..续本文上一页nk it”s a very spiritual thing to do because you”re already supposed to know if you”re spiritual, but maybe it is the right thing to do and maybe that”s how the moral arises. The moral arises not through certainty coming down from the sky. That”s how rules arise. Somebody engraves something in stone with a lightning bolt. The moral arises from the ground up and it arises through the partial in the floor. So we have to always take on in ourselves, and in those we love, the floors. We have to be acknowledging that they”ll be there and that”s okay because that”s the windows through which transformation comes. And if you haven”t got your floors, then your neighbor will have to have them for you and that”s a horrible thing to do to your neighbor.

　　I don”t know if you”ve found this, but I”ve found that when I first discovered Buddhism, I went to the National Library in Australia and I read every book there was on zen in the National Library, which actually sounds more dramatic than it was. Three books. No, there were quite a lot. I had this passionate devouring of the subject. After a while I began to notice the similarities in the narratives, that there”s this heroic narrative. All the autobiographies are essentially the form of the heroic narrative where somebody goes out, falls into the wilderness, digs their way out, and comes home with wisdom and gets help along the way in various ways. That”s a classic story. But I found that there wasn”t a lot of imagination, often, in the Buddhist literature. The Pali Canon, for me, is an example of the most unimaginative, mental engineering that I”ve ever run across although there is a great depth of brilliance to it, too, but it offended me. The lack of soul, I suppose, always offended me in some classic Buddhist literature. I think it”s boring because it”s soulless. It doesn”t allow the imagination to play. It doesn”t allow anything personal to happen. If something personal doesn”t happen, we”ll start paying lip service to it and doing something else in our private lives. So we need to bring the personal into the zendo, into the temple, and make it sacred and that”s the true task. There must be some sense of imaginative play in zen. There must be laughter and jokes and things like that because the soul loves those things, and they”re so transient, and you explain it later and there”s no point to it. You can”t put it in a sutra. Sutras aren”t very good on jokes, but that”s an essential part of human life.

　　The last thing I want to say is that I think the great traditions did embody this. This work on character and the honoring of the soul, and the transience, small animals, gardens, the feminine in whatever forms the culture hallucinates it. All this was in the great tradition. There are always misogynists in the great tradition, but there are always great women, too. This work on soul always did go on although it”s hard to codify and wasn”t codified. I think one of our tasks of really deepening Buddhism--I think one of our tasks is to try to help the culture if we can by deepening Buddhism. I think that the first place to do it is in ourselves, that we have to hold that conflict within ourselves and work with our own messiness and see what happens from there and then we follow and trust the actions that start coming out from that, the generosity of action that will automatically come from a spiritual practice so that we can make our bodhisattva contribution to the culture.

　　This might be a good place for me to take a breath. I think it was Mark Twain who said, "Few people are converted after the first twenty minutes of a sermon." And maybe take some questions.

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