dimensional, that you were inside the mirror. It's that kind of feeling. And it seals in two ways. It seals in that it authenticates your experience. This ocean seal samadhi, when you experience things in this concentration, it authenticates Everything feels true. You don't have to get validation. It is a validating concentration. If that makes sense. Seal. What's the word seal in German? Like you seal a letter? Yeah. Not like... Not like those kind of seals, you know, in Monterey.

[01:04]

Now in San Francisco, all over San Francisco, there are nooses. Water rats. They're charming, actually. I've swum with them sometimes. They're great to swim with. Now it seals also in that... It seals also in that this ocean seal samadhi is particularly connected with the hara. It's located in the hara and the hara is considered like the ocean where all the streams flow in. The ocean is a place where all the streams flow in and it doesn't get any deeper. And it's considered that we're leaking from the hara all the time. So this ocean seal concentration means you're sealing with concentration the hara so you don't leak anymore.

[02:14]

So this, I mean, this kind of teaching of samantabhadra has a lot of dimensions and I'm touching on some of them. One is it's like a multi-dimensional mirror that you're in the midst of seeing things reflected. It's a samadhi because It accepts the reflections and doesn't add content. Okay, are you following me? But in accepting the reflections, it becomes a kind of structure. In other words, it's an awareness that becomes structured through acceptance. So you develop... Now, why am I saying it this way? Because what I'm talking about is experience, common experience.

[03:19]

A taste of it, at least, is common experience. In other words, you do have an experience of this flow in of the phenomenal world and memory, etc. You have that experience and making a decision about it. Now what makes it Buddhist practice? In Buddhist practice is when you really notice that, open this each up so you don't rush by this each. Generate an awareness which accepts all the flow in. An awareness that stays in place, do you understand? An awareness that can accept and stay in place and not run off. And that staying in place becomes something you can develop. In other words, you can develop this sense of awareness, particularly with a sense of an awareness that allows all your experience to come in, grow together, and then be expressed.

[04:25]

Now, if we wanted to, we could talk about manjushri, which is cutting off myriad streams. More the image of manjushri. And more the emphasis on fire. And manjushri emphasizes the upper chakras. Samantabhadra emphasizes the lower chakras. Now, I'm bringing this up because this is a different image of the body than we have. And why do we call Samantabhadra a bodhisattva? Why when you're working with the lower chakras in this way, with this image of kind of ocean seal, a multi-dimensional reflecting present moment, because that functions like almost a separate person. Now there's, in this practice, in this session, there's 30 people here. 30 and Rishad, 31, I think.

[05:31]

Now if I say 30 people, that's a kind of generalization. I mean, it is a generalization. If I say 30 persons, I'm getting a little more particular. Then if I recognize each of you, Kern, Tim, Rhonda, Yuta, Rebecca, etc. If I recognize each of you, now it's one and one. It's not people, it's not persons anymore. Ulrika, Randy. This is quite different. Now, if I bring that recognition further in that I experience your shaping the present moment, In other words, if Randy is sitting here, Randy right now is various streams of the phenomenal world, the alaya, vijnana and so forth, various streams are flowing in to make Randy's present moment.

[06:37]

And Randy can allow that to happen, hold it, feel the skandhas, the vijnanas and so forth. I also, if I can feel it myself, open myself to that aspect of Randy. In other words, I'm now open to the Samantabhadra concentration or present moment of Randy. In that sense, Randy is manifesting this bodhisattva function called Samantabhadra. And I can, to some extent, or a great extent, or a little bit, feel that with each of you. The more I know my own present moment forming, I can feel your present moment forming. This is an aspect of the body of Buddha. This cannot be sought in sound or form.

[07:42]

And if I seek it in sound or form, I am on a mistaken path. So again, we have this koan, which I suggest if you want to get another perspective on what I've been talking about, to read this koan in the Heikki Ganroku, the Book of Records, 47. It tells the story, you know, what is the body of reality. And Yunmin says, the six don't take it in, as I mentioned last night. As I said, a leading and misleading statement to make you find your own wisdom. And there's a story in this where the body of reality, one of the roots of this story is, there was a... a lecturer, a Buddhist lecturer called Phu Thai Yuen.

[08:50]

And he was lecturing and he said, the body of reality extends vertically through the three times and horizontally in the ten directions. there was a, what the story calls a Chan, a Zen traveler in the audience. And when he said this, this Zen traveler couldn't repress a kind of, really. And so if guy had more modesty than some lecturer, he came down afterwards and went up to the Chan Zen traveler and said, where was my mistake? And the Zen guy said, well, you described the extent of the body of reality, but you do not see the body of reality. You don't, clearly don't experience the body of reality.

[09:56]

So, he said, well, what should I do? And the Chan guy said, well, you better go do Zaza and sit in a quiet room. That's our standard answer in Zen, you know. My daughters ask me advice and I say, sorry, I only got one kind of advice. You know, okay, Dad. Anyway, so he went and he sat through the night in a quiet room between Sazen, sitting Sazen. And at the fifth watch, you heard the bell. You know, in a monastery, traditionally, you ring the bell. He had a realization, and he went and saw this Chan traveler who was, I guess, still staying over in the guest house or something.

[10:58]

And he said, I understand, or something like that. And the Chan said, well, say something. And he said, never again will I twist these nostrils born of my parents. So I leave you with that. Thank you very much. May our intention equally penetrate every ending and place with the true merit of Judah's way. Satsang with Mooji Nena wakuan yorai hosu shinjutsu nyo keshi kate matsuran

[12:29]

and the non-surpassed, penetrating and perfect Dharma is verily met with even a hundred-thousand hidden kalpas, and you see and listen to, to remember and accept. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words Ah, such a beautiful spring day. And I guess you guys had a good walk, a kin-hin walk. How nice.

[13:33]

And such a beautiful day, you know, I feel, perhaps even more so, I'm confusing you with things like Samantabhadra, you know, this elephant, and Manjushri, Why do you have to have any truck with such stuff? But for me, you know, Samantabhadra has a lot to do with beautiful spring day. I remember years ago, I guess in the 50s. Quite a few years ago. Or 60s. No, it has to be the 50s. But maybe before one or two of you were born. Oh, dear. Yeah.

[14:37]

So anyway, I was in... I don't know why I was in New Jersey. It's a heck of a place to be. But... I'd gone across the Hudson for some reason. I think this is my memory. And I can remember this street I was walking along and I was a kind of depressed character. You know, my idea then was to live off collecting pop bottles, turning them in for the nickels or three cents or whatever you got in those days. And I, you know, I had a funky apartment. Oh, I actually lived in New Jersey. I was in Hoboken. That's why I was in New Jersey. Yeah, Alzheimer's. But actually, I was in a different part of New Jersey than I usually was, because I also lived in Manhattan on the Lower East Side, 4th Street between C and D. It's now kind of bombed out, or it was last time I looked.

[15:43]

Yeah, so I was walking along, and, you know, it was springtime, I remember, and I felt... I didn't know it was spring, actually, because I remember I suddenly felt good. I was walking along this street, kind of median, in the middle of a street, kind of a residential. I was walking in this grassy, little spot of grass in the middle of a street. And I suddenly felt kind of good. And I thought, why do I feel good? I'm such a depressed character. This doesn't make sense that I feel good. This is completely out of character for me. One of my nicknames was, one of my friends was El Darko. Anyway, so I suddenly felt bright-o. And I thought, oh, it's spring. And I thought, yeah, but what does spring mean to me?

[16:48]

What do I care about spring, you know? It's just one of those things on the calendar. It's not going to make my life any better. But I did feel good. You know, I can remember feeling kind of good for, I mean, almost an hour and a half. And I remember thinking about it. Do I have to wait till next spring? But I had some kind of intuition that, you know, if it's possible to feel good like that, it must be possible to feel good more, maybe even all the time. What's this about? And for me that was because, you know,

[17:50]

saw an elephant on the street bearing Samantabhadra. Something like that. Actually, we used to, in San Francisco, have a ceremony. We made an elephant. Big wooden elephant. Sometimes somebody would ride in it. We'd fill it with flowers and pull it through the streets for a Buddhist festival. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm doing my best to show you and give you a feeling for what for me is certainly one of the potential ways to be, potential ways to discover our great life. And I'm not holding out candy or promises. I mean, I just think You know, we're alive, so that's okay.

[18:57]

And we're going to be alive until we die. That's good. I mean, that's the truest thing I can say. We're each going to be alive until we die. Okay. This is good. Now I don't know if this is the potential of being or of great life that is the best or something. I only know this. This is what I know and what I'm doing and so if you want I'm trying to share it with you and study it with you and teach myself, you know. My being with you is teaching myself. Now they have, you know, in Christianity they have saints.

[20:03]

And in Buddhism we have some kind of exemplary people. We don't call them saints, but certainly they're exemplary people. And some of those exemplary people are folks in the koans. Not all the people in the koans are exemplary, but all of them, most of them are realized people. But we have bodhisattvas. And bodhisattvas are not saints. We emphasize not exemplary people, but exemplified being. In other words, modes of being that are exemplary that we can realize. So a bodhisattva is a teaching. Bodhisattva isn't some kind of great person somewhere, but rather a possibility of being for each of us.

[21:07]

Now, I'm not unaware of what a great occasion each of you is. Each of you are. I mean, this... I don't... You know, sometimes I like to change... language I can say you're each a wonderful person or something like that but and I feel that but if I change words I sometimes it feels more accurate to me so right now I feel each of you is a great occasion and I feel the weight of that and the lightness too of that and I No, I'm saying this not to give you guys a compliment, you know. I could say this to any group of people. Well, of course, I know you better than most, but I'm saying it with more familiarity and connection with you.

[22:16]

But I'm saying it because it affects me. It affects my sitting here and practicing with you. If I didn't know the great occasion of each of you, I couldn't practice with you. I mean, I wouldn't have the motivation. I'd be out doing something else. Making money, perhaps, might be a good idea. Or having some career or doing something, you know. But nothing I could do in any field that I can imagine I could have some skill in compares to the great occasion of being here with each of you. It's like I feel each of us, let me include myself, each of us, each of you, carries the whole earth with you. It's like the whole earth has come together and is carried by each of you.

[23:27]

This is actually the meaning of emptiness. We can understand it that way. You look at an airplane in the sky and it's going along, sometimes with a vapor trail, But, I'm sorry for such a kind of dumb image, but that airplane depends on the whole sky. That airplane is up there, it's in one little spot, but the whole sky is supporting it. And I feel that of each of us. We carry, like the airplane perhaps carries the whole sky. We each carry the whole planet or everything. Yes, but how do we know this? I mean, I think that that is as true a statement as that we live until we die.

[24:33]

But it's the kind of thing that we don't notice, or if we notice it, we don't know what to make of it. But practice is to come to notice and realize this, this spring day. So this little anthology we did. we published with Weatherhill years ago, clearly, it's called Timeless Spring because there is this sense of spring that appears just now. Yeah. So, what is the bodhisattva? We can say, you know, Manjushri is supposedly, for instance, perhaps a essentialization rooted in an actual person who lived at Buddha's time. One of Buddha's disciples, I think, is this story.

[25:41]

But whether that's the case or not, the sense of a bodhisattva is, let's take Suzuki Roshi, or we could take any one of you, Melita or Randy, and we take what is best in you. or most realized and most complete, say in Suzuki Roshi. And we notice what is Suzuki Roshi's pivotal, realisational mind. In other words, each lineage, each person usually is working out of one major realisation. I think of Rilke as a Rilke poem I like, I don't know what it would say in German, but it's something like, he refers back to the glistening lake of his childhood. A poem translated as Oblation. And my guess would be that Rilke was a poet because of this experience.

[26:48]

And that his writing poems as an adult is the effort to bring back this glistening lake of his childhood. But this glistening lake is also the present moment. And again, I don't want to speak about this like candy or something. But if there's choices, why don't we make the better choice? So if we again looked at Suzuki Roshi and we took what was exemplary in Suzuki Roshi and what his fundamental, pivotal, realisational mind was, and we took these qualities and

[27:59]

and thought of them as a kind of being. And we developed that in terms of how it could be taught, practiced, and realized. That's a bodhisattva. Bodhisattvas are rooted. Now, that's really a mahasattva. A mahasattva is a kind of archetypal bodhisattva. So we chant the bodhisattva mahasattvas. So Samantabhadra and Manjushri and Avalokiteshvara and Kanzayon and so forth, Kuan Yin, are maha-sattvas, we can call them. I mean, each of us can be, each person can be conceived of as a bodhisattva. But when we turn some quality of our life, the potentiality of our life, into an embodied teaching so that we can embody it, then we have a kind of archetype of compassion or wisdom, so forth.

[29:10]

So in other words, if I talk about Samantabhadra, and partly I'm talking about it because we're chanting it in the meals and in the morning and stuff like that, so should we just chant it and leave it aside like it was some kind of obscure doctrinal something or other? But no, these archetypal mahasattva figures are there because they're a way to realize the teaching. So in other words, it's as if Catholicism says, oh yes, would say so-and-so is a saint, but here is how you realize that yourself. Here's the practice that leads to that. So Fugen is the Japanese name for Samantabhadra, Fugen. But Fugen really emphasizes longevity.

[30:15]

It's a little different than Samantabhadra. Just like Kannon is Avalokiteshvara or Guanyin. But Guanyin emphasizes compassion as mercy. And Avalokiteshvara emphasizes compassion as wisdom. So there's these kind of differences. And we could say Samantabhadra emphasizes the dynamic of acceptance, where form is form. Or of patience, the dynamic of patience. Someone reminded me this morning of a koan. It's one of my favorite koans. Case 70. I'm going to show you Roku. And we've studied it here various times.

[31:19]

But it says... Jinshan asks Shushan, I always think of him as the Chattanooga Shushan boy. Did you ever, how's it go, Chattanooga Shushan boy, he's a, you can't sing it anymore because it's, you know, a racial slur or something, I guess, I don't know, but. One of those songs that's politically incorrect now. Anyway, Shushan, this Chattanooga Shushan, Jinshan said to Shushan, knowing the unborn nature of, knowing the unborn nature

[32:28]

Why are we stayed by life? Why are we hindered by life? And Shushan answered bamboo shoots become bamboo but you can't use them yet for rope, for hemp. Now And then something goes on where Shushan says, I am just thus, what about you? And Jinshan said, there's the main house in the kitchen, and over there is the dormitory. Here's Hotawa, something like that. Now this answer, bamboo shoots and rope and so forth, this is the basic truism or teaching of Buddhism, that if you know the taste, you'll eventually know the recipe.

[33:49]

If you know the taste of the unborn or the taste of this practice, if you have the patience If you have the wisdom, you will realize your true nature, our true nature. But life hinders life. Life itself hinders life. Dogen says, arrival hinders arrival. I always like that. The act of arriving itself hinders arriving. Especially when I'm going somewhere. So many suitcases and stuff.

[34:55]

I never arrive, anyway. Now, how can I... I've talked about the vertical, what I call, and I think it's a fairly effective word, a vertical dimension of our life and a horizontal dimension of our life. And the vertical dimension of our life, the horizontal dimension of our life is... our work, our sense of existing in time, and so forth.

[36:04]

What we have to do to take care of things. And the vertical dimension of life is the stopped sense of things, the timeless sense of things. In our experience, this is again this wide each. when you stop, and it feels like everything stopped, and there's a timeless, let's call it timelessness. Now, this experience may come any time. You just look at something, look at the mountain again, or in zazen, or in the way time, sometimes one period seems like a couple minutes, and sometimes it feels like Forty-one. Forty-two. Could it be another minute? I heard Kern gave us an extra ten minutes this morning or five minutes or something.

[37:10]

Twelve. Twelve, oh. Thank you. Thank you very much, Kern. Sukershi once gave us two and a half hours in the third day of a sasheen in the afternoon. Mamma mia! It was the first time I ever sat that long without moving. But, you know, I don't know if I could have moved. I've told some of you the story. In those days, that was before Xerox and things like that. So they had onion skin schedules. You know onion skin? Because they had carbon paper, and they had to type. So the carbons were on this real thin, crackly paper called onion skin. And the schedule, which I typed up for them, was on onion skin. And he wasn't in the zendo, but he lived upstairs in a little tower room, kind of Kafkaesque, little tower on Bush Street. And he would come down the stairs, boom, [...] boom.

[38:11]

We'd been sitting an hour and 15 minutes or something. He'd open the door, look in the zendo, close the door, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then he'd come down again after, you know, a half hour or so. We'd think, jeez, what is wrong with him? And he'd come in. He'd walk in his endo wheels. He'd go up and he'd pick up the schedule because we could hear the rattling of the onion skin and look at it. He'd put it down and go back out. laughter You know, those were the days when five minutes would kill me. Three and a half hours. Well, finally, he did ring the bell. It was two and a half hours, and everybody just started laughing. This friend who sat beside me, who never moved, he was a much more solid sitter than I was.

[39:14]

But I think it was the two of us, the only two who didn't move, but he actually leaned forward once. After about an hour and 45 minutes, he leaned forward like this and came back. Oh, I didn't do that. Anyway, so Kern, I thank you very much for continuing this tradition. About 12 minutes. Maybe you could try for 14. I don't really need you to stop me. Oh, I wanted to give you credit. Good credit to stop. Now, we're born and we live until we die.

[40:41]

If you really know that, you have no fear of death. Just hang on there. Hang in there until it's over. There's not much else to do. When we're born, everything appears. You come out of your mother, I mean, I remember when my daughter, who's now taller than me, came out. She was a pretty long man. We didn't put drops in her eyes, and she immediately looked around. She was looking all around the place. She was still only half in the world. She was up to here still in her mother. She was looking around. What is all this stuff? Wow! She was like that. It was great. And it's still like that. Everything's appearing. And disappearing is impossible to separate from its disappearing, which is dying also.

[41:54]

So everything appears and disappearing... You know, Russell and I and Mark were... The three Monketeers were... We're looking at the half moon yesterday. And, you know, when you just stop and don't think about it, it's totally amazing. There was some guy up there. You know, people have walked around in that thing. I mean, the ladder? I mean, the ladder must have been really long. Or just the fact that you can take calculations on a piece of paper and the calculations work out. So we get out of the gravitational field of our old earth and so forth. That's just totally amazing. I mean, what a powerful mind we have. Yet if you stop and think about this present, where does it go in the past?

[43:00]

Does it only last a moment? I mean, is all this just flashing into the darkness, flashing in utter darkness? Present doesn't exist, the past doesn't exist. So there's a very thin little present here we call everything. And our mind can't grasp this. I mean, no matter how much you think about it, our mind isn't capable of dealing with such a simple fact of our existence that here we are in this present with past and future not... available. What is it? We don't know. For the more you feel this timelessness, you feel what we call in Zen the unborn on all sides, this mystery of the unborn, in which then everything appears. So we can understand fairly easily

[44:02]

Form is emptiness. Carl isn't so sure. Well, I hope none of us are that sure. But in any case, it's not so difficult to understand because, you know, it's clear everything is interdependent. Things don't have an independent permanence. They don't have any predictable nature. Somewhat predictable, but still, only somewhat. And if you try to look at yourself, particularly in meditation, and you look at what's here, it's slippery, you know. This, our vaunted, vaulted self is, you know, you try to get a hold of it and it squirms right out of the way. And whatever your state of mind is, it's very fragile.

[45:07]

It takes quite a while to create a really stable state of mind. But even then it's posited on appearing and disappearing. So we can understand emptiness, that form is emptiness, fairly easily, and you can understand it intellectually. Now you may not experience it, But if you, using this word I've come again to give you as a kind of turning word for this koan, this sashin, is uniqueness. When you actually feel the freshness, the uniqueness, the fresh great life present on each moment, then you have actual experience of interdependence, of everything changing. And as I said the other day, if I look at you first as people and then as persons and then as individuals, I recognize each of your individuality.

[46:21]

And then if I have more of a sense of your process, I mean... let's take the two pillars on either side of me here, Randy and Rhonda, if I, you know, it helps that I'm familiar with Randy and Rhonda, but independent of how familiar I am, I can feel, I know them well enough to feel what it's like to be Randy, I hope. Rhonda, but independent of how familiar I am, I can feel, I know them well enough to feel what it's like to be Randy, I hope. This is partly true at least. And to feel what it's like to be Rhonda. And I can feel what kind of thinking or decisions Rhonda might make and it's different than Randy might make and so forth. And it's different than myself. But I can feel, Randy, this is a bit like feeling Samantabhadra, or feeling Siddharthi, feeling any one of you, Brian or Walt, Kern or Gary.

[47:36]

Now the more I feel you, any one of you, or my teacher Siddharthi, from inside, all this definiteness from people to person to individual disappears. The topography is shifting. Yes, there's some kind of central kind of process there, but it's quite shifting. So no longer, then I really see the interdependence, the mutuality, the momentariness of each of you. And that's not grasping. So we go from the general to the particular to the very particular then it begins to disappear. So when I experience how changeable each of you are and that I'm participating in that changeableness and everything is participating in that changeableness

[48:55]

My sense of categories like liking and disliking are somewhere up in the distance. There's only this great occasion of each of us and each of us together. Something wonderful. So now emptiness is formed. which is somewhat harder to understand or experience. But if I have a sense of this timelessness, if I more and more have a sense of this, everything arising in this moment, and as I've said many times, a basic practice of Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, is mindfulness of mind itself. So that I notice again that when I'm looking at you, I'm seeing my own mind seeing you.

[50:03]

Okay. That's a given. Now, it's a step deeper when you talk about Samantabhadra, this ocean seal, multi-dimensional mirror. Because on the one hand, they're closely related and one leads to the other. In other words, the more I develop the habit of seeing my own mind on everything, this is a gate to feeling the mind that accepts the present and gives it form. It accepts the present and gives it form. This is much more dynamic or subtle or inclusive idea than just seeing my own mind. Because there's an activity giving form to the present at each moment. And you're then participating in the arising of each moment.

[51:06]

You're not only seeing into the details of things when you slow things down, you're seeing into the details of how you put things together. Okay, let's go back again to coming to this sense of this vertical dimension where everything is absolutely independent. The pillow is the pillow, my bowing cloth, which makes a mandala. It makes a mandala that I fold up this mandala on my... So my lay life is to have the mandala folded up on my arm. And I walk around, and even if I'm in regular clothes, perhaps I feel to some extent this mandala is folded up on my arm. But I can open it up and put it down, and I can make a big mandala or a small mandala. And this is called the bodhi mandala, the mandala where you realize enlightenment.

[52:10]

It's just like Castaneda hunting all over the porch till he found his spot. But with the zagu, any place is your spot. If we could have given Castaneda, here, take this zagu, open it up, put it down, sit. It's that kind of feeling. That is the bodhi mandala. Or here is the bodhi mandala. That knowing this is the bodhi mandala is sudden practice, sudden enlightenment practice. This is the bodhi. Where else? In New Jersey, in a, you know, middle of a street on a spring day? It's too late for that. I don't know where that went. Yeah. So let's come back to this vertical dimension. Everything is appearing on this moment. And yet, there's the unborn emptiness everywhere. So you know this, at the moment of knowing this timelessness, you really feel this emptiness.

[53:16]

But in a moment everything's going to be born again, and you're going to be in the horizontal dimension. So this koan is also about how do you go from the unborn to the born. How do you make this transition? This is the teaching of the five ranks. How you make this transition. And this is the forge, the fire, the anvil. Whether you're ready for this or not. Now, it doesn't mean simply, oh yes, practice is gradual. That yes, you have to slowly pound things on the anvil and wait for the bamboo to grow. Bamboo shoots are there, the rope is there. Maybe some other bamboo, but the rope is there. So it's not just that knowing the taste, you discover the recipe.

[54:22]

But the taste itself is realization. How do you fold it up on your arm? How do you fold it up into your daily life? I mean, if you, for instance, do something you don't feel good about, when you say, this was not a good thing to do. If you say, I'm not a good person, this is... what we call in Buddhism, sinking mind. And it usually means you're trying to punish yourself for something in the past. But if you just think, I don't like what I just did, this is Buddha nature. So in Tantrism, the defilement is the gate. The recognition that you don't like what you did is realization. And you decide, I won't do this again, or try not to do this again.

[55:28]

That's the precepts. That's realization too. So emptiness's form is knowing the unborn and making that transition. And to make that transition is also rising mind. Rising mind just says, okay, I can do something about this. Or joyful mind. Or empathetic mind. Oh look, everything's appeared again. Another opportunity to join with each person in this great occasion. Like that. So Dogen said, Moon is in the water. We see the moon in the water, but the water is not broken, and the moon is not wet.

[56:34]

Now, you can look at the moon in the sky, too. Same, same. I mean, some guys went up to the moon. We know that, and they came back with some moon dust, you know. But is that the moon? No. Moon is... Our reproductive cycles, the tides, how we feel as the moon each night now is more full So the moon is in the water, the water is not broken, the moon is not wet, and yet moon is moon and water is water. This is form is form, emptiness is emptiness, this is Dogen's way of expressing it. So the more you know the unborn, not in some gradual sense, but you know it and are able to Know it so that it permeates form.

[57:42]

This is again the five ranks. Yeah. Then everything appears. And the water is not broken. The moon is not wet. Form is form. Emptiness is emptiness. So if we looked at The practice of the mind of Manjushri is form is emptiness. Manjushri mind, which is usually what's supposed to be in the Zanda, Manjushri mind is to always see emptiness. On each occasion you see emptiness. Samantabhadra's mind is to see form is form. Moon is moon. So Samantabhadra, the mind of Samantabhadra, accepts and transforms The mind of Avalokiteshvara sees emptiness as form.

[58:50]

The actual experience of form is form. Emptiness is emptiness. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. And each of these four is a different embodiment and different practice. And that's what we're chanting in the Heart Sutra. Samantabhadra's ocean seal, multi-dimensional mirror mind that seals our energy and authentic, because he's a big, you know, we're in a practice here where there's no Bible. There's no rules of what's true or not. We have to discover what's true. What is valid? What is a valid cognition? What is authentic cognition? The mind of Samantabhadra, see if you know what's authentic. Form is form. This is authenticity. True, not false. And you have that experience at the depth of yourself.

[59:54]

100% alive until I die. Sounds like a good place to stop. Thank you very much. Oh, ginger, you know, you're good. Oh, you know, I know. Oh, God, I see. Oh, I know. I know.

[60:54]

I know. [...] negawa kuwa yorai oshin jetsu myo keshi date matsuran An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kelpas, having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Well, as some of you may have noticed, this is the sixth day.

[62:22]

So one more day of Sesshin. Not so long. Maybe it'll feel long. Maybe not. So I guess I'll just continue with what I've been speaking about. Nothing special about today. Perhaps I should say something about our erstwhile filmmakers. Anyway, maybe I should tell you something, a little bit more about their background. He's a, Helmut is a, friend of a friend of mine, and they drove across the United States and they stopped here. And Helmut has made a film about Christianity in Turkey or something like that. And for Austrian television.

[63:26]

When he got here he was quite surprised by the practice here in Buddhism and so he found it very attractive to him. It's a kind of small version of Martin Scorsese, is that how you pronounce his name? Who first did Jesus Christ, the movie about Jesus Christ, right? And now, where he was, I'm afraid, a little... Anyway, he made Jesus into some kind of neurotic guy. Who knows? Might have been the case. And now he's... And now he's made this movie, Kundun, where I guess it's quite a good movie, I'm told. And it was written by Harrison Ford's wife, our action star. Anyway... So anyway, he decided, oh, and then he went back to New York, helmet to knee. He thought, jeez, Buddhism is everywhere. I don't know how much he'd noticed it. So he decided he should make a film about Buddhism. Anyway, they drove across the country because they had this equipment.

[64:30]

They've been calling me. We're near Kansas City now, you know. So then we're near Colorado Springs yesterday morning. We'll have breakfast. So they're staying down here at the Alder Terrace. Anyway, they got here and they were filming nature as they went along, and the camera didn't work after a while. So they got down here to, first of all, the camera doesn't work, and there aren't many camera shops around. Especially for PAL system, the European system. So that's the rinky-dink affair, you know. And so then they got in touch with Mark Elliott, who has quite a few cameras, but they're all, you know, the American system. So last night they drove to Denver and rented, by some chance, somebody in Denver, some big store, or Boulder or Denver, had a European system camera.

[65:32]

So they rented it, and they're on their way back. They called me a little while ago. Dick, we're on the way back. Yeah, we'll see what happens when they get here. Maybe we can convert them. Throw down your cameras. Check your cameras at the door. That's what we did with Ron Eyre with the long search. He was going to make a BBC series, which we were going to be part of it. And I said, I'd rather practice with you than be filmed. And eventually he became a Buddhist, and we practiced together. Nice guy. Yeah. OK. So let me tell you something about the process of my giving these lectures.

[66:33]

It's not so different than other times, but anyway, I'll talk about this time. Well, I have some experience in practice, and you have some experience. So this week's coming up, and I want to go on with practice period. And also, you know, I've been thinking about this aspect of what my friend Michael Murphy's phrase, broken lineages. Is that we are practicing Buddhism not only because of an attraction to these Asian lineages, but also because of lineages of music, art, and philosophy, and so forth, in our own culture. And as I've said before, Sukhirishi was quite clear when he came to America that he wasn't going to be here long enough unless people were prepared.

[67:36]

His intuition was, in his reading, he'd read a lot of philosophy, almost no psychology, knew very little about psychology when he came to America, but knew quite a lot about Western philosophy. And he'd concluded that the American pragmatists and transcendentalists were probably the best preparation for Buddhism in the West. And I would say he may have been even more right than he realized. And I think that Western American pragmatism and transcendentalism well could be of interest to European philosophers and Europeans as well, not just us backward Americans. Because it has some interesting ingredients. One is, it was quite influenced by yogic culture, particularly the Upanishads. They were unencumbered by the weight of philosophical terms, thinking, etc., from Europe.

[68:44]

And they had to start rather from scratch, rather freshly. So there's a very fresh, honest, experiential. They keep, if you read William James, he's, Peirce, they keep referring back to their experience, not just to how this thought leads to that thought, et cetera. Okay. Now I'm going through this because I think it's a paradigm for how you can also look at your own practice. So I, reading William James recently or a while ago, I came across his trying to look at what an event was in a very similar way to my experience in Buddhism of that an event is not a simple location, that it's a moment in which

[69:48]

we are, as I've been speaking during this asheen, absorbing or a concrescence, a kind of growing together of the present moment. Now, James looks at this, and you know, excuse me for saying again, I read in a rather peculiar way, I... I'm usually, in my reading, looking for language. And partly I'm looking for ways to describe something. So I read a little paragraph in this, and some paragraphs in that, etc. So I'm not even sure where, I'm not absolutely sure where I read this, but in any case, because I don't keep track. But it struck me how close it is to our practice.

[70:54]

And it struck me then how close it is to this Samadhi of Samantabhadra. So then I began working with these two lineages. of the Western lineage and James and Peirce and other people, and then this Buddhist lineage, looking at how they come together, and then also looking at my own experience. I didn't know, I had no idea I was going to talk about good old Samantabhadra so much, but when I got in here, and saw you all riding on elephants or something like that happened, I felt. You know, Samantabhadra is a kind of patron saint of women in Buddhism because That may be of interest to some of you. And me too.

[72:03]

Because in the 25th chapter of the Lotus Sutra, the Universal Gate, where Samantabhadra appears on a six-tusked, isn't that great? A six-tusked. Oh, that already makes your jaw drop. Anyway, a six-tusked white elephant, Samantabhadra, appears. And at that time, and he appears for anyone who studies this sutra wholeheartedly while standing and walking as well as sitting. Samantabhadra will appear and cure illnesses and deepen wisdom and so forth. But in this same chapter the Buddha says women can preserve the scriptures and realize the practice. He makes a specific point of saying women can carry on the teaching through the scriptures and through practice.

[73:09]

So that's why Samantabhadras sometimes patron saint, the patron bodhisattva. And you know Samantabhadra as an Adi Buddha, that means like Vairocana as an Adi Buddha, a Buddha which is very close to dissolving into space. So big you can almost not make an image of. And this Mthangka we have, To the right of Kannon is Samantabhadra as in Adi Buddha, this black, blue-black. If you look into her, his blue-black, blue-black means somatic emptiness. If you look into her blue-black eyes, you might have a good experience. I like doing it every now and then. Midnight, you know. It's a wonderful figure.

[74:15]

And in that, this Samantabhadra is one of the bodhisattvas that is also a Buddha. Samantabhadra represents the Dharmakaya, the all-at-onceness, the vast space. In fact, Sudhana in the Avanthamsaka Sutra wants to, in the Avanthamsaka Sutra, Samantabhadra is the boss, you know, bodhisattva. And Suddhama wants to meet Samantabhadra and he creates a mind as vast as space, unhindered. This is good advice for any of you. And when creating this mind unhindered and vast as space, he suddenly finds himself inside Samantabhadra. Yeah, I like these things. And then it's even a more vast, multiple, infinity of spaces.

[75:25]

And he finds himself finally at one with Samantabhadra and at one with... everything all at once, the universe, the cosmos, etc. Now, William James didn't think of all these things. He just imagined this state of mind which encompasses things and leads to the next moment. But it's not so different. And when we look at Buddhism, we see this kind of emphasis. If I was going to make it simple, Samantabhadra represents meditation, or shamatha, and Manjushri represents insight, vipassana. But when you...

[76:33]

Now, the other day I gave you a rather short, and not as much as I'd like to give you, the way enlightenment is part of the dialect of Buddhism as well as the experience of Buddhism. But let me just say a little bit about it. We had, roughly what I said, is that there's original enlightenment, initial enlightenment, incremental enlightenment, opening enlightenment, full enlightenment, and Buddha's enlightenment. Got that? Pretty simple. Another spaghetti sauce, cosmic spaghetti sauce. Anyway, so original enlightenment is this sense, that concept and experience that All of us are enlightened.

[77:43]

Our life has to be based on enlightenment or it couldn't be. Or what is, is, and that is has to be enlightenment. Now that and the idea of initial enlightenment, in other words, that intuition you have that you should practice. Or that taste of original mind. Now there's a kind of parallel between original mind and original enlightenment. So I'm trying to give you a kind of picture of Buddhism and what we're working with, which for example William James was not working with, and which makes a difference in how we understand things. Now Suzuki Roshi said, I remember, we have many new experiences in sitting and living, etc., and practices about what we do with those new experiences or whether we even notice.

[78:46]

And he said, I remember, sometimes you'll cry from some new experience. Sometimes it will widen your vision of the world. But when your practice is mature, he implied, you won't cry. You will develop a practice that notices new experiences and absorbs new experiences. Now, those two dynamics, absorbing new experiences would be Samantabhadra, noticing new experiences would be Manjushri. Because Manjushri is this functioning wisdom. In other words, we could also say Manjushri is the mind of the Genjo koan. In other words, Dogen has this idea that every situation deeply penetrated is a koan.

[79:58]

Or every situation offers you up a koan. Or the ability to see in any situation what is enlightening and what is endarkening. what is hindering is the function of wisdom. So in a way you're always discovering your own koan and that discovery of your ability to discover your own koan is this mirror with or conversation with the koans collected by the lineage. So the more you have a sense of your own personal koan, that's of course related to making a koan from the lineage personal koan, but also when you feel your own experience has in it and you've got the astuteness to see in your own experience those aspects of your experience which hinder you and those aspects of your experience which

[81:13]

are gates. That mind, when that astuteness is taken to the traditional koans, the lineage koans, they often turn your own personal koan into a new level. This is a very dynamic way to practice. And you're always working with this sense of new experience And what I've been trying to say by talking about the taste, the taste of, like we all have the taste of this moment, this moment, each moment, and expanding it, opening it up, pausing within it. We always have some experiences like this, but does that experience turn us into Buddhists? Mostly not. Why? You don't have the trust in yourself.

[82:16]

You don't have enough confidence. You don't have the astuteness, perhaps, to see what the potential of these gaze. Now this isn't about just, you know, I've got a lot of chutzpah or I'm smart or I've got courage and I've got insight and I've lived a long time and, you know, basically this is a pretty narrow view. You trust your own power but you open up that power through others and through practice and the sutras. Just like William James could have opened up his understanding if he'd known something about Buddhism. And the difference is there's this tradition in Buddhism of what we're doing right now, passing the teaching along. And not just to other smart people. Passing the teaching along in some way that large numbers of people can come to this.

[83:19]

Because large numbers of people develop it a lot better than a few smart people. And the question is, can you open yourself up? The patriarchal or ancestral lineage means to open yourself up to realization with and through others. That's really the emphasis of Mahayana and difference from a Pratyekabuddha that And different from also the tathagata realization, which means realization through the experience of the dharmakaya, through the experience of suchness. But our practice is both. It's the experience of the dharmakaya, of this accepting, open,

[84:29]

gathering, absorbing mind of, we're calling Samantabhadra, ocean seal samadhi, and this engaging, astute, functioning wisdom of Manjushri. A lot of people did a lot of work to bring us to this point. I mean, you know, I'm I know how much work it has been, and it's nothing really, to just get this place started with all of you guys. Randy and Mark and Gerald. I mean, we've worked pretty hard to make this little place. And before, in San Francisco, I worked pretty hard to develop the centers there with people. But my gosh, you know, in 1900, a farmer in something like the sand dunes over here discovered a cave in north, in an oasis town in northwestern China.

[85:33]

And in one cave, he found 40,000 scrolls. Mamma mia. I mean, we, you know, this is absolutely astonishing. And he found about five, eventually they uncovered about 500 caves still preserved with 2,500 statues. The biggest one about 100 feet, 34 meters or so tall. I mean, and this had been a kind of city of monks. living and practicing. And they've discovered immense stuff on early Zen and so forth. I mean, this is, you know, we've got our little Zen, though, and we've got a small library. But we are standing on the shoulders of those who've done this work.

[86:37]

Clearly, it was immense think tanks, practice tanks. realization tanks. Samadhi tanks. Oh no, that's a commercial product, isn't it? Full of salt water. Oh dear. And I'm beginning to really dislike how everything is commercialized in our culture. Enlightenment, Buddhism, Samadhi tanks. And so little of it is really face-to-face. So original enlightenment, original mind.

[87:42]

An original mind is the Buddhist descendant of the Indian idea that there was waking, sleeping, waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming deep sleep minds. And it was possible, perhaps through practice, to come to a fourth mind that included and transcended those three. So we're born, we all know, these three minds which don't communicate with each other much. Waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming deep sleep. And the ancestor of this, the descendant of this mind, in Buddhism we call original mind. And particularly in Zen, the teaching process assumes the presence, the potentiality, the actuality of this original mind.

[88:44]

And it's a very parallel idea to original enlightenment. Now if you listen to my teaching, I'm mostly working with original mind and then generated, matured and articulated original mind. So I'm emphasizing that side of this parallel more than the enlightenment side. At least in what I say, but in the The form of practice I'm presenting is the emphasis is on the enlightenment side. And this is this interesting poem, which I brought up yesterday, that somebody brought up to me, K70, of Shushan. I did remember a good part of those words, finally.

[89:49]

Did you ever pass the corner of Forth and Grant where a little ball of rhythm has a shoeshine stand? People stand around and clap their hands for he's a great big bundle of joy. That's the part I liked. Great big bundle of joy. I suddenly saw the bliss body appearing, you know. Anyway, when Jinshan and Shoeshine said, knowing the unborn, why are we stayed by life? This is our experience, isn't it? At least the experience of the stayed by life part, hindered by life part. And if you looked at this... cursorily or casually you could see think this was about gradual enlightenment bamboo shoots can't be used as rope until they grow up and all that stuff but it's again it's about sudden practice the unborn is when you're born you're born everything appears bang everything's there

[91:13]

So it's knowing the unborn. In other words, the taste. As Sukriya said, you may have some new experience. You might call it Kensho. He said, whether you call it Kensho or not is unimportant. What's important is you're facing this new experience and its implication and the courage to let your life go where it leads you. And not say, oh, this was a good experience. Now I go back into the rut. Or back into the pattern. Or back into... I mean, I'm not knocking exactly the pattern, because that's how we practice compassion with each other. We join in our society, we support ourselves, we support our aging parents, which I will be soon, and we support our... Carl and I are leading the way. Joe's not far behind. Hey. But you can do that without falling into the belief.

[92:25]

Practice opens you, your life opens you to new experience. The taste of original mind, original enlightenment is new experience. The unborn is new experience. We're born and everything appears. So knowing this, why are we still stayed by life? Now the emphasis in this koan is not, oh yeah, there's some kind of gradual, let's sit around and let the bamboo, you know, grow. But rather the bamboo and the ropes are simultaneous. That's why when, it's quite interesting and it tries to catch you on both sides of the view. So it says, Jin Shan says, in the future you'll be enlightened on your own.

[93:30]

Thanks a lot. And Xu Shan says, I am just thus. I am just this way. That's a powerful statement. I am just this way. That's both acceptance and the practice of sudden realization. It's both acceptance, this is who I am, whatever kind of schmuck I am, this is what I am. I'm just this way. So what is your meaning, he says. So he says, the superintendent's quarters are there and the chef is, etc., But the emphasis is on, yes, there is articulation and maturation of the unborn.

[94:23]

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