So, good evening. Wow, that was a loud sigh. So, I, uh, got an email from Rosalie a while ago, and she said, so, would you like to do a Wednesday night talk? And I thought, yes, of course. And I wrote back, yes, of course. And then I was sitting there looking at the email, and the little thought came up, I should ask her what I should talk about. And so I asked, and she compassionately said, refused to give me even the slightest hint.

[01:00]

And so there I was. I was stuck. And my stuckness didn't really become totally manifest until about three weeks later, and I was lying awake at about 3.30 in the morning or something like that, and all of a sudden it was like... What am I going to talk about? And here's the problem, right? When I got right down to it, being asked to come here and give a talk runs me smack up against this thing, right? So years ago when I was tearing apart my house, I found a report card in the space behind the mantelpiece in the house.

[02:10]

And it was from the 1930s. And it had slipped down behind the mantel. And my theory is that the recipient of the report card had actually put it down there on purpose. Because it wasn't a very good report card. It was actually kind of a crummy report card. And I think he'd put it up there on the mantle and then carefully come in in the evening before Dad came home or something like that. And it went like this. And it fell down and it was gone. And then it was like, where's the report card? Oh, I don't know, Dad. So it was not a very good report card. But one of the most amazing things about it, it was from a North Beach school, like I said, in the 30s. You turn it around in the back after looking at the guy's really lousy grades. And And there was a little note for parents, and it said something like this. It said, you know, really, school is about teaching children to be good citizens and good members of society, right?

[03:11]

And so you shouldn't worry too much about how excellent a student you're... your son or daughter is. If they do okay in school, even if they do kind of badly in some classes, it's not really a big deal. What you should be really concerned about, and they went down this long list of things, and it was pretty remarkable actually, is things like if they eat too much or too little, right? Or if they are too either too concerned about their appearance or insufficiently concerned about their appearance. There's this whole list of really interesting things that the parents should look out for and, you know, kind of ignore the strict academic regimen, right? And it was almost like they were saying... if they put themselves wholeheartedly into school and into this kind of mix and matrix that the school is, then that's the good part, right?

[04:16]

And everything else, eh, it'll come along, right? So by the time I was in school, it wasn't like that at all. It was like being the good student was every single thing, right? And so here I am now. I've been practicing here for arguably... almost 18 years. And because of the way, because of my, the way I've engaged with practice, I mean, I've been in residence here for a few practice periods and at Tassajara and so on. But for the most part, I've been kind of coming in from outside to do practice. And it means I never get to be a good student. Never, never, never. Like I notice even now I come into the Buddha Hall, for service after morning zazen, and I cast around desperately for a place that I can stand where I'm not going to be asked to hand out the chant books, because everyone knows that handing out the chant books is the most complicated thing that you can do, and it'll ruin your life.

[05:23]

And so that's what I found myself chewing on at 3.30 in the morning when I was trying to figure out what to do about giving a talk here and it tastes bitter and kind of ashy and dry and not that good actually so fortunately for me and pretty much for everybody Buddhism is this radical proposition, and Zen Buddhism, in particular Dogen Zen, is this radical proposition. The fundamental primary statement of the radical proposition is saving all beings from suffering. That's a good one. And why not?

[06:35]

By the time this proposition had been run around for a few thousand years, 1,500 years or so, almost 2,000, and had gotten around to Dogen, when he came back from China, as I'm sure all of you know, he wrote, because you're the good students, right? He wrote this book or book, thing called the bendowa, right? Which, if it was written in the 19th century, would have started, a specter is haunting the temples of Japan. It's the specter of Zen, and it would have ended, you know, Buddhists of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your suffering, or something like that. And it would have been called the Zenist Manifesto, right? I mean, it really is, it's just, it just is his manifesto. And he says some really remarkable things in it, right? But the best part for me has always been, there's Q&A at the end, if you haven't read it.

[07:41]

It's definitely worth reading. He was, when he came back, he was kind of in Kyoto, and all these people from the existing Buddhist traditions asked him questions about why his stuff was so all-fired great. And he kind of came up with a set of answers, and then he wrote them down in the Bendawa. In it, he displays the most punk attitude. It's amazing. Somebody asked him a question, and he goes, although it's been said that it's useless to offer oars to mountain people, because they don't live near the water, so what are they going to do with them? I will nonetheless answer your question. He comes right out and says, that's a really stupid question. He says these things. It's remarkable. But he also says some somewhat less pointed things. Somebody says, oh, well, you know, we monks, we have time to devote to this, to the Buddha Dharma and to the practice that you're talking about, to the practice of zazen.

[08:58]

But what about, I think they say, laymen and women And maybe they say it in a slightly different way, but in any case, he says something like this. The Buddhas and ancestors are holding wide the gate of compassion so that all living beings can enter, right? Who should we say isn't going to enter? you know, kind of classist, non-egalitarian medieval Japan, that was pretty radical. And then later on in a similar vein he says, you know, if you think that people don't have time for Buddhist practice and there's no place for Buddhist practice in secular life, then

[10:03]

you've seen that there's no Buddha Dharma in secular life, but you haven't yet seen that there's nothing secular in the world of Buddha Dharma, right? So what that means is spending a day with your most difficult colleague at work, working closely together, or going to get ice cream with your daughter, or getting up in the middle of the night and walking into a newly installed spiral staircase and nearly putting out your eye is all equally the Buddha Dharma, right? And all completely the Buddha Dharma. And that's a comfort. So the question is, how do you practice that?

[11:12]

And the great gift of monastic practice is that it's a well-oiled machine that's been tuned up so as to produce this marvelous container in which How many of us here have not had the experience of being in the midst of this machine and just saying, if I can only just follow the schedule in this way, generously eat what's presented and generously meet everyone that passes me in the hall with a bow, that's putting forth my best effort. Yeah, that's right. That's the great thing about monastic practice.

[12:14]

It gives you a context in which it's clear what it is to put forth your best effort. It's a little less clear when you're spending the day with somebody who drives you nuts, right? Or some other set of things that are... It's not a finely tuned machine designed to produce a container. It's some other thing, right? It has some other function. And... So Buddhism is full of lists, right? So there's the six paramitas, and there's the three factors, and it goes on and on. But I... What's been helpful for me is to boil it down to a list of two items. I think I probably should just tattoo them somewhere. So the first one is it's a little like the line from Reservoir Dogs about always be closing.

[13:28]

Always be practicing. And the second one is don't believe you're on hype, basically. And I think with those two list items, that two-item list, you can do householder's end practice. So the question is, how do you do, for example, let's start with always be practicing, right? Best way to model that is what we all do in Zosman, right? I think typically what happens when people start sitting is they do something like this. And I certainly did this, right? And still do it. Place the body in a posture that as much as possible matches Dogen's prescription for

[14:33]

for practice, for seated practice, right? So, you know, ears in line with the shoulders, nose in line with the navel, teeth, you know, and put some effort into bringing the body into that shape and then kind of get on with the real business, which is paying attention to your mind. And it's interesting what happens when you do that. So you can actually expend a tremendous amount of energy putting your body into that shape. And in fact, you can expend so much effort doing it that it's actually hard on your body. You can really kind of clamp your lower back and really wrench your chest up pull your chin down, that starts to wear out after a while. And particularly if you're sitting in this machine and you're doing that, you know, 100 times a day or something like that, that'll really wear you out, right?

[15:38]

And then the other thing that happens that's really great is you do that and you kind of park your body and after a while things sort of start to slide a little bit, right? And you slide a little bit and often I'm not there for that. right, for that sliding. And after a while, maybe I'm even kind of like this, right, and then I go, oh yeah, here's in line with the shoulders, now it's in line with the navel, and the truth is there's nothing wrong with that. It's great, right, and you can sit a hundred sashims like that, right, but Typically I think what happens for all of us is that over time we realize that there's a way to refine that effort.

[16:39]

And that that way is to constantly be forming your posture. So it's not that you make a big effort to to form your posture once and then park it. It's more like every moment be there forming the posture, right? And when you do that, the amount of effort that it requires tails off like this, right? And eventually, it's no effort at all. And so in some ways, always be practicing means practice making no effort. To practice this, practice with the body, you don't ever have to go any further than forming your mudra. The entire exercise of always be practicing is contained in how you form your mudra.

[17:45]

To... Because it actually doesn't take a lot of effort to form your mudra. And doing it in this way that's no effort or always be practicing produces this marvelous result, which is that the joints of arms and shoulders feel full of space and the mudra feels kind of energized and warm and it finds its right spot on your body and floats there like some kind of magical object. So that's always be practicing. And that has nothing to do with walking or sitting or standing or lying down, but we can practice it when we sit. So what is it not to believe your own hype?

[18:55]

There's a koan about that, and it goes like this. A monk asked Hikai, by what gate can... an aspirant enter our school, right? Or something like that. And the teacher says, through Dana Paramita, the gate of Dana Paramita. And I think this is just my interpretation of that statement, but I think the... the interpretation of that, I think the teacher was kind of playing a little trick on the student, right? So, you know, there's the six paramitas, right? And typically, the first paramita, dana paramita, it's always listed first, is kind of the domain of the laity, right?

[20:06]

So it's the function of the laity to donate, and it's the function of the... of the monastic orders to take the precepts, be forbearing and diligent, meditate and attain wisdom, right? Or whatever you do with wisdom, bestow wisdom, I guess. And so he's saying, actually, it's all about Dhanaparamita, right? And not surprisingly, the monk says, There are six Paramitas. Why are you picking on the first one? What is it without it? He goes, well, it's because Dana Paramita is the key, and through it, all the other Paramitas are realized. And the monk says, so, the monk says,

[21:14]

well, why is it called Dana Paramita? And then Huichai says, Dana means relinquishment. Or if you were to loosely translate that, it would mean to give is to give over or to give up. And the monk says, give up what? And then Huichai says, the dualism of opposites. And he goes on to list a number of dualistic opposites that you can give up. It's clear what he's talking about here. In every moment and in every situation and every encounter, our natural tendency, and it's a natural tendency that's brought us generally great success in life. So it's a natural tendency. tendency that we tend to cling to quite tightly.

[22:16]

And what we do is we stake out a position. I'm over here. You're over there. I know this. You know that. I say this. You say that. Here is form. Here's the void. Here's pure. Here's impure. And so on. And we do that in public. We do that in private. We do it With our bodies, we do it. With our minds, we do it. And then we do it with speech, right? And the request, and in particular with practice, and here's the interesting thing about practice, right? So when you take anything on, let's say you decide to be a painter, right? Immediately, all of the dualism of opposites that we carry with us and all of the I want more of this, don't want so much of that, et cetera, that we bring with us attaches itself to the activity of being a painter, right?

[23:28]

The first time we paint, who knows? Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad, but it doesn't take very long before this whole edifice of... Likes and dislikes, pure and impure, knowing and unknowing, and so on, attaches itself to the activity of being a painter. Provided that we care about it. If we don't care about it, it's not an issue. It's the same thing with practice. If you care about Zen practice, and in some ways what that means is if you have way-seeking mind, then immediately along with that comes this, the activity of the constructed self and the dualism of opposites, right? And so the request of don't believe your own hype is to let go in every moment, is to give over and therefore give yourself completely to that moment and to that encounter and to the,

[24:38]

you know, difficult colleague at work and to your daughter buying ice cream and to walking into a stupid spiral staircase that just got installed and nearly putting your eye out. All of that, right? And then a curious thing starts to happen. When we start to practice, everyone has, I think, has goals and aspirations, right? and if we didn't have goals and aspirations to start with, a lot of them are supplied the minute we sit down and start reading the Buddhist literature, right?

[25:48]

Things like, you know, free to turn around, things like knocking out wedges and pulling out nails, you know, locking eyebrows with all the Buddhist ancestors. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I like that. Striding naked and free across the sky. Like a fish in a bottomless clear pond. These are wonderful things. And they're in the literature because they Because when we hear them, we take them in and something happens in our body. And that's a marvelous thing. But over time, as we do this practice, this continuous, unstanding, wholehearted practice, and as we meet our

[27:03]

naturally human desire to cling and to strategize and to work things out and to, you know, come out on top and so on, as we meet that with a kind of compassionate curiosity and neither putting it down, because it's after all just our best effort to be human, right? Or lifting it up, right? The... These... these kind of aspirational words and phrases get replaced with something that's more like instinct, right? It's like you can smell out the option in all the options that are presented in any moment that feels like the way, right? It's really like animal instinct, right? to know when to hold fast, to know when to let go, to know when to speak, to know when not to speak.

[28:07]

So what's the problem? That all sounds okay? The problem with this practice is that... It's easy to fool yourself. I can't tell you how many times a week I think I'm always practicing and practicing diligently and as diligently as I can and then I look at something that just happened and go, hmm, that could have gone better. How many times a week my whole idea of what I thought I was doing and what I should be doing is a turn on its head, right? That's the hard part.

[29:14]

It's never clear or seldom clear what the next thing is to do and it's easy to slip, right? So in the last 17 or 18 years I've lived very close and spend lots of time here, and then sometimes I was in Italy. It's hard to come to morning zaza when you're in Italy. And that means I never get to be the good student. But oh well. So that's the report from the kind of world of household or zen or something like that, right? So I'm living over there in North Beach. I've got two daughters who I sometimes drag down to sit with me in the morning, and they can do about 10 minutes and 25 minutes respectively, and that's about it.

[30:27]

And... a small group that comes and sits in the morning, and I convince them to come to my weekly talk by serving them free pie afterwards. And it works pretty good. So, here's a question. Does anybody have any questions? Well, you're the good students. You don't need pie. Remind me next time and I'll bring pie. How's that? Yeah. After all your experience in practicing all these years, what has been something that's

[31:29]

fascinated you about the practice or confused you or something that you're still uncertain about? Well, the first thing that's been fascinating is that I, you know, I mean, I think I started practicing for a lot of the same reasons that everybody else starts practicing. I had this life. When I charted it out on paper, it looked pretty good. And simultaneously, I was intensely miserable and worse. I was making people that I cared quite a bit about and that were very close to me miserable as well. I was behaving pretty badly, actually. And that was what got me started with it. When I got started, I had all these ideas about how that was going to turn out and how I would be at the end of 15 to 17 years of Zen practice.

[32:42]

And it was just all total nonsense. It was so incredibly wrong. I can't begin to tell you how wrong it was, right? And so that's fascinating is to see how sort of my expectations have continuously been thwarted and continuously replaced with something substantially more interesting, I guess. So that's the first thing. And then in terms of what's difficult, it's all difficult. The reason why life is suffering is that delusions are inexhaustible. Wherever you are, and in whatever moment you find yourself in the middle of, there's always an opportunity to get it wrong.

[33:51]

Because even at... Even in the moment when you're sitting in the zendo and your body is filled with this pure energy and sitting all by itself and it feels completely fabulous and the mind is settled down to this kind of glassy smooth surface or something like that, the thought comes up, wow, this is great, I'm really doing this. No! No! No, that's right, but it's too late, right? It's too late. And that's just an example, right? Our capacity for misjudging, and it's because of the way we're built. It's not wrong that we're built this way, right? The way our mind works is... it takes in a tremendous amount of information and it throws about 90% of it away because it can deal with 90% of it and it draws conclusions and makes simplifying assumptions and hooks it all into this framework that we've built up over the course of our lives which is simultaneously pretty good and also completely misses the point.

[35:12]

The thing that's baffling and difficult is that wherever you are it's so easy to get it wrong. And the more deeply you feel it, the more difficult that is, right? That's what I'd say. Is that sort of your question? Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, I don't know if this is at all a perfect question, but I find myself asking this, and I guess my question is, why are you self asking yourself this? So what answer do you come up with? Which is, why is it so hard? Why is it so difficult? I see that... It's so easy to be lost in quote, quote, delusion. And even if I sort of intellectually grasp it, oh, that's not going to work very well, and that's not even what's true, I still find it often very compelling, the thing that's, oh, I don't know, really, or otherwise not a good strategy. Yeah, absolutely. It's compelling. That's right. I mean, and that's why delusions are inexhaustible, right?

[36:15]

I would say this, right? It's hard because we're these, a human being has this range of aspects and capabilities, right? We're a fully realized Buddha right where we sit, right? And everyone comes with this built-in ability to feel, I can feel what you feel. without even knowing I'm doing it, right? Remarkable. So we become built up as Bodhisattvas, right? Wonderful. And then at the same time, we have this kind of self-construct that really arises mostly out of our ability to use language and get around in the world without bumping into things that... it requires so much effort and takes so much attention to do its stuff that it pulls our... I'm certain everyone's had this experience in sitting.

[37:25]

It's like there's almost this gravity of discursive thought and the activity of the constructed self that pulls attention in from where it can be, which is... in the whole world, right, into some strange dark place, right, where the agenda of the self is executing full force. And that's why it's hard. It's because of how we're built. And that's what it means to say that suffering arises out of self-clinging. That's self-clinging. That's the self-clinging of... our language-using, agenda-executing, construct itself. And it's some work to face that and study it and then find yourself in a place where you can kind of drop it a bit.

[38:29]

I think how it works is it kind of loosens up, the gravity kind of lets go a little bit, and after a while it becomes clear that those agendas and thoughts and the emotional tags that they come with aren't the gospel or the deep, dark truth. They're kind of just constructs, right? And then more things are possible. But, I mean, to be fair to Zen practice, it's also got this kind of, you know, tasting the strawberry aspect, too. I mean, it's pretty great. And there's a lot of glorious and rewarding things that come out of it at all stages. It's easy to sort of paint it black, but it turns out it's actually pretty nice. So anyway, that's what I'd say. Anybody else?

[39:31]

Okay. 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.

[39:58]

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