Shuso Talk

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SF-01118
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ah thank you for coming
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ah i think that before i begin are speaking tonight i would like to r issue or hobby up our to about what you were about to hear on my first lecture are which was indeed my first election was about something i knew fairly well
i my own life on or beginning with dyslexia i am ought to begin spotting the dharma
on so what i want to talk about tonight is something that i have been thinking about a great deal and practicing with for quite awhile
and i hope that my expression does not run too far behind
so with that in mind i beg your indulgence on
many years ago more years ago than i care to i'll admit i lived in st louis and worked in a madhouse are literally on and eyes to during our ten seasons at the weather permitted ride my bicycle from my house to on my personal
employment
it wasn't a particularly pleasant ride in that are i went through some rather ugly neighborhoods all
rundown houses all factories plants
things like that there was on the way am an orthodox chicken butchery against such a part where you kill chickens on and i remember seeing a line of chickens hanging by their feet sort of like a wash line going from a truck into them into the house
where they were all killed in
ah for food on which reminds me as an aside the a writer on isaac bashevis singer all once said when asked about why he didn't meat on whether was for his health or not said no
no it's not for my health that i don't eat chickens it's been the chickens health
oh at any rate if it was not a particularly pleasant ride
but one thing that that i always enjoyed when i wrote in one thing i looked for was on one tree is a big maple tree and it was in the corner of i guess what was an industrial park and it was just beautiful
in all seasons you knowingly in the spring it was just coming out green in the summer rolls leafy and dark and in the following it was on fire and even in the winter
had a certain architectural beauty
sony i would i would greet this tree every time i i drove right past and look forward to and new sort of like my friend had sort of blessed my eyes each time i came back
and one day i was riding my bicycle and i happened to look at the tree and i had rather an unusual or at least at that time unique experience as i looked at the tree and i believe it was an autumn i have a memory that been quite colorful
i had this sudden understanding realization imagination call it what you will that
my perception of the tree was as much a part of the total reality of it
as where it sleeps it's roots its branches it's sad
that i was involved with the tree and it was involved with me that through
my perception through my senses through it's being there
there was a marriage of sorts an identity
i saw the tree in my scene of it was part of it
and the tree because i saw it was part of me
and at that time i didn't really have
a way of thinking about this too much r r r a conceptual framework
but i think of it is as an experience sit on links a very close with my understanding of buddhism
i'm skipping ahead
several years i had a somewhat similar experience once i moved to san francisco and made what i believe was my only visit to the san francisco aquarium
which i found essentially rather distressing because of all of the critters are boxed up but i was going from hallway to haul a are looking in tanks and i happened to see one fish you caught my attention and i don't know why i can't even describe what it looked like i think it was rather play
i mean i think it was the only one its tank and i looked at it very closely with a group of a high level
and i had a sudden feeling of what it must be like to be dead fish to be a consciousness trapped in a body with jim senses
and a feeble body
and no real intellect to make sense of their existence
once again experience realization imagination
but as i looked at the fish in the fish turn facing me i suddenly felt a so something had dropped away and what drop to where i felt
what's the boundary between jeffrey mr fish
i felt as so i experienced it as though there were only one consciousness
looking out of that small body and limited intellect and looking out of this larger body and also limited intellect
it was on his her intense
he was an experience of i don't know what one mind
in a state with me for a long time and stayed with me
well until now
and it's this kind of experiences kind of dropping way of boundaries is this understanding of self and other than i'm trying to get at night
and i think that we can practices i think this can be a deliberate practice for us if we wish
and i think there are ways
that we can touch this and develop it in ourselves
first of all ah
we can begin with our intellect and with the teaching and way that i i i thought about this or an example that i'll give you is sitting in the zendo in the morning at the beginning of zazen listening to our the bell is it rings again and again during the first period of zazen
and so as i listened to the sanders as listen to the sound
where does it come from you know it comes from the bill
comes from the hammer
it comes from the hand and the arm and the muscles of the person striking the bell it comes from the mind of that person in his or her intention and it comes from the hundreds of years of tradition saying that the bell shall be struck at this time and in this way
and sound i think
well let me back up a little bit so we can take anything in our experience any object or sense experience and use it and trace it back intellectually this way you know
where's the sun you know is that ninety three million miles away is it all their distance that light travels is it
is it reflecting on my body is it in my body is it in the plants that it makes grow
and we can do this with many things with anything really
and this is a consciousness that we can develop i think
and it takes some effort it takes some practice
and at first as an intellectual thing
but then we can begin to experience it was in our bodies and thousand is a good time for this especially if we're doing lots of thousand and say during the one day sitting your during the session
and one of the things that i'd like to do or that i do do during sauce and is pay a lot of attention to sound as i said i used to express the m the bill
and i think sound is a very good on
example of what our existence is like
one sound does not block out another
the a sound spreads in all directions sounds interpenetrate sounds arise sounds go away
and
because they are so food there an easy thing to relate to an easy thing to think about
to experience in this way when actually i think i experience and i believe that
ah we are taught that all things are like this interpenetrating arising falling away not interfering with each other
and so in our zaza and practice we can
grasp this directly
and
i think
that this is what
dogan is talking about when he says in the game joe cohen
to carry yourself forward inexperienced myriad things as delusion that myriad things come forth and experienced themselves as awakening
when you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body and mind you grasp things directly
when actualized by myriad things your body and mind as well and the bot as well as the body and minds of others drop away
in the hook ios online it says you are not yet it actually is you

so when we experienced famous this way
the barriers are locked down
and we realize that self and other are points on a continuum
the foreground and background collapse into each other or perhaps we can just see that they are on a single plane
i think maybe this is what you and then meant by body exposed in the golden wind
and so as i said we can develop this as an intellectually at first and then to our experience and we can carry it with us
through our daily life as a practice ah
but i want to point out that on what i'm talking about is not some special stage or exalted state
not some special kind of mine that we grasp for but rather that it's
it's our everyday mind with just a little band
just another way of looking
and in a way
i think we can call this ecstatic practice
oh
the word ecstasies from the greek it means to cause to stand forth
in this kind of practice and i'm talking about causes us to stand for a some body exposed in the golden wind
without that that barrier
oh
but when i say ecstatic i don't necessarily mean completely joyful onto to live in a few minutes
and so the question of course perhaps arises as to why we want to cultivate this sort of mind should we doesn't make any sense
are we doing it just because it feels goods
it's kind of and up
but i don't think so i think there are other reasons the other day and evening service we stood in the zendo chanting the heart sutra which i have chanted many many times over the years and for some reason for the first time as i chanted a
the beginning of a low-key dish or a bodhisattva when practicing deeply the problem new power meta perceived that all i've scanned as are empty and was safe for suffering it finally occurred to me to wonder now why is it off loki dash vara whose practice the practicing the pride in your power meter of loki dish as most of you probably know is the buddhist
thought for who in buddhism is generally associated with compassion and manjushri is the bodhisattva who is associated with wisdom so i would have expected to i thought about it you know before that it would be manjushri who is practicing the prussian of our meta
and
so i thought about this new couple of days later and move against paul heller because i know that he had studied in and taught the heart sutra and his interests in his answer was one that i actually should have figured out for myself
he said on location bar is the one practicing this because
in the mahayana compassion as primary
even before wisdom
and that made sense and it reminded me of something that
i had heard many years ago
the dalai lama once when he lives are in the states stated green notes for a few days which was really wonderful and gave a lecture for zen center people on i was lucky enough to be there and i don't remember much of what he said
he spoken to baton so there was a translator was hot i was tired but i during the with he said that wisdom arises out of compassion
and that really blew me away because i always presumed that it was the other way around you know i was going to sit a lot of zazen and get enlightened and then i would turn in automatically to this wonderful compassionate being that i'd always wanted to be and then i would be
you know really great dispensing wisdom and compassion to all of you lesser beings
but when he said that it made a lot of sense and i've continued to think about it and
what i believe is said
wisdom is different from knowing blanche the other week quoted on dogan in his guidelines for studying the way as sing old man shakyamuni says of location vara turns the stream inward and disregards knowing objects
in disregards knowing objects
it's because objects cannot be known
only subject can be known
and no subject for all things to be subject this is the kind of practice that we develop
when we are no longer on
discrete particles moving through empty space
but when we are on part of the continuum
so the knowledge
that we're talking about is more like
wisdom you intuitively grasping
ah like a hand reaching behind you for a pillow in the night
so we have this connection we have this
letting go of boundaries
we have this ecstatic practice and it's very nice
i'd like to take a walk in the morning before i come here and i found a little garden
little community garden would like to visit and it's really beautiful there's no roses and gladioli and he has just wanna for going there and and stopping their even for five minutes really refreshes me
and it's at times like this that you know this this is kind of practice of dropping way boundaries of of
of realizing
the continuity of self and other is pretty ecstatic
you know i mean a beautiful rose in your hand
but there's a downside
if his buddhism says there is no self than course there is no other
and realizing this experiencing this we not only open ourselves to me
the beauty of roses in the the great joy of connection but like are lucky dish vara we open ourselves to the seemingly infinite suffering of the world
when your friend is in pain
in the boundaries of dropped you feel that pain
when you're angry and you're looking at the person that you're angry yet
you feel that pain
when somebody hurts you
and you realize that there's no separation
maybe that's even worse because you can't objectify the person that has hurt you
and so
we have a choice
for maybe we don't
maybe if you if we stay with this practice
that's what happens to us inevitably
that we are
that we see that we don't have a choice
and when you get there
what do you do with it

so
as i warned you would first ipad rambling a little bit
if anything that i have said this evening has been or can be useful are whatever i hope you will use it and keep it as your own
if anything that i have said has confused or discouraged you
please forget it
if you can
and
i guess i could go on that since i don't have anything else to say that he would say good evening