And old Buddha said that while carrying a self or while holding on to a self to conduct one's life and confirm all things, or to... That's okay. To do that is delusion. When all things come forth, When the coming forth of all things confirms and conducts one's life, that's awakening.

[01:29]

And a basic teaching of Dogen Zenji is that conducting your life. The Chinese word he uses there is shu. It means to conduct your life, or to order your life, or to govern your life well, which we also often call practice, or cultivation. You do that and the witnessing or certification or proof or vindication of that effort, those two things are one thing. But that is under the circumstances

[02:33]

that is true of that the oneness of them is under the circumstances not of caring a self but when all things come forth to conduct and confirm one's life. So the foremost thing for a person to do is not to make your life into enlightenment, because already it is. All we need to do is let go of the idea of self. To detach from the notion or sense of self is all we need to do. And so I'm going to be again talking about some ways that we can protect ourselves from the habit of holding on to fixed ideas.

[03:52]

The primary fixed idea is a fixed idea of self. But this particular thing then gets projected on everything else. So because we have a fixed idea of who we are, we also have a fixed idea of what practice is, about what right conduct is, about what compassion is, about what wisdom is, about what enlightenment is, about what bodhisattvas are, about everything. So the foremost thing we're concerned about, the first thing, is to detach from self. And to detach from self, again, does not mean to get rid of the self. To get rid of the self would be to grab the self and throw it away. Detached from the self means that it just spontaneously drops away by itself.

[05:05]

One method, which I mentioned last night, is, first of all, we need to identify what you think identifies some self. You need to find if you have some self that you think you have. And in particular, try to see... Well, I said identify, but another way to say is find your identity. Everybody has an identity except people with some kind of organic problem, or people with severely disturbed psychological development, or teenagers.

[06:16]

Having an identity is part and parcel of being a human being. There is a constant identifying function of the mind. What identity do you have? And look, is this identity something which just pops up moment by moment and is then replaced by another identity and another identity and another identity? If so, Again, assuming you're not a teenager or have some kind of organic problem, that's enlightenment. There was a popular book recently called A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, or was it His Hat for a Wife? And one of the stories which I thought was particularly moving, and one of the reasons why it was moving was because I read it, that was a joke too, is that it was about this man, a forty-nine year old man, who basically he thought he was nineteen years old.

[08:09]

He had, he was an alcoholic, and because of alcoholism, the chemicals had destroyed, I think, something like the mammillary glands, not mammary, but mammillary, which are some glands, I think, in the brain stem that are closely associated with memory. And the way that they destroyed it was that he remembered he had normal memory up till 19 years old. And when he was 19, he was in the Navy during the Second World War, and then nothing after that could he remember. So he thought he was 19, and his name was Johnny, I believe, or Jimmy. And not only couldn't he remember anything that happened from 19 to 49, but he couldn't remember what happened a few minutes ago, or not even a minute ago. If you met him, he would say, if you met him, let's say your name was Galen.

[09:18]

If you met him, he would say, Hi, my name is Johnny, what's your name? And you'd say, Galen. He said, Glad to meet you, Galen. And then you'd look over here and say, Oh, hi, what's your name? And you'd say, My name is Hal. He'd say, Good to meet you, Hal. And then he'd look back this way and say, Hello, my name is Johnny, what's your name? And you'd say, Galen. He'd say, Good to meet you, Galen. He would forget that fast who he had just met. And the doctor actually played a trick on him one time. He said, you know, you're not 19, you're 49. And he said, come on, Doc. Who are you kidding? And anyway, he just couldn't convince him that he had lost his memory. So he held a mirror up to the guy. And the guy saw in the mirror a 49-year-old man, and he got very upset. He said, what kind of a trick is this? And got very distressed, because of course his whole reality was broken.

[10:20]

And the doctor took the mirror away, and the man was very upset, but then in a second or two he had forgotten the experience and was not upset anymore. He had, in some senses, no problems because he couldn't remember his identity. He couldn't carry it over except his 19-year-old. But also the doctor asked him, he said, who are you and do you have a self? He really had no identity. So for us to be like him would be really good. With our ability to remember and with our ability to carry, to then forsake that that habit, that mental habit, that ability we have to drop it for us would be freedom. For him it was incapacity. He couldn't function in the world. He had to live in a special home.

[11:25]

So aside from cases like that, all of us have an identity moment by moment. And our problem is that we bring it, we hold on to something and carry it with us. So we need to, first of all, let go of that or let that go. And again, one way to do it is to simply identify it. And if you identify it, if you find your identity, then to see, do you carry that identity from moment to moment? Do you have a fixed identity that you carry with you? And then watch to see how that works. Does that cause disturbance in your life? And if you just simply watch the identity, catch yourself carrying it, and see the disturbance, and you just see it over and over, it naturally drops. That's one method. It's one of the more painful methods, but that's the style some people like. It's really good water.

[12:34]

Another method is one that Hamlet discovered. You know that play about Hamlet? written by William Shakespeare. This guy had a problem at the beginning of the play. He thought something stunk or something was rotten. There's many ways to look at this play, but I would say you could look at it... One way you could look at it is... First of all, he tried to think about... He tried to think about the problem. He noticed that something was off. He tried to think about it. He even thought about maybe committing suicide. And he just... He got a little cuckoo from thinking about it a lot.

[13:56]

And then he started acting out, bumping people off and running around doing all kinds of wild things. And after he tried thinking about it and acting it out with his body and his voice, towards the latter part of the play he said, I think, readiness is all. And so another way to practice not caring a self is to practice what he found, readiness is all. In this context I'd like to mention that I agree with Alfred North Whitehead who says The essence of something like this, the essence of tragedy is not sadness. It is rather something like the solemnity of the workings of things.

[15:11]

So Hamlet is a tragedy not because it's sad, but because of the solemnity of the way events proceeded in the play. And in the midst of this solemn procession of events, the practice he came up with in the end was readiness. Okay? And you all know how to practice that, right? You don't, right? Nobody knows how to practice readiness, right? If you know how to practice readiness, that's not readiness. If you know how to practice readiness, that means you've got an idea about what readiness is and you bring it into this moment and you say, okay, now we do this. That's carrying a self.

[16:22]

That's having the burden of the practice of readiness that you carry around with you. But readiness is not something that you can carry with you. It means that you actually arrive here under the auspices of everything but knowing what to do. You arrive here equipped with everything you need and knowing nothing but that this is happening. Yet you arrive empty-handed and full-bodied. You've got everything you need without bringing anything. That's readiness. And no one knows what that is. And everyone is always that way. If you can have the courage to admit that you've got nothing in your hands from your past, and yet all you are is your past. Readiness is not to be ready for these people or those people. Readiness is not to be ready for the floor to come up and meet your face.

[17:27]

Readiness is not for anything in particular and for everything. Readiness, you can't prepare for it and you can't not prepare for it. Readiness is all and there's no way to do it. And Buddhas are those who have the courage, intelligence, and wisdom to live that way. And then, what happens? He gets stabbed with his poisoned sword, and they put him on a nice little stretcher and carry him out singing all kinds of nice songs. The events keep walking on. This is not to try to influence the way things go. This is a very solemn affair here, this universe. It's not to be tampered with. But you can be ready in the midst of it.

[18:30]

That's what we can do under the circumstances of our little tragedy. What do you think about that? Are you ready to practice readiness? Some of you are, it looks like. You can go to sleep, it's okay. It's almost time. Okay, so there was this there was this guy named Bodhidharma. He was a Chinese visitor. I mean, he was a visitor to China from India. He was the first Chinese Zen master, right?

[19:32]

And so he came to see the emperor. The emperor of China, this particular emperor, was named Wu. And he built lots of monasteries and supported lots of monks and male and female monks. And so Bodhidharma came to see him and he said to Bodhidharma, �Well, how much merit do I get for all this stuff I did?� And Bodhidharma said, �Zip it!� He said it in Chinese, of course. And the emperor kind of was a little bit staggered by this. And then he said, okay, what's the highest meaning of the holy truths? And Bodhidharma said, vast emptiness, no holiness.

[20:38]

And the emperor said, who is this, who is this facing me? And Bodhidharma said, don't know. And then Bodhidharma walked off, crossed the Yangtze River, went to Shaolin, and sat facing a wall for nine years. After he left, the emperor's minister said, Your Majesty, do you know who that was? And the emperor said, No, I don't. Who was it? He said, That was the enlightening being of Alokitesvara, the Bodhisattva infinite compassion. The emperor was very upset that he missed out noticing who was visiting and wanted to send an emissary to get the bodhisattva of infinite compassion to come back, but the minister said, he won't come back, your majesty, you missed out.

[21:49]

Now, I ask you, does that sound like infinite compassion to say to a nice emperor who's done all this good stuff for Buddhism, does that sound like compassion to say, no merit your worship? Does it sound like infinite compassion to say, vast emptiness, nothing holy, and I don't know? Does it sound like vast compassion? Well, some of you might dare to say yes, but some of you might say, well, I don't know. What do you think? Does it sound like vast compassion or a little bit of compassion or infinite compassion or not? What do you think? Huh? What? You don't know. You say yes. Thank you. It's not like my idea either, to tell you the truth.

[22:58]

It didn't sound very compassionate to me. I thought it was neat what he said, really neat, but compassionate, infinitely compassionate? Could infinite compassion come down to such tough talk? Well, that's the, what do you call it, that's the proposal of the Zen school. that somebody can talk like that and that can be infinite compassion. In other words, you and me, we got ideas about what infinite compassion is, don't we? But some people do stuff which we don't think is infinite compassion. We say, well, that's infinite compassion and that's infinite compassion, but that, wait a minute, I'm not so sure about that one. There's some people around here who do things which look like infinite compassion, quite frequently actually, and I'm not criticizing them for looking like infinite compassion, that's no problem.

[24:00]

But that doesn't get in the books, because everybody knows that's infinite compassion. You know what I mean? Have you noticed some of our people around here being compassionate? Have you? There's some pretty compassionate people around here. Easy to spot. For example, you notice we have a lot of blue jays here? Those blue jays are not dead. They are alive. Why do you think they're alive? Just take a guess. It's because of compassionate people. It's not because of cruel people. Cruel people would kill the Blue Jays. And even sort of just middling kind people would kill the Blue Jays. But you've got to be really compassionate not to kill them. And we've got a whole bunch of people here who are protecting the Blue Jays from murder. And there's a few people here who are pretty nice who have good reasons to kill the Blue Jays because, you know, they're spreading disease and stuff.

[25:07]

Well, that kind of compassion is swell, and you should keep practicing it. I really think that's good. Don't hurt the Blue Jays. I know they're really obnoxious, but please don't hurt them at all. Be nice to them. They're really wonderful. It's true, they are, sort of. But anyway, Bodhidharma got to be the first case in the Blue Cliff Record and the second case in the Book of Equanimity because his form of compassion is ... well, he was the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion and he does stuff like that. Also, when his first student came to him, his first student came to him and said, can I study with you? And he said, basically he said, get out of ... go away.

[26:10]

Get away. We don't need people like you around here. Go away." The guy begged and begged and he said, just get away. We don't need you. Go away. And the guy stood outside in the snow and the snow built up. up to his waist and he stood in the snow, all night in the snow, waiting to be accepted as a student of this Bodhidharma guy. Is this infinite compassion? Now, if confronted with this fantastic Bodhisattva, we can't even tell that he's ... we can't even tell what he's doing is infinite compassion, what about us? How do we know if we're being infinitely compassionate? Well, we can try to figure it out, and it's good not to kill the blue jays, definitely, but how are you going to figure out whether you're being infinitely compassionate?

[27:18]

Well, you can figure it out, but you're just going to be figuring it out. That's not going to be the reason why it's infinite compassion, because you figured it out. Your calculations do not make it infinite compassion. What makes it infinite compassion is what? What makes it infinite compassion? You tell me. You know already. I told you. Just say it. No self. Being carried over to your life. Meeting people without knowing any more than anybody else knows. As a matter of fact, knowing a little bit less than most people. But actually knowing more than most people because you're not carrying over garbage of yourself from the past. And you're actually there meeting them in a situation, so that's called readiness. So you want to practice that one? Are you ready to say yes or no? Yes.

[28:19]

You're ready to say yes or no? Okay, what's the answer? Are you ready to practice readiness? Yes. Yes. That's two. No, who's not ready? Who's not ready? You're not ready? How do you know you're not ready? Huh? Okay. What? It also means, and you've also probably heard this before, is that there's no way to practice sasen. You go sit in your cushion, you do not bring a way to do it to your cushion. Now, of course, if you want to bring a way to do it to your cushion, you can do that, but that's not zazen. That's called... I don't know what you want to call that. You can call it concentration practice. How about that?

[29:21]

I'm going to go concentrate. Fine. But zazen practice is actually to go and sit zazen with no idea about what it is. You can also bow to Buddha. No problem. But please, when you bow to Buddha, just go do it. Don't bring an idea about how to bow to Buddha to bowing to Buddha. Okay? Just go there and do it. Like, just do it. Just do it. Nothing more than just doing it, okay? Now, I said that, but it's not easy to just do it, because it's scary to just do it, because Who knows what will happen, and maybe you'll do it wrong, or maybe it'll be, well, you don't know what it will be. This also applies to golf, and many other things. Just do them. It doesn't mean you have to give up golf, or bowing, or incense offering, or zazen, or qinyin, or anything.

[30:26]

You can do all these thing practices, there's no problem. brushing your teeth, eating, all that stuff you can keep doing, but just try to do them without bringing to them any idea about how to do them. Okay? Time to stop. You got it though, right? I don't have to say any more. You got it, right? No? Okay, well, I'll give another lecture tomorrow then. Can we sing now? Yes. It's now time to sing a song, tonight's song. Last night's song was a song which, as I mentioned, some people think was written by Gershwin, but actually it was written by Oscar Hammerstein II with the lyrics by Kern.

[31:28]

What's his name? Jerome Kern. Tonight's song is written by Gershwin. George Gershwin. And the lyrics by I don't know who. Maybe Ira. Okay, it's called Summertime. Do you know it? Okay, here it goes. Inhale. Summer is coming, and the hill is teasing. Fish are jumping, And the cotton is hot Your daddy's rich And your mama's silver

[32:37]

Don't you cry. One of these mornings, you're on the run. You're going to spread your wings and you'll take to the sky. Until that morning, there ain't nothing can harm you. Winter can harm thee, stealthy one, Tension equally penetrate every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way.

[34:19]

Sakyamaku, Sakyamaku. Bhut su-do-jo, se-gan-do. Deeds are numberless. I vow to awaken with them. Deliberations are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless.

[35:29]

I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. Hey!

[35:50]

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