In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I appreciate you all being here again. So we can see if we can speak again about the Dharma. Hmm. I'd like to speak to you. What I'd like to do is speak to you from my feeling.

[01:01]

Which I can't really put into words. Dogen extols Zhaozhou's practice of speechlessness. And he calls speechlessness never leaving the monastery. I'm sorry, this is kind of Zen talk I have to explain. And never leaving the monastery means continuous practice. And never leaving the monastery means the whole world is the monastery. The whole world becomes the monastery when you have continuous practice.

[02:04]

And continuous practice means the intention to practice in all situations. And when there's the intention to practice in all situations, everything is always talking to you. And we call that speechlessness. Because there's no need to talk. I'm sure you understand exactly what I mean. It means that if we share the intention to continuously practice, Something is always speaking.

[03:21]

And we don't need to only listen to our words. Kaz Tanahashi has a new book out Kind of following up on his book Moon in a Dew Drop. Of Dogen's, of Dogen's translations. It's got a really good introduction that he wrote. As good an understanding of Dogen as I've read anywhere. And he tells in the second book, it's called Enlightenment Unfolds, And he tells in this second book many of the teachings of Dogen.

[04:37]

that were the basis of the stories Tsukuyoshi used to tell us. So if you have a chance and you don't mind reading in English, I would suggest you try to read it. He was just here for a week or so, is that right? Marie Louise took him to the Basel train station yesterday. This always confused me because I always brought my passport to go to the Basel train station to change trains. No one told me the Basel train station was in Germany. And when I went to the Basel airport, no one told me it was in France. Yeah, it's in France.

[05:59]

There's a little corridor you go into France. It's been leased by Swiss black money. I don't know. It sounds like Zen, you know. The Basel airport is in France. The Basel train station is in Germany. Nothing is what it seems. Speechlessness is when everything talks to you. So what I'd like to try to give us a feeling for is this practice of acceptance. This radical dynamic of a practice of acceptance.

[07:08]

And it doesn't mean accepting. The key is to generate a mind of acceptance. I suppose some of you may be possibly having some physical difficulty during Sushin or what is commonly called pain. Now, if you can just sit there in the midst of your pain, You may not be accepting it. But if you can just sit there, you may develop a mind of acceptance. Sukhyoshi was, I think, a rather handsome young man. And people appreciated his pretty appearance, I think.

[08:27]

And I think he appreciated it, too. And he always dressed very well. I think instead of wearing his clothes, he carried his clothes. And he always dressed very well. Or his clothes carried him. And so his teacher one day told him that he had a disease where his bones would grow randomly and he would become very ugly. I knew somebody who had that disease once, a college professor in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And by the time he was 40 or so, he looked like Frankenstein. And when he was 40, he really looked like Frankenstein.

[09:46]

Do you know this disease? Yes, it's acromegaly. We've got doctors all over the place here. If anybody needs to get sick, this is the chance. If anybody wants to get sick, this is a good opportunity. Anyway, Sukhiroshi's teacher told him he had this disease. And Sukhiroshi knew it probably wasn't true. But Zen masters have a reputation for truthfulness and prophecy. Sukhya, she was young, too, and he kept saying, he would look in the mirror in the morning and check his bone structure and stuff like that. So it kind of bothered him all the time.

[10:56]

And he had to develop a mind of acceptance. Which kind of penetrated under the vanity. It's like, do you shave your head because you're a monk and you're supposed to shave your head? Or do you shave your head to get the white hairs off so you look younger? And now what would be the mind of acceptance? To accept having long matted hair? To accept having the golden locks, which I would have if I let my hair grow. Or... To accept having a shaved head, because that's what I'm supposed to do.

[12:09]

Or to accept that now I shave more than a few white hairs off. Where is the mind of acceptance? I think if I shave my head for vanity, then My outer appearance might be okay, but my inner appearance feels funny. And my inner appearance feels better if I just accept. I can tell when I'm just accepting in this deeper way. Dogen says something like there are a myriad In this earth there are myriad forms and hundreds of grasses.

[13:34]

But he says, each single form, each blade of grass, contains the entire earth. Now, we know that somehow, poetically or intellectually. Then you know if you went to Mars, and some space traveler found a single blade of grass on Mars. you'd know immediately that the entire Earth had to be around somewhere. Just under the surface of Mars or something. Or perhaps it was on the boot of the space traveler. Because it takes the entire earth to produce a single blade of grass.

[14:51]

Now, though you know that a single blade of grass is the entire earth, Do you have the mind of a single blade of grass is the entire earth? This is the mind of acceptance. This is a mind inseparable from a single blade of grass. And again, not to make fun of the pain some of you are feeling. To be completely hindered by pain is to be completely immersed. And sometimes this pain of sashing is the only way we come to a mind where we open ourselves to a mind of complete immersion.

[16:11]

And this mind of complete immersion we could also call the mind of acceptance. Dogen also says The forest is the bird's path. Isn't that an interesting way to describe a forest? A forest is a bird's path. I think we'd cut down less forests if we understood that forests are a bird's path. The speechlessness of the forest is the bird's path.

[17:14]

We can perceive the world We can know the world in our senses. We can conceive the world too, as I said yesterday. And beyond both we can feel the world. And letting the witnessing slip away. And you have a choice. You have a choice.

[18:22]

And what's important is that you have a choice. And you can perhaps through practice and Sashin come to know this choice. And even come into the magic and power of making the choice. Now I've been emphasizing recently this bringing your energy equally to each moment. Each dharma, each moment is like a fish that jumps into view. something that emerges or appears, emerges in your senses, in your sensibility, emerges in and generates your presence. and changes the surfaces and depths of the present moment.

[19:39]

Again, we have the habit of bringing our energy to the products of self. Likes and dislikes, discriminations, and we keep reinforcing the self. And if we kind of slip our energy into each moment equally, Without discriminating. Just what appears. You bring your energy equally to each and complete whatever it is.

[20:44]

You're no longer bringing your energy to the abiding self. You're bringing your energy to whatever appears, which is something like a blade of grass that is the entire earth. Something more subtle than self. And something more subtle too than the senses. We can't quite say what it is. Something mysterious. Some kind of breeze blowing from everything at once. Sometimes you may feel this.

[21:48]

And Dogen and our Buddha ancestors are trying to point this out to us. To open ourselves to this golden breeze. to the impulse of the universe at this moment. This is a way-seeking mind. This is the mind of acceptance. And You know, don't get scared. You don't have to live this way all the time. Yeah, you might lose your job. You probably wouldn't. Probably everybody would like you and promote you, but you think you might lose your job. Hmm. But it is something scary to be open to the impulse of the universe.

[23:02]

But some taste of it. And that taste comes also from a choiceless mind. Again in Dogen's language as Kaz points out, to be hindered again means to be immersed. To be hindered means to be in a choiceless situation. It's funny in English, if you say something's choiceless, you mean it's the best. But when you're sitting, In a 50-minute, well, we don't have too many 50-minute periods, 40-minute period, and the bell is 30 minutes away.

[24:10]

This is a choiceless situation. Which you may not feel is so choiceless. But it is giving you a taste of this choiceless, immersed mind. That you have to find some territory or topography within. Since you can't get out of it in some linear way, you have to bring the circle of the path back from this here to this here. And there's a kind of quality to the mind of acceptance which we could say is

[25:18]

Again, I have only a negative sounding word, frozen. And it's one of the reasons why this question, what is it, is so good. You can also practice with this is it. It's okay, it's okay to practice with this is it. But the mind, you know, is very, as you know, distractible. But it's also very subtle and has little tiny movements all the time. I went horseback riding this. A week ago or so, first time since I was, I don't know, old, eight, nine or something.

[26:30]

So as you can imagine, I don't know how to ride a horse. And so we went very slowly. And also so I could cross my legs during sashimi, you know. So I was able to still sit after, you know, if I'd gone fast. And these horses were elderly but well-trained. So if you just moved your legs slightly, particularly around the ankles, they started doing all kinds of things, you know. So there was a whole language of the legs I had to learn and I couldn't, otherwise the horse started doing things I didn't like. I just had to even let a fleeting thought go into my calf and the horse did things.

[27:39]

So your mind is like that. It's always you. And the trouble with the phrase, this is it, it directs the mind slightly in some direction. And maybe the mind comes to rest, but it tends to come to rest here and rest here and so forth. But the question, what is it? What is this? If you keep asking it, it can't be answered. So it's like the mind of acceptance. It's not about accepting, it's about generating a mind, so totally a mind of acceptance, that everything all at once is immersed in it.

[29:05]

as the entire earth is immersed in a blade of grass. So when you ask yourself, when you give yourself the question, when you answer the mind's need for movement, When you answer the mind's need for movement, with a question that can't be answered, the mind starts to move and then freezes. What is it no one knows? It's a kind of speechlessness. It's a kind of silence. It can't be answered, so it's answered by silence.

[30:26]

And it's answered by the mind stopping. Freezing. And you may experience this sometimes in Zazen. Suddenly, like there's suddenly a wide frozen space. Or crystal or bright space. And your breathing, everything appears in it, but there's a stopped quality or timeless quality. This is also the forest is the bird's path. I don't know why I want to tell you this story, but I'll tell you this story anyway.

[31:36]

Once I was young. You know how fairy tales start? Once upon a time. I start stories once I was young. Only once. Anyway, I was living in a very poor neighborhood. Most of you wouldn't know the Lower East Side in New York. And the Lower East Side. But I lived on 4th Street between C and D. Which is about as bad as you can get. The only good thing about it was the Hasidic neighborhood. A Hasidic neighborhood. You know, the Jews with the... Oh, yes.

[32:36]

So there are a lot of little kids in huge black hats and sideburns. Yeah, they were little girls. They were a great little kid, yeah. But it was also a very, very dangerous neighborhood. A 14-year-old boy was shot to death on my doorstep. The day after. This is like Time magazine stuff, you know. It's what a lot of people who've never been to America think it's like all the time. And the day before this kid was shot, I was... Some kid stopped with all his friends. I was sitting on a doorstep because I'd sprayed my bed with bug spray because it was full of bed bugs. And I was sitting on a doorstep a few doors down from the bug spray.

[33:39]

Because I discovered in my great... I discovered that sleeping in a bed soaked with bug spray was not very good for one. But waking up covered with welts was also not very good for one. Welts? Welts? How do you know that? And believe it or not, I was reading Shakespeare. And this kid came up, stopped, and he just held a gun to my head for a while. And everybody stopped and watched. And I kind of looked at my book. Somehow I knew Shakespeare was more real and he put the gun down, which he did.

[34:55]

Otherwise I might not be giving this lecture today. Yeah. I mean, it was common if I had a visitor for dinner or something, we had to step over someone urinating in the hall, a woman who often did that for some reason downstairs. And there was a Jewish woman who lived downstairs from my apartment. Who... who I liked a lot, I'd go chat with her. But her eyes were bad. And she couldn't see that her sink had hundreds of cockroaches in it at all times.

[36:00]

Or she'd learn to tell me they weren't there because it was a better way to live. Anyway, why am I telling you this story? Because one time I went out and, I don't know, I had felt this poem coming. I guess if you live in neighborhoods like this, you're supposed to write poems. Yeah, so I went out and I decided it might help to have a beer or wine. I don't know what I was drinking, something. And I think I proceeded to get, for the only twice in my life I think, rather drunk. So I, or at least I went, I made a pretty good pretense at getting drunk.

[37:22]

And I went from bar to bar, having one or two drinks in each. And this golden stream of a palm somewhere deep in my consciousness got wider. And then it began to get dimmer. I lost track of it somehow. It floated off somewhere. Hmm. And finally I ended up sitting in front of somebody's store. Some shop. And there was some kind of bum sitting beside me. And I felt quite good because I felt that I was like him. And then this woman came out of the shop and kind of asked us both to move.

[38:25]

And I remember thinking, this is real life. This is down to earth. And I went back to my little apartment. And I wasn't really so drunk, but I did fall asleep on the kitchen floor. And when I woke up, I was staring at the linoleum. Yeah, and I recognized the linoleum was the same pattern I had on my kitchen floor as a child in a farmhouse. Now, I hadn't noticed it before for some strange reason, but I noticed it then. Some sort of Kandinsky-like pattern of squares and circles and triangles.

[39:51]

And it was almost as if it was three-dimensional and some of the patterns were grooves or ruts. And I would say that this was the point at which I decided to practice then instead of write poetry. Now whether this is true or not, it's true because this is what I remember. And whether to say that this kind of golden stream I saw inside myself It's too much like the Lotus Sutra or some kind of imaginative description.

[41:07]

Still, that's what I remember. And the light was shining off it. And there was a kind of singing in the surroundings. And I would say now that I could feel that if I follow that stream, I would have a life that I decided I didn't want to have. And I decided I had to have a life that was more ordinary and down to earth. And somehow I followed that by deciding not to write that poem. I mean, I may look like to some people that I have a rather unusual life, or we do here at Johanneshof.

[42:30]

But I got here by deciding not to write that poem. And to do something that seemed more ordinary or down to earth to me at that time. and led me to sit down and practice. And I guess what I'm saying here is that there are patterns in the linoleum of our mind and that if sometimes we're sitting sitting in sashin, details, tiny details that we hardly remember under usual circumstances, come into relief, and something so hard as a linoleum surface opens up and

[43:38]

That point suggested some direction in our life. Or like Sukhiroshi's teacher telling him he was going to get this disease. The mind that that produced this strange teaching his teacher gave him, which was not true in what he said, but was true in the effect it created, which allowed him to get underneath an involvement with himself, and open up into a mind of acceptance. a mind where you find yourself all alone and strangely at one with everything.

[45:19]

Thank you very much.

[45:20]

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