Good afternoon. I'd like to plunge into this text for Zenki. But one comment that Lori had after the talk, which I thought was interesting and relevant, in that section from Genjokan, The nature of wind is permanent. Because of that, the wind of the Buddha's house brings forth the gold of the earth and makes fragrant the cream of the long river. She was remembering a lecture by Richard Baker, where he was suggesting that the metaphor of the ripening of grapes might be, in a sense, a better metaphor in that the wind is a condition for the development of, for bringing forth.

[01:14]

This bringing forth is a little obscure, but it's like the wind and the rain And the environment, our conditions for the ripening of the grapes, which then continue to transform into wine or grape juice, relevant to what you drink. But I thought that was a, it's a little, it's somehow a little more to the point than somehow the gold of the earth makes fragrant the cream of the long river. But that was just her thought and I thought I would share it. What I'd like to do is let's read this and I think that I like the practice of reading and the practice of listening. So what I'm going to suggest is let's go down the line

[02:21]

and down the line and just each have one person read a section until we get to the end. It's not very long. So Mary would you like to begin? The great way of all Buddhas thoroughly practice is emancipation and realization. Emancipation means that in birth you are emancipated from birth. In death you are emancipated from death. Thus there is detachment from birth and death and penetrating birth and death. Such is the complete practice of the Great Way. There is letting go of birth and death and vitalizing birth and death. Such is the thorough practice of the Great Way. Realization is birth. Birth is realization. At the time of realization there is nothing but birth, totally actualized. Nothing but death, totally actualized. Such activity makes birth holy birth, death holy death.

[03:26]

Actualized just so at this moment, this activity is neither large nor small, neither immeasurable nor measurable, neither remote nor urgent. Birth in its right nowness is undivided activity. Undivided activity is birth in its immediacy. Birth neither comes nor goes. Birth neither appears nor is already existing. Thus birth is totally manifested. Death is totally manifested. Know that there are innumerable beings in yourself. Also there is birth and there is death. Quietly think over whether birth and all things that arise together with birth are inseparable or not. There is neither a moment nor a thing that is apart from birth. There is neither an object nor a mind that is apart from birth.

[04:28]

Birth is just like riding in a boat. You raise the sails and row with the oar. Although you row, the boat gives you a ride, and without the boat, no one could ride. But you ride in the boat, and your riding makes the boat what it is. Investigate a moment such as this. At just such a moment, there is nothing but the world of the boat. The sky, the water, and the shore, all are the boat's world, which is not the same as a world that is not the boat's. When you ride in a boat, your body and mind and the environment together are the undivided activity of the boat. The entire earth and the entire sky are both the undivided activity of the boat. Thus, birth is nothing but you. You are nothing but birth. Zen Master Wang Wu, priest-kin, said, Earth is undivided activity.

[05:31]

Death is undivided activity. Clarify and investigate these words. What you should investigate is while the undivided activity of birth has no beginning or end and covers the entire earth and the entire sky, it hinders neither birth's undivided activity nor death's undivided activity. At the moment of death's undivided activity, while it covers the entire earth and the entire sky, it hinders neither death's undivided activity nor birth's undivided activity. This being so, birth does not hinder death, death does not hinder birth. Both the entire earth and the entire sky appear in birth as well as in death. However, it is not that one and the same entire earth and sky are fully manifested in birth and also fully manifested in death. Although not one, not different, although not different, not the same, although not the same, not many.

[06:36]

Similarly, in birth there is undivided activity of all things, and in death there is undivided activity of all things. There is undivided activity in what is not birth and not death. There is birth and there is death in undivided activity. This being so, the undivided activity of birth and death is like a young man bending and stretching his arm, or it is like someone speaking searching with his hand behind his head for a pillow. This is realization in vast wondrous light. About just such a moment, you may suppose that because realization is manifested in undivided activity, there was no realization prior to this. However, prior to this realization, undivided activity was manifested. But undivided activity manifested previously does not hinder the present realization of undivided activity.

[07:40]

Because of this, your understanding can be manifested moment after moment. Great. Thank you. So a little something about the title before we look at the structure. The title is Zenki. And zen means, in this case, this character zen means total or whole, complete, entire. And this is what Cos and Ed Brown translate as undivided, meaning unified, whole. key is interesting. So, you know, this is variously translated, as I said earlier, as undivided activity or total dynamic working on functioning fully or the whole works

[09:01]

my favorite sort of wordplay from Thomas Cleary. But what Choako Okamura was talking about, and in the commentary Dr. Abe talks about, this word ki has something of the feeling of a machine. An early you know, early Chinese machine like a loom. And so a loom, as it works, has these two dimensions to it, right? It has a vertical, it is what, you know, the warp and the woof, and those of you who weave probably know What those are. And I don't I just know the words. But I believe it is too. It's two axes of the fabric.

[10:06]

Is that correct? Right. So. But what's interesting about a loom is the activity is coordinated so that you work one pedal and it pulls these threads. together in this interdependent, interacting fashion. Is that correct? Those of you who know? The warp and the weft are the cords or strings that go this way, that you slide back and forth, versus the ones that are pulled taut by the loop, and that you're interweaving them. As you work a pedal, right? Right, because there are two sets of the ones that go from top to bottom. They alternate, so that some go out, you send the yarn through, and then they reverse, and then you send it through again. Right. So, what this is saying, you know, this is something like, it's a metaphor for our practice, for Zazen.

[11:18]

By applying your effort at one point, you are weaving together. these different strands of reality into the fabric of life. You don't have to take this metaphor too far. So what you have in the end is out of these different threads and these different dimensions, you have, if everything is working correctly and is in alignment, which is another question, you have one fabric in the end, right? That fabric is, you can call it your life. But what Dogen is talking about here is, is life colon, it's like dash and dash death, or birth dash and death dash.

[12:29]

Death is what you have in that verse from Engo, life fully manifests its function, death fully manifests its function as well, all within the limits of great unbounded space. great unbounded space is birth and death, together, as one undivided activity. Does that make some sense? Is there a question about that? Or everybody gets it? Getting it is the hard part. Using it is the trade-off. That's something about the title and I think that this working in alignment is what's implied as well by this interesting pre-industrial metaphor of a machine.

[13:42]

We have to be in alignment. This is fanning yourself. is being in alignment with reality. It's an effort that we have to make. If you do not work the pedal, you'll have two skeins of wool that are sitting on separate spools, right? And they won't make a fabric. And they won't function. So, Again, we come back to this effort, and Dogon is always talking about this effortless effort. And this effort also you could think of as our offering. This is what we have been given, our birth, hence our life. our practice is then to continue and offer in alignment with the rest of life.

[14:59]

There's also some question in the language of the text about are we talking about living sometimes it's translated as living life and death or is living and dying, or sometimes is birth and death. And this again is a matter of a kind of shifting perspective or view. These conditions are always in motion and we have a Life and death is kind of the way we ordinarily see our existence. It's like, oh, alive one moment, and not alive another moment.

[16:04]

Whereas birth and death is the nature, from a Buddhist perspective, it's the nature of our view of reality, that everything is moment by moment being born and in the next moment it slips away. So it seems differently according to what is appropriate. So let's look at this first, the first propositions. I'll read you two translations of these. I like both of them. So the one we read, the great way of all Buddhas thoroughly practiced is emancipation and realization.

[17:11]

Emancipation means that in birth you are emancipated from birth. In death, you are emancipated from death. Thus, there is attachment from birth and death and penetrating birth and death. Such is the complete practice of the great way. There is letting go of birth and death and vitalizing birth and death. Such is the thorough practice of the great way. Realization is birth, birth is realization. At the time of realization there is nothing but birth, totally actualized, nothing but death, totally actualized. Such activity makes birth holy birth and death holy death. Actualized just so at this moment, this activity is neither large nor small,

[18:14]

neither immeasurable, neither remote, nor urgent. Birth in its right-now-ness is undivided activity. Undivided activity is birth in its immediacy. That's difficult language, I think. I'd like, if you haven't seen, there's an entire translation of Shopogenso that's online, that's free, from Nirman at Shasta Abbey. Have people seen that? His language is pretty accessible. So let me read that same passage. When we thoroughly explore what the great way of the Buddha is, we find that it is liberation from delusion and letting our true self manifest to the full.

[19:19]

For some, this liberation from delusion means that life liberates us from life and death liberates us from death. Therefore, both are getting out of birth and death and are integrating into birth and death as one thing. are the great way. Both are laying birth and death aside and are going beyond birth and death to the other shore are also the great way. Our true self revealing itself to the full is what life is and life is our true self revealing itself to the full. So this is often works. He's covering all the propositions, right? It's like in Genjo Koan, the beginning of Genjo Koan, as all things are Buddha Dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice and birth and death.

[20:31]

There are Buddhas and sentient beings. That's proposition one. As the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no Buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death." Proposition 2. The Buddha way is basically leaping clear of the many and the one. Thus, there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and Buddhists. That's Proposition 3. Once you unpack this a little, and I think this applies to what he's saying here, Proposition 1 is what you might call the Hinayana perspective, that there's delusion and it's distinct from realization. There's birth, which is distinct from death. There are Buddhas who are distinct from sentient beings.

[21:32]

The second proposition is the Mahayana perspective. It's like the heart sutra. There's no by himself, there's no delusion, there's no realization, there's no Buddha, there's no birth, there's no death, there's no sentient beings. It's just, you know, no, [...] don't get caught on some idea of what reality is. Be free from that. But it's framed as a negation. And this is, in each case, these are appropriate medicines for what ails us existentially. Sometimes we really need to know that there's a distinction between Buddhas and sentient beings. And sometimes we just need to hear no, because we're, you know, not this, not this, not this, because we keep wanting to say something is real.

[22:45]

And that creates an illness for us. So this is medicine for that illness, the illness of our views. And then you have Dogen likes to identify himself with the Buddha way, the Buddhayana, which is... What is it in... Is it in Ulysses? Here Comes Everything? Here Comes Everybody. What? Finnegan's Way. It's like... Everything is coming forth. Everyone is coming forth. So it's basically leaping clear of the many and the one, including both of those sides, but not being caught by any of them. Thus there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and Buddhas.

[23:53]

And this is where he's coming to in in this section. So he presents these various positions. It's interesting that in the Genjo Koan message that you read, there's one inconsistent item, which is practice. You notice that in the first series, there is all these things and practice and practice never gets negated. That's right. Anything else does. It's I don't know if you're right. I doubt it.

[24:55]

without emphasizing it, that somehow he's saying that practice is a different thing than all this other stuff. Well, I wonder about that. He doesn't say there's no practice. No. He doesn't say there's no practice. Whereas he says all the other things can be plus or minus. But I think that in that first proposition, Maybe he's including practice because we think there's some separation. We think that practice is somehow distinct from our life. And in the others, it's not. So it needs not be mentioned. Maybe. I don't know. But this is part of What he's talking about in the Genjokan, what Sojin writes, what Dogen seems to be saying is, life does not impede life, death does not impede death, death does not impede life, and life does not impede death.

[26:18]

So he has the four aspects of birth and death covered. It's very typical of Dogen to cover all the possibilities. and this is just like Dogen is doing in a poetic way what he's kind of bringing Nagarjuna to life and you know what Nagarjuna says everything is real and it's not real both real and not real neither real and not real this is Lord Buddha's teaching So it's the same, in a really condensed way, Nagarjuna is presenting these same propositions. But this question of, it's interesting, To me that whole issue of dynamic activity kind of brings that to life.

[28:01]

That there isn't a static world of form and some emptiness and a separation. There's this dynamic coming and going and interacting with all of that that makes that third alternative. And there is not attachment to it. This is one of the, you know, thus there is detachment from birth and death and penetrating birth and death. So this detachment from birth and death, which sounds very abstract, Suzuki Roshi said someplace in one of his comments or was reported, He said, don't worry, you can die. Which we think we can't.

[29:03]

This gets back to what I was saying, boiling down Buddhism to, you can do this. You can die. Which is good. You can let go in this momentary sense in each moment, in each moment of whether that moment is difficult or that moment is joyous and in the larger sense of your life which is moving on through time. Can I just clarify? You know, to me, what I hear when I hear detachment is that you see the emptiness of it, so you don't grab onto it. And then when I hear penetrating it, you actually see both the emptiness of it and the fact that there's a conventional coming and going that's also happening. So you penetrate past the emptiness into the emptiness of the emptiness.

[30:07]

In the Nirman translation, which is interesting, he says, where this is says, Duster is detached from birth and death and penetrating birth and death. Nirman says, therefore, both are getting out of birth and death. Which is the emptiness part. Which is also the, it's the early Buddhist part. It's like, this is the goal. The goal is to get out of birth and death. or entering into birth and death. So here you have the definition of samsara. So the goal is, you know, we have these four marks of existence, at least in Mahayana. You have life is marked by dukkha, suffering. impermanence, non-self, and nirvana.

[31:20]

So Dukkha and nirvana is bracketing these two marks, impermanence and non-self. Those seem to be somewhat non-negotiable. Dukkha and nirvana are maybe negotiable. or realizable, let's put it that way. Dukkha means being caught in this world, in what we call samsara. What samsara means, in a kind of literal way, it means to flow on or to continue. it means the transmigration through various lives and various realms. And we suffer because according to Buddhist doctrine because we are constantly migrating both moment by moment and life by life through these six worlds or through these realms.

[32:33]

Nirvana In early Buddhism it means you're off the wheel, right? In Mahayana and Dogon's way of looking at it, you see through this. You see birth and death as one fabric. and therefore you find liberation right in this moment. So that's the penetrating birth and death. And then he says, such is the complete practice of the great way. There is letting go of birth and death and here in this translation vitalizing birth and death. In most of the other translations, what they're saying is crossing over birth and death, which is Bodhisattva activity, bringing other beings across that barrier and going back again and again to bring beings across.

[34:01]

this is your vow. You recognize that there are people who are suffering, who are caught in this conception of the separation of birth and death and you keep going back to the other shore to bring them across. Does that make sense? So this is, you know, so his further exposition as he's unpacking The word that they use, the great way of all Buddhas, the first line, thoroughly practiced is emancipation and realization. Emancipation in the word in Japanese is Todatsu, which means freedom from, or the ability to change or to continue. So, it means not being stuck in this one place.

[35:10]

Not being stuck in your idea of what it means to be alive or what it means to die. And then, realization, the word that he's using here is genjo, as in genjo koan. It means manifestation, but it's a manifestation that has particular conditions, the moment that we're in, the moment of our life, that our realization doesn't take place anywhere else, but right now. So this is like the first section of this of this fascicle is we can wake up right now whether we know it or not whether we like it or not it's possible in the same sense that you know if you

[36:24]

really study Nagarjuna and you can understand that philosophical language and that kind of intensely logical presentation. He deconstructs reality and you're free. Dogon is doing it in another way, through his kind of poetic and free use of the language, hoping to wake us up. not just by the words, but also by pointing us back towards our life, which includes zazen. As Ken was pointing out, I'm not sure that this text ever uses the word practice. Does it? Yeah.

[37:26]

This practice does doesn't get in the first section talks about practice. Yeah. OK. All right. Good. So that practice. Right. That practice includes what we're doing here in all the other hours when we're not. listening to this talk, and it includes the practice of your entire life. Expanding that practice, expanding your understanding of practice to include your whole life. So let's see. Are there any questions or thoughts?

[38:26]

Yeah. I have two questions. Yes, please. First one, could you translate the qi in Zen qi as life force? Different character. OK. Yeah. You mean qi, is it like in qi? Yes. Yeah, I think it's a different character. And then the second question, could we say that this text is an early take on a non-dual way of looking at things? You could. I don't know how early it is. There certainly are non-dual teachings that go way back within the Buddhist tradition and go back within Indian religion and philosophy, go very far back, I think. This is a, it certainly is a unique and relatively new, I think, relatively new Japanese expression of it.

[39:32]

But you find it, but he's just also picking it up from from Chinese Zen, which is deeply non-dual in its own way that really has a very different flavor, I think, than the Indian, if that makes sense. Yeah. What does this made me think about? And I wonder if you think it's a helpful thing to think of in context of this. from this morning and then now, especially when you said that this relies on a shift in perspective, does this have anything to do with thinking of ourselves, sort of the same way we might think of a cell in our body, in that our cells die all the time, but our body is still complete. Yes.

[40:35]

And we're kind of like that. in the context of existence, if we're not taking a perspective of ourselves? Well, I think this is a really important and difficult question. I was listening to the tapes with Shohakusan, and I heard, there was question and answer, and I heard Andrea Thatch. on the question and answer, and she was saying, wondering aloud, well, is this useful to her terminal patients? That's a pretty good question, I think. What? It's not an obvious yes. I don't think it would be me if I could internalize it enough.

[41:40]

It's really hard to disidentify, perhaps, when you're in dire straits. Well, I think you've just hit the nail on the head if you could internalize it. And so, yes, if you can see yourself as identical in kind or in the sense of impermanence, as one of yourselves and sort of dis-identify with well, let go of this clutching after being then in that sense I think it's very similar and if you can do that and ultimately I think this is one of the things that Sid, I love that. That saying, that line from Suzuki Roshi, you can die.

[42:45]

You are able to do that and ultimately every one of us will. Every one of us will let go. And it's like, you know, there's, I don't know how many of you read The Death of Ivan Illich by Tolstoy. You know, it's like this, it's kind of this illusory life, terrible family, difficult job, horrible disease that comes on, you know, and it just, the ship gets worse and worse and worse and worse. And in the last moment, he wakes up as he's letting go. Now, how did Tolstoy know that? We don't know. But it's very... It's an encouraging reality.

[43:49]

In the end, we all let go. Whether we've been previously inclined to do so, or not. But I think it comes back to the question that Andrea was asking on the tape. I mean, I tend to agree with Paul. Yes, this is very encouraging, but as I was saying this morning, the critical question is how? First of all, how do you convey this in a way that people can relax? let go of their anxiety about existence, let go of the clutching after it, and then when it's you, how do you actually do this? That's a critical question. We've all heard this metaphor of talk about koan work of pecking and tapping where when a chick is about to be born it's tapping from the inside because it's time has come to be born to move from one state of being an egg into

[45:23]

the state of being a chick. So the chick is tapping from the inside and the hen, you know, I've never seen this. Has anyone seen this? You hear about this? You have? Does this actually happen? Oh, good. That's good to know. I mean, it shows you how little I know about real life. Presumably, the hen is pecking from the outside, helping to crack the shell. So this is, you could say, total dynamic working. This is life helping birth along. And I think I'd like to see it. It must be a wonderful thing to see. I've seen other births that were certainly totally dynamic and amazing and somewhat

[46:37]

somewhat marked by bodily fluids of different kinds and completely incredible. It takes total dynamic working to bring that forth. And I think a lot of us also have seen people pass away, which also is affected by our presence. For some reason I'm really thinking, just right this moment I'm thinking about our friend Rebecca. And some of us, a couple of us in this room spent time with her as she was dying. Everybody said, oh, she's going to die tomorrow. supposed to die pretty suddenly, but what happened was she was surrounded by love.

[47:48]

This is, you know, she was surrounded by, what did, yeah, what is the line? Moment by moment manifestation of sincere hearts. I actually feel very emotional just thinking about it. And whether this is good or not good, the family ended up moving her from this home that she was in, which was an OK place, to one of their daughter's homes. And it seemed like a kind of radical and precipitous thing to do at the moment when that happened and we had to call an ambulance and get a hospital bed and set up all this stuff. It was a lot of activity. But once she was there, it's like, this is really the right place.

[48:58]

There was no question that this was the right place for her to be. And she took a lot of time to die. She took like, what, 17 days? Something like that. You know, and surrounded by sincere hearts. And, you know, that was how she moved through this phase and this is why I'm thinking about even though her responsiveness was limited and her consciousness may have been limited you felt that still there's fully functioning human being up until this last moment and everyone

[50:00]

was also reckoning with the process of our own letting go. Let's take a five minute break, OK? And people can use the bathroom. I need to use the bathroom. Come back in five minutes. The clock's still ticking. I believe it. OK. Alan, did you ever buy the play?

[54:18]

Did you ever see the movie, The Tree of Life? No. That's a new one. It's really a great movie. Is that a new movie? It's a new movie. Yeah. Buy it. I'll get the guy to see it. Because I never, I really actually felt, watching that movie, that I was seeing real, I was actually penetrating, you know, it was amazing. They had this incredible photography. probably the sun, Mars, you know, places where, you know, there's just all of a sudden this dynamic wind, everything, volcanoes arising and volcanoes going down, waves, giant waves come and go. Wind comes and goes. You know, I mean, it's just like the way the world works in this incredibly dynamic way that makes you feel like a little dot. And you get it.

[55:21]

A little dot in this enormous cosmos that is dynamically doing what it's doing at every moment. And I think that it really matters. Relative to this, let's wait.

[56:23]

Maybe they need to do the clap first. Bye. I'd like to press on a bit, but Mary had a question.

[59:43]

I can't forego the question. Well, now you've tantalized me. Well, this morning I was interested in your talking about your five-year-old self and your sixty-something self and the How they never meet is the way you put it. Which is interesting to me because I'm thinking about my ten minutes ago self and my this morning self and my now self. Are they completely independent? Are they at all determining one another? Or is the idea of emancipation the idea that in each moment One is anew and potentially completely different. Would you like to hear what Sojin Roshi says? Yes. It says right here on the page.

[60:51]

There was a question someone asked. This is from a talk in North Carolina. The question was, sounds like in the moment when you make what you consider an embarrassing mistake, That does not impede the next moment when you can be completely clear again. As Sojan Roshi says, there is always the possibility of recovery on each moment, but it means that each moment's activity is independent and at the same time includes everything. It covers the whole universe. and then he says, I like this a lot, in zazen when we narrow our activity to focus on one activity totally everything is included moment by moment so it's not that you're married this morning is

[61:59]

Not the same person has married this afternoon. It's just they never meet. They are independent and interdependent. One way that Shōhaku-san talks about this is your hand. Your hand has five fingers. But the fingers and the hand, if you look at the fingers, they're fingers. If you look at the hand, it's a hand. So the fingers never meet. Something called the finger never meets something called the hand. This is just But in reality, the five fingers are completely integral, or however many you have, you could have lost a finger, are completely integral to this thing that we call the hand.

[63:18]

It's just you can't have them, if you take away the five fingers, you don't have a hand. If you take away the hand, you have a bunch of fingers lying around. So they're interdependent and they're dependent. They are distinct and they are part of a process simultaneously. And this is as far as we can go in language. The question is, how do you use this? And how are you fluid and not getting stuck in one position or the other? There's another, where I think sometimes when, in the case of having done something embarrassing, for example, well, we're in that situation, we're embarrassed, and we may continue to feel bad about that indefinitely, and then again, we may arrive at a point sooner or later

[64:33]

where we look at ourselves, or at that moment, objectively. And that could be when we laugh at ourselves, or when we confess, oh, I did this thing. But the difference is that the state still happened, and it has some connection with you, but you're no longer caught by it. Right. And often people are doing this kind of unconsciously. It's not a strategy exactly, but I've noticed that there's a kind of relief, it's almost blissful, And you would believe how silly I was, or something like this. And at that point, it's as if it's another person.

[65:38]

You're not worried about it. And yet, in another sense, you can say, well, yeah, that's me. I have a connection there. But you're no longer hung up in it. There's like that freedom that you're within that person, And yet you're totally separate. It's like somebody a million miles away or a million years ago it could be. So you can just laugh and look at that, you know. Is that the emancipation he's talking about? Yeah, that's free from being... It's not being caught in the sense that this mistake you made or this thought you had or this thing you did is fixed forever in reality. You know, that it defines you. It doesn't necessarily define you. It's not that it didn't happen. But, you are not that activity.

[66:42]

You know, you have moved on. So, the next sentence here that I wanted to talk about is, just in this translation says, know that there are innumerable beings in yourself. This has been a very important teaching for me. It comes about in a different direction. It comes in the Platform Sutra, in the Bodhisattva Vows that Rinpoche offers. The way we're going to chant it at the end here is sentient beings are numberless, I vow to awaken with them, or save them. In Winang's version, and we're not sure whether this is a good translation or not, but it's sort of been proliferated, sentient beings of my mind are numberless, I vow to save them all.

[67:47]

I find this incredibly useful. It's a really useful way of looking at myself. I may be anxious, or I may be irritated, or I may be grieving. All of this is a birth. When those states of mind arise, I'm born in a realm. Don't take the realm too literally, but you can be born as a hungry ghost, you can be born as a fighting demon, you can be born as an animal, you can be born as a human, you can be born in the blissful realm of being a god where you're just completely blissed out. These are rebirths, samsara, and we don't live in them forever, they kind of have a life span, but when a state of mind arises, often this is very much a Zen perspective, the rebirth is moment by moment, and at the moment

[69:14]

like sort of Ken is talking about you know if I'm really upset or I've really done something stupid then you feel like this being is real but it's not it's impermanent and if you so the question here I think and this is this is where you get started discovering it today. This is a moment by moment manifestation. Can I have a manifestation of a sincere heart? Can I apply that sincere heart, bring it to bear on that sentient being that's in myself? If it's suffering, can I take care of it in the sense of the metta sutta, just as a mother watches over and protects her only child, so with a boundless mind is once infused love over the entire world.

[70:30]

Which does not mean without boundaries, or without strictness, but it means unconditional love. So it's in a sense, to me, when I read this whole fascicle, I'm hearing the sincere heart is the unconditional love that pervades the awakened attitude towards birth and death. a way that we can take care of ourselves and take care of each other. In the next sentence, it's really nice, he says this, know that there are innumerable beings in yourself, also there is birth and there is death.

[71:37]

Of course there is birth. We've been born. And of course there is death. This is going to occur. And there is the moment by moment birth and death. Then he says, quietly, think over whether birth and all things that arise together with birth are inseparable or not. It's like, slow down, quiet down, sit, have a compassionate attitude, just quietly think over, not agitatedly, not grudgingly, just take your time and see, does this perspective, does it make sense? Is it helpful? And if it is, then I really like this section.

[72:42]

And then comes this, just right in the middle of it, you have this metaphor. Birth is just like riding in a boat. You're talking about the quietly think over? Yes. Let me just look at another translation. It's neither an object or a mind. It is apart from death. Right. That's right.

[73:44]

He just stops bothering to repeat himself, to say it's true for death as well. That's implied. There is an interesting note aside that are inseparable or not. I mean, it's obvious what I'm saying. I guess I'm just making a point that it's obvious. Tell me if I'm wrong though. No, no, you're right. And the note in the Abbe Waddell translation speaks to that. The following passage, that passage which we were quoting, part of which comes in the Vimalakirti Sutra. The body consists of all dharmas combined together. When it is produced, it is dharmas only that is produced. When it perishes, it is dharmas only that perish.

[74:45]

When these dharmas are produced, we do not say an I is produced. When these dharmas perish, we do not say an I perishes. Right? So that's, yeah, you're on the mark there. I think he just was compressing a little. He compresses elsewhere. He says it a lot. And the question in this translation is, so in a lot of the other translations, instead of birth, they use life. Life includes birth and death. But it's strictly speaking. So it's a little confusing when you use birth. So I think that's just a translation. That's just a translation thing. So birth is just like riding in a boat.

[75:48]

Or life, let's do it this way. Life is just like riding in a boat. Is that OK? You raise the sails and row with the oar, although you row, The boat gives you a ride, and without the boat, no one can ride. But you ride the boat, and your riding makes the boat what it is. Investigate a moment such as this. At just such a moment, there is nothing but the world of the boat. The sky, the water, and the shore, all are the boat's world, which is not the same as a world that is not the boats. When you ride in a boat, your body and mind and the environs together are the undivided activity of the boat. The entire earth and entire sky are both the undivided activity of the boat. Thus, life is nothing but you.

[76:51]

You are nothing but life. It's interesting. Let me read you Dr. Abe's translation. Life is like a man riding a boat. Aboard the boat, he uses a sail. He takes the tiller. He pulls the boat along. Yet the boat carries him, and without the boat, he is not there. By riding in the boat, she makes it a boat. You must concentrate yourself to studying and penetrating this very time. All of a sudden we're talking about time. At this time, all is the world of the boat. So where Kaas uses when, Dr. Abhi is using at this time. All is the world of the boat. The heavens, the water, the shore, all become the boat's time.

[77:53]

And they are not the same as time, which is not the boat. It is for this reason that life is what I make to exist and I is what life makes me and so on. This is a really ... I like Dr. Abhi's translation a lot. But the point is the interaction of oneself And the boat creates the function of the boat. Yeah. This goes back to the discussion we were having this morning about self, self power and other power. Right? So there is this way in which So, we can talk about it as, I'm rowing the boat. It's this kind of self-power feeling. We can talk about it as, I'm being carried along by the boat.

[78:54]

It's this kind of other power feeling. It's sort of the loom. It's in the dynamic. It's this. Which is it? It's actually rowing. It's rowing, but you're carried along as your role, then there's motion, right? Yeah, and so both ways of framing it are kind of one-sided, or miss what's actually happening. So this is leaping beyond the one and the many, or including the one and the many as one, as the all within the limits of the great unbounded space. And this is, you know, he uses this, he also uses this boat metaphor in a slightly different way in Gajabhavan, right?

[79:56]

When you ride in a boat, when you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. But when you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has an unchanging self, which also means everything has an interdependent self. that the act of stepping in the boat makes it a boat, and the act of rowing gives it the activity. Just to say, this next, so then that world that's created together, by me and above, by the activity, is not like, is not the same as a world that is not composed.

[81:20]

So it's a different world because of that functioning together. Yeah. What I like about Dr. Abbe is we can get stuck on world. So at this time all is the world of the boat. At this time all is the world of the boat. The heavens, the water, the shore all become the boat's time and they are not the same as time which is not the boat. So all of a sudden you are shifting your focus from place to time. Time as a dynamic activity. Time is something that's moving, whereas place I think has a kind of more static feel in my head. But they're dynamic, place and time.

[82:34]

Can I read you something? I've been looking at songs. I've been learning songs lately. And I found this great song from a group called the Flatlanders. People know of them? Joe Ely, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock. This song is called Just About Time. Everybody's saying it's just about time, but it's partly about space. The rest is all about not dividing things up and leaving every last piece in its place. You can start out slow, you can speed things up, you can take things as they are. Your average person is afraid to talk about death, but not afraid of driving a car. Take the whole ball of wax Stick it to the facts. Life might stop on a dime. Sooner or later, it's now or never.

[83:35]

Don't you think it's just about time?" It's pretty cool for a country song. I know. I met him in Texas last month. He and his wife, they read the Avatamsaka Sutra. in bed before they go to sleep. I thought it was very cute, though. So this might be a relatively good place to stop before we get to a number of koans towards the end of this. So I think we'll talk about this tomorrow and then move on to Shoghi. But any last questions or thoughts?

[84:37]

Yeah. Would you say that this phrase that you mentioned earlier, all within the genesis of the great unbounded space, isn't it a koan? Yes. And not only is it a koan, but it's commentary. It's literally commentary on a koan. It's commentary, as I said, on this case 55 of the Blue Cliff Record, where Chinyuan is banging on the coffin, wanting to know alive or dead. And his teacher says, I won't say. His teacher is maybe also saying, one can't say. And this is, this is Ingo's commentary on that. And this is the wonderful, what it, there's a commentary on the commentary

[85:48]

which Shohakusan quoted, saying, this poem is like placing a flower on the great brocade of the universe. It's like extra. Or, is it actually making it more beautiful? Or, is it both? Our perspective can keep switching, like changing the focus on the lens, bringing things near and far. into clarity.

[86:51]

Any other? I don't remember if you explicitly discussed section 3. Which we don't buy now. I have a feeling that could be explained. It's not beyond explanation. Yeah. Particularly, birth neither appears nor is already existing, for example. To me, this section means that life includes birth and death, and that birth and death Birth meter comes and goes because it is part of this whole reality of birth and death as one entity.

[88:00]

And yet, birth and death are like day and night. We call this one day, right? And it has two aspects. It has the aspect of day and it has the aspect of night. Our usual thought is that our life is bracketed. It's got births on one end and deaths on the other. Birth is constantly happening. That's why it either comes or goes. Right. That's right. And it either comes or goes because it is part of one larger reality. It's part of the reality of birth and death as one thing.

[89:06]

You can't separate it off and say there's just birth because there is no birth that doesn't imply the and impending death. But if it's continuously happening, how come it isn't already existing? Because of the nature of birth. Yeah, because birth is becoming. And something which is becoming can't already exist. Right. Well, you're sitting next to somebody who is going to have this experience in a relatively short time. I'm having it right now. I'm birthing and dying. Right. And you can only remember it. Yeah. I think.

[90:08]

I can't comment on it. It's going to happen. It's already until something's already happened. Right. You're already looking back at it. And yet... Is it Devin? So it's... There's something that's happening, that's approaching. And then you'll be on the other side of it. And you will remember it, but you'll remember it indistinctly. It's not that it didn't happen. Right? Memory is just something that's being birthed right now. Right. Time. Time is being birthed right now. But the memory is not the same as a moment. Do you think it's possible that in the moment though you can actually meet the moment and experience it in the moment? And then when it's gone, it's gone and it's a memory or whatever, but isn't that what Zazen is?

[91:11]

Meeting a moment and fully Experiencing what is so? Yes, but without, we're meeting, the thing that we're meeting the moment, every moment. Right. We're just, you can't hold on to it for a microsecond, you know. It's gone already. It's just gone. So we're meeting moment after moment. It's worth trying, I thought. Yeah, well, we thought. Well, there's the death moment after moment. Right. And, you know, it's like, oh, this is a pretty great adventure. Trying to do this, you know? And it's like, oh, it's not graspable. And we fail. You know, it's like failing moment after moment, which is, Allowing yourself to do that is a great relief. That's, having failed, that's a good place to stop.

[92:14]

Thank you very much. Let's close with a format.

[92:19]

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