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 evening. Good evening. So Saturday I talked about Zazen. directed attention, receptive attention, and all sorts of good things that that leads to. But I thought, since you're such seasoned practitioners, why don't we just do it? So we'll start with a... I thought that was a joke, but well... we'll start off with the guided meditation we will just do it we'll just be it so if you could take your best Zen posture physical mental and any other alignments or adjustments and let me offer you some

[01:28]

things to note on the path of being body and breath. And just starting with your seat, how you're seated on the cushion, your stability on the floor, your lower back slightly tucked in so your chest can lift up your shoulders can widen across the front, across the back, your abdomen, your stomach can relax, your arms and hands relaxed, fingers of your left hand on top of your right, forming a mudra, thumbs, touching about level with your navel,

[02:31]

in a comfortable spacious balanced way your head over your shoulders throat relaxed muscles of your face muscles around your mouth your jaw around your eyes Cross your forehead. In all these details, just introducing being body. The experience of physical body. Just starting to notice breath in that body.

[03:49]

The physical experience of breathing in. The physical experience of breathing out. listening to that physical experience? Are there cues that would allow, cues about how to allow the in-breath to be easeful and full? Are there cues to allow the exhale to release the let go.

[04:54]

Just directing the attention on body and breath. simple ever-present element of being each in here its own deliberate event each exhale its own event. And then if you could take one deep inhale and exhale, and then we can pause.

[07:02]

If you could just uncross your legs for a moment. And then just start over. Take your posture again. See them in a deliberate way. Crossing your legs. Lining your spine. Opening your chest. at this time, just the willingness to experience whatever happens, whatever comes into consciousness.

[08:11]

No agenda. Maybe experience of the body, maybe an image, maybe a thought, sign to the traffic. be that deliberate receptivity, a deliberate non-agenda? Can there be an attentiveness that notices that one experience turns into another? Okay, and then you can pause.

[10:37]

So directed attention, receptive attention. Sometimes we say shikantaza, just sitting, is the receptive attention. I think of it more like the saying of Suzuki Roshi, you know, you're perfect just as you are, and you could lose a little improvement. Yes, it is, Shikin Taze is just sitting, being what is. And you could use a little structure and guidance in staying in that state, experiencing that state and staying in it. Because unless you're very, very unusual, Your mind has its own tendencies to go the way it wants to go. A common question that comes up for each of us and students bring to teachers is, well, how much?

[11:59]

How much directed attention? How much receptive attention? When do you know? Do you, like, do one for 15 minutes and then the other for 15 minutes? Reminds me of another saying of Suzuki Roshi where giving zazen instructions says, pay attention to your breath, but not too much. I don't know if someone else can answer that question for us. In some ways, can that question come alive for us in the process of sitting? Can you know when your directed attention is moving towards controlling? Can you notice when your receptive attention is getting spacey and dreamlike so to know something about the proposition the request of being what is the tathagata the one who's in what is you know sometimes that's a name for the buddha the tathagata the one

[13:27]

who comes from suchness, the one who's in what is. There being that. And each of us innately has that capacity. Each of us dips into that 100 times plus a day. And usually we flip right through it into the next thing. of judgments, conclusions. We're too busy in our ideas about it, or our judgments about it, to actually taste, dwell in. And this is the invitation of Shikantaza, to taste and dwell in the experience of just being what is. and how in the process of committing to sit, involving ourselves in sitting, how to bring forth that disposition, that intention, that engagement, how to discover it's at the heart of being.

[14:47]

It is, in fact, the Heart Sutra. Or the Heart Sutra is simply talking about this being. It's at the heart of the human experience. And we call it by all sorts of names. In the talk on Saturday, I referenced a poem called Love. And this evening I'm going to reference a poem by the same poet, Jesma Moloish, called Hope. It comes from a trilogy, faith, hope, love, that he called the world. So we engage it, and we learn.

[16:03]

We don't learn something we can cling on to. We learn something we can be. We learn something about how to be. We learn how to attune. We learn something about it. freedom. Just being the moment. And part of where it becomes distracting for us is that in the process of learning about freedom, we learn about affliction, habit energy, contraction, preoccupation, distraction, all those great things. That together our world. The world according to me.

[17:08]

And from the point of view of being, from the request of being, that arising is the koan of our life. Should I suppress it? Should I deny it? Should I open and embrace it? Should I tell everyone I meet what I really think about them? And confusingly, Zen doesn't offer the answer to those questions. It just offers a process. How about you keep coming back to what's at the heart of being?

[18:18]

How about you keep letting it illuminate how all that particulars of your conditioned life come into being? close to that heart is something about intimacy, something about tasting, feeling, touching, hearing, being connected. Connected to what is. And in Shikantaza, Part of the art of shikantaza is to keep reminding ourselves this is about being, this is not about making something happen.

[19:20]

And that becomes all the more tricky when you start engaging in directed attention because pragmatically you've discovered that when you don't, your mind wanders off in a long, wonderful dream. It comes back to touch here and now every five minutes. And then as you work with it, you discover you can have it touch here, touch me more frequently. You discover you can keep it in the territory. you discover that being can be close enough to illuminate the constructs and habits of what arises in thoughts and feelings and images and psychological importance.

[20:34]

Returning to this, returning to the being so it can illuminate. The unconditioned illuminates the conditioned. The freedom shows the tenacity of conditioned existence. And the process of Zazen, and I would say, going right back to the early sutras. Process of the Tathagata, of Shakyamuni. This fundamental importance given to being present, being in the moment. That as we take up our practice, that this being in the moment becomes A relevant, a relevant activity, not an irrelevant, a relevant.

[21:51]

A relevant activity. And also something that becomes as intriguing as all the other intriguing thoughts and feelings that come up for us. And it's the way in which we dedicate ourselves to Zazen. It's the way in which we wholeheartedly commit that stimulates that intrigue. Like when you wholeheartedly commit to being in the moment and discover how absolutely wild your mind is. There's something utterly captivating about that. Part of the language I tell myself is, it's just one big, long, extravagant poem.

[22:57]

Multimedia. Words, images, signs, recollections, fantasies, all streaming together. what I'd like to talk a little bit about tonight. And I will finish at 8.30. For those of us who get up early, that's reassuring news. I'd like to talk about this notion about hope. Hope, in this context, meaning something about how we engage the world. Recently, someone did something that I find hurtful.

[24:01]

And with a perfectly logical consequence to feeling hurt, I felt resentful. In that, the person became an object. This kind of unchanging being. They were this. They were an object deserving of my resentment. And then... Surprisingly, after 35 years of practice, I thought, well, maybe that's not the whole story. And I endeavored to engage the whole experience and let the person come back to life.

[25:14]

Not just be... this singular object that has been crafted by my emotion. And it reminded me of this poem. Because I've often wondered why he would use these first couple of lines to define hope. Hope. Hope is with you. When you believe the earth is not a dream, but living flesh. Other people are not objects defined by the solidity of our thoughts and feelings and judgments. Other people are actually a dynamic existence. When you smile at them, they're more likely to smile back than when you curse at them. And when you curse at them, they're more likely to be upset, frightened, angry, than to smile at you.

[26:23]

It's an interactive co-creation. The whole world. Hope is with you when you believe the earth is not a dream, but living flesh. That it's interactive. You conjure up the other person, the other person conjures up you. It's all about relations. We're co-creating each other. And it's always dynamic. And there's something hopeful in that. Maybe there's a request. We're obliged to take responsibility for our own participation in the creation. But there's also something hopeful.

[27:28]

That when we smile, the world is inclined to smile back. From the heart of practice, from that place of being, and how it teaches us to be, bringing it into all our interactions, receiving it from all our interactions. That being awakened, being awake is not a singular activity, it's a collective activity. That the signs of the traffic, the light in the room, the sensations in the body, the living flesh of the world is helping to co-create awakeness. Our relationships with others are helping us to co-create awakeness, helping us to awaken in a whole variety of ways.

[28:47]

in the realm of emotions, in the realm of psychological process. We take other and internalize them as an object. And as such, they play a role in our psychological life. But they offer us in their living being a way to wake up from that fixed ideal. They offer us a way to draw us back into interactive existence. Hope is with you when you believe the earth is not a dream but living flesh, that sight, touch, and hearing do not lie, that all things you have ever seen here are like a garden looked at from the gate.

[29:51]

Could we but look more closely, more clearly and wisely? We might discover somewhere in the garden a strange new flower, an unnamed star. something about how the process is always revealing something new, because the process is dynamic. We're dynamic. Maybe we have habitual tendencies, but we're still dynamic. We're gaining new experience, we're going through some transformation. And the more we can return to being, the more we can experience the dynamic living flesh of momentary being, the more we can discover how to bring that into interbeing, we learn

[31:24]

something fundamental about what supports the human life. The Heart of Zen practice is about studying this process and living this process. How do you get in touch with it fundamentally and how do you live it in your life? And of course, we can offer as we do in Zen. You know, we offer a structure. Okay, let's behave like this for this period of time. Let's all sit in this room and you all sit there and I'll talk. Is this helping us wake up?

[32:30]

Well, I guess we all can judge that for ourselves. How does the very question become relevant in the middle of all the other things that press upon you for your attention? And I would say, it's something about finding shikkantaza, It's something about finding momentary experience in all the different dimensions and modalities of your life. Wherever you turn, can you be at the heart of it? Not just living it as the objectification of your thoughts and feelings and opinions and conclusions. Can it become alive? Can there be this formless process of shikantasm?

[33:33]

We go to the heart of the being of whatever comes up. And in that process, can we discover something about liberation in the midst of conditioned existence? And this challenge is what we call in Soto Zen, the fundamental con. This alive, spontaneous response to conditioned existence. Strictly speaking, Shikantaza Zazen is to fully engage that con. And strictly speaking, from a Zen perspective, there's nothing in your life that isn't engaging that con.

[34:43]

Whether you're happy, sad, deeply saddled, greatly agitated, it's all this request. Be this. Experience this. And the point I want to make tonight was something about how the willingness to let it be alive, the willingness to let it be interactive, has a hopefulness. It has a way of supporting our life. You know, the fact that this is a constant unfolding. And as the poet says, we might discover somewhere in the garden a strange new flower, an unnamed star.

[35:45]

Every period of zazen, every time we sit down to do zazen, something happens. Maybe it's impossible. At least very, very difficult to know what's going to happen in your zazen. And if you think about it, most of us we're too busy making something happen. We're too busy trying to stop something from happening. We're too swept up in a dreamlike quality of being to notice the original moment this moment sometimes you know what was it before your parents were born what's the moment

[37:00]

before all the agendas came forward and obscured it? What's the moment that awakens to all the agendas? So in Zen practice, especially Soto Zen, we take this proposition and then we take a deep breath And we say, okay then, let's do it. Let's sit a shashin, let's have an intensive, let's have a dharma talk, let's... All as an expression, all as an engagement in his fundamental proposition about being. All in the service of waking up. 8.30.

[38:11]

Let me just read this one more time. Hope is with you when you believe the earth is not a dream but living flesh, that sight, touch, and hearing do not lie, that all things you have ever seen here are like a garden looked at from a gate. Could we but look more closely, more clearly and wisely we might discover somewhere in the garden a strange new flower, an unnamed star. Bless you. And maybe just to finish, before we do the chant, just to close your eyes and ask yourself, right now, What does that offer my life? What kind of intention can that offer?

[39:20]

What kind of perspective for who I am, for what's in my life at this time? And just let that register. Okay, thank you very much. 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.

[40:17]

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