Luzu Faces the Wall

[00:00:00] Speaker A: For more information on Ancient Dragon Zen Gate, please visit our website at www.ancientdragon.org. our teachings are offered to the community through the generosity of our supporters. To make a donation online, please visit our website. So it's a quiet kind of cloudy Sunday morning here in the Lincoln Square Sun Doe this time summer. So without further ado, let's say [00:00:35] Speaker B: our [00:00:35] Speaker A: very own head of practice, Tonto Douglas Floyd Lay entrusted dharma teacher, offer the dharma talk. Thank you very much. Can you hear me? Okay? A floating thumb. We'll take that as a go. Excuse me. Good morning. It's good to see you all. I know everybody here online or in the zendo, which is reassuring. Friendly faces, friends, members of the community. I'm going to be a little croaky and sniffly this morning. I spent time with my granddaughter, very young infant granddaughter. Last week she goes to daycare, which makes means that she is a virus vector. And she shared the virus with me. So in a way you could see that as, you know, a demonstration of the truth of dependent co origination. We're in a giant network of disease today. Finding a topic for the dharma talk was interesting. You know, I tried to do something like alternate a talk about a koan or some text in one talk, the next one I'll talk about zazen. The way I thought of today was a day for offering zazen instruction. Nobody here got zazen instruction, okay? But I thought I would sort of go between the horns of the dilemma and talk about both using the koan as a jumping off point to talk about zaza and problems we have in zaza. So the koan for today is called Luzu Faces the Wall. And the story is that whenever Luzu saw a monk coming, he immediately turned and sat facing the wall. Hearing of this, Master Nanjuan said, I usually tell my people to wake up to what has existed before the Kalpa of Emptiness and before the arrival of the Seven Buddhas. But I haven't acknowledged a single disciple yet. I don't think I even have one who's halfway there. If Luzu continues this way, he'll just keep on going until the Year of the Donkey. The interesting thing about that is that the people know the Chinese zodiac has no Year of the Donkey. So his teaching will extend forever without limit. There's another version. That version is case. Case 23 in the Book of Serenity, Hongzhi's collection of 100 koans that he formulated in the 12th century. But there's another version. It's case 87, I think of Dogen's Mana Shobo Genzo, his collection of 300 Kohons that he brought back with him from China. And that one version says that whenever Master Luzu saw a monk coming toward him, he would turn to face the wall and begin sitting in zazen. One day, Master Nanquan came to see him. So Luzu turned to face the wall and began sitting in zazen. And Master Nanjuan finally tapped him on the shoulder. Luzu said, well, who's that? Nanquan said, it's Nantuan. And Luzi said, what are you doing? And Nanquan said, nothing special. So I like both of those. So, Luzhou, I think it's interesting the way this story is set up, the way Hongjun compiling this collection and I think probably chose this koan and formulated it the way he did because he was the head of a movement in Sao Dong, the forerunner of our Seto school called Silent Illumination, which was the forerunner of our teaching of Dogen's form of zazen shikantazo, or what he liked to call as much as anything else, dropping off my body and mind. And at this time, there was a great dispute between the practitioner Hongzhi personally and the followers of Silent Illumination and a new movement that was arising under the influence of Zen master Dawei, who was a Lingji or Rinzai monk who was very well known and who thought that first it was absolutely important to have an experience of Japanese kensho awakening mind in order to. To have a true awakening and practicing with. With koan, Zenzazen was the way you needed to do that. That was based partly on his experience in teaching lay practitioners. He had a lot of government functionaries who were students of his. And he had a great deal of exterior experience maturing their practice through having in practice with koans and zazen. But I say that. So this, you know, the Book of Serenity, Hong Shi's collection has a real slant, Soto slant, Zaodong slant, a real silent and illumination slant. This one in particular, I think it's important because Silent Illumination emphasizes in its practice instructions the necessity of sitting upright and sitting still. To the extent that that's just about. For many of the teachers, that was just about the extent of zaza and extension. That's all you needed, that doing that would bring you to open your mind and allow everything. The practice could continue. The emphasis on sitting still. What's so important that there's a. There's a long list of quick phrases that. That we're taught to people very often about sitting still. Just an image to keep in mind. So the one I love the most is sit like a sack of rice, which I think, you know, if you've ever seen a big 50 pound sack of rice and pushed it, it doesn't, it really doesn't move. It's just, it's really solidly there. Or another one was sit like rotted out stump that's growing toadstools. It's rooted in the ground. Nothing's going on. There's no movement there. It's not even going to sway and breathe like a tree. It's just there. Beyond that, just. Nanquan's phrase is koan, either collected by Hongzhi or written by Hongzhi. Okay, you need to realize this, which precedes the empty eon and the appearance of seven Buddhas in the world is also a very typical kind of practice, instruction in silent illumination. Sit here, sit upright, don't move. Open the mind. Realize this boundless complete whole that is reality, right? That is suchness. Suchness is just. Is just this world. It's the world of our delusion. After you wash it through emptiness. We have to use. Drop off all of your conceptions, your thoughts, your feelings, your judgments. And then what is vividly in front of you is suchness, which goes by lots of names. It's, you know, your original face, your original face before your parents were born. Buddha, ultimate reality, you know, they. They go on forever. A description I really like is that if is one that you know. Steve Hagen, who's the. The teacher at Dharmafield Sen center in Minneapolis, likes to emphasize that this conceptionless awareness of the world that comes with zaza and is such as is inconceivable. It's ineffable. I mean, the concepts cannot reach it, ideas cannot reach it, emotions cannot reach it. They can talk about it, but they do not convey that personal reality of being alive in the world, of the world being the world in this moment. And what I like is that Steve Hagen says, okay, this ineffable word confuses people sometimes because I think it means it's ineffable. There's sort of this cloudy mist and hazy world, this hazy perception. And it's not like that. It's just alive and clear and bright. And Steve Hagen says, okay, it's like drinking a glass of orange juice. You drink a glass of orange juice, you know what orange juice tastes like? Yeah, this is orange juice. But someone says, what does orange juice taste? What is orange juice anyway? You start describing orange juice. Well, it's orange it's sweet, but it's kind of tart too at the same time, it's kind of pulpy. They have no idea what that's like. The experience of suchness, the experience that we come to in Zazen, is like drinking orange juice. The experience of the world is ineffable, like drinking orange juice. So something that I think is. Oh, I also wanted to mention that this story also appears in one of Togen's dharma talks in Nehei Koroku and Taigen and Shohako Okamura mention in a note that Dogen would refer to Luzubayun as his teacher, which is an unbelievable compliment because the only other people he calls it refers to as his teachers are Shakimuni Buddha, his first teacher in Japan, Yozen, who went with him to China, and his teacher, his ultimate teacher, who gave him transmission, Dantong Rujin. So to call him Luzu, his teacher is a huge compliment in this. So this, this koan, his story is important enough that Dogen included it in his personal collection of koans. And also he doesn't really talk about it. He recites the koan and then he recognized. Recites a poem about. But he include it got his attention. It captured the message as far as he was concerned. So the thing I have to, you know, in thinking about this koan, it sort of gave me a little jolt, I have to say, just a little. What is going on here this year? Imagine you were a monk, one of Luz's students. You have left home, you have taken vows, you've had these little scars burned into your skull. They used to in Japan, back medieval Japan. You don't sleep much, you don't eat lunch. Your clothes are hot in the summer, they're not warm enough during the winter. You're exhausted all the time. You do a lot of zazen in those great public monasteries like Nuzus. So you know, these monks are coming to Luz with questions. Practice, sincere practice questions. So it's a little jarring when he sees them coming and he turns and faces the wall and doesn't move and doesn't speak to them. What's going on there? And I think there are a couple of ways to think about this. One is there's a real resemblance here to the. To a lot of koans that are attempting to point, point toward experience of suchness through some article, some thing, some object or perception. Like, you know, Xo, when he's asked, you know, what's the meaning of Bodhidharmas coming from the west, what's the ultimate teaching. What's the meaning of Zen? And he said, well, it's the oak tree in the garden. So to understand that, you have to understand that he's not talking about an oak tree, right? He's talking about this all encompassing, complete, vivid reality. It encompasses everything, including the oak tree. But it doesn't have to have been an oak tree. It could have been three pounds of flax. It could have been, you know, a dried shit scraper. There's stories you hear all the time. Or one that's really similar, I think is Zen Master Juji, who I've talked about before, who was a Zen master. Anyone came to ask him a question about Zen, and he'd hold up and just hold up a finger. Just a. This isn't. This isn't a symbol for oneness. It's not even as far as it's a finger. But it's not just the finger. It's the finger that's inconceivable without the entire world. Just this finger infers the existence of the entire world. And we have to learn to approach it just to see the finger as just this. It's, you know, it's not just a finger, but Juji and whoever his student is. That oak tree over there, this shit stick scraper, this three pounds of flax. They're all aspects of this inconceivable, this boundless, complete whole world. So I guess you have to ask what's going on? I think one way to see this koan, to understand this koan is Luzu is taking the same posture as Master Juji, who this figure. He's just saying, I'm sitting here. Just this body, mind is a manifestation of suchness, of the original phase of Buddha. You need to understand that the students are coming. Okay, but I don't really, you know, I mean, you can. You can imagine the questions they have. They're going, well, I don't understand these koans. I'm working really hard at these koans. And we can see that as just a preface to every one of the questions that they might have, which are the questions that all of us have sooner or later. I don't understand these koans. I've been practicing hard. I'm not awake yet. I'm confused about what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't even really understand how zazen is supposed to work. My mind is completely flooded with this rushing river of thoughts. I would like to be to experience clarity for a change. I am completely overwhelmed by powerful, painful emotions. Like anxiety and frustration and anger and grief. So they all come to Luzu and say, that's what they want to do. They want to ask him those questions. And he says, I don't want to hear about it. What you need to do is learn to manifest, to experience and manifest. Buddha like this, do this. You know, he's. In a way, it's not the message, but he's saying, you know, look, you need to experience this world free of dualistic conceptions. All concepts are dualistic. They split the world into separate things. And you have to get beyond that. You know, that's. That's part of. That could be part of the subtext is facing the wall, sort of the message of the. The faith and heart mind. Tsang Tan's Xinxin mean, right? The great way is not difficult, but you can't have any preferences. You can't pick and choose your reality. You can't have this and that. You can't be like you guys saying, I'm really confused. I'm really upset. I'm not happy. I want to be awake. I want to be calm. I want to be clear. I want to be free. That's the perfect definition of dualism and the perfect example of the problem with dualism. It's not just that dualism doesn't reflect the way reality actually is, which is right. It's continuous. There is no separation. There are no gaps in the world. The problem is that when you say, this is how I'm thinking and feeling, I want to feel like that. There's a tension created, there's resistance to what you're feeling right now. And that in itself gives rise to or exacerbates the frustration and anxiety you're already feeling. So, you know, Luzu isn't wrong, right? I mean, you're saying you need to do this, you need to step out of that, you need to let it go, do that. And, you know, you'll learn to sit too. You'll learn to sit as the world, you know, sort of. And it's not just that he's. He's. He's manifesting, embodying, realizing suchness in his sitting there. He's actively embodying it. He's not. He's not just like an oak tree, right? Or the three pounds of flax or the shit scraper. He is actually engaged in participating in this reality, being this reality in the practice of zaza. You know, that's the distinction between maybe that's the same as what Juji is doing, but it's different from pointing to objects and saying, this is Sachtas, this is Buddha. You need to figure that out. Guys, keep sitting like me. I'm an example. Just keep sitting like this and you too will wake up. That's true. And it could be a reasonable response. I think if I were him, if I were Luzhu, that would be a reasonable response for someone who, you know is coming and saying, I am. I'm really upset about these koans. I just can't figure them out. I think, you know, maybe that's a fair message. Well, stop trying to figure them out. Do zaza and you will see through all the gods. That's just what you have to do. But if it were me, if it were me in the teaching seat and I saw my student coming who I'm the guiding teacher of a huge public monastery. There are probably 500 monks sitting there. I know these people have been practicing hard and they have a tough life. They're sincere, they're serious, they have real practice questions, and they're coming. I would take that more seriously myself. I think that it would be kinder to say, you know, I understand you're feeling this tension. You're feeling this resistance you're suffering in your practice. You know, this awakening and suchness seems so far away, but they're so close. It's right here. And, you know, you've been taught, you've been studying. I mean, outside the practice periods, they would have teachers coming monastery to monastery, teaching classes on the sutras, teaching Buddhist doctrine for three months. And then three months they go sit for three months. Incredible, crushing schedules in those big public monasteries, you know, we hear about, you know, oh, the rules were that the monks had to work to make their living. Well, that's not how those people did it. They might have had some jobs doing minor cleaning and taking care of the altars and stuff like that, but they had serfs and slaves maintaining the fields and paying them rent so that they could sit 12 hours a day. Outside of Szechin sechine meant lots more. It could mean no sleep. It's like in Korean monastery meditation monasteries. Today you have this big sachin that finish finishes up the practice period. And they've already not been sleeping. They've been sleeping like five hours a night. They go, oh, welcome to Sashin. You're not lying down or sleeping this week. You are just doing zazad. So anyway, I would take these people more seriously and I would have to say, try to give a little guidance. I understand it seems so close, but it Also seems so far away. And I would sort of, I would have to sort of paraphrase Doget when he talks about, right. He starts out saying the world is limitless, it's complete, it's whole, it's right here. You'd think you don't even have to do anything to understand that, right? But you do. But Dogen sort of, he sandbags you a little bit. You know, he hold, he holds his hand out and then he takes it away. He goes and you know, it's really easy to realize. It's simple at least to realize suchness. To do this practice, just step back from all your thoughts and feelings and judgments, your views about the world, how things are supposed to be. Just take that backward step, Turn your awareness around so you're not just aware of the world. Turn your the light around so that you're aware of the world. You're aware of your body, you're aware of your bodily sensations, you're aware of your thoughts. Be aware of your emotions. Just do that. Let leave it all alone. Just be aware of those things and your original face will appear. My work here is done. But he says, look, don't get cocky. As soon as you are involved in the slightest degree of dualistic thinking. Hey, I made it. Oh, wow. This is, this is it. This is the original mind. Wonder what's next, and so on. You are as far from original mind in the experience of suchness as the earth is from heaven. So he tells you. You can't get caught up in thinking likes, like and dislike, right or wrong, good or bad, should or shouldn't, judgments of any sort, trying to figure it out with conceptions, trying to measure or assess anything, including your own. Zazen. Don't get caught up in your memories or your fantasies or fixing your your attention on something in some sort of contemplation, fixing your attention, watching something reifies it. You've pulled it out of the entire world and go, oh, I'm paying attention to that. That's Buddha nature. That shit scraper, that's Buddha nature. No, you're thinking about shit scraper. You're not thinking about. You're not perceiving Buddha nature. But he has said do that. So how do you do that? How do you not have liking and disliking and this and that and judgments and so on? Do I just suppress all of that? Do I try to mask it by thinking about something else? I just keep thinking. And the answer to that is no, you can't. Thoughts are going to come. You have These proclivities in your unconscious mind, these seeds of thought and feeling and values, everything that your mind might work on operates and can appear as your conscious activity. So you don't have direct control over. You don't have direct control over your conscious mind. Don't even talk, think about your unconscious mind. So what can you do? You know, Togen says, well, you practice sometimes. The translation is non thinking or not. It's not not thinking. I'm not telling you not to think, but it's not not thinking or to say beyond thinking. I like beyond thinking. Because the idea of beyond thinking is you've stepped away from the conscious activities of thinking and so on. Your awareness includes that, and it's bigger than your thinking. So you sit there, put the thoughts and feelings to one side. They come and go and come and go. You don't resist them, you don't concentrate on them. You don't focus on them. You're not trying to understand your thinking. It's just there and you're sitting in. Your thoughts and emotions and all the rest of that mental activity are just part of your sitting. In the same way you're breathing. And the sounds of birds, the sounds of the cars, the sound of the air purifier, the appearance of the rug, the walls, the furnishings of the room, it's all just part of it. And when you withdraw that attention, when you don't follow up on, you don't chase after your thinking and apparently, and so on, when thoughts and those seeds come up and express themselves in your mind, if you're not chasing them, you're not pushing against them, you're not reinforcing them, they expend their energy and they dissipate. And the habit energy, the karmic power of that seed, that thought goes away. And over time, within a period of zaza, and sure, over a period of practice, yeah, your mind calms down. And as your mind settles and there's less activity, you become more caught up in that, more distracted, you become aware, more aware of this world. So sitting here, that includes everything. You know, body and mind fall off. You're not separate. Your body and mind are just part of this. But I gotta say, not so fast. You know, you go through, you go through phases and they're not 1 then 2, then 3, then 4. This can come up at any time in the practice. So you sit down the first time they tell you to count your breath or to be aware of your breath or just to maintain your posture. And as soon as you do that the lights come on. You know, suddenly I'm sitting here, I'm not moving, I'm sitting up straight. Suddenly I am really aware of, of the world, of my body, of the thoughts coming and going and coming and going. And that's kind of new. There's, it's okay, it's a new sort of fresh look at life and it's a more spacious version. I'm not hemmed in by my thinking and feeling and all these categories and definitions that I've been caught up in. And as you do that and you are bound up in the thoughts, your mind settles down more and more. It gets quieter, there may be fewer thoughts. I'm talking about over time. I'm not talking about within any given period, you know, that can change within any given period. And you know, it becomes clearer, your mind settles and then the understanding maybe of is you sort of get a feeling for non thinking or beyond thinking. Because the thoughts keep going and going and going and you're not thinking, you're not engaged in thinking, you're not intentionally thinking, you're not wrapped up in or caught up in thinking. They're just thoughts coming and going and emotions coming and going. I'm just sitting here with that and that. At that moment when you have stepped back, you really see the thoughts and emotions as part of the experience of this. Your mind settles and settles and settles. You become more and more aware of being part of and in this world. But there's still someone doing zaza, and there's still someone who says, hey, I'm part of the world. Sit. If you do lots of sitting, if you sit in the sashin, for example, the mind will quiet down more and more and more. And at some point you go, you know what that sense of being this person who's sitting and doing zazen, this person who's watching the world, who's experiencing suchness, that's just thinking. And just like with the other thoughts, if you're aware of it, you sit with it, you don't do anything with it. Okay, that's how I feel. Eventually it may subside, it may dissolve, and in that case there's just this world, just, just this moment, just right here, right now. So I hope that's a sort of aspirational description of what can happen to encourage you in your practice. So, you know, but the experience, even before that final stage of just letting go of this sense of self opening to the world, open it up to reality. You know, this is. We don't give up seeing things, objects or people or beings. In doing that, we come to be aware of that this is a shared reality, it's a shared life. And that's not only liberating from the problems we have from feeling like this isolated, separate individual, but it's also the very basis of the precepts and Zen action. So I will leave my talk by suggesting that you, Sid Zazan, drink the orange juice, wake up to who we really are, and save all beings. So I will look forward to any thoughts or questions you might have. Thank you. Okay, we're done. David, thank you. [00:32:54] Speaker C: And I'm going to try to speak in my room voice so people can hear me in this space as well as on Zoom. Douglas, thank you so much. I appreciate both the genres of talk that you give on. On. On Cohen's, Cohen's and Zazen. And I really appreciate that this one is about both. So I think I have a comment and a. And a question. Well, I'm not sure yet, but I think I do. The comment is that, yes, one might say, oh, I wouldn't do that. In that situation, I would be kinder, quote, unquote. But I, in my experience, sometimes the kind of. Sometimes there's a real kindness and just, just either just getting out of the student's way or just letting the problem be the problem. I've really appreciated teachers in my life at certain moments that just got out of my way and sort of didn't. Didn't try to. I didn't try to fix my problems. Just let my problem be my problem. That thing. And, and somehow, like, maybe there's a. Just. Just embodying the dignity of Zazen in answer to a. To a student. So that's the comment. And here's the question. I, I was. I was wondering if you had further thoughts about Nanquan coming and that piece of, like, whether that's theater or what it is like that, that Nanquan tapped him on the shoulder and then he said, who is that? And his answer was nothing special. Presumably none of the. None of the ordinary monks did this. Right? Not just anybody would go in and do that. But what do you take that to be? [00:34:27] Speaker A: Well, Nanjan was a great sin master. I've even given Dharma talks about at least two stories about him. One is Ordinary Mind is the way, which is. It's a wonderful taunt, captures the nature of our practice. And Nanjaran kills the cat. The one, the very famous koan that always gets people very excited. But. So he was a great Zen master. And he was. He was Also loser's dharma brother. They had both studied for ages with Mazu, also a great, great, powerful, influential Zen master. So they knew each other very well. There are stories about Luzu sitting and getting caught up in samadhi, some sort of deep samadhi, and Najuan coming in with a needle or an awl and poking him with it and saying, wake up. You know, it's just come back because that's not the point. This is that kind of samadhi experience of maybe, maybe the experience of the Dhyanas, the trance states, intense concentration. And I think that the non Juan is coming. Just checking you're awake. Right? And when Lizzu responds, yes, I'm awake, I'm here. This is. I'm here in this, this ordinary mind, this ordinary world right here. The Nantuh could say, yeah, nothing special. I'm not doing anything special. Just checking it and sorry, I got a little soft. Just checking in. As you know, having cuddled my granddaughter a week ago and received her call, my voice is going away. So, yeah, that. That's what I think is going on here. I think, I don't think it. I don't think that there's some profound non. Dual meaning there. The way there is in different aspects of, of koans, like, or for that matter, where he says, you have to realize what was here before the empty eon, really before time and before the seven Buddhas came right here. This is. This suchness, this reality extends without limit in space and time. So realize that by realizing just this right here, right now, that's. That's what I think is going on in that one. But I think tapping loser on the shoulder is a different kind of thing. That's how I read it anyway. [00:37:03] Speaker C: I mean, a thought I had was that. That's sort of like a thought. A thought. A thought is sort of like tap, tap you there. It can be a wandering thought and I can get. Get eaten by it and wake up when the bell rings, but it can also just be you there. [00:37:17] Speaker A: Yeah, and I take your point about, you know, letting you week. No teacher can solve our problems, you know, and any explanation of what, of what Buddha nature is and so on, it really misses the point. But I do feel like depending on who you're talking to, what their needs are, you can help them become aware of their problem, what's going wrong, and get them back on track, you know, I think it's probably true that if people are caught up in thinking about what it would be like to be awakened or my mind is going crazy. Boy, wouldn't it be nice if I were calm and clear? If they keep sitting, that will resolve itself. But they have to go through that anyway. If you explain what's going on to help them not be so upset it and continue the practice, you don't want to discourage them from further sin. Just saying, I'm done with this. It's not going anywhere. I'm going to grow my hair back and put on regular clothes. So I think, yeah, it's going to be a judgment call based on the circumstances. Yeah. Josh, as always, thank you, Doug Douglas, for that talk. I was thinking about the teacher as the. The robber. My first teacher, when we would go around at the beginning of retreats and everyone would say their job like I'm taking out the trash or I'm chopping vegetables, he would say I'm here to stir up some trouble. That's what he would say every single time. I'm here to stir up some trouble. And kind of this idea of ro. What. What does that rob from the student when you turn and face the wall. So this idea, I maybe if I'm going into doan with some idea of. I think I got it. I got this. I had this insight. This is what it is. And maybe the teacher might. Well, you know, your, your carrots weren't quite the right size. Next time you chop them, maybe you could. Something like that. It's kind of the teacher is the robbery, pulling out the rug. So I don't know what you, what you thought, what you would think of that. I think it would be again, a judgment call on where the student is and what you think would be fruitful for somebody who's thinking that Zen practice is sort of exalted practice and it's all about just sitting on the cushion saying, yeah, you know, carrots were a little uneven when we chopped them today. Didn't scrape them very well. That might be a good instruction. Yeah, I don't know about. I still sort of like the idea of helping people be near of the nature of the problem, they're going to have to resolve it. But I, I don't think. I'm not sure that it just helps to let people stew with their problems until they figure out, you know, I've got a problem and I know what it is and this is how I'm going to fix it. I think you could jump a step or two and get them back on track. Maybe. Sorry. Maybe it could just be then like, how you doing? Well, that's pretty good. Is your Knee feeling okay? Yeah. Yes. You know, this is great. Keep going. Yeah. Chris. [00:40:57] Speaker B: Morning. So you know when you're saying that the student says, this is really not going anywhere, I'm done with this. But I'm just kind of wondering, isn't that part of what we come to realize in our practice? And is that not also a glimpse of suchness as much as, oh, this is great, I figured it out. [00:41:24] Speaker A: I don't think so. I think being really pissed off that you don't understand and you're really upset, I'm not going to do zazen anymore is different from someone waking up and saying, you know what, there's nothing special here. This is just. It's just this. I think that's different. Maybe I didn't quite grasp the problem. You're not moving. Are you there? Yeah. [00:41:54] Speaker B: Yes, I'm here. [00:41:55] Speaker A: Okay. Your signal is not showing your mouth move and you talk, is it? Would you. Do you have a follow up to get for clarification or disagreement? [00:42:07] Speaker B: Well, no, I just, I guess part of it is. And you know, I'm remembering something that you said to me quite a while ago when, you know, I was wondering about dropping off mind and body and that you explained to me that this isn't something that you do. This is something that happens. Right. And I just sort of wonder if that's not also part of this is going nowhere. I'm done with this. Isn't that also part of realizing what happens? Whether it's, whether it's. I get it, this is great, this Zen thing is awesome, or is it, this sucks. Both are true. So it's just, to me, the question is that just not coming to that realization and letting go of it, just not trying to be pissed off at it and not necessarily be overly joyed about it. It's just experiencing it and not trying to have it be something that I do. [00:43:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess it depends on sort of the hypothetical about the person who gets discouraged and leaves. I don't think I. That just doesn't sound to me like someone who's resolved the problem of delusion, has realized his true nature and says, okay, well, I can go work in the marketplace now it sounds like a person who's saying, you know what, I'm deluded, I'm unhappy. This is only making it worse. I'd rather go work in the market and just be moderately nuoted. Yeah, I do think there's a difference there. Yeah. Giving up is not the same thing as letting body and mind drop off. Yeah, we need to wrap up. I've droned on a long time. Thank you very much, Douglas. So sure. Let's do the four Vows. We vow to free them. Delusions are inexhaustible Leave how to cut through them. Our objects are on this we now do. Realize it these are numberless we vow to free them Delusions reach out to them Dharmaless we love to enter is unsurpassable we vow realizing being. We vow to free them. Delusions are exhaustible we vow to them not Updates are boundless we bow to them Buddha's ways of surpassable we realize.