If it's all right with you, I'd like to review these three kinds of three treasures. There are three kinds of three jewels. And as has been said before, really the three jewels are just one jewel. And holding up this one jewel in the midst of our life, we see that it, in a sense,

[01:05]

is three jewels. And contemplating it further, we see that there's even three different ways to look at these three aspects of this one jewel. So, first of all, there is this is this awakening, bodhi, which is just really the way everything in the universe is. And the way everything really is, is unsurpassed, correct, and complete bodhi.

[02:12]

This is the Buddha jewel, the Buddha treasure, from the point of view of the single-bodied or indivisible triple treasure. And the complete purity of this bodhi, because it reaches everywhere in the universe and is the nature of the way everything is, and is completely free of any kind of subject-object duality. This is the dharma jewel of the indivisible one-bodied triple treasure. And the thoroughgoing harmony between this purity and this awakening is the sangha jewel

[03:25]

of the single-bodied indivisible three treasures. When this triple treasure becomes manifest, when this indivisible single-bodied triple treasure becomes manifest and is verified, this is the Buddha jewel as the manifest three treasures. That which is realized, that which is verified, is the dharma jewel as the manifest triple

[04:34]

treasure. And those beings who study this manifest Buddha and dharma jewels are the sangha of the manifest triple jewel. Or, as Suzuki Roshi put it, what Buddha found out, or what Buddha realized, is the dharma treasure, is the manifest dharma treasure. And what Buddha became by what he found out is the manifest Buddha treasure. And those who became disciples and studied with what Buddha became after Buddha found

[05:44]

this out is the manifest sangha jewel. Then later on throughout all time and space, things changed and this triple jewel needs to keep living and keep being taken care of and protected and maintained. And so, as celestial and human beings are converted from their habitual ways, as celestial and human beings are inwardly converted, and as this appears in vast openness of being

[06:51]

and also as it appears within the dusts of the objective world, this is the Buddha of the abiding and maintaining triple treasure. This is what the Buddha jewel is like as the triple treasure continues to live and be taken care of on through time. And then, that the triple treasure can be transformed into an ocean storehouse, into monasteries and temples and robes and all activities and into scriptures, so that animate and inanimate beings can be converted. This is the dharma jewel under the abiding and maintaining triple treasure.

[07:55]

And the relieving of suffering and setting beings free from this world is the sangha jewel under the abiding and maintaining triple treasure. And, I also thought that this first kind of triple treasure, the single-bodied triple treasure, because it is so completely beyond human judgment of good and bad, and because it is the jewel which produces manifestations in this world of Buddhas and what they realize,

[09:00]

because it is so beyond our human way, that the way it appears in the world is sometimes quite difficult for people to accept or appreciate, because it often comes in a way that is fundamentally challenging to their attachments. How these manifest Buddhas behave and how they teach may sometimes be quite surprising and considered to be even outrageous. They teach things like what you human beings think is totally the reverse of the way things are. You've got it completely backwards.

[10:04]

You have to give up everything that you are holding on to. This kind of teaching some people don't like to hear. So it is helpful to have another kind of triple treasure wherein beings are inwardly transformed and outwardly you can see that they are relieved of suffering, that they are happy and peaceful and kind and free from attachment. And by having these kinds of demonstrations in the world, people can forgive, perhaps, a teaching and a behavior which they don't understand, that's shocking, or even more so that's not interesting. So the triple jewel takes on a form which protects the Buddha and the Dharma, which

[11:13]

supports it when it doesn't seem to be interesting or valuable according to ordinary human judgment, and it protects it when it seems to be outrageous or threatening the entire socio-cultural economic structure of the world of human beings. I think if we just in our minds and hearts and in our discussions go over these three jewels, again, like holding a great jewel before our consciousness and turning it and

[12:14]

turning it and studying it and discussing it, little by little, by daily devotion to these triple treasures, we will be able to see a little bit of how great a human being can be. In Suzuki Roshi's discussion of these precepts, of these first three precepts, these three jewels, he says over and over and over again, he says, that they're not some unusual thing, they're very common, they're just about what we are.

[13:18]

They're all about we ourselves and our practice, over and over he says this. And this, I feel, ties in very nicely with the other point that he makes and with the feeling I had in studying the triple treasure, that the triple treasure is not very interesting when I first look at it. It's so basic and it's so much just what we are, that it's just like studying ourselves. And, in fact, I do feel often that the most uninteresting thing in the world to study is myself. But by total devotion to the triple treasure,

[14:34]

to these triple treasures, and being willing to be intensively involved in trying to understand them, we get used to being close to something that's not necessarily interesting. And if we can study this rather common thing, which is common to all Buddhists, which is not a special teaching, which is not superficially a profound teaching from the human point of view, our willingness to stay with something so ordinary, our willingness to stay with makes it possible for us to study ourselves. These are about ourselves, but ourselves in our ordinariness, not ourselves in some special, unusual, powerful, magnificent way.

[15:40]

As he says, maybe you have to be very sincere about your life. Maybe you have to be very sincere in order to study something that's not interesting. So these first three precepts, completely beyond human evaluation, and yet at the same time, completely just about ourselves. Now, I have a question for you. How do you

[16:51]

in a sense go against...I rebel against this boring topic and want to tell us some interesting stories, so I'm being a bad boy now. Please forgive me. I have a partial excuse for this because the story I want to tell is a story about one of our ancestors who was a monk and a priest, and one of our ancestors who just happens to be the next one in line from the last one I talked about. So I'm sort of justified in bringing it up because it's next in order, but also I bring it up because this ancestor, in my view, has always been very touching because he seems to be perhaps the most ordinary of all. Ordinary of the early Chinese masters in our lineage. So I think maybe it'd be good

[18:06]

to point him out at this time when we're talking about how ordinary and common the Triple Treasure is because he seems to be, in a way, as I said, the most ordinary, uncommon, I mean the most ordinary, common, and uninteresting of these Zen teachers. His predecessor was who? Yaoshan. So who am I going to talk about? Hungan Donjo, or in Chinese his name is Yunyan, which means Cloudy Cliff. So I'm bringing him up, but really secretly I'm bringing

[19:07]

him up just because I can't stand how uninteresting things have gotten. He studied with the great Zen master, Bajon Waihai, for 20 years. He was Bajon's attendant for 20 years. By my computations it looks to me like he was, by looking at Bajon's dates and his dates, like he was about 14 years old when he became the great master's attendant and he was the master's attendant until he was 34. Now, right away I think, well, that's pretty unusual for him to be able to be the attendant to such a great teacher for so long. Very fortunate, certainly. Think about it, 20 years hanging out right next to Bajon,

[20:14]

Bajon would be sitting in a seat here and he'd be right there for 20 years. Very fortunate. But during that 20 years of study with the master, he didn't understand Zen. One of my favorite stories about them is one time, I don't know, these old masters, I don't know if they chewed tobacco or had lots of respiratory problems, but for some reason they seemed to have spittoons next to the abbot's seat. And one time he spit into the spittoon, I don't know what distance the spittoon was, do you know what a spittoon is? It's like a jar that you spit into. They have like in the American West, in the saloons where the cowboys were, you know the cowboys chewed tobacco and they would stand

[21:19]

at the bar and spit long distances into those buckets. So he spit into the spittoon and little Yun-Yan sitting over here said, what's that about master? And Bajon said, it's not in your realm. So after studying with Bajon for 20 years, Bajon died at 94 and Yun-Yan went to study with Yaoshan. When he got to Yaoshan, Yaoshan asked him, where have you come from? And Yun-Yan said, from Bajon. And Yaoshan said, what does Bajon say to his students? And Yun-Yan said, he often says, I have something that contains

[22:28]

all flavors. Yaoshan said, salt is salty, plain water is bland. What is neither salty nor bland is the constant flavor. What is the saying that contains all flavors? Kind of a good question. Yun-Yan after 20 years of study had no reply. Yaoshan said, what can you do about the birth and death right before your eyes? Yun-Yan said, there is no birth and death before my eyes. Yaoshan said, how long were you with Bajon? Yun-Yan said,

[23:31]

20 years. Yaoshan said, you were with Bajon for 20 years and your understanding is still like this? Yaoshan, who was contemporary of Bajon younger, and also outlived him, but he was very interested to have somebody who was so close to him so he could learn about Bajon's teachings. So he kept asking Yun-Yan about what Bajon taught. So another day when Yun-Yan was standing in attendance upon Yaoshan, Yaoshan asked him, what other teachings did Bajon expound? And Yun-Yan said, sometimes he says, understanding

[24:36]

is beyond the three formulations, comprehension outside the six propositions. Yaoshan said, three thousand miles away, there is no connection. Then again he asked, what other teachings does he teach? And Yun-Yan said, once he came up into the hall to preach to the assembly and was standing there. And then he dispersed the assembly with his staff. And as they were running away, he called out to them. When they turned their heads, he said, what is it? Yaoshan said, why didn't you say this before? Today through you I have been able

[25:49]

to understand and see brother Bajon. At these words, Yun-Yan was greatly awakened. So, I introduced this ancestor to you today and I hope to study his ordinariness with you more later. He just kept plugging away. And then he said, year after year, devoted to the triple treasure.

[26:58]

In terms of the sangha, the sangha is sometimes spoken of as our good friends. And Kathagiri Roshi talked about three kinds of good friends. One kind of good friend, which you maybe know the word for in Buddhist teaching, is called kalyanamitra, which means beneficial friend, somebody who benefits you in some way, rather ordinary sense of friend. The next kind of good friend is a friend who is a friend beyond their benefit to you, beyond give and take, someone who just simply commands respect, someone who just simply commands

[28:13]

respect. Really, you can't see that they benefit you, but somehow you have to feel their integrity and be inspired by it. And then a third kind of good friend is someone who is beyond give and take and beyond commanding respect. And I kind of feel like that's the kind that Yunyen is, in a way. Very subtle friendship, shining out across the centuries. His disciple, his most noted disciple, is the next person in our lineage, Tosan Ryokai,

[29:19]

Tungshan Yangzhe. One day he was doing a memorial service for Yunyen, and he said, Hanna, one of his monks said to him, you were first recognized by Nanchuan, and in parenthesis, and he also met many other quite famous and interesting Zen masters. He studied around with lots of great teachers, and by that study really developed a deep understanding of the triple treasure, Tungshan did. So the monk said, why among all these great teachers that you studied with, why do you venerate Yunyen, again in parenthesis, this

[30:25]

ordinary one? And Tungshan said something like, it's not the profundity of his teaching, or the radiance of his understanding that impresses me. What really causes me to venerate him above all, is that he never taught me anything directly. At this teacher, this quiet, ordinary teacher, Yunyen, who spawned a deep understanding such a brilliant teacher as Tungshan, and a lineage which somehow has survived, I think

[31:36]

he shows in a way, in some sense, the special quietness, ordinariness, and simplicity of the lineage. There are other kinds of ways this lineage of Buddha can be, but this particular quality is one emphasizing ordinariness. In other words, emphasizing just ourselves. So, again, I come to say, after all this, who could be willing to take refuge in such ordinary jewels? Anyway, who is right? The world-honored one.

[32:45]

Takes refuge in these jewels, in these three treasures. So I want to say a little bit about this thing, this non-thing, called refuge in the triple treasure. And I want to say a little bit about this thing, this non-thing, called refuge in the triple treasure. So, saranam means refuge. Gacchami, I think, means go to. Buddham saranam. Gacchami means go for refuge to Buddha, or go to Buddha for refuge, or go in refuge to Buddha. And I do not know about the Pali and Sanskrit

[33:47]

of the word saranam. In other words, what the etymology of going for refuge in the Sanskrit and Pali is. I should find out. I will try. But I can say that both the English and Chinese words used for this have a double-semantic message. In Chinese, the word saranam is translated by kie, two Chinese characters, ki and e. In Sanskrit, the word saranam is translated kie means, I believe, to return. And e means to rely on. And in English, the word refuge,

[34:58]

when I ask people, if I ask them what it means, they usually emphasize this rely on side. Namely, it's a sanctuary, a refuge is a sanctuary, like a bird sanctuary or a bird refuge or animal refuge, animal sanctuary, a shelter, a place of protection, a place of safety, a sacred place. That's the relying on side, the e. But the English word refuge also means refuge, to fly back, the return flight, fuge like fly, like centrifuge. Centrifugal means to fly away from the center and centripetal means to go towards, to walk towards the center. So refuge means to fly back, return. So these refuges are safety, are peace, are safety

[36:08]

are sanctuary, but they're also our home, which we fly back to. As human beings, we constantly move away from our home. We constantly, part of our mind is always going out to objects, and by that process of being involved in knowing objects, we disturb ourselves. We lose our home. And actually, one of the things that Suzuki Roshi mentioned when talking about the Buddha is that what the Buddha realized was that all

[37:08]

beings are the Buddha, and the way he realized that all beings are the Buddha was by himself simply being himself. By completely coming home to what he was, he was awakened, and by being awakened he could see that all beings were Buddha, similarly by their true home. And he said that mostly what Buddha taught after he realized that all beings were Buddha through himself being himself, he mostly taught how people don't believe they're Buddha and how beings run away from being Buddha. Most of his teaching was about how we run away from our home, how we run away from ourselves to look at more interesting things than this one. So the Buddha's teacher encourages people

[38:13]

to come home and explains to them the various ways they leave home, pointing out the leakages, encouraging people to spot these leakages, these ways of leaving home, and vowing to come home. So kye means to rely on and return to our true self. Saranam. To go, return to, and rely on our true nature, which is these three treasures. And once again, once we have returned to our true nature, once we have taken refuge completely, then everything we do is Buddha's activity. And when Japanese people take refuge they

[39:37]

sometimes say, namo kyei butsu, namo kyei butsu, namo kyei ho, namo kyei so. And namo means sometimes translated as homage. But it also again has the meaning or the etymology of throwing yourself into something. And that's really the way to pay homage, is to throw yourself away and throw yourself into something. To pay homage to the Buddha way is to throw your personal self away and give your life over to the Buddha way. So namo kyei means to throw yourself away and throw yourself into returning home. So, this refuge is, as Trungpa Rinpoche says, to completely stop shopping. Or anyway, to

[40:55]

finish this shopping trip and go back home. And the funny thing is that when you really do take refuge in the triple treasure, you become Buddha's child, which means you completely accept the entire universe. You stop shopping for some other universe. And you completely accept all sentient beings that live in this universe. And you completely accept yourself. And then, all sentient beings are the content of yourself. So by stopping shopping for anything other than yourself, you stop shopping for anything other than all sentient beings. Precisely these sentient beings at this moment, which is so ordinary.

[41:59]

I mean it is exactly and completely the usual state of affairs at this time in history. It's just what we've got here. And each of you can fill in the blanks of what that is. Who's the President of the United States? Who's the Vice President? Who's on TV? Who's at Tassajara? What's in your stomach? What's your body temperature? Everything in the world, precisely as it is, in its utter ordinariness. And what's interesting about that? So to take refuge means to so sincerely value life as it is. And to take refuge means to know that you actually are interested in what's happening, most of all. Yuen Yuen was somehow, I don't know how I did it, but he was somehow willing to be

[43:52]

the kind of person he was all those years. He was willing to live out stories which were apparently so unrewarding and so uninteresting for all those years. Day after day he was just a guy that was there not knowing what was going on. And there's no signs of him complaining about that. Maybe he did, I don't know. Yes, finally it did pay off. And he did finally get a glimpse, a great glimpse, of how wonderful

[44:52]

his life is. But in our ordinariness it's very tempting to get involved in interesting things. Interesting things do appear in our life. You can't avoid them. And there's nothing wrong with them. But they are tests. Tests to see if when an interesting thing happens you cannot get stuck in it. You cannot get entangled in it. You cannot hold it or be disoriented by it or confused by it. In other words, walking along being so ordinary, interesting things

[45:53]

appear and then we have leakage in relationship to them. It's not just that the practice is ordinary and that we're ordinary. It's not just that. It's that there's interesting things right nearby. So it's not just hard to stay and be ordinary. It's also in a way equally difficult to avoid grabbing for the interesting things which are right over the hill or right around the corner. That true laugh did not get recorded. Tassajara even has big piles of catalogs of interesting things for the monks to look at and wonder what should they do? To order or not to order?

[46:57]

To shop or not to shop? And if you shop, will this be an entangling shopping trip? Or will it be clear, ordinary, straightforward shopping? And if you get it and you don't like it, can you send it back without any leakage? Eventually, we do want to be able to go into the marketplace and not shop. To be at peace and harmony while walking through a land of interesting things, because even though we're surrounded by interesting things, we are actually somehow satisfied with being ourselves, first of all, which means that we really take refuge in the triple

[48:03]

treasure, that we're really devoted to the triple treasure, which is what we are after Buddha. And before anything interesting is grabbed onto. If we can stay with what's happening, stay with what's so ordinary and common, we may be able to notice the person sitting next to us and what's going on with that person. If we get entangled in interesting things, we lose our way and can't stay with all sentient beings.

[49:09]

So far, what I've said is exactly the same as what we call zazen, which we practice. The relationship between zazen and the triple treasure is that they both have to do about nothing but ourselves. After all, zazen is just about ourselves and the same as the triple treasure. So being willing to accept completely, to throw ourselves into, relying on and returning to our ordinary life is exactly zazen. But there again, when we go to practice zazen,

[50:36]

if we haven't devoted ourselves to the triple treasure, we may also have fancy ideas of what zazen is. So this is why it is said that in order to enter zazen, you must receive the precepts. You must take refuge in the triple treasure in order to enter zazen. Without receiving these precepts, you cannot practice zazen. Without taking refuge in these three treasures, we can't practice zazen, because devotion to these three treasures takes us to the very ordinary, non-gainy center of zazen. Without devotion to these three treasures, which we do not know anything about because they are completely beyond all of our evaluations

[51:43]

of good and bad, without this completely stupid mind that doesn't know any better than to be itself, we can't practice zazen in its true sense. Which is to say that we ourselves, through practicing zazen in this pure, non-gaining way, are exactly the triple treasure. We ourselves are the triple treasure. We ourselves, zazen, and the triple treasure are three synonymous statements. But it is possible, I've seen it in the history of the zen movement in America, for human

[52:55]

beings to go to practice zazen and not understand that zazen is just themselves. Not accept zazen in its ordinariness. So the triple treasure that we take refuges in, and taking refuge in the triple treasure, makes it possible for us to practice zazen in its true sense. And then again, practicing zazen in its true sense, makes it possible for us to be the triple treasure, and for the triple treasure to be ourselves. Again and again, the triple treasure, after all, are just ourselves. And then again, we can't practice zazen in

[54:01]

its true sense. And then again, we can't practice zazen in its true sense.

[54:38]

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