I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. I'm not sure whether all of you know that last night was prom night for Tam High School and, I don't know, maybe a lot of other high schools as well in Marin. And I have a daughter who's a senior at Tam High School— can you hear me all right in the back? —who went to the prom.

[01:00]

And in thinking about my senior year, the prom, I was totally uninterested in going to the prom and didn't go, and didn't know who did go, which is another story. But yesterday was a one-day sitting, and also it was getting ready to go to the prom, and I was leading the one-day sitting here at Green Gulch, which is a very full schedule from five in the morning until six. And my daughter had a lot of things to do and really wanted me to help her. So I was caught in the middle of wanting to do both things, wanting to do both things really thoroughly and wholeheartedly,

[02:05]

and both things were lots of fun. And I wanted to be in two places at once. Has that ever happened to you? So there's this wonderful children's story called Owl at Home, maybe some of you know it, and Owl wants to be upstairs and downstairs at the same time. So he's downstairs and he calls out, Owl, are you upstairs? And he says, No, I'm downstairs. Then he runs upstairs. Owl, are you downstairs? No, I'm upstairs. And he keeps running back and forth up and down the stairs calling to himself until he ends up stopping in the middle of the stairs and just panting with tiredness. So that's kind of what it was like yesterday. Alison, my assistant, can tell you, I was down in the center and then I ran upstairs. My house at Greenville, just up on the hill,

[03:06]

ran upstairs and watched her try on the dress and then we needed to hem things and then run downstairs and run upstairs and find the right earrings. And it was great. But I did miss some zazen because after I put her hair in curlers during the lunch break, they didn't dry. So when we undid them, they were still wet, and you know what that means, trouble. So we had to get the hairdryer out and work feverishly. Anyway... So this is what our life is like, more or less, all the time, really. Wanting to put our efforts, our full effort, in various places and always feeling like you're running upstairs and downstairs,

[04:09]

catching up. And feeling like you're disappointing everybody. You know that feeling? You can never... If you're one place doing it wholeheartedly, they're saying, how come you're not here? So this is the pain of our human life. And... I think it's compromised or made more difficult when we're not true about what's going on, when we're not telling the truth to ourself. This morning I'm teaching a class on the precepts, and we brought up the precept, a disciple of the Buddha does not lie. It's also translated as no false speech.

[05:17]

A disciple of the Buddha does not speak false speech. So it seems pretty clear, and it seemed in class there's pretty clear indications, or pretty clear instances, I should say, where this is the truth and this is not the truth, and you know pretty clearly that you've decided you're going to deceive someone by saying something else, and you know it. So that's one kind of not lying, or lying, I should say. But there's also a whole strata, substratum of deception on a subtle level where we don't even know that we're not quite being clear with ourselves or not being clear with another person, where we're slightly shifting things and exaggerating a little bit here and there to create an image or a perception,

[06:20]

and we're not close enough to ourself and what's going on with ourselves. We're not integrated maybe enough to even see what we're doing. So to know that you want to be in two places at once is the beginning of letting go of suffering about it, to actually know this is what's going on for me, this is how I feel, this is disappointing others and what it feels like. Actually, to be in alignment with yourself like that is very... well, there's a lightness, there's a kind of lightness. Rev once described it as if you were taking a hot bath, when your speech is in alignment with your true intention or your vow,

[07:21]

when you come into alignment that way, it's a bodily event. So the word pram comes from the word pramana, to take a walk, and the earlier origins of pramana, pramana means to go ahead and attack first. That interesting? I don't know what your pram is like, but... So there's lots of transitions that are going on right now, like graduation from high school and pram,

[08:26]

and yesterday I gave the talk during the one-day sitting and spoke about transitions, and I wanted to just bring it up again because I think springtime is a time of transitions. Excuse me. There are lots of people who are in transition right now who I'm talking with. Some people are dealing with grief, there's been a death in the family, and the transition, the shock and the shattering of our life that comes about when there's a loss through death, the deep shock to our system actually that happens

[09:29]

throws us into transition, into a transition. And after the shock comes the realization of the gravity, the immensity, the unfathomableness of the loss. And then later, after time, there becomes, with grieving and time actually as healer, there's gradually acceptance, and balance is renewed or comes again. And yet there may always be this sadness there. So that transition, going into that transition of dealing with yourself after there's been death is a major transition, and many people who have not taken care of themselves very well during that transition,

[10:29]

actually, I think you may know this, there's incidences of sickness, like serious illness, that can happen when there's death in a family, when another person isn't taken care of well around it. So it's very important to be in alignment with yourself and to get help and take care of this transition. And then there's the transition of birth, and there's two babies that have been born in the last two months, one baby at Green Gulch, and there's two more on the way, I don't know if you know this, two more families are having babies on the way, and maybe there's even more that we don't know about. And so that kind of transition, that main transition of becoming parents

[11:30]

and becoming a family, not just a couple anymore, and then there's becoming grandparents, becoming aunts, becoming godparents, and how our life gets thrown into a new dimension, really, around birth. And there's people who are breaking up in relationships, who have been in long-term relationships and have realized this after long struggle and work, and introspection and help, that this isn't the path to be on anymore. So there's breakups, and then there's people who are coming together who are actually realizing that there's a person in their life that they may want to really commit to, that they are drawn to in a deep way. So all these transitions.

[12:31]

And there are also people who are contemplating becoming priests who have decided to be ordained in the community, and people who have decided after many, many years to be ordained, after over 20 years of practice, have decided to become ordained. And people who have decided that living in residential practice, this residential meditation community is not what they need to do, they need to do something else. So all this is going on, and always is going on. And when we're in the middle of transitions, actually, one admonition is, for example, about ordination, to not get ordained at a time when there's a major transition in your life. For example, a death, or a birth, or a marriage, or a big move, something like that, to wait for your ordination until this new balance has come about.

[13:34]

And that's not always the case, but that's one thing to look at. So, transition means to cross over, to go from one state to another, and is often talked about in terms of birth and death, to transition from birth into death. And then there's the transition of hay fever season. Excuse me. Green Gulch is a great place for allergies of all kinds. So as I was saying yesterday, and I'll say again, this transition time, it can be a risky time for people, because the old ways, the old set of situation and people in your lives,

[14:44]

that has all changed, and the new has not settled yet. And often what happens is, it feels like there's something missing or something you want to do to make things feel in balance again, and we tend to want to grab out for something to stabilize ourselves, actually, and reach out in some way. And sometimes what we reach for may not be very helpful and may be detrimental to ourselves. We want to activate ourselves and manipulate things so that we'll feel more comfortable again, because this transition time has a discomfort, it has an up-in-the-air kind of feeling. And one analogy that I find very helpful is, in childbirth, when a woman is going through labor, there's a time during the labor that's called transition.

[15:46]

And if you've done natural childbirth, or been around someone who's gone through birth classes and natural childbirth, this, the labor starts out, this is a kind of ideal, you might say, or kind of regular, starts out, and the contractions have a, you know, there's certain minutes apart, and you can breathe into them, you can be ready for them and receive, relax into it, your partner can help you breathe, you can get into a position that's most comfortable, where you can stay aware of what's going on, and things are going along, working really hard, because it is called labor, working very hard with this event. And then things shift, and this time of the shift is called transition, where, for example, the contractions might come very fast and very strong, like super strong, and not giving you much time to recuperate in between,

[16:51]

and other things, other feelings, and along with that change is a kind of mental feeling like you don't know what to do anymore, whereas you're working really hard and pretty clear about how to relate to this big change. So, at that point, someone may feel like they want to grab for something, to change things, to take the pain away, to stop it, to get me out of here, just get me out of here, and so decide to have painkillers or something, which each woman has that decision, or each couple, each birthing group can decide that. I don't mean to put down the decision to receive painkillers or any other kind of help, but I'm saying that in that transition time there's this wanting to make it okay, somehow, how about this, well, give me something.

[17:53]

And then after transition comes, it's very clear again, pushing, it's intense, but you know what to do. So in the transition, I think one of the qualities of it is not knowing what to do. Should I move, should I stay, should I drop out of school, should I stay with it and follow through, or is that, you know, it's not clear. So if you're in transition, a major transition, please take care of yourself and get the help that you need, and take it slow, you know, because the familiar has dropped away, and the unfamiliar, it's unfamiliar. And I think this analogy about transition is the same for someone who starts to practice, starts to sit, sit upright in meditative, in taking a meditation posture

[18:56]

and practicing meditation of whatever kind, one may find that the familiar is not so familiar anymore, and the ways of relating don't work anymore, or you don't want to do that anymore. And then what? Then someone may feel, you may feel, I may feel very lost, very lost, nothing makes sense anymore. So this is suffering. And one person recently, when they were sitting, they were paying very close attention to their body and breath and posture and watching, and they became, I think, what she called it, very concentrated, and what they saw, they had a kind of insight into impermanence,

[19:57]

into what they said was, there is, it's all moving, it's all transition, it's all, there's this insight into there is nothing to settle down into. That was her insight. So in some ways, there aren't these, you know, times of transition only, each day is transition, each moment is transition, and, you know, this term moment after moment, to me, it used to be a very fresh kind of term, moment after moment, and now it has the cliché-ness of the 90s, I guess, 99. It has a kind of buzzword, oh yeah, yeah, moment after moment. But in practicing, to actually experience moment after moment, not even breath after breath,

[20:57]

breath is too long, you know, one breath is so many moments, uncountable moments in one exhale. So to actually feel this movement and shift moment after moment and transitioning, transition, and that the actuality is, there is nothing to grasp for. As the sutras say, grasping things is basically delusion. So, so much of our activity is either grasping after things, trying to hold on, or trying to keep things away, keep things out that are going to be painful, hold on to things to get the pain to go away. And this kind of activity of grasping after, craving after, looking, seeking, trying to improve, is very, very,

[21:59]

can make us, it's very tiresome, and actually perpetuates our suffering, grasping after things. And it's not in alignment with the actual way that things are, which is impermanent, and there's nothing to grasp. There's nothing there, so when we grasp, we're disappointed. Even if we think we have it for a while, it disintegrates. It reminds me of all the machines that I have in my life, the car, the computer, the radio. I'm just thinking of all the things that fall apart, you know. And we get so used to it. But when I was a kid, I remember getting a toy, I remember it was a particular toy, it just occurred to me,

[22:59]

it was a Mexican little cup on a stick with a ball on a string, and you would swing the ball and then flip it up and try to get it in the cup. Do you know that toy? And when I first got it, I thought, I will never be bored again. Because I couldn't do it, and it was so infinitely amazing to get the right swing and the feel for it, and watch the ball and try to... And then after a while, I was able to do it, and then I could do it over and over and over again, and then it was, okay, now what's next? But for a while there, I thought, this is it. It was like I had found the answer to... But that's samsara, that's the samsaric mind that gets a hold of something and says, Aha, this is it, and then pretty soon that will... That disintegrates, that shifts, there's a transition, and the truth of impermanence is that game doesn't last.

[24:01]

So in a world like this, how do we live? How can we live? Sometimes this truth of impermanence comes so strongly and we feel so turned upside down by it, we feel like I can't go on in a world like this. It's not fair. Where is there any place to put my feet and stay put? So I think this is what the Buddha felt and set out to settle for himself in a world of greed, hate and delusion, old age, sickness and death, and the boredom of games. How can we live in this world?

[25:03]

So I know you all want that answer and are waiting for it. I'm waiting for it too. But I will talk about it. I wanted to just leave that there hanging. I have a friend who said to me, pretty recently, she's in her 50s, and she said, You know, I realized pretty young that I wasn't a beauty. And I said to myself, Okay, I'm not a beauty, but I'll do the best I can with what I've got. And her practice, I think, was to be really meticulous about her grooming, the color she wore, her hairstyle. She knew that she could look around her and see. For others, for true beauties, they could do anything,

[26:16]

but she knew she had to take care of herself in that way. And I felt, when she said it, this feeling of being in alignment, this hot bath of true statement, that someone can be that honest with themselves and go from there with acceptance and kind of a joy and kind of interest and curiosity. Well, how am I in the world knowing this about myself, that this is who I am? And when someone is that comfortable with themselves and that true to themselves, and that when they're just who they are, anyone who's around them feels like they're in the presence, this is what I'll say right today, of a hot bath. I mean, they just feel like whoosh. And you feel like you can be who you are too when you're around someone who knows who they are,

[27:17]

accepts it, and goes from there. So the pain of getting ready for prom and not feeling like, you know... All of you, I imagine, can remember what it's like to be a young person, either you are a young person right now or you can remember the pain around self-image and what you looked like and how much you weighed in your clothes, whether people liked you or approved of you or were you on the inside or the outside of a group, and the loneliness there, the utter loneliness. And even if you were in the popular group, feeling the utter loneliness there and knowing that it wasn't all that much fun there either. So the whole thing is just one, lots of suffering there.

[28:21]

And to meet someone, to have met someone at that time who just knows who they are and is comfortable with their body, comfortable with their life, the refreshment of that, the ease, the happiness that can spill over is amazing. So this doesn't just drop away in adolescence, but I think it does change as we mature and we accept ourselves more and more. But I think one of our main tasks, or I should say my main task, is to accept who I am and express that. Now, recently I was asked to participate in a ceremony down at Tassajara,

[29:22]

and I had a particular role in the ceremony, and the role was the role of preceptor, which is the person who is involved with giving the precepts to someone who is receiving Dharma transmission. It's a big ceremony in someone's life, and the preceptor has a major role. And part of taking on that role meant I needed to have certain ceremonial items with me, a particular robe and a whisk, this whisk that was given to me at my Dharma transmission, a white horsehair whisk that is involved in the ceremony and other things. So I went to Tassajara to fulfill this role, but what happened was I forgot the whisk and I forgot the right robe, the ceremonial robe,

[30:27]

and I got down there and I didn't have my accoutrement, I didn't have what was necessary, not accoutrement meaning excess, I didn't have what was needed. And I realized I had an insight into what this was all about and a kind of deception. I started out the talk talking about the precept of not lying, and I saw a kind of strata of self-deception that had to do with not fully occupying the space that I was asked to occupy, not fully entering, not fully expressing what I was asked to express. And what was that all about? Not taking up my own clear role or job in the world.

[31:31]

For what reasons? And to look at it, to study what was that all about? What was I backpedaling about? What was I trying to get away from by forgetting very conveniently to pack the very things that were needed? So to me that really pointed to the shadow, the shadow side, those blind spots that are their shadow, because we do not see them, we do not see those parts of ourselves where the light hasn't been shined, but yet we express them in our actions of body, speech and mind. So here is a perfect example of the expression of the shadow, the unexamined, the unstudied. And I saw a lot there, and it was very embarrassing, and embarrassment is very helpful, you know, and I blush easily too, so it was a hard week to be a Tathagata.

[32:35]

So the task of being ourself, I'm not a beauty but I'll do the best with what I've got, to actually settle with whoever we are, and this uniqueness of whoever we are is the gift to the world, and the whole world wants us to be who we are. The world, everyone, every person, animal and plant wants us to be completely who we are in a comprehensive, wide, wide way, not kind of the self-deception of thinking, oh, I'm only this, and diminishing ourselves into thinking we're just this. We talked about this in class this morning, the tendency to say, oh, I always do this, or that person always does that. Well, it's not always, it's sometimes, or it's infrequently even, or it's once in a while, or once they did that, but the tendency to exaggerate and kind of blanket things over

[33:39]

which is not clear thinking, and not clear speech, and not in alignment. So to be ourselves in a wide, wide, comprehensive way is the practice of zazen, is Zen practice, is the one precept. The one precept is to completely be yourself and to study yourself. So when the Buddha set out to find out how can we live in a world where there's nothing permanent, there's nothing there, no place to settle, his enlightenment, what he said upon waking up, the Buddha comes from the root budh, which means awakened, the Buddha is the awakened one, and Buddha and sentient beings are not too, is one of the main teachings, which is what he exclaimed upon waking up under the tree,

[34:42]

under the Bodhi tree, the tree of awakening, he said, marvelous, marvelous, all beings without exception are completely and fully enlightened, except because of their coverings, or because of their illusions, they don't realize it. So this was the Buddha's enlightenment, that sentient beings and Buddhas are not too, so that when I say to express our full self in the comprehensive, wide, wide way, and that the whole world wants us to do that, I mean our awakened nature, wide, and to diminish ourselves and squeeze ourselves down into, you know, I always do this, or a kind of routinized way of thinking about ourselves,

[35:44]

habitual way, stale, cliché, you know, it's a, well I suppose it's not observing this precept of a disciple of the Buddha does not lie, does not have false speech, we can speak falsely to ourselves, and in fact in the world of conventional life, meaning the life, the dualistic life of birth and death, and good and bad, and beauty and ugly, and we actually can't help but break the precepts, the ultimate meaning of the precepts, cannot be observed in a dualistic way. They can be observed in the conventional way, meaning dualistic way, conventional way, means the shared understanding of what is black and white, and profit and loss, and we have a shared understanding, although not everybody shares it, you know,

[36:46]

our conventional understanding in this culture may be different than others, but it's still conventional meaning is created together by convention, you know, we convene, and we work these things out together. So unilaterally you can't decide, oh this is good and this is bad, and if people do that, they often get lots of feedback, you know, well, this is my way and I'm going to do it well, that doesn't work for us, that actually is harming. So conventional is shared, kind of a shared working out of things. But along with conventional, there's the conventional way of not lying, which seems pretty clear and straightforward, and that's the way of conventionally upholding the precept. Then there's also the compassionate way

[37:47]

of upholding the precept. And the compassionate way of upholding lying, not lying, not using false speech, may be that you have to lie sometimes in order to benefit beings. For example, you can think of your own examples, but for example in World War II, let's say you're hiding some people in your house, in a false attic or something, and then someone comes to your door and says, are you hiding people? No, no, nobody's here. You lie. In the conventional sense, you lie, you have the intention of not telling the truth, but the purpose of it is out of compassion and out of a higher benefit to others, and out of the bigger, the higher precept, the overarching precept of non-harming. So you go ahead and break the precept in the conventional sense of what's true and false. Conventionally speaking, yeah, there are people in my attic,

[38:49]

but you're not going to say that, so you lie. But that's not breaking the precept. That's the compassionate way of observing the precepts. And there's maybe other instances too. Maybe your daughter's all ready for prom, and her outfit, you know, it's like pretty far out, let's say. This is actually an example from someone else. How do I look, you know? How do I look? How do you like it? And for you to say, that is really an ugly outfit, would that help? Would that be a benefit to say? And it's only your opinion. Her friends probably think it's really the coolest thing they've ever seen. So conventionally speaking, what is true or what's false? What's beauty and what's... But what do you say then at that moment?

[39:54]

If someone says, how do I look? Or did I do okay in a baseball game, your kid? Maybe you say, I just thought of this joke in the New Yorker, those people who are kind of those yuppie hippies with the big hair. Corinne is the cartoonist, they always have lots of frilly hair and they're very kind of new agey. And there's this picture, do you know who I mean in the New Yorker, those cartoons? Some of you do. Anyway, there's this kid who has frilly hair too. He's coming down the mountain, he does this fall and his dad says, nice fall, Josh. It's like that, you know. Out of compassion, we say those kinds of things. But when we say those things, when we don't tell the truth and it's out of self-preservation, self-protection, you don't want them to get angry at you, you're afraid. And it doesn't really benefit them.

[40:57]

You just don't want to be the beneficiary of their ire or have to deal with what's going to happen. But it really would benefit them to speak the truth. But you protect yourself. This is often the reason that there's non-interference in terms of child abuse and racism and sexism and things that we actually see, we witness it, and yet don't want to get involved. Why? Fear. Fear for our own, what's going to happen to us. So we kind of look the other way. This happens all the time. So out of compassion, sometimes we lie, but let's not kid ourselves about that. Is it out of true compassion or out of self-preservation? If it's preserving your own life, I don't mean that. I mean self-protection in terms of not wanting to deal with consequences

[41:58]

and face the music. So there's the conventional practicing the precepts, there's the compassionate practicing the precepts, and then the third is the ultimate way of practicing the precepts from the ultimate, you can't really say point of view, because the ultimate doesn't have a point of view. There's no place to stand in the ultimate to get a view. But what it points to is that... Well, please excuse me for even trying to talk about this, but I will anyway. All beings, marvelous, marvelous, all beings are completely awakened except for their obscurations, their thought coverings and afflictive emotion coverings and karmic coverings. Those are the karma avarana and the klesha avarana

[43:00]

and the jnaya avarana, the obscurations or coverings they're called. Except for these coverings, all beings are completely awake and enlightened, meaning all beings do not have a separate inherent existence apart from others, apart from objects. So, the suchness of mind and objects is enlightenment or awakening to see the non-separation of self and objects. And this selflessness, practicing the precepts, not based on anything to do with self, but practicing them out of complete expression of your understanding of the nature of reality, that's the observing of the precepts from the ultimate, out of the ultimate. And, you know,

[44:02]

how do you point to that? The question is, how about you? In the koan where it talks about coming to the end of the practice of the precepts in the conventional way and feeling that struggle and then dropping that, dropping that off, and then it's just, how about you? Neither this way nor that way is right. How about you? What's your expression of your understanding? Not based on any stuckness in any ideas. And how come there's no stuckness in any ideas? Because there is no stuckness, because there's just transition and impermanence, there's nothing to grasp, nothing to hold on to. And as soon as we hold, there's stuckness. So to live in this life with the truth of impermanence

[45:06]

coursing in us, not holding on to anything, neither a view nor a non-view, and just responding to what comes up, just responding and feeling. You know, I've been doing these Alexander technique classes, and when you stand in a certain way, my teacher Bob Britton is telling me, which is a different way than I have been standing forever, you can actually move and respond. Your body moves differently and responds to the world. You can actually pivot and turn in a way that when you're holding your posture a certain way, you can't move, actually. If someone were to call your name, you couldn't actually make the turn. So to actually take a posture of body and mind that's ready to respond, not out of self-protection, not responding to promote self,

[46:08]

or to look good, or anything, but responding because there is no other way to live. So... I think that's all for this morning. Thank you very much. May our intention be the same for the future.

[46:49]

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