One day the World Honored One got up on the seat. Manjushri struck the gavel and said, clearly observe the Dharma of the King of Dharma. The Dharma of the King of Dharma is thus. The World Honored One then got down from the seat. So later in the Sung Dynasty in China, some of Buddha's disciples suggested that Manjushri did something that was unnecessary, that he really didn't need to hit the gavel and say those things.

[01:51]

He did something extra. And yesterday also, a DJ asked something like, well, he thought maybe that after this occasion, Manjushri became a great bodhisattva. And I said that he was already a great bodhisattva. And I think DJ said something like, does that mean he wasn't just some guy walking around? Wasn't he some guy walking around at the time of Buddha? If we look at the records of the teachings of Buddha, I haven't seen them all, but I've never seen one of the early records where they said Manjushri was there in the audience. Has anyone seen that? He didn't seem to be in the flesh.

[02:59]

Who are they talking about, Manjushri, there at the time of the Buddha? What do they mean, Manjushri striking the gavel and saying this? Perfect wisdom did it? Perfect wisdom got manifested somehow and did this? Or maybe Manjusha got into some person, animated some person, some ordinary monk, and that monk came forward and did this. That sounds paranoid.

[04:13]

That sounds paranoid. Paranoic? Yeah, yeah. I have a friend that he changed his... What's his name? Karakiri. He didn't like it at all. Mr. Campbell said that a myth is something that never happens. It always is. So yesterday afternoon someone told me a story about Buddha and the sesame seed. A woman came to him with her dead child and was very upset.

[05:27]

and asked the Buddha to bring the child back to life. Or no, anyway, she asked some monk, I guess, some disciple of Buddha to bring the child back to life. And the disciple said, go see Buddha. So she told Buddha and Buddha said, well, I need a sesame seed. in order to do this from a house where there has been no death. So please go get me the sesame seed." So she went around looking for a house that had no death in it to get a sesame seed. And then after some time she came back. And in the meantime she had become illumined by this search. And of course she did not find a house that had no death in it.

[06:39]

So this was a good practice for her. And she then buried her child and became a disciple of Buddha. Also someone said to me yesterday that he heard from Suzuki Roshi that when your babies are dying and you can't do anything about it, that you should go back to Saza and And I would change that a little bit. I would say, when your babies are dying and you can't do anything about it, when you really can't do anything about it, that that is zazen.

[07:49]

You don't have to go do zazen. Or at least at Zazen, yeah, at Zazen. At least as far as we understand it. When your baby, you know who your babies are, don't you? When your self is dying and you can't do anything about it. And can't means not that you're trying. I mean, you really can't do anything. You can't even wiggle. You can wiggle, but that's not doing anything about this dying baby. It's just a distraction. When you see this and when you're living in this way, it's pretty good.

[08:55]

Did you want to say something? I was just going to say, about the comment, about the story about the Buddha saying, Buddha will house and no debt. It sounds in that light that this comment by embodiment of Manjushri or whatever was actually quite a very skillful one. And this statement that Manjushri set up the situation for the Dharma to be manifested in a powerful way. So that might seem like, you know, people say that Manjushri's statement was near perfect wisdom or something along with it. Uh-huh. Yeah. Did you hear what he said? Hmm?

[09:57]

Well... And another turn on that is... If an ordinary person would go up to Buddha and fall on their face, that would also perhaps set up a powerful opportunity for teaching. Okay? But we would understand that this is an ordinary person falling on their face and therefore offering an opportunity for Buddha. A living being clinging to the self is definitely an opportunity for Buddha. And it's not that we criticize them for being attached to the self. We don't have to do that.

[11:00]

I'm just simply saying that a person, a living being, attaching to their self, holding on to their self, is the occasion for the appearance of Buddha. But when Manjushri Bodhisattva comes up and says something like that, it doesn't sound like you think, well, this is Manjushri Bodhisattva. This is not a suffering being. Or you might think, this is pretty good. But in fact, It may be that we should understand that Manjushri also blew it. But blowing it also sets up the opportunity for practice and teaching. Pardon? Uh-huh.

[12:07]

Right. You blow it outside. Ultimately, you don't. You have to. Because when you're not, you know, that's a case of constant, always gone. Other than my eyes. So I had to interrupt my eyes, because I can't remember what the last thing was. You know? So it didn't go well. And it's just part of the teaching. No stuff. I do, but I feel like you're also under emphasis. You're sort of trying to wipe away the blowing it. I feel like you're trying to wipe away the blowing it. No, I'm not saying you're not. I'm saying I feel like you are. In other words, again, to go back to the example of someone falling down on the ground. If they don't fall down on the ground, they can't get up. But if they don't fall down, they don't have to get up. So if you're not blowing it, you don't have to blow it.

[13:13]

But if you've already blown it, you know, if you don't know that you've blown it, then it's good to do something so you experience that you've blown it. But if you haven't blown it, you don't have to blow it. No, but I don't have to. See, that's what I'm saying. You don't have to point to it. For example, I can say to you, if you're standing next to me and you fall down, I can say, you fell down. Okay? You may not notice it. You may be saying, why is the sidewalk in my face? But if you say that to me already, I can say, well, why do you think the sidewalk's in your face?

[14:19]

Do you think I put it there? And I might say to you, well, how are you doing? How is it there for you now? Do you like sidewalks? And you may say, well, Actually, they're not that bad. If you have a sidewalk in your face suddenly, it's like the Buddha didn't say to the woman, you are upset. You're confused. You're attached to your child who's dead. You can't do anything about this. He said, go get me a sesame seed. It's the same as saying, when someone's on the ground, you say, how are you? How are you doing? It doesn't mean that you're... The Buddha's not reaching down and pulling the person up. The Buddha's just saying, how is it for you there? And by sending her to find the sesame seed, he's saying, how you doing? So you don't have to point.

[15:23]

The pointing is... The sentient beings, the pointing is attaching to the self in the first place. And then you can go around and point to people who are pointing. You can say, okay, you're pointing. And then you're pointing too. And someone can point at you. You're pointing at their pointing, which is all fine. This is more, each one of these pointings are opportunities for Buddha. If nobody's pointing... We don't need Buddha. But once there's a pointing, then somebody could just say, how do you feel? How is pointing? Do you like pointing? Tell me about pointing. OK? So Manjushri is an example. In some sense, Manjushri is leaking But he's leaking for our benefit, as you said.

[16:36]

He's setting up an opportunity for teaching. He's playing the role of a sentient being by leaking. He's playing the role of a suffering being by pointing to where the Buddha is. It's kind of like that, yeah. It's like Christ. Yes, but we have to let it be that he blew it. They really have to let it be that. Because if it's not, then he's a special case. He's not really doing it. He's not really doing it like us. That's why they really want Christ to bleed, just like ordinary person.

[17:37]

So the Buddha, the whole Buddha drama is the Buddha is not going to make any mistakes. The Buddha is not going to mess around. with people. The Buddha's not going to cling and the Buddha's going to show non-clinging. But the Buddha also gets his, sort of his, what do you call it, crown prince to come forth and blow it, to act out being a sentient being. But the way he acts it out, he doesn't come forward. He could come forward and say, could have Manjushri coming forward and saying, Dad, I'm really messed up today, you know. I'm scared to death. I don't know how to go on with this work of being, you know, chief of the bodhisattvas, you know. I'm scared to death. I've got all these addictions and so on and so forth. If he did that, then people would say, oh, Manjushri's got problems. And probably, and then one of the other bodhisattvas would probably say,

[18:38]

Crown Prince Bodhisattva Manjushri, that's so sweet of you to, for the sake of all sentient beings, enact confusion and suffering. And in many sutras, the bodhisattvas come forth and ask Buddha questions which obviously they already know the answer to. But they ask, and they're not pretending to ask the question. They're not like faking to, like, I know the answer and I'm going to go. They really have the question. But then the person they're asking, which could be the Buddha or another bodhisattva at the same level as them or lower, says, wow, son of Buddha or child of Buddha, you are really great that you put this question out there, this wonderful question for other people. But in this case, they didn't say, thank you, Manjushri, for leaking. That was so kind of you to give the Buddha a chance to teach. They didn't say that.

[19:42]

They didn't say it until the Sung Dynasty. Then they pointed out, please observe what's going on here. Manjushri said, clearly observe. He also could say, watch me. See what I do. Look very carefully. I'm going to come up here. I'm going to point. Watch this, folks. Watch very carefully. The Dharma of the Dharma King is thus. It sounds like he's talking about something other than his own leaking. But actually what he did is he came up and said, watch me leak. and see what the Buddha does in response to my confusion. I'm going to set up a duality and act it out for you. This is going to be a little show I put on. So then Buddha could help him. How did Buddha help him? similar to the way Buddha helped us before Manjushri did anything.

[20:45]

It means he got down from the seat. This is not exactly pointing. This is a response, though. Now, bodhisattvas, when they get born, they have to transgress in some sense to be born in a body. but they do so out of their vow. They willingly do it and they know they're blowing it by taking a body. You got to make kind of a deal to take a body, a kind of a dirty deal. And they do it because they know they have to in order to help beings. And in this case too, Manjushri had this sort of leak in order to help us. But these Song Dynasty people, they didn't thank him. They just pointed out what he was doing.

[21:48]

Also, what's his name? Hongzhi said, nothing can be done about Manjushri's leaking. He just says, nothing can be done about it. So again, to go back to this image of the Buddha or the teacher standing by the student and the student falling down, there might be a person inhabiting the body of the teacher, just like there's a teacher inhabiting the body of the person. The person there probably would like to help this person up off the sidewalk. Because it hurts, it maybe hurts the person to see them down there. And also they would like to maybe continue walking. But they're kind of stuck there.

[22:57]

So they kind of would like to reach down and help the person up. The funny thing here is that it seems a little heartless not to help them up. But to help them up, in this case, would be selfish. And to not help them up is unselfish. However, this does not mean, for example, people use examples of, what about if something like, you know, what if you see someone... What if someone says, okay, you're standing by two people and one person says, well, I'm going to push this person down now on the ground. Would you just stand there and let them do that? And not point? No, you wouldn't. You would try to stop them from hurting the other person. You would try to stop them from hurting the other person because you don't want the other person to get hurt.

[23:59]

But more than that, you don't want the person who's going to push to push because it would really hurt them. So what you might do is you might say, how about pushing me? You can push me instead. Again, you're not saying, you're not pointing and saying, now this is going to be a Buddhist teaching for you, and I'm going to show you how to save yourself and avoid, and this isn't saying, you know, you're going to get in big, well, you might say you're going to get in big trouble in your next lifetime if you push this guy down. No, you might not do that. You might just say, take my body. Look at my body. It's much juicier. If you push it down, it'll splatter. Forget this guy. He's not, you know, he's not going to be very much fun to push down. It'll practically be a non-event. But now if you push me down, that'll really be fun. So go ahead, push me down. And in the process, the person might say, why do you want me to push you down so much?

[25:01]

What's so good about you? And pretty soon, maybe they'll forget about pushing you down and you just go off and have some coffee. More likely? Really? Well, got a little rebellion here. Huh? He said more likely he'll slug you. Well, then what you do is you, again, very skillfully duck. Because you don't want him to hit you, because if he hits you, he'll be in big trouble. Bigger trouble than if he misses. So then you grab his hand and flip him in the air three and a half times and put him down very gently on his feet. Now, what did you teach him? You better go and...

[26:04]

Yeah, you better learn something. So these stories, oftentimes a person said, hey, teach me that. I want to learn that. That's more interesting than punching people. Say, okay, well, make out an application in the office. And then you turn and hit the first guy yourself. He needs help too. He got sort of left out of this story. Isn't the Buddha, by having form, appointing? Well, in order to get into a body, a Buddha also has to screw up a little bit. But then the Buddhas, if it's a Buddha in the sense of taking a human form, they clear everything up before they actually stop.

[27:16]

They go through a bodhisattva phase in one lifetime, and then they become a Buddha. And then from then on, they don't do any excess of activity. They don't do anything. They don't really do anything. I mean, they teach, they talk and stuff like that, but they're not really doing anything. They're not leaking anymore. They won't do that. They don't play that side of the drama. They can't, no. They can't. Bodhisattvas still can. Now, yeah, bodhisattvas still can, so there can be a drama. If there's no bodhisattvas... then there's no sentient beings and there's no Buddhas. Again, we go that route again. So we definitely don't let, you know, if we see some harmful situation occurring, we definitely try to, we throw ourselves into it.

[28:18]

We do something about it. Hopefully in a helpful way. This is still in the spirit. This can still be done in the spirit of not helping the person up. The Buddha does not reach down and pull people up out of the mud. The Buddha just gives Dharma. And what's Dharma is talking and gestures to help the person wake up to the truth, to help the person get themselves up. Yes. Wisdom doesn't leak and neither does compassion. Right. Well, I think that maybe it's because people expect Avalokiteshvara to be willing to leak. So if he or she does something in a situation like that, they might be more willing to say, oh, they compromised for the sake of other beings.

[29:27]

But Manjushri, we think of, well, he's not going to, he's going to, you know, he's too tough. He's not going to get involved in anything like that. So that's maybe why they picked that story. Again, how did the story really happen, you know? What really happened? What is the story actually? What's the purpose of the story? What's it really trying to express here by this setup? Why didn't Dogen Zenji just say form is emptiness and emptiness is form? Why did they even say that form is emptiness and emptiness is form? Why do they say that kind of stuff to us? And why do they say the mountains and rivers of the immediate and present are the manifestation of the path of the ancient Buddhas?

[30:43]

Why do they talk like that? Otherwise we'd just get it. Yeah. Yeah. I already know that. And in order to put the pieces together, we sort of have to, I don't know what, we have to stand on our head or we have to look at the pieces through a mirror. It isn't our usual way. They're trying to affect a reversal in our usual way of thinking. Yeah? It sounds to me like we're starting with the question, if we started with perfect wisdom, perfect compassion, or perfect awareness, why do all this? No, we don't start from perfect wisdom and perfect compassion and perfect awareness.

[31:47]

It's all creation, working your shoulder. Uh-huh. Oh, well, you know, my...what do you call it? I don't know what you call it. I forget what to call it. Anyway, this relates to your thing earlier, and that is that it took creation in this particular latest cycle of things, you know, this universe that we have history of now. Life is a pretty recent part of it. You heard about that? Life has not been in this kind of like the earth, you know. Life is kind of a newcomer on the earth. And the earth is kind of a newcomer compared to some of the other stuff that's going on. And then in terms of life, human life is quite recent, even another very recent part of the life.

[32:49]

it's been, in terms of the last period of history, the last few billion years, conscious life is just kind of a recent thing. In this particular location, this area around the earth, conscious life is a new deal. And not only that, but conscious life, there was a kind of conscious life that lived for a long time, and then it was a consciousness in this aboriginal sense. In other words, it was conscious, but it didn't know anything. It knew no objects. It wasn't aware of anything. Then what happened is that conscious life became self-conscious, or conscious life started to know things. This isn't necessarily better than the way the stars were before there was life.

[33:55]

But now the universe somehow changed. And from the human point of view, it changed in this way that somehow there was something going on in the universe now, or at least in this little section of the universe. There was something happening. Some kind of awareness of what was happening started to happen. Knowledge appeared. life and then conscious life and then knowledge of objects started to occur. In order to pull that off, creation pulled that off, by the way. Creation created a planet. Creation created water. Do you know that as far as we know, this is the only place we know of, this planet just happens to be the only place we know of where there's standing water. Did you know that? There's no other place that we know of where there's water sitting like in lakes and running down rivers. All right?

[34:57]

In terms of our vision of knowledge of the universe, this is the only place we know of where there's like rivers and oceans. Okay? It took the universe. It was a lot of work for the universe to make a planet that had rivers and lakes and ponds and stuff like that in it. Then even more work, a lot more work than to make living beings, plants, animals. And then even more work to create conscious beings, beings who are conscious of objects, okay? All that happened, that's creation, all right? No, that was already done, no? That was easy. That came right along with it. Okay, I'll go along with you. It was a lot of work in addition to that to make them unhappy because what happened is that once they became self-knowing, by knowing things, they became separated from the earlier stage of their development.

[35:58]

In the earlier stage of development, by definition, is separated from the later stage because in the earlier stage there's no knowledge of things. The later stage, there is knowledge. But because there's knowledge in this realm, this latest realm, the newest realm, because there's knowledge in that realm, the knowledge realm cannot understand the realm where there's not knowledge. So there's this separation. And in the knowledge realm, you can't even remember the realm of where there wasn't knowledge or where there wasn't words. Because, in fact, you're in the realm of words and knowledge, okay? So there's a vague, first of all, there's a vague sense of separation and loneliness. But, and I think, I go along with Gerhard, that then they had to do an additional, the creation had to build an additional thing. The additional thing was, had to rise to a sense of self.

[37:02]

And then it had to do one more thing, it had to make beings cling to the self. Because once they started clinging to themselves, they started suffering. And once they started suffering, they knew that they had to do something about it. Some of them did. And that suffering motivates them to do the work of reunion with what they lost. That's my explanation about why beings suffer. And then once the suffering occurred, And once the implied project of reunion with what was lost was highlighted, then the universe gave rise to Buddhas, which are the force or the quality or the nature which guides beings back to reunion. Or not to back to reunion, but guides beings to reunion.

[38:05]

And I propose that the vague sense of loss and the yearning for innocence that we feel in ourselves is not sufficient motivation for us to do the hard work, almost unnecessary work, of turning around and going back to what we lost and finding it again. So the additional pain that's caused by self-clinging is, for some people, the combination of the loss of the juice plus the pain of clinging, those two together are sufficient for some people to get them to do the work of reuniting the whole living being and basically reuniting with all living being, which is where we came from in the first place. There was a time when all living beings, and we're not so many years away from that, when all living being feels this connection with all living being. This is what I call dark bliss.

[39:11]

What? I don't know what they mean. Yeah, I don't know. But it wasn't long ago in our own life. Well, again, when you're in the state of dark bliss, you're not looking out for anybody else. There's nobody else. You're just touching everybody. It's like when you're a baby. Well, you can look back, like you can look back to pictures of, you can look back in your memory, but you can't feel what it was like. It's in your body all the time, yeah. It's always happening. It's already right there, but because you live, because of being up in the realm of knowledge, the realm of knowledge can't understand the realm of not knowledge.

[40:21]

But it sort of vaguely feels it. You sort of remember it, but you can't quite. And that's part of our motivation for practice. But that's not enough. Because we have all these fun things to do in the realm of words, we can say, well, yeah, I'm missing it, but so what? I've got all this stuff to do. But if this is painful, too, then we may say, well, maybe I let the kid And you don't necessarily know that if you're removed, when the pain's removed, you also get all those jewels. You get a double, you get double jeopardy and double reward. So, yeah. It sounds like it, prior to creation, you know, the Big Bang, whatever, starting of emotion, that leads to all this...

[41:26]

I think that there was almost, let's say, an endless place going nowhere, and maybe something has to, in order to start moving, something has to make, the stakes have to get high, something has to be forgotten, something has to be begun again, so that we can play, be a play, an interplay. That just has to keep it. You know, either it's nothing and everything, and you're just going to sit in steady state, or else we need to have it. . No, it wasn't duality.

[42:29]

Oneness wanted duality so it could know something. I'm faith without knowing, you know, not being able to remember. That makes it a heroic journey. That's a weird word, but I think it does. Yeah, and you have glimmerings of this. You have glimmerings. And you sort of know it, but it's not in such an intense knowing. It's kind of like, you know, because you have forgotten it. If you could remember it, then you wouldn't want to get back to it because you'd have it. But you can't remember it. Therefore, you can't remember it. But you sort of remember it because it's in you all the time. It's constantly feeding you all the time. It's just that you're separated from it by your own thinking. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[43:31]

Now, clearly observed doesn't mean to let go. Clearly observed means letting go and observing. Mm-hmm. If you see what you were before, though, that's not what it was like before. If you see what you were like before, it wasn't like that. When you were that way before, you weren't seeing it. So seeing what is like before is like a memory, but it's not like what it was like before.

[44:35]

If you sense it, that's not what it was like before. When it was before, it was no you sensing it. It was sensing it without a you sensing it. You cannot remember that. You can think of it, but you cannot remember it really. You can vaguely see, you can see pictures of it. Like you say, unconsciously, there's images of it. But when you look at the images, before you were it. Now you're looking at it. So now you look at it, but that's not what it was like before. Before there was nobody looking at it. There was just you were that. And that's a vague kind of loneliness or sense of loss. And I'm saying again, that's not sufficient for us to do the work. We need additional pain to motivate us to overcome this dualistic thinking, which sees the way it used to be, which longs for something else. And the people here, you people do have sufficient motivation, so now you're working towards reunion.

[45:46]

It seems as though also at the point that pain coming in, originally, there are many responses to it, and all human-created stuff, In a sense, it's a response to the pain that comes with the self-clinging. It's like these millions and millions of ways that we attempt to get past the suffering. So it's like the creative act of what we're trying to do here is very directly attempting to reunite. The suffering itself is the impetus for all creation that human beings do.

[46:49]

De-escalate the teaching so it isn't dual. Uh-huh. They bridge the everyday stuff? Uh-huh. No, it doesn't. All you got to do is have enough faculties to... to have self-cleaning.

[48:16]

And, you know, most people have that enough. Why did creation create? Well, I mean, why did the Big Bang happen? Anyway, I don't get into those kinds of questions. I would say, I won't answer why. You can get somebody else to answer why. But I will say how, how creation works, I'm happy to talk about that.

[49:23]

But why, you know, why did, you know, Pam just told you a why. But why creation creates, I'd rather talk about how. That's what I'm trying to talk about, how creation works. And at this phase of development anyway, we have suffering beings on our hands. Okay? And the suffering beings and Buddhism is just about this particular part, this particular point. All the emphasis is on the suffering beings. Okay? So we're trying to see why and how the beings are suffering. And the root cause of the suffering is this self, clinging. And I'm even proposing that we wouldn't want to avoid that because the self-clinging is actually the key. It's the key, too. It's the motivation and it's the key. It's the reason why we're interested in Buddhism.

[50:26]

It's exactly what Buddhism is addressed to. And it's also the place where the whole thing turns around, right? And that's self-clinging. Yes? I don't know. Okay, now again I proposed to you the image of the mass of all living beings and that if these living, I would propose to you that if these living beings are not, if they don't know any objects, that this is a mass of bliss, organic bliss.

[51:33]

And I propose to you that when parts of this mass of this totality of living creatures, and I wouldn't even call them living creatures quite yet, but I call them living creatures, living beings actually, sentient beings, at the point when part of this mass starts to become aware of objects, at that point I propose that self arises and self-clinging arises. and to wake up and therefore suffering. And in order to make this mass of all living beings a happy mass of living beings again, the way they would have been before they knew anything, in response to this suffering, there appears Buddha. And Buddha is not anything in the slightest bit additional to this mass of suffering. So this mass of suffering is the context or the womb of Buddha.

[52:49]

This mass of living beings that are suffering is the womb of Buddha. It is the germ of Buddha. It is the seed of Buddha. It's both the seed and the womb. So the jewel of Buddha, the jewel of Dharma, the jewel of Sangha appear in this mass of living beings. And living beings, again, is synonymous with beings that cling to themselves and beings that suffer. And in this mass of beings, there are some individual beings who have been transformed and our bodhisattvas and Buddhas in this mass, showing an example in the mass to other beings in the mass of ways that they can appreciate the interconnectedness of the mass again and be free of the clinging which prevents them from feeling that, and the clinging which causes their suffering.

[54:03]

Well, it's getting late today. So I'm just sort of setting the stage. I'd like to start talking about now the three jewels, the Buddha. There's really primarily one jewel that's the Buddha. The other two are kind of outflows, natural outflows, or natural, not outflows, I should say, natural consequences, are naturally flow from Buddha, that the Buddha has a teaching and the Buddha has a community. But I'm proposing that this is the context of Buddha. So in your meditation, too, Somehow, if you can just feel that, you know, awaken to this mass of all beings, live as the mass of all beings, and also realize that you have the problem of being located, or I should say that the mass of being has the problem of being located in individual beings who have individual eyes, individual selves, and therefore feel separated.

[55:35]

But I'm not suggesting necessarily you think of that image, but rather that by thoroughly being in your particular place, with your particular sense of separateness and your particular pain, that by settling into that, you awaken to this totality. And that also causes you, by opening up to this interconnectedness, you also integrate this earlier stage of development when we all felt that way, when we all felt that basic thing of everybody being the same to us and nobody out there but just feeling connectedness. And this, ironically, this connectedness with all living beings is very similar to when your babies are dying and you can't do anything about it.

[56:43]

It's a very similar kind of situation. That not being able to do anything about dying babies is actually what it's like when you're connected with all life. and death.

[57:05]

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