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. Hope everyone is well this morning as we start our seven-day voyage together. Is the audio good? What a beautiful day. It was colder yesterday. It seems like it's warmer. Did they turn the heat up in the building? I can't tell which, but it's nice. So what to talk about on the first day of a seven-day sashim, such an unusual thing to do. How many people have Is this their first sashin, seven-day sashin?

[01:01]

Quite a few people. Well, something's gonna happen. We don't know what. It's kind of like a pilgrimage, an inner outer voyage, something. So there's no real strategy to a sushin, except for to give up and see what happens. I was thinking about sushins at tasara during practice period aren't much different than the regular practice period. During a practice period, you're sitting nine periods, a zaza in a day, doing all three meals, or yoke style in the zendo. So doing a sushin is just like adding... a few more periods of zazen into it, it's not much of an event. But in the city it's a little different because most of us are only sitting one or two periods a day, and now we're going to go to something more often sitting.

[02:12]

And so I think it's a bit of a change. You all are now monastics for a week. Monks practicing the Way. And by tomorrow, that's exactly what you feel like. You're just a bunch of monks wandering around, practicing the way, going all the way back to Buddha and China and Japan. How lucky that you can become a monk so quickly. Normally one has to go away to the monastery for years and years, but you'll be a monk quite quickly here. So anyway, It's traditional on the first day of a Sashin for me to review some basics about Zazen. And I've become more traditional lately, so that's what I'm going to do. So mostly you're in ceremonial space all day long, so it doesn't make so much difference.

[03:19]

But we have a tradition when you enter the Zendo that you enter the Zendo on the left side of the door with your left foot. And then you go to your cushion and you bow to your cushion and you bow away. And this has both no meaning and a lot of meaning. On the one hand, if you get used to entering with the left foot and you enter with the right foot someday, you'll notice, oh wow, something was weird, I entered with the wrong foot. And it will remind you that you're moving from some space a meditation space and so that's the beginning of your zazen is as you enter the zendo you're already entering into zazen space and a bow to the space where you're sitting is a bow to something sacred the spot that you're sitting in and when you turn around and bow to the entire rest of the room you're also bowing to all the other people that are sitting with you

[04:24]

And that's a very important part of zazen. And then you get up on your cushion or you sit in your chair. And I think it's very important to take enough time to actually feel yourself sitting there. Feel your sit bones in your buttocks on the cushion. Take the time, more time than I took this morning sitting here. But when you're in the zendo, you have plenty of time to actually settle yourself in your seated position. Feel gravity, which is your great friend, pulling you to the ground. I was thinking about gravity this morning when I wrote that sentence, and I thought, gravity is such an amazing thing. I was a physicist when I was young, and so I... went up to the Internet to find out what gravity is about these days.

[05:26]

And, of course, gravity, as you all know, is the force which runs the universe, basically, in terms of the macro level. All the planets and the galaxies, the moon, the tides, are all run by this marvelous force called gravity, which is the thing that Two masses are brought together. If you have a mass here and a mass here, they're attracted to each other. That's gravity. And it doesn't matter. According to this, gravity has an infinite range, and it cannot be absorbed, transformed, or shielded against. So if there's a mass way out there, we're affected by it. Now, of course, the mass that we're most affected by is the Earth. although maybe the moon pulls on us a little bit. It certainly pulls on the tide. So the earth is pulling on us. Well, actually, it's not pulling on us.

[06:29]

We and the earth are attracted to each other. That's a wonderful idea. We're just attracted to each other, and the earth is attracted. So we want to appreciate that attraction, and we want to sit and feel this marvelous force that keeps us attached to the ground that we're going to sit with. On the other hand, there is another force that's going on here at the same time, which is our life energy. If we didn't have life energy, we'd just be on the ground and we wouldn't get up at all. But we have this marvelous life force energy in us that allows us to sit up. So after you've got yourself, your tripod, if you're able to put your knees down or whatever other way you've got of balancing yourself and you feel very balanced with gravity, You sit straight up with a straight back, as straight a back as you can get.

[07:31]

Now, when I'm talking about posture, I want to be very clear that posture isn't looking at some picture in a book and trying to look like that picture in a book. Posture is your inner posture. You find your own way of sitting up. There was an Alexander Technique guy that came to Zen Center one time and was talking about the fact that most of the muscles that hold your back up are not part of your conscious control. They're just these big, strong muscles that hold your back up. You don't have to work at holding your back up. Your back knows how to hold itself up beautifully. So find that strength in your back by sitting upright and feel... your neck going up, feel some lift here so that you have an open chest to breathe. And feel the energy.

[08:33]

There's an energy that goes up and down your spine that actually you can feel after a while if you sit. So feel yourself sitting straight up. And while you're sitting, one of the things that I've found very useful to pay attention is to to the chin. It's very easy during long periods of zazen for the chin to either droop, oh, I just fell asleep a little bit. Or all of a sudden you find yourself up like this and it's because you're dreaming, you're thinking in your head. So you may not always be able to tell whether you're sleeping or dreaming, but you can tell if you have some kind of part of you that pays attention to your chin where your mind is. So we're using our body to pay attention to what's going on in our mind. And just one other suggestion, which I'm sure you all are aware of, but there is a tendency sometimes. We sit with our eyes open.

[09:34]

We don't sit with our eyes closed. There's a tendency when you sit with your eyes closed. I mean, sometimes you can concentrate in a certain kind of way. but it's also very easy to drift off into thinking or dreaming or daydreaming. So eyes open, cast down, not open looking, but sort of just open to be aware of what's going on because our practice in the Zazen is not to go anywhere, but to be here, to be here in this place at this moment. I had a whole riff I was going to go on about the four fundamental interactions of nature, the strong force, the weak force, but merely to say we sit in a very magical place with many forces applied to us here.

[10:38]

So I pulled out a chapter from Not Always So called Resuming Big Mind. This was a lecture given by Shinra Suzuki Roshi, the founder of this temple. in February 1971. We bought this building in 1969 and moved in at the end of December in 1969, so February 71 was probably maybe the second or third sashim done in the building. And there was another sashim done in June of 71, and then there was a sashim started in December 4, December 3 or December 4 of 71, which was the sashim that Suzuki Rishi died the first day of that Sashin. So this was lectures given during a Sashin in the last year of his life. And we're going to be having a ceremony the evening of December 3 and the morning of December 4, memorializing Suzuki Rishi's annual memorial ceremony, which will be a nice ceremony.

[11:44]

So anyway, here he goes. The purpose of Sashin is to be completely one with our practice. The purpose of Sashin is to be completely one with our practice. Well, what is our practice? And what does it mean to be one with it? Well, maybe you can discover what your practice is while you're sitting during this period of time and feel your connection to it. It says, we use two characters for Sashin, Setsu, which shortens to ses in conjunction with shin. So Setsu means to treat something the way you treat a guest or the way a student treats his teacher. Now, we all treat guests very well, right? Certainly much better than we treat ourselves. We treat guests very well. And we're supposed to treat our teacher extremely well. In our tradition, you treat a teacher as if he's

[12:49]

or she, is Buddha. This is a temporary construct until you can start to realize that you're Buddha too, so you treat your teacher very well. And shen means heart or mind. And so Suki Roshi says that meaning, the definition of sesshin means to treat your heart and mind like you would a guest or your teacher. What a wonderful thing to say. Treat your heart, all your feelings, your emotions with this great respect. Treat that crazy mind of yours with great respect. You're hosting your mind and emotions for seven days, treating them beautifully. I forgot to mention anything about breathing when I was talking earlier.

[13:59]

So once we've got ourselves settled in our posture, we pay attention to our breathing. And this is a real art form or something that we learn. How to not control your breathing. Our practice is not to adjust your breathing in some way. I mean, there are many techniques that one can do in terms of breathing, either adjusting the rhythm of your breathing, adjusting the position of your breathing, breathing deeply into your chest, breathing deeply into your abdomen, paying attention to the breath as it enters the nose or leaves the nose. There's lots of ways to pay attention to breathing, but our way is mostly to just let our breathing find its own way. So we pay attention to the breathing very carefully, and we just let the breathing find its own way of breathing.

[15:03]

We watch the breathing. We become one with our breathing. Suzuki Roshi says, take care of your breath just as a mother watches her baby. We're watching our breath just like a mother watches her baby. That's with a lot of care. We're watching our marvelous breathing, which is keeping us alive moment by moment. I never had children, so I make a statement like that. A, I've never had children. B, I never was a mother. But I was talking to a student who was a mother, and we were talking about mirroring, You know this thing where you actually sense another person quite intimately and she mentioned that she was looking at her baby and her baby's face completely changed into her face.

[16:09]

It was like looking at a mirror. I mean the baby's face distorted to be exactly like her. This connection when you're that intimately connected that you can actually become the other person. That's how we're taking care of our breathing. I mean, it is us, so it's not separate from us, but it's the way we're going to take care of our breathing while we're sitting. So then Suzuki Roshi goes on and says, another meaning of Setsu is to control or to arrange things in order. So seshin means to have proper functioning of mind. It is our five senses and our will or small monkey mind which should be controlled. When we control our monkey mind, we resume our true big mind. When monkey mind is always taking over the activity of big mind, we naturally become a monkey.

[17:13]

We don't want to be a monkey, do we? We want to control our monkey mind. So monkey mind must have a boss, which is big mind. Now, for those of us who have been around Suzuki Roshi's lecture in a long time, big mind we're pretty familiar with. Small mind is our little monkey mind. I wish it was warmer. I wish it was colder. My knees hurt. The food wasn't so good. It was good, but if it was maybe a little bit more this way or that way... Why is my neighbor breathing so heavily? It's disturbing me, et cetera. That's our monkey mind. And by the way, why did that person two days ago when I was trying to get to this sashin and he knew I was in a hurry bother me with all this? You know, it's like that, an endless stream of thoughts. So Sukhara says, however, when we practice zazan, it is not that big mind is actually controlling small mind, but simply that when small mind becomes calm,

[18:15]

big mind starts its true activity. Most of the time in our everyday life, we are involved in the activity of a small mind. That is why we should practice zazen and be completely involved in resuming big mind. So one of the nice things about Sashin is we're going to sit long enough that eventually you'll be bored with your monkey mind and you'll have a... a glimpse of this bigger mind's activity. So our basic practice is a thought comes up in our mind, and instead of just building a whole story with it, we go, oh, that's an interesting thought. It's fine. We've invited these thoughts in. We're happy to treat them as a host, but we're not going to invite them for tea, is the way Suzuki Roshi would say. We don't need to stay around and have a long afternoon lunch. with this particular story. We're going to just let it come in and go away.

[19:15]

So this, I thought I should bring in a few things. We've been studying the Genjo Koan, this practice period. So there was a famous sentence in the Genjo Koan. How many of you aren't familiar with the Genjo Koan? Good, so not so many. Anyway, a famous essay by Dogen, who was the founder of our Japanese Soto Zen tradition. And here's the sentence. To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening. To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening. So Shuaka Okamura, who wrote a beautiful book on the Genjo Koans, comment on that first sentence is, carrying the self forward and illuminating myriad things is, we take our distorted ideas, desires, and move toward the world trying to find truth or reality.

[20:29]

You might notice you may be doing this sometime during Sashen. We try to see and capture reality with our minds, our abilities, our willpower, and effort. We try to become enlightened in order to put everything under the control of the self so that our life is stable and peaceful. Wouldn't that be nice? This attitude, according to Dogen, is delusion. That is not how you're going to get to a stable and peaceful place by taking our distorted ideas and all of our ideas are fundamentally distorted and with our willpower and our abilities and effort, go and see if we can capture reality in order to be enlightened, and then we'll be peaceful and stable. So rather, he says, the subject of practice is not the personal self, but all beings.

[21:38]

So this second sentence, which is that myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening. There the subject is myriad things coming forth. All beings, not you. So the subject of practice is not the personal self, but all beings. To practice is to awaken to the self that is connected to all beings. To practice is to awaken. to the self that is connected to all beings. Do you know that self is connected to all beings? That feels connected to all beings? Do you feel that sometimes? In Sashin you'll feel that many times. You'll feel as you're sitting in the zendo that you really are connected to everybody in the zendo. You'll hear the Eno come in and you'll know it's the Eno because of the way she walks.

[22:39]

And the beings that we're connected to are not limited to all the people we're sitting in the Zendo with. There'll be that horn honking outside. Enough just to hear it. We don't have to go on a trip. I wonder if that's a Ford. Is that a Chevrolet? Oh no, this is San Francisco. Is that a BMW? It sounds kind of like, and then somebody will play a song, and you'll hear that song, and that song, you'll be connected to that. There's a whole world out there. We're in an urban temple. Many things go on, and we're connected to all of it. And to practice is to awaken to the self that is connected to all of that. By letting go of our thoughts and consciousness, we actualize the self that is connected to all beings. Shoako's teacher used to say, opening the hand of thought.

[23:47]

All these thoughts that are running our life, we're going to put them down for the time we're together. Because we don't really need them anymore. We don't have to solve all those problems that we have to solve when we're outside. or if you're inside here, it doesn't matter. Our daily life involves using our thinking brains a lot to do things, and we don't have to think about it very much. When the bell rings, we go to the zendo. We sit down. And, of course, there's a magical show going on once we sit down. If you can start to appreciate all these things that are going on in your head, appreciate what's coming up for you. Things will be coming up for you that aren't the same as what's coming up for someone else. They're unique to your life. And there's some reason why they're coming up for you. This is a very important thing, that at this moment in your life, sitting there, something is occurring, some thought, some emotion.

[24:57]

This is your life in this moment. So it's important. It's important what's going on. But the thing about zazen is we're not going to, we think, well, this is an important thing. In fact, this is a problem. I'm gonna try to solve the problem and you'll go on a thinking trip about how to solve this problem. But that's how we got in this problem is by going on all these thinking trips to solve our problem. We're gonna solve our problem in a different way during Sashin. during Zazen, we're just going to sit, pay attention to our breathing, pay attention to our posture with our problem. We're gonna let our body solve our problem. We're gonna let some part of our mind, other than the frontal cortex, which solves all our problems, solve our problem. There was a, I don't know what,

[26:01]

Where did I write that down? Oh, yes. I was talking to a therapist about something the other day, and he mentioned something to me about EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. I don't know how many of you people have ever heard of this process. Quite a few, yeah. I'd never heard of it. I mean, I'd heard of it, but I'd never been in a conversation about it. But apparently there's some way in which you... move your eyes in coordination with your hands while you're reliving some traumatic experience, that is, you integrate the traumatic experience into your body and out of your head through this process, which is fairly sophisticated. And I thought, well, that's kind of like zazen. We're sometimes reliving these traumatic experiences. They will come up during this period of zazen, this seven-day sashim for you, And the way to relive them is not to think the same old stories, or while you're thinking the same old stories, pay attention to your breathing, pay attention to your body, let your body resolve this trauma for you.

[27:11]

I remember I was sitting one period of zazen, this was early on, and I was having some real difficulty, some remembering something from my childhood, and I had this incredible pain in this part of my stomach. It was so painful. I couldn't believe why I was having this big pain right here in my stomach. But it wasn't exactly in my stomach. It was somewhere. And then I just paid attention to my breathing, paid attention to that pain, became completely that pain, and then... big release, was gone. It was like I had been holding some muscle, some part of my body had been holding something for a very long time. And who knows how it started, where it went, we don't know, but I don't have that anymore.

[28:22]

So zazen is a very We don't understand zazen. I mean, I'm giving you some kind of therapeutic, you know, story about zazen. Zazen is much, much deeper than that, but it certainly does that much. Also, okay, back to Shohako's comments on the second sentence of the Genjo Koan, that myriad things come forth and illuminate the self as awakening. This is not the self awakening to reality, but Zazen awakening to Zazen, Dharma awakening to Dharma, and Buddha awakening to Buddha. Zazen practices Zazen. It is not that a separate individual practices Zazen to become enlightened. This is the meaning of Dogen's expression, practice and enlightenment are one. So when you're sitting zazen, zazen is practicing zazen.

[29:25]

You're not practicing zazen to get enlightened. So you don't have to actually be involved at all. You can just let zazen practice zazen, the dharma practice itself. Of course, these words are very magical. They sound very poetic. What they mean actually while you're sitting there, well, this is what we spend some time figuring out. I'm sort of wandering around the field of what does it mean to give up small mind and have big mind? And so I was picking up on this sentence. To carry the self forward and illuminate myriad things as delusion, that's small mind. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening, that's big mind. And I picked up another paragraph from Wang Bo, who was a disciple of Baijiang, which is a very famous... teacher, 8th century China, and Wang Bo was describing enlightened teachers, enlightened patriarchs, in real life situations, and this is how he described it.

[30:30]

Enlightened patriarchs in real life situations efface themselves so that the true contour of the situation comes to disclosure in them. Wang Bo pictures enlightened patriarchs in real-life situations effacing themselves so that the true contour of the situation comes to disclosure in them. A face means to make oneself appear insignificant or disappear. So you're making yourself, your small self, disappear, your monkey mind disappear, so that the true contour of the situation, everything, all beings, comes to disclosure in you. Disclosure means is revealed. So if we let go of our small monkey mind, the whole world, all beings, will be revealed in us.

[31:39]

That's big mind. They encounter the world not through acts of will and mind primarily, but through relinquishment. Opening their own minds and will, the larger context of the situation comes manifestation through them. So, relinquishment. It's a beautiful word. Give up. Give up your small self-effort. Make an effort to sit up. Make an effort to stay present with your problems or your enthusiasm or your daydreaming. And you'll open yourself up to something bigger than yourself. I'm going backwards.

[33:01]

I'm now on page one. Page two, page three. I'm supposed to go forward. Four, five. Oh my goodness. So in our practice, we rely on something great and sit in the great space. The pain in your legs or some other difficulty is happening in that great space. As long as you do not lose the feeling that you are in the realm of Buddha nature, you can sit even though you have some difficulty. When you want to escape from your difficulty or when you try to improve your practice, you create another problem for yourself.

[34:06]

But if you just exist there, then you have a chance to appreciate your surrounding and you can accept yourself completely without changing anything. That is our practice. To accept ourself completely without changing anything. Nothing to do but sit there and accept yourself. completely. And trust that you're sitting in some great space. To exist in big mind is an act of faith, which is different from the usual faith of believing in a particular idea or being. It is to believe that something is supporting us and supporting all our activities, including thinking mind and emotional feelings. All these things are supported by something big, that has no form or color, something big that cannot be described, cannot be grasped, cannot be understood by our thinking mind, our emotional mind, our consciousness, but it is supporting us.

[35:15]

It is impossible to know what it is, but something exists there, something that is neither material nor spiritual. Something like that always exists, and we exist in that space. That is the feeling of pure being. feeling of pure being. What a wonderful thing. Don't you have those moments when you just go, you put your baggage down, all the things you're trying to get done, all of the projects and things you're going to fix and everything, you just set the whole bag down and just are happy to be alive, happy to be here and be alive, to be the sense of pure being.

[36:21]

So, I mean, it happens many times on a beautiful summer afternoon in a meadow in the aspen groves or in the mountains, but also it happens just sitting here with your friends when you can put down all your efforts in your life. Sukiroshi goes on, if you are brave enough to throw yourself into zazen, throw yourself into zazen for seven days, a little bit of understanding will help your rigidity and your stubbornness. I love that. All our rigidity and stubbornness. I can't let go of this problem. This problem is too big. I'm going to die. I understand that I can never sit zazen. I'm very stubborn about that, but no, you can let go of your stubbornness. Almost all the problems you create because of your stubborn mind will vanish if you sit for seven days.

[37:23]

If you have even the smallest understanding of reality, your way of thinking will change completely and the problems you create will not be problems anymore. He goes on, but it is also true that as long as we live, we will have problems, so we don't practice to attain some big enlightenment that will change our whole being and solve all our problems. That is not right understanding. That may be what people call Zen, but true Zen is not like that. In Sashin, we concentrate on having the experience of true practice, forgetting all about any idea of gaining anything, and we just sit here. If this room is too cold, we will make it warm. If it is too difficult, you can rest. But let's continue our practice for these seven days. Whatever will happen to you during the seven days will be unique to you and also shared with other people.

[38:41]

Whatever your opinion about what is happening, I'm sure your opinion will be incorrect. It is what's supposed to be happening for you, and you can trust that. Trust that what is happening for you in this Asheen is what is supposed to be happening for you. Let us continue our practice for these seven days. 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.

[39:33]

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