disrobed. And he would not be disrobed. He had nothing he felt to repent for. And his cases are now an appeal, but nobody knows what's going to happen. So this story doesn't actually have a happy ending yet. But when I saw Krapachak in March, he was quite unperturbed, having pretty much come to terms with the possibility of freedom or the possibility of imprisonment. And he said, even if they take my robes, they can't really touch my understanding of life, and nor will I stop protecting the forest, because the forest is always protecting us. So I just, I find him, I wanted to tell you about him because I find him a very compelling example.

[35:20]

I think you would get it much better than my words if you saw him. I actually, I would love to see Prabhupada and Nell standing together. I'll have to show you a picture sometime. So I find him an example of doing exactly what was in front of him, what he saw in front of him, to take care of, and to do it for the sake of all beings. So in these next days, as we practice together, we can try to do exactly what's in front of us, sitting or walking. of whatever we have to do, as completely and strongly as we can, and be as intimate and compassionate with each other, recognizing our own experience, our own suffering, and knowing that each person

[36:33]

is experiencing themselves in just this way. Not necessarily exactly the same as you or I, but with just as much meaning, just as much intensity. So that should help us be compassionate to each other. And the ways that we do this, there are a couple of simple ways that we do this transition. One is just keep this kind of wonderful silence that we have, not chatting. I feel like there's been a lot of people that are much better about writing notes. And that's better than talking. But better yet is to figure out, do you have to write a note? Do you have to express something at all? So, if we keep ourselves as contained as we can, we can just, each of us experience each complete moment in each arising dharma, whether we like it or not, whether it's joy or pain, we can experience these completely and just let them go.

[38:01]

because many of them will not have very much significance in the next minute or the next hour, certainly the next day. And we try to allow our spiritual friends here the same kind of freedom and opportunity. We also try to avoid looking around. I'm very bad at that. There's some of us who are good at not looking around, and there's some who are bad at not looking around. And we know who we are. But... How do you know? How do I know what? How do you know who's good at looking around and who's not? Because I'm good at looking around. And I see the other people who are looking around. We recognize each other and quickly and embarrassedly avert our eyes. Rawr!

[39:06]

But actually, there's so much going on just in front of you and within you that we should be careful about looking for more stimulation, looking to see what's being done right or what's being done wrong, because this is just another way that takes us away from our own immediate experience. So it's not out of a kind of rigidity formalism that we lower our eyes is actually to really increase the intensity of our experience, but also I think to sort of seal all the leaks of ourselves as containers. And if we keep to ourselves, ourselves, we might find that helpful.

[40:09]

So this simple kind of tree-like way is also the same as dana paramita, the perfection of generosity. We let other people make their mistakes, have their successes, have their own And this is the expression of deep trust in our own nature and in our friends' sacred natures. Maybe this is, this might be the highest meaning of the Holy Truths. Maybe after Seixin, if you find Emperor Wu walking in the Imperial Forest, you can ask him. So I'd like to just offer you a few lines, a little poem in closing.

[41:20]

The plum trees on Russell Street are filling with purple fruit right now. Each plum is sister to each. In the consanguinity of branch, stem and sap, bare wood and black cushions are branch and stem for us. Just one dharma is rising and flowing. Shall we ripen and fall from the tree? And will kindly friends sweep us off the bricks every morning? Thank you very much. We have a few minutes, I think, for questions or comments. I don't know. I think they were left long before. When I see him next time I'll ask.

[42:30]

There's always a concern. I thought of that. I was thinking of that too. It's hard to communicate. He actually doesn't speak English. Ah, yes, it's, ah, you won't, well, one thing I'd say is, you will not be hit unless you ask for it. What it is, ah, carrying the stick is a way of, ah, waking us up. People ask for, ah, they ask for their Kiyosaki, ah, to bring them out of sleepiness, essentially.

[43:37]

And the way it has evolved here, one asks for it. By putting your hands in Gashuv, when the person carrying the stick is carrying it. So it's not discipline, it's compassion. And if it is... I have never seen anyone carry it or any of the San Francisco centers. There are places where it is disciplined. And of course, being a stick and it being an act of hitting, it has that connotation for some people. But it is done here. We're all pretty carefully trained to do it actually.

[44:45]

And we're also trained to hit in a way that it doesn't hurt, but it's just a smack of wood on cloth. But sometimes our skills aren't so sharp, and sometimes there's out of pain and there isn't any component of malice or power to it. Do you have a reaction to it? Just that I heard the noise. The first time I heard it, I felt hot. I did yesterday one time, I think.

[45:51]

But we don't, actually, we stopped Canada's Dick in the afternoon because there's so many new people coming and going who don't have it, who, it's really startling. Now, startling is okay. You know, startling wakes you up as well. unawares, then that's not the spirit that we want to convey. So we stop carrying it. But in Tichini, we carry it and offer it when people ask. It crossed my mind that that might happen and then I thought, well, and that I would be Well, you just, if you want it, you just put your hands in that shell, and the person will just stick on your shoulder and bow down a little so that they can get it right to your waist, and it lets you part of your shoulder, whack, and then they do the other side.

[47:03]

And, uh, you know, I invite you to try it sometime. It's a really nice connection. It's a connection to the land up there and to the you know, another strain of the same tradition in America and to the life of language.

[48:08]

I would like a coffee. Oh, sure.

[49:25]

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