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 and welcome. As many of you know, because you're part of it, today we're having a one-day sitting. And if you're not familiar with such a concept that we have here, we get up early and start sitting and sit all day. And in the middle of the morning, we have a talk. It's an interesting process, giving a talk during a one-day sitting. You know, in some ways, And being in the flow of the sitting is to let go of everything, let go of your thoughts, and then in the middle of that you're trying to put together some thoughts for a talk.

[01:10]

I find out a couple of days ago that this weekend there is a conference. called Wisdom 2.0. That's interesting. Of course, the play being, you know, 2.0, how in the tech industry, each iteration of software, hardware, whatever it is, gets a new number. And so presumably, wisdom is the same. It can be revamped. And my mind was thinking, well, is it 2.0 or does it go from 1 to 0? Surely there's always some process of contextualizing the practice.

[02:26]

Each one of us hears it. and hopefully get something out of it, and then we're obliged to translate it into the context of our own life. And that's what I'd like to talk about this morning. The theme, which we're in the middle, we're not quite in the middle, but we're close to the middle of a 10-week intensive where we're dedicating our efforts to practice. And the theme of it is awakening. And the teaching, the traditional Buddhist teaching that I've been referring to is the seven factors of awakening. Most of these traditional teachings, they were put together in a contemplative context.

[03:33]

Some of them were actually designed that you would go into a dedicated period of meditation, usually by yourself, in a very simple environment. Sometimes you would actually stay in your hut. Your food would be brought to you. And so your world shrinks. Your involvement with the outer world is cast aside, and there's this intense inner process. And then you set aside your usual way of formulating reality and how you're preoccupied with it. and how it stimulates your desires and aversions, set that aside, and with a teaching, discover a different way of being, hopefully a helpful one.

[04:37]

You know, and it's my notion that the seven factors of awakening, this was their origin, this was their function, primarily. But that's not what's happening. It's not the context in which we're practicing with them. So I've been thinking about that. What is the essence of these teachings? And then how does it apply within the lives we're living now? And so my mind came up with this notion. It's a threefold process, undoing, doing, and then being, being in the context in which you're living. And of course, you're always being in the context in which you're living, whether you like it or not, or whether you know it or not.

[05:47]

So the factors of awakening classically are this. First one is very broad. just being aware, noticing what's happening. And then the second one is acknowledging, experiencing that, that noticing. And then the third one is letting that come into be. Experience it. And then the fourth one is letting that experience express itself. And then the fifth one is abiding in that. And then the sixth is continuing that abiding.

[06:50]

And then the seventh is letting that reshape your whole being. It's commonly thought that the first four, noticing, experiencing, engaging, and letting that register, are the kind of initiation, and then the next three are the maturation. But recently I've been thinking the first four pretty much apply to any circumstance, any state of mind. And then in that, given that we can take them, they can be a foundation for whatever mind, whatever activity we're engaged in. And that's how I'd like to relate to them today. As I was saying, you know, classically, and this was actually how I was introduced to meditation.

[08:02]

I was in Bangkok, and I wanted to learn how to meditate. I actually lived in Japan and read many books on Zen. And it somehow seemed impossible to go to a monastery and stay in it. So I went to Bangkok. I was advised to, and I did. And I went to a monastery, and I said, I'd like to learn how to meditate. And they said, okay. And they put me in a room with thick walls, and the room was about this wide, five feet wide, and about eight feet long. And I didn't know it at the time, but the plan was, just stay in that room for ten days. And I got fed twice a day. I did leave to go to the bathroom, but that was it.

[09:03]

So it was that classic process of studying the self intently. And then there were instructions as to how to do that. And essentially it's a process of undoing. As we attend to the experience, we're obliged in the process to let go of the usual preoccupations of our thinking and feeling, recalling the past, anticipating the future. ruminating on what bothers us or what we desire, and coming back to the experience of now. And really, as we do that, it's an undoing of the habituated self.

[10:11]

In some ways, it's enormously difficult and challenging and intriguing and rewarding. And I think many of us have spent a lot of time doing that. Dogen Zenji, the founder of this style of Zen said, to study the way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self. As we attend to the particulars, in the process I was taught initially, attend to the particulars. Some of them were quite simple. Notice when you have an inclination to move. And before you move, try to notice what stimulated the impulse to move.

[11:21]

So try it sometime. Go into a room. and just sit down, notice what your senses are experiencing, and then when there's an impulse to move, see can it be conscious. And then you move slowly. And then you just do that all the time. And in some ways Zazen is the same practice. except we attend to the body and the breath in a particular way, codified as upright sitting. And there's so much involved in that, but I'm not going to go into that today. So this attending to the experience of the moment.

[12:30]

And then a while back, I made up this little formula. Notice, acknowledge, contact, experience. And when we bring it back to the experience, and this, I would suggest to you, works not just for the settled meditative mind, but for pretty much any mind that can come up. And sometimes the acknowledging is quite discursive. And sometimes it's quite refined. Sound hearing. Sometimes it's quite discursive. I don't like the implications of how that person described me in the email they sent me. And then can you notice how's that being experienced? What's the state of mind?

[13:37]

What's the emotion? And then as we do that, as we go to the elemental experience, the story becomes less relevant and the essence of it, the subjectivity of it becomes more relevant. and we go through these first four phases, the noticing of the path of awakening, the sati, the mindfulness, the open awareness. We experience that, and then the exploration of that, the investigation of it. It can be discursive, or can be non-discursive if the mind's settled enough. And then we experience that it has its own energy.

[14:40]

There's a spark of being that comes into involvement. If it has a strong emotion, that can reverberate through our body. It can shape our state of mind. When that energy goes to a difficult emotion, the response is uncomfortable. When that energy goes to a pleasant emotion, like something like gratitude, the mind softens. The breath softens, the body softens. And we can track this in our life. So that's the first factor.

[15:42]

This is the undoing. And then the doing. Our life is about engagement. Even there I think there's a progression as Buddhism goes through different countries. In early Buddhism they were mendicants. They literally did not work. After that period of meditation where I learned how to meditate, a couple of years later I continued all that and eventually I became a monk and we were forbidden to work. There was a rule against work. And then, that tradition carried on, and then in China, it was modified. The work could be in the sustenance of the practice, in that phrase that probably I suspect many have heard, you know, fetch wood and carry water.

[17:00]

minimal involvement in the utility of life that supports life, supports providing the basic necessities. And that was actually how it came into being. It came into being in a monastic system where indeed they grew their own food and took care of their own buildings in our monastery. That's very much what we do. But the doing, when it's informed by the undoing, it has a different quality to it. It has validity in itself rather than just

[18:02]

in the consequence, what it produces. In a couple of teachings I've heard in relationship to this have stayed with me. And one of them is, do what you're doing. So often, it's so easy for us to give what we're doing the minimum attention it needs. Or so often, whether we like it or not, our mind wanders and we're giving it minimal attention. And that quality of engagement has a consequence. And then sadly, often in our life, we're doing something reluctantly.

[19:07]

It's like we'd rather be doing something else. And then the other slogan I heard in relationship was, give each thing the time it needs. And certainly both of these are held in esteem in Zen practice. Do what you're doing and give it the time it needs. But in a more general way, I've made me think of this poem by Margie Piercy. To be of use. The people I love the best jump into work head first, without dallying in the shadows.

[20:08]

The work of the world is as common as mud. Botched, it smears the hand and crumbles the dust. But the thing worth doing well shapes, satisfies with the clean evidence. Amphoras, for wine or oil, a Hobie vase for corn, are put in museums. But you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to be carried, and the person for work that is real. So how, throughout our day, to do what we're doing and give it the time it needs. And of course, this is in complete harmony with be mindful, pay attention, engage it diligently.

[21:22]

But it also speaks of what we're doing. It lets it come alive with a validity of its own. and the important teaching of it is that it shifts from consequence to process and the very nature of meditation is that it's process rather than consequence We have within our meditation, you know, directed attention, receptive attention. But really, it's to wake up to what's already happening rather than produce something exalted that then we can attend to.

[22:25]

And maybe the point of caution around wisdom 2.0 is that somehow we're heading for an improvement, a goal in what's happening. Whereas in some ways the goal of waking up is to be with what's already happening just as it is. Okay, so that's doing. And then the third one, I think this is the one that's most challenging for us, because if you think about it, first of all you had mendicant monks and nuns, and then in China, and this is the theme of the passage of the Zen school, in China that became the utility of taking care of themselves,

[23:34]

But then in the West, the kind of Zen practitioners that we are, it does involve the world. It does involve a kind of a rethinking, a reshaping of the practice. Our lives extend out into activities that go beyond these simple tasks. And that challenges us to find the purpose, find the context, know what principles to live by. And I think there's two dimensions to this. And what is somewhat mysterious, we could say it's staying true to the very thing that brought us to practice.

[24:52]

An interesting thing, what brought us to practice, we may have had some ideas. Like when I turned up at the door of that monastery to learn how to meditate, I had plenty of ideas about practice. And I still have plenty of ideas about practice. But I would also say there's this theme of what you might call an intuitive wisdom. In Rilke, Rilke wrote, a particular kind of poem around this. He said, sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors and keeps on walking because of a church that stands somewhere in the east. And another man remains inside his house, stays there, inside the dishes and the glasses.

[26:01]

something calls us, vocation, a calling. And that calling creates a purpose. It creates a sensibility. And then we live our life in reference to that calling, to that purpose. Or often we deviate from it. I read this humorous quote by Mark Twain recently, and it said, having lost sight of our goal, we doubled our efforts. I think we all get it.

[27:10]

If you don't know what you're doing, just try harder. We're actually staying connected to what's important for us. It's almost like the opposite. Instead of tightening... and becoming more strenuous. Something needs to loosen and remember what it already knows. This is where the undoing comes in. As we undo in that experiential way, we get in touch with something. There's a curious story in the early sutras where Shakyamuni is recalling as he starts to have a sense of undoing, of being present just as it is.

[28:13]

And he recalls when he was eight years old and his father said to him, go sit under that tree when I go over here and attend to something. And then as an adult, he recreated that mind, that mental state that was experienced when he was eight. And each of us was eight, or six, or four, somewhere in that magical range where the nature of what was was so evident for us. So that calling, that's there in our life, and how easy it is for us to be too busy to attend to it.

[29:17]

We have too much to do. There's too many things demanding or asking for our attention. But not to say that those things are in opposition to our calling. Because everything is just taking care of the life. There's a Zen saying that says, there's two things you do in Zen. You meditate and sweep the temple. and the whole world is the temple. All the tasks of life have this capacity to just be what we do. All the tasks of life have this capacity to just give each thing the time it needs.

[30:24]

And when we start to engage like that, we're continually in the process of rediscovering and refining our calling. And I think somewhat a winnowing, too. And here's how Mary Oliver, my mind works in poems, if you haven't noticed, puts it. She says... Meditation, old and honorable. So why do I not sit every morning of my life on a hillside looking into the shining world? Because properly attended to delight as well as havoc is suggestion. Can one be passionate about the just, the ideal, the sublime and the holy and not commit to labor in its cause?

[31:31]

I don't think so. All summations have a beginning. All a fact has a story. All kindness begins with a seed sown. The gospel of light is the crossroads of ease and action. Be ignited or be gone. How in the midst of what seems to be the necessary utility of our life. How do we keep alive the calling? How do we contextualize it in the life we live in? There's a Zen calling. mysteriously says, how do you take a step from the top of a hundred foot pole?

[32:49]

It's someone who's Chinese. She lives in the States, but she grew up in China. She said to me, this is a common phrase in China. People will say this to each other. When someone's in a situation where they have to make a decision, take a step. from the top of a hundred foot pole. And the koin is, how do you do that? How do you step into what's next in your life? Okay, given all this, now what? And when are we not asked to take the next step in our life? When are we not asked to be purposeful about what we're doing, that it's in accord with what's important to us?

[33:51]

In the practice of Zen, in the process of Zen, the undoing, the doing, they set the stage. If we come to this place of taking a step, agitated, distracted, it can easily obscure that intuitive wisdom. We can indeed easily decide this is an occasion to double or effort. Or we can substitute. We can substitute with a simple desire or aversion what's required. And it's an interesting coin.

[35:08]

because the koan doesn't hint at any specific answer. It doesn't say, oh, here's exactly how you do that. Instead, somewhat mysteriously it says, when you take the step, the whole world supports you. When you step beyond, the preoccupations of self. When you step beyond the dictates of liking and disliking, something's revealed. So the purposefulness of our life, the vocation of our life, is not a static thing. It's not something we establish,

[36:09]

and then we head forth insisting that either we accomplish it or the whole world comply with it. It's a dynamic, continual unfolding. It's a discovery. It's a wisdom 2.0 and 2.3 that we are always beginners, that we are always approaching with that curiosity. That this calling of our life that has brought us all here this morning, that influences us in the midst of how we set the priorities, how we engage the agendas that arise for us.

[37:18]

And in the context, it becomes quite tangible. it becomes quite specific. But it's also beyond the specific. It's in the how we do it. It's in the doing. It's what we do, and it's how we do it. And in Zen practice, this is represented in just that. The how has its own, the what we do has its own discernment, but how we do it has its own discernment too. And when we engage like that,

[38:35]

when we're both doing what we're doing and in an almost paradoxical way, we're undoing the stories we're making up about it. That when we're returning to awareness, it becomes both a practical expression and a continual exploration. In the language of Zen, we say it has both the form of what it is, and then it has this mystery, this formless, this shanyata. And these two together. Or as Mary Oliver says, it's both indolence and action. That we both

[39:38]

boldly enter our life and we hold this mind of curiosity. What am I doing? How do I stay true to something that I can't turn into words? 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.

[40:33]

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