Thoroughly Ragged Practice

[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. Welcome everyone. So some of you may notice, we're at the end. We're coming to the end. We're in the final week of the Dragon practice commitment period. And next weekend, this coming weekend, there'll be some major dharma events happening, including Sessine, which begins on Thursday and continues through Sunday afternoon. There'll be a dharma inquiry ceremony for our Shiso, Jerry Sarah sitting next to me in the afternoon on the 17th, and then a reception coordinated by our trusty Tanzo, Wade. Ah. And although we have sasheen next Sunday, everyone in the universe is invited to join us for the public programs. And you can join us on Thursday evening when we start Sasheen. If you're up to in person or online, we have zazen at 7. Something 7:30, maybe. Then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 9:30, public zazen with Dharma Talk at 10:15. Can't promise the Dharma talk, but something will happen at Nzazen for sure at 9:30. However, on next Sunday, there'll be no temple cleaning or tea, so. So you can just come for zazen and some words. So that's for anyone, those who are registered for Sachin, you're spending the whole time here, unless you run away. So Sacheen begins at 7 on Thursday. Now, if anyone's noticed but Chicago, the greenery is leafing out like, as we speak. And there might even have been. I noticed. Maybe it's not as apparent now, but like a tinge of green on our pinky beige carpet, the leaves coming into the zendo glowing. This morning I woke up kind of early to prepare for this talk. And I was enjoying the green leaves glowing in the room I was in. So enjoying this kind of May infusion of green is a kind of ritual for me. Just really going, enjoying it, wondering, meditating, you know, are the trees outside or inside? What does such a distinction mean at all? And then June, these trees, if we're lucky, these linden trees will blossom with fragrant blossoms. Very nice. And then everything will drop and there'll be a lot to clean up and take care of. But that's another ritual I have of being inspired by their offering of fragrance. You know, in the Buddha Sutras you often fragrance and trees and flowers are raining down. And I wonder if it was inspired by such experiences. Yesterday we prepared for Sacheen. Believe it or not, we got the Temple ready, which is why it looks so clean and wonderful. The zendo looks fantastic. Due to the efforts of, I think, Wade, Mike, our new business administrator, Nicole, David, Ray, our shiseau, and our Benji and Howard. We're all here. Howard came a little late, but he was here preparing, helping us prepare. We cleaned the temple thoroughly. Howard did inform me that there was some leakage in the closet in the kaisando room. So he took care of that. That was his cleaning effort. We'll even take better care of it later. But apparently no major damage was done. Wade prepared new sets of oraoke, our eating bowls, with Nicole, and taught Nicole how to use these bowls, these ceremonial bowls that we eat with during sashin and the zendo. And I was thinking, well, all these Zenish words in Japanese, you know, sashin, oroki, I don't know what else I said. Chuso, Benji, all that stuff. And why not just say, you know, meditation hall instead of zendo, or eating bowls instead of oroki, or head student instead of she. So. And I'll confess to maybe a little nostalgia or a little feeling that these words are kind of a family heritage in both of the sort of family lineages. In my own personal family of origin, I often would hear my grandparents say words in their native languages. One was Potawatomi, the other was German. So I heard these words on occasion. And if anybody had that experience, they don't speak the language, but you hear these words that came from the old country or their family of origin. And I think of these words as kind of our ritual, a spoken ritual honoring our Japanese Zen tradition, brought to San Francisco in 1959 by our great teacher, Shinryu Suzuki Roshi. So I was reflecting that it seems right that in these final weeks of our practice period, this intensive practice that some of us have been doing for now, seven weeks, that we are focusing on the writings of Dr. Paula Arai, who is a Japanese American scholar and Zen practitioner. Dr. Arai's scholarly work examines, in part, everyday ritual in the lives of Japanese Buddhist women. So she lived for a time in a nunnery, a Buddhist nunnery, kind of a rare thing, and I think reconnected to her heritage in some ways, both scholarly and personally and from a Zen practice mode. And she is the author of this book, Little Book of Zen Healing, which is one of the texts that is for this period of intensive practice we've been engaged in. The theme of that practice period is Buddhist practices for caring for all beings. And Dr. Arai is a. An academic, and she occupies Not Wall street, but she occupies an endowed chair as a professor of women and Buddhist studies at the Institute for Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California. And just coincidentally, Tigan Dan Layton, our emeritus guiding teacher, also teaches there. And Dr. Arai directs a program that gives a certificate in Soto Zen. Very unusual in the United States. Kind of like a seminary. Like, I think I want to sign up for that. Don't think I've ever gotten quite a certificate in Soto Zen from an academic institution. Why not? But to be. To be continued on that front. But her, she's got a new book that will come out called Of Mud and Lotuses Dreaming the Lives of Buddhist Women in August. And she might even show up here. Her son lives in Chicago and I've invited her to come by and she has agreed to do so, but, you know, because she's in academia, I didn't want to nail down any dates until the school teaching year is over. But the blurb for this book says that Dr. Arai vividly imagines the lives of Buddhist women over 2,500 years of mud and Lotuses illuminates the hardships, resilience, and creative ways in which Buddhist women have adapted the dharma to daily life, often in ways that history has ignored. So I'm looking forward to that publication and this little book. It's a little, you know, we think of little books as like, less than. Right. They're not like big, thick academic books, so to speak. It's deceptively simple and tiny. It's easy to overlook. Might be overpowered in our Zen library back here, full of these massive tomes and difficult philosophical texts that many of us have been chewing on. This book has titles for the chapter like Garden, the Heart Hook, Clean, Clean, Flow, Relate, Grieve, Harmonize. Sounds like Zen practice to me. It has little poems and hand drawn imagery in this book. You know, little leaf here. Ancient waves move eons of light through our hearts, Illuminating Love has calligraphy, beautiful brushwork done by her teacher, a Buddhist nun. But if this seems too sweet for you, guess what she even publishes in something like this. Zen and Material Culture. This is great shu. So should actually read the first chapter by Stephen Hein, which has Zen staffs as instructions because she's going to carry a Zen staff in the Zendo. So Stephen Hein also is going to be here online in June speaking about his new book, which is on. This is a big fat tome. Do you know the name of that book? It's like a hundred something Won Song, blah, blah. Yeah, okay, so, but in this book you can find Dr. Arai also, along with a whole bunch of other great scholars. It's one called Prayer beads in Zen Buddhism. Anyway, this. So if. If this, like, little book turns you off, like, it looks too. I don't know, I want to say it looks too femme. Can I say that? Got this one. Okay. And her chapter in this book is called the Zen of Rags. The Zen of Rags. But you can also just check out, if you're in the practice commitment period and you haven't cracked this book open yet, you can just read the chapter on clean. It's short, and it begins with a very simple question. Very simple question. How do I clean in a way to connect more intimately with myself, my loved ones, and my environment? Now, Paula Rai is impostering. She doesn't say anywhere that her writing is teaching the Dharma. She. She doesn't say that. She's asking a koan offering. A koan offering, a teaching story with this great question. How do I clean in a way to connect more intimately with myself, my loved ones, and my environment? Some of us were doing that yesterday, became kind of intimate with ourselves, with each other. With this temple, somebody said, I need to find a brush to get dust out of the corners. If I use a rag, it'll just push the dust back in the corners. Somebody found something to help with that. This is this great question. In our Buddhist practices of caring for all beings, how do I clean in a way to connect more intimately with myself, my loved ones? But we could substitute, how do I eat? How do I speak? How do I take out the garbage? How do I interact with technology? How do I make love in a way to connect more intimately with myself, my loved ones, and my environment? So I'll just give a few stories from the Zen of rags. So here's a story from Pala Arai's practice, learning the dharma of the rag while practicing as a layperson in a Buddhist nunnery in Japan. So as the meal was nearing completion, she says before the final bow, to be cued by the clack of the wooden clappers. You know that sound right? For kin hin. But it also punctuates our meal practice and movements in the zendo. Before that, she said, rags to wipe. The tables make their journey down the row of nuns. So they're sitting at a table, right? This is my vision of it. Wooden table. And let's say this is a table. Somebody places down the rag. Somebody takes the rag, and they move it. They put one hand on top of another and move it down the row. But before it gets to the next person, the rag is turned. And Niyozan would be in Gasho, and I would place the rag, and then we would bow and he would take the rag and clean. Clean if you want to. So as the rags are making their journey down this row, when a rag reached her part of the table, each nun vowed slightly as she mindfully picked it up, placed it along the top edge, right? And then placed her overlapping hands vertically aligned with the thick nap of the rag and moved it along. This rag was folded in half, making it approximately the width of a hand, right? So then you can apply the pressure evenly with your hands. If it's too big, we're too small. What happens? We might miss something. Then we'd have to get somebody to come along and go, there's some dirt in those crevices. Can we clean that a little better? And then her arms are stretched forward and moves along the grain of the wood at the top edge. And if the table's big, comes across again in alignment. See that? Sort of like this, right? And then when she reaches the other side, she efficiently wipes each square inch of the front of table in front of her and then refolds it to expose the opposite side. So if the rag was like this, would be refolded. But where it's like this, which is actually, this is what we use to collect fallen food that's fallen on the floor. See, this is folded in thirds. And then you collect the food in this little pocket, which you can hold underneath your rakasu. Then you go, I'll take your fallen rice or salad or whatever's plopped onto the floor during our meals in the zundo. Then you bow. And then this gets taken back to the kitchen, emptied, cleaned, and then refolded. This is a dharma of rags. Some people see me, the tenzo or a server will see me, and I'll take the rag and I'll refold it. Because it's been, like, folded in some funny way. And they're sort of like, I'm sure, going, houketsu, why are you correcting me? Why are you so picky? I don't know. It's just our family style. So it's freshened up for the next person. And then she takes this bow in a quiet, dignified manner. And the rag carefully cleans the table, flowing from hand to hand. And then there happened to be one other American person, a Catholic nun, at the event at breakfast. And the nun picked up the rag, watered it in a ball and was like, you know, like a waitress, you know, know, balls it up. These meals are in silence, right? And of course, some sections were, like, really well wiped and others were not, you know, in this kind of wild pattern. And then the nun placed the ball in front of the next person and bowed that lovely. Okay, how do I clean in a way to connect more intimately with myself, with my loved ones, with the environment. And then Pala Aray and the rags that teach the Dharma turned Dogen into a teacher of the Dharma of rags. I think everyone knows who Dogen is, the Japanese teacher who founded Soto Zen in Japan in the 13th century. We all revere these great writings, these big tomes, most of them pretty, pretty large collections. And Polari does this thing where she substitutes the word rag, for instance, for food in Dogen's writings. Dogen wrote an essay in the Eihe Shingi, which is his instructions for his practitioners in the monastery, and she replaced food with rags. Just let the Dharma be the same as a rag. This is Dogen with food and rag transposed. Let a rag be the same as the Dharma, the teaching of Buddha, this holy great teaching of Buddha, the Dharma of thusness is a rag. For this reason, says Dogen, if the Dharmas are the dharma nature, the then a rag also is Dharma nature. If the Dharma is suchness, a rag also is suchness. If the Dharma is the unified or single mind, a rag is also the single mind. If the Dharma is awakening Bodhi, then the rag is awakening. Isn't that wonderful? Wonderful. Polari does, you know, just sort of like helps us see Dogen to make a little shift in our perspective right in the middle of our ragged lives. And then she does this with Eihei Kuroku. By the way, both Ehei Shingi and Eihei Kuroku were translated into English by Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku Okamura. So we have these two cultures meeting, Japanese and American. In one of the dharmahal discourses, Paula Rai comments that Dogen assumes the true nature of dust and stones as Buddha nature. Seeing Buddha in every bit of dust does not denigrate Buddha hearing the sutras in every bit of earth. We are not, apart from the sutras, the teachings, Buddha's words, actually Buddha's speech. Do you want to attain intimate prediction on Vulture Peak? That is an affirmation of your oneness with all beings. Large and small stones nod their heads and come. Imagine these little stones, these little pieces of dust, these little grains of sand. And Paula Reis says, Dogen is confident his teachings are not denigrating. His image of stones nodding in anticipation of intimacy with the Dharma is a delightful illustration of his effort to help people not get caught in duality. I'll just read one more of these lovely plays that Paula Rai makes with Rags and Dogen. So here's one from Zenki, the fascicle of Dogen's writings called Total Dynamic Functioning or Total Dynamic Engagement. The total working of everything together. So instead of boat, she takes rag. Life can be likened to a time when a person is cleaning with a rag. I clean with this rag. I wet it with water, I wring it out, I fold it, I wipe tables and floors with it. At the same time, the rag is moving me. There is no eye beyond the rag through my cleaning with the rag. This rag is being caused to be a rag. Let us consider and learn and practice just this moment of the present. At this very moment, there is nothing other than the world of the rag. The bucket, the water, the floor have all become the moment of the rag, which is utterly different from moments of not cleaning with a rag. So life is what I am making it, and I am what life is making me. So this is in seeing this practice. This inspired Paula Arai greatly. She had some other experiences in this nunnery. She was reprimanded for kicking a zafu to save it from falling on the ground. So she was carrying zafus to a tarp, because they take everything outside and put them on a tarp, all the cushions in the zendo to let the sun regenerate them and dust them and clean them. You know, yesterday everybody worked really hard just to move cushions around the zendo, right? When you're moving those cushions, I don't know how many times I've done it in my life. You know, there are times when you're like, I'm tired. I don't want to move all these heavy cushions and then brush them and stack them up. But, you know, they're carrying them out. All these old nuns are carrying these out with Paula Rai and the Catholic nun outside. So she's like, oh, I'll take this big staff and one of the big stack of zafus. And one of them falls off. And she doesn't. She wants to rescue it from the ground. Aren't I rescuing this cushion? And she pushes it back on the tarp with her foot before it hits the dirty ground. And when she does that, the supervising nun says, ouch. She said, I was arise. Like, I'm confused. I thought I was preventing the cushion from landing in the dirt was certainly worth a little clean foot save. You know, how could I have done any better? Besides, why was it so important? The expression on my face revealed I was more perturbed than perplexed. And the nun said to me, that cushion is Buddha, so treat it with respect. And then she says, I had to figure out the rest for myself. But, you know, this isn't an easy practice to figure out the rest by yourself. She found herself rebelling against dusting and the way she did it. And she was like, I've got to clean this floor every single day. Dirty or not, you clean the floor in a monastery. Some people might have thought that yesterday, I mean, we just cleaned this last Sunday, or I just cleaned that yesterday. Isn't it good enough, Hougetsu? Well, it's just. And in temples like this, you only bathe on four and nine days. So she's like, I'm bathing this floor every day, and I don't get to clean my body in the sweaty, humid Japanese climate every day. She said, after two months of being jealous that the floors get to be cleaned every day and I don't, I was utterly surprised when a senior practitioner mentioned to me that I needed to dust behind the fire extinguisher every day, not every other day. So she thought she was being sly by not doing this dusting. And then, like a few days later, this person said, and by the way, please dust behind that fire extinguisher every day. So even her act of rebellion, like, I'm just gonna knock dust right here, she's busted, you know? And she said, perhaps such thoroughness comes across to you as obsessive or just plain weird. But the fact that I'm even sharing this story from 1989 reflects the lasting impact it had on me. My resistance to dusting behind the fire extinguisher had little or nothing to do with the dust. Rather, it revealed my resistance to the complex causes and conditions that brought me year to practice. This intervention by this nun in my relationship to that one square inch of floor illuminated for me my lackluster gratitude for a rare opportunity to do fascinating research that was helping me learn to embody compassion and expand my perspective. It helped me see how my own body, heart, and mind was so out of balance by the physical inconveniences, right? The heat, the grinding schedule that it distorted everything I perceived. So this is seeing our delusion, right? And I had so narrowed my view, she said, that I could. All I could see were things I did not like, do you ever have that happen in psychology, we call it negative sentiment override. Where you're upset at someone or you're frustrated with something and everything is just confirmation of how awful things are, how awful a person is. Can't see. This is delusion of an afflictive type of delusion. And she said, I realized that this nun cared enough about me to pay attention to my cleaning. She helped me see that private disgruntlement was visible even in my cleaning. These karmic effects, you could feel that Paula Arai felt gratitude for being having a mirror that reflected what she was up to and helped her see. Is this in alignment with how I want to show up in the world? And allowed her to have her private moment and figure out the rest. And I'll confess, I experienced something like this yesterday. You might call this the dharma of feeling ragged. I was tired. I was a bit grumpy after yesterday's hours of temple cleaning and practicing ceremony. You know, we did doam practice, we did cleaning, we did chiseau ceremony practice. We ate delicious lunch together. But afterwards, you know, my dishwasher was still full of dishes that had to be put away and emptied so I could put the dishes from lunch in there. And at the end of the day, I had little patience when some wonderful bodhisattvas in this room wanted to enthusiastically talk about ways to improve temple functioning and administration. So enthusiastic. But my impatience was right out there. I was like, I don't want to talk about this. And then I got involved talking about it, and I shouldn't have talked about it. And I felt ashamed, you know, for being so grumpy and curt or people that just wanted to help probably have better ideas than I'll ever have. So after I put the new dishes in the dishwasher and turned it on, I said, I think I better write my dharma talk. And I felt frayed and tired. And I said, oh, I have nothing to teach. I have nothing to offer tomorrow. Then I rested for a few minutes. I'm like, I better lay down. Just rest. Just rest. It's kind of like a laying down saw Zen, which I've been doing lately. That's like. And you know, and I'm like, what's in my consciousness now? And all of a sudden, I remembered this article in this book, Zen and Material Culture, on the Zen of rags. And I was so grateful. All of a sudden, I'm laying there with gratitude. And I recall that our shoe was. Took a bag of dirty rags home from the temple to wash Isn't that amazing? I recalled my own personal practice of, like, after cleaning, I. When I wash rags, I fold them all very carefully and remember. Remember this, right? I remember to come back to reality. And all of a sudden, I remembered the great robe of liberation. This. This is made of rags. This is a rag robe. The okesa, the rakasus you wear, they're made of rags traditionally that were discarded. These are kind of nice, but they still should have the humility and the grace of a discarded rag. They still teach the dharma of a discarded rag stitch by stitch. We take refuge in Buddha when we sew these. This dharma robe is known as a field of blessing. I remembered I just spent the last two weeks studying rags where Shohaku Okamora gave two weeks of teachings, two hours a day for 10 days on the rag robe. And my grumpiness was soothed all of a sudden. And I became inspired to offer this to you today. So this is our Zen way, right? This is our way of going deep into our bones and tasting the Dharma in the dust and the dirt and the raggedness of our lives, feeling the pain of remorse, the liberation of coming back to reality. I might have to talk more about rags. Who knows? I actually wrapped my sutras in a rag. This is a Japanese towel. How do you say it? Tengui? [00:33:28] Speaker B: I don't know. [00:33:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's called tengui. And it's the. No, it's the type of rag that it is. It's a towel called tangui. And they're. And you can see the edges are frayed. So when you buy this, the one edge isn't finished. It. It's exactly. It comes off. You know, this is a selvage edge. It comes off the loom like this. And then they cut it into towels. But it said. And I was like, what's up with these things? They don't finish the edge of these. And then I found out that, like, it's on purpose. These rags. These kind of towels or rags are given to people as gifts all the time. And they're used in the household, and they're printed with a special technique. Sometimes. Sometimes they're just regular white muslin kind of fabric. But they're not finished because it makes it easier to tear them in case you need to use them as a bandage. You know, sometimes monks put them on their heads like that. That's a typical monk thing. They were used for various purposes. And also they think that the. If the edges are sewn, that when they're drying things can dirt and Mold and bacteria can accumulate in them. Probably also just cheaper to make them this way, but nonetheless. So this was one for spring with little rabbits. See those cute little rabbits and flowers? And I thought, oh, you can also use this to wrap the Dharma sutras in. Thank you, Jerry. I guess we should have put in the chat. Hougetsu was putting her sutras back in wrapper. Sorry for online people. You couldn't see things. So whether you're using a rag, whether you feel ragged, Buddha Dharma is always with you and always an opportunity to open to this reality right now and open to our delusion. Samsara, the world of delusion and Nirvana, the world of liberation. Complete liberation and wholeness are exactly the same. This is what all of our Zen rituals teach, and Paula Arai says it better than I because they involve the Dharma. Rituals are effective in reminding one who is engulfed in an unjust or painful situation of the context of interrelatedness. The mind can comprehend interrelatedness, but this knowledge alone does not bring about healing. The visceral experience, the embodied visceral experience of interrelatedness is required for healing to occur. So thank you all very much and any comments or questions. [00:36:34] Speaker B: Thank you. Hongetsu. [00:36:36] Speaker A: Welcome, Howard. [00:36:38] Speaker B: I appreciated hearing about the grumpiness yesterday. I was like, oh, I think Hogetsu is a little grumpy today. And I, I think I said to you at one point during Doku san, I said to you that, like, I think sometimes I, I, I see my own grumpiness, the way it shows up for you. I see mine show up too. And I'm like, oh, I don't like that. Yeah, because I don't like mine. And at the risk of exposing Wade and myself, surely as I was leaving me and waver, like, whispering to each other, like, we'll, we'll figure something out, you and me. We'll do it anyway. And I'm like, what? What? I feel like this is a pretty, like, Zen thing to do. Like, no, we know. We kind of know what needs to be done. We kind of, like, are up to doing it and feel like it kind of needs to be done. In what capacity we can do it and recognizing our limitations, but also with much love. Hougetsu. [00:37:30] Speaker A: Only with love. [00:37:31] Speaker B: Only with love. But as you talk, talking about this, too, I kept having this recurring image of, you know, I think it's become more popular in recent years of kintsugi. The, the, the sort of typical image of the broken cup or the broken mug with the gold lacquer. And it's funny, I was thinking of it because, yeah, this, this, this kintsugi is also. We don't really see it show up in a lot of sort of Zen ritual description or anything like that. But I feel like that is actually sort of an apt way of looking at cleaning with rags and whatnot. Like, even though there was cleaning yesterday, like, after. After this program, today we're gonna go and clean again, even though we cleaned yesterday, because there will always need to be more done. There's always more to, like, have to respond to. There's always the opportunity to respond to things, even if we don't like it. So I just wanted to say thank you for sharing about rags, whether that is like physical rags or mental rags, and having to come and clean over and over and over and over and over and over again. That is the practice, right? To, like, show up for the cleaning, whatever that cleaning looks like, for the dirt in the way that we can. [00:38:43] Speaker A: Right. [00:38:44] Speaker B: So thank you. [00:38:45] Speaker A: You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Nicole. Good morning. I loved this talk so much. Thank you. [00:38:54] Speaker C: I think for a similar reason, I love this Paula Arai book that has really moved me so much in the intimacy of it and the honesty of it. And I really thought about that Zafu story when I was moving Zafus in the sender yesterday, because I did just want to pick them all up at once. And I. And I really had this image of seeing them tumble from that story that Paula told. And I think I kept stopping myself from trying to do too much at once and really focus on what I was doing, because I think about this ability to be here and clean the temple as this extension of trust, this, like, forming trust between all of people who practice here and tend to this space and tend to this energy and. [00:39:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:41] Speaker C: So I'm feeling very trusted and grateful for that. Trust about grumpiness or just the. The real. The real raggedness. What a word. What a beautiful demonstration of that word and that metaphor. [00:39:56] Speaker A: So thank you. From one ragged person, one ragged bodhisattva, to the other bodhisattva. Great rag. [00:40:07] Speaker C: I was having a conversation with a friend last night, and we were kind of riffing on the, like, the something in me sees the something in you. So, yes, the ragged me or the raggedness in me. [00:40:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Billy Corgan. Oh, I don't know. Isn't it? Isn't it? Yeah. The killer is the Smashes hump killer in you. [00:40:27] Speaker C: Right on. [00:40:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:40:28] Speaker C: Feeling more seen every moment here, but yes. [00:40:32] Speaker A: Yes. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Leo, back in the house. [00:40:38] Speaker D: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for the talk. For me, my mind went somewhere slightly different with the rug. And I was thinking how, like, an inanimate object, like rag that we take for granted can elicit so much within us. And the thing that came mostly up for me is how for many years, I mean, including nowadays I feel like sometimes when I clean up, don't do it right. And it, like, it. It always creates kind of like this internal barrier to do more and more. And in how many times and instances in my life I would withhold myself from doing stuff for not doing it right. So that came up for me today on multiple occasions. And I've been kind of, like, grappling with that since you mentioned it. [00:41:39] Speaker A: That's great. Yeah. So it's the opposite of, like, going, I thought I did it right. And this person's telling me I didn't, versus, I'm not even going to try because I'm not going to do it right. And all of this is known as negative self clinging, which is the root of suffering. And when we melt away, the root of transgression by the power of our confession and repentance we exhibit the true color of practice. So. Thank you, Leo. Lippy. How close do I hold this? [00:42:14] Speaker E: Like this? That's fine. Yeah. [00:42:16] Speaker A: Yeah. It'll. It knows you. Okay. [00:42:19] Speaker E: I was so touched when you started really entering this material about. Material about rags. And I was like, what is happening? And I. I was like, oh, this feels. [00:42:31] Speaker A: It's. [00:42:32] Speaker E: I. I'm like, oh. In some deep part of myself, I associate rags with my mother. It feels so. I. I don't wanna. I don't know about others, but for me, this was feminizing of. Or this was bringing in that I. So I think part of what was touching partly just my own history with my mom but partly just feeling my own relationship, like, feeling like I can find myself in this dharma that you're talking about. So. [00:43:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:43:03] Speaker E: And I. You know, my mom always wants to save things and reuse things and not throw things away. And, you know, so there's rags that are former clothing or things that are, you know, former towels. And that's the same in my house. [00:43:16] Speaker A: But. [00:43:17] Speaker E: Yeah. And she was the one who was more cleaning and. Yeah. So anyway, it's just very, very moving to. To, I don't know, just everything you. You know, when you were comparing these two books and the sort of high academic writing and the more personal heart, you know, sort of evocative, feelingful style of writing, And. And use of language. So. And the way that Paula Arai is someone who integrates all this, integrates these ways of knowing and being, so. Yeah. Thank you. [00:43:59] Speaker A: Yeah. You're welcome. [00:44:00] Speaker E: Yeah. And I guess the last thing is that story about your own grumpiness and your remorse and, like. And you're feeling at loose ends, feeling ragged at the end of the day. I've never heard. I can't remember hearing a Dharma talk. [00:44:14] Speaker B: Right. [00:44:14] Speaker E: Where a teacher spoke in that way about their own experience. It's very touching. And that, too, feels very important. Yeah. [00:44:25] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. Can you see me? Come on over here so we can see each other. Totally fine. Not to put you on the spot. Hi. [00:44:42] Speaker F: Thank you. So I was thinking about this Chinese monk that is famous in the region my family is from, and he has this poem that I think about a lot, which kind of roughly translates to, if there's nothing to begin with, if I have nothing to begin with, where would the dust come from? [00:45:01] Speaker A: Didn't get the last part. If there's nothing to begin with. [00:45:04] Speaker E: Right. [00:45:04] Speaker F: If there's nothing there to begin with. If I'm nothing to begin with. [00:45:07] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:08] Speaker F: Where would the dust come from? It's like, where would the dust attach? [00:45:11] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. Of course, she actually quotes that famous story with Wenon. Right. [00:45:18] Speaker F: And then a lot of times when I'm cleaning my house and dusting, I would think about this poem. [00:45:22] Speaker A: Great. [00:45:23] Speaker F: I'm like, right, maybe I should just own fewer things. If I own nothing, then there's nothing to dust. [00:45:28] Speaker A: Right. [00:45:30] Speaker F: But then during this talk, I was thinking about how the act of dusting is less about, like, cleaning the things, but cleaning maybe yourself or just the action itself. [00:45:43] Speaker A: Yes, that's. That's right. Exactly. So there's both sides and more sides than that. Of course. We don't want to fall into dualism. Let's see. I think it was Patrick who said to me recently something like, by doing nothing or taking care of nothing, I take care of everything. But take care of this thing. I take care of everything. So the phenomenal world, the world of dust, is no different than the world of everything from a certain perspective. So this is a practice of taking care of everything. Rag is a jewel. Jewel is a rag. And the nothing that we speak of is not nothingness or nihilism. It's the wholeness. And we only see the wholeness through the particular, you could say, in these human bodies. Unless somehow you're meditating like crazy and you go into some weird realm and you think you see something, but that's just dust. Anything else? Keep going. [00:46:50] Speaker F: Oh, that's all I wanted to say. So, yeah, I was just reflecting and trying to compare the stories. [00:46:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much. Yeah. I can't remember. I think it's in the Zen of Dust in the Zen of Material Culture, our book, that she also quotes that famous interaction with Wei Nang in the poem, our great sixth ancestor in China. So she also includes that. Thank you. And then we just take care of things. Anyone online? I don't want to be ignoring you. Bodhisattva. Patrick, was that you that had that great quote? Yeah. [00:47:32] Speaker B: Yes. Accident. [00:47:33] Speaker A: You can own it. [00:47:34] Speaker B: Accidentally on purpose. Yeah. [00:47:38] Speaker A: So join us at Sasheen, but sign up asap. It is going to going to be time for me to go. And I think what will happen is we'll have some announcements after I do my ending vows by the Sunday Eno. Keep thinking of that Blondie song, Sunday Girl. And I will say goodbye to cloud folk because.