Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. Usually by this time of day, in a one-day retreat, people feel like they have in fact entered the water like the dragon or found themselves in the woods like the tiger. But they're not always feeling like the dragon or the tiger. It's more like perhaps the turtle or the mouse.

[01:04]

But anyway, please make yourself comfortable. As they say, you know, my friend Fu practices tea ceremony and they always say at the beginning of tea ceremony, please make yourself comfortable. And you're sitting there, Sesa, and they don't give you any cushions or anything and then it's kind of like, excuse me? She said that she finally decided what they meant was please make yourself comfortable as you can under the circumstances. The first time I tried to do tea ceremony, I was sitting, Sesa, and then after a while, the room turned sort of, it all got sort of yellow tinted and I thought this is very interesting and then it kind of got brown tinted and pretty soon the room was completely black. And then when all the colors are back, they're on their side.

[02:14]

I thought this is really unusual. And then I realized I was on my side and that I guess I must have fainted. So after that, I didn't do tea ceremony for a long time. Well, I wanted to come back at least briefly to Dogen. Dogen said to be unstained is like, unsurpassed bodhi is to be unstained. To be unstained is like meeting someone for the first time and not thinking about whether

[03:17]

you like them or not, like viewing the moon or flowers and not wishing for more color or brightness. This I was saying this morning is like appreciating the inherent virtue of your life rather than asking your body and mind why it hasn't done something better for you yet. Why haven't you enlightened me yet? And Dogen continued and he said that this unstained mind cannot be established. It's not something to be established or produced or created by you. Unstained mind is not something that comes or goes.

[04:20]

So unstained mind is already here. And sometimes we think that this can't be unstained mind. Thinking, feeling, confusion, sorrow, sadness, depression, this couldn't be unstained mind. And Dogen says, because you were looking somewhere else, you thought and you said, this can't be unstained mind. Because you were looking somewhere else, you thought and you said, this couldn't be unstained mind. So you just made that up.

[05:26]

So anyway, where were you looking? You were looking somewhere else and thinking it had to be like something else. This is, you know, in terms of Zen, there's the Soto Zen and the Rinzai Zen. So this is Soto Zen teaching, you know, that emphasis is on inherent enlightenment or inherent awakening. Unstained mind is already here. Because you were looking somewhere else, you didn't appreciate it. And I want to tell you a little more about, you know, how we make up stories and descriptions

[06:34]

and understandings, which don't necessarily have a basis in reality, as it were. A while back, I read a book by Michael Crichton called Travels. Michael Crichton is mostly famous for Jurassic Park and Disclosure, various things, Andromeda Strain, but he also wrote a book called Travels, which is about his, starts out about his experience in medical school and starts out, in fact, whether cutting up a cadaver. And he has to saw the face in half. Because throughout the semester, he'd gotten other people to do the things that he didn't want to do. And so finally, he had to agree to cut the skull in half vertically with a special saw they used for this. In medical school, he kept thinking, this isn't what I want to be doing.

[07:43]

And then he'd go to the dean and say, I think I'm going to drop out. And the dean would say, well, you should talk to the therapist first. He'd go to talk to the therapist, and the therapist would say, well, everybody feels this way in their first year of medical school. Nobody likes it. Don't you think you owe it to yourself to finish out the year? So then he'd finish out the year, and the next year he'd think, I'm going to quit. And the therapist would say, you've already put in a whole year. How can you quit now? And then the third year, well, you know, this is your last year. Don't you think you'll feel bad later if you drop out now? So he finished medical school completely before he dropped out. Anyway, this is a book about some of his subsequent travels, which start out being places to

[08:50]

go in the world, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and scuba diving in the West Indies and Tahiti. He almost drowns a couple of times scuba diving. One time, he's 60 feet under the water with his sister, and she asks for the camera, and he gives her the camera, and it pulls out his breathing tube out of his mouth, and he can't find it. It's supposed to just fall down by your right waist, apparently, and be right where you can find it, but it's not there. And his sister's taken the camera and gone off to take pictures. She doesn't even know that he's about to die. Anyway, it's all very interesting. He finally gets her attention and tries to signal that he doesn't have any air, and she still can't figure it out.

[09:51]

And he writes it in a way that's just like his novels, there's a lot of suspense. And then, a ways through the book, he starts doing other kinds of travels. He starts while he's in Great Britain, working on the great train robbery with Sean Connery. And when he's in London editing the film, he starts visiting psychics at the London Psychic Society, or whatever it's called. And every day, he goes to visit a different one, and he's trying to check them out and see if there's anything to it. And this first woman that he meets, and so, you know, in order to do that, he's made up these various rules, like say as little as possible. And if they ask you anything, be non-committal and don't say anything, so that you don't give away too much, and see what they can come up with.

[10:54]

And the woman says, well, you're in some kind of laundry room, I don't understand it, but you're in some kind of laundry tube, and there's these big white bats, and there's these black snakes coming out of them. And she's, without ever having seen it, she's describing the film editing room. Anyway, he was, on the whole, quite impressed with the psychics, and some of them were telling him about his grandfather, and various things that they pretty clearly couldn't have known. And he progresses in his travels to where he's doing travels on the astral plane, and he's become a channeler, and the funny thing is that he can't channel for himself. So then he asks his friend to ask him, when he's doing channeling, to ask him, why can't Michael buy a house? And then he'll give the answer, while he's in this trance state, it's all kind of fun.

[12:01]

Anyway, towards the end of the book, there's this little story he tells about, he says, he bought a house in the Los Angeles hills. This is after, I guess, he got over this, you know, why isn't he buying a house, he bought a house in the Los Angeles hills, and just loved it, and had a great time, and there was a pool, and a deck by the pool, and he spent a lot of time sunning by the pool, and going for little swims, and he was having quite a wonderful time, and then one day, about six months, he said, well, I was ecstatic. Then after about six months, he ran into a friend, and he told his friend, I got this wonderful house in the Los Angeles hills, and the friend said, I guess you don't mind rattlesnakes, do you? And he said, what do you mean? And the friend said, well, there's a lot of rattlesnakes in those hills, you know. And Michael says, you're kidding. No, you haven't seen them yet? Well, they're bound to come out in September and October, when it gets really dry, they

[13:09]

start looking for water. So he goes home, and he's completely petrified. Here he's been ecstatic about his house, and now he's petrified, and he doesn't want to sit on the deck anymore, because he thinks the snakes are going to be coming to the pool to sun on the deck, and to try to get some water out of the pool. And he's locking his doors at night, because he's afraid the snakes are going to crawl into his bedroom. And pretty soon, he doesn't want to walk around the property, of course, either, in case he might encounter a snake. So he's going from his garage on the path to the house and back, and he's not going anywhere else on the property now. And he's being very careful and paranoid the whole time that maybe a snake will get him. Up until this point, of course, he hasn't seen a snake.

[14:10]

But he's quite worried. And then, one day, he sees his gardener. So the gardener comes, and he says to the gardener, how long have you been gardening here? And the man says, well, I've been here for six years now, and have you seen any snakes? Well, I did see one. Well, what did you do? Well, I got a shovel, and I killed it. So then he thinks, one snake in six years, that's not so much to worry about. So he gets some papers, and he goes out and sits by the pool, sun in, and he thinks, well, I may have to be, I don't have to be paranoid and completely on edge. I may be slightly watchful. So he's relaxing and has a pretty nice day of it.

[15:17]

At the end of the day, the gardener comes to say goodbye and says, you can be sure you don't have any snakes around here. And he says, why not? Well, he says, you've got a huge gopher problem. And he says, I really did have a gopher problem. The burrows, the gopher burrows were crisscrossed in the lawn, so you couldn't walk across it without in places sinking into your ankle. And he worried sometimes, in fact, that the house would come down from all the, you know, one too many gopher burrows, and that, in fact, his house was Gopher National Park, as far as he could tell. So then, you know, he still hasn't seen a snake yet, and he keeps saying, no, I still hadn't seen a snake, but now I started wondering, why don't the snakes come here?

[16:20]

What's wrong with my place? How can I get the snakes to come? I wonder if there's some kind of snake food I can put out. So this is often, of course, the way we think about things. Sometimes, and, you know, sometimes we may not want some experience that we have in our life. And it's not as though, anyway, but somehow, of course, we end up having experiences that

[17:23]

are beyond our choosing. Sometimes I think, especially if you come to a one-day sit-in, you will think, at some point you're bound to think, I'm not going to sit still for this. And meanwhile, you're sitting there, and then after a while, you think, well, I'm not going to, certainly I won't sit still for this, and you're still sitting there. So experiences seem to come, you know, outside of our choosing. Sometimes, this is called the unborn Buddha mind, or unstained mind. Things arise outside of our choosing, and deciding, wishing, or not, you know, wanting or not wanting. And without anything, sometimes it's like in Michael Crichton's story, sometimes, you

[18:35]

know, we haven't even experienced something, or seen something, or heard something, and there's a whole story about whether or not something will happen. I told you earlier, the line from Rumi, when he says, don't go where you think you want

[19:48]

to go, ask the way to the spring. Rumi also, in another poem, says, you miss the garden because you want a stray fig from a random tree. Here we are in the garden, and we look around for that stray fig in a random tree. We're looking, you know, it's the same as Dogen saying, because you were looking somewhere else you thought, and you said, this couldn't be the garden. What kind of experience were you looking for?

[20:50]

Another line of Rumi's, so after he says you're looking for the stray fig, he says, let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really want. Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really want. So what we really want is not the stray fig in the random tree, but to find ourself in the garden, and what we really want is just to be with, you know, not to abandon ourself moment after moment, and what we really want is, you know, to stop criticizing ourself and being hard on ourself, being judgmental. We want to be accepted, we want to be loved, we want to be appreciated.

[21:56]

And who's not doing that? Who made up the story of why? You know, what's wanted and what's not wanted. In Zen the story is the third, or the fourth patriarch came to the third patriarch and said, nowadays of course we don't say patriarch, excuse me, we say ancestor. Anyway, asked the ancestor, how can I attain liberation? And the ancestor said, who's binding you? He said, who does that? You know, we want, what we really want is to be appreciated and loved and accepted, and someone isn't doing that. Someone's finding some reason to reject us and criticize us and be hard on us.

[23:02]

Someone is believing the cartoon character really exists. There's the poem by Mary Oliver that you probably heard, you know, the beginning of the poem Wild Geese, when she says, you don't have to be hard on yourself. You don't have to be good. You don't have to walk on your knees a hundred miles across the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. This is, you can tell, you know, very much like the Brummie poem.

[24:20]

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really want. When I was the cook at Tassajara, I had a very hard time. This was in the 60s, and at one point my crew rebelled. They had a revolution. They said they didn't want to work with me anymore because I was too bossy and critical and hard on them, and I wouldn't let them do anything. You know, I made all the real decisions. One woman said, well, you treat us just like the bread. And then she thought about it for a moment, and she thought, oh, well, you treat the bread pretty well. You treat us worse than the bread.

[25:24]

You treat us just like we were another spatula. I thought that was what, you know, the Zen thing. You know, like you give up yourself and do what the master says, right? That's what one of my later teachers used to say. Yeah, you're a spatula in my hand. He used to say, you know, that you give up yourself by doing what I tell you. So, yeah, I wonder who that was. But anyway, the director of Tassajara came to me and said, do you want to change the way you do things, or would you like another job? So I decided to try to change the way I did things. It's kind of embarrassing then, you know, to be found out,

[26:33]

and especially when, of course, you're always the last one to find out. Everybody else already knows. And the only person you've been hiding it from is yourself. This is strange, isn't it? Last one to know. So anyway, I kept trying. And one of the things that sustained me was the teapots. So I want to tell you about the teapots. We had those Japanese teapots. Sometimes they're kind of a golden color and sometimes silver. They're aluminum. We had the golden kind. And they started out really beautiful and shiny. They have a nice, round, ample plumpness. And then a wonderful, long, curving spout. And then an elegant, you know, kind of a nice, big, round, curving handle with a little stripping of bamboo around it.

[27:37]

These are not chic and stylish pots. Do you know the kind of pots that say, Are you sure you are worth using me? Sometimes you get into certain stores and then after a while you feel like everything in the store is going, Are you sure you belong here? So there are some teapots that are chic and stylish and kind of sassy and pert. You know, beyond pert. And they kind of like, I am something. There are teapots that say that. You know, and as soon as you have something in your life like a teapot like that

[28:39]

that's saying, I am somebody, I am something, I have style. And then after a while you may feel like, you know, it's saying, Well, what about you? How are you measuring up these days? Do you have any class? But anyway, these teapots are very easy to be with because they weren't like that. They are just round and ample and beautiful without being stylish. And we used to serve hot water at meals because we served the hot water and we have a cleaning stick and we cleaned the bowls in the meditation hall. Then the water goes to the next bowl and you dry the first bowl and this whole get up. You know, it's the revenge of the Japanese for losing the Second World War.

[29:39]

You get this whole set of eating bowls and towels and cloths and this whole ritual way of eating. And you can't just sit down and eat. You've got to go through this whole deal. But anyway, so we served hot water and then we had tea from these pots once or twice a day. And in those days at Tassara, now we have what's known as the backdoor cafe. The backdoor, the kitchen, there's always snack food available. So you can always have fruit, bread, crackers, rice crackers. There's butter, margarine, jams, honey, peanut butter. There's always some rancid peanut butter. People just love rancid peanut butter. I don't know why. You know, rancidity is not very good for you. And if you tell anybody that peanut butter is rancid, they say, I don't care. People love rancid peanut butter.

[30:43]

You can tell when the peanut butter is rancid because it doesn't smell like peanuts. Peanuts have a very distinctive smell. And when the peanut butter no longer smells like peanuts, that's called rancid peanut butter. But in case you're interested, a little health tip. But anyway, it's all at the backdoor. But in those days at Tassara, we had no backdoor cafe. So you got to eat at mealtime and also at tea in the afternoon. And at tea in the afternoon, there would be the tea in the teapots and there'd be a snack. So, of course, a lot of people were determined to be up. You get close up to the table and you chant. We did that chant. You know, it's something like, it's about enjoying the true taste of the Dharma. And we hit the clackers. You have to wait for everybody to get there and then there's a chant, and then the clackers, and then you head to the table.

[31:46]

One of my friends said that, after a few years of practicing, waiting for other people, letting other people go first and things, one of her teachers said she needed to practice selfishness. So her teacher told her to get first in line and take the biggest piece. And that if anybody asked her to do anything, say no. She said it was a very helpful and important practice for her. Anyway, there were the teapots. And then, the thing is, the thing was, though, that those teapots, you know, there's a tradition in Zen that we practice the teapots. We practice respect for things. Practicing respect for things is a way to practice, of course, respect for yourself. Are you worth respecting? Well, a lot of us aren't sure.

[32:49]

Maybe you need to bind yourself up for a while. Or maybe you need to prove in some way that you're worth respecting. I don't know. You may have various sorts of thoughts about this. But you know, in Zen we practice respect because we bow to each other. Then you practice with the things. You know, when you pick up a cup, you pick it up with two hands and then you often hold it in your two hands. This is how you have respect for something, to hold it with two hands. And it brings your awareness together. You have a lot of awareness in the cup. This is very different than cocktail parties where you sort of talk. Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean. And, you know, where something is in one hand, you can kind of... Excuse me, I'm going to have... So in Zen you take it in both hands.

[33:54]

So there's a lot of concentration as soon as you take something in two hands. And it's kind of considered to be in Zen the way to respect something. So the idea is to take one thing in two hands. So these teapots... We used to try to instruct people. I used to as the head of the kitchen. But the teachers would say... And then I'd just try to say, you know, what I thought the teaching was. Take one thing in two hands and then after a while, you know, people would take two things in one hand. Instead of one thing in two hands, you'd take two things in one hand. And then I'd say, you know, out here in the world people get pretty busy.

[34:56]

And there's dental appointments and getting your car fixed and all kinds of stuff. So people are racing around. Zen students are racing, of course, too. They're racing for their time off. Because time off is when you really start to live. Sometimes I joke with people when the bell rings at the end of Zazen. And I say, you can relax now. So Zen students race for their time off because then you get to be you. Or something. Now you can relax. Or now somehow your real life comes in when you get the time off. I never noticed particularly being down at the pool and lying around at the pool being particularly aware.

[35:59]

That was an especially good time to be marvelously aware. Once in a while when I'm lying in the pool looking up and there's the mountains and the blue sky. It's pretty nice. And I feel actually awake But anyway, Zen students race for their time off. So instead of taking two things in one hand, if you take one thing in two hands, and then two things in the other hand, now you've saved yourself three trips. This is interesting, isn't it? So then after a while these nice teapots, they would bang together when you carry them and you walk along real fast. They start banging into each other and pretty soon the teapots are dented. And then if you don't dry them, pretty soon you know the way if the water's on them and you don't dry them

[37:00]

then there's a little watermark. Pretty soon they're kind of a patina of watermark over the outside of the teapot and they're dented. So I used to sometimes stand in the kitchen and look around the kitchen and feel so tired and kind of at the end of my endurance and there'd be all the bowls and the knives and the cutting boards and the pots and the jars and then there were the teapots on the shelf all dented and I felt just the same. All dented. But there was something about the teapots that they were still ready to be used again.

[38:02]

And there was something to me, to my feeling the teapots to me felt very sincere. And they still had some of their dignity and their you know this willingness to be used, to have tea in them to hold water. And I would think I would look at the teapots and I would think Sweethearts if you can do it I can too. Because you know after a while you know we've all been dented. That's the way we are. There's no way to get through life without being dented. And it doesn't mean you have to be particularly abused to be dented. But we all get

[39:05]

dented, we get banged around. We haven't been our whole life treated with respect. Last summer when I was thinking about sincerity Patty asked me if I knew what sincerity meant. She happened to be working on a sculpture. And sincerity means the S-I-N is like sans S-A-N-S in French without, and the ser is wax. Without wax. And the wax is what you can use to fill in the cracks and fill in the dents and make it look like you're perfect. You have no blemishes. So this is what we do a lot of. We try to fill in and make ourself appear

[40:05]

a certain way. So to be sincere is that you show the cracks. The cracks and the dents in your life show. This is what happens when people practice Zen. And in sitting one of the things that happens is the wax comes off. Have you noticed that? So by the end of the day you have a little less wax and you're a little more familiar with all the cracks and crevices and crannies and nooks and dark and hidden places. And the places where things don't fit together in your life necessarily. Where it's not smooth and brilliant and enlightened. It's just sincere. ...

[41:17]

And often times of course there's a great relief in becoming sincere. In having the wax come off and being revealed and being unmasked. Because that wax is like a mask that we're presenting to the world and then we're also presenting to ourself. We're trying to present a mask to the part of ourself that finds fault with ourself. We try to hide things from ourself. So we're trying to, you know, all of these are just cartoon characters, but anyway it would be nice if they got long. ... Even if they are just cartoon characters and we just made them up and created these characters. But these characters are existing in relationship with each other. You know, one is finding fault all the time so then the other part of us feels like we have to hide stuff. So if you can get the one to stop finding so much fault and start practicing some respect and say,

[42:29]

thank you for making your best effort. I appreciate all the effort you're making. Your sincere effort, thank you for your sincere effort. Your sincere effort with all of its flaws. Thank you for your sincere effort. Then the other part of you relaxes. There's also of course, you know, someone who's not any of those ... which I've been pointing out today. Unstained. Unstained. Each of these parts of us is unstained. So we can practice thank you for your sincere effort. Thank you.

[44:04]

... ... ... We sometimes think that ... ... You know, when that happened, that kitchen revolution happened, I had to think about what I had been doing in the kitchen. And I thought, if I let other people do more, then they'll get more of the credit. I won't be able to have all the credit for myself. I'll have to share the credit. It was pretty silly of me obviously to think that I could have all the credit anyway, but this is the way we think sometimes. And then I thought, well, why do I need

[45:05]

all the credit? Because then I thought, well, then people will say, oh, you're such a great cook. Thank you for being such a great cook. And I thought, well, who cares whether they do that or not? You know, why would that be important to me? And then I thought, well, it would be important to me because if they like my cooking, it must mean they like me. That's a little jump, right? But we start to think like this. And then, well, what difference does it make if they like me? Well, if they like me, then maybe I could get, can be convinced to like myself. So, uh-oh. How much convincing do you need? So I thought, how much convincing do I need

[46:09]

in order to like myself? And then, will any of this work? Can you ever possibly produce enough evidence? Then you're only, obviously, you're only as good as your last meal. I like you, I don't like you, your cooking's good. Oh, that was so crummy, that dish. Uh-oh. So now your self-esteem is going like, you know, and you're always anxious. How is this going to be seen? So then, how can you have any, you know, just liking yourself? This is really, you know, this is called samsara, folks. Samsara, this is the world of suffering. You know, when you start looking around for evidence of how people think you're doing, and how well you've done something, and that has something to do with your self-esteem. And so I realized at that point that if I

[47:13]

if I wanted to like myself, I better start just liking myself. You know, whether there's any evidence for it or not. This is hard. You know, it means you know, the story I like is the one that Robert Bly tells. His friend Bill Stafford, who's since died, used to write a poem every day, and one time somebody interviewed him.

[47:37]

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