You don't want that. Kodo, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Excellent. Well, we should probably get started. So welcome, everyone, to Saturday morning Tazan Instruction. And thanks for coming from wherever you're Zooming in from. It's an exciting prospect. Let's see. So zazen is an interesting word. It's the word that we at Zen Center and in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition used to describe what's commonly called seated meditation.

[01:19]

But the core of it, the word Zen, is also, interestingly, the name of the whole Buddhist sector school that that San Francisco Zen Center is a part of because it's San Francisco Zen Center. And it's a very old word and doesn't come from Japanese and doesn't come from Chinese. It was borrowed from Chinese. And the Chinese word was borrowed from Sanskrit and Pali, the South Asian languages. In those languages, it means something like absorption or single-pointed concentration. And if you look at what zazen means in some kind of deeper sense of the word, it's

[02:35]

It really is kind of just, well, absorption in sitting is a good way to say it. But you could also say something like single-minded attention to sitting. And that's a pretty good hint at what it means, particularly in the Soto Zen School, which is the root school of San Francisco Zone Center. The other word that people use to refer to this is shikantaza, which is also often just translated as just sitting. It has the same particle, za, in it that zazen has. And it And if you look at the meanings of the characters in it, it's really just like, oh, I don't know, like always be sitting or really pay attention to sitting or something like that, right?

[03:46]

It's like the characters are a weird compound that include the word, include the the word for striking, right? So it's like you, I don't know. It's even hard to say exactly how to translate it. But in any case, something about really being in the midst of sitting, right? And so that's what we're going to talk about a bit. I guess, since I always forget to do this, I'm trying to be better about it. I should say at the beginning that my name is Zachary. My Buddhist name is Anshi, and my ordination name.

[04:47]

And I've been a student at Zen Center since roughly 1993, although I haven't lived there very much. And I've been... a priest for the last, well, a teacher since roughly 2007, a priest for the last five-ish years, and I received what they call Dharma transmission, which is this kind of, you know, it's like a permit for a free agency. I can go and, you know, join another team or, I don't know, you know, start my own. thing or whatever, and so on. So that's sort of been my trajectory at Zen Center. And so here we are. So I wonder if at this moment anyone in the

[06:00]

in the group that's now virtually assembled in some weird virtual space that's been created by Zoom. I mean, thank you, Zoom. I wonder if anybody would like to volunteer what it was that brought them here and why they're interested in Zodostruction and sort of more than that kind of what they hope to hear and get out of Zazen instruction this morning. This kind of, well, I don't know what it's like where you are, but where I am, it's a spectacular morning. It's sparkly and clear and full of sun. So on this morning, what brought you here? Any takers on that? You can go, as I understand it, to your participant's menu, and raise your hand.

[07:03]

And Kodo will unmute you, and we can talk about it. Oh, and this is not my cat, but this is the cat that lives in my garage where I sit. So he's going to be walking around and doing stuff like this, for example. Anyway, so any takers on that? I see one hand in any case. Who is that? Can we unmute you? Yes, I see David. I'm sorry. David? it's a refresher to make sure it's what I'm doing.

[08:11]

I mean, it's all kind of similar, but I just want to clarify. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, feel free. How about this as a proposition? When When I'm talking about this stuff, if you have a question, we'll probably have time for questions at the end. But if there's something that really strikes you that you need clarification on, why don't you try raising your hand? I'll probably see it, and Kodo will undoubtedly see it. And maybe he can just interrupt me, and you can raise your question. And that's true for everybody else, right? We should just try that. I don't think this group is so large that that's going to be a problem. And it would be great to, it's always better to have real questions from people who want clarification and for whom it would be useful than for me to just be sitting here behind a cat talking for an hour or something like that.

[09:32]

So yes, please ask. And anyone else want to talk about what their motivation for this encounter is, this virtual encounter? Who's that? You're unmuted, I think. Yeah. Hello? Hi. Can you hear me OK? Absolutely. Yeah. Go ahead. Awesome. Hi. I am interested in learning, adding a little bit more discipline to my meditation practice.

[10:36]

And I'm hoping that maybe you can speak to some of the physical discomfort that comes with sitting Zazen, because I really struggle with that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. So I will make every effort to get to it. And I discovered this last week. So I think it was last week. I also did Zazen instruction. When I do Zazen instruction, at the temple, so this is the second time I've done it in this Zoom format. When I do it at the temple, there's all this signaling going on because there's also a period of Zazen starting up. So there's a Han and all this other stuff. And I always know exactly what time it is and how much time I have left to finish up. I noticed last time that there are no markers except maybe the sound of my family's increasingly vigorous activity upstairs, walking up and down the floor and going to get themselves a coffee or something like that.

[11:47]

And so if you think he's not getting to my question, then absolutely raise it again. But I'll make every effort to talk about that because it's a really important question. So all right. I guess I should probably throw in a little background first. I think probably no one out there will quibble with the assertion that there's some difficult bits about being an embodied human and having a human mind, right?

[12:56]

I mean, there are some obvious great parts. So you can, if you want, decide you're going to You're going to write poetry and read your poetry to people. That's a beautiful thing. And in some ways, effortlessly, well, I mean, obviously, it's an effort to write a poem. But compared to the amount of actual work that's going on in the composition, inscription, reading, understanding, and responding to a poem, even a really sharp poem. The amount of actual work that goes into writing it is kind of just a small part of the picture, oddly enough.

[13:59]

I mean, think about what happens when You write and recite and somebody receives a poem. It's this unbelievably complicated process with multiple, multiple layers, multiple modes of encoding happening simultaneously. Some play in the mind and body of the author of the sort of emotional, notional, linguistic, and just sensate experience such that, in the end, a string of words is captured that produces some kind of experience in the mind and body of the author.

[15:01]

And if it's well done, produces some kind of experience which may or may not be homologous in the mind and body of the listener. It's amazing. It's almost too amazing to even conceive of. And we do things like this all the time. Remarkable and wonderful. We can plan and build things of remarkable size, remarkable complexity, and remarkable scale. And do it, it's not effortless. And people are screwing stuff like that up all the time. But in any case, a lot of it gets done. Amazing. So there's some good parts. But the difficult parts are familiar. I think, to everyone.

[16:02]

The way in which our thinking seems to have a kind of obsessive, almost addictive flavor, like it's so hard to just give it a rest. And people, quite often when I ask this question to people who come into Zazen Instruction about what they'd like out of it, That's the first thing on the top of their mind. I just need a rest from this thinking. And it's not obviously just thinking. It's also the emotional load that comes along with thinking. Because everyone's thinking is buttressed by this constant play of emotion. And often that emotion is expressed in the form of complex emotions that we all that are difficult to describe, but that we all kind of understand, the kind of yearning or aversion, just sort of complicated, auto-catalyzing fear and distress, worry.

[17:21]

And then on the other side of that, there's this way in which we can sort of pump ourselves up and kind of inflate a bubble of self-esteem in the middle of our body and mind. And then watch over time as that bubble is burst by experience and turns into something else, something kind of poisonous and difficult. We all, I think, have these experiences. And it's a grind. It's very... Even for people who are relatively fortunate, well taken care of, and healthy, and so on, it's difficult. And for people that have additional difficulties due to the circumstances of their lives, this stuff can be crushing.

[18:29]

And it crushes a lot of people. If you look around in the world, you see the way in which the world is charged with suffering that in some fundamental sense arises from exactly this aspect of human nature, of the human condition. There's a pretty large and complicated Buddhist literature spanning 2,500 years, which in a lot of cases is just devoted to charting the way in which the way we're built as humans, the way we're put together, the way our minds work, and so on, in addition to producing all the wonderful things that it produces, also produces the suffering and causes the causes both in the demand of the personal, the sort of locally social, so families and groups of friends, and then a broader context, including the political and even up to global.

[19:43]

These aspects of our human condition and human nature cause tremendous unbelievable, extravagant suffering. You see it in the papers. You see it in stories of your friends, neighbors, and relations. You see it in world history. It's really astonishing how difficult it's been generally. the explanation and solution that Buddhism proposes and proposed roughly 2,500 years ago in the middle of a sort of cultural ferment in really kind of a large portion of the world that included South Asia, Central Asia,

[20:54]

the sort of Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean. There was this kind of this cultural mix there in which a lot of these ideas were coming up all around the same time. Kind of remarkable, actually. And Buddhism specifically intends to address this way in which suffering arises in the world and in which we are both afflicted with it and generously afflicted on each other in the course of our lives and in the course of history. Because the lives that happened generations ago are still impacting the the suffering of lives that are happening today and will happen generations from now.

[21:58]

So the basic propositions of Buddhism as laid out in the Buddha's first sermon are that life is suffering in this way that we've just been discussing, and that suffering is fundamentally built into us and built into the way we're constructed and associated with the capacities that most clearly make us human. ability to use a richly symbolicated and richly grammatical language, our ability, our really unprecedented ability to do long-range planning, and our ability to construct complex, multi-layered social environments for ourselves that include multiple social identities to which we attach

[23:20]

powerful significance. And that there is relief available for that and that we all experience it. And we all can experience a lot of it with practice. And then there's a practice whereby you can there's a program whereby you can navigate in the direction of relief from this suffering and from a life that not only relieves your own suffering, but helps relieve the suffering of those with whom you come in contact. And if you were to Extract from that program a sort of, you know, three top level bullet points.

[24:21]

They would be kind of wise up to how it works. So study it in your own body and mind and in its effects and kind of manifestations in the bodies and minds of others. Adjust your life so that it promotes more of that wising up. Like for example, If your job is one long moral conflict every day, chances are it's going to be really hard to pay attention to and be honest with yourself about the causes of suffering that are arising in your life and those with whom you have an effect. Or if you're never getting any sleep, that's a problem, et cetera. change the circumstances of your life to the extent that that's possible so that it promotes more contact with this fundamental question, how do I suffer?

[25:25]

How do I cause suffering to others? And how can I live a life that has different consequences and feels more alive and awake? And then the last bullet point is, practice meditation and mindfulness, or in this case, practice zazen. So all that said, let's talk a little bit about zazen. The instructions for zazen that we use were written down in the 13th century by the guy that brought this particular Zen school to Japan. Excuse me. And it's a great document. If you translate the title of it loosely, it's like, everybody should be sitting in this way.

[26:29]

And it starts out and says something that's a much briefer and pithier version of what I just said about how practice relieves suffering. And then he says, OK, and here's how you do it. And the entire rest of it is pretty much procedural. So he says, put down some matting. So you can't really see it, but I'm sitting on tatami. You don't need tatami. But I have a thing called a zabitan, which is a big square cushion that makes it even squishier right directly underneath me. And I have a pillow called a zafu. I actually have a couple of things under my butt. I have this thing, which is a sort of skinny and well-worn Zafu. And then I have this thing, which is a support cushion. And we use to, among other things, change the height of our seat. So you can stack a bunch of these and then stack a Zafu on top of that.

[27:32]

And with respect to the question of discomfort that we were talking about earlier, the height of your seat is pretty important. So we can talk about that a little bit more later. So this is what I sit on. I will now reinsert it. There, see, that worked. So he says, OK, so put down some matting and put a cushion on top of it. And then he says, tell everyone to go away. and not bother you. And set aside a period during which you can really pay attention to sitting rather than paying attention to, I don't know, preparing for your next work-related Zoom meeting or so on.

[28:36]

And then sit. Here's what he said. So he said, he said, sit either in the full lotus or half lotus posture. Okay, so this is the full lotus posture. And the only reason, this is easy for some people and difficult for others. The reason why it's useful to look at is it has this particular quality, and that is that it's very well balanced. The pressure on your knees is pretty even. Because your feet are lying on your thighs and producing a certain amount of down pressure on your knees, which is pretty balanced. And your knees are relatively close together for a cross-legged posture. The tighter your lotus is, you can see this, the closer your knees are together.

[29:38]

And having your knees coming... more out like this, be closer together, alleviate some of the stress on your psoas muscles and upper quads. And if you, and then he says, OK, so you suggest full lettuce, or where you essentially, I'll demonstrate, you put your right foot on your left thigh and your left foot on your right thigh, or half lettuce, where you For example, you can just place your left foot on your right thigh. So I don't know if you noticed, but when I switched to half lotus, my knees moved kind of farther apart. And half lotus is a flexible posture. You can put your foot up here. You can put it down here on your calf. Or you can use a posture called Burmese where your leg is all the way down on the floor.

[30:43]

But you'll notice every time I did that, my knees got farther apart. That's okay. But again, it puts more stress on these muscles up here. And so there's a balance between having your knees closer together and having the twist in your hips and knees that's required to maintain that posture be greater. and having this portion of your body feel comfortable. So that's a balance that's going to be different for everybody. And so it's worth exploring to find the balance for you. In the interim since the 13th century, many things have happened. But among the things that have happened, are that we've added some other postures that you can use. So the one that most people use as an alternative is called Seiza.

[31:47]

And Seiza, the simplest form of Seiza looks like this. You just sit on your feet and sit. This is really, really comfortable if you can do it. But the problem is that for most people, it causes their legs to go to sleep because of the pressure, of the down pressure on various parts of their legs causes impingements. And some part of your legs go to sleep after a while. And if you've ever done a Japanese tea ceremony where you're required to sit in this posture for hours, I can guarantee that eventually your legs will go asleep in a way that's so extreme that you think, OK, now my legs will never again wake up in the entire rest of my life. And then you're sort of astonished when they do. But in any case, so in order to alleviate that, what people usually do is they take a cushion, and they put it on edge under here.

[32:58]

And they sit on it. And that elevates the body and takes the pressure off the leg. So that's good. The other way to make SESA more comfortable is to use a bench. So this is mine. You put it like this, and you sit SESA elevated by the bench. And this I find actually really comfortable because it allows you to keep your legs together. And that's actually comfortable. That makes SESA even more comfortable if you can keep your legs pretty close together. So that's SESA. And of course, you can sit in a chair. I don't have a chair down here.

[33:59]

if you want to sit in a chair, the kind of prescription is the same regardless of whether you're sitting in a chair, on a SESA bench, sitting SESA, sitting cross-legged. You want to have a balanced posture where either your knees or in the case of sitting in a chair, your feet are firmly planted and your butt is firmly planted on whatever it's sitting on. So you have this sort of tripod of support. You feel solidly planted on the Earth, and so solidly planted that it feels like you could sit there forever, which is good. And then, like I was saying earlier, height is important. So with sitting Seiza, obviously, it's important because the height sort of elevates you off your legs and takes off some of the pressure. If you're sitting cross-legged, let's say I was sitting cross-legged in Lotus without any cushion under me at all.

[35:06]

You can see that, I don't know if you can see or not, but you can see, yeah, there's some space under my left knee. My right knee is pretty far down, but my left knee doesn't quite go all the way down. And that sort of makes the posture a little bit unbalanced. I would say, so if I'm like this, it's not going to be all that comfortable to sit zaza. And the other thing is that when you're sitting low in a cross-legged posture, there's a lot of pressure on your lower back. And that's not great either. Whereas if you, you know, let's say instead I was like this, obviously my knees are now down. And if I sit straight, the pressure on my lower back is pretty low. So again, You can put this under here now so I, too, can be comfortable. There.

[36:08]

So play with the height of your seat. You can try out skinny Zafu, fat Zafu. You can try different stacks of support cushions. Some people even sit on twos offers. And then if you have some joints, for example, usually a knee joint that doesn't sit solidly on the mat, you can take a support cushion and put it underneath it. All of that stuff is OK. The idea is to have a posture that feels balanced and planted. and sustainable. So in a chair, in SESA, in some example of the cross-legged posture, it should feel solid and balanced, basically. And so there's an upper body posture, too. It has to do with keeping your back straight. And the way that works, the way to keep your back straight is to allow your back to take its natural curves and to

[37:17]

have your to be upright largely because you're .. So you might try rocking left and right, forward and back, until you find a spot where if you rock back, gravity grabs you. If you rock forward, gravity grabs you. Somewhere in the middle, there's the middle. Then the same is true for right and left. So find the spot where your head appears to be most directly over your belly. If you let your head flood up off your shoulders, that tends to straighten the posture and relax the back. It kind of feels like the skin between your shoulder blades and up the back of your neck is kind of falling down your back. Your neck flattens out a little bit, but not too much. And your head falls into a vertical plane. Your face falls into a vertical plane where your nose is kind of pretty much above your navel.

[38:23]

And your ears are lined up with your shoulders. The arm posture is like this. So your arms should feel like they go out. And then in a big circle, your left palm is on top of your right palm. And inside that big circle, there's a little circle where your thumb tips very, very lightly touch. The contact between your palms and between your thumbs should be really, really light. And it should feel like your hands, they don't so much push together as they kind of vibrate together. There's this kind of energetic contact there. Your thumb should be roughly... at the height of your navel, and the rest of this assembly should sort of hang below your navel. So it brings attention to this part of your body right here, which we'll talk about in a second.

[39:24]

So that's the upper body posture. We sit with our eyes open and downcast, just bringing in the lights, not looking at things, not examining things, just bringing in the pattern and the light and bringing in enough light so that our mind feels kind of wakeful and engaged. So in this posture, let's try something. Bring your attention to this place that's right behind your mudra, in the middle of your body. So in Japanese, that's called the hara. So put your attention there and maybe bring a little tension to it. And the way that works is you kind of slightly tighten the muscles of your pelvic floor and your lower stomach muscles. And with that kind of tension there, very gentle tension, just breathe all the way up.

[40:35]

And then when You're breathed all the way out, and your diaphragm says, time to breathe in. Let the breath come in. Just keep your attention here, but relax all the tension that you put there. And just let your breath come in and fill your body. And maybe you can imagine your breath sliding up your back and sort of landing here in your forehead. That can be hard to then slightly counterintuitive when you first encounter it. But just think about it. It's like there's this. There's this energy that flows up the back and lands here. And then on the out-breath, again, put a little tension in your hara and just let the breath collapse from here all the way to death. And do that three to five times, I would say. in a kind of concerted way.

[41:38]

And then just let your breath take its natural course, its natural depth, and just watch it. Just see what happens. So we're going to sit for maybe five minutes. And then we'll have time for some questions. And I'll also try and remember to address the issues of comfort, because that's important. So let's sit for five. By now you may have noticed that there's some thoughts arising in your mind.

[47:01]

You might be wondering what to do with them. The answer is, really don't do anything. When a thought arises, If it just arises and slips away without, you know, raising any ruckus or kerfuffle, then just let it slip away. The thought rises and it has enough of a hook in it, emotional or otherwise, to sort of involve you for a while. Okay, that's what happened. When... invariably it will fade and your attention will come back to your body. Just notice, just be here when that happens and notice the kind of effect and residue of that thought event.

[48:20]

And then As it fades, just attend to what's happening now. And continue singing. That's all. There's nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to... So that's basically all there is to it. That's sitting zazen. So here's the first thing to say about how to deal with the difficulty.

[49:27]

And I'll just start with this. Zazen is a yogic practice. all of the physical postures, the breath, a lot of the stuff about the mental framing of the activity is initially and fundamentally derived from yoga. And for those of you who practice yoga, you know that in some ways the way The whole function of yoga is it brings you into your body and it brings you up against kind of the limits of your physical capacity. And there's two ways to have that be problematic. One is if you go, okay, I'm going to push through this, right?

[50:27]

That might work for a while, but eventually you're going to you're going to injure yourself doing that. And it's not particularly good. And that kind of framing of the limits of your physical capacity as a problem that needs to be struggled with and pushed through is also quite problematic. The other problematic way is, on the other side, When you come up against the physical capacity, you're like, oh, my God, this is no good. I've got to do something else now. I must not be doing this right. No. Both of those are kind of difficult, obviously, in different ways. But to do the other, where you shrink from the limits of your physical capacity, there's this problem where it produces a kind of of mental and physical fidgeting in the context of the practice that is mostly a distraction.

[51:35]

So to approach the limits of your capacity in this way that's gentle and self-compassionate, but also firm, to plan yourself there. And when you feel yourself becoming uncomfortable because honestly, I mean, what this is doing is it's, it's putting your, your body in a posture that's kind of near the limits of your physical capacity and you're sustaining it for a long time. Maybe this was only five minutes, but typical period of Zazen lasts between 25 minutes. And sometimes at the monastery, we, if you sit for, if you come in early in the period of Zazen as well, the all people are still filing in. You sit down and you sit for the whole period. You're sitting for an hour and 15 minutes. What that requires is a kind of both a kind of willingness to note the limit and really understand it, like notice where and how the difficulty is arising, and then take appropriate measures.

[52:51]

First of all, If you discover that, oh, my knee always hurts because I'm, or let's say my lower back always hurts because there's a strain on it from sitting too low, then next time try and adjust the height of your seat, right? Next time, if you discover that your upper back is hurting, often that has to do with the way in which your head is pulling, the weight of your head is pulling on the muscles of your upper back or some other... things like that, to really understand the mechanics of your body, of your particular body, and to work with them both in the context of a single period of zazen and also between periods of zazen where you can make small adjustments to the way you sit so as to relieve the stress on your body. And then the other thing is this. None of this should feel like self-torment. It's not about self-torment. So if you feel yourself uncomfortable to note it, to explore it, to really bring your awareness to the discomfort and see how it's working, often when you do that, things shift around.

[54:09]

Just bringing your concentration to a particular place in your body changes the kind of neuromuscular dynamic in that part of your body. And so sometimes things shift around. Sometimes the difficulty even goes away, but not all, right? But what can arise in that case is some sort of insight about the function of it. But after a while, you're like, okay, I've had enough of this. Then move. Adjust your posture. You can even change from... from cross-legged posture to Seiza in the middle of a period of Zazen. No one's going to yell at you or anything like that. It's really about staying with sitting in the best way that you can in order to bring about the mind and mode of engagement that

[55:12]

helps alleviate suffering. That's what it's about. It's not about some kind of self-torment or a 40-day walk in a desert. It's not like that. So does anybody have any questions? We have a few more minutes to ask questions and discuss it. Does anybody have any questions? And in particular, the person that asked about discomfort, is there some specific discomfort you want to raise that we can talk about? So just raise your hand in the usual way, and I'll see it, and then Coda will be able to unmute you. I can't, unfortunately, read the names on my screen because I'm sitting pretty far from my screen. But anyway, go ahead. I see Victoria with a hand up, and I'll unmute you now. Great, great, awesome. Thank you. This is really helpful. I've been meditating for about three years now, and I notice I sit, let's see if you can see, I sit more in this position. I can't see, but... Wow, okay.

[56:17]

Maybe we can finish. No, it's okay. I can verbally describe. Yeah, it's okay. I sit with one foot in front of the other, and today I heard you mention... More thing, and then I'll completely shut up. This is what's on offer. It's a life that... feels alive and awake and that offers a kind of freedom of action in the midst of the obvious restrictions and limits of our capacity, both socially, physically, et cetera, et cetera, all of that. It's wonderful. And all you have to do is practice it. For this Zen Center, even in this time when you can't actually go there, is a tremendous resource.

[57:18]

They have daily sittings, they do practice periods, classes, retreats, all that sort of stuff. It's really good. If you want to just do it on your own, that also is imminently possible. Just find a place... Like Dogen says, where you can kind of get everyone to get out of your hair and set up a place, a time in your day or multiple times in your day where it's possible to just settle and just do this and do it in a way. The key is to do it in a way that that's diligent, but simply diligent in a sense that it's not overburdened with expectation, judgment or or pre. kind of condition, right? Just to be genuinely curious about what happens and genuinely empathic with yourself as you notice your life arising and notice the ways in which suffering arises for you and the ways in which your pattern and condition thinking and behavior

[58:39]

causes you and others difficulty. That's all. And just, you know, do it every day. The invitation is wide open. So anyway, thank you very much. It was really wonderful. And have a great day. Take care.

[59:02]

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