No. No it is. Okay. Yes, I think some of you know maybe more than you'd like to that we're in the last F machine. And some of you know of us being in Alaska Chisheen. And then some of you probably are just here for the first time or a couple of times you've been here. You have no idea what Chisheen is. Is it a kind of fish dish or just one of those obscure Zen things? I was bowing, I was thinking about how it must be to come here for the first time, not quite know, or maybe not know at all what happens here, and then watch all this, you know, ceremony, maybe rigmarole.

[07:45]

Why didn't they just come in and sit down and start talking? It's a long story. This is the last day of the seven-day meditation retreat in Japanese Shishin. And the Shishin is the last event in a period of time called a practice period where we make a concerted effort to practice with a thoroughness every day. And then it culminates coming to the retreat. And those of you who did the retreat and the practice for it online,

[08:48]

at some point, to be able to talk to you and discover what your experience was and how we can help you participate in an intimate way and a powerful way, your own practice. There's a certain kind of magic that Zen creates. Actually, from a Zen perspective, we're all creating this kind of magic every day of our lives. Whether we're awake or asleep, if you think about it, it's extraordinary that we can go to sleep and dream up a version of reality and then like it, dislike it, be frightened by it, be enthralled by it.

[09:51]

Wake up shaking. Wake up laughing. And that we're doing something similar. Different but similar. All the time. So that kind of magic. That aspect of the human condition. And then we take that capacity and then we shape it and relate to it in a way that helps us to wake up. So all the rigmarole of sitting down is in an endeavor to use the theater of formality.

[10:52]

to help us center ourselves in this place. And like all of theater, sort of letting in the magic makes it more fun. But not to forget, it's just theater. Even though you may have seen a similar theatrical performance before, this one is entirely itself. And the theater of a practice period is demarking a period of time in which we're collectively going to make a certain effort.

[11:56]

of constructing, there's a word, a Pali word, it's kaya. In just the same way we construct a dream, and within the dream there's all the attributes of the dream, we can collectively construct a version of reality. I remember once I was going to Boston. And I write the morning after Boston. I can't remember whether they're the White Sox or the Red Sox. Where's Roger? Thank you.

[13:01]

The morning after Boston Red Sox had won the World Series. And it seemed like everybody in Boston was in a good mood. People checking the luggage, driving the bus, people on the street in the cafe. Everybody seemed to be... Sharing in Achaia. We're all in this. And I was. Marvelling at the arbitrariness of it. Bunch of guys. Go out in a field. And hit a ball with a stick. And then whoever wins. Which they have designated. You know. What it is to win. And then the whole city is happy. So that's what we try to do in Zen.

[14:06]

We say, instead of a World Series, we just call it a practice period. And then within that practice period, we give it a theme. Oh, it's going to be about this. The theme was to study the self. And then within that, there will be certainly agreed upon ways in which we will behave. They didn't involve having a bad or a ball. And there was no one competing against us. except ourselves. But I'll get to that. So we create a kaya. And in a way, that's what spiritual practice does.

[15:17]

That's what religions do. In the Zen tradition, We both endorse the religious element and we have an ambivalence about it too. We go for both. Maybe it helps us engage the magic and not get too stuck in it. statue of Shakyamuni Buddha, despite the fact that while he was alive, he distinctly said, don't make statues of me. But something in our humanness likes to make this magic tangible.

[16:21]

creating an object, and that helped us conjure up the sensibility. And we do a variety of other things. Meditation, Zazen, is a significant part of the tradition. And so we construct a schedule with daily meditation and end in a week-long meditation. And I hope for those who've been through all this, sitting here, listening to me describe it in this peculiar way, that you can see yourself in a little bit odd way.

[17:30]

Oh yeah, I'm one of those odd people. Somehow or another, I find myself, despite in many ways thinking of myself as an ordinary person, here I am, engaged in the magical theater of Zen. I would say, isn't everybody involved in a magical theatre? Isn't that the amazing thing about being alive? Both our creative and destructive tendencies, our helpfulness, and our aggressiveness individually, collectively, globally, and this notion of kaya.

[18:38]

So the challenge, as it appears within the world of Zen practice, is to see the construct. See how it comes into being individually, within our own circle of acquaintances, and globally. To see what it is, how it plays itself out, and how it infuses our behavior. a certain kind of influence. And then also, the extraordinary thing about zazen practice as a meditation, usually zazen is not called a meditation because it doesn't have a goal.

[19:49]

And strictly speaking, it doesn't have a fixed methodology. interestingly enough, as the person who was expounding on the theme, I was advocating a methodology. Methodology associated with the tradition that eschews methodologies. And in some ways, this illustrates one of the key notions of Zen practice is that we're engaging what it is to be a human being in the service of not getting stuck in being a human being.

[20:56]

We can bring awareness a certain expression of being, a certain kaya, have been taken for granted. One aspect or other of our own sense of self. This is to study the self. We have a sense of self, and then we function, in relationship to that. So to see it, to feel it, and learn how to be skilled with it. And then along with that, the complimentary practice is to see it and see through it.

[22:00]

and learn something that goes beyond the constructs of self. And for each one of those, there's a classic, the seeing it for what it is and seeing through it. Each one of those has a classic coin, a... Inquiry. Imagine if I said to you. Well, just looking at what you're seeing. See the color brown. And then you start to notice. Oh, well, maybe the tatami is a little bit brown. Maybe that picture frame. The point of inquiry.

[23:07]

The way attention is directed can make more evident, can make more visible an aspect of what's happening. So in the world of conditioned being, the cause is this. What is the sign of one habit to happen? sit with that for the next 10 years and come up with your own version. I'll just give you a second. And then maybe you can sit with it for 10 years. When one hand's clapping, it's kind of like pure movement. There's nothing obstructing it. There's no great clash. It's pure movement. Usually in our expression of our aliveness, we like, we dislike.

[24:17]

I want more of that and less of that. I like this person, I don't like that person. I like this about myself, I don't like that about myself. I want to improve this part and I want to get rid of that part. It's like there's a struggling in our being. And the challenge is, can we see the struggling and can we learn from it? Note that I didn't say... Zen has a very interesting relationship to our struggling. It's that when we can see our struggling, without getting hooked by judging it, trying to avoid it, getting stuck in it and exacerbating it, when we can just see it for what it is, we learn something.

[25:38]

And the more thoroughly we can see it, we learn something about the particular person we are. We learn something about the human condition. We learn something about being stuck and not being stuck. We learn something about that process. There's a phrase in Zen, like... the turning word, the turning idea. How does struggling open the door of liberation? How can this very expression of being that I'm struggling with, that annoys me, that irritates me, that frightens me, that confuses me, that drains my energy, I relate to it in a way and learn how each of those alter human responses, when we look at them carefully, they have a teaching about how to go beyond them.

[27:02]

And so that peculiar card There is no obstruction. There's seeing, in a way, how to get out of our own way. We don't have to have these two hands pressing against each other in a furious battle. That this existence can flow. That we can See it function. This morning, right at the end of the talk, or just a couple of minutes before the end of the talk, I paused, and then I was about to say something. And then in that moment of silence, someone was riding a bike down Page Street and said in a very loud voice,

[28:12]

a swear word. Actually, they said, swear word, you. F, you. And we all burst out laughing. I think in a more unsettled state, We might find that unnerving. We might be judgmental. What's your problem? But in that moment, it was kind of comic. That just arose. In the fruit of our practice, There was no hand blocking, trying to diminish, trying to change, blaming what arose.

[29:27]

So as we study the self, we learn the constructs of the self. We learn all the different coyotes that we create. And in learning that, often we initiate intellectually, but then the challenge of Zen practice is, can you draw it into the realm of experiencing? Can you feel an experience within yourself? The kaya that's created by a certain strong emotion. This is one of the terms we use in Zen. This is the constructed reality. And then the other notion of seeing and seeing through.

[30:38]

And this is the great challenge of sense. That we're part of. Insists upon asserting itself. We construct kayaks. When we're awake. When we're asleep. When we're in a good mood. When we're in a bad mood. When we're feeling loved. When we're feeling abandoned. all are opportunities to construct a kalyama. And the powerful challenge of zazen is that can you sit down, be present, and explore what it is to not construct.

[31:54]

Of course, you see the relentless nature of constructing. You can also start to see, sometimes it can appear like layers. First of all, we're just so lost in the constructs that we can't even see them. What constructs? sitting here, hearing kind of boring, odd talk, and it's Saturday, and after this, thank goodness, I'll be able to go and do something else. It's all a construct. Every single part of it. Starting with, I'm sitting here. second calling in relationship to this has a little bit of a background story.

[33:14]

This person was very well versed in Buddhist teachings and Zen teachings. And he went to a Zen monastery and whatever inquiry the teacher tried to evoke the person would quote, oh, in this book, in this sutra, in this person's writings, they say this. There's a way in which the impulse to kaya can be almost unavoidable. And whatever the teacher offered him as a point of inquiry, to see through, to go beyond, to stay still in the middle of. He had a conceptualization. And then one day the teacher said to him, what were you before your parents were born?

[34:26]

and didn't have a ready reference from all the things they learned. This is Zazen. Can we sit and not know? Can we sit and not construct? Can we sit and not know what should happen or what should not happen. You know, in some ways, it seems like an odd thing to do. How does that help anybody?

[35:38]

went to a gathering and kind of a social gathering someone wanted me to come something in the tech world and you know and then people stand around and then they chit chat and this guy was chit chatting with me and he said well what do you do how do i answer this and then i said i teach meditation and he said And you can make a living down that. Maybe Zazen, the proposition of Zazen, is utterly bizarre in our conventional world. In our conventional world, you should be in there doing, making what should happen, happen. And avoiding things that are not helpful.

[36:55]

Or more sadly, you know, we're swept up in what we want and what we don't want, and we're acting out whatever will promote more of what we want and less of what we don't. What were you before your parents were born? the identity should have. Well, I'm from wherever. Someone told me once, I'm from Nebraska, and we went to church every Sunday. It was my job to go back to the house in the middle of the sermon and light the oven so the chicken would be roasted when we came home for lunch. constructs we created.

[38:07]

And there's a strange kind of paradox in our life that the more we can see it for what it is, the less we tend to cling onto it. You know, you'd think it would be the opposite. And in some ways it is, but if you keep looking more and more deeply, and this we'll see, well, that's a construct too. Go home and light the oven. So the chicken will be cooked. We see the constructs.

[39:12]

We see the nature of the person we are. And we see, we start to see almost by inference the possibility of not being limited by conditioned existence. I grew up in a country where there were two religions, Protestant and Catholic. Now, you could say they're both Christian, but where I grew up, they were different. They couldn't be more different. social pressure was to be one of the other.

[40:26]

So I left. As we see it, as we feel it, as we see the impact of it, we start to give birth to the possibility of liberation. Either you're this or you're that. But aren't they both constructs? I remember when I was about 10, I was walking past a gable end of a building and it said, God is love. And I thought, Well, is that a Catholic saying or is that a Protestant saying? Because everything where I grew up was one or the other. And then if it was from your side, well, then it was great.

[41:31]

And it was from their side. Well, then you should curse at it. Reconstructedness is a key to liberation. Which leaves me five minutes to talk about what I was going to talk about today. I was going to talk about something I started talking about yesterday. by Dōgenzenji, the finder of this style of Zen in Japan. And he's quoting a Chinese teacher who lived a hundred years before him.

[42:37]

And the name of the Essen is The Point of Zazen. And the play on The point of zazen is that the point is like an acupuncture needle. In acupuncture, you put a needle in where the energy is stuck, the qi is stuck. And so, in a way, zazen is like putting a needle into your life where you're stuck. And how do you know where you're stuck? because it keeps coming. Just think of when something really bothered you, and you went through the day, and you thought about it, and then you forgot it, and then it came back, and then you forgot it, and then you came back again. Maybe when you tried to go to sleep that night, it woke you up in the middle of the night.

[43:44]

Or you couldn't go to sleep because your mind was stuck in thinking. We can get stuck in thinking. We can get stuck in emoting. We can get stuck in so many ways. We can get stuck physiologically as classic Tai Chi. Or classic acupuncture does. And Tai Chi. In Japanese, zazenshin, the point of zazen. The essence, the essential function of the awakened ones, the ones who are not stuck, is actualized through not getting stuck in thinking.

[44:48]

translations. This translation says non-thinking. There's a Zen admonition. It says, think non-thinking. And I think, hmm. It's a little bit like saying, don't think about a giraffe. And then, of course, your mind conjures up a giraffe, but it's not simple. In Zen, experience what's being experienced. And so I introduced a teaching from early Buddhism that predates Zen. It simply says, be aware of your breathing. And follow what happens.

[45:57]

When you continually do that. Now, strictly speaking, you could say, well, that's Zen heresy. Because now you're doing something. Now you're constructing something. Now you're trying to make something happen. What about this non-thinking and no goal and, yeah. marvelous thing about breathing is that we're always doing it. And one of the other marvelous things about breathing is that it's so representative of what's going on for us. Getting angry affects how we breathe.

[47:03]

Being frightened. Being happy. being thrusting and at ease, they all affect our breathing. So when we can invite this flow of breath in the body, we invite this flow in our being. And in a strange and messy confusing way. Zen doesn't exactly exclude the heresy of having a method. It just says don't cling to it. When it's appropriate, engage it.

[48:04]

it's not appropriate, could it not? It's very practical. And just remember that there's something of a construct in your method. And so, Wong Shih writes, the essential functioning of liberated beings, is actualized by this disposition of not clinging to whatever construct arises, not clinging to whatever kaya arises. And that process turns our being from being born in a land where there's only Catholics and Protestants.

[49:14]

And so, of course, you have to be one or the other to see the possibility of beginner's mind. Hmm. What if I wasn't stuck in an either or? Of being the. And that's. In Zen terms. That's access. To liberation. When you sit. And just be. In an unconstructed experiential way. Then. You can enter the world.

[50:18]

Filled with possibility. And the marvelous thing about it. The magic of it is. That you might think. Oh. Well you have to be. utterly successful and completely competent in that process. Not really. If you just keep seeing moment by moment and get distracted and return, it's like something in you is vowing to be awakened. And that vow, that intentionality, is like having a change of heart.

[51:24]

Something in us says, oh, I really don't like that person. And then we find all sorts of reasons to validate our dislike. And then we have a change of heart. And it's like, oh, that was just a construct. And now I've had a change of heart. All sorts of possibilities. Sometimes people... like each other, then they have a change of heart and fall in love. And this vow, when we take it work its magic on us.

[52:37]

When we find ourselves constructing a world that is the consequence of our glimmers of liberation. just laugh when someone passes swearing at the top of their woods. Probably if we'd have gone around the room pathetically and said, what should we do if someone just drove a road and bypassed? We come up with all sorts of clever notions.

[53:40]

But in the moment, it was just one hand clapping. Something passing through. Collectively spontaneous. in which this terrible, terrible world is a beautiful place. There is a way in which this terrible, terrible world can crack open into possibility of liberation individually and collectively. Cheers.

[54:43]

Welcome all to San Francisco Zen Center. Thank you for being here this morning. As Paul mentioned, we are in the midst of a seven-day Sashin, so I'll keep the announcements brief this morning. To support the silence of Sashin, we will not be having question and answer, and there's no tea and cookies today. We'll be on interim. The temple will be on interim Monday through Wednesday, and we'll start back with our normal program with the evening Dharma talk Wednesday night. That'll be given by Catherine Spaeth. And then next Saturday, we'll have a normal, well, actually, it'll be a more than normal Saturday morning program. Our new abbot Mako Vocal will be giving the Dharma talk. We will have a public lunch that day.

[58:13]

And we'll also be celebrating Buddha's birthday. So there'll be a wonderful theater celebration of the Buddha's birth. So this concludes our public program for this morning. If you could help us and return the Zafus that you're sitting on to the racks here. And also, if maybe residents and those who are in the Sashin, if about 10 or 12 people could stay behind and help bring Zabutans in, we'll be setting up for our ceremony this afternoon. The Zabutans are just in the hallway here. And... THEN FOR THOSE WHO ARE IN SESHIN, THE NEXT PERIOD OF ZASLIN WILL BE IN AT 1130. THANK YOU ALL.

[59:13]

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