This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Pleasure to be here on this beautiful day. Zen Master famously said, every day is a good day. Sometimes that's more difficult for us to realize than other times. But the point of practice is, how do we find every day to be a good day? That's the direction of our effort. So I'd like to speak this morning about our zazen practice, our sitting practice, and about the expression of our zazen, of our zazen mind, we say, or attitude, the expression of that in our everyday life.

[01:34]

which is a good thing for us to consider because mostly we're not sitting on a cushion. Mostly we're involved in our life, various things, various activities. So very central to our practice understanding is the attitude and the understanding of practice, and then how that attitude and understanding is manifest in our life. Our sinning practice is zazen. And we often, for the sake of being more easily understood, we often say Zen meditation.

[02:47]

But Zazen does include flies, but they seem to be finding me very attractive this morning. What's so nice about me? But zazen is not exactly meditation, which may surprise you. You thought you were coming to do Zen meditation, but it's not exactly meditation. The za of zazen is sit, simply to sit. And the Zen part, zazen, our sitting practice, the Zen part originally came from the etymological root, originally meant a certain form of meditative practice, jhana, it was called, in India, the jhanic practices.

[03:58]

It was a meditation technique, very specific, how you do it. You get a disc, you focus on a disc, various other things. I could spend a thousand years telling you about it, but I won't. So that's how it started, jhana, as a meditative technique. And jhana, that word jhana in Chinese, China, it became chana. And then that became, in Japanese, zen. So although zen has, etymologically, a root that specifically means meditative technique, there's the zen that we practice, the Zen that we practice on the cushion and that we bring to our life is, I would offer, deeper and wider and bigger than simply a meditative technique. The emphasis is not on a technique.

[05:06]

And that's partly because when we think of a meditation technique, it often implies a means and end kind of an arrangement. That is, I'm going to do this meditative technique, and then I'm going to get something from doing this meditative technique that's going to be really nice if I know how to do it well and work at it. But in our practice, in our practice understanding, means and end are collapsed into one thing. They're not separated, which is very odd. It's very unusual. It takes a while to get with that, to understand that. And then perhaps even odder is that if we talk about what the goal of meditation of Zen, what the goal of Zazen is, we say non-attainment.

[06:30]

That's what we're trying to attain, is non-attainment. Curious. It's a curious business. So non-attainment means that we actually don't get anything out of it. We do this thing, so-called zazen, and then nothing happens after that. So I'll try to say a little bit more about the zen part. about what we mean by Zen. So otherwise it just seems crazy. Why do you do this thing and nothing happens and you don't get anything out of it? The non-attainment refers more to, again, our attitude, our understanding, our understanding of what's going on and our attitude toward the practice.

[07:37]

not trying to get something, which is our usual way. So it's doing something unusual and not trying to get something. So as often is the case, as I often do, I want to begin with words of Suzuki Hiroshi, the man who founded San Francisco Zen Center and is our lineage founder. Some of you know that I lead a meditation. Some of you know I lead a Zen group. very habitual. I lead a Zen group in San Francisco and we meet once a week and we do Zazen and we have a Dharma talk and Dharma discussion.

[08:52]

And we have been very, very slowly together working our way through, beginning at the beginning, beginning at the introduction, working our way through the collection of Dharma talks that Suzuki Roshi gave, that Ed Brown collected and put in a book, and the name of the book is Not Always So. That's the title, which was a favorite expression of Suzuki Roshi, is Not Always So. And we've been working on it. We've been meeting each week, and... We've been working on it for three years, maybe four years, and we're up to page 38. We've gotten to 38, which is a big accomplishment because you could really spend a long time just in the introduction, never mind even starting the actual book.

[09:57]

So from one perspective, page 38, four years, is like really slow, you know, really takes a long time. But from another perspective, if we're not trying to get anywhere, then page 38 is okay. When I was preparing for my talk, what that reminded me of was Dogen, the great Japanese Zen teacher who lived in the first half of the 13th century, in a short work that he wrote about Zazen, how to do Zazen. Both practically, you put your left foot up here, you put your right foot up here, you put your hands like this, practical, but also what I'm referring to as the understanding and attitude of Zazen. You could say the philosophical, the philosophy of Zazen.

[11:04]

It's not exactly philosophy, but more like the feeling of it, the spirit of it. So in this work of Dogen's, Fukan Zazengi, he speaks about this. And in the Fukan Zazengi, Dogen says, why go off to the dusty realms of other lands? and leave the seat that exists in your own home. So in this sense, and he's speaking rhetorically and metaphorically. He's saying, don't go off to the dusty realms of other lands. Stay here. Stay in your own seat. Metaphorically, stay in your own life. Find your own deep meaning in this life that you have now.

[12:04]

Never mind going somewhere else. So from that perspective, it doesn't matter how slow we go. The point is to find depth and meaning in instead of this idea that we're going to go somewhere else. And I think, I feel, that this way, the way I'm describing, and will try to describe more, is... It's worthwhile. It's worth our while to turn our energies in this direction to a way that indicates the absolute.

[13:17]

It's worthwhile and it's also insofar as it is in our own home. our own seat in our own home, in our own life, it's dependable. Because we don't have to depend on figuring out how to get to some other place. We're depending on our life, which is very dependable. It just keeps going, as we may have noticed, until it stops. So we're on page 38, and page 38 is the middle of a talk of Suzuki Roshi's, which I am going to quote soon, called Respect for Things. And Suzuki Roshi gave this talk. Maybe 1970.

[14:30]

And I say that because in the fall of 1969, San Francisco Zen Center, we had been, this was before Green Gulch. Green Gulch, not before Green Gulch, but before Zen Center had Green Gulch. In the time that I'm talking about, George Wheelwright III owned Green Gulch. And Zen Center acquired Green Gulch in the spring of 1972, the spring after Suzuki Roshi died. So this was before that. So there was just Tassahara, many of you know Tassahara, which we had just started just a couple of years before that. And then in the city, we were practicing at Sokoji Temple with the Japanese Zen congregation on Bush Street.

[15:35]

And then in the fall of 1969, we moved to 300 Page Street, which is now called the city center. And in the building, 300 Page Street building, there was this large room in the basement. very large room with linoleum on the floor. And that was the room that we made into the zendo, like this room, the Zen hall, the place to practice zazen. And on the windows, on the inside, I'm recalling this, were red and white striped, like awnings, on the inside. I'm not sure, but I think for the previous people, maybe the previous owners had dances down there. It was the rec room, basically, for the residents.

[16:36]

And so maybe it was vaguely supposed to be reminiscent of like a cafe, Parisian cafe street scene with red and white striped awnings, which probably seemed really cool in 1950. Gene Kelly, right? An American in Paris, dancing on the cafe street scene. We took those down pretty soon after moving in. But we sat there. Before, you know, these are called TAN. These raised platforms are called TAN. And before the wood floor and before the tan, we started right away to use it as a zendo. And above the zendo, right above, like it would be right above here, was the dining room. So the talk was generated because Suzuki Roshi felt we'd be sitting in the zendo.

[17:44]

And then you'd hear people moving their chair. You know, and then moving it back. You know, except louder than that. Louder than that. I can't make it louder, as loud as it sounded to us. You know, if you're sitting quietly in the Zendo and somebody's, oh, because the dining room floor still was, it was not carpeted. And it wasn't wood. It was like, it's like a cobble. I don't know how to describe it. It's like a refined cobblestone. is the floor of the dining room. It's quite beautiful. The building was, the architect was Julia Morgan, and she did a really wonderful job. And the floor is very wonderful, but very noisy if you're moving chairs. So we'd be sitting in the Zen no, and you'd hear a lot of chairs going back and forth when people moved. So this was the origin of the talk.

[18:45]

Suzuki Roshi said he felt it was disrespectful of the chair to be scraping it. Never mind the people, never mind the noise. That's not the way you treat a chair. You want to move a chair? Lift it up with two hands. Lift it back. That's what respect for things refers to. We should respect things. This is part of what I was referring to as the attitude and understanding of practice as expressed, as manifested in our life. And the feeling is not I'm the big shot and you're just a chair and I can move you around and do whatever I want, you know, because I'm important and you're not important. No. The feeling is participatory. I'm here.

[19:46]

You're here. You, the chair, are here. And now let's work together. Let's see what happens. That's deep respect. That's deep concern. That's resonance with things. And people. People are sometimes harder than things to resonate with, but people too. So not just the chairs, but the people sitting in the chairs. So, at the beginning of this talk of Suzuki Roshi's, he says a few things, very fundamental aspects of sitting practice. Not directly, later on he talks specifically about the chairs. The first, right at the beginning, it's not specifically about that, but it's related to that. So he says, Suzuki Roshi says at the beginning of his Dharma talk, Respect for Things, he says, in our zazen practice, we stop our thinking and we are free from our emotional activity.

[21:16]

We don't say There is no emotional activity, but we are free from it. We don't say we have no thinking, but our life, our life activity, our life is not limited by our thinking mind. So I think this is really terrific and very important All aspects of it. Very important for us to know. It was very important for me. For many years, what I thought was that we stop our thinking and we stop our emotional activity, that that was what zazen was.

[22:20]

Stopping thinking, stopping emotional activity. Not the we don't part. And the way to stop those things, I thought, was to use a meditation technique called zazen. I thought zazen was the technique whereby, the means whereby I was going to get to this end called stopping thinking and stopping emotional activity. Well, this caused me a lot of difficulty and a lot of grief. It was very difficult and discouraging and upsetting and disturbing. And let me see if I can think of a few more words to describe. Oh, it really promoted me. self-criticism.

[23:22]

It was like a really good support for attacking myself for being a bum who could have been a contender. Which is what I am. So I could never get I could never do that. Couldn't figure out this stop thinking, stop emotional activity. This thinking and the emotional activity just kept on going. And of course, I recognized that my efforts to stop thinking and stop emotional activity was a lot of thinking and a lot of emotional activity. So this didn't work out too good. And that went on for about 20 years. I think so. I think it was 20 years. It might have been 25. Yep.

[24:26]

So, what Suzuki Rishi actually said, what the teaching actually is, is that in our Zazen practice, we stop our thinking and we are free from our emotional activity. But... We don't say there is no emotional activity and we don't say there is no thinking mind. Nevertheless, we are not limited by our thinking mind, not limited by our emotional activity. That's the heart of it, not limited by, unlimited. Our zazen practice is an entry into our unlimited life. So rather than going off to some other realm, some other place of no thinking, no emotional activity, we remain in our own home, in our own seat.

[25:40]

We find the unlimited seat that exists in our own home. It's not exactly that we find it. Well, you could say you find it. We realize it. It's not exactly that we realize it. It's real whether we realize it or not. It's there whether we find it or not, this unlimited life that's there with us all the time. But we recognize it and the feeling of practice is the recognition of it, taking it into account. as Uchiyama Roshi would say, we live the life of unlimited mind. We live the life of the unlimited quality of the present moment. That's zazen. We live the life of

[26:47]

the unlimited quality of the present moment, of the unlimited basis, the unlimited basis of the present moment, out of which the specific moment that we've got right now occurs. The matrix, the unlimited matrix of the moment, out of which the particular moment that's right now, right here, is born. It's born out of that unlimited quality. And then it's born again. And then it's born again. And then it's born again. Multiple nanoseconds, you know, apart. So that's, that's worthwhile. That's worthwhile. It's very understandable that we want to get away because our thinking mind and our emotional activity cause us a lot of trouble, we notice.

[28:12]

Our thinking mind, our emotional activity is our... karmic consciousness is our karma and is necessarily limited and that limited quality inevitably involves suffering. That limited quality inevitably involves. So suffering is what, as many of you know, that's the first noble truth. That's the very first thing that Shakyamuni Buddha talked about was the noble truth of, in Sanskrit, it's called dukkha. We usually say suffering or unsatisfactory quality of life. The unsatisfactoriness of life. Very important, very first thing Shakyamuni Buddha said. publicly, mythically.

[29:18]

We don't know if he actually said it, but it's an important thing. This limited life inevitably involves unsatisfactory quality. But this should not be... confused with some kind of pessimism or morbidity. This is not a morbid perspective. This is just the way things are. The classical breakdown of dukkha, of suffering, is so Listen to this list and listen to it with the idea of limited because it's all just limitations.

[30:20]

It's limitations that causes our suffering, causes our unsatisfactory quality. Old age, sickness, death. Limits, limit, limit. It's all limits. the classical explication of dukkha is old age, sickness, death, being separated from those we love and from situation and things that we like and appreciate. It's a limit. Being stuck with, being put together with those we don't love and situations and things that we don't like. Not being able to get what we want.

[31:23]

That's a limited life. It's completely limited. So this is the nature of our life. Limitation inevitably involving suffering. But in this life, in this life of limitation, it's limited. See how limited it is?

[32:25]

Here we are. We're in this particular place at this particular time. You have the fortune or misfortune of having to listen to me. I have the fortune or misfortune of having to talk, you know. This is all limits, karmic limitations coming from thinking. and emotional activity, and karmic consciousness, and the other aspects of karma, body, speech, and mind. In this life, however, though our experience is limited, that doesn't mean that the unlimited quality of our life is eradicated, erased. No. It's there. As Jerome Kern said, it keeps on rolling along. It just keeps rolling.

[33:30]

Like Old Man River. So I wanted to mention Jerome Kern and Old Man River, but I realized that there may be perhaps younger members of the listening audience who don't know what I'm talking about, which was shocking to me. So don't be embarrassed. Those of you who know what I'm talking about when I say Jerome Kern, Old Man River, Showboat, please raise your hand. Those who do not know what I'm talking about when I say Old Man River. Please raise your hand. Wow. I am really an old guy, I'll tell you. Just proved something that I was suspicious of all along. So Old Man River is a very famous tune in the American songbook.

[34:41]

Old Man River, that old man river, it just keeps rolling, he keeps on rolling. Like that. It's really powerful. And it originally was, so everybody who was more than seven years old, by 1940, 1950, knew Old Man River. But it seems to have slid out of the collective mind. It debuted, and Jerome Kern was the person who wrote that musical called Show Boat, in which the song Old Man River was sung. And that musical debuted in 1927. which is 89 years ago.

[35:44]

But, so Old Man River, the song, is about, even though I'm involved in my daily life, Old Man River just keeps on rolling along. Even though I pick cotton, Even though I plant potatoes, Old Man River keeps on rolling. And it's a powerful song, and it's even more powerful. It's put in the voice of a black person, which makes it stronger. he says, the singer says, I'm tired of living and I'm scared of dying.

[36:54]

But Old Man River keeps on rolling along. So little did he know it, But Jerome Kern was explicating the unconditioned nature of all being. He was referring to the unlimited quality of the present moment. That's old man River who keeps on rolling along in an unlimited way. And little did he know it, but he was, Jerome Kern, was also commenting. It was a commentary. Stay with me on this one. It was a commentary on a poem by a Chinese Zen master in the 8th century called the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, which many of us are familiar with.

[38:10]

In which, in the Jules Mera Samadhi, the person, the Jules Mera Samadhi is, what do you call it, ascribed to Dungshan, Tozan, the founder, one of the main founders of the school of Zen that we practice. And in the Jules Mera Samadhi, Tozan, or whoever wrote the Jules Mera Samadhi, says, when erroneous imaginations cease, the acquiescent mind realizes itself. I see how Jerome Kern is commenting on that line. You may not, but I see it. So what he said, what Dungshan is saying is he's putting it like a, if this happens, then that happens. When erroneous imagination cease, the acquiescent mind realizes itself, means that if you stop, the acquiescent tells us something about what Dungshan means.

[39:22]

He means that when you stop looking for the other place where things are going to be much better, then our life can develop. That's my rough translation with poetic license of Dungshan's statement. So Dungshan is putting it, well, first you need these erroneous imaginations to cease. But Jerome Kern is saying, no, you don't have to wait for the erroneous imaginations to cease. In the midst of the erroneous imaginations, laminated to our erroneous imaginations, Old Man River just keeps on rolling along, laminated Right in it, right in those erroneous imaginations, the acquiescent mind already is realized.

[40:24]

We don't have to make that happen by a meditation technique or any other way. We just need to know it to make it real in our life, to express it, to allow it. A little bit later in Suzuki Roshi's talk, he also says about this in the same talk about respect for things. Later in the talk, he says, to stop our thinking and to be free from our emotional activity. He goes back to that topic. To stop our thinking and to be free from emotional activity is not just a matter of concentration. This is to completely rely on ourselves. It's really surprising what he says.

[41:28]

To stop our thinking and to be free from our emotional activity is not just a matter of concentration. It is to completely rely on ourselves to take absolute refuge in our practice. We are like a baby who is laying in the lap of her mother. That's what he says. It's not just a matter of concentration. I understand what he's saying to mean. It's not a technique. It's not primarily a technique. To stop our thinking and to be free from our emotional activity is not primarily a technique. It's not just a matter of concentration. This is to... completely rely on ourselves. That's how you stop thinking. That's how you get beyond emotional activity.

[42:32]

That's how you're not limited by thinking and emotional activity, by completely relying on ourselves. This is an expression of the mind not caught by limitation. Not... caught by it, not stuck in it, not overwhelmed by it, not sunk in our limited way of thinking, not dominated by our limited life. We have a limited life. Ain't no getting around that. That is the nature of life. That's the way things are. And we have an unlimited life. Always. And our practice is a remedy for a too limited perspective.

[43:33]

It's called counting our breathing. That's the remedy for a too limited perspective. It's called just sinning. or following our breath. We have the opportunity, that's what the sitting is for, not to get something. We have the opportunity to express and appreciate this wider, deeper perspective, this unlimited perspective that's always there, but that is easily forgotten. We too easily forget it. It's one of our problems as human beings. In the traditional literature, this unlimited quality is called true nature.

[45:41]

True nature. We are all equally endowed with this true nature. It's true, not true versus false. It's not positing some false nature that this is the true nature in comparison to. Maybe it would be more accurate to say original nature, fundamental nature. true and original and fundamental nature is big. Suzuki Rishi called it big and other people have called it big mind.

[46:48]

Big mind. That includes and is coterminous with and laminated to and totally identical with small mind. Unlimited nature is completely identical with our limited life. In fact, that's the place where it arises, the only place it could arise, because that's all we've got. is this limited, unlimited life. So maybe I'll stop there. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[47:54]

Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[48:20]

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