This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Morning, everybody. Happy holidays. Nice to be here. Thank you for coming. Thank you. My favorite Zen story, which is the source of the name of our group in the Bay Area and of our organization, Everyday Zen, is the 19th case in the Mumonkan about Zen master Zhajo, who was famous for being very old, but this is the story about when he was very young, when he was first with his teacher, Nan Chuan.

[01:05]

Probably you all know about their story. Zhao Zhao came to Nan Chuan when he was a very young man. He took one look at him and somehow he knew that this was his destiny and that he was going to study with Nan Chuan as long as Nan Chuan lived. And he did that. He stayed with Nan Chuan for 40 years. Nanchuan died, and at the age of 60, Xiao Zhou said, now I better test my practice. So he went on a pilgrimage to visit other Zen teachers, a pilgrimage that took him 20 years. When he was 80, he said, well, I probably don't understand deeply enough yet, but I might as well stop being on pilgrimage and see what I can do. So he set up a place and began It was a small place near a famous bridge in China, and he lived for 20 more years or so, maybe 40 more, something like that.

[02:16]

Supposed to be, he died at 120. And he encountered in that time many, many Zen students with his relaxed, humble, and simple wisdom. I always imagine that because Zhaozhou didn't begin to teach until he was very old, he figured he had nothing to prove. Unlike other Zen masters of his day, he didn't really much raise his voice or wield his staff. His expressions were always plain and quite matter of fact, although they evidenced a deceptive profundity. Maybe his style of teaching came not only from his age and steady, settled practice, maybe not only from his relaxed personality, but also from this story, which was one of his early encounters with Nan Chuan.

[03:19]

He asked Nan Chuan, what is the way? Nan Chuan said, everyday mind is the way. Zhao Zhao said, if everyday mind is the way, how can I direct myself toward it? And Nanjuan said, if you direct yourself toward it, you'll be going in the opposite direction. Zhao Zhao was perplexed by this reply. Maybe he thought about it for a few minutes. Maybe he thought about it for several years. The story doesn't say. But eventually, or maybe immediately, he said to Nan Chuan, but if I don't direct myself toward it, how am I going to ever know it? And Nan Chuan said, the way is not a matter of knowing and not knowing. Knowing is an exaggeration. Not knowing is just stupidity.

[04:24]

Once you find the way, you'll see that it is as vast and boundless as space. And what does that have to do with ordinary yes and no thinking? Hearing this, Zhao Zhao understood for himself. Despite the reputation, I think most of these old Zen stories are not that hard to understand. What is the way? What a beautiful question. So simple. For somebody like Zhao Zhao, asking what is the way is like us asking, you know, why is the sky blue? Because if you're a monastic like Zhao Zhao, your whole life is devoted to study of the way. You're living in a monastery, you're reading texts, you're hearing lectures, you're engaging in

[05:27]

dialogue about the Dharma with your fellow monastics. Your whole life is nothing but the practice of the way. There's nothing else but the way. It's just like us. We go out every day and there's a blue sky, but whoever wonders about it. The sky is rather remarkable, really. So many faces of the sky. So many clouds and not clouds and so many colors. But who notices? We're busy people. We take the sky for granted. We don't wonder about it. We don't notice it. So to me it's so beautiful that Zhaozhou asks a question like this. What are we doing all this for? How come we wear these robes? How come we bow to these statues? How come we chant these sutras? What's it all about?

[06:28]

What is the Wei? I'm sure you all know that the Chinese word that we translate into English as Wei is Dao. And Dao is one of the most crucial words and concepts in all of Chinese thought. A word that was in the Chinese language and thought system long before Buddhism came to China, and it does mean way or path or method. But it also means, at the same time, it means the essence, the truth, reality itself. Taoism, which existed in China before Buddhism came, saw Tao as the way of nature, the way of reality, the way of truth, the way things go, the way things are, the eternal path of how things go.

[07:32]

In Western thinking, there's a big distinction between process and substance. Process is method and means. Substance is the end or the goal. That's the important thing. That's the essential thing. The way, the means, is just a way to arrive at the goal. But in China, from ancient times, truth and reality was not seen as essence or substance. It was seen as a process, as a way, as a path, as a journey. To make a very broad kind of statement, you could say that Chinese culture is concerned not so much with why or what, but with how. How do we live? How do we get along with one another?

[08:38]

So it makes a lot of sense that Chinese metaphysical concerns would be expressed with this word dao or wei, which emphasizes not so much a destination, but a journey. In Sanskrit, we have the equivalent word in Buddhism, marga, which means path or way. But in India, the Buddhists also had words like nirvana, bodhi, vimoksha, peace, awakening, to describe the goal of practice on which they were quite focused. In China, the word Wei or Dao was inclusive of both path and destination. This might be one reason why Zen, as the essential form of Chinese Buddhism, can seem in its discourse so different from other schools of Buddhism.

[09:42]

So Zhaozhou's question then is really, in a way, two questions at the same time. What is the truth? What is real? What is the essence of our living? And also, how do I practice? How should I situate myself? What techniques should I use? What attitude, what spirit should I be cultivating? And I am sure that for a young monk who has determined that he'll devote himself to practice for his whole life through, these are not casual questions. So I really admire the young Zhaozha for the innocence of this question. And maybe you have to be innocent, even to the point of being naive, to actually devote yourself to spiritual practice. Maybe all of us sitting here are actually pretty innocent and naive, at least in part of ourselves, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

[10:45]

I've long thought about the Buddha, that he must have been an extremely naive, simple person. I mean, think about it. Think about someone thinking to themselves, as the Buddha did, sickness, old age, and death. Wow, these are really big human problems. I think I'm gonna leave my present life and go forth and solve these problems. I don't know how I'm gonna do this, but I'm sure that there's a way. I mean, you gotta be really naive and innocent to think like this, you know? But that's what the Buddha thought. On the one hand, you could say, wow, what an arrogant person to think that he could solve what none of the rest of us would even dream of solving. But then you figure, well, he was a young man, and young men are like that. But really, I think it goes way beyond arrogance.

[11:52]

It's like being a child. A child would say that, right? A child would think that this is possible. Only a child could imagine such a thing. We adults were too sophisticated to take up such questions. We would never dream of such a thing. We adults, we don't ask ultimate questions. We would never ask, you know, what is really real? What is truly true? And how do I live and think in such a way that I will realize what's really real and what's really true? We are way too sophisticated for that. And way too involved with, maybe involved with is not the right word, maybe scarred by is better, the world. A phrase that we use without irony.

[12:57]

The real world, we say. too scarred by the real world to even dream of such questions. We just had a visit from our son and he was reading a book by Charles Bukowski and he was very happy with the Bukowski quote that says, most of us are born as geniuses and die as idiots. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? We're very bright when we're young and then we get swirled into the world and it just makes us stupider and stupider as we go along. In the so-called real world, you know, you don't ask these questions. You don't think you can engage these questions. Growing up in the world that we live in means letting go of such questions and replacing them with doable objectives and much more practical questions.

[13:57]

Questions like... How can I improve my health and financial security? These are our questions, right? How can I find what I want? And once I find it, make sure I hold on to it? These are the questions that we're concerned with. Yes, but not really. I actually don't believe these are the questions that we're concerned with. because I think that being human is having inside of us, all of us, some little place where that innocence and naivete still exists, as it did in Zhaozhou and Buddha. We all want to have the courage and the innocence to ask these ultimate questions, even though we've all been educated, read a lot of books, and we know there's no answers, even so. we want to engage these questions.

[15:00]

And I think we all know that our survival as real people, real people, depends on our asking and exploring such questions with all our hearts, pouring our whole lives into them, dedicating ourselves to them, I think we all know that somehow the practical notion that we should only ask questions we can realistically hope to answer is fundamentally flawed. That we really do have to have dreams. We really do have to have imagination. We really do have to have impossible hopes. Otherwise, what are we? We have to ask and we have to seek. whether or not we expect to find anything. I hear all of this in Nanchuan's wonderful question.

[16:07]

And, I mean, Zhaozha's wonderful question. And Nanchuan's response is kind of surprising. Everyday mind is the way. Quite an astounding answer when you think about it. Just the opposite. of what you would expect. The truth, the essence, the way, the path, the impossible dream, surely this is something lofty and removed, some profound insight, some secluded and exalted state of mind, but no. Nan Chuan says, everyday mind is the way. Nothing more, nothing less. In Chinese, the etymology of the word used here is something like normal, ordinary. Some people translate everyday mind as ordinary mind, normal mind. That which is repeated and therefore constant because it's repeated over and over again.

[17:14]

Constant, repeated and therefore eternal. And this in itself is astounding when you think about it. We think of the eternal as something somehow floating far away in the sky. But what would be eternal? It must be what's most common, most repeated over and over again all the time. Moments of time succeeding one another. Eternity. Standing up, sitting down, lying down day after day after day after day. Eternally. eating, going to the toilet, washing the dishes, eternal. The way the mind goes, the way consciousness works every single day, eternal. This is the way. We don't need to seek something more exalted.

[18:18]

To imagine something more is maybe a kind of fantasy. a kind of distraction. People who take up spiritual practice usually have good reasons. And the reasons are usually negative ones. Maybe we have encountered some suffering, some dissatisfaction, some trouble. Maybe the suffering and trouble have been strong enough to make it impossible for us to go on with our lives as they were. Or maybe not. Maybe we've been all more or less doing okay. But there's a nagging feeling of incompleteness. A feeling maybe we successfully ignore for a long time, but eventually can't ignore anymore and have to acknowledge. Or maybe we just got old enough. And you don't have to be that old, actually.

[19:24]

Some people, when they turn 30, they say, oh no, I'm getting old. Maybe we just got old enough to realize that we're not gonna live forever. We're not gonna live all that long, actually. And this is an alarming fact. And when you think about it, it actually doesn't make any sense. the more we examine it, the more we realize we don't know what it means. But we have to live in the face of it. How are we going to do that? Well, whatever our reasons for taking up spiritual practice, whether it's something like what I've been saying or it's something entirely different, It usually begins, doesn't it, with a feeling that our everyday life, our everyday experiences are not quite enough.

[20:26]

We were looking for something else. Something more real, something deeper, something more satisfying. So, this is not a story about Zhaozhou, you know, it's a story about us. What is the way? We have that question too. We come with that question. And we would be just as astonished as maybe Zhaja was when the teacher tells us, everyday mind is the way. Your ordinary, everyday mind. You're going to sleep. You're waking up. Your cup of coffee. Your day at work. You're cleaning the house. That's the way. That's the path. That's the truth. What? We might say. What? I didn't come here for that. My everyday mind is not the way. That's the problem. So what is Nan Chuan trying to say here?

[21:32]

Again, like the sky overhead, we take our everyday lives so much for granted. It's just like the blue sky in our lives. Our minds are so muffled with thinking and feeling most of which is completely unconscious, that we really don't know what's going on. We're barely noticing our moment-by-moment experience. Here's an experiment you can try sometime. Try for an hour, just one hour. Make it a half an hour. Make it a half an hour. Try for a half an hour just to track your state of mind. whatever you're doing for that half hour. As you're walking, standing, speaking, doing whatever you're doing, just noticing, how's my mind? How's my mind? What's going on in my mind right now? And you'll see that you really don't know. Your mind is actually somewhat muffled, somewhat preoccupied, somewhat dulled.

[22:38]

And you don't even know why. You notice there's some kind of mood going on that comes from somewhere and colors everything, and you don't even know what that mood is or where it's coming from, that mostly you're not completely alive to your life. You're not really noticing the fundamental experience that we are all always having, all the time. The one fundamental experience on which all other experiences are based but the only experience that we almost never, never notice, which is you are alive. You're not dead. You're alive. Life, which you don't even know what it is, is coursing through you, making everything else possible, and you don't really feel that, and you don't really know what that means. Being alive in time

[23:42]

This is an immense thing. Shining like a star, appearing out of nowhere, floating on an endless sea of time and being. That's what's going on. That's your everyday mind. It actually is what's going on. That is the way. So Nanjuan is not kidding. This is not a Zen answer. He's just telling them the truth. And then he says later, it's not a matter of knowing or not knowing like a question on an exam or something. Knowing is always an exaggeration and not knowing is stupidity. Why are our minds so muffled and confused? It's because we're always trying to know our life, to possess our life, to have our life work out as we would wish for this day, this week, this year, this decade, this lifetime.

[24:55]

Why? Because we think it's our life. We think we own it, and we think we manage it. Not that we have all that calculation in our mind, but when you think about it, that's the way we live. We think, you know, my life is mine and it's up to me to figure it out. We don't see this life as an impossible gift that isn't ours. It really isn't ours. Life is not yours, you know, it's not mine. We don't look at it that way. You didn't earn this life. You didn't ask for it. You didn't make it. you don't own it, and you don't even understand it. Knowing my life, possessing my life, that's not right. It's really an exaggeration. On the other hand, not knowing my life, not taking possession of it, not taking responsibility for the gift that's been given, that's not right either.

[26:07]

We care for our life like we care for a child or a pet, with loving kindness, the best we can, but without coercion. Once you find the way, Nan Chuan goes on, you will see that it is as vast and boundless as space. What does this have to do with yes and no thinking? And it's true, you know, your life is... as boundless as space. Every moment of perception, every moment of thought, every moment of feeling is as boundless as space. And this fact that you can actually appreciate and sense, even though you can never experience it in the literal sense of that word, has nothing to do with all the ways we have of conceiving of things, all our crude

[27:10]

and unexamined black and white yes and no ideas. And the best way to train your mind to be able to notice this vastness and boundlessness, well, we all know how to do that. That's what we learn at the Zen Center. How to do Zazen. How to do it, how to appreciate it, and the spirit of it. To sit and breathe and simply train yourself to pay close attention to what's going on right now To be able to understand that the mind is muffled is already to clarify it. And once you sit down and see how this goes, your path has begun. And little by little by little, over time, your life does come into view. And the dullness begins to brighten up. And you can feel what's going on in your life. You can feel the texture of a fabric, the weight of your clothes on your body, the warmth of the sun on your skin, the sound of someone's voice.

[28:23]

Every sensation brings with it the whole of life and death, if you can really be there for it. What religious experience do you need beyond that? And yes, sometimes everyday mind is not pleasant. Sometimes it appears as pain and suffering. Sometimes everyday mind is your anger, your fear, your greed, your worry, your confusion. Even the very spiritual longing that you've come to practice, hoping to quell, even that longing itself is everyday mind. the truth, the way, the path. As we all know, spiritual practice is not necessarily a walk through a park. And when such afflicted states of mind arise in us, as they will, we really wish they would go away, we wish we had a way of leaping right over them.

[29:37]

We try to figure out how they got there, a way of getting around it. He did it. She made me mad. He upset me. This situation is bad. This person is causing me pain. And sometimes it really gets tough when the person who's causing one pain is oneself. That's a hard one. We can feel pretty trapped and frustrated. How can we make the changes in our situation to make it better? We think. Maybe we even figure a good, healthy dose of Zen practice is going to help make it better. But no, everyday mind in that moment is the way. This moment of anger or frustration, this moment of anguish, grief, confusion,

[30:44]

In this moment, it's the way. What does it feel like? What does it look like? What color is it? How tall is it? Can we breathe with it? Can we allow it? Can we let our pain have its own life within us without doing battle with it every minute? Can we forbear trying to leap over it with our efforts to escape or make it disappear somehow? This is really what Nanshwan is telling us. We don't want to allow our internal pain to simply be what it is. We don't want to give it the space inside of us that it requires. We don't want to bring it back to the body, to the breath, to the awareness. But that's what we need to do. We need to forbear it and see what that in that moment, this is true, and this is our path.

[31:50]

And we practice this everyday mind koan, everyday. We breathe in, we breathe out. With that breath, we can say to ourselves, this breath, this is the truth, this is the way. This feeling in the body, maybe this pain in my knee or back, this is the way, this is the truth. This disappointment, this sorrow, this despair, this is the way, this is the truth. We finally have the courage to breathe with it, allow it, we finally give up trying to figure it out, strategize, or fix. Simple idea, not hard to understand, but more difficult to live.

[33:01]

But when we live this way, little by little by little, we will look at our life radically differently. We'll stop feeling. as if conditions run us. And that our days consist of strategies to alter conditions to suit. Because that is an exhausting life, especially in a complicated world. Now, of course, we're practical people, so yes, when conditions can be, should be adjusted, we adjust. Anyone would do that. But we realize that our happiness doesn't depend on getting the right conditions. Our happiness depends on our being able to appreciate fully the conditions that prevail. And that no matter what the conditions are, that's always possible.

[34:05]

And the depth at which we appreciate those conditions, whatever they are, can be endlessly developed. deeper and deeper. How would we be if we felt confident that we could appreciate the conditions of our life in the moment of our dying? How would we be if we felt like we could appreciate that moment even right now? What would we live our life like? How would it be to live our lives if we had that feeling? We would be free of the deep-seated dread that we're all carrying most of the time. And the world would appear radically different to us.

[35:10]

So this is a holiday weekend. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope everybody had a good dinner with family, friends. As I said, we had a great time with our son and daughter-in-law. We have the most beautiful, I think, probably, objectively speaking, the most beautiful seven-month-old granddaughter that anybody has, I think. And if you dispute this, we can, afterward, I'll show you photographs on my telephone. So we had a really good time. And I hope you also had a good time. And nowadays, a lot of people sitting around the table, you know, begin the meal with expressions of what they're grateful for. And this is a good idea, you know, to have a holiday in which is devoted to giving thanks and recalling what it is we're grateful for. So, a beautiful weekend, but also a weekend not without trouble.

[36:16]

There is no day on the planet Earth in human civilization that is not also a day of trouble. We were all enjoying our holidays. There were riots and buildings burning down in Ferguson. There was another shooting of a 12-year-old boy, black boy, in Cleveland. There was a lot of anguish in communities of color all over the country. Everybody in all communities anguished over all this. And it would be nice if it was limited to the United States of America, that all other places in the world were happy and peaceful. Only here we had trouble, but that was not the case. There were also suicide bombings in Afghanistan. There were... horrible killings in Nigeria, and many other things in places that did not come to our notice, even though they happened.

[37:27]

At the end of this week, I'm going down to Mexico to practice with our everyday sanghas in Mexico, and I'm thinking of all the suffering the people in Mexico are feeling in which, in their world, violence is an everyday Fear, realistic, everyday fear. Lawlessness is real. You know, one of our Sangha members was kidnapped at gunpoint. The idea of going to the police is ridiculous. You don't go to the police when this happens. The police and the bad guys are all in the same group. It makes no sense to go to the police. Just get more trouble. Zha Zha's teaching of everyday mind doesn't mean too much to us, if it doesn't help us to live in this everyday world as it really is. Our practice cannot be just a break, just a fairy tale.

[38:36]

Practice, the way, the path, is not a destination, it's a path. It's a way. In a few moments, we're going to chant, I'm almost done talking, and we're going to chant, beings are numberless, I vow to save them. This reminds us that Zen is a Mahayana path. And that means that everyday life, just as Nan Chuan teaches us, is vast and boundless as space. It is not taking place inside the little bubble of me. There is no such little bubble except in my mind. And that little bubble is the cause of my fear and anguish. No. My everyday life, your everyday life, takes place everywhere in this wide world. It includes all beings and their experiences of joy and suffering.

[39:43]

you know, now there's all these sort of pop, zen things. I have a friend from Greensboro, North Carolina who has a hairdresser. She doesn't practice zen, but she sometimes says to me, well, I'm taking the day off and I'm going to get my zen on. So she means by that, you know, I'm going to relax and be calm today and take it easy, go to the spa. So there is that idea that people have that that's very Zen, people sometimes say. Oh, you're so calm. Even though you got hit by a car, you're very calm. It's very Zen. So there's this popular idea that Zen is a path of calmness and happiness, which is true, I think. I think it's true, but also not true. I mean, it's true insofar as, yes, I actually think we all have a moral obligation to ourselves and everybody else that we should be calm and happy, as calm and happy as possible.

[40:55]

Because nobody is served. We're not served, and nobody else is served by our agitation, our anxiety, and our misery. We're not helping anybody. Sometimes we think the world is a mess, therefore I should be miserable and unhappy. But that doesn't make much sense, really. Who's going to be benefited by your misery? No, I actually think I have an obligation, I think we all do, to be as calm as I can be, as happy as I can be, so that I can share my calmness with you, share my happiness with you. We all have to do that. So yeah, I think they're right. But at the same time, I also have to suffer when you suffer. We all do. That's also part of our practice. How would it be possible, really, when you think about it, for any of us to rest happily when there is so much unconscious, destructive, unacknowledged racism, sexism, corruption, when our political system is so badly broken and so

[42:12]

unbelievably unjust, when our economic system, when you think about it for a while, is almost a form of legalized robbery. You know? When the financial people get caught and put in jail for breaking the law, I think, so what? What about all the people who are not breaking the law, who are also stealing from all of us? When you have a few people making... all the money and most of the people struggling, this is not justice. To practice everyday mind is to stop not noticing this. It's to notice it, to face it, and to figure out whatever is possible for you to do to point this out and to work against it.

[43:13]

Doing that is just everyday practice. It's nothing special. It's just the everyday practice of compassion and caring that helps you to expand your life and feel more reality and more happiness and more compassion. This doesn't require us to be bitter and or despairing, or to hate anyone. It only requires our activity, our energy, our intelligence, and our joy. Practice is a path. It's not a destination. The more we continue to practice, the more confidence we have that this way of life is really great. That this life that we're living is as boundless as space.

[44:17]

It's really, really true. And every step we take in practice is a good step. Every step we take is already complete. Every step we take includes happiness and sorrow on behalf of others at the same time. I think that part of being a human being is to have the imagination to be able to envision a world in which every human being, every person, every being has the opportunity for happiness and fulfillment. We can imagine such a thing. We can say it. Look, I just said it. And we've been saying it for thousands of years to one another. It's part of being human. To imagine it and to work to bring it about, whether it's possible or not, it doesn't make any difference.

[45:21]

Part of what Nan Chuan is teaching is that we will never be able to see the whole of life with our human eyes and our human intelligence. Life is always larger than what we can see and know. This makes us humble, and it gives us courage. We cannot let ourselves be limited by and discouraged by our small view of the world. But also, we cannot close our eyes to what we see. We have to open them, study our world, take an interest in it, and do what we can to benefit others. That's part of our path. We can't not do this. And this is the only way you could be happy. You can't be happy, you know, by yourself. There's no way. You have to expand your life. And that's the Bodhisattva path.

[46:26]

That's why we take the Bodhisattva's vow every day. No matter how much suffering there is, no matter how much injustice there is, no matter how much human greed and folly there is, just like the energizer bunny, you know, the bodhisattva keeps on going, keeps on going with courage and joy. That's just everyday mind. It's not a big deal. We roll up our sleeves and do what needs to be done. whether it's cleaning up the kitchen, the city, or the country. And then at the end of the day, night comes and we lay down and take a good rest. We're going to need it, because the next day it happens all over again. This is the simple, joyful practice of everyday life.

[47:33]

So, thank you to Abbot Ed. for inviting me. I'm really happy to be able to be here. I don't come very often, it's kind of a treat. We popped in, we were on the way to the airport to drop off our children, and we showed them the Buddha Hall. Noah, of course, has seen it, but Brenda, our daughter-in-law, hasn't, and my wife said, and this is where we were married. It's true, we were married in this room almost 40 years ago. So it's always nice to be here. Plus, we got to see Blanche, which is a treat. So thank you all, and good luck for your session and the end of your practice period. I know it's been a great one, and I know that everything is humming and thriving here at City Center. Thank you. 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.

[48:42]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[48:57]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.0