The truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. How many of you are here for the first time? And is this the first time you've heard about Zen Buddhism or had some instruction? Or have some of you studied or read about it? Let's see, how many have no idea about it? This is the first introduction. You. Okay, so everybody else, even though this is your first time here,

[01:01]

you've read about it or been someplace else or practiced someplace else? Well then, I shall assume that what I'm going to be talking about will be familiar to most of you. And I want to invite you, if my voice drops or if I say something that you really don't understand, to please raise your hand so that it doesn't get lost. That's helpful to me. This being the kind of the cusp of the year's turning, just before New Year's,

[02:03]

maybe it's appropriate to talk about vow. You know, New Year's Eve we have a sitting here. We do a little cleaning first and then I notice that we're going to have soba and then start sitting around 11 o'clock, I guess. 11 o'clock. And we sit through the year's turning. And I assume we'll be striking bells again. We sound 108 hits as we go into the new year. And about 12.20 we conclude the sitting and we come upstairs and we have a fire ceremony in the courtyard. And it's not exactly as if we're throwing the old year away,

[03:04]

but we can put into the fire whatever we have finished with, records, materials, or what we feel resolved about, about ourselves, about our life. Or perhaps some early vow that we're ready to let go of. Many of you here know about Kadagiri Roshi, the teacher at Minneapolis Zen Meditation Center, who was the teacher there for about 12 years, the abbot there. And prior to that he was a teacher here for several years. He joined Suzuki Roshi in the 60s to bring Zen training to this bunch of Americans.

[04:13]

And actually when I walked into Zen Center, which was at that time at Sokoji Temple, Kadagiri Roshi, who was then Kadagiri Sensei, was the one who answered the door and gave me zazen instruction, as some of you have had zazen instruction today. So he was doing it at that time. And over the years I have asked myself, how does he keep doing it? How does he keep going? How does he keep making such enormous effort? Responding to every request, it seemed. Always bringing his heart and his full energy to every sitting, every lecture, every session. It was a koan for me. I didn't know if I could follow so fully in that way.

[05:17]

He died in March, March 1st of this year. And when I saw his death poem, I understood. His death poem is Living in Vow. Silently sitting, 63 years. Plum blossoms that begin to bloom. The jeweled mirror reflects truth as it is. Oh, I got it. He was living in vow. He was no longer living for himself. Out of his own desire for life, stimulation or whatever. But he had completely turned his life over to everyone else.

[06:27]

And in each situation he asked, what can I do for this situation? What's the best I can do? What would help this situation the most? Not, what's the most convenient thing for me to do? So, in a way, living in vow is easier than living for the self. It's a lot easier. You don't have to decide all the time. What do I really want to do? What would develop my emotional development the most? What would make me a better person? Or a more admired person? A more accomplished person? You don't have to think like that anymore. You can just say now, where am I needed? How can I most help what's happening? So, I want to talk about living in vow.

[07:42]

I've got about three themes for this talk. Let's see if I can weave them into one talk. And I want to integrate that with a question that's been coming up for me. The last year or so. Which is, we teach in this practice, we say, no gaining idea. Please come and sit, nothing to gain. At the same time, we kind of convey an attitude that actually there is something to get. There is someplace else to be besides where we are right now. There's another state of mind or another understanding, another quality of existence. So it began to feel kind of contradictory to me. How do we teach no gaining idea when almost everybody begins to feel, I'm not quite enough. I should be more present. I should be more concentrated.

[08:44]

I should be more mindful. I should be more giving. I should be more selfless. I asked this question in Japan a couple of months ago. Every other question I asked, I got an answer to. And this one, anger came back at me. I thought, oh, that's interesting. That provoked anger now. Why? So maybe think about, had I not phrased the question well, was I confused? Was I deluded? Was that my discriminating mind playing games? Was my deeper mind not understanding something? And I think all of those were true. I finally feel and want to talk about today that what we're talking about, the place that we're encouraging ourselves,

[09:47]

myself and each other to get to, is the place of being fully human or fully ordinary. Fully ordinary. And a way we talk about that is see things as they are. See yourself as you are. See each other. See each person. Each phenomenal existence. Each thought. Each feeling as it is. And seeing thoughts or feelings or the body in zazen, the instructions that we give in meditation, follow the breath and watch thoughts arising or watch feelings arising. Watch impulses. Watch states of mind come and go. Watching them isn't the same as seeing them as they are.

[10:51]

So I want to talk about what that as they are means. Because it's kind of tricky. Although seeing things as they arise is the gate, it's the entry into seeing things as they are. And what I mean by seeing things as they are and what Buddhism means is free of how we attribute feelings or judgments or values to things. Attitudes. Interpretations. Seeing things as they are is to see things free from the judgments, the preferences, the desires, the irritations, the guilt of our normal everyday mind,

[11:54]

which isn't different from ordinary mind as it is. It's just a little shift there. And I had an experience in our recent one-day, seven-day sitting, which we do every year, the first week of December. And I sat the whole day, 14 hours, and I couldn't get a certain thought, a certain problem out of my mind. Something was bothering me. And I tried all the recommended practices, you know, keep your back straight, keep coming back to breath, but my mind kept going on and on about something that was really occupying me, and I couldn't sort out. So I did what was the recommended practice. I brought my hands into the abdomen, and that helped a lot. Because when you touch your body, you touch your abdomen, touch here,

[12:55]

you awaken, you stimulate your skin, your muscles, your cells, your nervous system, you just stimulate energy down here. And that was very helpful to bring me back to right here. And it also helped keep my posture alert. And at a certain point, I said, okay, obsessing, obsessing, obsessing. So that's how I spent the day. The latter part. Wandering, wandering mind, obsessing mind. And it was okay. I had hoped, you know, I had brought an attitude to Sashin, that I might have a quiet seven days, might really get out of the busy activity of my life and just have a pleasant seven-day sit. So there I was, obsessing. I went to bed. My mind was still active.

[13:56]

Obsessing. The next day, without any effort on my part, when I went to Mozendo for the second sit, second day, the energy had totally shifted. The energy had dropped out of my head, was down more in this area, and I wasn't bothered by all those thoughts. The thoughts were still there. They weren't as dominant. They weren't as demanding. There wasn't the same energy, emotional energy behind them. So they were just thoughts. Fish in a pond, going back and forth. They weren't the whole pond. They were just fish in the pond. And I realized again that what was bothering me was not the thoughts, but the emotional energy,

[14:56]

the anger, the guilt, the responsibility, the attitudes I brought. When that happened, and the emotions dropped, and the guilt and the agitation and the confusion dropped, what was happening at the thought, at the ideal level, was rather simple to resolve. It's very interesting. Oh, yeah, well, that's kind of a conflict. I'm in a situation that's got a built-in conflict with it. Well, I'll just solve it this way. I'll just acknowledge it's a problem and I'll do so-and-so. The solution was obvious. So seeing things as they are, free of the stuff that we bring, the emotional coloration, the emotional tone, the energy, sometimes requires sitting a while with it

[15:58]

and not trying to do anything with it. It's doing zazen. It's just sitting there, letting thoughts come and go, but being willing to stay with them until they disassemble or dissolve or transform by themselves. In the current issue of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship publication, there's an article by a woman who sat here years ago who was born with an incomplete arm, not exactly withered, but it only came down to about here. She didn't have the lower part of her arm in hand. And I remember her sitting in the zendo. One arm was forming the complete mudra and the other arm was just hanging.

[17:01]

She said that because of her own attitudes toward that disability, that her arm, and society's attitudes and the attitudes that were reflected back from people she met, some of whom never even said, what's happening with your arm? Never even asked. Acted as if there wasn't any problem because we don't know how to face something like that. She said it took 25 years before she first looked at her arm. She said, I was 25 years old before I first looked at it. Isn't that interesting? To just look at it and see it free of whatever energy or feelings or disappointment. That we carry. And a friend was here a couple of days ago

[18:10]

who, again, was a student here in this community for 10 or 15 years and is now living somewhere else. She has a 7-year-old son who is developmentally retarded. He can't walk or talk. He's now 7. She said that when you have a child that's not normal, you give up your illusions a lot faster. When you have a normal child, whatever dreams, expectations, hopes, fantasies we may carry for our own life and that child's life, that takes many, many more years to drop them.

[19:15]

If your child isn't normal you have to be with the child that you have not the child that might have been. So, our vows to be ordinary this is my practice. We're always talking about ourselves. My vow to be ordinary has something to do with looking at fear. Fear is something that is looking at things as they are has to do with divesting things ourselves, each other of our ego investment of our attachments to how we think we should be

[20:19]

how we think we should perform how we think we should give lectures how we think we should handle difficulties, conflicts how we think we should resolve that which we this conflict situation we're in with our girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse or child and we somehow don't let ourselves actually go through the normal difficulties of working things out with each other inside we come from some attitude of how we're supposed to be and that idea of how we're supposed to be so that people will not see us as we really are so that we will not see ourselves as we really are that just gums up the works. Then we're all meeting each other we're meeting ourselves from some place of projection

[21:21]

description some clothes that we put on some attire we put on so that you don't see the real person. Bush in the Persian Gulf what's really going on there? Do we know what's going on there, really? Does the press tell us? Does Bush tell us? Can we figure it out enough to respond appropriately? Again, for myself, how I can respond and how I feel I can encourage others is to respond from the posture of zazen. I don't know what's going on in the Persian Gulf

[22:25]

I don't necessarily believe what the press tells me I don't necessarily believe what all these generals and cabinet officers are saying I don't know if they know what's going on inside of them or how they have projected their fears their confusion their self-image, their desire to be right how they have projected that on the world are they acting in terms of projections in terms of their own honest heart-mind experience of the situation the craziness of the situation so all I can do is to say I don't know and to keep asking what's going on how do you know where do you get your information where does that feeling come from both here and in others so that we help each other open up

[23:30]

to the full range of our experience rather than corner each other into attitudes if I come up with a smart reply then everybody, I corner somebody somebody will have to give me a smart retort back but if I honestly say I'm confused and I'm worried and I don't know and I listen carefully to the other person there's some chance of opening up some honest dialogue among ourselves and and that's zazen it's attending to what's arising without judging it without discarding, rejecting, diminishing or exaggerating

[24:38]

because all of those attitudes diminishing or exaggerating are the attitudes of the ego which has its own agenda for being well-received in the world and we're always distorting events what so-and-so said, how I heard it, what I said back to what the ego is comfortable with just listen to yourself how you talk about yourself or somebody else how you talk about their conversation notice the subtle distortions, exaggerations so that's how the ego messes up

[25:39]

things as they are the ego's desires and projections inclinations most of which are, many of which are not even conscious to us at times we're so used to them, self-habituated to them that we're caught in mind-body issues ideas, thoughts and we don't, can't separate them from the emotional energy that's entangled with them so one of the things that's characteristic of Americans, I think and I heard this in Japan as well as experienced it here is that a lot of us have free-floating fear we're afraid right? I'm afraid we're afraid of each other we're afraid of all kinds of things most of us are operating from fear our defense strategies with each other

[26:44]

have to do with protecting you from seeing things in me that are really awful inadequate, insecure confused I don't want you to really see me as I am and you wouldn't you wouldn't have you wouldn't know what to do with your projections of a Buddhist speaker so you can keep a Buddhist teacher or Buddhist priest outside your own life but if this talk isn't about your life then it's kind of useless to you and it's not helpful to me either so I want to talk about fear because a little bit, just to say one of the vows I'm working with

[27:46]

is is the vow of forgiveness about when we when we talk when people talk with me about what's coming up in their life a lot of times it's about anger unresolved issues or fear and there's very frequently my experience is that there's a that the what would be helpful is an attitude of forgiveness attitude of forgiving the self and forgiving the situation and forgiving the person

[28:57]

whoever else is involved and maybe most important and hardest to get at is to forgive that which is unforgivable in us that maybe we can't quite get a hold of but we sense that there's a line in us Am I doing that? If I can play with it? Okay. There are the things that we know we say to each other things that we know that we do the arguments we get into the greed that we get into, the confusion we can say, okay I forgive myself

[29:59]

that's really important and this is a practice that may take several years, by the way to learn to forgive yourself for having tight shoulders having a tight stomach having a hard edge to your voice when you speak to someone out of tension so I'm raising the possibility of opening up to a kind of again, it's a Zazen attitude we just watch what we do and the attitude of watching is already an attitude of forgiveness because our normal style is to clamp down on ourselves if we see a thought or an attitude or an impulse that we don't like or tight shoulders we want to change it, there's something wrong so it's quite quite a shift in our inner ecology

[31:00]

to allow ourselves to see anything we may see and I'm talking about things like tight stomach and tight chest and tight neck and all the physical manifestation of this body and mind and not want it to be any different that's an enormous different way of being with ourselves and we have to give up wanting to be something special in order to be willing to be tight shoulders tight stomach short breath, shallow breath tight neck willing to be that person that we are forgiving ourselves for wanting to be otherwise forgiving ourselves for having imagined there was another

[32:04]

better way to be which is somebody else around us or somebody we care about when I try to do this practice on my shoulders which I would really some part of me would love it if they were different and some part of me knows that that attitude undermines undermines me when I actually brought awareness to the shoulders to the tension in my shoulders and just kept bringing awareness to it I had to really struggle not to join that awareness with the hope or expectation that if I work this hard at being aware something will change you bring awareness and you watch your tight shoulders or your tight stomach and it's perfectly okay you don't want them to be different you really don't

[33:08]

because the wanting it to be different adds to the tension adds to the winding the tightening of whatever it is in us that's bringing us closer to the center rather than releasing us so when we do that practice of just watching our body and I mention the body because it's it's pretty available to us watching thoughts is excellent highly recommended watching feelings and watching that part that we will not forgive I want to talk about that I don't know how much to say about that because it's I think we all sense we have a line that there's some place in us that we won't forgive we took an early vow

[34:10]

to be a certain kind of person we would not be ordinary we would be special we would be better than others we would not capitulate in this situation we would be strong or whatever it may be so I'm encouraging myself and all of us to just hang out there at the edge of that line that border that boundary of that which we know about and which we may not know about and be willing to watch the experiences the sensations the images the thoughts the confusion without wanting it to be different to be willing to be with ourselves just as we are

[35:14]

to be fully human to be fully ordinary this is so easy to these words are so easy to say compared to the effort I'm talking about and excuse me for sounding glib I know this is a heroic effort I feel it's a heroic effort and it's not an effort that focuses it's not self-serving even though it may appear to be totally preoccupied with the self I looked up the word forgive in the dictionary and it has roots to Old English and to German and to Latin it's connected to pardon

[36:15]

and to giving wholeheartedly to forgive is to give wholeheartedly when you give yourself wholeheartedly there's nothing left that's holding back there is the joining going with non-separation from that which you are turning yourself over to so for New Years can we turn ourselves wholeheartedly over to our own processes our own delusions our own tensions our own colossal feeling of despair over the situation in the Middle East

[37:17]

the government's response or our own inability to come up with some response or our own good feeling about participating in someone to turn toward that which is beyond our own boundaries or limits because if we ever I think lots of us have made vows that we're unforgivable something about us is not forgivable but you know that was just an idea that's just an idea so to turn toward that idea and hang out with it and dance with it and play with it and enjoy it until it transforms until it dissolves this is longer than I thought

[38:26]

well I think that's all I want to talk about thank you very much

[38:40]

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