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. Good morning. How's our audio today? Good. Looks like we've got a classic San Francisco summer morning going on out there. Wonderful. Well, welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. Is there anyone here for the first time? Welcome. You're here on a somewhat unusual day in that this is the first day of a seven-day summer retreat that we traditionally do here in the temple. The main import for you is that means you don't get any cookies and tea after lecture.

[01:03]

We have question and answer, but no cookies and tea, and you can't stay for lunch because we sort of close the building for a week so that the residents can kind of spend more time together free from all the other activities that go on in the temple and see if we can harmonize our practice. I'm sorry about that, but do we have lunch next week or does it continue on? Two weeks without lunch? I'm sorry. Anyway, last night we sort of opened this retreat with a wonderful evening at Grace Cathedral with Pico Ayer and Fu Schrader. Had a nice conversation about the art of stillness. Anyway, so in thinking about how to give a talk before this one-week summer retreat, I looked up in the archives all the lectures that Suzuki Roshi gave, which we taped and then digitally transcribed, and I found the first lecture that he gave after we moved into this building.

[02:24]

And in reading it, I just thought it was so wonderful that I would share excerpts from it, use that as the framework for my talk, and make comments on the various different things that he had to say. Sukuroshi came here in 1957, and he practiced over in Sakoji, which was, he came as the temple priest for the Japanese congregation. But after, and then in 1967, there were so many American students that had gathered around him that they bought Tassahara and established that as our mountain monastery. But he had always had a dream that he would have a city center. And in 1969, they found this building and bought it. And in November 15th of 1969, Suzuki Roshi and his family moved in here. and the many students that had been living in the neighborhood around Sakoji moved in and began.

[03:26]

It was actually in great shape then, but they had to do some repainting, and there were some very weird colored walls down in the basement where the zendo is, because that was the rec room, and they had to paint that. But the day he moved in, of course, they had zazen that evening, because that always comes first. They had zazen in the morning in Sakoji and zazen in the evening here. So anyway, in January of 1970, after fixing up the place, the Zendo was officially opened and named the Maha Bodhisattva Zendo. How many people here know that that's the name of the Zendo? One, excellent. Maha means great, the great Bodhisattva Zendo. So that's the name of our Zendo. And this is the lecture he gave the Sunday, I think, just following the ceremony that opened the zendo. In our zazen practice, we stop our thinking and we must be free from our emotional activity too.

[04:36]

I'll read that again. In our zazen practice, we stop our thinking and must be free from our emotional activity too. We don't say there is no emotional activity, but we should be free from it. We don't say we have no thinking mind, but our life activity should not be limited by our thinking mind. In short, I think we can say, Puran, we trust ourselves completely without thinking, without feeling anything, without discriminating good and bad, without saying right or wrong. We should trust our life activity. Because we respect ourselves, because we trust completely, put faith in our life, we do not think, we do not discriminate, and we sit. That is, you know, our practice. Isn't that just great? That's, of course, how he started his lecture, which is a comment on zazen practice.

[05:39]

We stop our thinking and we must be free from our emotional activity, too. So, you know, when you first think that, you think, oh, well, gee, Zen is like not a very emotional thing. Be free of our emotional activity. But Suzuki Roshi was the most emotionally expressive person I'd ever met. And he could capture each emotion he was expressing purely. So if he was being sweet, it was the purest expression of sweetness. And if he was being angry, it was like... anger. So it doesn't mean that we don't have an emotional life. In fact, when we practice Zen, we have a much fuller, bigger emotional life than we had before, but we're just free from it. That is, we can have that emotion, but it doesn't catch us. Hang on with us.

[06:42]

You know what I'm saying? Okay. And then he says, and we must be free and we stop our thinking. That's another classic Zen statement. You're sitting Zazen, stop your thinking. Think non-thinking. It doesn't mean that you don't think. It's practically impossible to stop your thinking. Thinking is just like smelling or hearing or seeing. It's going on all the time. The trick is here, He says, we don't say we have no thinking mind, but our life activity should not be limited by our thinking mind. Our life activity should not be limited by our thinking mind. Even the barest attention to what's going on in our thinking mind would notice the many ways in which we frame our view of the world, frame our possibilities by our thinking mind, and

[07:45]

limit our activity. Oh, I can't do that. That would be much too scary for me. Well, I'm not any good at that. I can't do that. I can't live that kind of way. I can't have that kind of relationship. This is our thinking mind telling us all kinds of things. I'm not going to get into it. The whole last lecture I gave here was talking about how our thinking mind can limit us and how we have to... I mean, as I mentioned then and I'll mention again, our thinking mind is just one of the greatest things in the world. It allows us to travel to Mars, do many different things. But at the same time, any time your thinking mind... One clue of whether your thinking mind is taking you in the wrong direction is if it's causing you suffering or creating suffering for other people. That's a clue that you should say, hmm, I wonder about those thoughts.

[08:46]

And then the second part of this paragraph, as he said, without discriminating good and bad, without saying right and wrong, we should trust our life activity. Always, you know, there's great koans about no picking and choosing. But one of the statements I always like from the prologue to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is, if we discriminate too much, we limit ourselves. Our discriminating mind is fantastic. Oh, I wish it was just a little sunnier today. If it wasn't quite so gray, then I could really have a wonderful day. The weather isn't just right. That breakfast I had this morning, I mean, they just didn't cook that cereal just perfectly. And this morning, my shoulder hurts a little bit, so maybe I don't feel so good.

[09:54]

And basically, nobody around here at Zen Center runs this place properly if they had the cushions. You know, I mean, we can just go on and on with this discriminating mind, and many of those comments are decent and okay, but if you do it too much... You eliminate, you limit yourself. So that's a warning. It's a warning from our teacher about our discriminating mind. So he goes on. Tentatively this morning, my version of practice is like this, like he just described it. Isn't that beautiful? Tentatively. You know, like, we tend to take all these words, as Zika Roshi says, and we're like... you know, take it to the bank. This is the way. But he just said, this morning I'm describing it this way. My version of practice is like this because I want to extend this kind of understanding to our everyday life. Human relationships, for an instance, should be based on this kind of understanding.

[10:55]

If our love between us is not based on this kind of understanding, respect and complete trust, we will not have completely peaceful life. Well, that was a lot thought in that little paragraph. He wanted to extend this zazen practice, he's talking about this non-discriminating mind, to our everyday life. And in the city, this is, of course, the place where we really get to do that. And, you know, at Tassajara... We follow a very monastic schedule. We get up at, I don't know, 3.30 or 4.30 in the morning, sit nine periods of zazen. It's very sort of regimented. But everyday life here in the city is very different. We have so many people living different schedules. We have people in the building that are on staff and basically live here all day long and do work here all day long.

[12:03]

We have people that live in the building that go outside and work in the outside world. We have people that are employees that live in the outside world and come and work here. And we have people, many of them, you in this room, that live outside and work outside and come and participate in our many different programs. And how we mix all that together is how we practice with that is our practice of everyday life. Or sangha practice. Sangha practice is recognizing that we're part of an interconnected network of human beings, all beings. And our practice is to embrace that connection fully and be embraced by it, living in concert with all that is. I'm on the tail end of a cold, so I'm a little bit... So then he says, if our love is not based on this, if our love between us is not based on this kind of understanding, respect, and complete trust, we will not have completely peaceful life.

[13:29]

Already in the second paragraph, if our love between us... You know, when I came to Zen Center, this was back in 1970, all the rage was, let's get enlightened, this big experience, and then everything will be okay, and we can go on and live our life. And I went to Tassara, and met Sukiroshi, and sitting Zazen, and all of a sudden, after being there a while, I started to get this idea partly through who he was and what he was talking about, that it wasn't about having some fantastic experience, it was actually about love. You know, the point of our life, our human life, is to love other people. Be kind to them. How do you do that? I remember one evening, I don't know, maybe it was Maybe it was the next summer when I was there, I can't remember.

[14:33]

One of the things when you get older is you can remember events, but you can't remember the chronology of them, what year they happened in. Anyway, it was a lecture at night, and the staff, I wasn't on the staff, but the staff, I guess, had gotten into some arguments with each other about how the guest season was going, or they were not being harmonious. And apparently Suzuki Roshi had gotten real strict with them and been tough on them. So that night he gave a very short lecture and said, I suppose there's some questions. And one of the senior staff members raised his hand and said, Suzuki Roshi, I've been practicing for five years and I'm sorry, but I just wasn't able to be kind. Felt very discouraged about how he had behaved with his other fellow students. Suzuki Roshi said, Five years is nothing. You don't know how hard it is to love some people.

[15:35]

And we were a weird collection of people. You grasped immediately the concept. Because essentially all of us in that room felt loved by Suzuki Roshi. And we started to grok. the difficulty of that, since we were having a hard time getting along with each other as it was. So that's the point of this practice. And then I was reading something in this area, just to make another comment about it. We chant, after zazen in the morning, we have a chant we do before we put on our robes. It's a great robe of liberation, field far beyond form and emptiness. Wearing the Buddha's robe, we say wearing the Tathagata's robe, saving all beings. And in the early days we chanted this in Japanese, so we had no idea what it meant. So I think one of the students asked Suzuki Roshi, we chant this thing after zazen every morning, what does it mean?

[16:47]

And Katagiri was in the room and he couldn't figure out what to say and they were looking up some translation of it and all of a sudden Suzuki Roshi just stopped Katagiri from trying to translate it and said, It means love. That's what it means when we chant, our robe chant, every morning. Anyway, going on, the next paragraph, he says, and relationship between ourselves and nature should be like this. We should respect everything, especially something which we are related directly to. This morning when we were bowing, you know, in the zendo, we heard big noise here, you know, because... Everyone, fling chair. I thought this isn't maybe not be the way how we should treat chairs, laughs. Not only because it may cause disturbance to the people who are bowing in the zendo, but also fundamentally this will not be the way to how we should treat things.

[17:48]

So apparently upstairs someone was moving the chairs around to set up for breakfast, and they were just sort of sliding them across the floor, and that made a lot of noise downstairs. So... So by the third paragraph of the first lecture, he is commenting on how we should move the chairs in the dining room. Because he says, and our relationship between ourselves and nature should be like this. Of course, this is a big thing now because we all realize that because there's so many of us human beings and we become so powerful, we're practically... possibly, probably, destroying the very planet we're living on. So, yes, our relationship with nature should be like he was talking about, like we take care of our zazen, like we take care of our robes, like loving nature.

[18:50]

But also he got very practical, and he said, but let's just take some simple thing like the chairs. Let's not talk about a big thing like the environment. Let's talk about how we move our chairs. How do we take care of the chairs in the dining room? And to this day, we do try to move those chairs without sliding them across the floor, pick them up and carry them all the way back to the Zen Do and set them down without making too much noise or banging them or scraping them. And this is very traditional in Zen. We talk a lot about how we take care of things. You know, how we take care of the clothes we wear, how we take care of a teacup we use in a tea, when we eat in the Zendo using our Orioki bowls, how we take care of the bowls, how we clean them, you know. Zen practice is a practice with things. Not quite as glamorous as enlightenment, is it?

[19:56]

Unfortunately, it's pretty much true. Continuing on, he says, he's talking about this lazy idea of moving the chairs. Instead of respecting things, we want to use it for ourselves. And if it is difficult to use it, we have an idea of conquering something. I think this kind of idea does not accord with our spirit of practice. He goes on, we are thinking about rituals and how to decorate our Buddha hall, having some beautiful Buddha and offering some beautiful flowers, you know. And we were, I think this altar had just been built in the first 45 days, beautiful, still that altar, still great. But Zen Buddhists say, with a leaf of grass we should create Buddhas, golden Buddha of body which is 16 feet high. With, you know, blade of leaf we should create big Buddha. That is our spirit. But here you know, to create 16-foot high Buddha with blade of, you know, leaf, need great... These are his non-edited transcripts, so there's a little bit of a... I edited some, but you have a little bit of... But it's okay, you get a feel for how it was.

[21:15]

But here, you know, to create a 16-foot high Buddha with blade of, you know, leaf, need great effort, laughs. I don't mean to accumulate many leaves and grain and to make a clay in Big Buddha. I don't mean that. But anyway, to see, until we see the Big Buddha in a small leaf, we need a great amount of effort. I don't say how much effort we need, I don't know. For someone it may be quite easy, but for someone like me, laughs, it needs a great effort. You know what I mean, right? If you can look at a small blade of grass and see it as a 16-foot Buddha, see Buddha in a small blade of grass, maybe that's harder than seeing Buddha in a 16-foot high golden Buddha. We don't have so many of those around Zen Center, but if you go to Japan or Asia somewhere, China, they have huge golden Buddhas, 16 feet high.

[22:19]

But to see a Buddha in a small blade of grass, that's our practice, is to do that. That's what he's saying. Well, he's saying to see a Buddha in everything. See a Buddha in the chair work area. Most importantly, see a Buddha in every person we meet. Can we meet a person, every person we meet, and see a Buddha? See a 16-foot golden Buddha? Or I pose an even more complicated question. Can you look at yourself? and see a 16-foot golden Buddha. I hope so. So then he goes on to talk about how we may think it's easy to practice now that we have this beautiful building with a Buddha hall and a zendo. And certainly it is true in many ways. It's much easier to practice in this inspiring Buddha. But, he says, because I know to practice our way is not, he laughs, easy.

[23:29]

I don't know if you new people here are aware of this, but this is a direct quote. I know to practice our way is not easy. It is anyway, it is difficult. That's, like, not easy. And what kind of difficulty we have is, and he muses a little bit, which was hard to figure out. I couldn't figure out what he was musing about, but then he goes on. As this is, as you know, city Zendo, city Zendo where everyone come and practice our way, not only old student, but also those who don't know anything about Zen. There is double difficulties. You know, for new student and for old student too, I think old students have double duty, you know, and new students will have difficulties which they do not ever dream of, dreamed of. So we have two categories of students he's talking about.

[24:33]

We've got the old students that have double duty difficulties, and we have the new students that have difficulties, or are going to have difficulties they never dreamed of. I'm sorry for you new students. Maybe it's not too late and you can still escape. But if it is too late, it's just unfortunately the way it is. I don't even really know what to say about it because when you're a new student, you have all kinds of ideas about what your life will be and what Zen will be in your life. Fantastic. great ideas and probably more ideas about how you're going to free yourself from your suffering and live a good life, which is true, but you also have to go through some difficult learning to get there. Anyway.

[25:36]

It's worth it. So he goes on, so we must, old students must make their practice easier, the new students practice easier. That's the old students' responsibility, is to make the practice easier for the new students. How to make it easier is, without telling this way or that way, you should do this or you shouldn't do that, you should lead them so that they can practice our way easier. There may be various ways, but I think our traditional way, we say our traditional way, is with this idea. how to help people to practice right practice. So he just leaves it as a kind of question. Old students' practice is to figure out how to help new students. That's maybe a big responsibility. I remember when Norman Fisher was made abbot of Zen Center, he was very worried about

[26:45]

how he wasn't prepared to be Abbott and help other students. And he went and talked to Mel, his teacher, and Mel said, well, you know just a little bit more than some other people, so you can help them that much. And that's true for all of us. You know just a little bit more than the newest students, so you help them, and somebody that knows just a little bit more than that person can help. So we all help in the ways we can help, and we don't worry too much about it. There's many stories about how Suzuki Roshi helped people in many different ways, but I'll share one of them. Over in Sakoji, they had a soji. Soji is where you clean up the temple after zazen in the morning. One of the students, who was an older student, kept complaining about the new students who didn't seem to know how to even find a broom in a closet. He was very frustrated by this, and he kept commenting about And he went and talked to Sukiroshi and said, I just don't know how to deal with these new students.

[27:48]

They keep asking me for brooms. I can't tell them where to find it. And he was kind of apparently quite exasperated by all this. And Sukiroshi didn't say much to him. And then finally, I guess one day, the old student was just sort of settled down from all of this. And some new student came up and asked him about getting a broom, I guess. And apparently the old student just handed him his broom. and he immediately turned around and Suzuki Roshi handed him a broom. So it was like a teaching lesson and Suzuki waited until just the right moment and then he handed him a broom. So this is difficult in some ways because you don't know how to help people many times. You think, oh, I know how I can help this person, but you can see they're not ready to hear how they can be helped.

[28:52]

And if you tell them and they're not ready to hear it, they won't hear it. So Sikiroshi was sort of famous for waiting until the time when you were ready to hear it, and then he would tell you. So this is one of the challenges for old students because older students want to immediately say, oh, I can help you do this. But it's not so easy. So he continues. He says, we say our practice is ornament of Buddha land. Our practice itself is the ornament of Buddha land. You know, even though they don't know what is Buddhism, if they come to some beautiful Buddha hall, then they will naturally, they will have some feeling. That is, you know, the ornament of Buddha land. So our practice is the ornament of this building that makes people who come in here feel something.

[30:03]

But then he goes on and he says, but essentially for Zen Buddhists, The ornament of Buddha Hall is the people who are practicing here. You are the ornaments of the Buddha Hall. The feeling that people get when they come to this center is the feeling of you practicing. Each one of us should be beautiful flowers, and each one of us should be Buddha himself who lead people in our practice. So whatever we do, there must be some way of doing it, and we should always think, consider about this point, of course. There is no special rules for how to treat things, no special rules to be friendly with others. There are no special rules. But how we find out the way we should do at that time is to think about what will be the way to help people to practice our way. He leaves it as a question.

[31:06]

No special rules. You should just be trying to figure out how to help people practice our way. If you don't forget this point, you will find out how to treat people. If you try to help people, you will find out how to treat people. How to treat things. How to take care of chairs. How to behave yourself. What a concept. If you actually be busy trying to figure out how to help people, you will figure out how to behave yourself better. You will naturally know how to follow the precepts. And that is at the same time so-called bodhisattva way. That is our bodhisattva way to figure out how to help people. He goes on, you know our practice is to help people and how to help people is how to practice our way on each moment and how to live in this world and how to practice Zazen.

[32:11]

Beautiful. I think somewhere else Sukaroshi said, group practice is the shortcut. Group practice is the shortcut. When I first came to Tassara, people were very excited about doing all kinds of things, sitting long sashins. There were some students that went out into the woods outside of Tassara and sat a 100-day sashin together, two or three of them. Suki Roshi, I said, well, did you ask Suki Roshi about that? He said, well, we told him about it afterwards. I said, what did he say? He said, he wondered if it was too selfish. You know, group practice is difficult, but you keep, besides, you keep bumping into all your issues every time you talk with someone, every time you deal with someone.

[33:32]

They just seem to be... in your way. Work in a kitchen. It's great practice. It's the shortcut. Group practice is the shortcut. Plus, it's enormously encouraging. It's not so easy to sit a seven-day sashim. Maybe some people can sit a 100-day sashim out in the woods by themselves, but I think most people find it difficult enough to sit a seven-day sashim when you have the support of 50 other people. doing it with you. So when you're in group practice, they support your zazen, and they make sure you are staying real with your life while you're living your everyday life. Of course, saying that group practice is a shortcut doesn't mean that it's going to be fast. Our way is, I think Sigurdjieff said, it's like walking in the mist.

[34:34]

You don't think anything's happening, but when you come in afterwards, you're soaked to the skin. But you've got to walk in the mist for a while, bumping up against all kinds of people. Group practice. So I'll finish with the last two paragraphs. So he returns to our zazen, to stop thinking. To be free from emotional activity when we sit is not just to have a concentration in our mind. It is not just for concentration. But if we have complete reliance on ourselves and find absolute refuge in our practice, that is zazen practice. And that is how we should extend our practice to our everyday life. We take refuge in our practice and we take reliance on ourselves.

[35:41]

So this is 1970. He goes on, I think we have a very good spirit here in this endo and at Tassajara. I was rather amazed at the spirit you have. But how you should extend this spirit to our everyday life will be the next you know question. And how you do it is to respect things, to respect with each other. When we respect things, we will find the true life in it. When we respect plants we find, there we will find real life, the life and power of flower and the real beauty of flower. So love is important, but more important element will be respect and sincerity and big mind. With big mind and with pure sincerity and respect, The love could be real love. Just love separated from these factors will not work. Let us try hard to make big Buddha laughs, you know, with our effort.

[36:47]

So... They won't add anything to that. Such a nice end. Thank you very much for coming here this morning, and we will have question and answer, but no tea and cookies. 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 sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:47]

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