Good morning. It's a wonderful summer morning, and that bird out there is excited as he or she always is. Is it he or she? Do you know? Yes. Yes. Yes. Today I would like to speak from a piece that was written by Maha Gosananda, this Cambodian teacher who passed away a couple of years ago, who was an inspiration for me and for many people. This is something that Sargent Roshi spoke about a couple of months ago. He read a section from this, I think it was months ago, it could have been weeks ago, it could have been years ago, which is

[01:05]

some of the matter of this talk. But what I remember, the book came out, it's printed in a book called Step by Step, which is now out of print, unfortunately. It was published by Parallax Press, and it came out, I think, just after I had met Maha Gosananda. And I thought I would pass around also a photograph of him. He was a very unusual person. Richard Baker described Thich Nhat Hanh as a cross between a cloud and a piece of heavy machinery. And Maha Gosananda he was much more cloud-like than Thich Nhat Hanh. He really appeared to be walking about three inches. Did you ever meet him, Tom? Because he was in the refugee camps in Thailand, when you

[02:12]

were probably in Thailand. He was a remarkable person, very, very joyous all the time. He had that lightness of realization, and very generous. And he looked like a substantial person. Once he came over and had lunch with us, he wanted to deliver something to me. But in order to get to it, it was in an inner layer of his robes. And so he went upstairs and he started unwrapping the robes. And it was like, you know, it was like watching an onion. It was like layer after layer. And you wondered if when he got to the last layer, it was just going to be emptiness. He was a really small, skinny guy when he got down to his skivvies, you know. Did you know him in Rhode Island? I knew him, yes. I saw him many times. He used to

[03:16]

come in my car a few times. He was at my priesthood ceremony. My first one. My first one. At least, you know, many maha-gos in that story. Right. He was a character. The first time that I saw him was the first time I was in Thailand at a conference. And he was a room full of mostly monks and some lay people who were there for this international network of engaged Buddhist conference. And he sat up there with a big smile on his face and said something like, for human beings, what's the most important thing? And you had all of these really very well-seasoned practitioners. And, you know, they were saying things like, oh, taking refuge in the three treasures. No. Honoring your teachers. No.

[04:17]

Keeping the precepts. No. Seeing all beings as Buddha. No. Does anyone want to make a try? What's the most important thing? Breathing. You're close. Yes. Poopies. That is a, that's the effect of the most important thing. That's right. Who said that? Oh, you can get a lollipop after this. What did she say? Eating. Eating. Eating is the most important thing. So this is a piece that was, this is what Sojourn was citing. And this is a piece, what I'm going to do is read you this whole thing and therefore save myself about 15 minutes of this lecture. But I didn't want to break it up. I'll comment afterwards and we can discuss it. It's

[05:25]

quite beautiful to me and contains the whole of the Dharma. So this piece is called We Must Eat Time. What is life? Life is eating and drinking through all of our senses. And life is keeping from being eaten. What eats us? Time. What is time? Time is living in the past or living in the future. Feeding on the emotions. Beings who can say that they have been mentally healthy for even one minute are rare in the world. Most of us suffer from clinging to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings and from hunger or thirst. Most living beings have to eat and drink every

[06:26]

second through their eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and nerves. We eat 24 hours a day without stopping. We crave food for the body, food for feeling, food for volitional action, and food for rebirth. We are what we eat. We are the world and we eat the world. The Buddha cried when he saw this endless cycle of suffering. The fly eats the flower. The frog eats the fly. The snake eats the frog. The bird eats the snake. The tiger eats the bird. The hunter kills the tiger. The tiger's body becomes swollen. Flies come and eat the tiger's corpse. The flies lay eggs in the corpse. The eggs become more flies. The flies eat the flowers and the frogs eat the flies. And so the Buddha said,

[07:32]

I teach only two things, suffering and the end of suffering. Suffering, eating, and feeling are exactly the same. Feeling eats everything. Feeling has six mouths, the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. The first mouth eats forms through the eye. The second mouth eats sound. The third mouth eats smells. The fourth mouth eats tastes. The fifth mouth eats physical contact. And the last mouth eats ideas. That is feeling. Time is also an eater. In traditional Cambodian stories, there is often a giant with many mouths who eats everything. This giant is time. If you eat time, you gain nirvana. You can eat time by living in the moment. When you live just in this moment,

[08:40]

time cannot eat you. Everything is causational. There is no you, only causes and conditions. Therefore, you cannot hear or see. When sound and ear come together, there is hearing. When form and eye meet, there is seeing. When eye, form, and consciousness meet, there is eye contact. Eye contact conditions feeling. Feeling conditions perception. Perception conditions thinking, and thinking is I, my, me. The painful misconception that I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and think. Feeling uses the eye to eat shapes. If a shape is beautiful, a pleasant feeling enters the eye. If a shape is not beautiful, it brings an unpleasant feeling. If we are not

[09:47]

attentive to a shape, a neutral feeling comes. The ear is the same. Sweet sounds bring pleasant feelings, harsh sounds bring unpleasant feelings, and inattention brings neutral feelings. Again, you may think, I am seeing, I am hearing, I am feeling, but it is not you. It is only contact, the meeting of the eye, form, and eye consciousness. It is only the dharma. A man once asked the Buddha, who feels? The Buddha answered, this is not a real question. No one feels. Feeling feels. There is no I, my, or me. There is only the dharma. All kinds of feelings are suffering, filled with vanity, filled with I am. If we can penetrate the nature of sensations, we can realize the pure happiness of nirvana. Feelings and sensations

[10:53]

cause us to suffer because we fail to realize they are impermanent. The Buddha asked, how can feeling be permanent if it depends upon the body, which is impermanent? When we do not control our feelings, we are controlled by them. If we live in the moment, we can see things just as they are. Doing so, we can put an end to all desire, break our bondage, and realize peace. To understand pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings, we have to put the four foundations of mindfulness into practice. Mindfulness can transform pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings into wisdom. The world is created by the mind. If we can control feeling, then we can control the mind. If we control the mind, then we can rule the world. In meditation, we relax our body,

[12:03]

but we sit up straight, and by following our breathing or another object of concentration, we stop most of our thinking. Therefore, we stop being pushed around by our feelings. Thinking creates feeling, and feeling creates thinking. To be free from clinging to thinking and feeling is nirvana, the highest supreme happiness. To live without suffering means to live always in the present. The highest happiness is here and now. There is no time at all unless we cling to it. Brothers and sisters, please eat thyme. So

[13:11]

so it's really hard to speak after that actually. Um there's nothing more to say. I was thinking of a song that a friend of mine wrote, uh a guy named Mark Graham in, lives in Washington. It's called I'm Working on the Food Chain. Uh and the lyrics are, it has an alternate last line, but the lyrics are, I'm working on the food chain and looking for a bite to chew. Out here on the food chain, and I'm telling you folks it's true,

[14:15]

you are what you eat, and you also are what eats you. The alternative last line is, when you work on the food chain, the food chain's working on you. Embedded in this, this actually would be a great thing to study. It's, it's, this morning it was striking me, sort of like the heart sutra, which is, when you start to unpack the heart sutra, which we recite every morning and afternoon, you realize that it's, it's a compendium of all of, uh, all of these Buddhist teachings. And quite a number of them are here, in this. You have, he's talking about the four foundations of mindfulness, which is mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of the feelings,

[15:21]

mindfulness of the mind, mindfulness of the dharmas, and he's encouraging you to study this. But he's also unpacking it as he goes through this in, in ways that the more you, you understand basic Buddhism, the more you see what he's, what he's actually talking about beneath the surface of the words. He's talking about dependent origination. He's talking about basic Abhidharma in the places where he's, where he says, for example, uh, when I form and consciousness meets, there is eye contact. So in order to experience anything, you have to have, you have to have, there has to be some object, which provisionally you call outside yourself, some external sense base. There has to be

[16:28]

the internal sense base, which is the organ, the eye. And then, but if, if the nerves are severed between the eye and the brain, which is where consciousness is more or less located, then you still are missing something. You have to have consciousness. These three, these three elements have to come together in order to feel something, in order to have contact. And then in the context of the foundations of mindfulness, when you have contact, and also dependent origination, when you have contact, then what comes up is feeling in the technical sense. There's two senses in which feeling is used in this, and as I've been, as I was looking around to just check it out more widely, the technical sense of feeling is

[17:38]

pleasant. It's only, it's pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. So the first thing that happens when you have some perception, or some thought, is very quickly, Lori was talking about this in her dharma talk not so long ago, very quickly, almost immediately, you have a sense of something being pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, if you can, when you apply mindfulness there. So the next thing that happens very fast is what he's calling perceptions. Perception is the beginning, perception is naming. It's like, there's a sound out there. First, you have the bird, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, and

[18:43]

what's interesting is that over the course of the last two weeks when that bird has been living here, I have experienced it as pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. You know, according to internal conditions having nothing to do with birth. Sometimes it's the most wonderful sound, sometimes I wish it would shut up, and sometimes it's just, it's just a sound. But it's, the next step that goes very quickly is bird calls, beginning to name that, and then the next thing that happens is one begins to formulate a story about that sound. Oh, is it calling for a mate? Is it hungry?

[19:47]

You know, depending upon, some people really understand, some people have a lot of knowledge, so they probably might know what that call means. Nonetheless, one begins to make up stories about that perception, whatever it is, whether it's, you know, whether it's something we're seeing, something we're hearing, and that's what he's saying. He says, feeling eye contact, seeing something conditions feeling, feeling conditions perception. Perception in this naming, there's also then the notion of, aside from pleasant, unpleasant, it's also like or don't like, this grasping or aversion. As soon as grasping and aversion comes, then perception conditions

[20:54]

thinking, thinking is where we begin to create a story, thinking conditions, thinking is I, my, me, the painful misconception that I see, hear, taste, touch, and think. Maybe it's not always a pain, maybe it is a misconception, it's not always painful, but the more we solidify this thought of I, the more we're going to set ourselves up for various pain, disappointment, sense of loss, because we can't stay there, because the I is not permanent, it's a constant flow coming together of causes and conditions.

[21:57]

So, I'm going to come back to this idea of eating, because I like to eat. Some people actually don't seem to like it a whole lot. Ah, Sojan likes to eat. And people like to eat different things. I would say that you are, you seem to be partial to sweet things. So, what? Salt? Hmm, I don't know, we could take this at the residence meeting. I'm partial to salty things myself, not so much to sweet, but I like to eat. This eating is just a wonderful metaphor, but it's not a metaphor, it's actually what we're

[23:12]

doing with our bodies. So, you know, when he says feeling uses the I to eat shapes, it's like we're taking in whatever we're perceiving, and we're actually digesting it, and then in that process of eating and digesting, that actually gives us energy, it keeps us going. So, we're eating our feelings, and this is something, it's interesting, this is where I have, Lori and I were talking about this, I have a disagreement with him on one dharma point, and I'm willing to hear what, I'm happy to hear, I'd like to hear what you might think. So, he says the ear is the same, sweet sounds bring pleasant feelings,

[24:12]

harsh sounds bring unpleasant feelings, and inattention brings neutral feelings. Whatever it is, we're eating these feelings, whatever it is, they can nourish us or poison us. But I think this question of pleasant-unpleasant-neutral is a tricky one, it's a subtle one. There is one traditional way of looking at this as neutral is inattention, as if you were really paying attention, you would see something was pleasant or unpleasant. I don't think so, and I think that the exemplar of that,

[25:13]

well, I think what I was saying about the sound of the birds is like that. It's not that one should come down on the pleasant side or unpleasant side, that's really dualistic thinking. What is zazen? Sometimes, zazen is excruciating, it's really unpleasant, and your legs are aching, or you're restless, or you feel like you want to jump out of your skin, and you just think, when are they going to ring that damn bell? They forgot, their dog forgot, and it's very unpleasant. You've taken something that's unpleasant, and then you've created a grasping, in that case you've created aversion, you've gone, you've moved from feeling

[26:18]

to aversion, and then you begin to think about a story of why this is happening. Sometimes it's incredibly blissful. Sometimes, just sitting down is like letting the cares of the moment, the cares of the day, the cares of the week, the cares of your body just drop away, and it's like, ah, this is great, why didn't I do this earlier? Ah, and you feel so good for a long time that you hope it will never end. It's the same after I finished, just after I finished reading this Mahagosananda piece, it felt so wonderful to be with the words, that I really didn't want to say anything,

[27:23]

quite honestly. So that was pleasant, and out of pleasant you make, you have craving, it's like, oh, let's let this go on forever, but actually, if Zazen, sitting cross-legged, went on forever, forever would be, really forever would, for me, would last about an hour, and then it would start to hurt. But most of what, and this is, this is also, I'm checking with Sojan Roshi and with you as we get to this, like, most of my experience of Zazen is, doesn't really fall into the category of pleasant or unpleasant. It is just moment by moment attention, which is not creating karma, it's not, not acting in one way, not pulling over

[28:34]

one side to another, actually that's the physical, the physical posture is to sit upright, and if I lean this way, then I come back to center. If I lean this way, I come back to center. You do that with your body, and you do that with your mind, which is part of your body. Still, there is contact in the awareness of breathing, in the awareness of posture. There is physical contact, there is mental contact, and there are feelings that are arising, it's just that those feelings may actually be neutral, and they're not necessarily feelings of inattention. They may be feelings of a very acute but undefinable attention,

[29:37]

which you might call neutral. I am eating them, and they are eating me. Everything is eating. So this question, I want to just finish by talking a little about this question of time, which I think is a, it's a whole, it's a whole other topic, and it would be wonderful to study it. Dogen, well, I think that, first I was reminded, I was reminded in this, sort of towards the end, he says, when we do not control our feelings, we are controlled by them. The same thing is true for time. This is Master Joshu's famous exchange. His disciple said, how do I use, asked Joshu, the disciple said,

[30:48]

how do I use the 24 hours? And Master Joshu said, you are used by the 24 hours. I use the 24 hours. So in that, that's very much the same sense as what Maha Goswami was saying. If you don't control your feelings, which means with awareness, not with, not with control. If this is control, if you do not control our feelings, we're controlled by them. This is control in the sense that Suzuki Roshi speaks in Zen mind, beginner's mind, in the control chapter, which is very, very wonderful. In order to control things, you give your horse or cow a wide pasture, and basically what he's saying about control is just watching, just watching other people, yourself. It's really about yourself. It's like, how do you,

[31:55]

what kind of mindful awareness do you bring to yourself? Because if you don't do that, you're going to be pushed around by your feelings. You're going to be pushed around by time. And that's the, that's the place I wanted to sort of get to, that this, this idea of time is also an eater. In traditional Cambodian stories, there's often a giant with many mouths who eats everything. Time, this giant is time. If you eat time, you gain nirvana. It's like, I realized that this giant, it's like happy yo-yo, you know, just voraciously hungry. But it relates also, this is, sometimes I'd love to study Uji, which is Dogon's fascicle on time. It's called, sometimes it's called being time,

[33:01]

or sometimes it's called time being. But at the beginning of that, there's a poem, and he says, there's some ambiguity in this language, at least in the translation. He says, for the time being, that could mean in the meantime, or it could mean for the time being, thinking of the time being as this giant, for the time being, stand on top of the highest peak. In other words, if you want to meet the time being, stand on top of the highest peak. For the time being, proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean. For the time being, three heads and eight arms. So three heads and eight arms is, this is a wrathful deity. Meet the being with three heads and eight arms. But if you think about,

[34:08]

like Esoteric Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, you think about wrathful deities, you realize the wrathful being is a production of your mind. So, the question, it's like the opportunity you have, is, you can meet time. If you don't meet time, time will eat you. How do you meet time? What he's saying is, don't be in the past, don't fall into the past, don't fall into the future. If you don't fall into the past or the future, then when you stand, whether you're standing on

[35:12]

top of the mountains or you're standing in the depths of the ocean, you are as large as that giant. And then you greet each other. It's not that there isn't time. It's not that each of us isn't getting older. It's not that we don't have infirmities. But within each person, within the oldest person in this room, there is someone who is younger than the youngest person in this room. That is still alive in each of us, right? Because you can see yourself as a 12-year-old, as a 13-year-old, as a 5-year-old. That being is still alive in you. When you let time eat you, that's who gets consumed.

[36:23]

Then your body is just a shell that is getting older and is subject to time. But if you stand up in the present moment now, now, now, because you can't stay in any present moment, then you are as large as you want to be, you are as young as you want to be, you are as present as you want to be, and you are awake. This is what we're doing. This is what we're cultivating when we sit in samsara. This is how, he said at the end, brothers and sisters, we must eat time. So I think that's where I will end. Bon appétit! Time for a few questions, but if you would like to correct my dharma, I would be, would welcome it.

[37:35]

I would be welcome if I could correct your dharma, but I understand that eating is, according, in this particular context, eating is the most important thing. I don't have statements, but I wanted to ask, which is most important, breathing in or breathing out? Well, you know, one of your students actually spoke to that in a book. Susan Bloom spoke to that in a book some years ago. She said, it was the teachings of Tokugoshi, that in our practice, we practice breath counts, and at the end of a period, you add up all your breaths. At the end of a period of zazen, you know, you see how many in-breaths are taken and how many out-breaths are taken, and if they don't match, then you take a few more to...

[38:39]

That was, that was what she learned from you. The first thing you said, though, was pooping, right? I guess I'll recommend to you, I just finished a really interesting book called The Big Necessities, which is, that's what it's about, and it's like, we all, you know, we know about restaurants, you know, when we talk about the best restaurants, we don't talk about the best toilets. There's probably a website that has that, but that's, that's the effect. What is, you know, what happens when you eat time? What do you shit? So, I'm going to leave that. Other comments or thoughts? What's the difference, or how would you describe the distinction between neutral and having no preferences? I think they're very much, I think they're very much the same,

[39:49]

unless having no preferences is some kind of resignation, you know, giving up. It's like, sometimes people don't have preferences because they're not willing to really take responsibility, or they don't, they've been beaten down in some way. So, can you have no preferences from the standpoint, maybe, of even being a passionate person? Within that, within a person who feels pleasant, maybe strongly, unpleasant strongly, in that sense, when you're in this, when your feelings are neutral, uh, then you're not preferring things to be one way or another. And I think that's, you know, it's like, the great way is not difficult if only you can avoid picking and choosing. So, I think they're very similar. Yeah, yeah. I'm interested in, I had the same

[41:00]

reaction you did as you were reading it when he came to, and, and neutralness is an attention, oh no, surely there's other kinds of neutralness. And yet, I found it very productive to hear that and to think about what it would mean if you were really, really attentive to everything. It's possible that what's being suggested, and I think it relates to what Alexander was asking, is that in the moment when you are free of preferences, you are also very awake, and what could be more pleasant? I mean, it's not pleasant, unpleasant in the dualistic sense, but you reach a state of liberation, of freedom. Right. And in that moment, when the birdsong that you're really hearing doesn't make you think, shut up, or oh, how beautiful it just is, I would have to say that's a very pleasant place to be. I tend to agree.

[42:04]

And it veers off into another, I don't want to go there, but other discussions. I recently been reading Jill Bultekehler's book, Stroke of Insight, and also thinking about that in terms of karma, you know, wholesome karma, unwholesome karma, and a kind of objective of non-karmic activity. Now, is non-karmic activity not wholesome? So, yeah, so I think this is a conundrum for us to face, but also neutral can be inattention. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, that's what I thought was productive, was actually hearing what he was saying. Right, yes, yeah. Two more, two more? Well, I was just going to make a reminiscence a little bit about Ramakosana. As he got older,

[43:08]

I think he had what you might technically call dementia. His mind didn't work as well, and once when I was at the Cambridge Zen Center, someone decided that he should give a dharma talk, and he wasn't any that articulate anymore. So he started out by saying, talking about we eat, you eat, we eat, they eat, he eats, she eats, and then he switched to French, and then conjugated it all in French. And that, I think, was the essence of his dharma talk. But I think what that, hearing you talk, and what that reminds me of is this was really his whole dharma. This wasn't like a metaphor he chose to talk about this one time. No. The way when we read Suzuki Roshi, he talked about brown rice one time, and cows another time. This was this incredibly central and important to who he was, and what he was trying to teach. So that when he got to the point where he could hardly give a dharma talk anymore, he went through it, and he went through

[44:10]

all the English tenses, and then he went through all the French tenses. He might have gone through the Cambodian tenses as well, and then that was it. So yeah. I think you're right. I think it was really, this was his dharma, a really central teaching, and he knew about six languages. I think one more quick story about him, because it relates. Lauren, were you with us when you went to that Cambodian restaurant? So we went to, we were having a meeting with him, with some other Cambodian people in a Cambodian restaurant in San Francisco, and he was a monk. It was dinner time. Monks can't eat, except some monks can eat milk perhaps, and we were having our dinner, and the proprietor of the sent him out this big ice cream sundae with whipped cream on top of it, and it was like, you know, just so much joy and energy that came from it. He just, he was so happy.

[45:19]

So I think he liked to eat, and I think that's where we'll end, and we can talk outside. Anymore with you? What? I think he might be in serious, yes. Not like anybody else that I know.

[45:36]

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