Well, thank you for all coming today. And I guess this is the last lecture. And tomorrow we'll have Buddha's birthday. I wonder if Buddha celebrated his birthday. All the bhikshus saying happy birthday. And many more. Anyway, we'll do something. And we'll also have a taking of the precepts. I haven't decided yet whether it'll be all five or all ten or some five. I mean, I don't know. I never know quite what to do, because what to do is not very clear. But at least what we've done is traditional, which is for taking the precepts as a layperson, you generally have one week of a sashin-type practice before taking the precepts.

[01:08]

At least in our school, you... don't give the precepts just as a blessing. It has to be related to practice. And if you want, and if you're ready, related to entering a relationship with a teacher and even with a lineage. So I think five people will take the precepts and one person is coming from a young man from Boulder who keeps asking me if he can take the prison. Finally, I said, okay, if you can come on the 8th. Someone else said the same thing. I said, okay, if you can come on the 8th, but he couldn't. I don't know. It's kind of So if anybody else suddenly has a sudden inspiration that you've done this seven days, maybe you should take the precepts. You should speak to me. If anybody else wants to do doksan together, you should let our sloping Eno know.

[02:20]

I'll bring it over to this side. I've got a list. Don't give him a list. Don't give him a list. Too many lists. Okay. And I admire your fertile efforts at beating the drum for the food offering. It's quite hard to hit that drum. You know, I think I told you I bought that at the press club. It was supposed to be a coffee table, I think. Well, it was cheap. And I had the whole price club because they had about, I don't know, 20 drums.

[03:23]

And I set them all up and I spent, I don't know, two or three hours beating them. Kids gathered around. We had quite a good time. And this was the one that sounded the best. There were two that sounded quite good, pretty good. So I got this one. But the thing is that there's two reasons it's difficult to beat this drum. One is that the stick should be longer so that they move in the hand like this. And the other is that much of the beating of the drum is done by the bounce from a perfectly round surface. In other words, you don't have to do much work because it bounces off. This, it doesn't bounce off because it's not round. But some of you know, I mean, it'd be nice to get a real drum, but they're made of kayaki, which is, in Asia at least, the best...

[04:26]

most stable wood. A block of keyaki about this big costs, solid, costs $25,000. Something like that. So a drum, they start at $25,000. And they, but they have a very precise, it's a musical instrument, they have a very precise and stable shape. And they sound wonderful. But, uh, I think we'll build several buildings before we buy such a drum. I think buildings are more useful. Or if I could find, the kayake is actually a wood rabbit close to ash, I believe. And I think Asa Gray established, who was a contemporary of Darwin, that the trees of Asia and the United States are more closely related than the trees of America and Europe, actually. And so we have similar woods in America as we do, as they have in Japan and Korea and so forth.

[05:31]

So ash may be very similar, but I don't know if one could get just finding these big pieces of wood for the eating board. Such old trees with intact pieces of wood almost don't exist anymore. They were gotten from fallen sugar pine trees that were quite old in the National Forest. They'd been struck by lightning. Lenny was given permission to go cut them or harvest them. But I guess there were six that had come down in a lightning storm. Okay, blew down. Blew down, is it? Yeah. Oh. It's a swath of trees. Blown down. And so if we could find a... You know, like when we carved Sekiroshi's statue at... for the Kaisando, the Founders Hall at Page Street, the Japanese sculptor asked us to find a large piece of wood, which we found.

[06:34]

He told us the dimensions. It was quite a job to find a big, solid piece of wood, big enough to carve a life-size Buddha, I mean person, I mean teacher, I mean Tsurugi Roshi out of it. But if we could find the right piece of wood... I could probably take it to Japan and have a drum made for much less money. Because they'd be interested in helping and doing it, but maybe it'll fall like monodrama from heaven into our hands somehow. Anyway, I admire your effort to make this drum work because it doesn't help you hit it and develop a beat. Now I, the presence of this lovely Kuanon, Kuan Yin, Kanon and Bodhidharma has made me think a lot about objects in Buddhism and also I've been trying to talk in practice period primarily

[07:54]

about the relationship to the phenomenal world. Because we don't have a, we're accepted a sort of a missed level, we don't have a heaven realm or a realm of a god in Buddhism. So the practice, particularly the schools of Buddhism emphasizing practice, this dimension which is experienced in religions, in Buddhism, related to the phenomenal understanding and experience of the phenomenal world. So I've been trying to talk about that in a way that makes it understandable or at least accessible. Now, statues like this, art historians say, because, you know, originally there was just the footprints of the Buddha.

[09:05]

There were no statues of the Buddha. With the Alexandrian Greek culture spreading throughout northern India, you began to have Buddhas sculpted like Apollo and So you have the kind of Greek kind of toga outfits on these Buddhas. But I don't think that maybe tells us something about the initial idea. It doesn't tell us much about what I would call the talismanic history of these figures. Maybe you could tell us, Daisy, that story you told me when you were sitting thinking about remembering Michelangelo's David.

[10:06]

Could you tell us that? Well, the morning the goddess was brought in here in the dark, I heard this rustling, and immediately I thought of Florence in Rome, and Michelangelo who lived in 15— Florence in Italy. In Italy. Oh, Italy. It's Florence. He did his gigantic David from the Carrara marble, and in those days they had no modern equipment. It's a magnificent, talismanic statement. of the overcoming of evil by David. And Michelangelo decided he was going to bring that into the town in the dead of night and have the people wake up in the morning and see this David standing there with his slingshot. And if you go to Florence, be sure you go inside the rotunda where they have the original, because they put a replica outside that's much bigger.

[11:10]

But the only one that has this talismanic charisma, saying the courage of morality and truth will win over any giant. So in those days, they had very little visual things. But when Michelangelo appeared and this David was rolled into Florence, he did it on wads. He moved, I guess he had helpers, but he moved. I hope. Well, he was called, you know, the master. And then he moved incrementally. David was moved incrementally all the way from the studio where he carved it all the way in the dark to the center of Florence. When the townspeople woke up in the morning, they all ran up and they were so excited to see this David Well, I felt like I was one of those townspeople when this goddess came in whom I heard this rushing.

[12:11]

I said, I know what this is. I said, this is like David. I said, this is, you know, Abel of Kiswahara. You know, this goddess is coming. And lo and behold, it was displayed. It was true. I just had fountains of tears pouring down my glass because there's a link between the creative energies of great masters. Okay. Now, you've told enough of the story. And so, I just had this wonderful sense that the truth will always be linked by such creative things. Even Bodhidharma with his slipper pointed China, he was doing the same thing, transporting it to another country to introduce something new and true and spiritual to the world.

[13:13]

Okay. Thank you, Daisy. Now it's your turn, Melissa. Could you tell the story of your... Could you tell the story of your walking around? See, I'm trying to... Pass on the teaching, all of you. Where do you want me to start? Just, you were out there running around the circle here. Yeah. When I first got here for the session, the first person I met was Daisy, and the first thing she did was grab me and take me in to see the statue. In the house, and... And then everything went along, and as I was telling Roshi, I think it was day four or whatever, I had a really weird feeling that the statue needed to be moved. But I didn't know where, I didn't know how, quote, to get anybody to move it.

[14:16]

But it was bothering me really bad all day. And I felt like that we... the way it felt to me was that we had an honored guest that we had left standing in the hallway while the rest of us had gone on to the banquet. That's what you call a sashim, huh? A party in slow motion. We should start taking turns at giving lectures here. Let me go through the day, and let me go through the night, and it's time to open city shut. I can't sit, so I was walking, and it was really more like pacing around and around to Zendo, and sort of you, because I didn't go through the back doors.

[15:19]

But anyway, I just couldn't seem to stop doing that. And then I started chanting to myself, because I was still worried about moving the statue. And I said, well, there's no way to get that done, so I'll just do this chanting and see what happens with that. So I did that for a long time. Round and round, round and round, round and round, and then... And so I told her, well, she's some jerk driving a truck. And she goes, oh, my God. And then I put my back facing her. And I told her, yeah, I'm trying to watch your back. Yeah, it's more intense about pacing. I said, oh, my God. You're getting out of control. And then they sink you back into the building. Hit the building. Yeah.

[16:21]

And so I kept walking and peeked around the corner once and I saw a girl I think with some firewood coming into the building. And I went, what the hell is going on? Fire police in here. So I kept going, going, going. And I thought it was Dan's anymore. And so I came around the front and over here to the east side of the building and rounded the corner. And there they were, like all these wonderful men with this fabulous head. So you have to be careful when you chant Tantrayana. Okay, thank you very much. Now I can give a much shorter lecture.

[17:25]

It seems like we had about four days of snow and then seven days of sunshine all in this week. Okay. Now there's been, I don't know exactly where to start here, but there's been a tradition in, and we've talked about it because we talked about the seamless tomb koan of in the Book of Serenity. And there's been a tension between emphasizing the relics of the Buddha and emphasizing the teaching of the Buddha being the Dharma.

[18:29]

There's a famous saying, if you see the Dharma, you see me. If you see me, you see the Dharma. Now this is meant to be in contrast to the relics of the Buddha. Some molecular sized ashes, ash of the Buddha, put in a stupa. But there continues to be this relationship to the phenomenal world. And you see in the Diamond Sutra, which we're reading so often, that if you chant the Diamond Sutra, the spot where it's chanted becomes sacred. So the spot becomes a kind of stupa.

[19:32]

And the seat of the Buddha, it often has the Buddha, the sutras start with the Buddha sitting and Ananda saying, thus I have heard, and the Buddha, you know, and that emphasizes that the sutras begin, even if the sutra is teaching that the Dharma is the body of the Buddha, still they emphasize that they're being taught at the seat of enlightenment or at Buddha's seat. So the seat of enlightenment is called the Bodhi Mandala. And the bow tree is the seat where the enlightenment occurred.

[20:37]

But that Zagu I had, the bowing cloth that we spread out, if you see it, shaped like a mandala, and it's called the Bodhi Mandala. So the Bodhi Mandala becomes transportable. And the Buddhist beads, which I wore some today, are called Bodaiju, or Buddhist Bodhi tree seeds. And there's 108. They make a circle. So they become a talisman. the seed of the tree under which the Buddha preceded enlightenment. So each seed is a seed of enlightenment. So there's this constant relationship to physical objects. Even the sutra itself becomes a talisman.

[21:42]

The stick, too, is one that was Suzuki Roshi's. So, you know, there's that feeling of, through a physical object, continuing the teaching. Or wearing Buddha's robe, which when we put it on, at least in our school, we put it on this chakra. And so your energy body turns it into Buddha's robe. But it is still made like Buddhist robe, or at least the tradition is that it is, was. So the sutra itself, the possession of a sutra can be put on the altar. The sutra becomes, like when we list the names of Buddha, one of the names of Buddha is the Prajnaparamita Sutra.

[22:49]

So there's this strange mix that occurs between the physical object and the Dharma and the invisible body and the actual, you know, etc., But we feel this ourselves. I mean, you don't wear clothes just to cover you. You wear clothes because you like a particular sweater. On a particular day you feel like this sweater. Another day you feel like that sweater. So we all have some emotional and symbolic relationship to physical objects. We walk on the earth to walk on the earth. It's not just to get somewhere. Some of you like to go barefoot. That's what I first liked about Zen, the barefoot religion, because we could go in the Zendo without shoes and I was so tired of banks and churches and ties and things like that.

[23:55]

No shoes, no service, but no, we have No shoes and do service. We should have a little sign on the door. Service. No shoes. Of the Zendo. Now to change the topic a little bit, and we're going to again celebrate Buddha's birthday tomorrow, so I'm thinking more about, you know, these people who we're related to. And Sukershi told the story of Shariputra. Shariputra's grandfather was a famous scholar, teacher.

[25:10]

I guess the tradition in those days was that various scholars would visit each other, but if you defeated a scholar in argument, then you replaced him or her. And Sariputra's grandfather was such a scholar and the king had given him some land because he was so renowned. But then another scholar named Desha came and defeated him. And so the king took the land away and gave it to Desha. Sukershi at that point commented, I remember, And terrible custom. And anyway, so then Desha married the man he defeated's daughter. Guy got away with everything. And he married Shari.

[26:15]

So they had a child who should have been called, I guess, Upadesha, meaning the son of Desha. But everyone liked Shari better, I guess, so he became Shariputra. And Shariputra, when he left home first, with a friend, they went to a festival. And at the festival, a kind of carnival or something, I don't know, everybody was having a good time and singing. And, you know, when you're young, sometimes you're a little bit more pure religious than when you're older, I think. And they both felt this was quite frivolous, and they felt the... evanescence of life.

[27:18]

And so they wanted to have a religious, they wanted to practice religion, and they both agreed that if either one finds a teacher, they'll join that teacher together and practice. And that reminded me of, you know, this friend of mine who... When he was going back, I've told some of you, you know the story. He was going back to New York from San Francisco. We thought we'd have a party or something, so I wanted to go to this, for some reason, in the middle of North Beach, this sort of sexy flamenco Mexican nightclub. I don't know why I had the idea of going there. It wasn't like most of the places in North Beach, which were topless. It was more normal flamenco dances. But I'd walked by it many times, and I thought, maybe one should celebrate sometimes and do something like that. So I went there with this friend of mine,

[28:23]

I don't know if it still exists. And the food was okay. We were sitting in a booth and people were dancing with all the colored skirts and all. Quite wonderful. And at the end of the meal, he said to me, you know, Dick, if we were really serious, we'd practice, do nothing but practice Zen the rest of our lives. You know, in the middle of this nightclub you know I thought you know he's right and a big door came down or went up or something and I've been doing it ever since so as I've told you I called him up the next day I said David thank you so much for what you said last night he said what did I say and he didn't remember but I actually wish I could have had that kind of that we could have said that to each other.

[29:27]

If either of us find a teacher, we'll join him or her in practice. But my pain is somewhat assuaged by practicing with all of you. It's okay. I'm recovering. Anyway, Shariputra became the Buddha's, and his friend too, became the Buddha's disciple, and Sariputra became, in some ways, the outstanding disciple, though Ananda, Mahakasyapa and all were equally outstanding in their own way. And Sariputra died a little bit before the Buddha. But even, but he often, or at least sometimes, gave lectures instead of the Buddha. Mm-hmm. Now in the Diamond Sutra it says a huge body.

[30:38]

Diamond Sutra is a very strange book because text, sutra, it says that this is a teaching of the Dharma and there's no Dharma. and there's no Buddha which teaches it, and you, the reader, there's no reader who has a person, a lifespan, nor are you a living being, etc. And even if 500 years from now or in the past, if you read the sutra, it's great, but the sutra doesn't exist, you don't exist, and the teacher doesn't exist. So, I mean, this is deconstruction carried far beyond Derrida and Foucault. ever imagined. So all you've got is this book, which has no meaning except it's great to read it. But it says, it refers at one point to, what about a huge body? So I thought I should say something about this huge body.

[31:40]

Again, there's this sense of relationship. Shariputra or my friend, the Buddha, Shariputra and his friend. And here you are sitting. And sitting is a marriage. And I think that actually practice is a marriage that surpasses marriage. And, you know, we don't know quite how to do it, but we are doing it. Anyway, sitting is a marriage of your posture and the ideal posture. So when you're sitting, you're always accepting your posture just as it is, and that acceptance is informed simultaneously by the Buddhist posture, as we see in statues and as we've been taught in instructions.

[32:46]

And that marriage of your posture and ideal posture is also facilitated by the teaching, by the Dharma, by the koan you're working with or the study phrase or insight or attitudes you bring to your sitting. And when this union of the Buddha's posture and your posture and the Dharma come together, we may have an experience of a huge body. And this body is described in the Abhantamsaka Sutra as of boundless qualities, of infinite range, of undefiled by desire, form or formlessness. of being thusness itself and containing all the teachings of all the Buddhas.

[33:57]

Now if you read a sutra, you read something like this very slowly, like a body of infinite range, boundless qualities. And you let that sink in, a body of infinite range. of boundless qualities, undefiled by desire, form, or formlessness. A body of thusness containing all the teachings of all the Buddhas. Now, sometimes when you're sitting, again I've been coming back to this because I've been talking about the Dharmakaya, Sometimes when you're sitting, you have the feeling of this huge body of infinite range without bounds.

[35:01]

And that's what it means in the Diamond Sutra. It just refers to what about compared to a huge body or great body. So you don't know what that means unless you are practicing. But if you have this experience, you know that this is. You can't say what its bounds are. You can't. It's certainly not defiled by desire or form or formlessness. And it is the body of thusness, and it does contain all the teachings. And when you emphasize this, we're talking about what's called Tathagata Zen, in contrast to patriarchal or ancestral Zen. In other words, it's this experience which teaches you. But this experience arises from the practice of meditation and the teachings.

[36:12]

So here we have the understanding that it's not the statue or it's not the relics or the stupa, but the sutra or the dharma itself actually produces a body which teaches you. So when it says, when you see the dharma, you see my body, It really means that there's a kind of alchemical, conjugal marriage here of teaching and practice, producing the experience of the Dharmakaya body, the formless body which contains the teachings and thus is the Buddha. And when you understand that, you The teaching is, the Dharma is actually the body of the Buddha because it's this body, essence of mind, by which, through which the Buddha was enlightened.

[37:16]

But it still touches your body. It still touches these seeds, or sugyurshi stick, or this statue. or your teacher giving you, telling you, suggesting you read the sutra. And when you work on a koan, you should know also, I mean, the jiao-jiu's mu. What is the relationship of you to jiao-jiu? What is the relationship of jiao-jiu to your teacher? What is the relationship of your teacher giving you the koan? What is the teacher's mu? What is your mu? what is mu. So there's this, the physical sound, the object of you saying it, the teacher saying it, Jiaojiao saying it, the body that arises from the union of the teacher and the

[38:32]

apprentice or disciple. Now this huge body that's created by the joining of the ideal posture, Buddha's posture and your posture and the teaching, this huge body also includes everyone else. So when you properly or accurately or experientially understand the ceremonies in the Yoyogi, they are meant to be an expression of this huge body or to instigate the experience of this body. It's one of the reasons how it's designed that we chant together and so forth. So even the physical objects of the oryoki, how we hold them at the chakras and so forth, or how we put the okesa, this chakra, are all meant to, they're physical objects, like the relics of the Buddha, but they're also meant to generate the dharma body of the Buddha.

[39:42]

They're seeds. So it's actually quite a complex mix of relics, of talismans, of the phenomenal world is simultaneously a body of space. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. So, Sariputta and his friend and Buddha together, we can't say it was just Buddha, generated this Dharmakaya body which continues until today and is the essence of the Diamond Sutra. The teaching of the Diamond Sutra.

[40:46]

A koan that Tsu Kiyoshi liked a lot I mean, I don't even have it quite straight now because, you know, when I was in my mid-20s and listening to all this, I mean, I'd studied Oriental history and stuff in college and I'd studied Buddhism a bit, but really I didn't know much what was going on. And he was talking about all these guys and, you know, for a while I thought Zuigan was somebody he knew. Because he'd talk about this person or that person, and then there was this guy. There was Gyokuro, his teacher, and then there was Zuigan. I thought, well, great. So I remember saying to somebody, this friend of Sukhriyashi Zuigan, somebody said, I think that's from a koan. But I didn't know. It's all just guys, you know. Not enough gals, but, you know, we're changing that. So, but now that I've, in my banquet years, you don't know what that means.

[41:54]

Oh, you do, I know. Because you're, in your banquet years too, a slow-moving banquet. So, I think I've sorted it out, which is that, And Sukyoshi told the story, you know, because the question is when, you see, Zuigan was this guy, yeah, and he used to say to himself, Master, are you awake? Master? Yes. Are you awake? Yes. Don't be deceived by anyone. No, I won't. He'd say that to himself, right? Kind of, probably, nowadays you'd be put in a mental hospital. This guy goes around talking to himself. I knew this guy who always talked to his hand. I've known several people who talked to their hands. You know, as a kid, you'd see them. And there's this old guy on Page Street. I don't know if you remember him. He used to walk up and down Page Street talking to himself.

[42:59]

He wore a hat, and he put his hand... I never heard the word Zuigan come out of his mouth, but one time he did stop. And I've never seen him say anything coherent. I have eye-to-eye contact with anybody. But he was talking to his hand, and he came down. And I was just going in the garage door next to my house there, and I used the squirter, the remote control that opens the garage door. So he saw me do that, and the garage door opened. He took his hand away from his hat. He said, what's that? And I said, oh, it's a squirter. I call them squirters, but anyway. It's a remote control, and you can open the garage door. And he looked, can I try it? So I took it, and he hit it, and the door opened. And he says to me, you mean you can open any door? I said, well...

[44:05]

He took his hand and all of a sudden... Well, Zuigan was this kind of guy. He thought he could open any door. He'd say, Master? Yes. Are you awake? Yes. Don't be deceived by anyone. No, I won't. But Sukershi sometimes told it with Zuigan calling his own name. He didn't point out that one of the cruxes of the koan is, what is master, or who is he calling? Maybe he's calling the dough of Sando Kai, the one mind. So Sukershi would just tell the story. Sometimes he'd call Suigan, sometimes he'd call master. And then, if I have it straight now, um, There was a friend of Suzuki Roshi who practiced with this phrase in Japan, in his own temple, with somebody.

[45:17]

And, are you awake? Yes. But he also had the, he was quite eccentric, and he had the habit, he was very poor, and he had, Suzuki Roshi always told this, I've heard him tell this story about four times, and he had only one kimono. So once a week or so, he'd wash it. And then he had nothing to wear, and he only had this kind of robe. So he looked rather, you know, naked, walking around in the village with this robe on, with no kimono. Calling, Zuigan, yes? Are you awake? Yes, I am. Well, the koan talks quite a bit about transparency and things, but... I don't think this is what was meant, because he loved to tell these stories in this mixed up way of telling a version. So all these koans...

[46:25]

And that Diamond Sutra, all asking, are you awake? And Randy wants us to put on the traditional, on the Han, is something like life, death, serious matters. Wake up. So maybe I'll try to write that on there. And waking up in the deepest sense means, in the Tathagata emphasis particularly, to wake up to this Dharmakaya body by joining your body with the body of the teachings and generating the true body of Buddha, which teaches each of us and all of us. We are intention deeply.

[47:37]

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