I've been treating you like rather mature Zen practitioners, as if there is nothing more you wanted to do than to sit Zazen for a week and to have an uninterrupted chance to deep in your practice. Maybe I'm treating you that way because, having just come back from Japan, I'm so relieved to find I'm having my vacation now. Such a relief to be here and just to be able to sit. So I'm enjoying just sitting with you. Just being here at Green Gulch, hearing the wonderful sounds of this valley. But I think for some of you who must be having some physical difficulty,

[01:24]

or if you're the kind of person who is caught in your thinking, you must be having some mental tedium. So this Blue Cliff Records story, number five, brings up what has always been a profound question for me which is, what do you do on purpose? How do you do something intentionally? How do you just let something happen, or how do you do something intentionally? And where does that intention come from? If you do it intentionally, are you creating some self, or who is that? of the many persons you are, which one is intending this thing? You know, when Thepo pulls up his husk of millet, saying, when you pick up the world, it's the size

[02:58]

of a husk of millet. Or if you throw it down, you can't find it. Apparently, he's just confusing us by saying husk of millet or world or big or small. But he's naming it. He's naming it world or millet. He's calling it various forms or names. His disciple, Sepo's disciple, Gensha, I think, Gensha. Ganto, we mentioned before, that was his Dharma brother, but Gensha was his disciple. Gensha said something like, you may be a man or a woman have various names, but when you're born, only your mother will acknowledge you as a person. So, Seppo is saying something like this. There's no need to point out the millet seed or husk of the millet seed. No need to call it the world.

[04:29]

No need to acknowledge your essence of mind. But yet, how do we point something out? How do we teach something? You know, you have to be, as that poet is saying, you have to not be just as you were born, you know, before you're acknowledged, from spontaneous activity. And to do something on purpose, which is also spontaneous, only possible if you're empty of thinking about things. You know, I always remember how clearly when I first saw Suzuki Roshi do the tea sermon, which although he was not an expert trained tea master, he was quite familiar with

[05:56]

And yet, when I saw him do the tea ceremony, after a woman teacher had demonstrated tea and made tea for all of us at a Sashin, when we were on Bush Street, at that time, I think maybe there were 20 people in the Sashin, but it was a rather lengthy process to make a cup of matcha for each person. And at the end, Suzuki Roshi made a cup of matcha for the tea teacher. And he did it, you know, and I mentioned this before. Everything as if it was the first time, as if he'd just thought of it, like he didn't. He was going to take the top off, use a sash, in, and it didn't have any feeling of being trained. I thought when I saw him, oh, he must have never done this before. I was completely fooled. I knew he must have done it before, but I thought, well, maybe he didn't ever do it before. But he just dipped it in.

[07:30]

Rather exploring. Water was cold on top or on the bottom. Where was he getting the water from? Setsho's commentary on Seppo's statement Is ox a heads have sunk Horseheads come out On the sixth patriarch So case mirror there is no Longer any dust Some next statement I forget and then he said For whose sake in the springtime for whose sake do the flowers bloom Anyway, I don't know the background of horse head Has come out and ox head has sunk

[09:17]

but it means something like the continuity of our activity. It may actually come from, you know, sometimes if one animal puts his head down, another puts his head up, because it has the feeling of wave following wave, big waves sometimes, or small waves. Anyway, it has some meaning like that, meaning the continuity of our existence, the second principle. contrasted with the first principle. Dust, no dust on the six patriarchs' mirror. Anyway, this question of what do you do on purpose, I'm bringing up because it has been such a long question for me. When you're doing Zazen, even in this Sashin, to what extent should I suggest something for our breathing, when you're breathing in Zazen? How should you breathe? To what extent should you control your breathing?

[10:53]

And I favor, you know, strongly the side of not doing anything, not doing much anyway. You know, I'm not in any hurry. Maybe some of you are in a hurry. But I don't care ten years or twenty years, thirty years. If my breathing is supposed to be such and such a way, I don't care. Live, maybe. I'll have some wonderful experience when I'm an old man. It's the way it's supposed to be. But it's good, I think, to be familiar with doing things on purpose. So I don't recommend that you try, every Zazen period, some breathing technique, which some Zen teachers do recommend. I do think occasionally you should try, and it opens up your breathing. And after trying for, in a session, maybe several periods, or two or three days, or in regular daily Zazen, maybe for 10 minutes, or 15 minutes occasionally,

[12:21]

but mostly just to let circumstances lead you and your breathing. I think Zen is most easy for sensory or sensual type people I think Jung divides people up into feeling, and sensual, and intuitive, and thinking. I don't know how useful those kind of categories are, but certainly people emphasize different ways, or they tend to get caught in one habitual mode of perceiving. Certainly, it's quite clear that people who have a physical bodily consciousness Buddhism is much easier for and Zazen is much easier for So it means you should develop that kind of bodily consciousness If you're a person for whom concentration is rather abstract Or who exists in your thoughts

[13:50]

a sashin would be something endless, something very boring. There's no mental stimulation, and it seems pointless. But for a person whose consciousness is bodily, you don't experience time successively, you experience time spatially more. And so it's quite, even if painful, it's a simultaneous succession of experience. I think the most apt way to describe consciousness, as someone who practices finds it, is that consciousness exists, we can say, for us, already exists, and it finds expression in the medium of our body or the medium of our mind.

[15:30]

and its expression is most varied in the medium of our body, actually in pure consciousness itself, which is samadhi. But in interrupted consciousness, it's most rich, maybe, in our body and most thin in our mind. So if your effort if your consciousness is a mental consciousness, a sasheen will exhaust you very quickly and will unravel its possibilities in a few minutes or hours or days. But if your consciousness is bodily, you can sit in zazen for 100 years and there's no end to the realms and worlds that you wish to escape from. So, in our practice, you know, moving toward pure consciousness, it's best to learn to develop bodily consciousness.

[17:01]

So it means in your zazen you should have visual concentration, physical concentration, and breathing concentration. This is that kind of lore I was talking about, you know, at the beginning of Sashin, which I decided during this Sashin to talk about a little. So bodily concentration means various things, but first of all, it means you sit rather straight, and you try to find that physical posture where you feel as settled as possible, but not forcing it. If you don't feel quite physically settled, concentrate on your breathing, and that will tend to as they come together make you feel, make your posture feel settled. And your breathing, you know. I've given many of you individual breathing instruction, and some of you sometimes have some question about breathing.

[18:28]

Not as much as I'd expect, actually, because the more you practice, very subtle things occur about breathing. Anyway, I don't talk in general about breathing so much, but individually I've spoken to many of you, so much of this, some of this anyway, you may be familiar with from me or from Suzuki Roshi, But anyway, the most basic thing is you're wanting to breathe with your abdomen or quite low. You don't want to breathe with your chest. And you want to find by your own observation some inventory of how you breathe until you're quite familiar with how you breathe when you're thinking or not thinking so much or having

[19:33]

transitory fleeting thoughts or narrative thoughts or disgusting thoughts about yourself, etc. The hard thing is to accept yourself. The more we can't accept ourselves, the more we like to think about ourselves, now we can't accept ourselves. To not think, for a person who can't accept himself, the best antidote would be to not think about himself, the very thing he or she can't do. You don't dare stop thinking about yourself if you can't accept yourself. It's quite funny. You know, I say my own feeling about people who think a lot, or compare a lot, it's like they're in a room looking out the windows and they can't find the door. I always think of it that way. You know, each situation you're in, if you don't compare,

[21:03]

There's immediately a door, you know. But when you compare, you can never find the door. You're always looking out the window. Well, I'd like to be up there on the light or something. But actually, if you just open the door, you're out there. The situation resolves itself. But you compare and look around and you never find the door. So this has a lot to do with breathing, because what you're trying to do is stop thinking. And how to stop thinking in Zazen is one thing, and how to stop thinking in your everyday life, narrative thoughts and transitory thoughts. You're doing something, some thought comes up. How to let it go? Best way is

[22:08]

Of course, that which motivates the thought is no longer, has no more fuel. But you can also stop your thoughts by your breathing. And you can learn something about it and see something about your thoughts by this kind of on-purpose effort. So, after you've taken some kind of inventory of your thoughts, of your breathing, how your breathing is in relationship to your moods and thoughts, this can take several years, but you can also take some note of how much you already know about that. being familiar with your breathing then and its various aspects that occur, you tentatively explore your breathing, lowering your breathing. So the kinds of preparation you make at the beginning of a period of zazen are pretty important. You rock back and forth some, you find various

[23:43]

because your rocking and your breathing are quite similar. So your rocking brings your breathing in some rhythm. Anyway, you have some process of settling physically with your breathing. And then it's often good to exhale once through your mouth. Dogen recommends exhaling once through the mouth. Some people recommend exhaling more. but it can become rather noisy if you breathe through your mouth but breathing through your mouth concentrates your breathing more than it does to breathe through your nose if your mouth isn't so open so once or twice you breathe, exhale out quite completely through your mouth And sometimes it's good to do it in two successive pushes. Because your breathing will go down, it'll reach a point where it'll stop. But there's still much more air, a reservoir of air in you. And to do that you have to make a second little push. So you do that, and then you, once or twice, you breathe out. Then you settle yourself.

[25:18]

Now, if you're not breathing up here in your chest, you're breathing from down here. There are two or more kinds of breathing from down here. And Bishop Yamada, we always call him Bishop Yamada, but Yamada Reiren Roshi, who's, I guess, rather ill now. He's quite old and he's number two man at AHA. He used to be at Los Angeles and come to our sesshins with Suzuki Ueshi. He, for beginning type abdomen breathing, he suggested this image, which has seemed to me always the most effective. which is that you have a sensation that your exhale is coming out very gently this way, and your inhale is coming in from down here, and the air is rising up. You can physically explain why you have that sensation, because of your diaphragm, but that's not so important. You have that sensation of it rising up. And exhale. Okay, so when you have that kind of sensation,

[26:49]

And there's some deep physical rhythm of it. Physical, your body is just doing it. That kind of breathing is quite satisfactory breathing for zazen and quite stable and won't cause you hallucinations and things which other kinds of breathing can do. So for those of you who aren't so familiar with zazen and with breathing, it will take you probably maybe one year or so before you can breathe that way quite naturally without most or all of the time in your zazen. And you can try it occasionally or reach for it, but mostly just breathe. But knowing that,

[27:50]

you will have a tendency to unconsciously favor that kind of breathing and eventually you'll find in your zazen as your posture develops that you're breathing that way all the time quite comfortable with your strength here we have many physical habits and emotional habits in our body prevent our strength being here and prevent our breathing from being relaxed. And if so, or rather when you notice that, maybe you should have some consciousness of that point at which it's not natural.

[28:51]

which it doesn't move. And not force it, but have some consciousness there, this bodily consciousness. And you will find out maybe some successive waves of emotional release will occur. Maybe weeping or great pain or naughty charley horse kind of feeling in some location which won't give up anyway we have that kind of thing in our body and many old habits in our body but breathing this kind of breathing will route such things into consciousness So, assuming you can breathe that way and rather steadily what I'm suggesting today for those people who can breathe that way is that you occasionally do some very long exhales Now, normally when we exhale

[30:21]

you count exhales, you know, if you're counting you can count both inhales and exhales and inhales but usually counting exhales is preferred 99% of the time so you're counting exhales or just following your breathing following that breath and usually you'll find as you So in a long exhale, you emphasize that shift, you breathe out, and then when you seem to have breathed out as much as you can, you don't inhale yet, but you keep some gentle pushing and more air will come up. This will inhibit your thinking a lot, this kind of breathing. Clear your mind up. And often afterwards, unless you are very experienced in meditation,

[31:43]

you will need to breathe quickly several times afterwards because your reservoir of air is depleted and that's okay, you know, so you'll breathe more quickly a couple times and then you can do a long exhale again and I wouldn't, again, I don't think one should do this period after period but for half a period, you know, you might do several long exhales just staying with it now by visual concentration I mean visual concentration will reinforce physical and breathing concentration tremendously if you look inside yourself you know not just kind of looking but even your eyes are a little bit open but you're seeing inside yourself simultaneously with your breathing and your physical concentration here and your breathing concentration and your mental concentration on your breathing you in addition have visual concentration inside you this kind of effort will develop your bodily consciousness so you're not caught by mental consciousness which is so dim and thin and easily aggravated

[33:11]

not worth the world it lives in. So probably most of you don't have the strength, actually, the energy to do that more than occasionally. Then you'll have lots of wandering thoughts and various feelings. Eventually, when a certain kind of pressure that's in us all the time is gone, you can keep with whatever you're doing. Your consciousness doesn't slip around and go bright and dim and off and on. Even then, it's rather difficult to maintain complete concentration

[34:17]

except in zazen when you really are undisturbed and settled in to your practice. Anyway, we wouldn't want to be like that all the time, but it's very useful in developing our deeper, wider concentration, which isn't easily disturbed, to have this very concentrated physical attention free of thoughts or undisturbed by thoughts. Do you have some question? Yes? Well, when you see something like lights, you're on the edge. It's like seeing outside. And you're so used to that, that when you have visual concentration, you tend to see things. Some blue thing or something coming and going.

[35:50]

That's rather nice, sometimes. And if you can stay with that visually and mentally, your visual concentration will become more... not so specific, more diffused and even. It's not something... it's a complex... it's not a question I can answer verbally, because verbally, you know, it's like... When you do visualizations, do you visualize something two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally? I know what you mean, but it's a difficult question to answer completely, because we're so used to seeing things two-dimensionally. For another kind of Buddhist practice, we do visualizations. in those visualizations, do you visualize the Buddha you're visualizing two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally or multi-dimensionally? It's a rather interesting question, because mentally we think, well, it has to be two-dimensional, so how do I see the back simultaneously? But this kind of question is resolved by feeling it out yourself over time. But we start with, just as you say, what we know of visual, our visual activity.

[37:16]

So you start that way and you see some things, but eventually it's not so specific. But if I speak about it, it's specific. Yes? I think I have to review it myself, physically Yeah, when you push up with your diaphragm when you're breathing from your abdomen I think this is right it will tend to stop here. Partly because when you concentrate on something, say you're a watchmaker, when you're concentrating, you stop. If you've ever done something meticulous and you notice you're breathing at the moment of concentration, you stop your breathing and you stop it here. So the kind of breathing I was speaking about with the circle, when you are exhaling,

[38:45]

you're pushing down here rather than up here, and then your breathing won't stop here. Actually, it takes time to just notice what's going on inside. Yes? Not at all. I mean it may of course some but there should be almost no sensation of any rising and falling in your chest your chest is completely open and there's a Some there's feeling here in your breathing But your chest feels quite immobile Oh alive and open not rigid, but just a passageway This kind of breathing, with your chest rising and falling, you can't really... you'll have many thoughts and you can't meditate with any concentration. Your mental involvement is continuous when you have this kind of breathing here. Yeah? What about the heart? My heart feels restricted a lot.

[40:15]

Yeah. Well, of course, our heart and lungs, our breathing, are both very closely connected to our thinking and emotions. The heart particularly to emotions. And so if you have any kind of It's obvious if you feel anxious, your heart goes more quickly, etc. And as you practice zazen, of course, as your breathing gets slower and deeper, your heart tends to speed up to make up for the lack of oxygen. So, as long as your breathing, as long as your physical zazen is pretty good,

[41:19]

but you're mentally still and emotionally active your heart can't slow down because it has to keep supplying fuel to that activity so your heart and breathing can't both slow down until your mind is quite calm but all of these things I talked in a session last session a little and the previous session more about our inability to trust our own organs, heart and lungs and stomach. And how scary it can be if you just say, do Zazen and say, okay, this period of Zazen, I'm going to turn myself over to my breathing and I'll go wherever it goes. You'll follow it for two or three breaths and get quite scared and jump off. Most people, I think, will. because there's a sensation it's taking you into some abyss, you know? Who knows where it might go, you know? So we can't trust our own breathing, you know? We can't trust our own heart and our own stomach. So these organs, you know, which medieval alchemists and contemporary Asians make so much of,

[42:45]

In Zazen, you know, medical, ancient medical science did, in Zazen you find there is a consciousness of your heart and a consciousness of your lung and a consciousness of your stomach and kidney, etc. Very clearly there is such. And as you become more bodily conscious, you will find out the consciousness of your kidney and heart, etc. And you'll find out how restricted and constricted it is. So, at first there is some fear at just becoming aware of our physical being. It's so objective and transitory, you know. It seems, at least from one point of view. So, again, Zazen practice then is at first a growing familiarity with our various consciousnesses, with our organs. And you can take as a kind of practice, just as I'm suggesting doing something on purpose occasionally, like long exhales, you can take as a practice.

[44:17]

What is the consciousness of my heart? Why does my heart feel constricted? What would it be to not feel constricted? Ask yourself some very simple question about it, and keep that question in your consciousness for a while, and in the concentration of your zazen, but don't think about it. Just that question present for a moment or so, and very interesting things will come. And since we're an organic, holy being, actually, when you deeply or sincerely arouse such a question, it will have some result. Definitely it will have some result. Maybe not today, or it may not be conscious, but six weeks from now or something, your heart consciousness will be different because of your sincerely asking that question. So our practice is that kind of bodily intimacy or sensitivity in which we trust our body or develop a trust in our body and trust the wholeness of our being over time and space not looking for something from the self

[45:38]

And you have some incredible opportunity in a sesshin. You won't have so many times that you're... Dan Will, who told me this morning, he said, how many sesshins? Anyway, most of you won't have as much chance to sit as many sesshins as Dan. Even so, that's not enough. So you have some opportunity in each moment to explore this great empty being that you are. Thank you very much.

[46:43]

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