I heard somebody say, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Did you hear that? Tathagata is an epithet, like a nickname for Buddha. It means somebody who goes to reality and comes back. Some of us said, I vow to taste the truth of this Buddha. Taste the truth of the Buddha's words, the Buddha's teachings. Now I see some people who are actually in another room. Can you hear me out there? Sort of? Does this mean sort of? You can somewhat hear me out there? Okay.

[01:03]

Hello out there. They're waving back to me. Now I'm going to put my glasses on and see if I can see them. the thought arises that what a wonderful way to start a new year, to make a vow to hear the truth of the Buddha's teaching. And I'm offering you some words this morning about something that these words do not reach. which is the truth of the Buddha's teaching. My words don't reach it, but I offer them to help us all realize the truth of the Buddha's teaching.

[02:08]

That's like my favorite thing, if people would taste the truth of the Buddha's teaching. Anything I can do to help that, I would be very happy to do so. Wouldn't you? Yeah. Finn, are you the one who's waving back to me? Okay. I'm going to start by making an assertion, saying something that I guess I believe in, or I'm saying something that I guess I'm betting my life on, my faith.

[03:18]

And I'm saying this to you both to let you know what I believe in, but also for you to think about, to experiment with what I say, if you want to. I experiment with what I say. So the first thing I'm saying is that everything, for example, all living beings, all humans, for example, but more than just humans. But all beings are always calling and listening. When I came in here I heard a baby calling.

[04:26]

And I think there was a woman holding her who I think was listening. And I guess they decided maybe to go into another room. I don't know. Is that lady outside now? Did she go away with the baby? Is she still here? Anyway. That was one example that I could perceive. I came in here and I had a perception of somebody who was calling. And I had a perception of somebody listening. And I was one of the people who were listening. I had a perception of me listening to that baby calling. Did you hear, did some of you perceive that baby calling? So, yeah, so you could perceive that baby calling. and you could perceive you listening. But I'm saying that this is going on all the time.

[05:30]

That every moment, I'm calling. Who am I calling to? Everybody. I'm calling to everybody. Also every moment I'm listening to everybody calling me. Sometimes we have a perception of it, the calling, and we go, oh, we see it or we hear it. Sometimes we don't. Most of the time it's imperceptible. Some of the time it's perceptible. Some of the time we hear people saying, Help. Be kind to me. But sometimes they're saying that and they don't even know it and we don't know it.

[06:37]

We don't perceive it. I'm suggesting it's going on without ceasing. that every moment of our life we call to all beings to assist us, to support us, to listen to us. And every moment we listen to all beings. And every moment we're imperceptibly and perceptibly, but always imperceptibly, calling for assistance and giving assistance. and this imperceptible mutual assistance, and all the perceptible mutual assistances, all them together are what I would call, if you excuse the expression, Zen. But Zen's a nickname for the practice of the Buddha's teaching.

[07:41]

The Buddha's teaching, the Buddha's life, The life of Buddha is this imperceptible mutual assistance among all of us. That's the life activity of great awakening. That's my proposal. So once again, all day long I'm calling to you to listen to me and you're listening to me. And all day long you're calling to me and everybody else and we're all listening to you. And then in that situation the Buddha offers many teachings about how to practice in such a way as to realize that. this imperceptible mutual assistance, which again, in Zen we call Zen, or we also call it Zazen.

[08:47]

Zazen is this imperceptible, which includes the perceptual, mutual assistance. Zazen is how we're imperceptibly according with all beings and they with us. So what is the practice of Zen? It is this imperceptible mutual assistance of all beings. That's the practice. And by doing the practice of that, we realize that. It's almost time to stop, and that's fine, because I thought what's been said is pretty good. We got the vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words.

[09:51]

Pretty good. And I made this kind of amazing statement, right? That everybody you meet is calling to you to listen to them. Even when they say, I do not want you to listen to me. Go away from me. But they do want you to listen to that. We do want people to listen to us. They do want us to listen to them. But again, the way they say it is, I hate you. Or, I don't want your help. But sometimes they say, I do want your help. Like I say to my small female leader. I say to her, do you want some help?

[10:54]

And she says, no. And then I listen to that. And then a few minutes later she says, I need some help. And I say, would you like me to offer you some help? And she says, yes. Yes. And then we go, we talk like that. She's calling to me. I ask her if she wants help. She says no. She says yes. I ask her to help me. She says no. We've been doing that dance, this dance for a while. Now she's eight years old. Sometimes her mother invited me to go pick her up at daycare.

[11:58]

And I did. I was happy to do so. And I came to pick her up at daycare and she saw me and she told the daycare people, I don't want granddaddy. And I listened to that. And then they kind of talked her into it, letting me take care of her. Another thing we... So here in this temple and also, by the way, of course, everywhere else in the universe, we're here listening to each other and calling to each other. And in this room, a lot of the time in this room, when we're calling to each other and listening to each other,

[13:03]

It's silent. And people are sitting still. So I'd like to talk to you a little bit about silence and stillness, which are closely related to the Buddha, the Buddha life, the life of Buddha lives in silence and stillness. Just like there's perceptible listening and calling and imperceptible listening and calling, there's perceptible silence and stillness and imperceptible silence and stillness.

[14:13]

Or we could also say there's constructed silence and stillness and unconstructed silence and stillness. So in this room we ritually construct silence. There's a human effort in this room to kind of like put together or build together, put it together and together as a group we build, we construct stillness. by human effort of basically not talking. And we also make a human effort to sit still. So in this room we have constructed silence and stillness.

[15:19]

And then and it has a beginning that constructed kind has a beginning like it starts at a certain like five in the morning it starts or And it lasts till 540. And then there's a bell is rung, which is not constructed stillness, it's constructed bell ringing. And then we get up and move around. So the stillness and the silence happens constructed for a certain period of time. Constructed things arise and cease. So there's a constructed silence. But there's also an unconstructed silence, an unconstructed stillness. And that doesn't have a beginning or end. It's always here. Just like this intimate relationship among us, which is nonstop, also there's a nonstop silence and stillness.

[16:26]

And our ritual practices of sitting still and silence, which we do for thousands and thousands of hours in this room, that ritual practice of constructing the ceremony of silence and stillness is in communication with the unconstructed. silence and stillness, which is always in this room and it's always outside this room and it's always at Safeway and Whole Foods and Good Earth and on the freeway. This unconstructed silence and stillness is always with us. We can't get away from it. It doesn't come or go. It's the environment of this communion among us.

[17:32]

And we use constructed silence and stillness to discover and realize the unconstructed. We sit here, we make a human effort to sit here, upright, silent, and still, and then we sometimes discover the imperceptible, beginningless, endless silence and stillness. The unconstructed silence and stillness is already part of everybody's life. But without practicing the ceremony, the ritual of silence and stillness, we may not realize the omnipresent silence and stillness. Twenty years ago, approximately, I was running in the hills, and I was running downhill, and a famous philosopher was running uphill.

[18:46]

We knew each other. He stopped and said, hi. And he said, it's not good to run down, it's not good for your knees to be running downhill. I often think of him telling me that when I'm going downhill on these mountains. Anyway, he also said to me, I'm deeply grateful that the people in your community sit in that meditation hall and witness silence and stillness. So we sit here and we witness it. And we can witness the perceptible, which we do. Since January 7th, we've been sitting in this room, a lot of us, and I've been sitting here, I'm witnessing people sitting very still and silent. But this is the constructed stillness. It's really wonderful. and constructed silence.

[19:47]

It's wonderful. I witness it. But I'm also here to witness another silence and stillness. Okay? In this silence and stillness there's a good opportunity to do other practices. And one of them I'd like to tell you about is spoken of in this way. Turn the light around and shine it back to illuminate the self. That's a teaching to help us realize imperceptible mutual assistance.

[21:05]

Turning the light around, one way to understand that is turn your awareness around and shine it back. Consciousness is often aware, in consciousness there's awareness of objects like windows, walls, people, feelings, fears, confusion. These are things which the light shines on. The light of consciousness shines on many objects. So this instruction is saying, turn that light around and shine it back. on the consciousness to illuminate the self. And then another teaching which I would offer is the teaching about delusion and awakening.

[22:13]

So this teaching is which is good for people to receive when they're looking at their consciousness. The teaching is to practice and confirm all things while carrying a self is delusion. Another way to put it is turn the light around, looking into the consciousness. And if there's a picture in there of somebody who is, as somebody said to me recently, somebody who is operating the world, somebody who is massaging life, and that self there, there's a self in the consciousness. There is a self in the consciousness. There is a self in the consciousness. And to see the self as doing, for example, the practice.

[23:28]

To see the self, for example, as listening. To see the self, for example, as calling. To see the self as helping. The self is helping. The self is helping. That vision is the definition of delusion. To see the self doing good. To see the self doing not good. That view of seeing the self do good and not good, that view is delusion. If you turn the light around, which some of you might have already done, you might have seen what I just talked about and be shocked that I say what you're doing is delusion. And then the next teaching is when, so again, once again, to practice all things or to practice anything, but now let's say to practice everything, while carrying a self, like the self is doing the practice to everything, that's delusion.

[24:55]

But when everything comes forward and practices the self, That's awakening. So again, I was talking to somebody and the person was talking about the self-massaging or I massage my life or I massage life. That's delusion. Life massaging me is awakening. And the person said there's a lot of self in there. In both situations there's self. In one case the self is there already and is kind of separate from the things. The other case the self isn't there already until there's everything.

[25:58]

As soon as there's everything there's the self. That's awakening. Now awakening, in a lot of neighborhoods, is valued above delusion. But not in Buddhism. In the Buddha way, which could be called awakeism, in awakeism we do not put awakeness over delusion. We do not put all things coming forth and giving birth to us above I give birth to everything. We don't put that above. We just call a spade a spade. This is delusion.

[26:59]

This is awakening. And they both live with the self. two different ways of working with the self. One is the self does the practice, the other is the practice does the self. One is to massage life, I massage life, the other is life massages me. But really the practice doesn't put one above the other. The practice is how those two interpenetrate each other. They interpenetrate each other. They're not separate. And one of them, I think, if you turn the light around, one of them, it's easy to find, the one about, I'm talking, I'm sitting, I'm thinking, I'm listening, or I'm not listening. All that is quite familiar, perceptible.

[28:01]

Delusion. But the other is right there all the time. And they interpenetrate each other. The interpenetration of the two is the actual practice. Not the enlightened, not the awakened side. And of course, not the deluded side. Delusion is delusion. Awakening is awakening. The actual Buddha way is the interpenetration of awakening and delusions. and they pivot on our body and mind, which has a consciousness, and in the consciousness there's a self. So the activity of imperceptible mutual assistance pivots on each of us, everything, and every self. Another way of talking about this is that

[29:07]

great awakening in the midst of delusion, or great awakening to what delusion is, is Buddha. Buddha is great awakening of delusion. And great delusion about awakening is living beings. So living beings have great delusion about enlightenment or awakening. And Buddhas have great awakening about delusion. Buddha's great awakening is about and in the midst of and inseparable from delusion. Great awakening is inseparable from delusion. Awakening and delusion interpenetrate each other. And vice versa. great delusion about enlightenment, they interpenetrate.

[30:13]

And those two, the living beings, will have the great delusion about awakening, they interpenetrate with the Buddhas who have great awakening. So the Buddhas and the sentient beings also interpenetrate each other. We, sentient beings, interpenetrate and assist all Buddhas. We assist the Buddhas, the Buddhas assist us. I guess most people would not be surprised to hear Buddhas assist living beings. But living beings assist Buddhas too. We're doing this together with Buddhas and Buddhas are doing it together with us. Enlightenment's working together with delusion. Enlightenment and delusion are neighbors. and they're friendly neighbors, really, but it's hard to see that sometime.

[31:16]

So we have a ritual construction of silence and stillness, and in there we discover the real silence and stillness. And in that real silence and stillness we see that enlightenment and delusion are intimate friends, family, they're not separate. And it's not just that they're not separate, they're calling to each other. Enlightenment is calling to delusion, delusion's calling. It's all really intimate. And so we practice the ritual of stillness to realize the actual stillness, the unconstructive stillness.

[32:19]

And in that unconstructive stillness this mutual assistance is living. And then we discover that and then we basically we just keep stirring the delusion enlightenment until it's perfectly integrated and actualized And as you may have noticed, we haven't got there yet. Now most people know there's plenty of delusion, especially other people have it. Right? You've noticed them. And yeah, so I've got the delusion and there's some enlightenment. Or even you could say there's a lot. But the work is to integrate the two, is to bring the delusion, the deluded people, together with the enlightened people. To bring the delusion that we're not working together and interfusing with the awakening of how we are.

[33:30]

stirring the pot, the cosmic pot of delusion and enlightenment until there's perfect harmony and peace in this world. And this has been the effort of Buddhas for a long time. And this is the effort of bodhisattvas who are trying to help the Buddhas for a long time. And we're still doing it. I could say there's no end in sight. I could say this is an open-ended process of harmonization and peacemaking. In fact, I did say it, didn't I? I see a young person who's smiling.

[35:34]

And I thought, before I looked at her and saw her smile, I thought, the children in the room have really practiced stillness very well. And I hope, and not hope, I didn't say I hope, and it looks like they understood me. Even though it's kind of an advanced talk, maybe the children understood. Right? Is it possible? Did you understand? May our intentions

[36:17]

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