This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Sometimes life is ferocious. always ferocious. David White says, in its fierce need to change us. Our deep wish conclude, to achieve, to have some mastery, some expression of the consequence, the fruitful consequence of our effort.

[01:20]

some reassurance, some comfort, some stability, security. You know, to say that these things are just delusion and expression of our misunderstanding of the nature of impermanence. To say that they're a sign of weakness or frailty. It's to miss something about the deep compassion of practice. Not to say we should determinedly cling to our deep yearning for reassurance, security, safety, accomplishment, somehow magically receiving what it is we deeply yearn for.

[02:57]

but not to cast it aside so thoroughly that it becomes a form of self-criticism. That compassion, that moment of pause, that echoes through our hearts and mind, so be it. So be it. Even though it seems to be standing right beside surrender, it's also standing beside So be it.

[04:05]

So be it. What's happening now? What is it to practice with it? So be it. And as we do that, all the strategies we've built in to our life. We've built in to our way of thinking and feeling. We've built in to the psychology of our personality. We've built in to how we hold our body. How we behave. All those strategies to become apparent. And something about surrender, so be it.

[05:18]

This is the fruit of conditioned existence. Can you hear okay Pat? Yeah? Okay. So as we settle deeper and deeper, sort of Indusashin. This existential dilemma presents itself.

[06:31]

The persistence of our habit energy, sometimes in an unmistakable, evident way. Your mind leaps off into there and then and refuses to come home. like your mother standing at the door calling you home for dinner. Hello, dinner time. Nope. I'm not going. Sometimes suddenly, like that coin I mentioned yesterday, Kyosho says, what's that sound outside?

[07:40]

Asking, when something arises at the sense door, how is it apprehended? Is the sign of the creek there or here or here? And what is the sign of the creek? Is it a discrete object other than subject? And in one way this can sound like a slightly irrelevant

[08:47]

tuning of the mental process. But if you attend carefully in Zazen, you can see how the ambient experience of our environment influences state of mind. Is the sound of the creed Stimulating thinking? Noise outside stimulating noise inside? Does it have within it some sense of troubled activity? It's very interesting when we hear a soft, mellow, babbling Baruch twinkling along.

[09:56]

It's like, okay, lovely. How's Zen? One of my brother's favorite jokes was a Zen story he heard, which was, a monk goes to the teacher and says, the butterfly landed on the flower. The shadow of the bamboo moved across the gravel. And the teacher said, You should really stop leading such an exciting life and calm down. Can we have impermanence in bite-sized pieces?

[11:14]

But what if it turns into the babbling brook, turns into the roar of a jet engine, coming with such ferocity and leaving with such determination to carry everything with it? So Kyosho says, what's that sign? And it takes us right back to sitting here. When I do kinhin and I get over there and I notice, hmm,

[12:19]

I don't know, 30% louder there than here. How does it influence your state of mind? And more interestingly, how to relate to it as an agent of awakening rather than one more difficulty, one more hindrance, one more place of failure in your life. course our life is always asking such a question each arising in our mind offers this question this request and the monk says it's a sign to the creek

[13:55]

One of Dogen's fascicles is called Soku Shinzen Butsu. This mind is Buddha. Dogen, in his own gentle way, says, stupid people. Without having established Bodhi mind, misunderstand this phrase. to say that ordinary intellect and sense perception are Buddha. So Kyosho, picking up on something like that, says, yeah, it's a sign of the creek.

[15:24]

But that can be turned into something, something separate from here. That can be turned into something separate from this. And then it can be reacted to. It can activate a world in which there is a this and a that, a here and a there. A very helpful thing about the sense doors is that they are simple. Sound can be sound. Sight can be sight. Physical sensation can be physical sensation.

[16:35]

Kyushu says, normally it's more than that. Dogen Zenji says, stupid people. At least that's how it's translated. Maybe he had a much sweeter phrase. Add something to it. And then the monk, given as good as he's got, says, well then what do you say? Okay, if that's what we stupid people say, what does a big shot like you say? And the teacher says, getting close to not losing self.

[17:51]

Getting close to not losing self. Is this not light enough? Hmm? Lighter would be better. Lighter would be better. Okay. Okay. How about now? The teacher says, getting close to not losing self. Very similar to Dong Shan's, I always stay close. As we start to settle in the Zazen, We start to see, experience the flow of the stream of consciousness.

[19:16]

The arising, the falling away. It's always on the move. In that movement, there is response. Sometimes that response takes us off for minutes and minutes and minutes. Sometimes just a few seconds. Kyosho's saying, when there's closeness, when we stay close, we can start to see what's being created in relationship to the sign, to the creek.

[20:22]

Does it... Does it quicken thinking? Does it add feeling... of urgency or unsettledness? Is it possible to pause and let it be sound, textured and complex? When my son was little, we used to come to Tassajara in the summer, and several times we stayed up in the hill cabins, and at night before he went to bed, we'd sit outside, and I'd say, and the crickets would be singing, and I'd say, try to hear every single cricket in the valley.

[21:39]

And you start to realize there's a lot of crickets here. And they're all over the place. And you can try to have a response to every one of them. And it becomes a hopeless task. You can try to break the sound of the creek dying and write a commentary on each sound. Have a response, a feeling. But this is not the intimacy of awareness. It's about non-doing.

[22:49]

It's about letting it come here as it comes and letting how it's met naturally unfold. Inevitably, that involves the arising of the self. in whatever way it arises in that moment. And in practice we call this non-doing. The complication of practice is that we do To undo.

[23:51]

To undo the habit energy. How it flows. How it asserts itself like an unrelenting stream. As we get close, we non-do. It's not about a perfect stillness. But it's not sloppy either. When the attention is astute, we see how quickly we impute upon the arising experience.

[24:59]

We add something. And it shows us that is the human condition. That our practice is not about obliterating that, our practice is about waking up to that. And the monk asks Kyosho, what do you say about this? And he says, starting to notice is not so difficult.

[26:04]

Coming from that place of noticing and meeting everything that arises That's difficult. And so yesterday I was trying to say how it requires... It asks of us a certain adaptability. Because the mind can move so quickly. Sometimes for a period of zazen there can be a pronounced character to it, quite settled.

[27:11]

Then you get up and you do kinyin and you sit back down and it's gone. And you quickly try to remember how what you did to make it happen. But the magic spell doesn't work. Even though you went through the same steps, a different mind arises. What's happening now? What is it to practice with it? how to bring forth, how to meet with that kind of adaptability. Joe Sho says, this is difficult.

[28:16]

Of course, it's only difficult when we try to determinedly create the consequence. When we're willing to let it arise here, let it be met here, let it fall away here, something unfolds. It's like letting the body breathe. But the process is like the lotus blooming in the fire. When I was young, we lived in poverty, meaning we had no money.

[29:47]

And the rent man would come every Friday morning to collect the rent. Usually we just wouldn't open the door if we didn't have any money to give him. This particular Friday morning, my mother and myself, I think I was about seven, eight, six. My mother and I were sitting in the kitchen. And she said, rent man knocked the door. Loudly. As I guess rent men are trained to do. My mother said, go open the door and tell him your mother's not home. And I looked at her and said, that would be a lie. And she said, she knew how to work me.

[30:55]

She said, the fourth commandment is to honor and obey your parents. And I said, but if they're telling you to lie, Surely not. And we had a stalemate. She thought the fourth commandment took precedence in this circumstance, and I thought it didn't. So we sat there, and the rent man pined it on the door a few more times, loudly. So I got up and I went to the door, and I think I said, I don't actually remember what I said, but I think I said something like, we have no money. What do you say to a seven-year-old when they say they have no money?

[31:57]

I mean, do you start rifling their pockets? You threaten them with physical abuse. Of course, we would all like the perfect circumstances under which to practice. We would like a babbling brook. We would like a canyon rent, not those squawky blue jays. That's not enlightening. That's disturbing. We would like the sweet blessing of one of those periods when our mind has wonderfully forgotten.

[33:09]

all the things that profoundly agitated and upset it. We would like one of those periods where our cushion is a bed of feathers and not a sack of rocks. Then we'll be a great adept neither inside nor outside in emptiness. then did you use am I self-employment and enjoying somebody and why not no if that's what happens as it says in the sutras suck it up saturate in it that's what it says When joy arises, soak it up like a sponge soaks up water.

[34:16]

And you thought those Theravadans weren't party people? Yes, they are. When you're having a good time, have a good time. But let's not forget the lotus in the fire. Let's not forget that when the rent man is pounding on the door, it's still a point of practice, the response. I say, it was my mother's fault. She taught me to be such a person. Sometimes in the midst of our poverty, we were Catholic. She would say, okay, from now on, every night, we were seven kids.

[35:25]

We're going to kneel down and say the rosary. It takes a long, long time to say the rosary when you're seven. She didn't say, when times get better, when we have an investment portfolio, when we're divested into real estate, gold and minerals, then we'll start to practice. Nope. To heck with that. Right now. Something about this mind and body you get period after period. Something about cracking open the hard shell of self is supported by the intensity of circumstance.

[36:36]

Something about the pure land of body at ease, mind at ease, makes it difficult to see where acceptance is just the consequence of comfort. This is the challenge. Can this deep human desire what we want for comfort for safety security can it be held in abeyance that allows a deep willingness to meet each moment that it allows the vow of practice

[37:44]

to be vibrant, to bring forth a willingness, a commitment to meeting each thing. Each of us had a set of circumstances that illustrated this to us. That's why we're here. Whether we have a story about it or not. And the verse in the Koan goes like this. In the empty hall, the Zendul. In the empty hall, the sign of raindrops. Even an expert, even an adept, even a seasoned Zen practitioner can hardly reply.

[39:00]

If you say, he turned the flow back, that's still not understanding. Understanding, not understanding, on North Mountain, on South Mountain, more and more rain. The complexity we create Just another object of awareness. Like the sign to the creek. Like the sensation in your knee.

[40:05]

Understanding, not understanding. In the midst of this, we're refining our effort. We're discovering something about kusala. What supports awareness? And we let that flow into how we walk. We let that flow into how much we eat. We let that flow into how much we sleep. activity of the day. How we conduct ourselves on our break. The activity of life in the service of awakening.

[41:21]

When is it helpful to sit through the pain and when is it not? Not that we're getting something right in contrast to getting it wrong. But what's the yogic skillfulness of practice? And what is it to let that be more the agenda of the day than returning to the agendas of self? What is it to let that vow bloom in the fire, in the non-ideal circumstances? Many years later,

[42:36]

my mother was in hospital and in those days it's kind of an odd relationship to telling people they were going to die so the responsibility was given to me and I went in and I said you're going to die and she looked at me and said You always did want to tell the truth, didn't you? Impermanence with its fierce need to change us. In broad strokes, the one breath of a human life.

[43:48]

In fine detail, how the sound of the creek at a particular moment is grasped or allowed to flow. in subtle workings of our human conditioned existence, when the tight knot of some issue comes up, can it just be like the sign of the creek? the arising of now? Can we feel, literally, its stirring, its weight, its intensity?

[44:54]

Can we neither push it away and our grasp onto it. And can we carry this activity, this steady vow, and discover it everywhere we look, everywhere we hear, everywhere we feel. And can we study how to relate the body and mind that support this vow? And can that reveal for us the habits of body and mind? And can the dynamic tension

[46:08]

between habit energy and vow energy, can that reveal the lotus? Can that reveal what it is to be human? Can we not mistake the request of practices that somehow that has to be squelched. Now the dynamic tension between vow and habit energy is what reveals the path of liberation. That's how we see self. That's how we become skillful in responding to self.

[47:14]

You don't have a perfect body. You don't have a perfect mind. The habituated way of being... This is what Dogen's pointing at. He says, the habituated way of being is not Buddha. Waking up and seeing it for what it is. And Kyosho says, this is difficult. Meaning that if you miss this opportunity, There'll be another one right behind it. If you spaced out on this one, don't worry. There's another opportunity to see this occurrence coming soon.

[48:25]

So here we are in the rain. north mountain and south mountain. With creeks to the west and creeks to the south. And squawking blue jays. And the canyon ran It's silent. Every day is a good day. 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, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[49:41]

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