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. San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Kyoshin Wendy Lewis. And today I will be addressing the aspect of philosophy. in the practice and study of Buddhism. And as a basis for this topic, I'll be referring to the fourth of the four foundations of mindfulness as they're presented in the Satipatthana Sutta. So the four foundations are contemplation of one, the body and the breath, two, feelings or sensations, three, the mind or consciousness, and four, the dharmas.

[01:05]

So the first three are familiar to most people who've engaged in Buddhist practice and in Zen practice, but the fourth, the contemplation of the dharmas, can be a little more complex. So in December, many Buddhist sanghas, maybe all, engage in what's called the Rohatsu Sashin or retreat. And this is a celebration of the enlightenment of Buddha. So that seven-day Sashin is going to begin tonight here at City Center. And part of the Sashin, of course, is what you're not going to be doing during it. And the other part is what you will be doing during the Sashin or during a single period of meditation. what are we engaging of ourselves and those around us in the world when we engage in meditation. And before a retreat or a Sashin, there's often a lot of busyness and anxiety and preparations and sort of a hectic atmosphere.

[02:19]

And so the first few days can be a sort of a coming down from that in a way. But most... retreats and sashins kind of settle down and then participants kind of settle down after a couple of days. So even the third day can be still a little static. But how does this settling occur? Is it just you get so tired of fighting or is it that you start to relax? What are all those things and what can support that kind of settling? Because a sashin as or a retreat like this, it's really an extraordinary opportunity and a privileged one. It's not just, you know, some special thing that we all think is so magical. It's a privilege, so how do we honor that? So in Zen, meditation is taught as being based in the posture and the breath.

[03:22]

And Shuniru Suzuki's term, beginner's mind, refers to the mind that is able to be patient and to apply, you know, that attention to the posture and breath over and over again, repeatedly, without really knowing what that might lead to. It's an instruction. Follow the instruction. Something like that. So instead of focusing on enlightenment or the next day or after Sashin or whatever it might be, and also about how enlightenment might empower us or free us or improve things, the basic teachings are approached and applied with curiosity and humility or openness. So the first of the four contemplations is contemplation of the body in the body. Here now, a person having gone to a secluded place takes the meditation posture and directs their mindfulness to the object of their meditation.

[04:36]

Ever mindful, they breathe in. Ever mindful, they breathe out. So, Meditation or mindfulness of breathing is not about control or correction, but attentiveness. In the instructions it says you note whether a breath is long or is it short. And this observation, as in all the contemplation, includes effort, mindfulness, concentration, and understanding. And as that attentiveness is applied, the object of meditation changes and shifts, and one's relationship to it shifts. One thing I found helpful in following my breathing was at the same time to open my hearing to all the sounds that were going on, whether that's just a...

[05:45]

the sound of the air purifier or the traffic or whatever, and then keep bringing myself back to my breath and listening to those sounds and back to my breath. So that's one of the ways to change or deepen relationship with concentrating on your breathing. And this first foundation of mindfulness continues to our four postures. Standing, walking, sitting, and lying down. And this is a training of the mind because those four things are things you'll be doing. They're things that you do in relationship to your meditation, even if it's just that one period or a day or whatever. So you become aware of, in these postures, the... a myriad of thought moments that arise and pass away. And what are involved, you know, sometimes we're very self-conscious about how we look and how we're standing and how people see us.

[06:53]

And other times we're just tired and we're just sloppy. And all those different states related to those postures are included. And this allows us to become familiar with the intentions. that are behind these simplest actions in our everyday lives, and then how those affect more complex circumstances. The second foundation is contemplation of feelings. And in Buddhist terms, feelings are not emotions, but qualities or sensations, which is basically pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. And of course, we naturally grasp those things that are pleasant. perfectly ordinary normal thing to do and we don't necessarily examine how that's contingent to unpleasantness and neutral feelings and when we feel an unpleasant sensation or a neutral sensation there's usually an urge to change it to feel like something is maybe wrong or boring something like that and

[08:09]

don't necessarily notice how contingent that is to our preference of what's pleasant. So according to Buddhism, just observation, training the mind to notice these feelings and how they arise and pass away is part of transformation. I do remember when I had an experience of... I've mentioned it before, there used to be a motorcycle, what do you call it, sales place down the street. And so people would test the motorcycles up and down Page Street and Laguna, very loud. And during Sashin, that was pretty intrusive, you know. So I thought, okay, it's just a sound. Why am I getting so worked up? So I just kept listening, and that's... I started listening to all the sounds around me, and it shifted. It did become just a sound, which is hard to describe.

[09:15]

But imagine no longer being irritated, you know, and having that sort of pass away. The third foundation of mindfulness is contemplation of the mind or consciousness. And this consciousness is bare awareness. I mean, the thing about Buddhist teachings is that they sort of take you down to the most basic level of experience. And this is applied in relation to the mental factors, such as greed, hatred, and delusion. And there are different types of consciousness, but the mindfulness instruction is to be aware of when, For instance, one is angry, sleepy, joyful, distracted, and so on, and to note that state. And then just as with the breath, how it arises and passes away, and one becomes aware of the causes and conditions and types of clinging and aversion related to all these various states.

[10:26]

So the fourth foundation of mindfulness, which is the one I was... focusing on is contemplation of the dharmas so after you've done all those the first three you've contemplated the body and the breath sensations and consciousness these shift to actual sort of teachings and they in the for the fourth foundation, these are the five hindrances, the five aggregates, the six sense fears, the seven awakening factors, and the four noble truths. And I'm actually not going to tell you what those are because I know you can look them up and that some of you have heard of them and worked with them. And one of the ones I will talk about is the four noble truths.

[11:28]

So, As that experience, you know, as I said, of the breath and posture, sensations, there's a deeper sense of the mind or thought tends to arise. And it's sort of like, okay, what does all this mean? And how do I live my life as it arises and passes away? And so there's 21 contemplations outlined in the four foundations of mindfulness that And for all of these, the attention is referred to as noticing or making clear. And with the fourth foundation, the requirement shifts to a kind of application or critical thinking about the teachings. What do you do with them? How do you know whether you understand them? How do you come to an understanding of them? And in his commentary on the four foundations, Venerable Analayo, who wrote a wonderful book about that, suggests that the first three establish qualities conducive to equanimity and that a temporal progression towards realization could form the key aspect of contemplation of dharmas.

[12:50]

So temporal progression means you... developed skills and methods over time. Based on a sufficient degree of mental stability through overcoming the hindrances, contemplation of dharmas proceeds to an analysis of subjective personality in terms of the five aggregates and to an analysis of the relation between subjective personality and the outer world, in terms of the six sense fears. These two analyses form a convenient basis for developing the awakening factors whose successful establishment constitutes a necessary condition for awakening. To awaken is to fully understand the four noble truths as they really are. this being the final exercise among the contemplations of dharmas and the successful culmination of Satipatthana practice.

[13:58]

Yeah, right. I mean, you know, you hear that, you read it, and the how of mindfulness can seem very esoteric and sort of even annoyingly vague. And... that's from the very first instruction to take the meditation posture. And yet often, and I felt this, and others have said they felt this, that first thing, sitting down in meditation, has felt like coming home. And in Buddhist terms, this could be called stopping. And I think that can feel like a relief or a return. And yet to stop repeatedly, becomes more complex, more intentional. And essentially, it's a skill that develops through being given attention. And I think Sashin, or even a period of meditation or retreat, allows for the spaciousness necessary for that attention.

[15:05]

As you settle into the repetition and rhythm of repeated meditation, in the postures and activities that involve sitting, standing, walking, and lying down, and noticing the arising and passing of sensations and states of mind, a deeper consideration of reality can be possible. Understanding, as Anilayo said, of things as they really are, and Suzuki Roshi used to say, things as it is. And I think this is a disorienting perspective in our normal everyday life, but it gets less so. And one of the qualities that is not often referred to explicitly is something I've spoken about before and I call poignancy. And that includes kind of in the midst of all this effort and this intention and these instructions, the sort of pathos of our human nature.

[16:12]

and a realization of the unresolvability of this human condition. In his philosophy, Jacques Derrida uses this term, difference, to indicate this kind of poignancy. And I think and believe that all people engaged in philosophical thinking and spiritual practice have to deal with it at some point. in their examination of how to understand the meaning of one's life in relationship to all other things. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch concluded that philosophical concern involved ethics and that was about love. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

[17:13]

And I think one of the aspects of this is self-examination that sort of reveals our contradictory attitudes and impulses and our self-righteousness and our absurdity as well as all of our caring about the world and so on. So Anelayo refers to an analysis of the relationship between subjective personality and the outer world. Sort of matter-of-factly. Yet, even if you think of this sort of esoterically, it will bring up some somewhat uncomfortable as well as wonderful insights. And I think, for instance, when you deeply study... four foundations of mindfulness, but particularly the four noble truths, it reveals that the pathos of things is not in the first noble truth, which is referred to as suffering, but in the fourth, the eightfold path that requires us to examine the world and our life through a set of restrictions.

[18:25]

That is right understanding, right intent, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. So this requirement is physical, psychological, and practical, and it's always tempting to engage in things that say right from a perspective of what I think is right or that I have taken these on and you know, embodied them and pointing to others' shortcomings, but also by not noticing how we contribute, how one contributes to others' behavior, experience, and interpretations, and they to one's own, and the vitality and unresolvability of that interaction. So one...

[19:28]

philosophical perspective is based in the method of Socrates, and it's that wondering is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher. This is where philosophy begins and nowhere else in wondering. And there's the definition of the word philosophy, love of wisdom or learning. And this can seem elitist, and applied in a very elitist way, just as Buddhism and Zen can be. And yet we all think about our lives and, you know, come up with ideologies that are both limited and inclusive. And they're informed by complacency, hope. our personal suffering, suffering of others that we perceive, our developed perspectives, our attention to the world, our lack of attention, our experience, and so on.

[20:32]

And in the midst of all that, there can be these little windows or openings for attention or inquiry. And the question I've always had is, how... this can be enjoyable rather than seem burdensome or even sort of boring and not applicable or something like that. And not in the sense so much of pleasure as in the sense of meaning and energy and understanding. And in spiritual practice of Buddhism, attention and inquiry are directed towards transformation, yet there's no one who can definitively describe or confirm it in a way that you would know, oh, now I'm there. And, you know, as with philosophy, we're kind of swimming alone and with others and with everyone and everything else in the midst of the kind of wonder and confusion.

[21:47]

meaning and purpose. As an example from history, I am particularly interested, became interested in the medieval period because during that time there were so many wars that women ended up having to do a lot of the taking care of businesses and taking care of estates and castles and all that kind of stuff and doing work that they would normally be unusual for women, for instance. And so as I have sort of looked at that period, and it's not the only one I am interested in, but I started, these odd little things would come up, and one of them was a discovery of this group of women called the Beguines. And they were active in Europe between the 13th and 15th centuries.

[22:49]

They were a lay religious movement, and it involved single women who owned property or businesses, and some of them who worked in those businesses or in other businesses, assistance to bakers and in sculpture, and there were scriptoriums where women worked. copying manuscripts and that sort of thing. So these Beguines lived together in small households and larger communities, and they shared expenses and duties, and many of them also supported and were supported by their extended families. And in Germany, Meister Eckhart lectured to and discussed theology with women in Beguinages. And in Paris, many Beguines owned, ran, and worked in businesses that were associated with the silk trade. So a woman who owned a business, her community, her Beguine community was often people who worked for her.

[23:59]

And the Paris communities were supported by the pious mid-13th century French king Louis IX, and also the by theologians and scholars who were establishing the institution that's now called the Sorbonne. And the Beguines were ridiculed and persecuted, and yet there was a sense that their way of life, which involved informer vows of chastity and community service, exposed them to the temptations of the world... as well as the endurance of mockery and humiliation that were essential markers of a truly religious life. So these theologians and scholars were just so interested in them and in their interest in theology. and those sort of things.

[25:00]

So a lot of these spiritual teachers and professors, we'd call them now, visited the Beginages, and they provided them with religious and philosophical literature, and the Beginages often had libraries. And they enjoyed organizing and attending these sermons and lectures and discussions, and they studied together on their own. And this is in the midst, of course, of their going to work and running their businesses and doing all those other things. And one of the tragedies, actually, of the Paris Beguines was the trial and execution by burning at the stake of the Beguine Marguerite Poirot in 1310 for publishing her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls. And... The Catholic Church eventually dissolved the Beguine movement in all of Europe, and often in that process appropriated the property and possessions of Beguines.

[26:07]

One Beguinage was used to establish a convent in Paris. So in my experience and study... You know, we say, you know, oh, here's all these instructions and here's these things you should study and there's all this going on. But they have an impact and an effect. And what I think happens is when things are, when people start to study deeply and start to ask questions, institutions often become uncomfortable. And there's also a kind of an anti-intellectualism that's often associated with spiritual practice. But also, oddly enough, it's part of educational institutions as well. Which kind of questions are appropriate? What kind of, what do you call it, investigation is approved?

[27:10]

So... I think one of the reluctances to take up sort of studying or intellectual, whatever you want to call it, is this sense of that one will be kind of marginalized or, there's better words for it, not respected or considered to be a snob or whatever. So I think that... We question ourselves. We apply our own anti-intellectualism sometimes to studying these deeper aspects of Buddhism. And, you know, sometimes there is a snobbishness, a kind of a, it's almost like a self-defense of people who take a more scholarly interest. But there are compensations. And I think particularly they are in developing one's practice experience.

[28:12]

So, in Philosophy of the Buddha, Christopher W. Gallens proposes, the Buddha offered his teaching to all human beings, and he invited us all to reflect on what he taught and to learn from it. His teaching spread to societies such as China and Japan that were substantially different from his own. So I think that trying to ascertain what we should believe is a philosophical task. Not so much about, you know, what to think or believe, but how. to think about Buddhist teachings and practices, and whether or how they can be applied in a meaningful way.

[29:17]

So many years ago, after I'd been at Zen Center for about six or seven years, I was the Tenzo here, actually, and what I did for two years is I did the Sishin at City Center as the Tenzo, and then I went to Green Gulch and sat. And the first time I did that, during that whole sushin, I never had any pain or discomfort. And it was so miraculous, I just, I didn't know what to think. Like, what does it mean? You know, should I be feeling pain? Should I make myself change my posture so it would be harder or something? But I never did really figure it out. And I knew some of the conditions, maybe because I had just sort of done a sashim in the kitchen, which has its impact.

[30:24]

I don't know. But what I did find was that... It sort of informed my meditation and the sishins I sat afterwards by a kind of confidence. It's not like I expected to never feel any pain or discomfort in sishin or meditation, but something deeper about patience and expectation. And in a way, the way I ended up applying it was that I considered each period a meditation to be approached as though it was the first and the last. This is the only time I have. This is it. And to respect my body and mind as being capable and to keep a sort of sense of humor and perspective. It was only one week out of my number of years times 52 weeks a year.

[31:28]

And at that time of that, In particular, Sashin, that was over 2,000 weeks. So every period of meditation is this opportunity to expand one's experience of and integration with the world as it is. And the four foundations of mindfulness provide these basic tools and suggestions, which seem very simple, and they are very straightforward. But... This includes the inquiry into our intentions and our commitment through examining the teachings or dharmas and whatever happens, enjoying the process as it unfolds. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[32:32]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[32:41]

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