So good, it's okay, Catherine Blanch here. hormone of the day. Let's see if I can knock this over at some point.

[01:12]

As happened the last time I was here, Paul Haller and I have traded places. So he was speaking at Santa Cruz tonight, and I'm here. And what I have to talk about is something that Blanche and I just completed together, a week's visit to the East Coast and to other Dharma centers. And I wonder if that is of interest to this group, since there are many of you I don't know here. Thanks. I got my request here. Right. I hope, there's no verse, Kerry? I was just saying there's a...

[02:26]

How's this? Thank you. I've been, I don't know, but I'm working with a head cold or allergy reaction or something, so I know my peak form. So I'm hoping my energy will hold up for this talk, or it might be a short talk, I'm not sure. Over email, Mary has been asking me, yesterday and today, how were the meetings? What happened? How did they go? And she also asked about a workshop that I co-led at Tassajara with Summer. And in both of these requests from her, I said we had the same dialogue. I said, well, it depends on who you ask. And she said, well, I'm asking you. And I'm having a little difficulty talking about what just happened because I feel I was very embedded in it and that words don't reach it.

[03:42]

And I feel... joyful about this, that it was such an immediate experience for me. And that rooms don't reach it, because that's been a powerful teaching for me. I think it was the teacher that I knew when I was there was missing. And it kind of came around back side and caught up with me. So I have been feeling this is a very rare group of people for me to spend time with. There were 10 or 11 women from the East Coast, Midwest, and California, and eight or nine men from the same geographical distribution.

[04:47]

Norman attended, and No men from Nebraska. Most of the other men, I think, came from the East Coast. Portland, but Carson's from Portland, right. And to have time to spend three or four days with colleagues who are also working with deepening their own understanding of Dharma and bringing it to the American public and to the West. It's a pretty unusual opportunity. This year there were There was one or two more women than men, which was a shift from previous ratings.

[05:50]

This has been called the second generation Zen teachers conference. First generation would be the Japanese teachers who came. The second generation is their Dharma heirs. And in the third generation, I think Blanche is third generation. So it's sort of mixed, second and third generation. And we met some unusually gifted people who are leading groups in Syracuse and New York, Mount Tremper. And three women who are, in addition to Branch, who are leading major Dharma centers. She was here last January, I think. She was the abbot at Syracuse Zen Center.

[06:54]

She was a daughter-in-law of Edo Roshi from Daibosatsu Monastery in New York. And Ruo Tai, I guess, I'm not sure how her last name is pronounced. She is the Dharma heir of Dardo Lurie at Mount Tremper in New York. just outside of Woodstock, or Woodstock is just outside of Mount Tremper. She was the vice abbess, I guess, and his first dharma heir. So it's rather interesting to see a woman ascending to these positions, just as Branch has become a co-abbot here, and Karen Suna, should be head teacher at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. So that shifts the conversation some.

[07:59]

Or it's just the energy in the room or something is a little different. And I think for me, I learned how other groups teach. I learned how the Dharma is presented in the Rinzai centers, the language they use, the images they use, the style they use. It's somewhat different from our tradition. And it's invigorating to hear presentations, Dharma talks, and language and emphasis that's somewhat fresh from our perspective. In Southern California, there's a teacher who is experimenting with using art in sessions a couple of hours every day. at a time to be chosen by each person, having each person work with whatever is arising that they cannot express directly.

[09:06]

It doesn't have to be painting or plastic arts. It can be movement. It can be writing. It can be some other art form. But whatever place is arising that you can't reach, that you feel stuck at, that you feel blocked, whether that's resistance or fear or anger or whatever for you, she's inviting people to be at that place, exactly at that place in their art. And not to deviate one whit. Want to deviate it all. If resistance, if lack comes up, if a hard place comes up, if you feel totally stuck, paint that. Enhance that.

[10:09]

Or be that in some way. Don't get away from that. Just be that. It felt to me as if it was such an innovative and liberating use of media that one could do it. Sometimes people come to see me and I ask them, you know, just what's arising right now, and nothing. You know, it's such a scary thing. We haven't done this too much, and so They're not sure what to say. There's nothing between us to handle. But if you took that place in yourself and went out and worked with it and expressed it and explored it and experienced it for two hours, something would shift. It would just shift. So she was learning that when people do something like that, they come back to Sashur refreshed and invigorated.

[11:15]

Sashur has energy from that. And we also heard of a practice, mostly these practice centers are using koans. The role of the teacher is not so much to support the student as to pull the rug out from under the student. The role of the teacher is to whittle away at the student's dependency, to underline the dependency. I don't know how they work that, and I'm sure there's flexibility with it, because these are large communities, and there's great warmth in the teachers. But the face-to-face encounter, and the focus on relationship, the teacher has a very, I would say, astringent relationship, just right now, right here, what's happening.

[12:17]

I found that pretty interesting, and then It leads me to what my own experience was during this week. Is there something else? I found that when we were invited to introduce ourselves in a circle and talk about where we were at right now, everybody said something. Every story was moving, I think, and heartfelt. But afterwards,

[13:19]

I, and a number of others, weren't so comfortable about what we had said. There was a sense of having been exposed, maybe being ashamed of what we had said, the side that we had presented, and some regret or some uncertainty. Maybe not everybody, but some people felt like that. And I, of course, said, it has students mistreating when they share something deep and troubling. with their mentor and how uncertain then they feel. What did I reveal about myself and was it acceptable? Is it okay? And reflecting on this, I began to feel as if there was a part of me that was dry land and a part of me that was only water. And the part that emerged as dry land, the part that I just happened to say, in the circle, was not the most interesting part.

[14:25]

The most interesting part was the part that was underwater. And I wondered how many others felt they were underwater, that are so much of our nature and doing. was not accessible to us, or plural, or not fixed. And what that was to meet somebody else who arises as the mountain, as form, and doesn't reveal the rivers. the flowing, and how we're all teaching ourselves we're all rivers. We know that. We know that we're all underwater, that we're struggling to come up to some climate and consciousness and awareness.

[15:28]

But the rivers don't reach it. And our attempt to formulate language and to communicate a language misses the mark. And as I worked with it, it was a problem for myself. How much is underwater? Does it have to be that way? Was there practice to be dry land? You know, I wasn't quite sure what the implications were for me. So many women described themselves as hidden or invisible or secret. That was interesting. I don't know if the men would do that. But a number of the women felt they had lived hidden lives or invisible lives. And we're noticing now, as the assumed positions of responsibility, which were very public, what a challenge it was and how complicated to become public and available to themselves.

[16:36]

So as I was thinking about all of this, I realized that it was all a stream. It was all moving. But I wasn't just swimming, either going downstream or floating or swimming or going upstream. But it was all the string, the swimmer and the string were not separate. It was very clear to me. Whatever I was experiencing wasn't separate from what the entire energy of the group was. This was a remarkable group because it felt as if nobody got stuck in a particular place. Group of people practicing 20 to 30 years each. and what everybody said at the beginning in a day or two or three shift, which was all kind of flowing through us. To experience myself as the flow, even though there was the identity that was part of the flow, but to see that in fact

[17:50]

my doubts or my concerns or my questions were expressed by and matched the concerns and questions and experiences of others. It was pretty interesting, pretty interesting that this sense of separate identity and separate self and separate persona or whatever separate ego that keeps reeling its head. This in fact, when it is held in a patient space, dissolves into, resolves into the rhythm and movement of everything. quite wonderful to feel the dissolution of some separate, I don't know what word to use, some separate will, some separate observing self, even though it kept popping up and back, of course.

[19:15]

Well, it didn't seem to have so much substance. It seemed to dissolve, but you could prick it and kind of get it back down in there. At least there was this big question. There was this going back and forth. And there was a space where we could meet in that way. But wherever a person or entity arose was provisional and was seen as provisional. The poem that I took with me from the teaching I've been doing in Santa Cruz and Monterey was the poem of what is right or livelihood. We've been studying the Eightfold Path And I've been interpreting Wright, the spokes of the hero, as liberative non-dual.

[20:21]

Liberative understanding, liberative intention or thought, liberative action, liberative speech, liberative thought. livelihood. When we talk about right livelihood or right speech, it conjures up right or wrong. So we get caught on the dilemma of what's right contrasted with what's wrong. So how to work with the code of right livelihood as non-dual livelihood, linear livelihood? If you put it in a box, where the teacher of, I'm gonna tie this to what I was talking about earlier, where a teacher of right livelihood or a lineage of livelihood is not to do work which is harmful to others

[21:42]

They have to do anything which involves killing or stealing or dishonesty. Do it in weapons or intoxicants. Or cause suffering to others, like hunting or fishing. But you can't put livelihood into those boxes and then decide where everything else is liberative. There are groups down there. We have people who are working in large corporations with overseas offices and overseas manufacturing. So we're so integrated internationally now that it was hard to know the consequences of any of our activity here. And we began to think of right livelihood in terms of right understanding, right intention, and right action and right speech.

[23:02]

And it didn't so much depend on the particular profession as how we enacted our role or relationship to the work. Did we see ourselves separate? Did we see ourselves outside the work? Could we so identify with the assignment of a task, but we had a non-separate, connected, interconnected relationship. A relationship where we didn't know what our relationship was. Where we didn't know what was correct or not. Little by little, we could build this mind and body to be experienced and explore and experiment how to be with each other in new ways, new ways that were free of conscious intention, free of conscious goals.

[24:26]

Could we take as the work of our livelihood That which truly sustains our life, that which truly nourishes us, and what would that be? What would be something that truly nourished this body and mind? What questions would we ask? When do you feel nourished by your activity? When do you feel invigorated and enlivened by your activity, by your work, by your action, by your relationships? so that you don't know anymore what the notion of right livelihood might be.

[25:35]

It's liberative in the sense of entering into a space that's quite unknown. Cutting really well, she used to say, don't put your head in there. Don't create a gap and put your head in it. Tosin Akiyama, when he talked, talked about his teacher or colleague who would say, take your head off and put it on the cushion next to you so that our zazen practice could be free of the discriminations of a brain that was always working. Uchiha Maroshi, you know, as Sho Hakuro Kimura says, open the hand of thought. Whatever thoughts are coming, let them go.

[26:38]

Put your head down here. How can we, it seems to me, challenge how do we enter our situation as the koan of our life? And what I've been feeling about this trip, about the teachings that we heard, is that they work with cons in which each student is invited to become each part of the con. So here's an example. Con on bad budget on work. Wenwen asked the Master, every day there is hard work.

[27:43]

Who do we do it for? The Master said, there is someone who requires it. Wenwen said, why not have him do it himself? The Master said, he has no tools. What if we take this koan as the koan of a livelihood or effort? Every day there's hard work. Who do you do it for? There's someone who requires it. The writer said, why not have Harry do it himself? Bajang, this conversation is happening with Bajang.

[28:46]

Bajang says, he has no turrets. So Vernon Fisher, during the winter of 1907, an issue of Terminal Hero, has an article on Zen lyric, in which he speaks to this koan in an interesting way. We look hard, Norman says, because there is someone who requires it. Who is that someone? We can show all beings. We can show reality itself. We can show Buddha. But none of this is quite accurate. Someone requires it. And maybe it is best to say we don't know who that someone is. Well, doesn't this person do it herself?

[29:49]

Because we are her tools. Our body, our mind, our whole life are her tools. So it's there I say so too I work with a lot of verve and joy. And to my surprise, we, last Sunday, Roy Tye, at Mount Trimper, started her donor talk with this case and talked about this case and commented. When we say she has no tools or someone has tools, why doesn't he do it himself?

[31:05]

Because he has no tools. In order to have tools, you have to be separate from tools. You have to be separate from the situation. And that is not realizing the koan. If you yourself are the tool, and if you reach everywhere, your mind, your heart, your stomach, your feelings, your energy. That's the person. What's the person that we're responding to? There's someone who requires it. It's interesting, who is it that requires us to work? Something in us that I call from the universe, call from your heart, call from your deepest intention, your deepest vow.

[32:22]

In what standards do you have fellow work? Why did we come here to Zone Center to work? What were you looking for here? What are the work opportunities here? What inside us requires us to be here? What invites us to be here? And what are our tools? What are your tools? What do you bring? What do you bring that you don't even know you bring? Besides your specific skills or gifts, what do you bring that you don't even acknowledge because you didn't work to develop it?

[33:25]

That's just your nature. So that's an example of looking at the issue of livelihood or work in an integrated way, in an interconnected or a non-separate way, but there's no distance. This one is wonderful. Curly. What's in the spoof here? What's in the spoof? There's another Curly about wild goose that really loved to live.

[34:30]

I don't know if I can do it to you, but it really, really loved to live. But her presentation was really powerful, and it's again speaking to this point of, right this minute, right here, where are you? What's happening? Not yesterday, not next week, not what we want to have happen, what we wish were happening, but right now, even right what you can't express. Can we start with that? Can you start with that feeling of something's stuck in with you at first? That's your practice. That's the practice of this moment. It's not all air clarity. It's also not all confusion. It's not all ambivalence. It's a wonderful mix.

[35:32]

There was this story. It was about who was a very important teacher in the Zen tradition following the sixth ancestor. And he was responsible for changing the Zen community. the domestic code from India to China. He really voted Chinese according to this text. He organized a service elite instead of a close student privileged elite. He's the one who said, a day of low work is a day of not eating. He reproduced words into his own communities instead of the system of not working, which had been happening before.

[36:46]

So the lurks were not being subsidized by the generosity of the low verity. but would run around food, turn around fields, take care of themselves. Apparently, there were abuses that grew out of the system of giving money, giving support to the monks. According to Corey here, it was corrupt because donors would give to the monks in order to get favors from them. So it was a patronage system. And Wang Zheng cut through this, ended that system, and introduced work so the community could be self-supporting. And Kuo's introduction says these Chan teachings, and this was in the sixth century, seventh century, seventh and eighth century,

[37:54]

Humanized Chinese Buddhism, emphasizing practical application beyond theory, giving up an idealized image of a superhuman Buddha. And, this is new to me, and humanitarian works of charity, education, and service in the world. So here's an example of a large buddhism back in the 8th century, 12th Dynasty China. Arubanjo's teaching emphasized suiting the teaching to current needs, not allowing it to become dead words. And he set up the Dharma Hall, the meditation hall, as the center of the realistic community to demonstrate that the teacher was more than letters, words, or images.

[39:05]

The teacher was about realizing for yourself the liberated life. Watching your own world and body through your own teacher not dependent on the teaching of others, not dependent on books and lectures, but your own experience. You're cutting through this wandering mind through your perceptions and feelings and impulses as the story of your life, through the stories that we continuously generate. I'd forgotten that Bajor was such a renovator, known for all time, I think. And there was this wonderful story about, page 19, Wild Ducks.

[40:11]

They were out for a walk, Matsu and Bajor. Matsu was his teacher. very famous Joe teacher. And I saw a flock of wild ducks go by. And Bajana said, what's that? And Bajana said, wild ducks. Some of the translations say wild geese. Bajana said, floating away. Matsu then turned around, grabbed Bajang's nose, and tugged at it. And Bajang let out a cry. And Matsu said, do you still feel the worry?

[41:13]

With these words, Bajang had insight. Then Bajang returned to the attendance quarters. And he was crying pitifully. And a lady who worked there as an attendant asked him, are you thinking of your parents? Is that why we're crying? And Bai Zhang said, no. And the attendant said, has someone reviled you? And Bai Zhang said, no. Then why are you crying? Bajang said, Lolo's was grabbed by the great teacher, and the pain hasn't stopped. And the attendant said, what happened? What didn't you realize? And Bajang said, go ask the teacher.

[42:16]

So the attendant went, unless, not so, The incident happened that attendant Bajor vowed to record with. He is crying in the other room. Please explain to me. And Matsu said, indeed, Bajor did understand. They told the attendant to go ask him. So the lieutenant went back and said to Baozong, what's it says you understand? He told me to ask you himself. The master then laughed. Baozong just laughed. And the lieutenant said, just a moment ago you were crying. You were laughing. You didn't understand. Bajang said, just then I was crying, right there and laughing.

[43:24]

The attendant was at a loss. There was a little more exchange between them. And then Matsu and Bajang have another conversation. Bajang said, yesterday you grabbed my rose and it hurt. This is the day it works for, I guess. And Wotsu said, yesterday, where did you set your mind? Bajang said, my rose doesn't hurt anymore today. Wotsu said, you have deeply understood yesterday's event. The master bowed and withdrew. So it's interesting what's going on here.

[44:30]

They're playing a little bit. Twinkie noses, cool and cold. Where was yesterday's morning? Where was yesterday? Yesterday's plane is gone. Yesterday I was crying, today I'm laughing. Can we live in such a way as to not carry yesterday's pain today, yesterday's confusion today, be with whatever is arising now? What has flown away? Where is the line that flew away? What was yesterday's mind? What is yesterday?

[45:30]

These stories and this style of teaching I found very engaging and provocative for me. So what I'm dancing with, the teacher of the school is not to make a thing out of any event, not to make a thing that we put in our pocket and remember and bring out on the next suitable occasion. And this gentleman teacher who was giving a talk Sunday, said, no thing. Something like that. It might be a good thing, but it's not better than no thing. The picture here is, how do you not work your experience of throwing?

[46:36]

How do you not crystallize it or make it concrete? How do you not? focus on it, extract it from causes and conditions, separate it, wrap our minds around it, and get caught by it. Then we're caught as one thing, objectifying the event as another. So, what do we do? Maybe I can stop now. And if there's some question or comment, we might have some conversation. Yes, Jim. There are several members here. Yeah. Just to get together. Is that your question?

[47:36]

What was the evidence? Oh, there's evidence. It's been happening for years, about 10 years. Just to stay in touch. I think many teachers feel isolated. And it's sort of refreshing to connect with each other, to see what other people are doing, to develop friendships. Before these movies happened, you know, in the Soto tradition, I don't know about Winside, but each community developed separately. So the San Francisco Zen Center community developed separately from Los Angeles Zen Center community. We had a little more contact with many of us because of Kadagiri Roshi's relationship to us, but not so much contact with the Rinzai tradition at all. Didn't know the people, didn't know what koan practice was, didn't know how they organized their communities, how they do the teaching, what services they use.

[48:42]

So we're evolving, we are collectively evolving American Buddhism, Western Buddhism. And some of the centers were no traditional than the others. Daibosatsu was very traditional. It's headed by a Japanese person, so it's quite formal. Mount Trimper has accommodated to being in a restaurant environment, working with both monastics and lay people. So it has a very flexible, very strict discipline program, but also flexible so lay people can come and go. It's quite exciting to see the forms that the Dormer is taking as people bring their intelligence and their own questions, their own experience to the teaching role. Joe Adato-Lewy, for instance, has spelled out, at Mount Trinford, who's the abbot there, has spelled out the 10 stages of the path for both monastics and lay people.

[49:56]

because he believes that the rest of your mind needs to know where it is and where it's going and what's gonna come next. And that's so different from Suzuki Roshi's way in our own teaching style, which is there's no stages, there's no path. Here we are. So it's interesting to kind of consider the usefulness of that and the materials that he's developed. and how it works in people's lives. We don't know. We just did a visit to that center. But the people that we met felt very engaged, responsive, very intelligent, helpful. Your final quote reminds me of this other one that Steve Weintraub was talking about this weekend about the ox and the carton.

[51:03]

Which one do you get? Do you get the carton? So how, simply to experiment a little bit, how do you get the carton without turning and hitting the carton into just another right way, the ox? Hitting a car is hitting a body. Is that how you explained it? Hitting a car is the no thing. It's sort of like putting your head on the side. And it's like a way to do nothing as opposed to doing something, which is hitting a house. So how do you do that without turning it into just another something, turning it into just another objective? Yeah, how do we do that? How do you hold that question? How do you experiment with that question? How do you bring your mind and its categories and its intention to that question and exhaust all of that and then see what's left?

[52:08]

I think the only way we take on any of these, whether it's new or the question of tools and who does the work, your discriminating intelligence to it, and then how far does that take you? And then where does that lead you? And where does the next question come up? Because everything that you try or that comes up in your mind leads to something else. There's the other side, the part that's underwater, the part that first appears, the part that's land, the part that's water. One of the quotes that she did, she quoted somebody, when you commit yourself to something, committing yourself means what resources do you commit? Committing yourself to something doesn't mean believing in something. What do you commit?

[53:10]

Do you commit your heart? Do you commit your mind? Do you commit your intelligence? to lead your life to this question. How alive is that question for you? If it's just a kind of curious question that you go around with occasionally, then it's not gonna really grab you. But if your life is engaged by that question, if it resonates with something deep in you that has to be solved, that's gonna bury the hole in you because your life is right there, it won't let you go. And that's when the koan and ru become one, and something will happen. So then you exhaust yourself. There's a moment of frustration. And out of that, well, there's a lot of frustration. And then there's a moment of relaxation. And it's that, the swinging in the river. What's an example of technique?

[54:17]

Now you work really, really hard for an hour. Then you take an hour off. Then you take 10 minutes off. And then you really beat yourself for 20 minutes. Then you go for a walk around the block. Then you go to a movie. It's not like that. Each person engages with it in a way in which it's alive and meaningful and necessary for you. you have an idea that you exhaust the intellect, and then when the intellect lets go, something else arises, something that's beyond what the mind can figure out. I think it happens in different ways for different people at different times, depending upon the urgency of the question and how blood mood engages you. I mean, I could tell you all kinds of things the way I work with things like this.

[55:19]

It just becomes total. Take it into the body. Totally take it into the body. Until it's a body experience. It's not just a mind experience. Become the cart. Become the foot. Become the person who's become the horse. Become every part of that. That's how they work with colons. And that's how we work with the Gojo colon. That's how I was working with this business of being underwater. I had to become all parts of the situation to see beyond my idea of what was going on, to feel it more completely. Yes.

[56:30]

I was going to talk about service, you know, that different Zen communities are providing, if they are. I know there's like a lot of talk about early Chinese Zen monks and services. I mean, sometimes they're kind of described as kind of civil engineers and kind of Red Cross workers, possibly the exceptional ones providing service in China. And I wonder if there was any discussion of that. service that the communities are providing. Can you talk about social service? Well, yeah, community service for the community. We talked about death and dying, working in hospices, working with AIDS patients, mostly around death and dying. I was out for a whole day with my runny nose. Was there something else, Branch, that I missed in that area?

[57:31]

Not particularly. It came up. one instance or another, but our focus was on death and dying was one of the focus of one day of the session. And domestic training and late training, how they have a similar and how they're different was the focus of another day's discussion. financial aspects of Fundraising and each year we sort of take a different group of subjects to help us out and otherwise we'd be home. So there was, other than how working with death and dying becomes service to the Sangha and to people beside the Sangha, in, for example, hospice work, or being, you know, responding to a call from a hospice with someone who wants to be a priest.

[58:49]

And at that time it sort of came up as that. But for me, just reading this book today, a series of and to see that he encouraged or introduced that aspect into his community is wonderful, because we're getting ready to engage Buddhism down in Santa Cruz. They've been doing it down in Monterey a little bit longer. There's a tradition. I mean, I've always thought that from the Asian perspective, it was more like just working on yourself rather than the social dimension. And here, apparently, in China, there was something else happening. But I think there are many groups that are doing service work, engaged groups and working with the homeless.

[59:56]

collecting food, working with kids, doing tutoring, various projects like that in Santa Cruz. We just didn't get into that. I understand that they're going to put sex on the agenda next time, sexuality or something. I wasn't there for that one. I don't think the topic of it turned, I guess. When asked if practice, it was very strong on one of monastic practice is serviced. I have a very strong feeling that monastics serve the lay people . A lot of them come for sessions and workshops.

[61:04]

And that's seen very much as servistic people. to maintain the monastery so that others can use it. Is that what you mean? Providing the metrics for people to come and practice and to come and study. Thank you very much. Oh, yes? I wonder if next time you come, you might talk a little bit about women, the activities that go on with, say, for example, a one-day sitting for women. What would that be like? Because I know there are things like that. I know that would probably take a long time. So maybe next time we come back, you could talk about that.

[62:10]

Could you tell me something of your interest in that topic? Well, my interest is specifically a woman's practice. What they say, what would that mean? Well, see, I've never identified exclusively as a woman sitting with other women and not with a mixed group. Like two communities, in Santa Cruz it's about half and half. In Monterey it's, I don't know, 70, 30, 80, 20 more women. So I don't develop special programs just for women. There hasn't been a request for that. I know Fu and Tia and some other people at Green Gulch did a workshop for women. Is that right? Derek Tassajara. Berkeley does, yeah.

[63:17]

Well? Well, I've had a real teacher. It's a little different. It's almost like you're... I mean, I think Women's Citizens came up because women felt a need for exploring a woman's unique experience, which, since we have received the teaching from Japan, from loyal teachers... We've experienced it somewhat differently. My own teaching is different in significant ways, I think, about the posture, how I work with posture, from how Suzuki Roshi, from what Noel said, Suzuki Roshi said. So Mel and I got into some conversations about how to work with people's postures.

[64:28]

So I think what was interesting, when women had made changes, innovations in their session schedules, that also it was scary to do because they were breaking with the lineage or breaking with tradition. and creating a new form. And that's scary, because we've been brewed, we're bedded in a form, and we're carrying a form in this tradition. So to break it, You don't know if you're not permission. You have to give yourself permission to experiment. It's interesting. And I think women are finding they need to do that more because their experience of working with their bodies requires it. There's been a request of Santa Cruz to stop using karaoke as a way of... or more relevant to American life.

[65:34]

Orioki's not so relevant to your home meals. And I asked this question at the meeting, and it turns out that many groups don't ever use Orioki. It's quite interesting. Capra Roshu used plates and I think forks and spoons and knives. Shasta Abbey didn't use arioki. And Syracuse, they used plates and forks and spoons. So that had seemed a kind of sacrosanct, part of the tradition to me. I didn't know if I could, because I enjoyed so much the give and take of the service, serving the food. That's when people have moved on from that and have already adapted to Western forms. I don't let her down in here. [...]

[66:36]

They would have those beautiful sets that Richard was helping us make. And we've created a lot of them down there. And so there was fundraisers. So maybe we'd have to have special sessions for only. That's what I could imagine happening once we switched, because I thought we would switch. At least part of the time. Maybe not every meal, but part of the time. Yeah. Years ago, it must have been years ago, Stewart ran the Existence and the Ecology Center of the Year Award because of Grant Fishwood. So, ma'am, a painting of this book, one of the poems doesn't wear satsu sticks. I thought it was daibosatsu. The rush, the first blows with their thumbs.

[67:41]

Those are hard to imagine. They're interested in one of the most elegant style, most elegant forms there. But they don't use setsu sticks. And then they drink. So you can see that whatever it is we're learning here, it's just one variation. And translations are different. The translations of the Heart Sutra, Where's your difference in unity? They're trying to develop a community now to standardize the service, so as you go from one community to the other, you understand. You'll be able to chant without the chant card, but I knew what the chant card in Mount Tremper had changed. It was the same chant, but those had different translations. Thank you very much.

[68:48]

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