Sesshin Teisho
                       JOHN TARRANT ROSHI
                          May 29, 1994
                     Camp Meeker, California

                           CAMPING OUT


We are all of us camped in the midst of eternity.  We are on a
journey from camp to camp and we walk through the summer under
the sky, under the green redwood trees.  The sky and the trees
and the building, all the people, the altar, the meditation, the
joy and sorrow we feel, all of these, all of these, are for us. 
All of these are for you.  Why don't you applaud?  

So we walk together.  The best thing we can do in this walking is
open our hearts so that we can taste the journey and deepen it. 
In order to do that we have method, we have various ways of
paying attention.  They're important and they're valuable, but
none of those is as important as this one thing--opening your
heart to the Way.  If you can do that, even if your method is
absolutely rotten and horrible, you will be fine.

Please sit comfortably right now; sit uncomfortably if you wish.

You know there are thousands of errors on the Way and I have not
managed to discover all of them.  The first error is to take
things too seriously and not to enjoy them.  That error is called
suffering; it's called the first noble truth.  We correct that
error by realizing that we are camped in eternity.  Then we don't
necessarily have to unpick every thread that binds us.  Some of
the threads just fall off.  We don't have to pull every stone out
of the stream so that the stream will flow.  Some of the stones
make the stream sing and they give us shape.  If we just remember
we are water, and if we can just see and taste and smell this
nature of water that we have, then we will flow and our lives
will flow and eventually the stream will make it's way to the
ocean whether we pull out the boulders or not.

Harada Roshi said there are a couple of different ways of doing
of what he thought of as good zen.  There are a lot of ways of
doing of what he thought of as bad zen.  In the deep work the old
way, he said, was that you take a good student who is committed
and you block them at every turn.  If they turn to the left, you
put up a wall at the left; if they turn to the right, you put up
a wall at the right; if they are starting to enjoy themselves,
you immediately hit them; if they are weeping, you drive them
further into it.  You put an obstacle at every turn.  This is an
old way of teaching.  Wumen speaks about it; he says, "The lion
trains her cubs.  As soon as they have climbed up the cliff, she
knocks them down again."  

There is a story about a famous sword master in Japan, who was a
poor young man with no particular prospects in life and no gift
at all, no talents at all.  He went along and pestered a famous
master of the sword to learn his Way.  The master eventually took
him on and said, "Okay, I'll take you on."  For years he just
made him sweep the kitchen and cook the food.  After a couple of
years of this the apprentice complained and said, "When am I
going to learn about the sword?"  The master said nothing, but
the next time the apprentice went for water the master leapt out
with a bamboo stick and hit him over the head.  Thereafter,
wherever the student went, the master was lurking somewhere and
would hit him.  The student became unexcelled at finding hidden
traps. 

This is something of Harada Roshi's method.  Life is the Harada
Roshi force and life will do that for you.  You'll get blocked at
every turn.  If you can see that this is a blessing, that this,
too, is a walk through the summer forest, then you can penetrate
through the thickest state that appears.  The grief, loneliness,
disappointment, feelings of being left out, even self-hatred,
feeling that you're doing it all wrong, the grimmest experience
that life can give you, you can still penetrate through it.  This
way has a lot to be said for it and everybody walks this way at
some time.  It is the night.  Everybody descends into night.  If
life does this for you, the only thing you can do with night is
to bless it and love it.  It is such a powerful animal that it
will certainly eat you alive, so that's what you have to do, is
be eaten.

Clarissa Estes tells a great story about a young woman who had
gotten herself into some kind of deep pickle, the way we do, and
had decided that life was quite futile and despaired utterly, and
was going to the river to drown herself.  She saw a very, very
old woman just sitting under a tree, a very sick old woman, who
called out to her and said, 

     "Hey, where are you going?"  

     The young woman told her, "I have no hope and I'm going to
     drown myself."  

     The old woman said, "I can fix your situation, but you must
     do exactly what I tell you, and you won't like it."  

     The younger woman was intrigued and said, "Tell me what it
     is and I'll decide."  

     The old woman said, "No, first you must promise to do what I
     ask you and then I will tell you.  Otherwise, you can go
     ahead and drown yourself."

     The young woman had already been intrigued, she couldn't
     resist the mystery, she was a detective by training, I
     guess, it's like a koan, and so the mystery intrigued her
     and she said, "Okay, I will do it."

     The old woman, who had some terrible disease with running
     sores all over her body, said, "You must lick each of my
     sores."

     Only then did the young woman realize how sick the old woman
     was and how many sores she had, but she kept her bargain. 
     She was like one of Harada Roshi's students, she kept her
     bargain and she licked the old woman's sores.  The old
     woman's sores healed.

     The old woman was filled with strength and stood up and
     said, "Now, come to the river and I'll show you something." 
     The young woman came to the river and the old woman pushed
     her in.

     And the story goes on, that she went under the water and she
     met the queen under the river and received a jewel.  She
     came back and became a healer in her tribe.


But I like that moment when the old woman, having promised to
save her, pushed her into the river, myself.  It seems a Harada
Roshi moment.  Because it is life that we must enter and we must
get pushed into it and we must get wounded by it.  Only then do
we find our true connection to the eternal forces and we find how
real that is and how beautiful.  So, when you're dying remember
Harada Roshi and have joy.

Harada Roshi said, "However, nobody has the guts to do this any
more so I have to teach another way."  He said, "Little by little
I bring people along and they have small experiences.  I hold
them until they can't bear it any more and then they have a small
experience.  I work with them and patiently we cultivate the
garden."  A person's character deepens.  They become more serene
and at ease.  They develop compassion and equanimity.  They
develop techniques.  Gradually, like one at a time the petals of
the lotus open and the joy comes in pieces.

At Kokoan I used to sit out in the dawn and watch--There was an
iris, some of you may have seen this yourself, that used to very
reliably open just at the moment the dawn was gray and the sun
had not yet risen.  It would flick, one by one, the petals.  It
was a wonderful thing to do, to sit out was a sort of spectator
sport, to sit out and meditate and watch the irises opening. 
It's like that.  The opening just happens, perhaps over twenty
years, perhaps over a whole lifetime, perhaps over many
lifetimes.  This way is good, too.  I do not think these ways are
fundamentally different, but Harada Roshi liked to set some order
in the universe, so he said, "There is this and there is that."

In the second way we can talk about technique and method a little
more.  The first thing to say is that it's good to have some
equanimity with all this up and down that we do.  This is why the
Shin Chi Ming (sp??) starts out saying, "The Great Way is not
difficult; it just avoids picking and choosing."  Because if you
are always picking and choosing, somehow the world is more
boring.  If, when the food comes, we just eat it, we are
released.  We are released into the taste of that bread.  If the
porridge is burned, we are released into the taste of that
charcoal.  This is a much better thing than complaining to
ourselves.  It's like trying to adjust the furniture in a burning
house.  We just accept.  We enter this moment and have equanimity
with it and out of the equanimity comes loves, and perhaps,
sometimes out of love comes equanimity.  If we realize that we
are committed to life no matter what; we are committed to this
earth and our fellows on it, then we had better develop
equanimity, otherwise, we'll go insane.  Equanimity is something
that comes with the zazen and it comes over time.  All you have
to do is sit in the afternoon and have sleepy, terrible, rotten
zazen, pain in the knees, complain about the leaders, and
eventually these things will go away and you'll have equanimity. 
Your heart will open and you'll see that it is all for you.  Even
this pain is for you.  If you have a sorrow, that, too, is for
you; that, too, is a gift.  When you unpack it, inside there is
gold.

One way to have the equanimity is to be with what is, to notice
what is.  It's just like you eat the porridge.  When it comes,
shut up and eat your porridge.  It's the same.  The feeling
comes, I'm happy, how wonderful.  You don't need to get a death
grip on it--your just happy.  You don't need to cling to its
ankles for the next three days.  It will rise and fall away. 
It's the same with your sorrow.  It is the same.  Allow it in. 
It will rise and fall away.  Eventually, it will come; it will do
its work; and it will go.  It is buddha, that sorrow and that
happiness and that pain in the knees.  It is not something other
than what is here.  It is the great force of buddha nature that
carries us in this way.  Ultimately, what equanimity is, it is to
rest in our connection with buddha nature, with the body of the
dharma; to rest in our connection with eternity.  The equanimity
allows us, not to give up on life, but to enjoy it and to love it
and to realize our own connection to the great ocean is always
there, and we can always rely on it.
A couple of weeks ago at Ken Ireland's request I went in and met
a guy who was in the hospital at UC with leukemia, Al Einhorn,
whose rakasu is on the altar right now.  He and I talked and he
was in pretty good shape at that time.  He was very lively and a
funny, funny person.  It's traditional to present incense or a
symbolic gift to a zen teacher when you take them on.  His gift
to me was two kazoos.  He read his poetry to me which was very
enthusiastic and of uneven quality, full of joie de vivre.  He
was a very lovable person who worked with children a lot and had
leukemia.  We talked about how after he got out of the hospital
from his treatment, we'd do jukai because he was very interested
in having ordination.  He was ninety per cent sure he was going
to die, but it was going to be a little while.  Then Ken called
me up and said it's not going to be a little while.  We talked
and somehow out of Ken's intuition and mine, it seemed like we
had to do it soon.  Everything got put aside and we went in to do
it the next day.  The night before Ken had been woken up by his
buddha nature to go into the hospital to tell Al, "Hey, hang on. 
We're going to come to ordain you tomorrow, so don't go and die
on us.  Don't be a shmuck."  Al's vital signs immediately went
up.  We arrived and he couldn't talk when I arrived.  Amie works
in the hospital and she was there.  She said when she arrived at
ten minutes to noon for the noon ceremony, he could still squeeze
a hand, but by the time I arrived at noon he no longer had the
motor control to squeeze a hand, but he could raise his eyebrows. 
I thought of Huang Po had this thing about the fellow who raised
his eyebrows in a lively way was the buddha.  He had very
eloquent eyebrows.  We did the ceremony and there was this deep
sense of love and peace in the room.  A couple of teachers,
Mellie Scott (sp??) from Berkeley and a friend of his, as well
were there.  Then he died that night.

The name I gave him--actually, it's on the altar there--the name
was Ocean Spray or Yomatsu (sp??).  The poem I wrote for him was

     We are the dew, a dream, a bubble
     The mist, a flash of lightning.

(This is actually the Diamond Sutra speaking.)

     We are the wave and the beginningless ocean.


And we always do go back to the ocean, but it's good to be that
beautiful spray, too.

The eternity is always with us, yet we pay attention to the
details of this form that we are in.  It is good to love it; it
is good to do it well; it is good to have compassion for others,
and to realize that however obnoxious they are, they, too, are
struggling along.  We are fellows here.  We are all walking from
camp to camp in that summer forest.  That's a good thing to be
doing and I thank you for doing it with me.  It is a great honor
to walk together in this road and to bring a little bit of that
love of the Way into the world.  Heraclitus said, "You know
everybody goes out and does things and takes the path of action." 
He said, "But it is the sleepers who do the real work."  The
people who are asleep and dreaming, connecting with the daimons. 
Here we are doing the real work of the heart and in our own way
purifying the great world, right now.

So please keep this work up and enjoy it.

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