I am impressed again and again and again and again how helpful it is if I am able to be aware of the dualities, the conflicts and contradictions that my mind creates and also if I can be aware of the pain and discomfort that arises around these conflicts, the tension

[01:10]

that arises between the poles of contradictions. If I can somehow be aware of this and be at peace with this, it seems to be very helpful. And I say myself, but when I talk to people about their lives, I find that not just me but other people too have a hard time being aware of this kind of tension and this kind of contradiction and this kind of pain, that

[02:16]

there is a strong tendency in us to turn away from this pain. One way to turn away from it is directly denying it. Another way to turn away from it is to simplify the situation so that the contradiction disappears. A couple of examples of that are, for example, the other night when the sangha gave me this robe, Galen read some things from Dogen's fascicle on the merit of

[03:18]

the Okesa and before the ceremony I asked her to read to me some selection that she was going to read and in her selection she avoided some of the statements that sound particularly exclusive and still there were a few in there that I thought were so exclusive that I thought it would cause perhaps immediately people to get upset so we eliminated some of them but still as I listened I felt like what those words sounded like still could lead one to feel some exclusiveness or some sectarianism or something like that in what was read.

[04:18]

And after that ceremony some people came to see me and talk to me, people who were Okesas, and I think if I might say that both of them said to me something like, when they heard those words of Dogen they said something like, I don't believe that or something like that, I don't believe what he's saying or I don't like what he's saying or something like that. In other words if he's saying that there's only one way and anybody who doesn't practice that way is excluded from enlightenment, I don't believe that, that's not my faith, I don't like that kind of talk. So I'll just say that's one situation where I sense there's some contradiction or some tension

[05:38]

there between the feeling like there's only one way and if you don't do it that way forget it and the other way, I don't know what the other extreme would be, the other extreme might be everyone can realize the Buddha way. Those may sound like two poles or maybe everyone in and of whatever way they practice can realize the Buddha way. So another tension or another contradiction or paradox is the paradox of our relationships, namely that when we are talking to somebody or communicating with somebody there's a contradiction between or apparent contradiction or tension between you expressing

[06:42]

yourself and you needing recognition of what you're saying and at the same time recognizing the other person and what they're saying. And so what we often do in a situation like that is the tension is so great that what we do is split off into roles of okay I'll recognize you and I'll let you express yourself or you recognize me and I'll get to express myself. But that splitting off although it seems to reduce the tension it doesn't work very well in the long run because if you're the one who is giving up her position to recognize him

[07:47]

after a while he won't feel recognized by you because you have no position and you're nobody or vice versa. I mean of course it works the other way if you express yourself to someone who you don't recognize after a while their recognition of you will be meaningless because they're nobody there. Not to mention that if you give up your position and recognize another person you might also at some other level find out that you've denied yourself and that might not work for you either to say the least. That's another example. I'm going back to the earlier example of

[08:53]

another way to put it is there's only one way and I'm getting a little lost here I'm sort of losing something I don't know what I'm losing but anyway there's only one way and and when we hear that we don't feel comfortable we might feel if and I don't know I somehow can't something's getting blocked here and I kind of would like to get out of this block situation

[09:58]

yeah in the first example I don't believe that is being opposed by I don't want to I don't want to not believe it either it seems that too I don't believe that or I think that something's wrong there it's being opposed by if you said there's something okay and it would be easier to flop over and do I don't believe that no matter what or I believe that totally at least that's what you said right does that help give me a break well let's just shift to a totally different realm and maybe this is all clear up later so my body has had some pain recently and so one of the things that comes up in my mind is

[11:09]

what is my body trying to tell me it's telling me that it's in pain but what else is it trying to tell me or what is the fact that my body's in pain telling me and I don't know exactly what it is but I feel really good about listening to the pain and keeping an eye on the pain and I feel there's a slight difference between saying that I'm coming from the pain of my body and to say that I'm coming from or that I'm trying to come from awareness of the pain of my body I feel I'm feeling pretty good about coming from awareness of the pain in my body I'm coming from awareness and taking care of myself in that awareness and someone said to me yeah the body's really great the body's like a bridge between

[12:17]

this person said the absolute world and she said what's the other one I said relative she said yeah that's it and what popped in my head was that our body is kind of like a bridge between what Dogan calls the circle of water and the ocean you know his expression when you go out in the ocean far away from the shore where there's no islands and you look around the ocean looks like a circle of water it doesn't look any other way because of the way we perceive things the ocean looks like a circle of water but of course the ocean isn't a circle it's much more complex and much bigger than that circle of water that we see but that's all we can see is a circle of water so now too I walk around in Tassajar or wherever I am and I see a circle of water wherever I go I see a world but this world

[13:21]

is just a little circle of water in the big world but my body is kind of like saying hello hello do you believe that this circle of water is what's going on it's like it's a messenger or a bridge from a bigger world that's saying are you overlooking something or are you on some trip in the circle of water and I don't know what to say but the pain of the body particularly asks that question are you believing that this circle of water is all that there is I mean are you have you remembered that there's more than this and in my mind I might be able to just go along day after day year after year and think yeah this circle of water is really what's happening but the pain kind of makes me lets me gives me the chance to think

[14:28]

in a real way this body this body and this bodily pain in this real way are kind of like offering a chance to connect the bridge over the little circle here and the big ocean and somehow when I become aware of this body and its pain which is not in my program there's a certain amount of pain that's in my program but there's some kinds that are not and when I become aware of them something changes for me and also when my version of practice is not hurting then my version of practice is also a

[15:30]

circle of water but when my version of practice is hurting or I have pain around what I think practice is in other words yeah when my when I feel some tension or pain around what practice is maybe I think well maybe there's a bigger world of practice too or a bigger understanding of practice sometimes when I'm talking to people in the last few weeks I feel have felt some pain in my back and particularly some stiffness around above my hips and if I put my hands by my side and lift myself up a little bit that creates a little bit less pressure on the joints and after a little while I feel more comfortable so partly I'm doing that to relieve the pain or the stiffness

[16:36]

but while I'm doing that I'm I also try to continue to be aware I'm actually watching the I'm actually tuning into that tension in that pain and while I'm taking care of myself under those circumstances I'm still able to hear the other person talk I found and then when the pain subsides or the stiffness subsides I can continue to hear the person for a while but I find actually I have found that when I'm actually addressing that pain and taking care of it I feel like I'm hearing quite well on the other hand if I sit and listen to the person but try not and don't address the pain and get into it or even try to sit through it like just sit through it I have a trouble hearing the other person so I found that if there is pain or stiffness if the more I get into taking care of it

[17:47]

the better I can hear I feel the other person and if I would just try to get through it then I'm on this trip of getting through it but I don't have much it's hard I'm not really listening to the other person at the same time if I'm sitting without any pain any awareness of pain I don't feel like I'm sitting through it or forcing my way through it it's hard I don't know what to say about that so because actually on some level I would guess that on some level there's some tension going on between us that even though I'm not having back pain probably in some other dimension there's some pain between us like right now maybe there's some pain between us

[18:49]

I jumping from here up to Green Gulch when I was at Green Gulch during on this recent trip during the time I was away I attended some meetings at Green Gulch and in a very gross just I'm going to grossly say what the meetings were about they aren't just to sort of give you a pungent sense of them but what they were about was to some extent some people were saying something about Soto Zen you know but some people were saying I'm here to practice Soto Zen they said and they even implied or almost said and I think there's some other people at Green Gulch that aren't here to practice Soto Zen and I didn't hear anybody say I think the people who aren't practicing Soto Zen should be asked to leave I didn't hear anybody say that but some of the people thought that somebody was saying

[20:39]

that about them and they felt really excluded by the way the person was describing their practice and felt really hurt and I felt and I said at that meeting that I feel like it's that there is in our hearts a tendency I don't know maybe I should say hearts but there is within our hearts and minds some tendency at Zen Center to become sectarian to develop some idea of this is the way to practice and the other ways are somewhat misguided or

[21:40]

maybe those people should practice somewhere else I don't want to exclude them but maybe they should leave something there is some feeling like that that comes up now and then and I was talking to Donald about this just a little while ago and he said that he felt in the among the communities that he's visited the spiritual community he's visited he felt that there was less sectarianism and self-righteousness at Tassajara than he had seen in other places and I said I feel like that may be true and I think part of the reason why that may be true is I think at Zen Center there is some awareness at least in our community that we are somewhat self-righteous that we are somewhat sectarian and that that's a and that that is a kind of an illness spiritual illness and we've got it to some extent here and it's also a little bit funny that we've got it

[22:46]

and we think it sometimes is a little funny and sometimes it's not so funny and it's also that's pretty funny too that it's not so funny people who are not committed to good are not so susceptible to self-righteousness but there is a fairly strong commitment here in this community to practicing good for example now we have the situation of some people who are becoming more and more aware of what's involved in bringing us dairy products and eggs mayonnaise and so on people are becoming more aware of the industrial farming process that brings these things and the suffering that's involved there and as a result they are starting to practice abstaining from these products the reason for that is seems to be that they feel they don't want to support or cooperate with an industry that

[23:52]

is cruel to living beings but there's a danger there that they'll start thinking they're better than these other people at Tassajar who are still eating dairy products and eggs some other people might decide that they want to stop smoking because they feel smoke is not good for them also that they don't want to support the cigarette business the cigarette industry which has its powerful lobby in government and does various other things to the land to raise the tobacco and so on so forth so they might say i'm gonna stop smoking that's a good thing but then they might start feeling bad about the smokers this might happen right here in Tassajar and what else is there? Sugar. The sugar industry, what it takes to make sugar is that people have the human beings anyway that cut the sugarcane down live horrible lives they haven't been able to mechanize the cropping of sugarcane because sugarcane grows in marshes

[25:01]

and trucks various kinds of they haven't found a vehicle that can go into the marshes so people are still doing it by hand and that work is body destroying it's a horrible life and these guys do it because they get paid a lot of money for it but it ruins their bodies that's just part of what it takes to grow sugar he used what it used to take was as you know in order to produce that white stuff you had to have lots of black slaves so some people also for the health factor have started to reduce or cut down sugar on and on various good things to do in this world but what about the people who aren't doing it zazen is good too what about the people who aren't practicing zazen? well there's a contradiction there right a tension between smoking and not smoking eating dairy products and not eating dairy products eating poultry products and not eating poultry products smoking and not smoking drinking and not drinking

[26:02]

we also have drinking problem too here at Tassar do we let the guests drink or not that's another one we've got here sugar or not sugar pesticides are not pesticides on and on we are concerned right so one way to do it is just forget about it right that makes it simpler the other way is know you're right that makes it simpler in other words let's do something make adjustments so we don't have this contradiction here we don't have this tension because this tension is painful isn't it sometimes so we want to just say i don't believe in that or i do believe in it absolutely correct and the other people are out of it some way to make the pension go away but what i'm proposing is that that these tensions exist as long as we look at the world from this circle of water and if we can accept the pain

[27:12]

of these tensions we may be able to not veer off into i'm right and you're wrong or you're right and i'm wrong or we're right and they're wrong or they're right and we're wrong those ways don't work out anyway that's kind of that's kind of the key point for me right now is can we somehow find a way to stand or sit or lie down anyway peacefully accept and to be able to tolerate the tensions rather than split them off in one side of the other i kind of my theory is my belief at this point is my faith is that by sitting in the middle of

[28:20]

these contradictions without simplifying them into one side of the other that we have a chance of realizing the truth i mentioned this uh this quote some time ago to you which is at the beginning of a book about martin luther king where the the person who wrote the book said i have the faith that the truth appears or the truth will be realized in the i think he said maximum effort to see through the eyes of enemies foreigners and strangers the truth will appear in the maximum effort to see through the eyes of enemies foreigners and strangers so for example if we if i'm a soto zen person and i think the case is really wonderful

[29:24]

and i've seen the examples of people who wear it and been inspired those are my eyes but what about the eyes of those who don't wear the ocasa or the eyes of those who even do wear the ocasa but have questions about it and so on people who are against that practice or who are strangers to it and so on how can i try to see through their eyes i never can see through the person's eyes but i can try i can make a maximum effort to see through their eyes and then it isn't my way or his way or her way that realizes the truth it is the mutual standing the difference between the way we see and both sides trying to see the other side trying to see trying to recognize and sympathize with the other side without

[30:31]

giving up our own eyes not abandoning our own position not submitting and forgetting about how we feel and what our experience is as a matter of fact being quite firm and fearless and steadfast in what our experience is and at the same time trying to see through the other person's eyes this is a very tense situation a lot of contradiction and i think it's painful different and all kinds of different kinds of pain pain that we hardly even know as pain it's very intense and we want to split off i think we have a tendency to split off from that kind of intensity into some easier way of being that requires in the short run less awareness however sometimes maybe in my case the body comes to our aid

[31:41]

and gives us some kind of message that maybe we have maybe we have been avoiding something which is very great that we get help that way or sometimes people come and tell us that they think we're denying something they care enough about us to say i think you're denying something or i don't think you're listening to me so i guess i just i'll throw this out too that i guess if i stay in my little

[32:43]

my little world my little circle of water and if i just stay there and hold on to that i think i'll actually feel some pain i don't think that will work for me and that my awareness of my pain in my circle of water may open me even though i can never see outside my little circle of water it may open me to the more complete world even though i'll still always see with biased eyes it's somehow if i can accept the pain that comes with seeing with biased eyes maybe i somehow set up some kind of communication with unbiased eyes and i'm not saying that only by except only by pain will we get this communication

[33:46]

but rather that if there is pain we can't skip over it because if we skip over it then our communication with the unbiased truth is just intellectual is just theoretical we are theoretically saved and so i just feel like we all have this tendency to skip over this simple fact that as long as we're looking through biased eyes and we do have biased eyes a good share of the day there's some pain associated with that it's sometimes quite subtle and i also would say that i personally vow to completely support anybody who wants to look at that

[34:46]

and i think that we have been trained in our childhood and adulthood too that some people do not want us to let them know that we're in pain but they'd rather not hear about it and part of the reason why some people have told us that is that if we tell them we're in pain they might become aware that they're in pain and they were told that they're not supposed to be aware of their pain too therefore they tell us not to tell them and so on but here at tasahara anyway even though it might lead to the fact of all of us going into complete collapse and nobody being able to cook lunch anymore i still would be willing to take the chance

[35:50]

of all of us just turning around and opening our eyes to whatever suffering is there and then see if we can go on i think we'll survive but it is scary it is possible that we will be temporarily incapacitated if we open our eyes to how much we're suffering it might happen i'm willing to pay the price with myself and with any of you if you can't go on if you can't follow the schedule if you can't cook lunch if you can't serve lunch if you can't do your work because you're so overwhelmed when you open your eyes to your suffering okay i don't think that'll happen but okay you can suffer here it is okay and now that you can tell us if you're suffering if that would if

[36:52]

you'd like to and you can suffer about anything you want to you can suffer about soto zen you can suffer about dairy products you can suffer about you know the way people talk to you you can suffer about the way people don't recognize you anything you can suffer about the way you're interrupted the way you're treated like a child the way you're disrespected you can suffer we you can suffer about anything because people can suffer about anything they do so you can do that you can you can see that it's okay and i'd much rather hear and i think most people would much rather hear you say i'm in pain than hear you say i hate you and i kind of feel from my experiences that if people walk around this world denying their pain pretty soon they start saying i hate you they start blaming other people

[37:54]

for it because they're denying it but if we could admit our own pain then we could practice patience with it and we wouldn't start blaming other people for it and still we could say to people when you say that it hurts when you talk to me that way it hurts owie it hurts but that's it okay i think people at tasahara can hear that from each other sometimes if someone tells you that what they say to you or what you said to them hurt them if they say that to you and there's some anger in it of course that will hurt but even if they aren't angry and they say it to you still might hurt because they might open you up to your suffering and you might feel like they imposed that on you well that stuff happens i'm sorry i think it's a lot better though than the other way of just you know attacking people

[39:00]

again i just think it's unavoidable that we have pain as long as we look through biased eyes and we're going to have biased eyes for some time in the future so it looks like there's going to be pain in this world and i'm just guess i'm just saying maybe maybe we should i had this idea maybe we should make a new buddhist flag at least for practice period and raise it up above the place and write on it denial not that we recommend denial but that we own to it that we own to the fact that we're going around denying our pain i at least wonder what pain am i denying right now the primary cause of enlightenment is patience and you can't practice patience in midair patience is practiced with hardship and pain

[40:11]

and you don't have to create any hardship and pain it's already there so why don't we just encourage ourselves and others to turn around and look at it and also be aware that there's some parts of it that we cannot see now and the way we see it is when we see other people who are doing something that we have some problem with and there's the tension again they're not behaving properly and again that points us back towards the source of our problem anyway i feel like i've gone on a little too long on this i'm sorry is there anything you'd like to discuss about this yes could you speak up please

[41:19]

one shouldn't try to be an ethical person i can't i can't hear you deep could you say it again please i think in the notes it said one should not try to be an ethical person uh-huh um i don't that was a lecture but did i say that that's what i thought anyway uh could you talk about that um did you mean uh you can't always if you think you're an ethical person you can find that you've taken on a role and uh you've actually well i think it's good i not i guess i think it's very good to try to be an ethical person so i think you should try to be an ethical person so i reversed my earlier statement but what i but what i also said was which is just a quote to think this is ethics i am ethical

[42:31]

and i'm helping people that kind of thinking is not what we call the perfection of ethics to think this is ethics i am ethical i think some ethical people think that way okay i think they do some very good people think that they're good but this is still as although they're good they're also self-righteous it's better not to go it's better to be dedicated to good without going around saying this is good to be dedicated to good and leave what good is as an open question between you and others in other words enter into the tension that what is good is something that is partly what you think and partly what he or she thinks and you don't really know what they think you have to work on that that good is arrived at in a common effort together and in that situation that kind of effort is not based on already concluding what's good

[43:38]

and if you think you know it's good then that's something you confess as a way you think does that make sense yes to be safe but we have to recognize the possibility of it happening at any moment. So she says it is possible for a perfectly happy person if he recognizes truly, completely, and all the time, the possibility of affection to enjoy happiness completely and at the same time there it is for us. Yeah. And that does fit perfectly with what I was saying. But I welcome people to say

[44:45]

other things which don't fit so perfectly. But that does fit perfectly, yeah. There isn't always such a big affliction but we'd have to be open to it. If you're close to it, even if it's not there, you're in trouble, just by your closeness. It turns out by Buddhist theory, by the way, that the first entry into the path, you know what's called stream-winner, the first entry always happens with the truth of pain as the object. But that's the entry point. Later levels of awakening do not necessarily have pain as the thing you're concentrating on. You know, if you heard of stream-winner or stream-enterer, there's four stages of holiness in the Theravada path, stream-enterer, once-returner, never-returner and arhat. The first entry into the formal Buddhist, you know, what do you call it, nobility, elite

[45:47]

club, the first point of entry is with pain as an object. But later developments isn't necessarily pain, but that's the entry point, just to make sure you don't skip over it. Anything else about anything that you want to bring up? Any bystanders? Or by-sitters? Yes? This is a confused statement about the pain that I could do, you know, there were all kinds of pain, just floating, I stepped out of my door, and on the sub-side, there were these incredible purple irises, and they were so vibrant and so beautiful, and it was like looking at them gave me a clean in my heart. And I sort of thought at the time, how strange

[46:54]

that something so beautiful would hit me in the heart like that, and immediately, I then thought of things, and I thought it was in my head, it was interesting that the way it touched me and hit me, and I was just, you know, something, perhaps with heart, and then I thought of the starry sky, and swirling, and some sense of just the pain of... the beauty, the intensity of being alive, sometimes, just sets up this tension, and it just is, I guess you step out of nowhere, and I just start brushing my teeth, and it's fine, and all of a sudden, it's like, there I am, and then I started walking, realizing that this is me, and I came across this today, too, and that in fact, was a very important

[47:56]

sentence popped out, and went on to detail something that I really wanted to do, and desired. So that thought came in my head, and I started walking, and sort of just the pain I felt, and the smell of it, and it was beautiful. I didn't feel it, it was just a luminosity. It was veiled only by the arising of the fire. It was beautiful. It was a reflection of experience. It was alive, because of the arising of the fire. It was beautiful.

[48:58]

Well, I think it's in the same, something pretty similar to what you've been saying, it's a little bit different words, but I'm not sure. My experience of being in physical pain recently has been that it's opened me up, and sometimes when there's substantial pain, it feels like I can't get attached with, I would say, some more fundamental pain, some kind of pain that's not that my neck hurts or my arm aches. And I don't see it so much as going out to the universal, but I see it as going down

[50:19]

into the universal in myself. And I'm wondering if that seems to you like a different description of the same thing that you were saying, or something else? Sounds like the same thing to me. But go ahead, say something different, that's fine. It hurts. It hurts. I can say something different. Uh-oh. Well, as I was carrying the condiments up yesterday evening, I fell. And instead of dropping the tray and protecting my knee, I landed up on my knee. So I hope you enjoy the condiments. That's what he's wearing.

[51:26]

How about we can make a little pellet, a little package of, what do you call it? What's that stuff called? Chutney. Chutney. Give it a little chutney heart. Actually, I wasn't going to have any chutney, but for some reason or other, I reached down and had some, and it really was good. Thank you. Well, since the kitchen seems to be abandoning us, maybe we should stop.

[52:02]

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