making a fairly strenuous effort. Some of us had maybe a very strenuous effort, others maybe less strenuous, but following the schedule, taking care of this sitting and also preparing for a ordination tonight, it's going to be a fairly strenuous day for all of us. And I'd like to talk about effort or exertion or exercise and balance. I've been talking about, I've been trying to express some of my feeling about the importance of balance in practice for a few weeks now.

[01:06]

I'm still trying to express some of my sense of this effort of balancing. And as I just said, effort of balancing and also balanced effort. What I'm talking about is also called just sitting or sitting still. When I start talking about my sense of how to sit still, it may sound very active. And in fact, my sense of sitting still, or my sense of peace, the kind of peace that I have found, is a very active peace, a very lively peace. There's also sleepy peace.

[02:10]

but that's not the one I'm talking about today so much. Today is the first day of the Olympics, I think, is it? Over in Korea now, the athletes from all the countries are doing their grand parade. And also for me, Saturday, particularly autumnal Saturdays, have many fond memories, particularly of not necessarily playing football, but maybe walking around raking leaves in the yard and listening to a college football game on a sunny, crisp autumn afternoon. I have such exquisite memories of those afternoons.

[03:18]

Sometimes it wasn't sunny, but those were nice too. So here we are with the Olympics starting and thousands of people trudging through leaves in the East Coast. They're heading off now to the football games at Harvard and Yale, Dartmouth, Penn State. A little later today they'll be going to football games in Ohio and Indiana, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska. And all over the South people are going to college football games today. And eventually they'll start going to games out here at Stanford and so on. So there's a lot of exercise going on here in this meditation hall. And in lots of stadiums all over the country, all over the world, people are exercising. I looked up the word, the word exercise, and I wanted to look at its root.

[04:29]

I also looked up the word athlete. I'm a little shy sometimes to talk about the way I sit because I don't want to... I don't want to discourage people who don't think of themselves as athletes. But I think that I don't mean so much athletics because the word athlete actually has the root of award or prize. And athlete means someone who is in a competition for a prize or an award. So in that sense I don't, I don't think that, well maybe, now that I think of it, maybe we are trying to get an award, the award of being awakened with all beings. But we're not exactly in competition with anybody because everybody has to finish first. So rather than think of us as athletes, perhaps more we're exercisers. We're in the process of exercising our Buddha nature, exercising awakening.

[05:34]

As I said many, many times, we're all completely endowed with the wisdom and compassion of the Buddhas. It's just that we don't exercise it. And the root of the word exercise has nothing to do with competition. It comes from one word which means, one Latin word which means to drill or to drive on or to practice. And the root of that word is XEX, which means to come out of or come from. And another root which is ASIRE, which means to be enclosed or restrained. So exercise comes out of some enclosure or some restraint. So we have this body and we have these mental events and out of the enclosure of our experience we exercise our true nature.

[06:47]

We exercise our awakening. Awakening is not floating someplace in mid-air. It must be exercised. through some limitation. And so we have a number of limitations here. We have the schedule, we have forms, we have our body, and many experiences, many enclosures through which we can exercise awakening. And exercise does not mean in some sense that you're in some particular state of health or something. As I said, today is going to be a priest ordination for Connie Everett.

[07:51]

And I thought last night of another priest ordination I did for a woman who had a very advanced case of cancer, a young woman about 20 or 21 years old She was Chinese, of Chinese ancestry, and she lived in Cambodia. And she came to Zen Center to practice. She intended to come to practice, but her body was deeply inhabited by cancerous growths when she came. So it wasn't clear exactly. She was coming to practice, but we felt probably she was going to die soon. And gradually she thought that she was going to die too. I think she stayed at Zen Center for about two months. And she was a delightful person. She taught us a lot. Great spirit. And then one night she said, I must be ordained now.

[08:59]

So I rushed up from Tassajara to ordain her. And when I got there, she was asleep. I got there about midnight, I think, or something. And she was asleep. They woke her up for the ceremony. And in her room with her friends, we did the ordination. And I think most of the time she was sitting up. They got her to sit up on the edge of the bed. And as you'll see tonight... There's various parts of the ceremony, but one of the parts where the ordinee gets to exercise is they get to exercise by saying, yes, I do. They get to exercise by saying, I take refuge in the Buddha, and so on. So I would say to her, please repeat after me. And then I would say, I take refuge in the Buddha. And then she would say, I take refuge in the Buddha. I'd say, I take refuge in the Dharma. And she'd say, I take refuge in the Buddha. And then she'd fall asleep.

[10:02]

And they'd wake her up. Wake up. Wake up, Le Hong. And I take refuge in the Sangha. I take refuge in the Sangha. And then she'd fall asleep. And we'd wake her up again to go through the precepts. And she did each one. Tremendous. Her whole life energy just taking the precepts, taking the refuges. So she did it. She exercised. exercised, exercised our Buddha nature. Just do that, you know, exercise each thing like that. Okay, that's what you did. So you don't have to breathe and be speaking strong or anything to exercise your deep intention to return to Buddha, return to the truth, return to the community. You can do that and no matter what your state, but it does take that kind of, you've got to exercise, you've got to find that deep desire to return to Buddha and exercise it.

[11:06]

So we're exercising something which is not, we have a limited space in which we do the exercise, but what we're exercising is not something you can exactly get a hold of, yet you can exercise it. Or it can be exercised. Now one of the exercise, the kind of exercise which I'm going to talk about today, one particular type of exercise, is exercise of balancing, particularly balancing the body. And to use that exercise of balancing the body as a context in which to practice the balanced way, the middle way,

[12:25]

So Buddhism in some sense is itself called the middle way, but you could also call it the balanced way, the way that's balanced between poised and balanced between taking things too seriously and denying them, or balanced between saying it is and it isn't our balance between indulging ourselves and mortifying ourselves. The balance between, in other words, what we call the Eightfold Noble Path. Right thinking, right thought, right intention, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right mindfulness, right concentration, right effort.

[13:34]

Each of these aspects of practice is a balancing issue. And in the process of balancing your body, that activity of just balancing your body, you can use that situation to look for right thought, right intention, right mindfulness, right speech. That the one act of balancing the body can guide you to find these eight aspects of the right path. I'll try to give you some feeling for that. Am I talking loudly enough? So the basic physical thing I'm talking about is that We're sitting here and except for that one man who might be leaning against the post, you all seem to be not leaning on anything.

[14:36]

And again, in the instruction for sitting we say, don't lean to the right, don't lean to the left, don't lean forward, don't lean backwards. We don't say don't lean against the wall or don't lean against the back of the chair. But this not leaning on anything is a literal physical instruction, but it's also a philosophical instruction. So with your body, you exercise the metaphysical truth of not leaning on anything. But not leaning on anything does not mean, although we don't lean on anything, we're also supported by everything. Everything supports us, but we don't lean on one particular thing. So being balanced, we can feel this, you know, multidimensional or multidirectional support.

[15:40]

So right now I'm just sitting like this with my hands out like this. And just like this I can sit. And I can feel, I can feel myself balancing. Just slight movements are necessary, but I, you know, I'm falling forward and I'm falling backwards and I'm falling from side to side, falling forward, falling backwards, falling, I'm constantly falling and catching myself. and bringing myself back to this erect posture, I'm wobbling, in a sense, constantly. Or, it's not so much that I'm wobbling, but that each moment my body changes, and each moment I get a new body, and each moment I have to reiterate my intention to sit up, But the instruction I've given before and I give again is I'm not going to sit like this all day with my hands up in the air like this.

[17:05]

I'm actually going to join my hands into the meditation mudra, which is to take one of the hands and place it on top of the other. In this particular case, I'm going to place my left hand on top of my right hand and join the tips of my thumbs and bring my hand, my mudra, my hand mudra, in contact with my abdomen. so that my hand is below my navel. My hands are below my navel. And so that my palm is about three inches below my navel and my fingers, my thumbs touch about at the height of my navel or a little below. In my particular case, my thumbs are touching right about the height of my navel. And my hands are not resting on my feet or on my thigh.

[18:09]

My hands are pressed gently against my abdomen. And again, my baby fingers, the back side, this side of my baby fingers are touching my abdomen. If I just touch the heel of my... Is this the heel of the hand? Do we call it the heel? Anyway, if I touch this part of my hand to my abdomen, but don't touch the baby fingers, my arms rest more closely to my body. But if I bring the baby fingers in close to the body, it brings my arms away from my body, which creates a space under the armpits, which is recommended for a number of reasons. But one of them is that your sense of balance is more acute when your hands aren't touching your body. And also you can feel your breathing under your armpits. But the main reason why I like to do this is because to touch the back of the baby fingers against the abdomen, the posture I get into is even more sensitive.

[19:24]

I feel even more sensitive and more... Acutely in touch with the balanced or the unbalanced quality of my posture So when I go like this, I don't feel the when I put my hands like this I don't feel the balancing as well as I do like this This is just my experience it also another part of the balancing is I also am balancing my pelvis and I'm trying to make my pelvis basically vertical, perpendicular to the floor. It's a natural way for me to sit, not natural exactly, but an easy way for me to sit is kind of like this. This is an extreme version of it, but with the top of my pelvis pointing back, this is a common way for people to sit. Some people actually go, straighten their pelvis up and even go more than straight, so it's like this. The best way is actually for the pelvis just to be vertical.

[20:31]

But if you can't find the vertical place, sometimes overshooting it a little bit and arching slightly helps you find it. But best is actually vertical. So the pelvis is actually, you know, as you know, it's actually balanced there. It's a kind of, what do you say, it's almost like a plane. that's sitting up on its edge. And we can do that. We can actually balance it. And in the spine, all these vertebrae are piled up on top of that. And when we're in a balanced state, the muscles are working, I would say, very attentively but not straining because they don't have to do much work. They just have to make slight adjustments to maintain the balance. So I would like to tell you that my experience is that when I enter into this kind of posture, I've used this analogy before.

[21:50]

It's like, for me, it's a little bit like tightrope walking. But not on a pretty wide tightrope. But anyway, it's... For me, when I sit this way, a lot of things... A lot of kinds of thoughts, a lot of concerns, a lot of extra things besides this effort kind of drop away of themselves. I can still daydream when I'm in such a posture, when I'm holding my mudra in this way. I can still daydream. It is possible. But actually it's quite a bit harder than usual for me. Because if I daydream, my experience is my mudra slips down.

[23:00]

Because the only way it stays up here, for me anyway, is fairly frequent, not constant necessarily. There can be little breaks. When I hear a bird, the act of hearing a bird is not the same as the act of holding this mudra up. Do you understand that? That there's an action called hearing the bird, and then there's an action called holding a hand here. So if I listen to the bird too long, my mudra will slip. But it doesn't slip quite that fast. So I can hear a bird and it doesn't slip. But if I listen to a bird and I think a few thoughts, it'll slip down. Or the fingers will come away from the body. But if I actually keep reiterating this placement of my hand against my abdomen, I really do experience this moment by moment. I experience moment by moment.

[24:03]

So again, as I've mentioned before, I'm not saying that hold your hands against your abdomen is the correct posture. I won't say that. What I'm saying is the correct posture is, what I will say is the correct posture is an awake posture. If you are awake to your posture, that's what I mean by, that's what I would say is the posture that the Buddha is recommending, is awake posture. You can be in awake posture in any posture. Standing on your head is also easy to be awake when you're standing on your head. Because if you get involved in too many distractions, you will fall over. Another thing I'd like to mention is that two people recently in this group, they're here right today, sprained their ankles. And my wife told me that when you sprain your ankle, then it's easier to sprain your ankle again.

[25:27]

And some people think that what happens when you sprain your ankle, the trauma of the sprain, you lose, the tissue around the ankle loses some of its ability to balance. That the trauma of the tear, whatever happens there, also disturbs the tissue's knowledge of how to balance. And that one of the therapies, once the swelling goes down, one of the therapies for a sprained ankle to bring back to the tissue that ability to balance, one of the exercises would be to stand on one foot. Now, if you stand on two feet, both of those feet are working pretty hard to balance all the time, but we're quite used to it. And if we go over to one foot, most of us are more aware of how much our foot's going through to balance.

[26:32]

So if you sprain one of your ankles and you stand on both feet, the one that got sprained, maybe it could possibly continue to be lazy. And the one who hasn't sprained can work hard and do most of the work. In fact, that's part of the reason why some people keep spraining one ankle over and over is the one that gets sprained gets lazier and lazier and lazier. You don't hit the ankle to make it stop you lazy. What you do is you stand on it to make it wake up. To make it be aware of how to balance. And as I mentioned before, when a baby first, when a child first learns how to balance, they know what a tremendous, I should say, when a baby first learns how to sit up or particularly stand up and walk, you can see how thrilled they are to be alive. and to be able to walk and stand up. And they know that they're very aware of balancing, of balancing, of balancing.

[27:37]

And little by little, people lose track of that sense of balancing. Not everyone, but a lot of people do. And part of the reason why we lose track of it is because, I would suggest, because of traumas. that we become more and more defensive of our posture as we grow up because we learn that if we walk through life in a very balanced state, we are easily knocked over. And the trauma of being knocked over, gradually we lose our ability to balance. And we stop balancing and we start leaning. We start leaning on our posture. We start leaning on chairs. We start leaning on things. And we gradually become sleepier and sleepier and sleepier. And partly because of traumas that happen to us when we're balanced. We say, this balance, I'm too vulnerable when I'm balanced. The funny thing about being balanced is you're very vulnerable.

[28:40]

Because when you're balanced, you can be knocked off balance. So what a lot of us do is we move into postures and ways of being with lower and lower centers of gravity and more and more points of support so that we won't be knocked down to protect ourselves. But then we lose track of our sense of balance. We lose sense. We lose our courage, too. We become lazy. Moving into a situation where we're balancing moves us into a situation where we're vulnerable And you have to be vulnerable in order to be courageous. If you're invulnerable, there's no courageousness. If you're in a balanced state, you can be hurt. So moving into a balanced state is not, we may have resistance to doing so because in fact we're moving into vulnerability, we're moving into

[29:49]

a situation where we can be easily disturbed. And I'm recommending that we move into such a state and that it is in such a state that we can find the authentic thinking, speaking, acting, and so on. Yesterday when I was driving out here from the city,

[30:59]

My wife pointed to a car in front of us and said, look at the bumper sticker. The bumper sticker said, Jesus on board. And I thought, you know, if I'm giving a talk tomorrow and I talk about Jesus, people may feel funny. They come to a Zen center and A Zen monk, Zen priest starts talking about Jesus. They're not supposed to talk about Jesus, right? It's too confusing. I thought, maybe I should talk a little bit about Jesus. Wouldn't that be interesting? No, I don't know anything about Jesus, really. But I get the feeling that Jesus was one of these exercise types. I feel like he really exercised. And there's a movie out about Jesus now, which you may have heard about. It's called The Last Temptation of Christ. And someone said, this movie is kind of like Jesus as klutz. The humanity of Jesus played up quite fully.

[32:02]

And someone felt that the movie showed that when Jesus contemplated having a wife and family and mortgage payments, he chose crucifixion. Now, I would say, you know, that if you're in a balanced state and you contemplate a wife or a husband and a family and mortgage payments, you would choose awakening. I think you really would choose it. I think you would just reach out there and say, I want, that's what I want. But if you look at the world and you're not in a balanced state, you're kind of tough, you know. You've got your arms, four-point stance, you're like in football. I can take it. Go on. Be the way you are in life. And then you won't necessarily be forced to take awakening, to realize awakening. But if you're vulnerable, if you're balanced, and you look at the world, you realize you're a dead duck.

[33:09]

You're really in trouble. The world's not, you know, taking good care of you in the sense of, you know, from the point of view of what you really want. The thing you need to do is got to wake up. So the balance leads to the awakening and the awakening leads to the balance. The life that is you and the you that is life. Both ways. The posture, your posture that is life and the life that is your posture. Life is your posture, but it's your balanced posture. It's not your posture that's so stable that it doesn't wobble. In the moment, actually, you're still, but the moment is fleeting, and then it changes. If you can feel that, you're feeling the gate to freedom. But if you take, if you're too well supported, if you have too many hands on the ground, it's pretty hard to feel that.

[34:15]

It's a simple thing just to lift the hands up and just to sit here in this balanced and vulnerable place. And also to me, another image I have of what it's like to be in this state is like being in a wind tunnel. And I'm sitting here and the wind of changes, the wind of something blows away stuff if I'm in this state. But if I rest my hands, I go down sort of, in a sense, under the wind tunnel, and I can hold on to everything then. But if I'm putting my energy into this balancing, just stuff just drops away. The crutches, I don't need the crutches anymore. For me, putting my hand, just the simple thing of putting my hand down on my lap or on my feet, it sounds innocent enough, but it's a tiny little crutch. Tiny little crutch, not a big bad crutch, just a little crutch. And you can feel what a crutch it is just by simply lifting your hands up and feel that you put your crutches down.

[35:24]

And you're now sitting on your own two sitting bones. You have your thighs to help balance you. But you're doing the minimum, you have the minimum number of supports now. You're really pared down, you're really simple. And you're making a pretty sincere and pretty thorough effort. Going back again to use another example, which is to sort of amplify the way I feel when I'm sitting this way, it's a little bit like juggling maybe three balls. Or anyway, it's a little bit like juggling.

[36:26]

And when you're first starting to juggle, or when I was first starting to juggle, if somebody wants to talk to me while I'm juggling, I would probably say, excuse me, I can't talk to you while I'm juggling. Does that make sense? Just like you, also if you're tightrope walking, if somebody wanted to talk to you, you'd probably say, I can't talk to you, I've got to really concentrate on balancing here. But if you could once start juggling and get the three balls moving, eventually you might even be able to think about something else while you're balancing or while you're juggling. And you might notice that certain types of thought go very nicely with the balancing and other kinds don't. In other words, even while you're balancing, even while you're juggling, even while you're sitting still in this balanced way, you can still think.

[37:39]

But there's a certain type of thinking that goes with it very nicely, and another kind of thinking that doesn't. And you can see which is which. A certain kind of thinking will knock you off balance. A certain kind of thinking will make you go to a state where you're not balancing anymore, namely where you're going to a more rigidified and protected position. Does that make sense? you can find out, in other words, when you're in a balanced state, when you're walking on a tightrope, when you're juggling these three balls, when you're sitting in this balanced way, you can find out what kind of thought goes with being balanced and what kind of thought does not. And the kind of thinking that doesn't go with the balancing, you don't have to say, that's bad thought, stop that.

[38:45]

You don't have to do that. All you have to do is go back to the balancing and that type of thinking will simply not be there. It will drop off. It can't adhere to the balancing body. It's not that there is no thinking going on in this balancing body. There is thinking. But the type of thinking that's going on is called awakening. When you're awake, it's not that you're not thinking anymore, it's that you're doing a kind of thinking which is called awakening. So in the balanced body, thinking still goes on, but it's a little different from the kind of thinking that goes on when you're basically protecting yourself, when you're not vulnerable to the truth. And once again, you don't have to get rid of the wrong kind of thinking, or even call it wrong kind of thinking.

[39:57]

It naturally drops away when you're balancing. And the kind of thinking that goes on when you're balancing, goes on. Now, I think you can say, when you're balanced, I think you can say, I love you, and not fall off. But when you say, I love you, if you grab, reach out for the thing and try to get a hold of it or control it, you'll fall off. I would propose you can think benevolent thoughts and not fall off. But if you think mean thoughts or hurtful thoughts, you will fall off. That hurtful thoughts will not hold, will fall away from the balancing body. If I think of a cruel thought when I'm balancing, I'm not balancing anymore. I go off.

[40:58]

I'm here, and a petty, selfish, cruel thought is over here. I go off to the side. But if I can stay with the light, with the brilliance of the balanced state, These crummy little petty selfish thoughts just are just, you know, like they're out there someplace. I can bring them right back in just by closing down shop and getting lazy. There they are. Don't worry. If you ever need them, they're right nearby. But they get blown away from this central concentration. This balancing is what we call exertion, total exertion. And when I say total exertion, it sounds a little bit like... It can have that quality, but it's also very light. It's like the total exertion of a soufflé.

[42:03]

You know, look at a soufflé. You know what a soufflé is? Everybody know what a soufflé is? When a souffle is a souffle, before it falls, it's really up, I mean, it's soft, it's light, but it's really up there completely as high as it went, you know, it's just... Or like that expression from the Bible, or maybe it's in the Bible, something like, regard the lilies of the field, see how they grow, nor do they toil. So there's a fullness to this, but there's not necessarily a strain, unless what you're doing is straining. If you want to strain, you can do that. But this balance actually can be very light. Very light. The hand mudra, actually, when you're paying attention to it with this balanced attitude, it floats.

[43:10]

And it floats. It's interesting. And underneath it said, A-S-T-A-R-T-E. Astarte, or something like that. This is the goddess, the Phoenician goddess of love and fertility. The word astarte sort of caught my attention. The picture was kind of nice, too. And then I looked more closely at the picture. And this goddess, this Phoenician goddess of love and fertility, she had her hands like this. She didn't have it like this. Sorry. She had her hands like this. And guess where she had them? Right there, around the navel. Now this is another possibility.

[44:22]

Just do it like that. Don't join them. But this is a little bit harder to keep track of, I think. They might start going . For meditation, it's better to touch them so you can keep alert to them, I think. Anyway, you can try this one if you want to be more the Phoenician style of awakening. But the Chinese Zen style and the Indian style is to overlap a little bit there and touch the thumbs. So I'm telling you about this and I'm trying to not tell you you should do this, but basically encourage you to look at what it's like when you do it. Just check out what it's like and maybe, as I've mentioned before,

[45:23]

in the number of years that I've been practicing, twenty years or so of practicing sitting, I have not spent all of that time sitting with my hands in this way. I didn't even know about this for many years. And even after I found out about it, there were many days when I just didn't have the enthusiasm to put myself out there to make that kind of effort. So I resisted, even after I found out about this and even after I found out how useful it was, I resisted entering into that level of effort. But I'm trying to encourage you and myself to make this level of effort through this one little thing here. One of our great Zen ancestors named Yaku-san Igen, Medicine Mountain, the Zen master, Zen Medicine Mountain, he was sitting once, very still.

[46:51]

And after the sitting was over, one of his students said, what's it like, what kind of thinking are you doing when you're sitting still? And it's interesting to me that the actual Chinese expression he used for sitting still was Gotsu, Gotsu, Chi. The monk said, when you're in Gotsu, Gotsu, Chi, what kind of thinking are you doing? And Gotsu, Gotsu, Chi means, Gotsu means sitting still, being still. And the character looks like this. If I just draw the character in the air, it goes like this, like this, like this, and like this. So it's kind of like two legs and a body and a head. And the image is like of a head and a body pushing up against heaven. Or the image of a bald mountain. And when you take Gotsu and you put another Gotsu next to it, one immovable mount, and put another one next to it, the effect is to intensify the stillness.

[48:06]

But also, the second meaning is wobbliness. The ultimate stillness is wobbly. the ultimate tranquility flows. It's impermanent. It's a total stillness that's fragile, that's fleeting, that can be knocked over. The stillness which isn't fleeting is not as still as the intensified stillness which is so still, so still it can last. This is the stillness of our true nature. Totally unmovable and fleeting. And chi, go-tsu, go-tsu, chi means earth. So what's it like when the earth is this complete, ultimate stillness which is fleeting?

[49:13]

That's the way Buddhas sit. Completely still, but just for now. And then everything goes. We get a new stillness. What's it like when you live in that world? And he said, what kind of thinking are you doing when you're sitting in this true stillness which is impermanent like everything else? And the teacher said, think I think of the unthinking. When you're sitting in this place, this completely still place that's fleeting, and the next moment you sit in this still place and your effort is what reconnects you to that stillness because the stillness is not something you can hold on to.

[50:25]

You have to maintain it because you keep losing it. When you sit in that way, the kind of thinking you do is that you think of the unthinking. That's the kind of thinking you do under those circumstances. Or you could say, you think of the ungraspable. You think of something you can't get a hold of. Lee mentioned to me the other day that he was reading The Course in Miracles and it said something like, God is in between thoughts. And when he said that, I thought, if you think of God as being between thoughts, in other words, if you look for God in between the thoughts, you're thinking of the unthinkable. Try to think of the place between your thoughts.

[51:28]

Try to wrap your mind around the thing that's between what your mind can wrap around and what your mind can wrap around. When you think that way, according to the Course in Miracles, that's God. And I would also say that you can see perhaps by the Phoenician god of love and fertility that that is love and that is fertility. It's not just sort of a philosophical love, it's a physical meaty love. Because you can... I propose that you cannot think this way. You cannot think of this kind of... this way unless your body's in it. You can't just do it with your head. Because if your body's not cooperating, your body's going to be lazy. Your body's going to not be participating in this instantaneous stillness.

[52:37]

You need your body in there, and when you have your body in there, the kind of thinking you do is this kind. I have a little bit more to say, but I don't know. Can you absorb any more? Probably some can and some can't. Well, you can observe this.

[53:48]

There's another kind of balance I want to tell you about. This is another thing my wife said. She said, when I go away from Green Gulch, particularly if I go away for several days, she notices that the mice and rats start moving into the house. She says it's to fill the ecological gap. It's called the vermin balance. I thought you could observe that one. We have this expression which is shikan taza. Shikan means just, or just do it.

[54:53]

Some people feel that shikan is the basic practice of Soto Zen, just do what you're doing. And taza literally means hit, sitting. ta means hit and za means sitting. So just hit the sitting. Just put everything in your life into hitting the sitting. And you could also, however, have shikan, what do you say, tashou. In other words, just hit the bell. So people hit the bells around here or hit the hans or whatever. You could also have the practice of just hitting the bell. But again, just hitting the bell doesn't mean that you just hit the bell, but you might hit the bell with everything in your life. So this young monk, his name was Morita, and he grew up to be Zen Master Morita.

[56:03]

But when he was a little boy and he went to the monastery, his father was sick and he sent him away to the monastery because he couldn't take care of him anymore. He said, when you go to the monastery, when you hit the bell, that would be one of your jobs, you're supposed to hit the bell. When you hit the bell, you should remember that when you hit the bell, at that time of hitting the bell, you make Buddha alive. And the Buddha way takes one step forward. Every time you hit the bell, the Buddha... Buddha wheel turns one little boom and Buddhism goes and Buddha comes alive so he went to the monastery and he hit the bell like his dad told him just completely hit the bell that way you know just hit the bell and the abbot heard the bell and he said who's hitting the bell Bring that guy here.

[57:04]

And he was very surprised to find this little boy. He thought he was going to find some splendid and mature monk who could hit the bell that way. But that's spirit, you know. That's the way to hit the bell. That's the way to sit. When you sit on your cushion, Buddhism goes one little forward. And when you sit at the next moment, Buddhism goes... Or... Whatever way you want. Anyway... Buddha comes alive every moment you sit. Sit with that feeling, that simple, just sitting that all of your Buddhist practice goes with this simple act of sitting, of hitting the bell, of whatever you're doing. I had a little bit of, I was sort of sniffling there. Did you notice? I thought, that's kind of like sniffing cocaine, isn't it? So I don't know about sniffing cocaine, but anyway, what you're doing, what do they say?

[58:08]

Should you sniff cocaine when you're practicing Buddhism? No. But should you practice Buddhism while you're sniffing cocaine? Yes. And then maybe you'll say, well, I don't know if I should keep doing this. This is not good for my nose. Well, I think I'll stop. Oh. This is a poem which I almost memorized. I love this poem because I think this is a poem about just, well, this is a poem about just flying, Shikan flying. Well, I, except in my dreams, I can't fly with this body But if I could fly, I would like to fly like this. This is a poem about a falcon.

[59:13]

It's by Hopkins. I caught this morning, morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dolphin, dappledawn-drawn falcon. in his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding high there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing in his ecstasy. Then off, off forth on swing, as his skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow bend, the hurl and gliding rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding, stirred for a bird. The achieve of, the mastery of the thing. Brute beauty and valor and act.

[60:17]

Oh, air, pride, plume here, buckle. And the funny thing is this is a poem about just flying and it's about Jesus too. This is what Hopkins thought Jesus was like. This kind of total engagement in sitting, in flying, in whatever you're doing. The act of the beauty of your life So let's exercise our Buddha nature.

[61:11]

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