This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. It's hot today, isn't it? Yeah. So maybe I'll make the lecture the exact perfect time. That's what the Eno asked me to do. Is there anybody here that's new for the first time? Is that better? Can everybody hear me? Back to where I was, how many new people do we have? Well, welcome. Nice to have you here.

[01:00]

And welcome to those who are here for a second or 50th or 100th time. Nice to have you. We just started a practice period on Tuesday, our fall practice period in the Sydney Center. Tuesday morning we had an opening ceremony. The theme of the practice period is Everyday Enlightenment, Shinra Suzuki's expression of Zen practice. The everyday enlightenment came from a phrase of Suzuki Hiroshi's which was, everyday life is enlightenment. But the marketing department over at headquarters thought everyday enlightenment was better. I just thought I would clarify where that came from. I do appreciate the marketing department over there. Thank you. Since this is the theme for the entire 10 weeks, I thought I would talk a little bit about it today.

[02:06]

Since Shinra Suzuki's expression of practice flowed from his daily life, I thought I would start with a few comments about him personally. He came to San Francisco in 1959, and he died in 1971. Over those 12 short years, He founded Tassajara, which was the first Zen monastery outside of the Orient, and this temple here. He came to San Francisco without a lot of fanfare. There was no large arena filled with people listening to a lecture. He just arrived as the temple priest at Sakoji. and started sitting zazen in the morning and sweeping up the place. And after a while, someone would come up and say they were interested in Zen, and he said, well, join me for zazen in the morning.

[03:09]

Sometimes he sat with one or two or three or four people. And I didn't know him during the Sakoji days. This was over in Japan town, but it did start slowly. But eventually, a whole group of people started sitting with him. beatniks, poets, and hippies. The important point was, until Suzuki Roshi came to America, Zen was mostly an intellectual pursuit. There we'd tell Zen stories, koans, Alan Watts' books. Nobody actually sat Zazen. Suzuki Roshi brought the practice of sitting Zazen to America in his temple. That was a significant event. for this country. I'm not going to say an awful lot more about Suzuki Roshi's life, because we have this marvelous book, David Chadwick's biography of Suzuki Roshi, titled Crooked Cucumber.

[04:11]

It came out in 2002. Suzuki Roshi died in 1971. It took 31 years for Zen Center to publish a biography of Suzuki Roshi, and I sort of wondered why that was. So I was looking in the book, And there was a place where Peter Schneider was an early, I think he was actually president of Zen Center at one point in time, but at this time he was the editor of the Wind Bell, which was our sort of newsletter that went out. And he was Zen Center's historian, and he was trying to talk Siguroshi into doing a biography while he was alive, getting some facts down. And this was the interchange that happened. So Peter was talking to Siguroshi, he said, Maybe some sort of history, some biography. Not too elaborate, but something. Not an entire book, maybe four or five pages. Is that a mistake, Suzuki Roshi? Suzuki Roshi said, four or five? Exclamation point. How much do you think?

[05:13]

Said Peter. One? Half a page? A paragraph? You can tell Suzuki Roshi still wasn't warming to this idea as he went down the list. One sentence? What about a biography saying only, I do not think much of this sort of thing and have not kept any records? End of biography. How do you feel about this? Suzuki said, I didn't get answers to these kinds of questions from my teacher. I don't have much interest in it either. If my life is seen in this way, everything will be lost. I have this story in my head of a, you know, and I really don't know if it's true because it's so long ago that there was a major magazine, maybe Time or National Geographic or somebody that wanted to do a cover story of Suzuki Hiroshi and founding of Zen in America. And somebody came up to him and asked him if he would be okay with that.

[06:14]

And he said, no, I don't think so. That would not be so good. The wrong kind of people would come to Zen Center. And it was true. When I arrived at Tassara in 1970, mostly everybody that got there had heard about it word of mouth. I mean, I don't think that could exist nowadays with Twitter and Facebook and everything. But in those days, you know, I was in Albuquerque and I heard about Zen and got three pillars of Zen and was doing a little sitting and somebody said, you know, there's this Zen master who just started a monastery in the Big Sur Mountains, you know. And I said, oh, great, you know. And that summer, I just finished all my work on my... my PhD, except for the thesis in mathematics, so I said, I'll take the summer off and go to California, find out what all this stuff's about, and maybe I'll drop into that monastery. So I just was in Carmel and got the directions there, thought maybe I'd go take a bath, because I'd heard there were baths, I drove in. And I don't know at Tassara anymore, what's the application process for being a guest student?

[07:18]

Do you have to fill out an application nowadays? Yeah, there is. I think so, just like here. Application. I will give you the application process that I went through when I arrived at Tassara. I think it's... I walked up, there were some people in front of me, some kids, and they said they wanted to go to the bath, and the guy behind the desk in the stone office said, well, that'll be $2 or $3, and sent them off to the bath. And I walked up, and I was about to say the bath, but then I made this sort of fateful decision. I said, well, you know, I'm kind of interested in Zen. I've read a book on Zen. and the guy behind the desk looked at me and said, you know, we have this program, it's called the Guest Program, and if you stay here, within a week you'll know more about Zen than if you read all the books written in English on Zen. Would you like to do that? I said yes. End of application.

[08:20]

Two hours later, Reb Anderson was giving me zazen instruction, and that evening I was sitting in the zendo with Suzuki Yoroshi wandering around. So the point of this story is he was accessible. I mean, I was there for a period of time. I bumped into him on paths, in the baths, various different places, and that was his way. His way was to just meet students and support them to practice. He didn't want to necessarily be famous, and he always spoke about You have to stay with big mind. You have to stay with your pure practice. Otherwise, everything is lost. I thought what I would do is read a couple of stories from students talking about what they thought of Suzuki Roshi. Actually, before I do that, I did want to do one other thing.

[09:24]

I think the power of Suzuki Hiroshi's way or style was sort of most visibly brought forward at the mountain seat ceremony for Richard Baker. The mountain seat ceremony for Richard Baker happened in this room. It happened two weeks before Suzuki Hiroshi died. He'd been in bed for quite a while. He could barely... get out of bed. So there were 500 people here. They couldn't obviously get 500 people in this room, so they had people in chairs all the way down the hallway. They were here not because Richard Baker was being made abbot, but because it was going to be the last time they would see Suzuki Roshi. And I was going to read this There's a very moving description of Suzuki Hiroshi leaving the room that day.

[10:28]

And I just, I don't think I can do it. But anyway, you should, maybe you could read it if you were interested. The last paragraph begins with tears and sobbing began on all sides. And the last sentence says, he left behind room full of palms pressed together saying thank you, saying goodbye. saying what could not be said. That's 500 people, and that was a small fraction of the individual people that Sir Koshi touched quite deeply during his time here. And this is one of the descriptions by... How many people are familiar with this book? Yeah. This is probably the best-selling book on Buddhism in America. It was published in 1971, 1970. It's still in print. Ten years ago, there'd been over a million copies sold.

[11:30]

And the power of this book is really hard to describe other than it sort of was just a series of lectures he gave to students. The editor of the book is Trudy Dixon, who is a woman who died of cancer about a year before she died. And this was her description of Suzuki Hiroshi. Hiroshi is a person who has actualized that perfect freedom, which is the potentiality for all human beings. He exists freely in the fullness of his whole being. The flow of his consciousness is not the fixed, repetitive patterns of our usual self-centered consciousness. but rather arises spontaneously and naturally from the actual circumstances of the present. The result of this in terms of the quality of his life are extraordinary. Buoyancy, vigor, straightforwardness, simplicity, humility, serenity, joyousness, uncanny perspicacity, and unfathomable compassion.

[12:37]

His whole being testifies to what it means to live in the reality of the present. Without anything said or done, just the impact of meeting a personality so developed can be enough to change another's whole way of life. But in the end, it is not the extraordinariness of the teacher which perplexes, intrigues, and deepens the student. It is the teacher's utter ordinariness. Because he is just himself, he is a mirror for all his students. When we are with him, we feel our own strengths and shortcomings. without any sense of praise or criticism from him. In his presence we see our original face, and the extraordinariness we see is only our own true nature. When we learn to let our own nature free, the boundaries between master and student disappear in a deep flow of being and joy in the unfolding of Buddha mind. Beautifully written.

[13:41]

You know, one might almost maybe say a little bit over the top. I mean, it's very easy actually to idealize Suzuki Roshi and turn him into something bigger than life, but she emphasizes here again his utter ordinariness, and of course she just had a chance in this to express her deep feeling for him. There's a lot of teaching in that paragraph, I think. And I picked one other student or person who met Suzuki Hiroshi that I wanted to bring forward. His name was Chugyam Trungpa. I met him back in those days and he'd come to Tashara and he wrote a little essay after Suzuki Roshi died, and this is a quote from that.

[14:44]

The style of his teaching was direct, thorough, and without ambition. His way of working with students transcendent cultural barriers as well as any others, reflecting his real being. Roshi's style shines through as part of the living lineage of Dogen Zenji. It is a direct experience of living Zen. It is a direct experience of living Zen. I love that line. To know what Zen was was to see Suzuki Roshi, just to meet him, to see how he lived his life. That was Zen. Anyway, Trugma goes on and says, At Tassar in June 1970, I first met Roshi, an old man with a piercing look who quite ignored the usual Japanese diplomacy. All his gestures and communications were naked and to the point as though you were dealing with the burning tip of an incense stick.

[15:52]

As if you were dealing with the burning tip of an incense stick. It sometimes was like that. At the same time, this was by no means irritating for whatever happened around the situation was quite accommodating. He went on to say, Roshi was my accidental father. presented as a surprise from America, the land of confusion. It was amazing that such a compassionate person existed in the midst of so much aggression and passion. We all know Trungpa mostly through his book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which has been published almost as long as Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. A friend of mine went to a Shambhala meditation center in Hawaii a couple of months ago and noticed there was a picture of Suzuki Roshi on the altar there. and he asked about it, and the person said, well, there's a picture of Suzuki Roshi on all the altars and all the Shambhala centers. Trungpa loved him. So, of course, Suzuki Roshi's life was his teaching.

[17:00]

He's no longer alive, so how do we carry that forward? And one of the ways it's carried forward is this magnificent book, which... in 1970 was published and then Zen Center didn't get around to doing any other book on Suzuki Roshi till 1999, almost 30 years. What's interesting about this book, how many people have read it? I mean, you all have it? It's one of these books, I mean, partly what I learned years ago is it depends on who the person is. then the words mean more to you. And since Hizuku Rishi was that kind of person, it means very much to me. But there's something about it that on the one hand is very accessible and simple, and yet on the other hand, you read it and you go, what is he actually talking about there? I mean, I probably read every chapter in this book at least a half a dozen times, and I can open it up and read a paragraph and go, wow, that's really... I mean, he actually lives like that?

[18:02]

He actually is like that? You know, it's just such a marvelous... Marvelous book. Anyone who hasn't read Zen Mind Beginners recently and is in the practice period, I would recommend this as one of the reading materials for the practice period. And I'd also recommend Crooked Cucumber as a great biography of his, and it's a teaching book at the same time. And Not Always So, which came out in 2002. How many people have read that book? Fewer, right? Do you think it's because of the title, Not Always So? Or was it because there wasn't that beautiful picture of him, like this picture was such a great picture? I like Not Always So a lot. All the lectures in Not Always So came from basically 69, 70, and 71, and it was sort of near the end of his life, and there's a kind of urgency in the lectures. You can tell he's trying to give you as much as he possibly can.

[19:07]

because he knew he wasn't going to be around much longer. And so I would also recommend that book. I forgot, how many of you were at the Ed Brown talk two weeks ago? It was a wonderful talk, wasn't it? And he told those marvelous stories. One of the things I forgot to mention in my introduction for Ed was that Ed edited that book. And I think it's one of the great contributions he's made. It's not easy to edit. Suzuki Rishi lectures, never as easy, and he did a beautiful job of editing and bringing it forward for us. So I would say during this practice period, those who are in it, I would recommend those three books to look at, Crooked Cucumbers, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, and Not Always So, and I'll be reading from paragraphs of those books in the class I teach on Tuesday night. I'm sorry you don't have a glass of water.

[20:15]

But you're not in all these robes either, so some of you in t-shirts have an edge on me there. Today we're sitting in One Day Sitting, a very fortunate event for those who are participating. So I'm going to start covering... This is... This is actually kind of a mixed blessing for me. I mean, a few months ago when I said I was going to take up Suzuki Hiroshi's style of practice for the practice period, it seemed like a kind of reasonable thing to do. And then yesterday I realized I was starting. And I thought, well, how do I approach this? On the one hand, I love him and his teaching so much that I'm drawn to talk about it. And on the other hand, I'm kind of intimidated by Because there was a way in which each person that met Suzuki Roshi sort of met a different person.

[21:19]

You know how that is? I could give a lecture and maybe two or three people come up to me afterwards and say, oh, that was an interesting lecture. And I'd say, well, what was interesting about it to you? And they'll say something that I totally heard. It was just an offhand comment. And then I'd meet somebody else. So each one of you is hearing a different lecture today. And each person that met and practiced with Suzuki Roshi met a different teacher because when he would meet you, he would actually meet you and much of what happened was formed by the relationship between the two of you. So that's partly why I invited Ed to come and talk and I want Mel to come and talk and Steve Weintraub and other people during this period that actually practiced with him so you can get some feeling for what they thought his teaching was. So it's hard to come up with themes but I'm going to dive in. I think the first one is not too risky. One theme that I would say characterized Suzuki Hiroshi's style of practice is the following.

[22:24]

Zazen is the most important thing in our practice, and true Zazen is our whole life. This probably doesn't come as a big surprise to you if you come to Zen Center as a new student on a Saturday morning. the first thing that you are offered is zazen instruction here in the Buddha Hall. It takes an hour, and then you're off and running. And, of course, the beauty of zazen instruction and what makes Zen so kind of, I would say, slightly different than Tibetan Buddhism with all those magnificent stages you go through and steps and complex processes or... Vipassana with those beautiful stories and long traditions from the old scripts is basically, you know, you're given zazen instruction for an hour. That is your beginning instruction, your middle instruction, your advanced instruction.

[23:26]

Good luck. Check with your teacher somewhere along the line. And there's something true about it. That is, we're sort of thrown in the deep end and say, find out. what it is like to sit like this, to sit still in this posture and pay attention to your breathing. So the first chapter in Zen being the beginner's mind, and essentially the first chapter, not always so, is a detailed instruction on the posture that you take when you sit zazen. I'm not going to say anything about the details of the mudra of your hands or anything like that, but I would just sort of make this one paragraph that I picked up, I think, from that chapter. Sri Krishna said, the most important point is to own your own physical body. If you slump, you will lose yourself.

[24:28]

Your mind will be wandering about somewhere else. You will not be in your body. This is not the way. We must exist right here, Right now, this is the key point. You must have your own body and mind. The most important point is to own your own physical body. When you sit zazen, your consciousness fills your entire body. It's a different way to be. It's not the way we normally are. Most of the time we're wandering around with our consciousness focused in some dream world we've created in our head around some problem we have. Here's a person that says, I want your consciousness to be in your body, your physical body, and I want you to own your physical body because that's the place where you can own your mind. It's kind of a yogic practice. The second chapter is, how do you breathe while you're sitting, owning your body?

[25:35]

I'm in a slight diversion here. I read an article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago proclaiming that it was now acceptable to use science terms as metaphors for other human activities. So, you know, I was a scientist, so I always cringed when people would make these, the Tao of physics, the analogy between physics and Buddhism. It was just, I was really... But I read that article and I got into it. So I was thinking, quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, you can't measure both the position of a particle and its momentum at the same time. The instrument you use to get its position, the better you get its position, you don't get its momentum. So it's sort of similar to an effect in physics called the observer effect. If you... try to find out something about something by observing it, the act of observing it changes it, right? That makes sense? So, here we go.

[26:44]

You're observing your breath. Can you observe your breath without changing your breath? What's going on in the interaction of observing your breath? There is this tendency when you observe your breath, Maybe I'll breathe a little deeper. And I'm observing my posture. Maybe I'll let my shoulders. Can I just let my breathing breathe me? So this is kind of part of Zazen is to sort of get into your breathing and figure out what is the relationship to my breathing and me and my head? What's going on here? It's a marvelous place to explore that because, of course, you're sitting in this posture where you have a certain amount of stability so you can take some risks and let go. You can let go of controlling the situation. And so anybody that comes back and gives me some Heisenberg uncertainty comments about their breathing, I'd appreciate that.

[27:50]

The third and fourth chapter on Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, is what to do with your mind. while you're sitting there being breathed by your breathing and having your consciousness in your body. And one comment Sigurishi made about thoughts is, you know, we say, if thoughts come in, fine, let them go out. Sigurishi once made a comment, oh, if thoughts come in, fine, no problem, just don't throw a party for them. You don't need to serve them cookies, you know, get into a long relationship. Welcome. Goodbye. That's enough. And to harken back to an earlier theme, to stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of your mind. Your mind is always doing things. It means your mind pervades your whole body. Your mind pervades your whole body. I'm checking with my Eno there.

[28:55]

I asked my assistant Judith to find a copy of Branching Streams, Flow in the Darkness. That's that marvelous book of essays that in 1970, Suzuki Roshi, in sweltering heat at Tassahara, gave a series of lectures on the Sandokai, one of our foundational texts. So she handed it to me and she opened it up and said, look at this. I said, oh, is that one of your favorite passages? She said, no, I just opened it up. That's the way it is with me when I open... You know, I could just open this book up, I kid you not, and read a paragraph, and we'd all go, wow, that's... Anyway, so... So I thought, well, just as an experiment, I would go through this. She just opened it up, and this was in the question-answer section of the eighth lecture he gave on it. And I'll just give you a few things. He's using two words, light and darkness. And in the Sandokai, light means the relative... dualistic world of words, thinking, the world, the visible world, the world we live in.

[30:04]

That's the world of light. And darkness is the world of the absolute. That's the emptiness. That's the interconnected activity out of which all of the world of light comes, but we can't see it because as soon as we can see it, it's in the world of light. So that's darkness. So a student, when one comes to see the darkness in the light, and the light and the darkness, do they finally become the same thing, or do they always remain separately darkness and light? Are the absolute and the relative, is the actual form world and the absolute always separate, or are they the same? Yes, they are the same, but our lazy mind separates darkness from light. We separate our inner connectivity to the whole world from our world that we see and live in. To plunge into light, to find darkness and light, to find Buddha, nature, and perfect zazen is our way.

[31:05]

Whether you are sleepy or not, good students or bad students, you should sit. This is the only way to have darkness in your bright dualistic practice. Okay. So there's a message here, right? We should sit zazen. On the other hand... It would be kind of weird if Buddhism depended on all of us being able to put our legs in some sort of pretzel shape and say, what about the people that can't do that? What about the people that have to sit in chairs? What about the people like me that are getting old and after sitting for three or four hours like this have to sit in a saiza bench or maybe late in the afternoon have to sit in a chair? What about those people? Is Buddhism going to leave those people out of the picture? I don't think so. So... The zazen that Suzuki Hiroshi is talking about here is not a function of sitting in this posture. I mean, we should sit zazen, but it is the ability to be in the present moment fully.

[32:21]

Whether you're lying in bed dying of cancer, whether you're out doing business, whatever way, if you can be there 100%, that Zazen. We call it practice enlightenment. Dogen has a lot to say about it. Suki Roshi follows that. And you could see in his life, his everyday activity, the presentness he brought to it was his Zazen. So the Zazen we're talking about here is with you all day long. Suzuki Roshi sometimes would scold people if they got too excited about their, you know, I got up and sat zazen this morning, my wife just stayed in bed and slept. Quote Suzuki Roshi, if you think that you're getting up to do zazen and your wife is sleeping and not doing zazen, then you do not really understand our zazen.

[33:27]

True zazen is not limited to a particular posture or state of mind. True Zazen is ultimate reality itself, and ultimate reality is the actual essence of every moment of our lives. To sit faithfully is to realize this point. So anyway, being an abbot that follows the Eno's instructions, I will say one final thing. We're sitting Sashin today, so I would like to encourage all of you who are sitting, to bring your best effort to your sitting, to see this moment as a rare chance to practice this very unusual, very special and ordinary way of being with yourself. And I'll read this final paragraph of Suzuki Roshi. If you're aware of your exhaling and inhaling,

[34:31]

if you feel your heart beat one after another, then you will understand what is going on in this world. Then you will feel your being step by step. You will feel yourself. Even walking on the floor is the actual feeling of your reality, your being. Here we have real gratefulness and feeling of being. That feeling is the feeling which is called essence of mind. We do not know what to say. In this sense, this is something beyond our knowledge. We do not know what to say. It is not because the essence of mind is so great that we can't even say how it is great. It's not a matter of great. We don't know what to say because actual reality is quite simple. In this simplicity, we must find our goal moment after moment. Did I read that too fast? Would you like to hear it again? Okay.

[35:36]

If you are aware of your exhaling and your inhaling, if you feel your heart beat one after another, then you will understand what is going on in this world. Then you will feel your being step by step. You will feel yourself. Even walking on the floor is the actual feeling of your reality, your being. Here we have real gratefulness and feeling of being. Isn't it true when you actually feel yourself alive, you naturally feel grateful to be alive? We take a break from our problems that control ourselves so much and actually appreciate the fact that we're alive. That feeling is a feeling which is called essence of mind. We do not know what to say,

[36:38]

In this sense, this is something beyond our knowledge. It is beyond our knowledge. What can you say about the fact that we're here and alive? Totally incomprehensible fact that we're here. I mean, there's lots of books written about how we got here from the Big Bang or poetry about it, but who knows? And we're actually here. So we do not know what to say. It is not because the essence of mind is so great that we can't even say how it is great. It's not even a matter of great. We don't know what to say because actual reality is quite simple. It's actually pretty simple. We're here. We're all doing it. In this simplicity, we must find our goal moment after moment. Thank you very much.

[37:43]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:11]

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