Hmm. This is Sunday, August 4, 2024 and for this talk, we'll be talking about change, growth. We'll be talking about we'll be talking about no self, not true self, our own self is no self, or true self is no self. Go beyond ego and past clever words, I think. And so, how do we do that? Do we want to change? Should we change? Of course, we do. I know for me personally, when I came to practice, I reached a point where I just, I was just so sick of myself, just the the the harm I'd caused others, you know, especially in my late teens and early 20s, and just, I Just felt like I was such a mess, and I the zazen, yeah, I was just fed up. I was fed up myself, and so really wanted to just dive in and make those changes. But here's the thing, when it comes to making changes, it's it does not happen on our own schedule. You know, we want to change. We want to we want to be a better person. Of course we do, but it's going to happen. Things will change, but not when we want them to be really in the long run, this practice is about becoming more authentic, being who we are, not trying to be someone else, not trying to be I want to be like this. I want to be like that. No, the change occurs when, well, of course, through our day in and day out of zazen, day after day, month after month, year after year, but just accepting ourselves for who we are alright. So I have all these, these afflictions, say or we become, we notice them as we as we deepen our practice, but not to do anything about them that just return our attention to the practice, you know, and as that happens, things do change, not all the time. And that's also kind of like our biggest blind spot as human beings, or one of our biggest is, is we don't see the change. We don't see the change in ourselves, but if we just stick with the practice, just keep just just, I don't want to use a grind, grinding away. That's the wrong word, but to just keep applying ourselves, applying ourselves to the practice, and then in time, things do change, and they change for the better. Okay, I feel like saying, We'll stop now and recite the four vows. That was basically it. But I think we'll talk a little more about this. I think I feel sometimes, I think we underestimate the power of zazen, just the power, in general, of meditation, how radical it is as a practice, you know, and particularly in Zen practice. Why is that? It's because we're not looking outside ourselves. We're diving within. We're looking within. We're not trying to change or control things. We see that. We see that in ourselves. We're always trying to control situations people, but we got to get beyond that, you know, and through the daily practice that will happen incrementally, slowly. Some things drop quickly, and others they just they're just like a dog on a bone. They just persist and persist. But that's okay. That's okay. We just keep we just keep returning to practice over and over again. So yes, it's this, it's this. This is the rat of the thing about the practices, it's, it's, it's looking within and not relying on what's outside or what we perceive to be on the outside, and so part of this talk is going to be just kind of showing the limitations of say, you know self help books, or even religion. You know the limitations of of a religion, although, yes, of course, Zen is a religion, religion, you do need faith that this practice works. You know that's that's the religious part of it really, ultimately, is having faith in ourselves and then faith that this practice works, the limitations of. You know, motivational speakers, just as a superfluous example, or personality tests I'll be talking about that. I was really, I really didn't know what, how this talk was going to come out. I was just really taken by this article that this woman wrote. Her name is Olga Kazan, and this is the article she wrote. She's a staff writer for The Atlantic, and this is the title of the article. I gave myself three months to change more my personality. The results were mixed. So I'll be getting back to that. But first I want to cover a few few other things, yeah, maybe just the last point. I know I've said this already, but in the end, zazen tears us down and eventually makes us more authentic. But it takes time. It takes patience. All right? Alright, I'm going to cover just, I always like to cover some definitions. So let's just start off with no self. So this is kind of like one of the core tenants of what the Buddha spoke about, the core tenants of Buddhism. You know, we have this, these three characteristics of being a human being. One is suffering, okay, I think we can all get that one, impermanence, same here. And the third one is no self. So no self, that one's a kind of a little harder to grasp, really, to really fully understand it. And I'm not going to try and explain it. I mean, I'm just going to give you this definition. Yeah. So according to Buddhism, individuals consist of five aggregates. So five aggregates, they're also, sometimes I've read their terms of heaps, imagine them as heaps known as the Skandhas, which are essentially collections of parts devoid of essential core. So devoid of essential core, those parts are divided into these five categories or aggregates, form, feeling, perception, mental formations, consciousness or awareness. Sometimes it's defined this fifth one conscious, or where being conscious of the the other four aggregates. So it's really yet, like I said, it's really hard to fully understand these aggregates. But that doesn't matter the the point and point, important point here is that these five aggregates are all interrelated processes that are constantly changing to create the experience of being, quote you. It's kind of like a confluence of these five different elements, or aggregates, and from these five aggregates that are arising, that are constantly arising, or here we form this, we self identify ourselves as me, true and but none is a self. None of it at all. All of it is in person, impermanent. You know, Roshi is fond of always talking in the workshops about how there's just, there's no little person in here, there's no little man or little woman, like just controlling things. Everything's impermanent, and that that's huge. That is a huge thing, because out of that awareness, out of that realization, change is possible. We can change all right, here's another definition I really like. It's kind of old school. This definition of no self. It's described in terms of the four elements in analogy. So we have earth, water, fire and air. Okay, so just stick with me on this one I'm reading from Ajahn Chah. Everything arises, everything fail falls away, teachings on impermanence and the end of suffering. And this is what he says. What was the Buddha advice on how to practice meditation? He taught to practice like the earth to practice like water, to practice like fire, to practice like wind, practice like the old things, the thing we are already made of, the solid element of Earth, the liquid element of water, the warming Element of Fire, the Moving element of wind.
The Buddha used this analogy, the aggregation that is us is merely a coming together of the elements of earth, water, fire and air. If you try to find an actual person there, you can't. There are only these collections of elements, but for all our lives, we never thought to separate them like this. Us to see what's really there. We have only thought, This is me. This is mine. We've always seen everything in terms of the self. Never seen that there is merely earth, water, fire and air. But the Buddha teaches in this way, he talks about the four elements and urges us to see that this is what we are. This is Earth water, fire and air. There is no person here contemplate these elements to see that there is no being or individual, but only Earth water, fire and air.
Another way we can see ourselves, this so called self, perhaps, is it's a confluence of habit patterns. You know, it's just constantly training like water. So we're just kind of, there's all this momentum we have these different ways of things, seeing things, different ways of behaving, habit patterns and some stick around much longer than others, but through the daily practice, bit by bit, some of these habit patterns will change, will drop, drop away. Okay, so back to this article. I gave myself three months to change my personality. The results were mixed. Her name is Olga Kazan, and like I mentioned, she's a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. She's the author of weird, the power of being an outsider in an insider world. And she has also written for the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and other publications. She writes a sub stack on personality change. So she's kind of, this is kind of her thing. She writes a lot about personality.
And she begins one morning last summer, I woke up and announced to no one in particular, I choose to be happy today Next, I journaled about the things I was grateful for and tried to think more positively about my enemies and myself when someone later criticized me on Twitter, I suppressed my rage and tried to sympathize with my hater, then to loosen up and expand my social skills, I headed to an improv class. I was midway through an experiment sample size one to see whether I could change my personality, because these activities were supposed to make me happier, I approached him with the desperate hope of a supplicant kneeling at a shrine. Psychologists say that personality is made up of five traits, extraversion, or how sociable you are, two consciousness, or how self disciplined and organized you are, agreeableness, or how warm and empathetic you are. Fourth is openness, or how receptive you are to new ideas and activities. And five, neuroticism, or how depressed or anxious you are. People tend to be happier and healthier when they score higher on the first four traits and lower on neuroticism. I'm pretty open and conscientious, but I'm low on extroversion, middling on agreeableness, and off the charts on neuroticism. So yeah, she's going to be talking a lot about neuroticism. I think, I guess, I imagine one of the points I want to get across is is, again, going back to our practice and practice, what I've noticed in myself and in others year after year, is there are no two extremes. You know, there's the introverted and the extroverted. But I'll just speak for myself, I tend to be my preference. Tends to be introverted. But as time goes on, it tends to balance out. We're not we if, through zazen, we kind of acquire, really, it's the middle way. We don't. Yeah, things open up and we're not so stuck on one side or the other. It just kind of, we slowly, slowly change where we're not so introverted and we're a little more extroverted, and we we're not so shy, and we tend to but this, again, is through the through the practice, that this happens same thing with neuroticism. I think, probably, I suspect, probably one of the best things for neuroticism is some kind of meditation practice. It doesn't have to be Zen, but through meditation, if you stick with it, then we're likely to become less neurotic. It less controlling. Researching the science of personality, I learned that it was possible to deliberately mold these five traits. So again, these traits are extroversion, consciousness, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism. To an extent by adopting certain behaviors, I began wondering whether the tactics of personality change could work on me. I've never really liked my personality, and other people don't like it either. In grad school, a partner and I were assigned to write fake obituaries for each other by interviewing our families and friends. The nicest thing my partner could make shake out of my loved ones was that I, quote, really enjoy grocery shopping. Recently, a friend named me, made of honor in her wedding on the website for the event, she described me as, quote, strongly opinionated and fiercely persistent, not wrong, but not what I want on my tombstone. I've always been bad at parties because the topics I bring up are too depressing, such as everything that's wrong with my life and everything that's wrong with the world and the futility of doing anything about it. Neurotic people twitchy and suspicious can awful detect things that are less sensitive. People simply don't register. Let me say that again, can often detect, okay. Neurotic people twitchy and suspicious can often detect things that less sensitive. People simply don't register. Rights of personality psychologist Brian little in Who are you really? He says, This is not conducive to relaxed and easy living. Rather than being motivated by rewards, neurotic people tend to fear risks and punishments. We ruminate on negative events more than emotionally stable people do. Many like me spend a lot of money on therapy and brain medications. And while there's nothing wrong with being an introvert, we tend to underestimate how much we enjoy behaving like extroverts. People have the most friends they will ever have at age 25 I don't where she got that, and I am much older than that and never had very many friends to begin with. Besides, my editors wanted me to see if I could change my personality and I'll try anything once I'm open to experiences, maybe I too could become a friendly extrovert who doesn't carry around emergency Xanax I gave myself three months.
And then so she meets this she reaches out to this psychologist, Nathan Hudson, who's a professor. He created a tool to help people alter their personality.
So she was going to do this three months test, but first she needed to test herself to see, you know, where she rates on these scales. I imagine that's how it's it's done. And so she answered all these questions through this personality test that Hudson, this professor, created. So this is what she says, I scored in the 23rd percentile on extraversion, very low, especially when it comes to being friendly and or cheerful. Meanwhile, I scored very high on conscientiousness and openness, openness and average on agreeableness, my high level of sympathy for other people, making up for my low level of trust in them. Finally, I came to the source of half my breakups, 90% of my therapy appointments and most of my problems in general, neuroticism. I'm in the 94th percentile, extremely high. I prescribed myself the same challenges that Hudson had given to students to become more extroverted. I would meet new people to degree to decrease neuroticism. I would meditate often and make gratitude lists okay to increase agreeableness, the challenges included sending supportive texts and cards, thinking more positively about people who frustrated and regrettably hugging. In addition to completing Hudson's challenges, I decided to sign up for improv in hopes of increasing my extraversion and reducing my social anxiety to cut down on how pissed off I am in general, because I'm an overachiever. I also signed up for an anger management class
Hudson's findings on the mutability of personality. Di seem to endorse the ancient Buddhist idea of no self, no core. You to believe otherwise the sutras say is a source of suffering. Similarly, Brian little writes that people can, quote, have multiple authenticities, that you can sincerely be a different person in different situations. All right, no self. So I'm going to skip over to this book, novice to master and ongoing lessons in the extent of my own stupidity. And it's written by a Japanese Zen teacher, Soko Morinaga,
okay, so this is going back to really. This is going back to zazen, what we're doing and this, and no self consider this. So he starts consider this. Suppose that a person is in a very sincere and tranquil mood with no anxieties, in a clear, healthy psychological frame of mind, in other words, centered the mind is still even in our daily activities. This disregarding thoughts, suppose that person is a housewife in the kitchen in the evening and she hears the familiar sound of her husband's footsteps as he comes home, wiping her hands on her apron, she goes to the door to greet him. In this instance, this person is with the face of a wife, the voice of a wife, the body and movements of a wife. A wife greeting her husband. Then just as she reaches to take his coat, a voice from behind calls mama, she turns around and responds, what is it? And just in that instant, this person no longer has the face of a wife, but of a mother. She looks back with the face of a mother, the voice of a mother, the gestures of a mother. Then, if a friend from the neighborhood comes to call, she receives her guests not with the face of a wife or of a mother, but with the face of a next door neighbor. Perhaps, as you read this, you imagine me in one form, as a month, but tomorrow morning, I will visit the grave of my parents. Standing before that grave, I am nothing more than a child. One appears before one's parents as a child before one's child as a parent, because one's husband as a wife before one's wife as a husband at work, the face and form one takes on depends upon the position they occupy. This is our true form. There is no clump called quote I, moving from this spot to that spot, instant by instant, rather through particular encounters with particular people within each encounter, within each transition, something called I makes its appearance that it thus it is what what seems to be an object outside yourself is, in reality, your compliment, that which gives This instance of your life its glow. If you understand phenomena in this way, you understand why the Zen school sets up its practice so that you can attain enlightenment by looking intently into your own heart. If that heart were really yours alone, no matter how intently you continue to gaze at it, you could never awaken to universal truth. But the heart is not an individual possession. It is not yours alone. Causes and conditions. We are not like blocks of ice conducting ourselves as solid in the individuals. As we move from one place to place, we are like water flowing freely. We are like water flowing freely, now into a four sided container, now in a three sided container, realizing a new birth. Each and every instance such, I believe, is a reality of our existence. And it is this sort of human existence, this sort of existence of all things in the universe, that Buddhism expounds. It follows, then that we are not individual eyes gathering to form a we, but that within the existence of we, something called I arises. So that's the delusion that I'm here and you're all out there. Reminds me of the box of Muhammad Ali, who probably came up with the shortest poem ever me. We you.
It follows, I'll say this again. It follows, then, that we are not individual eyes gathering to form a quote we, but that within the existence of we, something called I arises. This, I believe, is reality when we are in accordance with this original form, it is possible for us to understand the death, the pain, the sadness, the happiness of another as our own. You.
Back to the article, starring staring at my test results. I told myself, this will be fun. After all, I had changed my personality before in high school, I was shy, studious and for a while, deeply religious. In college, I was fun, loving and boy crazy. Now I'm basically hermetic, quote pressure addict, as one former editor put it, it was time for yet another me to take make my maker debut. Ideally, in the end, I would be happy, relax, personable, the screams of angry sources, the failure of my boyfriend to do the tiniest fucking thing, they would be nothing to me. I would finally understand that my what my therapist means when she says I should, quote, just observe my thoughts and let them pass through without judgment. Judgment, alright, just observes my thoughts and let them pass without judgment. So this therapist, I mean, this is easier said than done. Obviously, this therapist means basically describing what we're doing with our Zazen. You know, the thoughts arise. They're there, and they so long as we just stick with with whatever practice we're doing, whether it's following a breath or or working on a koan, the thoughts arise and they disappear. They arise and disappear. No judgment, you
all right, so then she talks about wanting to do I'm trying this improv. So immediately I encountered a problem. I don't like improv. It's basically a Quaker meeting in which a bunch of office workers sit quietly in a circle until someone jumps up, points towards the corner of the room and says, I think I found my kangaroo. My vibe is less, yes and and more, well, actually. And then she goes on, I was also scared out of my mind. I hate looking silly. And that's all. Improv is the first night we met in someone's townhouse in Washington, DC, in a room that was for no discernible reason, decorated with dozens of elephant sculptures. Right after the instructor said, let's get started, I began hoping that someone would grab one of those elephants and knock me unconscious. So, yeah, she's forcing herself to do a lot of different things, kind of like what we try and do sometimes outside of practice, say, or let's say, someone who, who doesn't know practice, is not aware of practice, doesn't have any kind of meditation practice. They might try these different kinds of things to kind of get them up out of their shell. I mean, that can possibly work, but anyway, I'm just going to keep going on.
What is personality anyway, and where does it come from? So she kind of covers the just really briefly. I'm not going to read it, but just the whole history of the science of understanding, exploring a personality. And this is interesting. Common estimate is that about 30 to 50% of the differences between two people's personalities are attributable to their genes. Okay, but hold on. But just because something is genetic doesn't mean it's permanent. Those genes interact with one another in ways that can change how they behave. Says Catherine page, harden of behavioral Genesis geneticists at the University of Texas, at Texas, they also interact with your environment in ways that can change how you behave. So there's that element of impermanence again and change this whole idea that you. Genes. Who can figure out how people behave or who they are through their genes. It's not a 100% thing for sure,
not until the nine Okay, so she starts the early describe the early research into personality, and then she goes on, not until the 1950s that researchers acknowledge people's versatility, that we can reveal new faces and bury others. Everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously playing a role. The sociologist Robert Ezra Park wrote in 1950 It is in these roles that we know each other. It is in these roles that we know ourselves.
All right, so now she gets into the meditation part. Well, she starts off for my gratitude journaling.
For my gratitude journaling, I purchased a notebook whose cover said, Give me those bright, sunshiny vibes. I soon noticed, though, that my gratitude lists were repetitive odes to creature comforts and entertainment, Netflix, yoga, Tiktok leggings, wine. After I cut my finger cooking, I expressed gratitude for the dictation software that let me write without using my hands, but then my finger healed. Very hard to come up with new things to say. I wrote one day, I find expressing gratitude unnatural because Russians believe Doing so will provoke the evil eye. Our God doesn't like too much bragging. The writer Gretchen Rubin hit a similar wall when keeping a gratitude journal for her book, The Happiness Project, it has had started to feel forced and effect that she wrote making her annoyed rather than grateful. Yeah, it seems to me. I mean, I've never done that as a practice, and I know I never will. You know, gratitude is such a sublime it's such a mysterious feeling, if we will, or the gratitude arising. I don't want to call it feeling. It's more than that. But you know, again, going back to our practice, gratitude does arise when we get out of the way, and it just comes up mysteriously unknown when it will happen, but it does happen, and it seems to me that writing a gratitude just feels so contrived to me to have like a gratitude journal as an exercise just trafficking in our own thoughts, writing these things down and again, like this person said this book, who wrote about this, The Happiness Project, it just felt forced and affected. I was also supposed to be meditating, but I couldn't. On almost every page my journal reads, meditation sucks. I tried a guided meditation that involved breathing with a heavy book on my stomach, only to find that it's really hard to breathe with a heavy book on your stomach. I tweeted about my meditation failures and Dan Harris. Dan Harris, a former Good Morning America weekend anchor, replied, He said, the fact that you're noticing the thoughts of sessions is proof that you are doing it correctly. I picked up Harris's book 10% happier. That's just one of the best titles of a book. When it comes to meditation, 10% we come to practice thinking there's going to be this tremendous transformation, say, in our personality or the things that we're working on, that we are going to be happier. Yes, of course. But the problem, of course, is that we want to be happier. Who doesn't want to be happier? You know? But happier is just another state. But as time goes on, get more grounded and and, yeah, happiness or joy will arise, but it's not something that we can contrive. And so this 10% happier is kind of like a good you know, it's not like I'm 100% happier. It's temper. You know, meditation works, but don't expect miracles overnight. Don't expect miracles overnight. Over time. Yes, things will change, but it takes time. Hence, the 10% uh, so yeah, she picks up his book 10% happier, which chronicles his journey from a high, strong reporter who had a panic attack on air to a high, strong reporter who meditates a lot. At one point he was meditating for two. Hours a day. When I called Harris, he said that it's normal for meditation to feel like, quote, training your mind to not be a pack of wild squirrels all the time. Very few people actually clear their minds when they're meditating. The point is to focus on your breath for however long you can even if just a second before you get distracted, then do it over and over again. Sound familiar occasionally. When Harris meditates, he quotes still rehearses some grand, expletive filled speech. I'm going to deliver it to someone who's wronged me, but now he can return to his breath more quickly, or just laugh off the obsession, obsession, obsessing. Heir suggested that I try loving kindness meditation in which you can beam affectionate thoughts towards yourself and others. This, he said quote, sets off what I call a GUI upward spiral, where as your inner weather gets bomb, near your relationships get better. In his book, Harris describes meditating on his two year old niece as he thought about her little feet and sweet face with her mischievous eyes, he started crying uncontrollable, uncontrollably. What a pussy. I thought. I downloaded Harris's but wait, wait, I downloaded Harris's meditation app and pulled up a loving kindness session by the meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg. She had me repeat calming phrases like, May you be safe and may you live with ease. Then she asked me to envision myself surrounded by a circle of people who love me, radiating loving kindness towards me. I pictured my family, my boyfriend, my friends, my former professors, emitting emitting beneficence from their bellies like Care Bears. Quote, you're good, you're okay. I imagine them saying, before I knew what was happening, I had broken into sobs.
So loving kindness meditation, that's that's not what we do here. It's a totally, totally based on, you know, my own little bit of experience is a totally, of course, it's a totally legitimate practice. Through, again, through, you know? So there's always, we always can talk about truth on two sides of the coin, right? The absolute and and relative. And so, yes, fundamentally, we are whole and complete. We're perfect. There's nothing to do. There's nothing to change. Yet, on the relative side, there's a lot of work to be done. So yes, we are okay. Everything's fine. Everything is as it should be.
Don't want to dismiss what she experienced there with this love and kindness. And I think if we did actually, Roshi was really impressed when he went to a visit at the Vermont Zen Center, Sunyata Roshi place with because they do loving kindness meditation. And he we actually tried that for I think it was like at least three or four sesshins in a row. It was in the afternoon. Were it was, I think was mostly Roshi, but I think also maybe the first monitor did it would actually do this guided meditation, loving kindness. For I was either for a round of sitting, must have been around the city, and I can't imagine doing this for a whole block, but spin around the sitting. But I suspect, you know, we stopped doing it, and I suspect what happened is just too many people just gave feedback, since that's, that's not our way, you know, that's not our practice. People wanted to get back to mu. Want to get back to the breath practice, even for that, that block round of Zen. When I was in Toronto at the Toronto Zen Center, I did manage to think, at least do a four day meditation retreat, and That's, that's what they do in every seshin.
Okay, so then she talks a little more about, oh, she talks about the pandemic, and a little bit and then she also blew off one of her anger management classes. She talks about that. She talks about the improv. It didn't go so badly. She says. She doesn't want to burden us with nothing more boring than describing an improv class, and so she moves on. So finally, the day came to retest my personality and see how much I change. She wanted hard data. So this time, the test told me that my extra version had increased, going from the 23rd to the 33rd so it wasn't just improv she was doing. She also kind of like got herself out there and kind of started talking with people at a say at the bartender at the local bar, just to get out of her shell more. So she went from 23rd percentile to 33rd my neuroticism decreased from extremely high to merely very high, drop into the Seventh, Seventh, 77th, percentile. So yeah, I mean definitely, I would venture to guess that that neuroticism decreased because of the meditation that she was doing. I
I told Brian little how I'd done. He said I likely did experience quote, A modes shift in extroversion and neuroticism, but also that I might have simply triggered positive feedback loops. I got out more so I enjoyed more things, so I went to more things and so forth. Why didn't I become more agreeable? Though I had spent months dwelling on the goodness of people, devoted hours to anger management and even sent an E card to my mom. Little speculated that maybe by behaving so differently, I had heightened my internal sense that people aren't to be trusted, or I might have subconsciously bucked against all the syrupy gratitude time that I had tried so hard and made negative progress. I think it's a bit of a hoot. He said, perhaps it's a relief that I'm not a completely new person. Little little says that engaging in, quote, free trade behavior, acting outside our nature for too long can be harmful, because you can start to feel like you're suppressing your true self. You end up feeling burned out or cynical. I am what I am. The key may not be in swinging permanently to the other side of the personality scale, but in balancing between extremes, or in adjusting your personality depending on the situation.
Okay, I really want to cover this one last section in Maureen August book. So I'm just going to skip over and just finish this article with what the late psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote, quote, When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. So again, through her zazen, just keep applying oneself and stop trying to be something that we're not. It's like what I said at the beginning. You know, through through the zazen, year after year, we just become more authentic who we really are, not how we want things to be, not how we want to be. But seeing and noticing these habit patterns, our defilements, our thought just Okay, so you they arise, we see them, and then we move on. We just return over and over again. And just now, I didn't want to say this, but because we've heard it so many times, but it is such a great quote that John sensei is fond Italian. I'll put I'll express it differently. I'm a mess. You're a mess, or I'm an ass and you're an ass. Me, we okay. I do running out of time, but I do want to read this last section, because it really does capture transformation and this change
that can occur this, this last chapter, last two chapters in again, I'm reading from novice and master an ongoing lesson in the extent of my own stupidity. This chapter call is called, give yourself to death. I. I would like to tell you one final story, a story that has moved me very deeply. It is the story of Miss Okamoto. Want to get this right, Miss Okamoto, who stayed by my teacher side for 40 years up until his death. Miss Okamoto, as I said earlier, quit her job in young women's education and entered the temple after the age of 40 as a disciple of Master zuogan. So this is Marina Gu teacher. She trained as a lay person, never shaving her head or taking the vows of a nun, but also never wearing makeup as a lay woman might. She carried out all her affairs tidally, attired in baggy work pants. It was not her intention to become a great monk, so rather than focus on the training itself, she worked hard to make life smooth for the master whom she so respected by washing clothes, cooking and raising fresh vegetables. Miss Okamoto. Okamoto ensured that he may always be available to teach the Dharma to others. Anyone who looked at ms Okamoto would see a thoroughly self sacrificing person. Master Zug died at the age of 87 when Miss Okamoto was 60 years old. When the final ceremony of the 49 day bereavement period was concluded, she packed up her belongings and declaring that she did not wish to be a burden to me, left the temple, she moved into the rented cottage of a different temple where she continued to live out her years of retirement under no one's supervision, just as she had lived when Mr. Zuogan, when Master zuogan was alive, Miss Okamoto rose every morning at 415 and although she had made no formal commitment to do so, clean the temple gardens surrounding her rented room. She cultivated vacant land and planted vegetables, which she would pickle to offer to the novice monks in training under me to share with visitors and to offer at the Buddha altar when she was already well into her 70s, feeling that she wanted to improve herself in whatever way she could. Miss Okamoto began to come inside after a day of sweeping, pulling weeds and gardening, to hear her talk and study classical Chinese literature. At other times, remembering the lecture she had heard Roshi give on various Zen works, she would open koan collections like the blue Cliff record and the gateless gate. Such was the life of Miss Okamoto Aled. She was a little old lady, short with a round boys face, but her exceptionally strict, upright lifestyle had given rise to something forbidding in Miss Okamoto and the young novice monks were never pleased when they were sent to her place on an errand. I visited Miss Okamoto monthly, and she always seemed eager for these visits, but one day, she sent a message to the effect that she wanted me to call on her right away, as she had something urgent to talk to me about here for the last past year, I've been suffering intense, physical wariness. She began when I visited her thinking, thinking that I had reached the age when I was growing dull. I tried to whip myself along, to keep going, but I just wasn't getting any better. Finally, she explained there seemed to be nothing to do but ask someone to take me to a doctor, although the doctor didn't say it in such many words, it seems I have cancer. Since I found this out, I have been afraid of dying. Not only was Miss, aka Moto, afraid of dying, she was also ashamed of that fear. She felt it disgraceful to fear death. After having been allowed to train for so long under her teacher, she felt tremendous gratitude towards the Zen sect and towards the Roshi, and it was unbearable for her to think that those around her might feel Zen practices useless, since it apparently does not even help one to overcome apprehension in the face of death. What in the world is the problem with the way I have practiced up until now that death could be this frightening? Please, please tell me how I have been wrong in my practice. She besieged opening up to me as if I were her own son. Although Miss Okamoto was 24 years my elder, her her earnest confession prompted me, despite her years, to bluntly call to her attention something in her manner that had already been weighing on my mind. This woman had led a flawless, commendable life, but she had always stoically gritted her teeth in an effort quote to do good to avoid doing evil, sharply distinguishing between good and bad, forever sizing up and passing judgments on the situation. She went about her endeavor to, quote, do better, but always with her teeth clenched fast. Let me be clear, very clear about this, the kind of. Effort in which one bisects good and bad and then chooses one over the other with the intent to stack up causes for positive results does not, in itself, produce peace of mind, as I explained to miss Okamoto, you come out from your mother's womb and go into your coffin that time in between you call life, and perhaps you think of going into your coffin as death. But true existence is birth and death repeating itself, instant by instance. If you look at a flame, it seems to burn continuously and give off constant light. In actuality, the wax is burning down bit by bit, and the wick that blazes in this instant exhausts itself, passing the flame farther along,
as I told Miss Okamoto, when you go to the kitchen to prepare dinner, be born in the kitchen. When you finish there, die, then be born at the dining dining table as you eat your dinner and when you finish eating, die there to be born in the garden and sweep with your broom, always now. Just now come into being. Always now. Just now give yourself to death practicing this truth is then practice. I have seen. And then the next section is Buddha life almost done here, but I want to get to this. I have seen many people practice, but I do not know of anyone who so splendidly, so thoroughly put my instructions in practice as did miss Okamoto. She comply, complied as docilely as a lamb. It wasn't even 10 days before her rigid countenance had softened into a baby face, into the face of a sweet old lady. She had left behind the lifestyle in which she had to grit her teeth and tried to live right. Her disease grew progressively worse, and she finally had to be hospitalized. I remember that when I called on her, the doctors and nurses all remarked that though they had worked in the hospital for many years, they had never encountered a patient like this, this one. By the time ms Okamoto entered the hospital, she was greeting everybody, everything, every scene, in the spirit of quote, one chance, one encounter. I
unfortunately, I agreed to journey to England and the United States again at that particular time, and I left feeling uneasy. I instructed my disciples to care for Miss Okamoto during my absence, but she passed away without waiting for my return. When I came back, I heard from my oldest disciple, the monk who had last attended her about the final moments before her death. Although this was a man who seldom allowed any expression to cross his face, tears streamed from his eyes as he told the story before Miss Okamoto died, she said to him, looking back, I have led a pretty stuffy life all these years, so I think I'll just take a ball and go out and play in the woods now, these were her last words. We placed a pretty ball made of colored threads inside her grave. I hope that you will not merely take Miss okamoto's final words for their emotional or their literary appeal, when I heard that she had said that, at last, I felt joy from the bottom of my heart, joy because I was confident that in her living and in her dying miss, aka moto had literally reached a state we can call quote Samadhi of play. The Samadhi of play is a state of mind in which one performs an activity without appraising its relative value, just as a child who plays in the sand would never dream of letting someone else take their place. It was with this mind that Miss Okamoto went out to the woods to play ball. There is within you, yourself, eternal Buddha life, that Buddha life appears in form, being born and dying instant by instant, emergent in constant succession. In the Samadhi of play, we can clearly say that the practice of this mind state is the story state of Zen. Within you, there is eternal life. This life arises as form and continues instant by instant, appearing and disappearing. Moreover, this flickering appearing and disappearing is not the flickering of a solidified individual self. It is the sparkling appearance and disappearance of a fusion of the self and its surroundings in Union. This is what the founder of the Soto Zen school, Dogan Zen Ji, meant when he said that birth and death is the life of Buddha. Birth and death is the pulse of Bucha life. Okay,
that was going to be a lot longer than I thought. Um, but I really wanted to convey that story. It's just such a deeply moving story. And I'll venture to the guest that Miss aka Moto, had some kind of practice, you know, to have that transformation occur at the end of her life. Yes, of course, when she realized she was starting to die, there is, there is something completely mysterious. Well, it's not so mysterious, the mysteriousness of of a person, or the person being aware of their own mortality when they are on their things open up naturally. But I venture to guess, I venture to say that this Miss Okamoto had some kind of practice, had a zazen practice that finally things opened up to her. When she finally saw that that she was she was dying. All right, I don't think we really have any time for questions. I don't want this to go on too long, but maybe just one or two questions or comments.
Duane, we speak so little of authenticity. It's nice to hear that mentioned. Never had a we've never had a definition of authenticity, but I've always known what it meant. And I think a lot of people do,
yeah, a lot of people do. I mean, I just look at you now and you're just whole and complete, just as you are. You know, it's just we all are the authentic. Authenticity, I don't know. I just when this came up for me in dokan, was a long time ago, so I don't, yeah, this, it's authenticity is kind of like, it's kind of like that word grace, you know, you gave that talk about grace. You know, it's words just fail. You know, words just fail in terms of trying to describe what grace is, or authentic, or being authentic. But being authentic is just being who you really are, you know. And by how do you become who you really are? Well, when you're doing zazen, you start to notice. You notice in the mind, body, mind, what's going on in the mind. And you get away from, I'm like this, or I'm like that, it's just alright. You're aware of the things you need to work on, and that's okay. That's good. I'm an ass, and you're an ass. Like, just keep moving on. You know it really this, speaking of gratitude, it's just, I feel so much gratitude for this practice. You know it because the longer you practice, the more you realize how endless, unlimited this practice is, and we think we have certain limitations, and we don't, you know that was the big thing that happened to me, my Yeah, I'll pass on that story. But just the Zen, you know, it is unlimited. We just have to stick with it. Just Just do it.
Is there anyone online that has a question or comment for for treatment? I
