This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Hoshinji, Beginner's Mind Temple. And for those of you who may not know me, my name is Tenzin David Zimmerman. I live and work here and practice here at the... City Center, San Francisco Zen Center, and I also serve as the Abiding Abbot. So it's wonderful to see you all. Thank you for being here today. I thought I'd start us off with a poem by someone who maybe a few of you might know. Her name is Mary Oliver. And the poem is The Poet Dreams of the Mountain. Sometimes I grow weary of the days with all their fits and starts.

[01:03]

I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, taking the rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping under the pines or above them on the unclothed rocks. I want to see how many stars are still in the sky, that we have smothered for years now, a century at least. I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all and peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know. All that urgency, not what the earth is about. How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only. I want to take slow steps and think appropriate thoughts. In 10,000 years, maybe a piece of the mountain will fall.

[02:11]

So a number of us here this morning are participating in what is called a one-day sitting. And so we are taking the opportunity to intentionally step out of the wearying fits and starts and seeming urgencies of our daily lives. All that urgency. What is not what the earth is about? So instead we can sit silently like the trees being our own poetry and in so doing returning to slow down and quietly enter into the mountains of our own being to return to our original peaceful nature and simply rest there. So our sitting began at 5.30 this morning and will continue until 6 p.m.

[03:17]

this evening. So because of that, our usual public program is going to be a little different today. The program will end... with this Dharma Talk. And so, alas, there will be no cookies and tea today and no open lunch, but please come back and join us next week when we will have these offerings. For those of you who are new to Zen Center, I'm just curious, how many people are new here today? Welcome. Special welcome to you all. The particular form of meditation that we practice here, San Francisco Zen Center, is called Zazen, which simply translates as sitting meditation. So Ehi Dogen, the 13th century Japanese founder of our particular school of Zen, uses various terms to describe Zazen, one of which is the word gotsuza, gotsuza, which means sitting immovable, like a bold,

[04:26]

And the image from which the Chinese character for Gotsuza is derived is said to be a level place at the summit, or said to be, the Chinese character, a level place at the summit of a mountain, and furthermore, a place where there's not even one tree growing. So a level place at the summit of a mountain that's barren, but not even a tree growing. So no matter how hard the wind blows on the mountaintop, there is absolutely no movement, stillness in the midst of great world. So this expresses well the immovable nature of zazen. This description of zazen as gozuza, sitting immovable like a bold mountain, was forefront in my mind during a two-week vacation that I recently just returned from.

[05:29]

I was very fortunate to have some friends offer me their cabin up in the Sierra Mountains near a place called Serene Lakes. Anyone know that? No? I never knew about it before. And it's... on the way to Donner Pass, on the way to Donner Lake, which is on the way to Truckee, which is on the way to Tahoe. So anyhow, it's a beautiful area. And I spent the majority of my time there doing a combination of Dharma study and meditation and communing with nature. And each day as a study break, I would take anywhere from one to three hours to go hiking in the local trails. or swimming or kayaking on the lake that was just basically half a block away from my front door. And it was interesting. While I encountered a number of people on the lakes who were also swimming, kayaking, and enjoying the water, when I went actually onto the trails and into the mountains, I basically didn't encounter anyone.

[06:40]

And I was really kind of surprised. I thought, you know, it's the height of summer, you know, this beautiful area. There'd be lots of people hiking through, but... I was basically on my own. It was as if I had the whole mountain to myself. It was very unique. And for someone who lives in San Francisco and doesn't get out beyond the city limits very often, I don't have a car, so I'm kind of dependent on public transportation and walking and friends with cars to get me outside of the city. So it's always a treat when I have this opportunity to go into more dramatic nature settings. And being once again in the midst of the kind of awesome beauty and presence and aliveness of the Sierras, I always remembered that there's no Zen without nature. There's no Zen without nature. And Dogen said in regards to the mountains and waters, the mountains of this water of this present, that they are completely actualizing the Buddha way.

[07:43]

when we are in the proximity of nature, this becomes much more apparent. It's much harder to kind of feel that presencing of nature here in the city, unless we really take an opportunity to kind of connect to the life around us, whether or not in the form of trees or the birds or the air or just each other. What is it to connect to that more fundamental, expression of Zen in our nature. In his Fukan Zazengi, also known as the Universal Recommendations for Zazen, Dogen instructs us that once we have adjusted our posture, we sit down on our cushion, we get into either a seated or cross-legged position, or if our particular bodies need maybe a lying down position, depending on what's going on for us, Once we have adjusted our posture and taken a deep breath and exhale fully, letting go, letting release, maybe rock our body right and left, then we settle into a steady and movable sitting.

[08:55]

In other words, to sit steadily without any movement, like an immovable mountain. So Zazen is a mountain that is imperturbable. So regardless of the weather, the mountain isn't disturbed. So if it's raining, lightning, snow, hailstorm. Actually, when I was up there, there was a hailstorm. It was really surprising. The blue is quite fascinating. Whatever's happening in the weather, the mountain doesn't move. And so cultivating the stability of sitting means that one has the intention. You could say we establish the body of intention. of not moving, of not grasping onto the experience and not pushing it away in some way, not turning away from it. Each of us sitting here today together is creating a supportive container of the upright intention from which we all benefit.

[10:01]

However, anyone who has sat even a short period of zazen, we'll recognize it's not possible to sit in a settled way if we are always reacting to every thought or emotion state that ends up floating by in our experience or all the other various body sensations we might have once we kind of sit down and say, okay, I'm not going to move. And then suddenly we have this kind of itch over here and this pain in our knee down there. And we start kind of fidgeting and like, not like this. This isn't pleasant. I don't like this. Or maybe we have a wonderful sensation and we want more of it and we start fixating on it in some way. So it's only natural when we have the instruction given in Zazen that the emphasis is put on continuously sitting without as little movement as possible. With as little movement as possible. So in Zazen we expressively do not move the body in response to some stimuli.

[11:09]

whatever is coming up in our field of experience, we don't move. Again, whether or not it's a physical sensation, agitation, a deep emotional agitation, a mental agitation of some sort, we just stay still. In fact, we said that the essence of the practice of Zazen is first to be found within not moving the body, the number one principle in that case. That said, there is a tendency to overemphasize the matter of not moving in zaza. So paying attention to the breath helps us to realize that practicing gozuza, or immovable sitting, is not a rigid, stiff expression. It's an aliveness. It's an alive stillness. An alive immovability, you could say. So the teaching of Zen and Zazen is of how to embody this very life.

[12:16]

By mindfully attending to our own breaths, we feel the movement of our body and those around us. The fact is, our body is never still. Even when dead, our bodies keep moving. insofar as they are decaying and moving through deterioration. Have you ever thought about that? It just continues, even when I'm gone. There's some process that continues beyond our concept of this body as mine. So nothing is fixed in the world of impermanence. Another key teaching in Zen. Everything is impermanent. Everything is flowing. Nothing is fixed. So the dedication to immovable sitting means feeling the alive, pulsing, and coursing of our body and breath. Feeling the whole experience, really being with this experience. And not just the gross movements, but really focusing on the subtle, the more subtle movements of what it is to be alive.

[13:26]

For example, the falling and rising of our breath. the arising of our hara, the center. It's good when you meditate to bring awareness of the breath down here in the center of your being, in the tantien, I think, of hara, down here. Allow that to be where your mind rests initially. So sitting in Gotsasa, we feel the alive sensation of being in a wake, a mountain, experiencing itself, in relationship to the rest of the world. I read recently that when the Chinese initially translated the Sanskrit and Pali words for meditation or the word meditation, absorption, concentration,

[14:30]

jhana in Sanskrit and jhana in Pali, that they use characters that express the homophonic, or the sound of the word, rather than the actual direct meaning of the character. So they translated jhana as chanya. Now, as I understand it, the characters for chanya literally mean to bow before mountains and rivers. to bow before mountains and rivers. So that tells you something about how the Chinese understood meditation. The Chinese didn't look at meditation as something that would be good for you or make you better or as a path to a particular destination. Maybe some of us, particularly here in the United States, might have that idea that, oh, if I do some meditation, I'm going to get something out of it. I'm going to be improved in some way.

[15:30]

I'm going to be a better person. I'm going to just be different than I am. If I just do meditation, I could be a different person. But the Chinese, according to what I read, understood that meditation was a religious practice and an expression of a spiritual truth. So the way they understood meditation was to sit, and bow before mountains and lakes and trees and rivers. Which means to return to our own nature. To return, to bow and return to the mountains and waters that we are. So bowing to mountains and rivers and of course sitting zazen is a way to return to our Buddha nature. I think we frequently need reminders of who we truly are.

[16:35]

That our true person is connected to the earth. And the quality of humility to be receiving the gift of this life at this moment and all that comes with it. The root of the word humility means close to the ground. Bowing itself, particularly when we're doing full postrations and touching our head to the earth, like I did when I first entered here, keeps us humbled and grounded. Both bowing and sitting zazen are profound practices that remind us of the source of our life. So continually touching the earth of our being with gratitude. During my first hike, I got there the first day and I arrived and settled in. And the second day, I took a hike into the area surrounding Sumine Lake.

[17:38]

And as I entered, I originally kind of crossed the road and went into this beautiful flowering meadow. I was surprised there were still flowers happening in that area. I'm used to Tassajara, where most of the flowers are kind of dead by midsummer in the area. But here, there were lots of wildflowers. And so I entered into the meadow, and then the meadow led to this kind of pine forest. And as I wandered my way through the trail of the pine forest, it started to ascend up a ridge, the side of a ridge, to a bare, rocky area where there were no trees going. So, go to za. As I was doing that, a particular verse, a set of verses from Dogen's Ehei Kuroku came to mind. And the first verse was composed by Hongzhi, who is an 11th century Chinese Chan or Zen Buddhist monk. And he was the one who compiled a collection of 100 koans known as the Book of Serenity.

[18:39]

So this is his verse. With coming and going, a person in the mountains understands that blue mountains are their body. The blue mountains... are the body, and the body is the self. So where can one place the senses and their objects? So Hongzhi is saying that we are persons coming and going in mountains. We are the people in the mountain, and the mountain is us. Hongzhi says that the mountain is his body, and his body is the self. That's why I as a mountain or a body can't see the self. An eye does not see the eye. Your eye can't see itself. So a person in the mountain can't see, if it's fully one with the mountain, can't see itself. So according to Hongshir, this is a good thing.

[19:43]

Insofar it means that there is no separation. No separation between us and the mountain. Another number one principle in Zen, no separation. Unfortunately for many of us, many people, it seems that we don't understand our non-separation with mountains and with the earth. And as a result, we end up treating it as other, abusing it, amusing the many gifts of the planet until we devastate the earth and the realm and the world. Devastating the body of the world and in doing so, devastating and harming our own body. What does it take for us to wake up and understand our fundamental non-separation with this planet? So the second verse is a response by Dogen to Hong Xiu's poem.

[20:47]

And it follows the same rhyme scheme. A person in the mountains should love the mountains. With going and coming, the mountains are their body. The mountains are the body, but the body is not the self. So where can one find any sense for their objects? Now, one way to understand the use of mountains in both Hongzhi and Dogen's verses is that mountains represent the entire network of of interdependent origination. It's a big word, interdependent origination. So the principle of interdependent origination says that nothing has independent, permanent, or absolute existence. Everything, the whole world and the entire universe, is intimately part of a limitless web of interconnections and undergoes a continual process of transformation as a result.

[21:52]

So in other words, we are always in the mountains and always connected with all beings in this entire world. The mountains are the world we live in, and at the same time, the mountains are our body. So Dogen says, a person in the mountains should love the mountains. What a beautiful reminder he offers us, right? Whenever I'm in the mountains, such as that, the Sierras of Tassajara, I certainly love them. I certainly feel inspired and encouraged, connected to their beauty and their awesome presence. In Dogen's fascicle, Samsui Kyo, the Mountains and River Waters Sutra, he also wrote that mountains belong to the people who love them. Mountains belong to the people who love them. A particular definition of love that I find germane here is Love as the knowing of our shared being.

[22:56]

Love is the recognition of our great intimacy as interdependently originated beings. We are intimate and we are one. One inconceivable network of shared being. And yet this shared being is expressed as particularities, as particular Dharma positions of you, and me, mountains, and trees, animals, and cars, all that is expressed as particularity, and yet is one. So we belong to the mountains. Our mutual relationship is one of love and belonging. When we love the mountains, the mountains belong to us, and we belong to the mountains. However, in contrast to Hangzhou, Dogen says that mountains are the body, but the body is not the self. In other words, his body is not the self.

[24:00]

So Dogen is not identifying his mind and body as being his true self. His mind and body are there, functioning as part of interdependent origination, but he is not identified, defined, or limited by it. So that's not to dismiss the body. It's not to dismiss this embodied being, but it's to recognize that we are more than just this particularity. In the last line of Dogen's verse, he asks, so where can you find any senses or their objects? In other words, he's pointing to the realization that there's no separation between the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue. body and mind, and their objects of color, sound, smell, taste, touch, and objects of mind. There is no separation between the selfless self and all beings.

[25:03]

We are in the mountains, and the mountains are us, together, one seamless life. Another term for zazen that Dogen uses is shikantaza, just sitting, or nothing but precisely sitting. So the whole point of shikantaza is just to sit. Doing nothing like a mountain does nothing. Going nowhere, nothing to accomplish, no special state to achieve. However, this is difficult for us. so difficult that we can even hardly conceive of it. Instead, we imagine that we sit here meditating. I'm supposed to do something called meditating. What is meditating that I'm supposed to be doing?

[26:05]

Or some other such idea. There's a wonderful story, Zen story, about a great Chinese Zen master, Yao Shan, just sitting. His teacher, Shito, was practicing together with him, asked, what are you doing? And Yao Shan replied, I'm not doing anything at all. And Shito said, then you are just idly sitting. And Yao Shan replied, if I were idly sitting, I would be doing something. Finally, Shito said, well, you say that you're not doing anything at all. What is it that you are not doing? Yao Shan said, even the 10,000 sages don't know. So even the 10,000 sages don't know what the mountains are doing when they are just sitting. The stages, the sages, like the mountains, let go of knowing when they are sitting.

[27:15]

We could say that Zazen, is a deliberate exercise in knowingly not knowing. Knowingly not knowing. Not doing doing and not knowing knowing. So when we sit in meditation, our zazen is stepping back from our conditioned thinking and releasing into the open, intimate space of not knowing. It's stepping into silence and stillness and non-striving and doing nothing. Again, doing nothing means to not move or not to engage or try to fix or change or seek anything in our experience just to allow our experience to be exactly what it is. And when we do that,

[28:17]

We can simply rest in allowing our experience to be what it is. It's profoundly peaceful. Have you ever tasted that? That profound peace of just allowing things to be as they are. So instead of trying to do something in meditation, we soften. We simply soften into being. Not as a noun, but as a verb. Allow ourselves to be. So we're not resisting, not moving away, making the effortless effort to just be the presence that we already are. And that everything else just to be the presence that it already is. So together we are presencing. And presencing is not a doing. It's not a doing. So we relax. and allow ourselves to ride the waves of moment-to-moment experience with an easeful attitude.

[29:23]

Allowing this larger field of being to hold us. And we simply watch. It's kind of like being the sky. Sometimes the mind in meditation can be described, the metaphor is used, as the sky. An open, vast, boundless, luminous sky. presence, awareness. Everything simply passes through it. The sky doesn't grab onto the clouds. It doesn't grab onto the birds. It doesn't go after the planes. It doesn't chase rainbows. It just allows everything that arises in it to pass through, noted, observed, and pass through. And the thing about that is that Ultimately, we may start that as a one step of meditation to be the sky observing the objects in the sky. But in time, the actual meditation might become one in which there's no difference between the sky and what's appearing in it.

[30:30]

There's no difference between open spacious awareness and whatever bird or plane or rainbow or cloud or thought or emotion that's passing through in that moment. finding again that place of non-separation, no difference, no othering. The meditation taught by the Buddha and practiced by Buddha's ancestors is deeply somatic, fully grounded in sensations, sensory experiences, feelings, emotions, and so on. We need to feel what we're feeling. It's not a cutting off from what we're feeling. It's going fully into the experience and allowing it and seeing it from the inside, you could say. So even our thoughts are related to our somatic as bursts of energy experienced in the body rather than some non-physical phenomenon that kind of are disconnected from our physical and neurological network.

[31:42]

So what the Buddha offered was a systemic process that results in the profound awareness in your body better than in your head. So again, what is awareness in the body? What is the body as awareness? What is to allow the body to sit as awareness? Dharma teacher Reggie Ray says that when we work deeply with the body, including in zazen, we make a series of discoveries that bear directly on the fundamental question that practice asks of us. Who am I? Who am I? The central discovery we make when we look deeply is that the unknown or experience of not knowing is the very center of our somatic being and the core of our personality. This Unknown is open, empty space, simply clear and unobstructed.

[32:48]

As we are able to surrender more and more fully into it, into the unknown, we discover that this ultimate space of the body has no boundaries or limits. In fact, it is absent of any reference points at all, including that of a concept of self. At the moment of meeting this space, if you will, there is quite literally no one, no separate object, observing and nothing being observed. So this is how we truly know the unknown. Not as a concept, but as a direct embodied object. Precisely because it cannot be known in any dualistic way. In other words, we can't stand back and observe it as perceiving and thinking and judging subject.

[33:54]

Because when we do step back, it's gone. The eye can't see the eye. Only in the moment of touching this state of being in our body, of touching embodied awakening, Is there the true knowing of our fundamental nature, a simply awareness knowing itself? Zazen is the way in which we take up the practice of deeply listening to and meeting reality, to enter into the reality and the nature of the mountains and waters and our true nature. As Dogen said, I came to realize clearly that the mind is not other than mountains, rivers, the great wide earth, sun, moon, stars. So I'll conclude with a poem by 8th century Chinese poet Li Po and it's called Zazen on Qingqing Mountain.

[35:06]

The birds... have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains. The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the cloud drains away. The last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains. So for those of us who are sitting the rest of the day together, thank you for sitting like mountains. Thank you for sitting with each other, supporting each other like mountain ranges, right? Embodying our presence, embodying our awareness, and encouraging each other to enter as deeply as into the mountain of our being as we can to discover the peace that waits for us there.

[36:14]

Thank you very much. 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, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[36:44]

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