This weekend in this temple we are having a party. We’re having a ceremony for people who are initiated into the path of becoming a Buddha.
For people to be initiated into the path of becoming a Buddha. It’s a formal ceremony, to initiate people into be Bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas are people who are in the process of awakening, who are in the process of becoming Buddhas. It’s voluntarily entering into a process of initiation to practice the vow to attain enlightenment so that you can be optimally beneficial in this world. So that when you meet beings, where ever you go, when you meet beings, you can meet them and awaken the spirit of love, in the meeting. Or, if not awaken it, support it, awaken it, nurture it, enter it – with the person you meet. Bodhisattva’s are called Buddha’s children, or children of Buddha. And Buddha welcomes up to be a child of Buddha and to grow up to be a Buddha. From the perspective of enlightenment, all beings have this same potential.
We invite all ancestors of the Zen tradition and also Buddhas and ancestors of any other traditions. The disciples ritually give up all attachments, and any kind of hindrance to the way of the Buddha. Then they confess that in the past they, quite a few times, have slipped off the path of enlightenment and have become involved in personal activity, personal karma. And also as part of this ceremony, they receive the Buddha’s precepts. There’s different forms they’ve been presented. In China they were usually presented in the form of 10 major and 48 minor – 58 altogether. In the tradition of Soto Zen there are 16. And if you’d like to see what these precepts are, there are little cards that have them. You can take one after the talk.
So these precepts are given during the ceremony.
The first precept, in this tradition, is the first precept in almost all Buddhist traditions and that is to take refuge in Buddha.
And there are 3 basic virtues to the Buddha that we take refuge in.
First, we take refuge in Buddha as supreme perfect enlightenment.
Next we take refuge in Buddha as Buddha appeared in history, 2500 yrs ago.
And take refuge in Buddha as Buddha is living today in our lives; that is Buddha in the form of being learning Buddhism – being edified about life.
So Buddha is thrice - enlightenment itself, the manifestation of a person in history who began the tradition, and the actual process of learning about enlightenment in daily life. So the first precept is to return to these three aspects of Buddha. I say, take refuge. And refuge in English – 1st meaning is protection or shelter, from hardship, and danger. That’s one meaning of refuge. That is part of the Buddhist meaning of refuge is that we take refuge in Buddha as a shelter, a protection form hardship and danger. And, another meaning of refuge is as a relief from hardship and danger and misery. But the etymological meaning is refuge - fuge means fly. Return flight. So it means to fly back – to fly back to Buddha. So the etymological meaning is to fly back to Buddha, to return to Buddha – to return home, to enlightenment, our true home. That’s the first precept in all Buddhist schools, but in particular this list of 16 has that precept first. … The primary precept is Buddhism is go back to Buddha. Return to your true nature – that’s the main thing.
You’re going back to Buddha – it’s not as if you’re going some other place to Buddha. Returning to Buddha. The etym meaning is more primary than the denotative meaning. The denotative meaning is that Buddha is a relief or shelter from suffering. That’s true, but the primary thing is we go back to Buddha, and then we find our shelter.
The people who are sitting here to my right……
Also, a scary part of this ceremony, is before receiving the precepts they get a new name. In one sense they’re very happy about this and in another sense, they’re a little scared because what happens to their old name. Well, they can keep it. And they get a new robe.……
So part of the ceremony is they become Buddha’s children. And in a sense they enter Buddha’s family, which includes their previous family, but it’s much bigger. So they enter this new huge family, with all the Buddhas, and they get a new name, and a new robe a Buddha robe. Then they receive the precepts.
Now all these precepts teachings about true love. About how to have true love. Love without attachment. Love without trying to gain something. Love in its true enlightened form, that’s what it’s about.
(left a certain amount out here, about a particular person)
Perfect pure love, can always be more thoroughly learned about. All these people are in the process of learning how to practice these precepts. We have not yet finished our learning about how to practice these precepts.
This ceremony in some sense means these people want to learn more. They’re publicly declaring themselves as wishing to learn and live these precepts.
When I first started to do zen meditation, I was in the north part of the country, doing it by myself. It was hard to do the discipline of meditation by myself. So I thought maybe if I went someplace where other people were doing it, it would be easier, I mean I would be more successful. So I came to Zen Center to be in a place where a lot of people were coming together to practice meditation, and it really did help a lot. And so when I came here, I was able to practice regularly. Now it’s getting close to 35 years, of being supported by the community to practice meditation. So it was very helpful to me to come here and get that support.
Similarly, many people want to practice the excellent precepts of an enlightening being, but they have a little problem. It’s hard to do it by yourself. So they come together in a group and do a ceremony. The ceremony is to support them in this effort. It’s a process to support and encourage the very challenging practice of being devoted to the welfare of all beings, and practicing the precepts which help us understand what that might be.
These Bodhisattva precepts are not so much about personal perfection. They’re more about perfecting our relationships. Having perfect, true relationship, than that I’m perfect. So if I’m not perfect, which I’m not, and forget about perfect, I’m just not very good, for me to tell you that I’m not very good, is a true relationship. So, a pretty bad person who’s honest about it, can have a really good relationship with you.
And some other people, who are pretty darn good, but who aren’t honest about the limits of their goodness, you can have a pretty bad relationship with an excellent person. You do have a bad relationship with them because they’re lying to you. That’s one of their problems. Or they’re even lying to themselves. Even though they’re excellent, they’re not looking at the precept about telling the truth and noticing that there’s some work there.
So, it’s not so much that we’re better than other people to receive these precepts (refers to the part left out), but that we want to develop good relationships with other people. Even if we don’t improve at all, maybe without me improving, I can have better and better relationship with you. So I can keep being a low-grade creature, but have a better and better relationship with you.
So the Buddha, we think oh the Buddha is pretty darn good, right. Of course the Buddha is spectacularly wonderful, brilliant, wise, skillful and truly loving, but that’s not what’s really good about Buddha. What’s good about Buddha is the relationship Buddha has with people, is the relationship people have with Buddha. Buddha relates really, really well, and relates in such a good way, that we relate well to Buddha. Buddha relates in such a way the WE get better at the relationship too. It isn’t like Buddha’s good at it and we’re not. If we’re not so good, Buddha’s not so good. Matter of fact, Buddha may need to be worse than us so that we can get better. Then realize that Buddha being worse was just right.
Within the Bodhisattva precepts there are precepts of personal moral discipline – the practices of moral discipline are in the context of true relationship. They’re not just to make the practitioner purer and squeaky clean. It’s not to make purer and purer beings, but to have better an better relationships. But part of having good relationships is to have some personal discipline.
I think it’s good to look at the word discipline and the word morale. I forgot to look and see if moral is a gendered word. But morale is the feminine form of moral. So moral has to do primarily with judgments of good and bad human activity and character. So to be judging the skillfulness and unskillfuness of your behavior is part of moral discipline. But morale had to do with the confidence and cheerfulness and willingness with which you carry out your activities. Moral is more about individual behavior and morale is more about communal conduct. Morale is more about how we are practicing together. So morale is in some ways closer to the Bodhisattva precepts, and precepts of personal discipline are included there, but in the context of practicing together.
Recently I’ve been presenting a kind of a picture or a story of the conditions in which understanding of the truth can occur, or is born. In the context of the precepts, you could say I’m trying to describe conditions for the awakening of true love. Because true love awakens with understanding of truth, both of them together. And the way I’ve been talking about it is, first of all, as a kind of foundation, we need to have confidence and trust. Trust, first of all, that the situation, that we’re in – not to trust that it’s a good situation or a happy situation, if everyone is unhappy or miserable – not to trust that, but to trust the situation if everyone is unhappy or miserable, to trust, to have confidence, that this is the situation we should work with. To have confidence that this situation that we’re in is the one we should work with – not “should” but can! And want to.
For example, here in this room, do you have confidence right now that this is a situation that would be good to work with, or do you think there should be some other situation to work with. To think there is some other situation you should work with - this is a free country, you can think that, but that would be an example of not having confidence that this is the situation you can work with, that you want to work with and can work with. For me, it’s want to. It’s must and want to, or want to and must, and then, maybe can. In other words, I want to work with the situation and I want to want to work with every situation I’m in. I want to learn how to want to work with every situation I’m in. Now sometimes the way you work with a situation you’re in, is to run really fast. Sometimes you use the place you’re standing, as a place to put one of your feet, while you move the other one forward. And then when the leading foot is on a new plot of earth, then you use that situation to bring the other one forward. And in that way you propel yourself across the planet. In each moment you work with the situation you’re in. To work with it that way and feel that you want to work in the way you’re working in the place you’re working, that’s confidence in your life as it’s manifesting around you right now. The way starts here. I say that with confidence. I think that’s the way. I’m talking about the way that starts here. Not where I’m not. But oddly enough, or maybe not oddly enough, people sometimes lack confidence in the place they are. They think they need to go someplace else to walk away, or to be. That’s called lack of confidence, or trust in where you are.
So there’s trust in where you are and then there’s another level of trust which is trust in the teaching. Trust in some teaching. What I’m talking about is not that I trust people –not that I trust you or you or you – but rather, I trust being with you. It’s not that I trust, someone who, I don’t know what, somebody who’s a child, I don’t trust that a child with keys to a car can drive the car. I trust being with that child and those keys in the car. I trust working with that situation, rather than what the child’s going to do. I don’t know what people will do. I don’t trust that people won’t punch me in the nose. I don’t trust that. And I really don’t need to trust it, myself. Maybe you think you do. I wouldn’t recommend it, actually trusting that people won’t punch you in the nose. I don’t trust that people won’t lie to me. I mean, that’s my vow, is to not trust that people won’t lie to me, but, work with the person who’s talking to me, and look at them and listen to them and see what’s going on. Maybe they’re telling the truth, maybe they’re lying, I don’t know, let’s check it out. I have trust in being there with the person. That way, you could trust every situation as a situation in which you can practice the teachings.
Now, if there’s time today, I’ll go back and talk about how to develop that trust. But I’d like to move on for now and say the next condition for the realization of understanding of truth and compassion and Buddha, Buddha’s way, I’m calling complete relaxation. Sometimes we call it Samadhi, tranquility, renunciation, but I’ll just call it complete relaxation. I don’t want to say one comes before the other, but I will say the relaxation does depend on this confidence. If you don’t have confidence to be here, then you can’t relax here. Then you have to go someplace else to relax. But you may never get there. If you have confidence now, here, confidence that you can work with the situation, then maybe you can have confidence that relaxation in the situation will promote the real work in the situation. And I suggest to you, that relaxation in the situation will promote realizing the truth, here, now. But if we don’t have confidence and trust, the relaxation usually doesn’t happen. And even when there is confidence and trust, the relaxation doesn’t necessarily happen in a way that you understand it right away. But it really is there when you trust. That’s why – it’s a condition, but it really is simultaneous. When you trust where you are, as the place you are going to work, there’s a relaxation there. There’s a loosening of a grip on the situation. You trust that you’re here, and you’re willing to be. Your morale is good. There’s more to talk about about relaxation, but just to move on now and maybe come back….
The next step, after relaxation, what is possible, based on confidence and relaxation is to be playful. Now, we sometimes do say “play soccer” or “play” other things, “play” poker, but people are not always being playful when they play poker. Sometimes when people are playing poker, they are being playful, I think. And when they are being playful, while playing poker, I think they are on the track to understanding poker, as the Buddha way. And if they are being playful while they’re playing poker, then they’re relaxed while they’re playing poker, and if they’re relaxed while they’re playing poker, that’s because they have confidence in the situation of poker – which, again, is not confidence that the other people aren’t trying to cheat you, it’s confidence that I’m in a poker game, this is my life now, and I’m going to practice. Or I’m in a poker game, this is my life, now, this is where I’m going to practice, and I’m now walking out the door, because this room has too much smoke in it. I’m going to go to a non-smoking poker game. I understand Zen Center has a poker game tonight, non-smoking poker game - vegetarian poker game. That’s my kind of poker game, someone might say.
Or, it might be a barbeque poker game, and that’s where you are. But maybe you just don’t eat the pig. And the way you don’t eat the pig is the way based on confidence, relaxation and play, and you start to teach the other people how to play with the pig, and practice the precepts.
The next state after learning how to play and being playful is to play with somebody else, is to play together. And based on playing together, we enter into creativity, and entering into creativity, we enter into understanding Buddha’s truth, because Buddha’s truth is basically the teaching that everything is creativity, that everything is dependently co-arisen. Entering into creativity together, through playfulness, we realize the middle way. We realize the middle way that everything is. We realize the middle way and the creativity of the Buddha’s teaching, we realize the creativity of each person we meet, we realize the creativity of our relationships, primarily it’s through our relationships - we realize the dramatic – we realize and enact and dramatize creativity by playing together. So confidence, relaxation, playfulness, playing together, creativity, and then dramatizing the truth of creativity together, this is how to realize the Buddha way.
And I can and you can apply these conditions to anything. So you can apply it to teachings, to practices, to beings and to non-living beings. You can apply it to clay and marble, paint and canvas, dancing, singing, computers, writing, each person you meet, each animal you meet, each plant you meet, and in the context of today, you can apply it to the precepts.
So these precepts are, in some sense they’re guidelines for true relationship, or true love, and in another sense they’re standards or criteria for true relationship. For example, in a true relationship, you’re taking refuge in Buddha. You meet the person and when you meet the person, you feel like -- In this meeting I am returning to Buddha, in this meeting I am returning to the truth, in this meeting I am returning to the preciousness of our relationship, the community. In this meeting, I’m practicing not killing, I’m not taking what’s not given, I’m receiving what’s given, in other words, I’m receiving you as you are now, and I’m receiving myself as I am now, I’m not asking for something other than what’s happening. I’m not stealing. I’m telling the truth – or I’m dedicated to telling the truth. So these precepts are guidelines or standards.
OK, so how do we play with these precepts? I guess the first step again is trust. Trust in the precepts? Well, yes, sort of, but trust in the precepts doesn’t mean trusting the precepts over there, it’s more like trust that in the situation of the precepts, of receiving the precepts, when I’m receiving the precepts, when I’m looking at the precepts, I trust the situation. I’m going to work with the precepts.
And included in working with the precepts, is in the situation when the precepts are not happening, like in a situation when I’m lying, having confidence that I’m going to work with my lying, the way to work with my lying, is to tell the truth that I’m lying, that you confess that you’re lying. The way to work with your stealing, if you’re taking what’s not given, the way to work with it is to acknowledge that you’re taking something that wasn’t given. So whether you’re in line with the precepts or out of line with the precepts you can practice with the precepts. Do you have confidence that you can practice with them, and now I’m coming back to how to develop confidence, in working with the precepts?
So this is a big topic, but basically, we are generally taught, in churches – I shouldn’t say – but we may be taught in churches and school and at home, that our mistakes are to be feared, hidden, and avoided. Does that sound familiar? Maybe nobody ever said that – you should fear your mistakes, you should hide them, and you should avoid them. Because if someone was telling you that you should hide them, they probably shouldn’t tell you that you’re hiding them. They just show you. You can just tell they’re hiding so you kind of say, “Oh, hiding’s the way.” So part of this relaxation, part of learning to relax with practicing the precepts, is to teach and affirm that we need not fear, hide and avoid mistakes. To teach and affirm that we don’t have to hide, and fear, and avoid being a fool, or fear and avoid being seen as a fool – I think some people doing this ceremony and receiving the precepts might say, I might appear foolish to take on this discipline. And may I also mention, etymologically, “discipline” comes from the Latin disciplina, which comes from discipoula, which means pupil or disciple. And discipoulis comes from discere, which means “to learn.” So the ultimate root of discipline is “to learn.” So when we become disciples of these precepts, we become disciples or students of a process by which we learn about the precepts, what they mean. They are to guide us, they are to help us, in some sense, have some way to find our mistakes – not to avoid them. It’s OK to avoid mistakes. But maybe, when you avoid mistakes, you don’t learn anything. If you already know how to do something, fine, then you do it. But learning involves mistakes. So in order to learn the Buddha way, we need to not be afraid to make mistakes – to not be afraid of being a fool, to not be afraid of falling off the path. And also, to learn to not hide when we make mistakes, or be concerned with avoiding it. The emphasis is not on avoiding mistakes, the emphasis is on doing what you think is good. The emphasis is on doing, acting in a way that you feel is most appropriate. That’s your orientation, but then you make mistakes. If you’re watching all the time about how to avoid mistakes, you don’t have any time to do anything. Because you can make a mistake anytime, in many many different ways. Primarily, we can miss our life. The main thing is, what’s life, what’s living, what’s living what’s living, and then, of course, we do something which we think is life, and then we find out it was a mistake. Or we do something we thought was life, and suddenly we seem to be having an accident. We seem to be having an accident. Now, if we’re afraid of having accidents, even before they happen, then we’re tense and we’re not going to learn.
So we need to create, for the beginning of the Bodhisattva precept practice, we need to create an understanding, not so much that mistakes are OK, and accidents are OK, I don’t really want to say that. I just want to say that we can learn from them, and the point is to learn. If you don’t do anything and stay in your closet, maybe you won’t make any mistakes other than being catatonic. But if you get out in the world and act, it’s pretty likely to make a mistake.
But in many situations here at Zen Center, I see this pattern. We have a teaching situation, a learning situation, we’re studying some teaching, we’re studying some practice, and people are afraid to make a mistake in front of other people. They’re afraid to make a mistake and they’re afraid to be seen. They want to avoid making mistakes, and one of the ways they avoid making mistakes is they don’t move or say anything. So how can we promote a feeling - we can work with mistakes, we can grow from mistakes, we need them. Now the thing is we have them, we’ve already got them, they’re already happening all the time, but if you’re tense and afraid of them, then you don’t get the benefit. I’m already screwing up, I’m already being somewhat unskillful, and if I’m afraid of it then I’m just unskillful. But if I’m relaxed while I’m being a fool, I will learn. If I’m relaxed and playful in my foolishness, I will, we will – if I’m relaxed and playful in my foolishness, I will even be foolish enough to play with you. It’s somewhat foolish to dare to play with others, especially others who are playing with you. Now if you’re playing with others who aren’t playing, that’s not actually as risky. If they’re afraid to move or speak, then you can dance around and be a fool and they just look at you like - well who knows, they won’t tell you want they think. They’re probably thinking something like, “Well, he’s a fool,” or “God, I’m glad he’s doing that not me,” or “I wonder if I could do that, no, probably not. Or some might say, “That really looks like fun,” and when they see that they’re starting to learn to play and then you have a playmate. In some ways that’s more difficult because now you’re starting to enter into creativity. This person’s not under your control, and your not under theirs and then you’re relaxing with it again, and, wow! We’re entering into reality here. Oh my God! Oh my Buddha!
I often think, and I’ll say it again, when I was a junior and senior in high school and a freshman in college I played Judo. Judo means “Gentle Way.” It’s a Japanese form of martial arts and we call what we do together play. And, one of the first things they teach you in Judo is how to fall. And how to fall means how to fall so that you don’t get hurt. There’s ways of breaking your fall that you teach, and you do little falls and bigger falls and then you learn how to fall in such a way that you don’t get hurt. And not only that, since they’re teaching you to fall, obviously falling is part of the program. Falling isn’t exactly OK or not OK, falling is just part of the deal. I’m not saying mistakes are OK or not OK, they’re just part of the deal. I’m not saying it’s OK if you steal. I’m not saying it’s OK, I’m not saying it’s not OK. I’m saying people do steal apparently. I’m not saying lying’s OK or not OK, I’m saying sometimes people lie, sometimes people tell the truth.
The point is that when you fall or when you lie, you aren’t afraid – that when you fall you can take care of yourself when you fall, when you lie you can take care of yourself when you lie, in other words you can just say, “Hey, I lied.” You can relax with the lie. You can relax with the fall. So suddenly you’re flying through the air, and you know in a split second you’re going to be coming down to earth, so if you know how to fall, then you can relax with being thrown through the air, and you can break your fall and it’s not a problem. As a matter of fact, you learned even more about how to fall, you did another one. Plus you also learned how you got thrown, which is what you’re trying to learn. You learned how you get thrown and how other people get thrown. That’s what you’re learning in this case.
Learning how we make mistakes is not so much just so that we’ll learn how not to make mistakes. It’s more that we’ll learn there aren’t really any mistakes. Learning how we makes mistakes from these Bodhisattva precepts is to finally learn that there aren’t any mistakes. Learning how we make mistakes in true love is to find true love. In other words to find that there isn’t any not-true love. We don’t have to get rid of not-true love, we don’t have to get rid of falling, we need to learn that there is no falling, and in Judo, you learn that there is no falling, really. There is no falling – the life of Judo is – flying all around the world. And they also told you early in the practice – some big strong people come to the program and start playing, and if they’re really strong, if they don’t want to get thrown, almost no on can throw them, because they resist everything you try to do. So they never get thrown, so they don’t even need to learn how to fall. Of course, if some really excellent teacher comes, or master, they can throw these really big people, but it’s pretty difficult to throw them if they won’t move at all. But they say if you don’t move, if you don’t let people move you around, you won’t learn. And again, if you’re afraid to fall, then you resist moving, because every time you move, you’re vulnerable to being thrown. It’s through the falling that you learn the game. But we need to be comfortable falling.
Now if we fall and everybody laughs at us and calls us stupid, it makes it harder to relax with the mistake. But that’s part of what happens sometimes; sometimes you make mistakes and people do laugh at you. I don’t think we can eliminate that. So how do we trust the situation of making mistakes and being ridiculed and punished for our mistakes? Well, how do we usually do it? By fear, hiding, and spending all our time trying to avoid them. I’m saying, OK, we don’t need that; we do not actually need to be afraid of making mistakes even though you might be ridiculed and punished for making them. You still don’t need to be afraid. It’s not necessary. You can make a mistake and be ridiculed and punished even though you weren’t afraid before making the mistake. The fear isn’t necessary, to get in trouble. You can make mistakes with and without fear. Did that make sense? Haven’t you sometimes made mistakes without being afraid before you did the thing? But sometimes you’re afraid before you do the thing and get in trouble and sometimes you’re not afraid before you do the thing and get in trouble. And sometimes you’re not afraid before you do it, and you don’t get in trouble, and sometimes you….anyway, all the different possibilities. The point I’m trying to make is simply, if you’re afraid of making mistakes you won’t learn, and if you’re not afraid, and you’re relaxed, while you’re living, because everything you do, everything single thing I do, everything I say, everything I think, everything I do, could be a mistake.
I feel that way. Now some people feel like – no there’re some things that could not be a mistake, and I say, “Well, fine,” That’s like being like – nobody’s going to throw you. You’re not going to learn anything if you close the door on being mistaken. If you say “If I do this, that will not violate anybody’s Bodhisattva precepts,” OK, fine, this is tension, this is not relaxation, this is not confidence, this is not being playful, this closes the door to the creativity which is right under your nose, coursing through your blood, and jumping around in your cells right now.
So. How can we encourage and support not being afraid to make mistakes, because we are going to make mistakes. And again, if we can really feel, again, not that mistakes are OK, but that we don’t need the fear of them, we don’t need to hide them, and we don’t need to avoid them. They are going to happen so we don’t need to avoid them, matter of fact we can’t. And hiding them doesn’t help the learning either, and fear doesn’t help the learning. So how can we let go of the hiding and the fear around mistakes, around falling.
So, if you compare this to the practice of Judo, we should get better at the practice of making mistakes. So, I guess today I should look to see if I can find any mistakes. Now if I don’t find any mistakes, I don’t know what that means; it probably means I’m not playing, but I think I probably will find some mistakes on my part. Of course it’s easy to find mistakes on other people’s part, right, so you’ll probably be able to find some other people’s mistakes, but finding my own mistakes. I think mostly people are afraid of themselves making mistakes, they’re not so much afraid of other people making mistakes unless the person’s operating on us or something like that, or our chauffeur. If our life depends on them not making mistakes, then we’re concerned, right? But, really, it’s a mistake relative to you. It’s other people’s mistakes relative to you that you care about.
Now also if you care about the other people with some attachment, even though they’re far away and it doesn’t relate to you directly, then the attachment relates them to you so you’re also concerned with them making mistakes. And I will spread the rule, that the fear of their making mistakes also doesn’t help you learn, or help them learn. That you will be able to teach them better about their mistakes, if you’re relaxed about their mistakes. You will learn, you will become an adept. But becoming adept doesn’t mean there’s no mistakes. It just means that when the mistake happens, it is in the context of wisdom and compassion.
One time I was playing Judo, and my teacher sometimes played with us, and of course usually when you play with a teacher, the teacher was basically going to demonstrate various things on the disciples. The teacher was going to show how to do this and that, which the teacher could do pretty much at will, because the teacher was very skillful, so the teacher would throw these people all over the room and ….he wouldn’t throw people until they knew how to fall, and they were supposed to – not necessarily let him do whatever – but just go play with him. And usually what would happen was he would throw the people.
So one time I went to play with the teacher, and the teacher was throwing me, and in the middle of the throw, the teacher got thrown. The teacher knew how to fall, so the teacher fell. The teacher fell. The student threw the teacher. But the student threw the teacher while the teacher was throwing the student. I never would have been able to throw him, or rather, the throwing of him, which I didn’t really do, but it happened. It happened because, I couldn’t have been in this process where he got thrown if he hadn’t tried to throw me. But since he was throwing me, and I was being thrown, he could be thrown. This is creativity.
And this was – you know – I basically retired after that. I was never going to be as good as him, but that moment was like --- And it wasn’t that I beat him either, it wasn’t me going up there and I’m going to throw the teacher. It was me going up there to play with the teacher and probably get thrown, and being thrown, and suddenly he’s thrown, and that’s like – I got the dharma of Judo. That’s it.
So it’s not that when you become adept, you don’t get thrown. It’s that when you get thrown, the student wakes up. The student understands the teaching when the teacher makes a mistake. Now if the teacher makes a mistake and the teacher is afraid of making mistakes, then the teacher is not a teacher of Buddhism. If a teacher makes a mistake and hides it then the student cannot learn. But if the teacher makes a mistake, and obviously the student did get it, because the teacher fell flat on his face, or actually on his back, in Judo – falling on your face is pretty difficult to do, but it is possible – put the arms out and the legs out and lift the head up a little bit – usually you go on your side or your back.
In tango they teach that when you’re dancing, there’s a leader and a follower. I hesitate to call it teacher and student, but anyway there’s a leader and a follower. And if the leader suggests something, and the follower does something different than what the leader suggests, the leader hides the followers – not so much hides – the leader protects the follower from being the one who made the mistake. In a sense it’s a mistake, because you said, you do this, and you meant such and such and she did that, but you protect her, you protect her --- I should say, it’s not a mistake it’s an accident. You protect the accident by including the accident into the flow of the dance. And there again, you’re playful with it. You’re not like – “I didn’t mean that!” You take that accident, the unexpected response you got and you incorporate it into the dance. And then you’re both a success with this accident, which you did not intend, and she did not intend, or he did not intend, because he or she never knows before you suggest something what they’re going to do next. They do not have an idea, “Well, I’m going to do this and that.” They’re just standing there and you suggest this and then they have some understanding of it. It’s always a surprise to them, I shouldn’t say always – but there it is, waiting to receive, and you get surprised by what they do. And if what they do is a real surprise, then it’s all the more an opportunity to incorporate it into the flow. If they do what you think, if they do what you meant, it’s OK, I’m not saying the dance is dead, but it’s really alive when they surprise you and you can incorporate that. So there’s no end to mistakes which are – you know – they are really part of it. We need, we need, we need, to feel that way together. Otherwise, we’re not going to dare to relax.
Once again, we do have mistakes, no shortage of them, but what we need to do is feel we can let go of the fear part around the mistakes, we can start to learn how to stop hiding them, and we can try to give up putting our energy into avoiding them. Work on that. That will develop trust in the situation in which relaxation can develop, and we can dare to dance and play together. Which Zen leads to – entering into the dynamic world of interpendence, where we will understand.
So the game can be Tango, it can be any relationship, Judo, or working with the precepts between you and the precepts, first of all, learning to play with the precepts, and then learning to play with others with the precepts. So anything can be used as the medium, or the topic for this confidence, relaxation, playing, playing together and creativity.
Tonight we have a ceremony, which I mentioned, and the ceremony is to receive these precepts, and also the ceremony has a traditional form. And probably, who knows, the form may be pretty much the way we expect it to be. There may not be any big accidents. There probably will be, but there may not be too many big accidents. Usually something, a few things unexpected happen. But even if the accidents don’t happen, but they will, the challenge for us all, for me and for the initiates is can we relax and play. And I think actually, it’s challenging for them to relax, because they know there’s a form. For example, in the beginning they come in the door here; we rehearsed and we told them they’d be coming in this door, but they may not. And there was a certain order, but they may not be in that order. And if they aren’t in that order, there’s a possibility that someone who’s not in the place we told them to be would see that as “Hey, I’m kind of a fool, I’m supposed to be last but I wound up in the front of the line.” That could happen. Then they come in here, and they walk over to the center, and they walk single file, and they walk up to the altar, and there’s a way of doing that. So, they can, like, not do it that way – like we agreed. And that would be very easy for them not to do, a lot of them, because they haven’t done it before. And then they come back and there are various other choreographies which we only went through once, and they very well might have forgotten, and they know that they might have forgotten, so they might be scared now that they have forgotten, and that they’re going to make a mistake, so then they tense up, and then some really unexpected things will happen.
Now if they relax, also sometimes they relax and space out and they kind of feel like, you know, and unexpected things can happen. A lot of things happen in these ceremonies. And then sometimes they notice, oh god, I’m tense, I’m tensing up, and I’m trying not to make a mistake, and I’m trying to do this ceremony right. And then sometimes….they may give it up, and sometimes we actually learn how to play. We might not make it there tonight. We might not make it to playfulness. I don’t know if we’ll get there. But that’s part of learning how to play…. “Well we weren’t very playful tonight, were we? No, we weren’t, we were kind of rigid and scared to make a mistake, yeah.” I’m that way too, I’m supposed to know the ceremony, right? I sometimes forget and sometimes people remind me and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they remind me after the ceremony when nobody else is around. “You forgot precept number seven.”
Now, I don’t like to read a lot of stuff during the ceremony, I like to do it without reading the script, which is dangerous. But it has more vitality, but also more mistakes. But tonight, tonight, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I think I’m going to wing it. I’m going to try to do my best, but I’m not going to look at the paper, to see the things I usually say, I’m not going to look at that to make sure I don’t make a mistake. So, you guys, I might make a lot of mistakes. So please help me, even though you don’t know much about the ceremony.
But also I have other people around watching me, who have the piece of paper, who can check to see. Actually I think maybe I don’t want you to have the paper either, and see how together without relying on anything, if we can just stumble our way into this ceremony. And see what happens, maybe it won’t be any more strange than usual. Or maybe, there will be a lot of mistakes.
I’ve been going on for quite a while now, it’s really late, but I just want to say some more things. In the early days of Zen Center, in 1970, Zen Center invited a person to come from Japan who was an expert on monastic forms, and he taught them to us, and we had a certain group of people who were trained to be the leaders in these new monastic forms. I really enjoyed learning them, myself, but there wasn’t much relaxation in learning these forms. And sometimes there wasn’t much playfulness. But sometimes there was. I’ll tell you about the playfulness at question and answer. But I just wanted to say that we did those forms pretty well, but there was a kind of rigidity in it and not much playfulness, and the person who was teaching us kind of glared at us every time we did something kind of unusual, so there was a real kind of pressure kind of feeling. And some people really didn’t like what we were doing, the energy of this group, learning these forms and being kind of (grrrr - sound) about it. But now that I think of it – I was starting to tell you it had this kind of aggressive kind of hard edge to it, but now I remember that that kind of broke down. It led to its own break down. And the break down of this hardness is what I’ll tell you about at question and answer.
But I also want to tell you that I heard about a monastery – it wasn’t a Buddhist monastery but a Christian monastery for disabled people. In this case, disabled nuns. So they had nuns, female monks, and they had an abbess, and I think the abbess was blind. And some of the other nuns were blind, some of them were deaf, some of them had cerebral palsy, some were amputees, various kinds of things, and they would try to do the rituals, the standard Roman Catholic rituals. Of course the abbess couldn’t see what was going on. So they would do these rituals, and while they were doing these rituals, they would do things like fall down on the ground, they would spill the blood of Christ all over people’s robes, they’d drop the body of Christ or put it in the wrong orifice or something; they’d make all these mistakes. But when they made these mistakes, they’d laugh. They wouldn’t beat up on each other, they’d laugh and continue the ritual. They had a ball. These things are for us to play, and it’s through play that we understand the awesome ultimate reality. It’s not by being tight, “grrr I’m going to understand the ultimate truth,” it’s through being light and flexible and playful that we understand the supreme enlightenment. But we need forms, otherwise there’s no joke.
Like that guy Charles Schultz, one of the things after he died I heard he said was, “There’s nothing funny about somebody kicking a football. It’s not funny. What’s funny is, missing the football.” So how many times did Charlie Brown miss the football? “OK, this time I’m not going to miss, here we go.” And then, it’s the miss….but the form is kick the ball, ball is for kicking it, and then you miss it. But if there wasn’t a form called kicking the ball, then missing the ball wouldn’t mean anything. It’s because there’s a standard of being a Buddha, that we’re so funny. And if you get the joke, you enter Buddha. You really take refuge in Buddha. And you realize – you really understand these precepts. You understand what it means to take refuge in Buddha, you understand what it means not to lie, you understand because you’re not holding on to your idea of it, and you learn that by – you have your idea, and then you fall on your face, and then you laugh and then you get it. OK? Great! So shall we proceed then, down the way?