Lost Coin notes for 5/31/1

Talking about in Practice how we do things. It’s different than the way we were taught growing up.

 
Koan: Kuei Shun and Iron Grinstone Liu
The old woman was a very wise student that the teachers were afraid to do dharma combat with. She asks her teacher if he is going to the feast at Tyshan (which is too far away to go to). His answer is to lie down and appear to be drunk. She is satisfied and leaves.
 
It’s a deceptively short koan, with a lot in it. What the master did was in fact go to the party by becoming one with “what going to the party in his mind means”.
 
In the practice that we are doing together the premises is different.
The east didn’t really develop philosophers, sages but not philosophers. They didn’t develop deistic religion or psychology. Instead they came up with this one all encompassing thing called The Way. In The Way it was understood that you did not understand the way by understanding things abstractly, nor by even understanding yourself- the way was not built on understanding. Wisdom is not The Way, understanding is not the way, Buddha is not your mind.
 
In the west we try to understand how to do things by understanding them.
 
But we want to look at what they (The Way) did instead.
We call it training.  It operates in the arts, with athletes, things like that.
 
Training involves:
Doing something over and over until you learn how to do it.
The practice is action. The practice is commitment oriented.
Commit to carrying out the action for many, many hours and over a period of years.
Our most basic thing would be sitting practice.
 
You do it because it is a better way to live than chasing around the shadows of your mind.
The mind feels safer to us, but practice takes place in a sphere outside of that and is therefore a bit more threatening.
It also means making actual things happen in your life. All the things of your life are a concern of your practice.
 
When you trust me more, like they do in Salt Lake, I’ll call you on your stuff.  It’s not intended to be nasty. The point is to see what’s real.
 
Practice is repetition and action over thinking. Cause and effect or karma, what you do creates what happens. What you do in your head doesn’t have anywhere near the effect of what you do with your body.
 
So practice encourages you to take on the stronger karma of action and therefore challenges you.
 
Stopping thought- Thought is a way of avoiding emotion and avoiding action.
 
If you feel something without also thinking about it, you become one with it. As you become one with it it’s a different kind of experience. And that’s what happens in this koan.
 
What if you were to use commitment for a starter as opposed to whatever you use now? How would you do it differently?
 
Exercise: Make a list of two things you’ve been wanting to do for awhile but haven’t done, and do them.
 
The barrier to doing things is often really courage and commitment.
