A theme story for this session has been a conversation between the teacher Tung An Yiran Guan, no, Tung An something, and Liang Shan. where the teacher asked his attendant, what is the business under the patch robe? And the attendant had no words in response. And the teacher said, to wear this patch robe, and not know what the business under the patch robe is, is the most painful.

[01:01]

Then the teacher said, now you ask me. And so the student said, what is the business under the patch robe? And the teacher said, intimacy. This character And the Chinese character that supposedly the ancestor said has a number of possible English translations. One is intimacy. Another one is dense. Another one is secret. Another is mystery. Earlier in the session, someone asked, what does this memmitsu no kafu mean? And I said, memmitsu is the Chinese character for cotton and the Chinese character for intimacy, this mitsu, this character for intimacies or denseness.

[02:27]

is in Japanese pronunciation is mitsu. So memmitsu is cotton together with dense or dense weave or intimacy. It means thorough, minute attention to everything. And that's a characteristic of the school. So the school is focused is a meditation on this intimate and thorough reality, thoroughly intimate reality. A number of people in this room have that question that the ancestor asked written on the back of their raksu. what is the business, actually it's what is the under the patch robe business.

[03:29]

And that character for business can also be translated as activity, thing, matter. But to translate it as matter sounds a little funny in English to say, what's the matter under the patch robe? But, you know, it's an abbreviation for what is the great matter under the patch robe. So on our Han it says, attention, birth and death is the great matter. Birth-death is the great matter. You could also say birth-death is the great activity, is the great business. So this intimacy is the great matter, is the great business of the school. And for example, birth and death is the great business, but also it's the intimacy of birth and death.

[04:36]

When birth and death are not intimate, it's called samsara. It's suffering. Birth and death separate is suffering. Birth and death intimate is nirvana. and nirvana and samsara intimate is the great matter for us to realize and practice. So this character, again, this character which I prefer to translate as intimacy also means secret. It could also be translated as secret or mystery. And in two of our other main poems of our school, the Harmony of Difference and Equality and the Precious Mirror Samadhi Song.

[05:42]

In those two, at the beginning of both, this character appears. In the Harmony of Difference and Equality, it starts up something like the mind of the great sage of India. And then it says, intimate, it has that character, intimate transmission. And then it says, east and west. And sometimes it's translated as the mind, the Buddha mind, intimately transmitted from east to west. or west to east. But another translation is that this mind, this poem was written in China.

[06:46]

Another translation would be that both in India and China, this Buddha mind is intimately transmitted. But again, I think it's also good to just understand that the Buddha mind is the intimate transmission. That's what it is. It's also okay to say Buddha mind is intimately transmitted in India and China and Japan and Korea and Tibet. and Thailand, and Russia, and the United States. It's intimately transmitted throughout the entire universe right now. And then in the Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi, it says, the teaching of suchness.

[07:54]

And then again it says, intimately transmitted, Buddhas and ancestors. often intimately transmitted by Buddhas and ancestors. But Buddhas and ancestors, I would suggest to you, is intimate transmission. That's what Buddha ancestors is. It's intimate transmission. It's that same intimacy which is the great matter. And also in the Song of Jumeirah, it says, the teaching of suchness intimate transmission. So the suchness, the teaching of suchness is the intimate transmission, is Buddha's and ancestors. It's not like Buddhas are one thing and intimate transmission is another and the teaching of suchness is another. They're synonyms, teaching of suchness, intimacy, intimate transmission, Buddhas.

[08:59]

They're three different ways of saying the same thing. the same reality. But again, some people translate the teaching of suchness is secretly transmitted. The mind of the great sage is secretly transmitted. So there's that element in that word too, secretly. And some people even translate it as unseen. Instead of mystery or intimacy or secret, they translate it as unseen. So you can't see the transmission. It's not something you see with your eyes. It's beyond hearing and seeing. It's deportment beyond hearing and seeing. And yet, the bodhisattva's wish to realize this deportment beyond hearing and seeing in our hearing and seeing, to realize this intimacy which is beyond our hearing and seeing in all of our hearing and seeing, to express as we see and hear, to express this mind.

[10:17]

in all of our sightings, listenings, tastings, touchings and thinkings. That's the training part. to remember this great matter and use every moment as an opportunity to express it and have it impressed upon our activity and express it with our activity and round and round. So I'm just sort of suggesting to you, you can see this point echoing throughout the teachings of the school. So it's in this story. It's in the precious mirror samadhi. It's in the harmony of difference and unity. And also, there's a story a few generations before, the one I just told you, of the ancestor Dung Shan and some monk.

[11:28]

Dung Shan asked the monk, what's the most painful thing? The monk said, hell is the most painful thing. And Dung Shan said, no, the most painful thing is to wear the patch robe and not reach this business. Not realize intimacy. Intimacy. There's also another character for, there's many other characters for intimacy. But if you would just go to a dictionary and look up intimacy in a Chinese dictionary, you might find a different character that pops up first. And that character does mean intimacy. And in Japanese, instead of being pronounced mitsu, which this character is pronounced, the other character is pronounced shin.

[12:32]

And it refers to the intimacy in a family, like the intimacy between parents and child, and child and parents. And that intimacy does not usually have the alternative translation or meaning of secret. That intimacy is well known. But the intimacy of suchness is almost like a secret, even though it's everywhere. So when people think of the intimacy of a family, they might not think of this other intimacy, which is like very dense and mysterious. So I'm happy that, you know, things are all coordinated and they use this word for intimacy in various, in all the Zen texts, they use that character.

[13:40]

And also that character also appears in the Chinese translation of a sutra that I've talked about and studied here a lot. In Sanskrit it's called Samdhi Nirmocana Sutra. And this character for mystery or intimacy is in that one too. And the translation is releasing or revealing the intimacy. someone said to me, oh, by the way, I just wanted to mention, here's a kind of, what is it, a praise or pointing out the virtue of dissent in a community.

[14:43]

So I mentioned to someone, someone was surprised to hear how much dissent there was in the community. And When you have a community and everyone is in agreement or even bonded on some value, the implementation of that value is oftentimes readily accessible or you can accomplish great things when everybody in the community agrees on something as a good project. And you can accomplish amazing things like you can build huge, beautiful temples when everybody agrees. It's amazing. And of course you can also build beautiful gardens and so on.

[15:46]

However, when you have, if you would have almost complete agreement in the community, on some value, the consciousness of the community gets darker or is lowered. Because in order to have nearly complete agreement and almost no dissent, some of the dissenters have to go into denial. And in order to go into denial, it helps if you're not aware that you disagree. So you just suppress your disagreements, lower your consciousness, and then you can agree. If you don't agree and you know it, it's kind of stressful. If maybe 90% agree on something and you're in the 10% that doesn't, it's kind of stressful.

[16:49]

So, you know, it might be more comfortable if you just like forget that you feel that way and say, okay, I'm with you guys. You can also say, okay, I'm with you guys and I totally disagree. That's also possible, but that takes a little bit more, I don't know what, skill and patience with the stress of working wholeheartedly with people on things that you don't agree with. And in a community where there's lots of dissent and everybody knows about it, the consciousness is higher. And where they not only know about it but allow it, the consciousness is higher. And then it's kind of like very difficult to accomplish anything. Except there's one thing you can accomplish in a situation like that. Guess what that would be? What? Meeting.

[17:50]

Intimacy. You could accomplish intimacy, you could accomplish the Buddha way with a group of people that, you know, everybody disagreed and everybody allowed everybody to disagree. And all the disagreeing parties realized, oh my God, we're totally intimate. Because if you allow that, your consciousness becomes very clear. And you start to see, oh, all the disagreements are actually in total harmony. Amazing. All the differences are the same. Wow. All we accomplished was the Buddha way. We didn't build any temples. But we accomplished the Buddha way. That's why it's often good to build the temples first You get a tyrant to come in and build the temples, and then the next generation, everybody can disagree and realize the Buddha way. Someone pointed that out, that that's what happened in Athens.

[18:59]

They had this huge tyrant who built all those beautiful buildings, and then they got rid of him, and then they had the facilities for the golden age of Athens, where everybody can disagree all day long. You know? And not get anything done, but just argue and question each other and never find anything out or agree on anything. And all this light came out, which illuminated millennia with the inquiring, the compassionate inquiring. Socrates was a very loving inquirer and he never accomplished anything. He never found out what he was inquiring about. The more he inquired, the less he found out. At the beginning of trying to find something out, he thought, well, maybe I know a little bit. By the end, he said, we know less than we did when we started. This is the spirit. So anyway, thank you.

[20:07]

Thank you. We have a place here to... It's not that we are here to disagree. We're different. We're not here to be different. We are different. We're here to harmonize by allowing. We're here to practice and realize intimacy, which is already there. And we don't get intimacy by eliminating difference. That's my, what do you call it, my peon for dissent. And of course even a greater peon for being compassionate to it and harmonizing with it and realizing intimacy with all these beings who don't agree with us and who are totally off base. And so someone says to me, well, for me, intimacy is like a relationship.

[21:19]

And I thought, that's right, it is. And then the person said, well, like in our relationship, it's not reciprocal. And I said, oh, really? I said, I think it's reciprocal. I disagree with her. It's not symmetrical, but it's reciprocal. The student makes the teacher and the teacher makes the student. And also the teacher can switch with the students and the student can switch with the teacher. But when they switch, it's not symmetrical, but it's reciprocal. The teacher demonstrates, the student watches. And the teacher watches the student watch the teacher.

[22:22]

And the student watches the teacher watch the student. They're watching each other. They're listening to each other. They're in conversation. But they're not symmetrical. They're different. They disagree. Like, what's most painful? Hell's most painful. No, it's not wearing this robe and not realizing intimacy is most painful. There it is. That's a reciprocal conversation. And exercising that reciprocity realizes suchness. And suchness is intimacy. Intimacy. So my mind, you know, just so many cases of this just flood through my mind.

[23:26]

Like one day in, I can't tell if it was like right at the beginning of 1970 or right at the end of 1969, but in 1969, in the fall of 1969, Zen Center, moved from Sokoji Temple to 300 Page Street. And that became our residence for a lot of us. And our zendo was there. And our dining room was there. And one day in our dining room, we were chanting in the dining room. And I was drumming the wooden fish, the mokugyo. And Suzuki Roshi was the doshi leading the ceremony, so I was facing him, and he was facing the altar, and I was playing the mokugyo, and we were chanting the Heart Sutra.

[24:36]

So he was looking perpendicular to my line of vision. I was looking at him. He was looking at the altar. I was playing the drum. But I was also, while I was playing the drum, I was looking at him. I looked at him. And then he looked at me. And then I stopped looking at him. And then he stopped looking at me. And when he stopped looking at me, I started looking at him. And when I started looking at him, he looked at me. And when he stopped looking at me, and then he stopped looking at me and went back to the altar, I started looking at him. And we went back and forth like that. I was up for that. He was up for that. That's what we did together while chanting the Heart Sutra.

[25:40]

And now, right now, a thought crosses my mind, doesn't a Zen teacher have something better to do than that? Of course, a Zen student doesn't have anything better than playing a drum and looking at a teacher and then looking away and looking at... I didn't look away, I looked down. So I looked up to look down, look up, down. He looked right, he left, right, left. This is what we did together. Yeah. This was our little thing we did. I also have this memory from the time when we had a tea teacher here named Nakamura Sensei. And I remember her saying, this is my memory, maybe she didn't say it, that in Japan, when you're learning something like tea or Zen, it's 80% watching and 10% verbal explanation.

[26:51]

Do you remember her saying that, Maria? And, yeah, so... And for me that was fine. I mean, nobody told me it was 80%, but I think I did watch the teacher a lot. I enjoyed it. And me watching him and him being aware that I was watching him I wasn't so aware that he was aware of me watching him, but I was watching him a lot and I was very happy to do so. And I think I watched him maybe more than I ever watched anybody up until that time in my life. Maybe I did watch my mother and father when I was little, but I was really aware that I was enjoying watching him. And like when we first met, the first thing I watched him, I wasn't planning on watching him, but he walked by and I was happy to watch his feet.

[28:01]

And I looked at those feet and I watched him and I thought, this is good to watch those feet. And as many of you know, when I watched those feet, the thought came in my mind, these feet can teach me Zen. So I was happy to watch his feet, his hands, What a blessing to be able to watch somebody and have them be aware you're watching and back and forth. One time before we moved over to 300 Page Street, when we were still at Sokoji, we were having, I believe it was lunch. But it might have been breakfast. Anyway, it was one of those two. Or if it wasn't one of those two, then it was dinner. It was definitely one of those three because we didn't have any other meals. So he's sitting there on the altar, raised platform, and we're sitting down a little lower.

[29:12]

But some of our seats anywhere were facing him so we could actually see him eating and he had his bowls and one of his bowls he had rice in and he had shaped his rice with his spoon kind of into a ball. And as I remember it, it was white rice. So here is this black bowl and inside of it is this nice little white ball. And he was eating from the bowl, but he was tilting the bowl. And he tilted it quite a bit. And I thought, if he tilts it much more, it's going to probably roll out. But I thought, but he's a Zen teacher. He knows that. So it probably won't roll out. But I was watching.

[30:17]

I was eating too, but I was watching the ball in the bowl. Now, I don't know if he knew I was watching the ball in the bowl, but I was watching the ball in the teacher's bowl. And then he tilted it a little bit more, and then the ball rolled out of the bowl, just like you would guess it would. And it rolled onto his robe. And then he picked up the ball and put it back in his robe, in his bowl. I was, you know, I was happy to watch him eat and see how he did that. Yeah, so for me, that was intimacy, or that is intimacy. And I was so happy to... I didn't think of the word at the time, but somehow it was happening.

[31:18]

How fortunate to realize the matter under the robe even before I had one. He had one and he was practicing that and transmitting it to us. And I wasn't the only one he was offering this to. He offered this to everybody in the room who could watch him. And then also he, during those meals, before the meal started, the tenzo would bring in a tray with food on it and then he would receive the tray from the tenzo and then he would offer it to the Buddha. And so again I watched him do that. And then one day after we moved over to 300 Page Street the tenzo brought in the food tray and he pointed to me and I forgot exactly what gesture he made but he pointed to me and sort of went like, you know,

[32:29]

come and receive the tray. So I got up from my seat and went over and received the tray from the tenzo and made the offering and then went back to my seat. And then later, one of my friends said to me, how did you know how to do that? And how did he know that you knew how to do it? I said, I don't know. But I've been watching him do it for quite a while. So I saw how he did it. So when he told me to do it, I did it. So for me, this is reciprocal. but not symmetrical. I didn't invite him to make the offering. He invited me, but he couldn't have invited me unless I was there, and I couldn't have offered it unless he was there, and I couldn't have offered it unless I had been watching him, and he couldn't have invited me to do it unless he had seen that I was watching him, and so on.

[33:42]

We work on this together. And then sometimes he would give me some feedback And it was reciprocal. Like he would give it to me just right. Not too much, not too little, because so it could be reciprocal. So it wasn't too much or too little for him or too little for me. And he could also give me feedback if it was too much or too little. And he was able to do that. And then sometimes, even though I really, like I said, I really enjoyed watching him, sometimes I didn't really want him to be watching me. So then he could watch me. He could find a way to watch me when I didn't want to be watched. He could kind of find a way to encourage me to stay in his presence when I wanted to get away.

[34:47]

So here he offers me a chance. I say, thank you so much. I come and receive the opportunity. And then I feel like this is too much, too intense. I want to get away. And then he sees that and he says, no, no, it's OK. We can do this. And we did. He didn't, for me anyway, he didn't seem to be afraid of me watching him, but sometimes I was afraid of him watching me, even though that's really what I wanted. I wanted to watch him. I wanted him to watch me. And yet, when it was just that way, sometimes it was so intense, I wanted to give him a break. But he didn't need one. He never said, oh, thanks. He said, you know, it's okay, I don't need a break.

[35:51]

Thank you very much for offering. You can stay and experience this a little longer. You know, basically until you're settled. When you're settled, you can go. When you're not trying to get away, please go. Yeah, so I do think that our relationships... are intimate. Not to say our relationships with our spouses and children and parents aren't intimate. They are too. It's all intimacy. But our intimacy is not quite the same as those. We have different forms. So I was, you know, I didn't live in Zizekershi's bedroom, but in a way I was more intimate than some people are with the people there in their bedroom. I'm not more intimate.

[36:52]

I was practicing it happily, whereas some people are in the same bedroom and they're avoiding practicing it. So there's opportunities are everywhere, but because of our forms and ceremonies, we can become very, very intimate in a way that really works for everybody. And there's other forms of intimacy which aren't appropriate in some cases. So, yeah, so I felt like Zen offered a way to realize intimacy that worked better than some of the other ways that we sometimes try. That seems to, the other ways, yeah, just, They work maybe with one person, but if you try to do it with 50 people, it doesn't work very well. But these forms you can do with 50 people, because everybody has the same access to the forms.

[38:00]

Everybody can watch the teacher. Everybody can question the teacher. Everybody can be seen by the teacher. Everybody can watch their friends. and question their friends and be questioned by their friends and question the teacher and be questioned by the teacher. We can all question each other. Everybody's okay with that. And that can all be... Everybody has a chance. So it's no jealousy or envy because we all have these forms to practice intimacy. And even so, it's very intense sometimes. So, yeah, I feel like not that we have fully realized our intimacy, but I feel like our Sangha relations and our student-teacher relations are really for the sake of and offer the opportunity for the great matter of intimacy, which is the great matter of suchness, which is the great matter of reality.

[39:06]

And sometimes when I'm expressing myself, people look various ways. One of the ways they sometimes look is very alert and joyful and receptive and enthusiastic. Another way they look is unhappy and resistant and depressed. And they're both opportunities for intimacy. And that made me think of the story of Suzuki Roshi saying to me one day, I want to give you a lecture. But it's a lecture that I can't give in the Dharma Hall, I can't give in the Buddha Hall.

[40:32]

I want to give it to you in private." And I thought, wow, what an honor, thank you. How wonderful. I get my own special lecture. So then, yeah, with both of us with our robes on, We went into his doksan room and he sat down cross-legged and I sat down cross-legged facing him and he gave me a talk on the harmony of difference and unity. Something that he's never said before in the Buddha Hall. Just for me. Doesn't that sound nice? It was. It was so nice. But I couldn't stay awake. I was like, I was falling asleep. I don't know how deeply asleep I was. It's hard to know those kinds of things.

[41:37]

But I was definitely noticing that I was going to sleep and then kind of waking up and going to sleep. And I also don't know how long this went on. I'm pretty sure it was not a full hour. But it might have been an hour. Maybe, possibly an hour. More than 10 minutes. But I really don't know how long it took. And after I got out, I didn't go and check. How long did that take? I was so embarrassed that Harry was offering this to me, this priceless opportunity, and the young man with his teacher who was going to go away pretty soon. I didn't know at the time, but this precious opportunity that I was sleeping. And again, he just kept talking. He didn't stop. He didn't say, maybe he did, maybe he said, are you actually asleep?

[42:42]

But if he said it, he was speaking English to me. I didn't hear him say, attention, son, are you asleep? Are you sleeping through this blessing that I'm bestowing upon you? I didn't hear him say anything like that. Right in darkness, there is light. But don't confront it as light. Right in light, there's darkness. But don't try to see it as darkness. They're like forward and backwards. That kind of stuff he was talking about. And I was like, How could this possibly be happening? Anyway, it happened. And that was reciprocal, but not symmetrical. Now, if I was giving a talk, maybe he would have gone to sleep. But I think he was awake and happily

[43:45]

This was our training in intimacy that he offered me that we did together. I brought up the issue of what's most important in our lives at the beginning of the intensive, and I got wonderful responses to that question.

[45:18]

And not too many people came and told me that the most important thing to them is intimacy. However, even though not too many people said that to me, I I have this thought that we have been practicing, we have been training at that very thing the whole time. And we have been doing so really wholeheartedly. And this is maintaining the essential working of the Buddha way. We have been doing it whether we think so or not. That's what I think. That's what I believe is that the work we're actually doing and that we will continue without end. So thank you so much for your great efforts in training in suchness, in training in expressing the Buddha mind seal.

[46:29]

May our intention

[46:38]

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