This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. Well, I prepared a two and a half hour lecture but it will only take me 35 minutes so rest easy so I was thinking about the four elements

[01:00]

the old-fashioned four elements. Of course, you know, every year there are many more so-called elements being discovered, but these are the old four elements historically, air, earth, fire, and water. Now we all know them very well, but we don't think about them too often. There's also another one called mind, fifth one, which is... the element of mind consciousness, which is very important. But I've chosen to talk about the first four. Mind consciousness is more a bigger subject. So I want to talk about how a Zen student practices with these four elements. of which we are all constructed. They're general elements.

[02:04]

They're not so specific. Air, which is sometimes called space, sometimes called sky, sometimes called empty. We talk about empty space. Empty space for us Buddhists has a very special meaning as we know all the elements are empty and not just space space of course what is space space is the element in which everything can change if it was not for space everything would just be the way it always has been and there would never be any change and we'd all turn into rocks. Or, you know, something like that.

[03:05]

So for us, space is the element in which everything can move. That's one meaning of spaciousness or space. And the reason that everything can move is because everything inherently is empty of its own so to speak everything is depending on everything else and is moving in concert with all other elements and nothing is standing still although there is such a thing as stillness and there is such a thing as motion Suzuki Roshi talked about our life is like a movie on a screen like a movie on an empty screen. There's a projector. There's the movie itself, which is the drama.

[04:06]

The film itself, which is the drama. And then there's the light and the projector. And then there's the screen. So when you're sitting there, when we're sitting there in the movie theater, we're sitting, you know, expectant, twiddling our thumbs, you know, when's the movie going to start? And then they turn on some terrible music to keep your mind occupied so that you don't have to be alone with the screen. Because the screen reminds us of our mind. Yeah. The screen reminds us of our empty mind. And we can't stand that. We have to have motion. We have to have some story that's occupying our mind so that we don't have to look at the empty screen. So the projection, so the movie is projected onto the screen.

[05:13]

Without the screen, there's no movie. You have to have a screen to have the movie. The movie has to be projected onto something. And it works best if the screen doesn't have anything on it at all. So this is how we understand our life and our mind. We need to have a story. As Shakespeare said something like, we're all actors on this stage acting out our drama. And that's exactly what we're doing. Whether our drama means anything or not is another story. It all has some kind of meaning. But some things are more meaningful than others. So we all keep looking for the story that has the right meaning for us.

[06:14]

And there's so many directions. And so many directions which are dead ends. sometimes a person gets mid-life. They say, oh, well, my life had been following this wrong story. It ends up in a dead end. Especially nowadays. So, for a Zen student, when we practice Zazen, what we're interested in is the screen. So, when we sit Zazen, our mind is projecting a movie, But it's not a meaningful mohi. It's just simply random thoughts. And sometimes we develop those random thoughts. Then we're no longer sitting zazen. So in zazen we simply let the random thoughts work themselves out, run their course and let them go. Then another random thought.

[07:19]

In the 30 verses of Vasubandhu, he begins by saying the mind, the thinking mind, is like a rushing torrent which never stops. It's simply just going on and on and needs to feed on something in order for it to be alive, to be lively. Most meditation practices are about how to control the mind, how to control the monkey mind, the mischievous mind. The mind is always grasping at things in order to stay alive. It's like a rushing torrent and people grasping at straws in the rushing torrent to keep going. You never notice how when a group of people is talking and jabbering away and keeping this thing going, keeping the momentum going.

[08:25]

And suddenly they come to an impasse and nobody can say anything. And there's this embarrassing silence. We're embarrassed because we finally let our big mind come through and we don't know what to do with it. Too big. So we keep this momentum going as much as we can. And we're always looking for the next thing to do, which is okay. It's so-called human nature. But if we don't understand or we never get in touch with our true big mind, which has nothing written on it, then we're only experiencing half of our life. We're not experiencing our life completely. And we're going running and running and running until the end.

[09:31]

So sometimes people say, well, why do we sit zazen? Well, we sit zazen to be in touch with our true mind, our true big mind, which has nothing written on it. Of course, when the movie is projected on the screen, The movie and the screen are one. They're not two things. There's not a screen in a movie. The screen and the movie are one. So the way our life continues is with the screen. The screen and the movie are one thing. But as soon as the movie stops, there's the screen. The screen is always the screen. But the movie is always different. Every moment of the movie, of our movie, is different. There's a past, present, and the idea of a future. So sometimes we dwell in the past.

[10:38]

Rarely are we in the present, because the present is ungraspable, because it's always becoming the past. As soon as it's the future, as soon as it's the present, it's always becoming the past. And the future is just an idea. We expect that we'll keep going. You never know, even though you know. So the screen is like our brilliant, bright nature, which is our true face. Banke calls it the unborn, undying, the true nature. It's not born and it doesn't die. And it's omnipresent. and we write our story on the face of it. But the story is ephemeral, and the screen is always there, even though everything changes.

[11:40]

So as a Zen student, we should be aware of allowing ourself to return to our true nature. to our fundamental nature. And you say, oh, I'm bored. Of course you're bored, because the mind is trying to grasp something that it can't grasp. Give it a rest. We say we give the mind a rest. We give the body a rest? Why don't we give the mind a rest? Even though we're sleeping, the mind's still going on. To just let things experience pure existence. So then there's earth, the element of earth, which is solidity, durability, where we make our home, where we grow our crops.

[12:44]

But it's hard, and it's somewhat resilient, but it's really tough stuff. And it's kind of like, the earth is like... For a Zen student, to be stubborn is really good. You know, we don't just accept Zen students who are nice and easy to manage and easy, you know, sweet. We really prefer the stubborn kind. I do. Because stubbornness has two elements. One is resistance. And the other is determination. So a really stubborn person has a lot of determination. And when that determination, or when that stubbornness is transformed, it becomes determination for the practice. And often those people who are the most stubborn, the most difficult, turn out to be really good teachers when they have realization.

[13:53]

Because they have that spark. that energy. Earthiness is touching the ground. Sky and earth, space and earth are like passive, somewhat passive even though Stubbornness is there. And fire and water are like active principles. So they balance each other. Sky and earth balance each other. Because gravity is always holding us down. We're always dealing with gravity every minute of the day. And space or sky is always... That's the place where we want to go to.

[14:56]

So it's going up. It's resisting gravity. The spaceship goes up resisting gravity. So we have this feeling of spirituality going up and earthiness holding us down. The devil, God and the devil, so to speak. So how we harmonize those is our practice. How we harmonize our spirituality with our earthiness. That's sin. Mostly we practice earthiness, but inside, the earthiness that we practice is our spirituality. We don't make a big deal of spirituality. It's just a common thing. The ordinary thing. What is ordinary mind? Ordinary mind is great spirituality, of course. then there's fire.

[15:58]

Fire is like desire. It's like faith. It's like heat. And passion and love and energy, great energy. And unless the fire is controlled, it burns everything up. So often students come to practice with a lot of fire and we don't want to put out the fire. We transform that fire into heat and sunlight and high spirit and love and in a true sense. we're always dealing a lot with our fire. We say the fire in the belly.

[16:59]

And the fire, Shakyamuni says, you should practice like putting out a fire at the top of your head. Suzuki Roshi said, we should just turn down, when you have a smoky lamp, it's because the fire's too high. So you should turn it down and adjust it. So it makes a brilliant light. without catching anything on fire. And you control that heat because that's the essence. That heat is the essence of our life. And if we put it out, it's too bad. Sometimes people say, or you read mostly, if you read Buddhist texts, it's very discouraging. They say, you should cut off desire. And you say, oh my god, castration. But cutting off is not right. You should turn desire in a way that is beneficial to you and others.

[18:07]

You should channel desire. And that's what we are always working with. 24 hours a day, we're working with that in one way or another. Sexual desire, desire for all kinds of things. How do we manage that? How do we keep the fire so that it works? and not burn just everything up. And that creates a serene environment. Serenity is like a sunset, a beautiful sunset with lots of beautiful color from the sun, but it's very peaceful. How do we maintain the peaceful fires that benefits yourself and everyone? So instead of talking about cutting off, we're talking about transformation, making it work for us instead of making it work against us.

[19:14]

And then there's water, the element of water, which is flexibility. Always be soft and flexible. Talk about having a soft mind, which doesn't mean fuzzy, although mind gets fuzzy. It means being able to be malleable, to know how to step back, know how to step forward, know how to... Water has no special shape or form. So it takes the shape and the form of whatever container it falls into. So I'm going to say the S word. is it? This C word, conformity. Sorry. Everybody hates conformity. But the nature of water is to conform.

[20:21]

So it simply means it taking the form of whatever whatever container you happen to be in. Not fighting the forms. When you can flow with any form that you encounter, then you have flexibility and you have your freedom. When we're always fighting the container, we're just beating our head against the wall. So even if the container is not the container that you want to be in if you know how to conform to it then you know how to separate from it we have to be able to say to acknowledge our mistakes before we can correct them we have to acknowledge who we are before we can change so in the same way we have to

[21:26]

Allow ourselves to be within the container of practice. Just let yourself do that without wiggling. You see, I like putting a snake in a bamboo tube to straighten it out. So we enter the bamboo tube of practice, which straightens us out. And we wiggle, we don't like it, and various things. Sometimes we do, but... we should allow ourselves the only way to get through the tube is to take the shape of the tube the only way you can possibly sit Zazen for 40 minutes is to take the shape of Zazen and when you do that then you take the shape of the universe so Zazen is to be in harmony with body breath mind and the universe called universal practice. Everything is contained there because we're not clouding over with our desires and thoughts.

[22:35]

I've been studying Master Banke, who was a 17th century Japanese Zen master, who always talked about the non-born and the non-dying. the unborn, you should always abide in the unborn. He said, but what we do is we trade in our unborn mind for the angry mind, or for the contentious mind, or for the desire mind. We just keep trading in our original mind for some temporary mind. In other words, we're trading in the gold for lead when we allow our anger to overtake us. I was thinking about the gold standard.

[23:41]

The Indians used to say, the white man, come and kill us because of this yellow metal that they price so much. It isn't worth anything. It's really not worth anything. It's only worth something because we say it is. But it has no actual value. So, the same goes. We're easily fooled. We're so easily fooled. But we like to be fooled. We do. Otherwise it wouldn't be. Would we? We do. We like to be told a story that we can believe. And we get ourselves in trouble. So it's difficult.

[24:48]

So some of the good quality, earthy quality, is endurance. For a Zen student to cultivate endurance is really important. I remember, you know, we have seven-day Sashin. It takes a lot of endurance to complete seven days of Zazen. And I remember somebody saying, Well, I think it's just an endurance contest. And I said, yeah, that's right. Is that bad? It's not a contest. It's a challenge for yourself. It's a wonderful challenge for yourself to raise an endurance which you never knew you had. I always wanted to go and bow down to my teacher when I realized that he kind of encouraged me to stay with what I was doing and never give up, which brought up an energy that I never knew I had.

[26:20]

Otherwise, I would never know that energy. I would never know that. So Earth is like groundedness. So for a Zen student, we should always be grounded. But we should always be grounded in our true nature. And so I think of that as the solar plexus. Solar plexus is, you know, people say, well, it's here. And some people say, well, it's there. For me, it's like the center of our body because we are a solar system. If you want to call it the solar plexus, that means this is where the sun is, and all of the satellites, like our arms and legs and our head and so forth, are the planetary system. So we are a copy or a miniature of the universe. Each one of us has their own planetary system, and this is the center.

[27:24]

There are various centers. There's the mind center and so forth. And when we harmonize body, breath, and mind around that center, then we have true harmony. And this is where we always come from. This is where we always come back to deep breathing in the solar system. And all the arms and extensions the energy comes from that spot outward. So when you sound the bell, when the bell sounds the bell, it's not just with your hand, it's from here. This is where the whole energy from the stroke comes and then the bell is sounded. And so the bell has its sound coming from this center rather than just from the hand. but this goes for all music and comes from when you're in the kitchen chopping vegetables you go in like this but it's actually the energy is coming from here through whatever extension you're working with so that's called mindfulness in our practice always being centered and our energy flowing

[28:54]

from that place instead of from some other place. When our breath is here in our chest, we're not centered. So even though we may be anxious here or whatever, we should get our breath down so that we're coming from here. And then we become settled. This is the place of settled mind, not the brain. When we're settled here, then the mind is quiet. Those are some of my thoughts about this subject. And I know everybody's sleeping. If I wasn't giving this talk, I would never come to a lecture at 8.30 in the evening. Thank you very much. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

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