O Gesheita Matsaran Anansaba's penetrating and perfect dharma is really met with even in a hundred thousand million galpas having it to see and listen to to remember and accept I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's word. Genjo Khan.

[01:48]

Proceeding backwards. Accordingly, in the practice enlightenment of the Buddha way, meeting one thing is mastering it. Doing one practice is practicing completely. the place, the way, has not carried over from the past and is not merely arising now. It's important when we practice to realize that practice isn't a kind of lobotomy. Sometimes There's a certain intonation or ambience generated. Accordingly, in the practice enlightenment of the Buddha way, meeting one thing is mastering it.

[03:04]

Doing one practice is practicing completely. It's like you're half dead and half asleep before the sentence is over. So try this one on for size then. It's always a danger. to aspirants on the path when they begin to believe or act as if the 10,000 idiots who so long ruled and lived inside have packed up their bags and skipped time or died. Or this one.

[04:08]

Don't surrender your loneliness too quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender. My need of God absolutely clear. Yesterday I talked about Mary Oliver being drawn to a world of perfection only to find it was imperfect and finding herself conjuring up a willingness

[05:27]

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing, to be dazzled. There's a... his end story teacher comes into the kitchen and the monk is cleaning the rice you know you clean the rice by taking out the pieces of grit and the teacher says do you separate the grid from the rice or the rice from the grid

[06:36]

So as we settle in this machine and we have some capacity for noticing what's going on when there are moments of presence and moments of something else. Do we hold on to the darkness, the constriction, the disappointment, the sad stories of our life? Or do we let something light shine in? Something dazzling, maybe not so dazzling, maybe just a quiet affirmation of its own being. The request to practice is pretty straightforward.

[07:58]

There isn't really a heck of a lot to understand. Here is the place. Here the way unfolds. Accordingly, in the practice enlightenment of the Buddha way, meeting one thing is becoming it. Doing one practice is practicing completely. How do we make here, how do we make presence an attractive proposition? So our karmic life will say, well, by making it the way we want it. That's pretty easy, the answer. in our Dharma eye wistfully smiles at such an idea because it doesn't work so how do we make here habitable

[09:28]

Mary Oliver says, even when you move towards it and discover that perfection is imperfect, even so, there is a precious jewel. There's a turning point. There is something revealed. Practice enlightenment is right there. Hafiz says your very humanness merits being savored. It draws us down. So in our practice we call the ways we access now, the way we access presence, Dharma gates.

[10:44]

I have to confess that as I watch the migration from the tatamis to the benches, I worry. The heritage of Zen is a yogic practice. Not to say that's the only way, but to say that it has been the heritage. Not to say everything doesn't change, but it has been the heritage. Not to say when you have a bum knee or bad back or sprained ankle or whatever, it isn't skillful and inappropriate to take care of it.

[11:56]

But to say that... The universe is going to devour you no matter what you do. Devour you no matter what you do. Devour. Eat you up whole. Yesterday I was mentioning, you know, trying to chant each line of the before lecture chant with one breath. At the speed we do it, you have to reach down deep. You have to be mindful of taking a full body of air at the start of the line.

[13:05]

becomes more exacting, more demanding. Nathan, try to sit still. You have to let each moment have its own way. It's no different from acting out our anxiety or turning towards our stillness, our capacity for presence. Yon Man saying each person has a light. In a way we could say our restlessness has no bottom.

[14:14]

Stillness is a bottomless coin. You think you're sitting still and then you notice the more subtle tensions. And then as they unpeel you notice something deeper. Similarly with the breath. As you let the breath settle, it settles and settles and settles. So we take something as extraneous and optional as trying to chant a line of chanting with one breath.

[15:20]

And it asks of us to know our own breath, to know our own body, to know breath in the body. And as we know breath in the body and find breath in the body, we find out how posture is built on breath. We find out that sitting upright comes not just from the sit bones, but from the way our being saddles down into that area. and find its core connection. As we find how our breath and our body find that core connection, our mind can rest on that. And as the mind rests on that,

[16:37]

Its dependency on the external starts to rest. So normally in Soto Zen we're not vulgar enough to say things like that. We just say, Let's chant. We're not crass enough to say this is the entirety of our practice. This is the whole yogic formation of Zazen. Because there's endless Dharma gates and that's just one.

[17:47]

This morning as we were doing the introduction chant, as I usually do, I tried to chant each line with one breath. I couldn't do it. Just towards the end of that long one, I ran under breath. So you come up to where you come up, or you meet yourself where you were in relationship to the request. You want, try to sit still. Try to just hold still. We're losing something. You know, the idea of tesho is the same as a Zen. It's to be as fully present as possible. It's not so much the content of what's said, it's connecting to something that goes beyond the words.

[19:07]

You know, maybe the speaker is limited in a way that's distracting or disappointing. But even so, you know, we can still hear something that goes beyond the words. But it requires something of us. It requires a certain receptivity. certain wholehearted engagement. And to once again be vulgar, that's supported by not fidgeting. Sometimes something as simple as letting an itch itch rather than scratching it reveals something about the nature of impermanence.

[20:34]

Something about letting certain manifestation of restlessness just be itself. Let something settle a little more fully. Of course Hafiz puts his hand around our shoulder lays his head on our chest and says, don't surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut more deeply. Let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients can. But if we're only moved, if we're only

[21:42]

drawn in through sweetness, we miss something else. We do itch. There is a restlessness in our hearts and minds and bodies. And there is a coin called holding still. Not that we should freak out.

[22:45]

practice into some austere or good and evil category. But just to realize that the nature of relationship, any relationship, is about give and take. We give our breath to the chanting and we receive something. We give attention to the moment. And the moment unguzzes. recreates us, dazzles.

[23:54]

But there's a fundamental equation there that's the core of our practice. Sitting still is a con. You can become rigid, frozen, and the moment becomes very small and inhospitable. Or you can sit still and let some subtle or not so subtle holding a restlessness undo itself. And the moment can become very expensive.

[25:03]

Expensive. It is very expensive. It costs everything you've got. But like any relationship, I think there's a song by Paul McCartney that goes, the love you take is equal to the love you make. What you give is what you get. That's even better news than that. You give a little and get a lot. You give what you got, which isn't a heck of a lot, and what you get in return is the whole universe. Pretty good proposition. When I was thinking upstairs, I was thinking... I was thinking more of trying to be warm and cuddly but...

[26:20]

The problem of letting the moment take you wherever it takes you is sometimes what your plan isn't what happens. In fact, if you look carefully, it almost never is what happens. And honestly, I don't mean to rebuke or frighten or intimidate. Because a very significant feature is making the present hospitable. As we enter more fully and more committedly into the moment, into our relationship to presence, like in your relationship, more fully and more completely, we're going to ask, is this okay?

[27:45]

Am I going to be okay? Do I really want to do this? Do I want to spend this precious life? in the now. There's so much good stuff in then and in the future. Yeah. I have a friend who got polio when she was like five or six. And her body was pretty significantly affected by it. And I don't know quite how, what all the attributing, contributing factors were, but she really worked with it.

[28:48]

Now she's in her 50s and she's had interesting life. Through working with it, you couldn't tell if you looked at her. You wouldn't think, oh, yeah. She's strong, athletic, yogic. Worked as a lifeguard. Was a runner. Successful career. But somehow in dealing with that polio she had to reach down deep. She had to discover how to make a certain kind of effort. It's a little perplexing how the difficulties in our life ask us to reach down deep, make a certain kind of effort.

[30:13]

And often in doing so, we tap into something, some capacity that's quite remarkable. This is holding still. Our arising discomfort, our arising agitation, our arising disturbance. Since I'm being harsh and cruel, I'll continue to be harsh and cruel. It's interesting, you know, sitting here and to say, hold still, and to notice how some people immediately move. It's a pretty scary proposition to hold still, to be completely yourself.

[31:25]

At the moment it seems, I just scratched my cheek. Come on, give me a break. What's the big deal? Zen is totally crazy. It makes a big deal out of nothing. There's a wonderful Zen line that says, Something is never as good as nothing. It is a scary proposition. It's a scary proposition as we move deeper into Shashin take it on more fully, more completely.

[32:36]

To notice the smaller, more subtle ways we sort of move around it. Sadly, we move around the delights as much as we do around the difficulties. get distracted and move away from the delicious tasting food. In somewhat the same manner, we get distracted and move away from the itch on our cheek. But in the midst of all this, to remember there is no success or failure.

[33:53]

Yes, we could say there's a practice of trying to breathe, chant one line with one breath. But if it doesn't happen, So what? What's next? If you forget and scratch your cheek, so what? No big deal. On to the next thing. The universe is endlessly patient. Didn't like that moment? How about this one? Didn't want to make that completely? Didn't want to make this completely? If an itch on your cheek didn't do it, how about a thought that you're going to die?

[35:13]

So, what we're talking about is really the nature of dukkha. Whether we want to call it adversity or whatever we want to call it, something about our human response and what's at the core of it. There's a great line by Suzuki Roshi, when asked to define Nirvana, he said, meeting one thing completely. Actually, what he said was, it's quoted as following one thing through to the finish. I just thought I'd edit it. His answer was pretty good, just could have been better. Holding still is a con.

[36:48]

When you're walking in the hall, how do you just hold still in the middle of walking in the hall? And it may seem the requirement is a kind of lobotomy. a kind of rigidity, a kind of dead man walking. But there are other ingredients that can contribute. And one is, as I say, how to let now be hospitable. How to go beyond success and failure and how to...

[38:02]

Let our notion of what presence is be bottomless and without boundary. A willingness that has no preference. has no fixed agenda and no fixed prescription and no fixed notion of what is presence and what isn't presence. So this is the counterbalance to holding still.

[39:15]

And these two attributes are like your two sit bones. These two attributes are like two palms coming together in gashow. These two attributes are like sitting still in the middle of form and going beyond any notion of form or time or anything. When we meet the moment, it points to something beyond the moment. I was just thinking, this talk's getting too weird. Is it almost done yet? It is. We can all relax. It's almost over. The word yoga is to yoke, is to join.

[40:39]

The way of joining our own, what we experience as our own sense of presence with all presence. The way of joining with our own body, the way of joining with our own breath and discovering that in doing so, our own disappears. It's about connecting. It's about the craft of connecting. Does that make sense? that whole thing I was beating to death about breathing the first line of the chant or each line of the chant that's the craft of breath creating an enabling presence connecting with body body and breath together supporting mind it's a craft it's a way to create it's a Dharma gate

[42:15]

I don't know. Crafts might work better, but the word in my head was crap. I'll try on grass. It's a little bit like holding still and completely letting loose. and how they balance each other. We find liberation through following the schedule completely. Don't be late. Turn up on time. And after you've managed that, be totally present when you're here. I'll try to find a reassuring poem after those terrifying words.

[43:51]

I open this book at random and the title is, Join Me in the Pure Atmosphere. But I'm not going to read it. Why not? It just occurred to me not to read it. That's why. Oh, you don't need a pause. Practice can be thought of as ferocious, as can our life.

[45:11]

Think of John King shining like a bright star. on the verge of death. Never so alive, never so radiant, never so sweet and available. As Miri Oliver says, I want to be willing to be dazzled.

[46:25]

But if we say to ourselves, well then don't give me any of that crap about sitting still. We try to stuff some demon in the closet. And the problem with stuffing demons in the closet is they're just getting bigger and bigger in there. And you got to put more and more locks on the door. What is it to just open the closet door and let the demonite and let it demonize? It's just another construct.

[47:34]

Demonize? Yeah. No different from the itch on your cheek. It's amazing, you know. An itch on your cheek can just be incredibly itchy. And if you wait about 60 seconds, it doesn't exist. Where does it go? What is it to give yourself to each moment? Okay. Well, that wasn't the talk I was expecting.

[48:37]

Thank you. May our intention equally and good be and blessed with the Spirit.

[48:59]

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