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. This morning, I'm basing my talk as a commentary on my teacher, and our founder of Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi. This is a talk that he gave in the 60s. Suzuki Roshi was always interested and always was talking to us about what is the most fundamental. And he was very happy to talk to us.

[01:11]

You know, when a teacher actually has students that are interested in the Dharma, it's very encouraging. We have scholars, Buddhist scholars, a lot of Buddhist scholars these days who are teaching universities, but they're teaching to university students who are not necessarily interested in the subject. So when they meet practitioners who are really interested in the subject, it's very thrilling for them because people tend to understand what they're talking about. We have a mixed audience, you know, Sunday morning at Green Gulch. So how to present our teaching to a mixed audience and to many people who have never really done meditation before is a little bit of a challenge.

[02:19]

But Suzuki Roshi's talk, for me, His talks are always very plain and simple, but sometimes people say, oh, I don't understand what he's talking about. But that's understandable, no pun intended. So here he's talking about, he uses examples of daily life and our activity to express his understanding of the Dharma. So here he's talking about the soil as the ground of our being. He says, most of us study Buddhism as though it was something that was already given to us. In other words, we read so much literature, we have so much literature in Buddhism

[03:25]

Nobody can read it completely because it takes too long. Although some people have done that. And so this is, you know, the history of Buddhism is so long and accumulated knowledge and understanding is so vast. And so we think, well, that's Buddhism. And so he says, most of us study Buddhism as though it were something that was already given to us. We think that what we should do is preserve the Buddhist teaching, like putting food in the refrigerator. Then, to study Buddhism, we take the food out of the refrigerator. So it's always there preserved. But he says, whenever you want it, it's already there. But instead... Zen students should be interested in how to produce food from the field, from the garden.

[04:29]

So we put the emphasis on the ground. During Buddha's time, you know, a teacher, when a teacher has students, there's no literature. So it's simply the teacher and the students practicing together. And the students... observe the teacher. The teacher and the students interact with each other. In Buddha's time, to begin with, after he started teaching, there were no precepts. But little by little, students would bring him a question like, what do we do about this? And what do we do about that? And then, little by little, precepts were developed. And so that kind of practice is pioneering practice.

[05:33]

There's nothing to rely on except your interactions with your teacher and the way the Dharma is expressed. So after Shakyamuni, Buddha, passed away, his students, of which there were quite a number, had a council. And they decided what it was, Buddha, that they wanted to follow what he said, or the way he was. So they incorporated a certain kind of practice. But there were other people, other students who weren't so sure. And they had their own understanding of what Buddha said. It's interesting. The understanding is that when Buddha spoke, everyone understood it in a different way.

[06:43]

Which is quite true. If you've ever given a talk... on the Dharma, you find that people will come up to you and they'll say, you know, when you said this and that, you said, I did? So everyone hears it in a different way and digests it according to their understanding. And so we have different schools of Buddhism according to the way many people understood it. So just in the 400 years after Buddha's demise, there were 18 schools, 18 or 20 schools of Buddhism, which each had a different slant on Buddha's teaching. And they were competitive with each other, which is good, because that really helped to figure out what Buddha was really talking about. So it boiled down to

[07:47]

12 schools. So we have 12 schools of Buddhism, of which Zen is one of them. But they were philosophical schools, mostly, and schools which followed certain sutras or teachings of Buddhism. The Zen school, which came into prominence mostly in China, although the thread is through India, did not rely so much on the sutras and the canonical works that most Buddhists rely on. So Zen students typically have relied on meditation. Although most schools of Buddhism have some sort of meditation, the Zen school actually was identified as the meditation school.

[08:56]

Meditation and intuition. So there are many philosophical schools of Buddhism which are quite intellectual and will boggle your mind if you read them with logic. But the Zen school is the intuitional school and the meditation school. So meditation is in, for the Zen school, which we call Za Zen, is intuition. Intuition means directly touching without going through the process of thinking. It's sometimes identified with a hunch. I have a hunch.

[09:58]

And we say, well, that's intuition. Maybe, sometimes. But a hunch can also just be a false way of thinking. Intuition, though, is direct understanding. So we say that our teaching comes through... intuition and our Buddha nature. Buddha nature is the blank slate on which everything depends. If you want to make a picture, you don't take a piece of paper or a canvas that has something else written on it. You take a blank sheet of paper and then you cover it with your painting or your writing or whatever. And then when you do that, you don't see it as a blank piece of paper anymore.

[11:01]

But it still is, even though you put your stuff on it. It's like a table that has nothing on it. If you have a table that has nothing on it, in about two days it will be full. of stuff. But the table is always empty. You take the stuff off and the table is always empty. So this is the ground. Emptiness is the ground of all of our activity. So he says, all of us have Buddha nature. Buddha nature actually is the ground. And the teachings that grow from Buddha nature are similar to one another. He's talking about the various schools of Buddhism. The teaching of different schools of Buddhism do not differ so much, but the attitude towards the teaching is different.

[12:06]

When you think that the teaching is already given to you, then naturally your effort will be to apply the teaching to the common world. So then he talks about various schools and their teaching, which I don't want to go into. But Buddha tried to save us by destroying our common sense. Usually we are not interested in the barrenness of the ground. Our tendency is to be interested in something that is growing in the garden, not in the bare soil itself, unless you are an organic gardener. But if you want to have a good harvest, the most important thing is to make the soil rich and to cultivate it well. The Buddha's teaching is not so much about the food itself, but about how it is grown and how to take care of it. Buddha was not interested in a special deity or in something that was already there.

[13:09]

He was interested in the ground from which various gardens will appear, and for him everything was holy. even though we say no holiness. So, you know, in Zen, whatever we say includes its opposite. People get very confused by Zen sayings and Zen koans and so forth. But the key is that whatever we say, there's always an opposite. This is the world of duality. Everything depends on its opposite. Good depends on bad. Right depends on wrong. Light depends on darkness. Everything has its opposite. So this is the world of discrimination. Discrimination means black and white. Black depends on white, and white depends on black. So everything is split.

[14:18]

This is the world of the split. And discrimination means to separate. We separate one thing from another. The discriminating mind is always separating one thing from another. And then we have compartmentalization. Compartmentalization. So, the ground of being is to reconcile all the dualities, black and white, dark and light, good and bad, right and wrong. When we base our understanding on non-duality, we rise above the dualities, even though the dualities are still there.

[15:23]

So it's not exactly two, it's not exactly one. So when he talks about the ground, he's talking about the oneness of duality. So yes, we are interested in when we plant our lettuce and tomatoes. We are interested in them growing. We watch them grow up and we water them. Now that we have a drought, you can water your tomatoes. You can water all your vegetables. This is a little sidetrack. By using the water that you would ordinarily put down the drain. You can do the whole thing just using the water that ordinarily goes down the drain.

[16:29]

If you put a little container underneath the faucet, and you see how much goes into that container that would go down the drain, and it only takes a minute. So all this time, we've been wasting all this water. When I was... When I first began, well, I started practicing with Suzuki Roshi in 1964. And 1967, he asked me to start the Berklee Zen Center, believe it or not. And so my practice was, I had a huge backyard, and the practice was to started a garden and I was in on the beginning of the organic gardening movement so I had a lot of experience doing that and just doing that in connection with Zazam was a great learning experience about our life and how everything is produced and the evanescence of life

[17:50]

and the meaning of what it is we're doing. It's all there in the ground. It's also all there in Zazen. So what Tsukiroshi is saying here is Zazen is our teacher. Zazen, when we said Zazen, we enter the ground of being. We let go of everything. We're not being guided by but we're opening our intuition. So when you sit in zazen, you sit up straight because it's easier, better than lying down because you fall asleep easier when you're lying down. And just exist moment by moment. You're living your life one moment at a time. and you don't miss anything.

[18:53]

And all the teaching comes through zazen itself. So this is taking care of the ground. When we take care of the ground, we learn everything. We really learn everything we need to know through zazen, which doesn't mean that zazen takes care of everything. But we understand the cause of suffering when we sit in meditation. This is Buddha's message. He said, I only teach suffering, the cause of suffering, and the cure. Everything else is extra. There's a lot of extra stuff. So suffering, the cause of suffering, and the cure is not so interesting. I mean, it is interesting for a while, but then, you know. So how to stay centered on the message is called practice.

[20:03]

So Buddhist practitioners narrow down their life activity in order to really focus on what is essential. So for the Zen school, zazen, meditation is essential. That's why we have this meditation hall, which is the center of our practice. It's the ground which teaches us everything. We learn what the cause of suffering is by sitting. We learn how it comes to us and how we create it and how we free ourselves from creating it for ourselves and for others. So he says, Buddha did not think of himself as a special person. He was just ordinary. He tried to be like the most common person, wearing a robe, begging with a bowl.

[21:10]

He came from aristocracy, but he left that to seek his fortune and ended up with a begging bowl. And he thought, I have many students because the students are very good, not because of me. Buddha was great because his understanding of people was good, because he understood people, he loved them, and he enjoyed helping them. Because he had that kind of spirit, he could be a Buddha. So this is kind of like, Suzuki Roshan was like that. So he understood it very well. He liked the students. Because he liked American students. Because we were so naive. And we didn't know anything. We were like babies. And all the hippies were coming to him.

[22:12]

Because he loved hippies. Because they were making an effort to get beyond being stuck in a dualistic world. And so he could hit fresh minds, even though we were grown up, sort of. But fresh minds and willingness. to learn something and flexibility. Flexibility, of course, is the key to everything. Rigidity is the key to suffering and flexibility is the key to release from suffering.

[23:18]

So flexibility is a very important term and we don't think about it too much, but if you think about it you will see that it's so when the wind blows the grass leans over and goes with it and then when the wind's passed the grass comes back up this is the secret of life is grass the trees are wonderful and they're tall and they're but they're very accessible to the wind, and at some point the wind blows them over. Anything that's too rigid will be blown over. So Suzuki Yoshi has another analogy here, which I like very much. He says, our everyday life is like a movie playing on the wide screen.

[24:25]

Most people are interested in the picture on the screen without realizing there is a screen. I think I'd mentioned that. When the movie stops and you don't see anything anymore, you think, well, I'll come back again tomorrow, tomorrow evening. I'll come back and see another show. When you are interested in the movie, when you are just interested in the movie on the screen, it ends. Then you expect another show tomorrow. or maybe you are discouraged because there's nothing good on right now. You don't realize that the screen is always there. Our life is driven by momentum. We go from one activity to another with momentum. And when the momentum and the rhythm is smooth and easy and we have an idea about what we're doing, we feel pretty good.

[25:36]

But life doesn't go that easily. There are always barriers that stop us from doing what we want. But because we need to keep moving, we don't really see what's fundamental. It's hard to see the fundamental. So in the Dharma, there are three fundamental things that are basic. One is there is no abiding self. Number two, everything changes. Nothing remains the same from one moment to another. And the third is everything is Nirvana. It's also said everything is suffering. So take your pick. You can pick suffering or nirvana.

[26:39]

And suffering and nirvana are two opposites. But true nirvana means the reconciliation of suffering and freedom. The reconciliation of all opposites is how we are freed from suffering. So the screen is the fundamental, and it accepts the duality of the movie. The movie only exists because of opposites. Here he says, But when you're practicing, you realize that your mind is like a screen. If the screen is colorful, colorful enough to attract people, then it will not serve its purpose.

[27:41]

The fundamental thing can have nothing. It has to be. It can't have any color or form or shape, even though the screen has a shape. So to have a screen which is colorful, to have a pure... So it's important to have a screen which is not colorful. To have a pure, plain white screen is the most important point. But most people are not interested in the pure white screen. It's hard to be interested in the pure white screen. When we sit in Zazen, people say, but I'm bored, because there's nothing to think about except what is happening at the moment, from one moment to the next. from one moment to the next, you're a new person. Our tendency is to think, well, I'm the same person that I was a minute ago. Yes and no. Because changes are minute and not graspable so easily.

[28:50]

If you go out to look at your tomatoes when it's a hot summer, You say, they've grown since yesterday. That's pretty obvious. You can actually almost watch them grow when it's really hot. But it's hard to see when you're looking in the mirror that you've changed. Although sometimes you look in the mirror and say, I've changed. When did that happen? But it's happening all the time. moment to moment, it's happening all the time. It is said that all the cells in our body are renewed every seven years. So there's nothing really permanent. I think it is good to be excited by a movie.

[29:51]

To some extent you can enjoy the movie because you know that it is a movie. but we don't always see our life as a movie. We're very serious about our life. We should be serious about our life, but hey, you know, lighten up a little bit. Lighten up means to be flexible. Lightness and flexibility is one of the prime conditions for happiness. So even though you have no idea of the screen, still your interest is based on an understanding that this is a movie with a screen and there is a projector or something artificial so you can enjoy it. This is how we enjoy our life. If you have no idea of the screen or the projector, perhaps you can't see it as a movie.

[30:54]

Zazen practice, which is our meditation, is necessary to know the kind of screen that you have and to enjoy your life as you enjoy the movies in the theater. You are not afraid of the screen. You do not have any particular feeling for the screen, which is just a blank screen. So you're not afraid of your life at all. You enjoy something that you are afraid of. When he says that you enjoy something you're afraid of, you're talking about you go to horror movies. You know, we're all interested in that horror part of our lives, right? So we like to go to horror movies. I don't particularly like to go to horror movies, but a lot of people do. Maybe you do. But he says, you enjoy something you are afraid of. You enjoy something that makes you angry or makes you cry or scream. And you enjoy the crying and the anger, too. We do that. We enjoy our anger, not crying. If you have no idea of the screen, then you will even be fearful of enlightenment.

[31:57]

What is it? Oh, my. If someone attains enlightenment, you may ask him about the experience that he had. Oh, and when you hear it, oh, no, that's not for me. But it is just a movie, you know, something for you to enjoy. You know, I remember Suzuki Roshi used to say, be careful about wanting enlightenment, because when you actually have it, you may not like it. I think that's very true. That's why most people don't, although enlightenment is basic to our nature, it is our nature, when we understand how to rely on the basis.

[33:00]

That's enlightenment. But that means that we have to let everything else go that we rely on. This is basic to all religions. Buddhism does not have a deity Buddha is not a deity although we deify Buddha a lot but basically Buddha is not a deity Buddha was not interested in a deity particularly he grew up in India where everyone was believing in a deity but he said that's not the proper focus. He didn't say that was bad or wrong or anything. He just said, that's not the right focus. You're focusing on something that is in the refrigerator called the deity.

[34:08]

You open the door and there he is. But we should rely on the ground of being, the ground of, which is like a deity. It has aspects of deity. Buddha nature has aspects of deity, but we don't call it a deity. So he says the white screen is not something that you actually attain. It is something that you always have. So the white screen is your basic nature. The reason you don't feel you have it is because your mind is too busy. When we sit in Zazen, we let go of our thinking mind, but the thinking mind is always there anyway. You cannot stop it, because it's like a rushing torrent, if you think about it. It never stops. Even when you're asleep, it keeps working in dreams, expresses itself in dreams.

[35:18]

And if it's not expressing itself in dreams, it's expressing itself as subconscious activity. If you say you're a musician and you come to a place where you play something over and over, but you just can't do it right, then you let it go. And then six months later, you do it again, and there it is. Because your subconscious mind has been working on it. over and over, without you knowing about it. You say, oh, there it is, so easy. It's the same thing with learning of any kind. When we study koan, which is the examples of the teachers and the students' understanding together, they seem incomprehensible. sometimes. But you study it and then you let it go.

[36:21]

And sometime later you say, boom, there it is. I get it. That's the way our mind works, mostly subconsciously. So when we sit, we don't focus on the thinking mind, because the thinking mind is always going on. What we focus on is posture and breathing. And then we realize our basic nature, which is not dependent on any of those things, but which supports them all. So the white screen is not something that you actually attain. It is something you always have. The reason you don't feel you have it is because your mind is too busy. Once in a while, you should stop all your activities and just make your screen white, blank. That is zazen. We say instead of like white, sometimes you use white piece of paper, that's good, but it's more like the empty sky.

[37:23]

This is the foundation of our everyday life and our meditation practice. Without this kind of foundation, your practice will not work. All the instructions you receive about how to have a clean white screen, even though it is never pure white because of various attachments and previous You know, pure mind means mind which is not compartmentalized. Non-discriminating mind is mind is not compartmentalized. But nevertheless, because of our past karma, our mind is, we don't say, when we talk about precepts, precepts like don't take life and don't steal and so forth. We don't say that you have broken the precepts unless you totally give up.

[38:31]

We say when you transgress a precept, we say you have stained the precept. So that stain is there in our consciousness. But it's like the most comfortable clothes that you have are the ones that you've worn over and over and over again. And they're almost worn out. And they have all these stains and holes and stuff in them. But you love them because they feel so comfortable. They're your friend. That's the way our practice is in our mind. So when we practice zazen with no idea of anything, we're quite relaxed or at ease. I don't like to use the word relax because it is difficult to have complete ease in our usual posture.

[39:34]

We take the posture of zazen. To do this, we follow the instructions that have been accumulated from the experience of many people in the past. They discovered that the posture of zazen is much better than other postures. better than standing up or lying down. But if you practice zazen following the instructions, if you do, if you practice zazen following the instructions, it will work. But if you do not trust your own pure white screen, your practice will not work. So this is the basis of, you know, when you have realization, We don't practice zazen to gain something. We don't practice zazen to get enlightened or to be Buddha or to picture Buddha or anything like that. We just sit, period. This is called just doing.

[40:34]

And just doing means that each moment is one total lifetime. When we talk about lifetimes and birth and death, it's a big problem. So when we talk about birth and death, we say, I was born at such and such a time. I was a baby. I was an adolescent. I grew up. We married. Worked, blah, blah, blah. Old age and death. So we live that drama. in between what we call birth and death. But actually, birth and death are happening continuously on each moment. That's called everything changes. Everything is changing. Moments of birth and death are happening all the time. And the only way to be free from that is to be totally present in the moment, in each moment, to live your life thoroughly on each moment.

[41:45]

That's practice. To live our life thoroughly in each moment, to be present in each moment with the circumstances that are here right now. So when we sit, we have the opportunity to do only that. One breath is when we inhale, that's coming to life. When we exhale, that's letting go. Inspiration is when we take a breath. Expiration is when we let it go. And at the bottom of the expiration is complete stillness, where you can actually experience a moment of timelessness. And then we come back to life on the inhale. This is just happening all the time. It's not our desire to do this.

[42:48]

It's simply our desire to try to understand it. Because this is what the whole thing is. This is inspiration, expiration is the whole thing. That's the basic thing. So we flow with our breathing. We flow within. inhalation, and we flow with the exhalation. And then at the bottom is a moment of complete, complete moment. That's nirvana, that complete moment. So when we breathe in our chest, when our breath doesn't go below our chest, then we realize there's some tension there, tenseness for some reason. fear, tenseness, whatever. So to breathe deeply, to allow ourselves to breathe deeply, inhaling, exhaling, you get a touch of nirvana.

[43:57]

It's the basis of our life. Nirvana is not just some special experience. It's just the ground of our life. It's what supports everything. So Suzuki Rishi talked about breathing as like a swinging door. The door swings open, the door swings closed. The door swings open, the door swings closed. And we don't have anything to do with it. It's just a universal activity. So we're totally in touch with the universal activity, which is what we are. And then we don't have a self. The self is gone. But the self is the activity itself. When we say no self, when you say, well, I have a self. What do you mean no self? It's the self that's not a self.

[45:06]

If you become attached to self, that's suffering. If you get attached to no self, that's ignorance. So it's a self. It's not a self. But it's always changing. That's why it's not a self. It's not a permanent self. So you become, the whole universe becomes yourself. When you allow yourself to expand, the whole universe becomes yourself. yet there is still you. So that's the end of my story. And if you want to, you know,

[46:09]

address questions, we can do that after the tea. I don't know if everybody knows that. I guess you can make an announcement. So I'll be there. 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 sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[46:54]

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