This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I hope you can hear in the back. My name is... Sojin. My teacher, Suzuki Roshi, gave me that name. I'm not going to tell you what it means. Mel. People call me Mel Weitzman. I was a student of Suzuki Roshi, our founder, for seven years. And I was once the abbot, co-abbot, Zen Center back in the 80s and 90s.

[01:01]

And it's nice to be back here to give a talk. I now reside in Berkeley and I am the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. So I want to talk about this morning about something very fundamental, some fundamentals of our practice and about our founder Suzuki Roshi's attitude toward some of these fundamentals. When our teacher Suzuki came to America, the one thing that, the most important thing for him to convey to his students was the practice of sitting still in Zazen.

[02:04]

Za means to sit and Zen means something else. Nobody knows. Zen means the fundamental of our life. So Suzuki Roshi was always urging us to find the most fundamental thing in our life. One day a student asked him, what is the most fundamental thing? And he said, the most fundamental thing is to keep asking the question, what is the most fundamental thing? So, It's not like we're handed something and you believe in it.

[03:07]

You have to keep, Suzuki Roshi was always urging us to keep, not looking for, but digging deeply to stay within the fundamentals of our life. So one of his key phrases was, nothing fancy. Nothing fancy and nothing extra. Nothing fancy and nothing extra. So it leaves you with almost nothing. But when you realize almost nothing, then you realize the fullness of your life. So... each one Suzuki Roshi we started out 1881 Bush Street in San Francisco a what was once a synagogue and then became a Japanese temple the Japanese congregation needed a a priest and so he

[04:31]

asked if he could come and do that. So they invited him and he came. And he said, I didn't... When I came to San Francisco, he said, I didn't... Before I came, I didn't try to learn anything about San Francisco. I didn't read any travelogues or try to get information. I just came. And the reason why was so that I could see it with my own eyes instead of through the eyes of digestion, pre-digested information. So that was always his attitude, was to see things through your own eyes. So Zazen was what attracted people to the practice. Zazen, sitting cross-legged. And in those days it was very difficult for us because there's always some discomfort.

[05:37]

Usually when we think about meditation, we think it's about something wonderful, something that makes us feel good, something like that. But actually, when we were sitting, it was very painful and difficult. But there was something very satisfying about that difficulty that just kept us continuing to do this practice. The difficulty, the satisfaction is in the difficulty. When you do something hard and you feel successful, you appreciate the difficulty. Our lives, in our lives, we all have some difficulty. I want somebody to raise their hand and say, I have no idea of a quality in this life. No. Life is suffering. But that suffering, going through that suffering, is a wonderful thing.

[06:43]

Suzuki Roshi used to say, if you don't have a problem, you don't have a practice. There's always a problem. Even if there's no problem, that's a problem. So we should appreciate our problem. We should know how to appreciate the problem we have. So we're always trying to change our problem to something better. But we may find something better, but something better is also a problem. So, the focus is always to come back to ourself, to know how to find our freedom and our composure within our problem, which is called our life. So there are several fundamental practices or

[07:55]

ways of practicing in Buddhism, which apply, of course, to our Zen practice because Zen is nothing but Buddhism, Buddhadharma. I don't like to say ism because I don't like isms, but Buddhadharma is the practice of Buddhists, whether there's an ism or not. So the first one is called faith. We don't think in Buddhadharma of a deity. Buddha is not a deity. Buddha was a wonderful enlightened person around 2500 years ago who found this path to freedom and reality. I sometimes think of

[09:00]

Our human life is like a big maze. In a maze, you have an entrance and an exit. And to get to the exit, there are all these dead ends. So to find your way through all these dead ends, to find a real way out, or in, as it were. So the Dharma... is the path through all these mazes that leads to liberation. And sometimes we say to enlightenment. So faith is a very important aspect because we all want to have faith in something. People say, I have no faith. an old-fashioned idea.

[10:05]

But actually, everyone wants to have faith in something. So we have faith in materialism, basically. If we don't have spiritual faith, we have material faith. Because you can't exist without it. You cannot exist without faith in something. And so there are all these people, all of us people, wandering around looking for something and we pick up whatever looks it's like for many people latching on to flotsam and jetsam because there's nothing else they don't have the path so We don't have, in Buddha Dharma, we don't have a deity, which is the praten head, but we have the Dharma.

[11:10]

Buddha, when he was dying, said, if you follow the Dharma, it's just like following me. You have to find your own salvation. The Dharma is a lamp. and will lead you if you practice. So practice becomes the main thing, how you practice the Dharma. So Suzuki Roshi used to say, we have to have faith in something that's bigger than ourself. Even though it's not called a deity. Buddha is not a deity. But in... the course of time, the ancients, they realized it's not right to have faith in a person dead or alive.

[12:14]

But there must be something behind the Buddha as a person. What did Buddha have? So they divided Buddha into three people. One was called the dharmakaya. Kaya means body, which is the essential body. And then there's the human body. And then there's the one in between, which is the wisdom body, Buddha's wisdom. So the dharma body is... called Buddha nature many different names for the Dharma body Buddha nature we call it which everyone is an aspect of we're all aspects of Buddha nature we're all this is our basic nature and we all share it you know in most religions

[13:31]

There's a soul. In Buddha Dharma, we say, there's no soul. And everybody says, oh. But actually, there is. But we all share it. There's only one. And we're all aspects of that one soul. But we act as if we're all different, because we are. We're all different. and we're all the same. We all share that one aspect of our basic nature. So faith actually is enlightenment. We talk about enlightenment. What is enlightenment in Buddhism? It's a big deal, you know. practice to get enlightened.

[14:32]

I have to say that that was never a goal of mine. That's why our practice became pretty easy for me. Because enlightenment was never something that I was running after. Enlightenment in our practice means the beginning of practice. What leads us to practice is our enlightened mind. And the beginning, the middle, and the end is enlightenment. So Master Dogen, the fountainhead of our practice in Japan, said, practice is enlightenment, enlightenment is practice. It's not like you're searching for enlightenment by entering practice. As soon as you enter practice, enlightenment is there. What's missing is realization. So faith and enlightenment are the same thing.

[15:35]

They're different but they're the same. One moment of practice is one moment of enlightenment. But we think enlightenment is some big deal. It's just our ordinary life. Faith is not a big deal either. It's just our ordinary life. Without faith, we can't even eat or walk or talk. So our teacher, Suzuki Roshi, used to talk about emphasize practice. Main thing is practice. The reason I liked I was drawn to this practice is because it wasn't like going to church on Sunday.

[16:37]

It was like your whole life has a meaning because you practice every day. When you practice every day, enlightenment comes forth. So enlightenment is just our basic nature, our true basic nature. It's not like we get something. It's like when we take off the covering, there it is. So practice is about letting go. Taking off the covering and letting go. When you sit tzazan, you just let go. We don't often have that opportunity in our life because we're always on the go. We're not on the stop. So because we're always on the go, our mind is full of stuff. Suzuki Roshi once said, my mind sometimes is like a garbage can.

[17:43]

You know, it's great to sit south and empty the garbage can. Or if you have a computer, empty the garbage, right? By pressing a button. The trash. Empty the trash. having a clean slate, moment by moment, our enlightened mind comes forth. Sometimes we see children with disabilities, and they're laughing at each other. There's certain something that they don't have that allows them to be perfectly normal. We think, oh, they're abnormal, and we're normal. But actually, it could easily be the other way around. So faith is our true nature.

[18:44]

It just is. And when we let go of our clinging to various false securities, faith can come forth. It just is there. Enlightenment can come forth because it's our basic nature. It's not something extra. It's just our norm. So there are other factors. One is called effort. if you enter practices based on effort. Sometimes we call it effortless effort. You know, when your whole life is in balance, whatever you do is effortless.

[19:50]

You know, what we do, and most of us in our life, we work real hard and then we rest. And then we work real hard, and then we get up again in the morning, work real hard, and then we rest. But actually, it's possible to rest while you're active. So the balance of ease and effort should be at the same time. So that whatever your effort or your activity is, there's always the restfulness within it. Zazen actually is our teacher, sitting cross-legged on the cushion for periods of time. We say that we receive Buddha's teaching through Zazen. It actually teaches us everything we need to know about the fundamentals of our life, just sitting still.

[20:54]

And it teaches us that within our activity is stillness. And within stillness is our activity. So we say that sitting still in zazen, which is to take the correct posture with effort, that the balance of effort and ease is called bliss. So in the beginning, you're fighting your difficulties. But at some point, you just give up. And when you give up, you have ease. And the difficulty becomes effort.

[21:59]

My teacher, our teacher, Suzuki Roshi, we always kind of were in awe of him because he was just so matter-of-fact. He didn't look like anybody special or act like anybody special, but there was something very special about that nothing special, which was always at ease. no matter what was happening. It's called composure. He talked a lot about composure. When we are not caught by anything, we have composure. Caught by anything means attachments. I think a lot of our illness comes from illnesses. are exacerbated by our fears and our lack of composure.

[23:13]

And we perpetuate something. And it's hard for us to let go because we're creatures of attachment. I was thinking, we're creatures of addiction. We are addicted to almost everything. And you may think, I'm not addicted. I don't smoke or drink. But we're addicted to something, mostly. So addiction means that you're no longer in control. Whatever it is that you're addicted to is controlling you, including time. Master Joshu in China, one of the famous masters, was talking to a monk. And the monk said, you know, I'm just so busy and like, I don't have time for all those things that I have to deal with. And Joshu said, you are controlled by time, whereas I control time.

[24:20]

This is one of the big problems of our life in the 21st century, is that in the information age and in the travel age, We can go anywhere we want. We are addicted to activities that were controlled by time. And then we love taking a vacation. And even in the vacation, we're controlled by time. So how to find our freedom and... so that our effort is not controlled by attachments. And then there's something called mindfulness.

[25:26]

Mindfulness is the latest thing in spirituality. But it's wonderful because in every wholesome state of mind, there's mindfulness. So it means, there's something called the practice of recollection in which we keep coming back to ourself. Our mind wanders. If you really pay attention to how your mind is thinking is going all the time. And so when we're doing something, we're very distracted. So distraction is normal human activity. It's called dreaming. We live in a dream. We do. So to come back to the reality beyond dreaming is important. So in our meditation, in our zazen, our mind is always being distracted.

[26:29]

And we think, I sat 40 minutes of zazen, and it was only one second when I was really paying attention. And then you start crying. But actually, that's the normal mind. The mind is something that is distracted. And if it doesn't have a subject or an object, it creates one. Because it needs... something to cling to. So we become attached to various things because our mind needs something to cling to. So in Zazen, we learn how to not control our mind, but to not be caught by it. Not to have a blank mind. A blank mind is not meditation. Meditation is to not be bothered by the mind stuff, to be free of the mind stuff, because it's just like a bubbling spring.

[27:36]

We call it sometimes a torrent, mental torrent, because it's always there, just rushing through our head. to allow us to see all that as the scenery of our life. Mental and emotional baggage. Then there's something called meditation. We call it zazen, which is not exactly meditation because many meditation practices in the usual sense, are to gain something. I do it to calm my mind or I do it for various reasons. Well, we have various reasons when we come to zazen, when we come to practice. But you learn that there's nothing to gain.

[28:40]

So meditation or zazen is the most useless thing. It is the most useless thing. because we always want to use everything. We're using up the world until we're standing on a little piece of earth. We will be, because it's more important to have wealth than it is to have earth. I'm sorry. But what Suzuki Roshi always talked about was no gaining mind. The mind is not that you're not doing something to get something else. It's not a means to an end. It's just to be present in reality.

[29:46]

So it's called stability. It's called just doing. Shikantaza, the word, this term, shikantaza, Japanese word, which means just this. So in meditation, there's no past and there's no future. There's only just this now. which is the hardest place to be because we're always going somewhere. I mean, that's normal and natural to be always going somewhere. But just to be somewhere is really hard. The nature of the world is that everything is changing and we're no longer the same person exactly that we were a moment ago. And so we're always creating karma.

[30:50]

Karma means a volitional action, basically. So we have good volitional actions which lead to good results and evil inclinations and thoughts and activity which lead to evil consequences. So everything leads to a consequence that we do. There's nothing that we do that doesn't lead to some consequence. except Zazen. That's where we suspend karma, which is the hardest thing, because we always want something. So in Buddha's Four Truths, Four Noble Truths, there's suffering is the first one. We're subject to suffering. And the reason why is because we always want something. That's the cause of suffering. Wanting.

[31:53]

So we want, the stereotype is, we don't have what we want, and we have what we don't want. And we can't be with people that we want to be with. We have to be with people we don't want to be with. And so forth and so on. So life does not go our way. For some people it does, and there are times when it does, but inevitably it doesn't. So everything we have, we will lose, including things, people, and the world. So how to just really be here, how to just be present, so that our life comes to life moment by moment. Pure life just comes moment by moment.

[32:55]

We experience that without any taint or without any partisanship. We're just pure existence. We don't experience pure existence very much. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we'll be sitting somewhere and suddenly everything will fall away. We say, God, what a wonderful feeling. That's pure existence. There's no past, no future. They're just the present with nothing but what's here. So this is zazen, just pure existence. called truth or reality. We say the real world, you know. We have this, well, you know, when we get out there into the real world, but this is the real world.

[34:05]

It's all real, even though it's not real. It's real delusion. It's real illusion. So sometimes we call that samadhi, samadhi means imperturbability, basically. There are many ways to express it, imperturbability or being with each moment as it arises, being one with each moment as it arises. That's why our effort is to be one with our activity. Whatever you're doing, just be totally one with it. So there's no separation. So Zazen means no separation. There's no division.

[35:09]

You are just one with the universe. Discrimination means to divide. We compartmentalize. So we're always compartmentalizing. We're always dividing one thing into pieces, which is normal and natural. But we don't experience the one thing that is being divided. You can experience the one thing that's being divided in each division. That's possible. That's called practice within activity. And then there's practice within stillness. That's Zazen. But when you're practicing either both on the cushion and in the world, it's the same. It's just that in Zazen, the dynamic activity is in stillness. And in your daily life, the stillness is within your activity.

[36:10]

So Zazen is like when you spin a top, and the top hits the floor, and it looks like it's standing still, but it's full of dynamic activity, and it's spinning. And if you were to hit the top, it would go spinning across the floor because of its great dynamic activity. That's Zazen. All that dynamism is contained within the stillness. And then when you go out into the world, The stillness is within the activity. So that it's always zazen. We sometimes say the whole universe is doing zazen. It's the activity of the universe. So it's not something special. It's really not something special. It's just experiencing what is. And then there's something called prajna or wisdom.

[37:19]

We all like to be wise, but wisdom is rare in this world. There's cleverness. And there's smarts. We say, oh, this person is so smart in business. But there's not much wisdom. Wisdom is... Pragya is the wisdom of the universe. Suzuki Roshi called it big mind. Big mind and small mind. Small mind is our thinking mind. But wisdom is the mind which is beyond our thinking and which animates everything. It's the source of everything. So sometimes we call it Buddha nature. essence of mind.

[38:22]

Suzuki Roshi called it big mind. Small mind is our, when small mind is actually an expression of big mind. So it's not bad. You know, when we're thinking correctly, that's big mind. When we're thinking incorrectly, that's just small mind. Ego is small mind. When we think egotistically, we're separating ourselves from the universe and putting ourselves in a dominant position through ignorance. But ignorance is also Buddha nature. Yes, everything is. But it's really great when wisdom wills, even if we don't like it. So when we say, when we let go of, when we offer, I like to think of it, when we offer small mind to big mind, then we allow big mind to appear because big mind is simply faith, enlightenment, effort, equanimity.

[39:45]

So the main thing is flexibility and balance. We have all these factors to balance. So when we do meditation, when we sit in Zazen, we balance all the factors of our life at that moment. The posture looks like it's stiff, but it's not. if you're really sitting correctly, it's nothing but flexibility and ease. And when things get out of balance, we have to balance them again. My old teacher would say, everything is falling out of balance, moment by moment, and regaining its balance. And if you think about that, you realize it's true. So we have to maintain our balance moment by moment and regain our balance moment by moment.

[40:54]

So I want to say one more thing, just one more thing, about meditation, as it's called. It's called samadhi. So samadhi is the balanced state, but also There's something we call jijuyu samadhi, which means self-joyous samadhi, or self-fulfilling. And the other side of that is offering that to others. And the offering of that to others is the most important thing. Because otherwise, practice just becomes a self-centered kind of indulgence. The purpose of practice is to help others, to offer whatever it is that we realize to others so that everyone has the opportunity to find it in themselves.

[41:58]

That's my offering, and I hope that we all will find enlightenment and have good faith with each other. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:01]

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