Good evening. So it is often said that Zen is a body practice. And I remember when I first heard that, that didn't make any sense to me at all. I knew about Zen from reading books, and it seemed to be mostly about a lot of words and mental states and concentration and things that happened in the mind, besides which you had to sit very still. I could not understand why this was called a body practice. So I'd like to talk about that. So we practice in and with our body. The body is a vehicle of practice.

[01:06]

It's not something to transcend. Shakyamuni, before his awakening, sought freedom through the two ways that were most common 2500 years ago. One was indulgence of sense pleasures, which he had ample opportunity for as a young prince. And when that wore out, he went the other way, which was ascetic practices and concentration practices. And when he realized that that wasn't the way either, and almost died in the process, took nourishment and remembered a state of mind he'd been in as a child. been present at a harvest ceremony and he sat under a rose apple tree just in a state of simple being. And he remembered that state as a time of oneness and presence.

[02:15]

And there was something about that that was a touchstone for him as he went on in his practices. Something about being present in the body. So he sat down and vowed not to move until he awakened. So his realization came through sitting practice. So that's a part of the reason that we sit, is that since the Buddha, that's been the way, the vehicle to wake up. There have been many other supportive practices, but sitting practice has always been foundational. literally the foundation of our practice, the fundamental field of practice. In the Satipatthana Sutta, which is often translated as the four foundations of mindfulness, could also be translated as, instead of foundations, establishments, to establish.

[03:19]

And mindfulness... You know, mindfulness is not just kind of a non-judgmental acceptance, although that's how we tend to think of it today, that the root of mindfulness, the sati of satipatthana, is remembering, is to remember memory. So to bring to mind mindfulness in that way, like mind your Ps and Qs, that kind of minding. So it was minding, being mindful of different things. It was mindful of the body, mindful of ethics, mindful of practices. So the four foundations, the first one is the body. And there are a number of practices within that. And then feelings, mind, and objects of mind. But the very first one, the very first thing that he taught was mindfulness,

[04:24]

being mindful, remembering the body, the posture and the breath, the simplest way of being with the body. And then there was this progression to the anatomy of the body and how the body manifests and then movement and many different aspects of the body which are more subtle and more complex and then moving on into... feelings in mind. These are increasing refinements, increasingly difficult to work with. So the body is an anchor. It's what we can come back to. It's what helps us establish concentration, presence of mind, connection with the present moment, connection with our own experience, getting out of our heads, out of our thoughts, out of our ideas and concepts. It allows the agitation and restlessness of the mind to settle.

[05:33]

Coming back again and again to the body. Dogen Zenji who's a very fundamental person and teacher in our lineage from 13th century Japan, really came back to Zazen. At the time there were many different practices, and he reaffirmed the practice of Zazen as foundational, just wholeheartedly sit. And in his universal recommendations for Zazen, An awful lot of it is taken up with just very, very specific and detailed instructions on where your body goes, how to sit, as detailed as where your ears are in relationship to your shoulders. So this emphasis on the posture and the body is how we learn.

[06:41]

In Japan, my understanding is that much of the teaching from adults or parents to children is through the body. You just put the child's body how it should be, rather than saying, like adults in this country used to say, stand up straight. Sit up, watch your posture. And I guess in Japan, they would just like touch them, move them, enforce that in a literally physical way. So I think there's a way that in Japanese and Chinese culture, being with the body was so foundational as a way of being. And part of coming back again and again to the body and the breath is that we tend to get bored and wander off. We want something more interesting yesterday or tomorrow often, or somebody else. So just to return again and again to the body and breath and settle and settle and settle.

[07:54]

The body is not separate from the mind. Over and over, Dogen talks about the phrase shinjin, which is body-mind. Body-mind is one suchness. And Suzuki Roshi in the very first essay in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, the very opening. He talks about posture. He says, now I would like to talk about our Zazen posture. When you sit in the full lotus position, your left foot is on your right thigh and your right foot is on your left thigh. When we cross our legs like this, even though we have a right leg and a left leg, they have become one. The position expresses the oneness of duality, not two and not one. This is the most important teaching, not two and not one.

[08:59]

Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong. If you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one. We usually think that if something is not one, it is more than one. If it is not singular, it is plural. But in actual experience, our life is not only plural, but also singular. Each one of us is both dependent and independent. Our body and mind naturally inform each other. They inform each other. The body forms a container. In terms of how the mind informs the body, if we think of something, there is a response in the body.

[10:04]

Our body responds to the thoughts we have, not just what we perceive on the outside. The body doesn't know the difference really between inside and outside in terms of its response. When we feel sad or depressed, we naturally tend to slump or lose energy. This is an expression of the body in relation to the mind. One of the most fascinating things is that in cognitive therapy, in mental therapy, your blood chemistry changes. just the same way that it does if you're taking Prozac or some other serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Isn't that interesting? You know, you can take medicine and it will change your blood chemistry, but if you change your mind, it also changes your blood chemistry. And from body to mind, you know, the form of our bodies...

[11:07]

informs our mind, quite literally. As I just mentioned, you know, I think adults used to say, my mother certainly said a lot, stand up straight, honey, sit up straight, have good posture. And I was reading this book about, I wish I could remember what it was called, I think it's in the library, but it's a book about posture. and practices around posture. And it had a lot of pictures of people from around the world in different cultures. And there are some cultures in particular where the people have amazing posture. And they're showing people working over, like woodworking, where they're leaning forward and they have perfect posture. It looks like they're just doing yoga while they're working. Eight steps to a pain-free back. Eight steps to a pain-free back. Thank you. Library or back porch, one of those.

[12:13]

Back porch. You can go find it on the back porch. It's lovely. And they also show pictures of portraits of people in the West, like from about 1900 before. And Victorian era in particular, people had very upright posture. You know, upright, I guess you could say uptight also, but the... But not just Victorians. Before then as well. So there was an uprightness that was considered to accord with your mind. You know, mind and body were working together. And I have, or I used to have somewhere, my great-grandmother's lace collar. You know, those high lace collars. And it was cut off of the dress. And it has whalebone stays in it. And it fit me perfectly. And the little lace edge comes right under my chin. It has little buttons that go down the back.

[13:14]

And I put it on and I felt just like a Victorian lady. Because I couldn't move my head anymore. You know, my neck was just completely, you know, couldn't sit like this. You know, you sit like this. And I felt different. You know, I carried myself differently. I felt different for having this containment of my body. and this very particular posture. Oh, and I felt like I understood Victorian women of a certain class much better for that. So when we talk about being upright, Reb Anderson's book about the precepts is called Being Upright. And we're upright in our behavior as well as upright in our posture. And these, I think, rather naturally go together. We often think of someone who is a, you know, popular culture, a sneak or a liar, a skulking around, you know, as kind of Dickens.

[14:23]

All the characters in Dickens kind of express their character through their posture. But it's not just that when you have a certain character, you express it in your posture. It goes the other way, too. You know, to sit up straight. is to actually feel differently about oneself and the world. So this is part of why we practice monastic decorum. We have particular forms when we live and practice together at Tassajara or City Center or Green Gulch. And we do things in a certain way because it helps support our practice. So when we meet each other on the path, we stop, we pause for just a moment, and we bow to each other. And then we continue on. And it feels very different if you stop for a moment and fully bow, even though it only takes about a second, and go on, rather than kind of having a rolling stop, you know, like you would at a stoplight.

[15:28]

Kind of like, you know, keep going. So those... The deliberateness, the stopping, helps to wake us up and come back to the moment and to the connection and to the intention, the sati, the remembering, to bow, to connect. What are we doing here? Why am I here? What are my vows? Can I meet this moment? Can I meet this person fully? So another way that Zen is a body practice is that awakening is not just a mental event. It's not just freedom in mind, but it's realization. How do we make that real in our lives, in our bodies, in our expression? How do we manifest it? This is always in and with the body.

[16:30]

It's also in words, of course. We can express it through poetic expression. But that's not the same as explanation or analysis. It's really the flavor of Zen is expression. How to express awakening. So it could be through tea ceremony or archery or painting, calligraphy. These are all expressions rather than analysis. Said to be pointing to the moon, you know, the finger points to the moon, the image of awakening, but not to explain it. There is a story about Kadigiri Roshi that one of his students, I think it may have been Natalie Goldberg, When she first saw him, she came into the, I think it was the Minnesota Zen Center, and saw him from behind.

[17:44]

He was arranging flowers. And she just stopped and watched him. He didn't see her. It was a private moment. He was just arranging flowers in a vase. But she felt his presence so completely in his body. and the way that he was handling the flowers, that she immediately knew that she wanted him to be her teacher. And there are a number of stories about Suzuki Roshi that are very similar. People who met him and from his being, how he was as a person, in his expressions, in his body. And they said, whatever he does, I will do that. because that's how I want to be a person. So Tassajara is such a wonderful place to engage in body practice.

[18:47]

It's such a, in so many ways, it's such a body place. It's hot, it's cold. There's flies or there's not. We walk everywhere. We're on the earth. There's baths. There's nature. We don't sleep so much, as students, that is. So all of this makes us very much aware of our bodies and how we're in our bodies and how we relate to our bodies. And during practice period, we can really see how we relate together as one body. we become one body of practice. Everyone moving together, everyone harmonizing. We're all following the same schedule, all doing the same things at the same time. We do formal ura-yoki meals.

[19:47]

They're choreographed, essentially, so that we're all finding our movements together. The first thing that happens is they wipe the meal boards And the servers come in the back door, and they walk all the way around, and they start here, and they go back, and you can just feel the satisfaction when everything is timed, and they arrive at the back door together. Bow, bow, exit. It's like, yes. And at the beginning of the practice period, it's new servers, and everyone's learning, and it's various degrees of chaos. and humor. And gradually it starts to get pulled in and the doans learn their positions. And then more and more, you know, service goes smoothly and meals go smoothly and there's this great joy in harmonizing together.

[20:51]

And we feel each other in our bodies. And we become intimate with each other's presence in ways that we often don't get to. watching someone's bare feet walk by, and you know exactly who it is. Bare feet below a black robe. There's like 47 or 65 of them, but you know whose those feet are. And it's not because you've been watching. You just know. So this kind of intimacy. And this kind of... bodily manifestation of monastic practice seems to extend across traditions, across spiritual traditions. There's a story about Thomas Merton, the Catholic Benedictine monk who was studying Zen, I think in the 60s, 70s, somewhere in there. And at one point he wanted very much to study with a particular...

[21:57]

Zen teacher from Japan and he asked the father superior if he could study with him and he said, well, you'll have to bring him here and we'll have to check him out. Okay. So, the man came and they grilled him on points of Christian doctrine. He didn't do very well. Predictably, he'd never studied Christian doctrine. And Thomas Merton was, you know, he'd pretty much given up. He's like, this did not go well. This is, it's going to be a no. But the Father Superior called him into his office and he said, well, I really couldn't understand a thing he said. But the man walks like a monk. He speaks like a monk. And he behaves as a monk. He eats like a monk. So I have to assume that he is a monk and you have my permission to study with him.

[22:58]

So the body practice at Tassajara in the summer has a little different flavor than it does in the winter because we don't have the same kind of container. But you can still feel it. You know, people come here in the summer who've been here before, and especially this summer, people would say, practice is really strong here. You know, they can feel it in a few hours. You know, and they feel it in how all the students are holding themselves, how they're walking and moving, how they're smiling, how they're bowing, how you're smiling and bowing. And they feel it. And all of you who are guests, I know you feel it too. You know, and those of you who've come many years, I've heard many of you say, oh, it's a good year. It's a good summer. I feel the practice. What they're feeling is the manifestation in the body. And of course, your smiles, you know.

[24:16]

But the energy, you know, there's a lot of energy, but it's not all over the place. So there's always an issue in the summer, not so much now when it's so nice and cool, but as it goes on, you know, how to practice with the heat and the fatigue in the body, you know, when the body is just such a strong presence in our lives. How to meet that skillfully. Suzuki Roshi used to love to move stones. So much of the stone work here he did. He did the stone gardens and some of the walls. And even though he was fairly old when he was here and not so well, and his students were young, they were in their 20s, he could outlast them.

[25:22]

He could work longer than they could. He said, how can you do that? And he said, I rest on every moment. He only used the energy that he needed. He met everything with just enough energy. So to find what's necessary and what's extra and how to move with it. There's a sort of a knack to that. It doesn't require brute strength. It's just like... How do I meet that? It's kind of in a keto move. How do I pick up that tray? How do I lift the corner of the bed? How do I do the dance of the kitchen with so many people and so much energy? How do I bring in the food for dinner? How do I move the chairs? What's just enough? How to find that balance point.

[26:26]

And that can actually be very restful. His resistance just really takes a lot of energy. Trying to get comfortable takes a lot of energy. But opening, opening and settling can give us energy. Finding that ease. So even in this very moment as we're all sitting here you can find ease in your body within whatever is happening in your body right at this moment. You can adjust your energy bringing it up or letting it go with the breath again and again.

[27:32]

Thank you all for your practice. Now, are there any questions, comments? Yes, go. Thank you for bringing that topic. That is very fundamental about practice, about life, I just like to add that the breath and the posture or the muscles for the posture those two actions are the only action or structure that moved by

[28:49]

conscious or autonomic, but also moved by consciousness. Yes. So I see those breathing muscles and muscle posture as a bridge of the body. this fact is a kind of popular and conscious medicine practitioner that conscious also spirituality. Thank you. Thank you.

[29:52]

It's beautiful. May our intention be able to extend for peace.

[30:17]

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