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, everyone. How's the audio? Can everybody hear me? Is anybody here for the first time this morning? Welcome to you. You've come on a special day. We're just beginning a 10-week practice period, which started on Tuesday, and this is a one-day sitting. We start most practice periods with a one-day sitting. So everybody in the temple is going to be sitting all day long, and we won't have any tea and cookies for you today. But come back next week and have tea and cookies with us. And welcome to the people that are participating in the practice period online.

[01:05]

We're experimenting with starting to share our practice over the Internet, and now we have more people in the practice period online than we have in person. It used to be Zen, you only could do face-to-face, and now we're experiencing some kind of new face-to-face Zen. So thank you for participating, online people, and we appreciate your feedback as we... learn how to make this work. So the theme of the practice period is the koan of everyday life. And this came from a commentary. Suzuki Roshi, the founder of Zen Center, made on a famous essay called The Genjo Koan by Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Soto sect of Zen in Japan. And that's the lineage we come from. And he lived in the 13th century, the early first half of the 13th century. And I've spoken quite often about Dogen, and many people here know about Dogen.

[02:07]

I don't want to spend much time on it just to say he was raised in the royal family in Japan, probably inspired by the fact that his mother died when he was young. He set off to become a monk when he was 13. And the times in Japan were changing. It was just the time when the royalty was losing control. There was a lot of chaos in Japan. And he wanted to figure out how to live the right life in that environment and found that these Buddhism that he found in Japan wasn't satisfying for him. And he, after studying for... eight years set off on a trip to China where he suspected that authentic Zen existed. In fact, he did find a teacher there and brought back to Japan what he had learned. One of the things about Dogen, which is unusual in Zen masters, most of them just teach and lecture, and the stories you hear about them are just the stories the students tell.

[03:15]

But Dogen was quite a prolific writer and he wrote a very large collection of essays called The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, Shobo Genzo. And essentially the first essay in that collection is called The Genjo Koan and is sort of known as the essay for which all the other ones flow. And that is the theme of the practice period, The Genjo Koan. And so today... I'm going to talk just a little bit about one paragraph from the Genjo Koan. I might just make a quick comment about the term Genjo Koan. Gen means something appearing, that which appears, and not Just something that appears, but something that appears just as it is.

[04:18]

That's kind of a nice phrase, just as it is. Reality appearing just as it is. I enjoy looking at clouds, and especially in the summertime we have the fog. And if you just look at the clouds for a while, it's just so amazing how it is just as it is. And then it changes. It's not quite how you expect it to be. Then it disappears and comes back again. When we were kids, we used to just lie on the yard, remember? And we could spend an hour looking at the clouds and think, wow, they really look that way. So to sort of view reality just as it is, that's again. And then, I mean, this doesn't happen just with clouds. I was walking in the hills outside of Marin the other day, and there was this lone tree on a little knoll. somehow just the way the wind was slightly blowing and it was waving in the sunlight, it just seemed like I'd never seen a tree quite like that before.

[05:22]

So we all have those experiences where we see for some moment exactly how things are. There's a famous interaction between Dengshan, the founder of Soto Zen in China, and his teacher Yunyan, where... This term came up. Dungshan was about to leave Yunyang after having studied with him for 20 years, and he said, After your death, if someone asks me if I can describe your reality, how shall I reply? After a while, Yunyang said, Just this is it. If after you die and someone asks me how to describe your teaching, what do you say? Just this is it. Just this. This moment is it. So it became a very famous saying in Zen. So gen means basically things as they are without our projections and preconceptions, this mysterious, ineffable nature of being itself.

[06:31]

The character Zhou means complete, full, all-inclusive. So... Genjo then is the total manifestation of things on every moment as they truly are. That's a mouthful, but you get the idea. The total manifestation of things as they are on every moment. Koan, I'm not going to, we all know what koan is, right? Koan is one of those paradoxical things that inspires us to wonder what's going on. So it's a question. We have these famous Zen koans. So Genjo koan is the koan of this very moment. What's the question presented by this very moment? Or the koan, the paradox of the manifestation as it is of each and everything as it's truly happening. Or a sort of shorter summary of

[07:34]

of that that's easier for you to remember. The koan of the present moment. I'm racing through this, I realize, because I want to get to the good stuff. And I've been over the genjo koan before. You've all heard various different definitions. But for those who hadn't, I just wanted to give you a brief overview of the title of this essay, genjo koan. The koan of the present moment. How do we actually practice with the koan of the present moment. Here's the paragraph I've chosen, which is probably the most often quoted and famous paragraph from the Kenjo Koan, which is the following. To study the Buddha way is to study the Self. To study the self is to forget the self.

[08:38]

To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. Isn't that beautiful? I mean, you know, just beautiful five sentences. We may not know actually what it means, but it's sort of beautiful to hear. So each sentence is the kind of stage that progresses to the next five sentences here. So first stage, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. So you might think, well, that sounds good. I'll spend a couple of years studying the self. And then I'll go to the next stage. To study the self is to forget the self.

[09:41]

Got to take a couple of years figuring out how to forget the self that I've studied. Second stage. Third stage is when actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the body and minds of others, drop away. Oh, wait, I skipped a whole sentence. We have to spend two years on the third sentence. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. Well, that sounds like a good project, to figure out how to be actualized or awakened is the other way it's often translated. To be awakened by the world. Then, in the fourth segment of our practice, when actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. Whatever that means. That seems like the most mysterious of the ones so far. And then we get, at the end of our eight years of practice, to no trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly.

[10:48]

What? Wait a minute, I thought the whole idea was I was supposed to get to realization, and now no trace of realization remains? I got nothing left after all that work? I mean, I've got no trace of realization right now. I don't have to go through eight years to get to that. It doesn't make any sense. Well, maybe it'll make some sense when we get through here. But at the same time, even though it's sort of presented as these five stages of movement through understanding, actually it's at the same time just different views of the same thing and can happen instantaneously. The whole process can just happen in a single moment. To study the Buddha way is to study the Self. That's interesting. If somebody said, to study physics is to study the Self, that would make no sense at all, right?

[11:52]

To study physics. I was a scientist. You measure lots of things and set up instruments. If you were going to study Buddhism, you might want to read a lot of books about Buddhism. You might want to learn all these strange ceremonial things we do. I mean, last night, the people that are sitting in this One Day Sitting spent an hour figuring out just how to eat food. We give it a fancy Japanese name called Oriyoki, and you have to figure out how to unfold your bold. So anyway, when it says to study Buddha's way is to study itself, it means Buddhism is not an external thing. We do study a lot. I'm giving you a lecture here today and we do learn how to do all of these rituals. But it's all around the idea of studying yourself. Finding out what it means to be you. Finding out what it means to be a human being. Finding out what your life is actually about. And the advantage of that is you're you all the time. So you've got the material right in front of you to work with.

[12:53]

I can say that, but maybe it's not so simple. So you have to first observe your life honestly. Be willing to admit, this is how I feel. Not this is how I wish I felt, but this is how I actually feel. This is what I'm actually thinking. This is how my body feels. This is what I'm actually doing. This is how I'm interacting with the world, to actually pay attention. with a certain amount of honesty. So in order to study yourself, you have to study yourself without prejudices. Let's take a non-critical attitude towards it. When I was young, I was trained as a mathematician and a scientist. So when I was first introduced to zazen, that's our way of sitting meditation, I thought, this is like a microscope. on my life. I'll use Zazen to examine my life, just like I used a microscope to look at the things in biology, or a telescope to look at the stars.

[14:03]

And that actually works. It's a little too scientific an approach, and I'll tell you the downside of it. But it does have the advantage of bringing a certain integrity to the research, right? You're a scientist, you look and see what's actually there. And when you first sit down in Zazen, or even if you're experienced like some of you are and you'll be sitting Zazen today, you'll notice a thought comes up in your mind. Something like, wow, I didn't do so good there. And pretty soon you've got a whole story that starts to build, a narrative about what you did wrong, why you aren't so good. Then all of a sudden you'll notice, well, I feel kind of ashamed of myself. And then... Then you might also notice, since you're just sitting there not doing anything else, that you sort of like slump over a little bit. Instead of sitting in this noble, upright human posture, you've kind of slumped, and you're giving yourself a hard time, and you're sitting in this pain.

[15:07]

And since you're not busy running around the world, you might notice, well, what is going on here? How did that happen? Why did I all of a sudden feel so ashamed? This whole story I told, the first question you might have is, is this story true? I've done a story in my head that's made me feel ashamed and feel bad. Is it true? Or is it just some past story from my childhood that I just keep running through in my head all the time whenever something even slightly reminds me of that? You know, this goes on all the time when we're not sitting zazen. Little shadows of thoughts go through our head that make us feel bad, possibly. But we're so busy, we don't really notice it.

[16:07]

We just sort of push it aside and continue on with our activities. But then at the end of the day, we know, wow, we're really tired. And maybe I wasn't quite so kind as I could have been all day long, or I wasn't quite so joyous. So the advantage of sitting zazen is you actually get to notice with a fair amount of clarity the ways in which you punish yourself or do things to yourself. Now, of course, life is complicated, and it may be that actually you did something that wasn't kind to somebody, and you're feeling bad about it while you're sitting zazen, and you sort of vow that when you get up from zazen at the end of this day, you're going to go and apologize to that person for your behavior. That's a good thing to do, too. So, not always... the pain we're inflicting on ourselves is unwarranted. Sometimes we do actually need to make reprimand. But an awful lot of the pain that we administer ourselves is unnecessary. And I could tell a lot of stories.

[17:09]

There's anger too. You might today, while you're sitting there, get angry. You might get angry at the person sitting next to you because they're moving too much or sniffling. whatever it was, they didn't bow properly or they disrespected you in some way. And then all of a sudden you're noticing all this anger going on and what's that about? And where did that come from? And again, the advantage of being angry while you're sitting zazen is normally if you're in interaction with a human being and you get angry, you sort of can't actually feel it completely because you're worried you might say something to them or hit them or in some ways do something that you'll regret. But while you're sitting zazen, you can actually feel the power of anger, the energy of it in your body. And you can go, wow, what's that about? Why is that? I'm not supposed to be angry. I'm a Zen monk. Zen monks are kind and beautiful and they don't get angry.

[18:10]

And here I am being... And what's underneath that anger? Maybe there's fear underneath that anger and you get to actually explore it. So... This is part of what we're talking about when we're talking about studying the self, which is to stand up and actually take it. The third paramita in Zen, we have these perfections that we talk about. There's attitudes that help you in your practice, and one of them is patience or tolerance or endurance. Sometimes I think one of the main things that comes out of spending a day sitting zazen is you endure. the pain of your life, the suffering of your life. And to be able to sit upright in the midst of your suffering and face it ennobles you in some ways. It gives you the courage to face your suffering at other times in your life. Of course, on the other hand, if we spend all our time trying to improve ourselves by working on our own craziness, we can get too self-involved.

[19:22]

And we can start to wonder, well, is that all it's about? And I think maybe it isn't all about that. Maybe we should drop our self-concerns sometimes and help somebody cross the street. I remember one time when I was young, I was very concerned that I'd destroyed my ability to, quote, be enlightened by some misadventure I'd had in my youth. I remember standing there looking at him, and just in his presence I realized how self-preoccupied I was. I mean, like, who cares? I mean, really. I mean, there's bigger problems in the world than my little issues, and there was a kind of relief in that. I think sometimes we have to... So dropping our self-concern and focusing on helping the world sometimes also has to be balanced against this. I mean, we could spend all day long going to yoga classes and psychotherapy, right? But I mean, probably better off helping people.

[20:23]

So let's explore this idea of study some more. The Japanese translation of study is to become intimate with. To become intimate with, if you're studying something. And the Chinese characters of that has two components, one meaning wings of a bird and the other being self. So study means to study the way a baby bird studies his parents to learn to fly. We had, just this spring, we had four baby birds in a little nest right outside in the courtyard in the dining room. And for some reason I got lucky that day and I got to watch them as they made their first flight. And that first bravest little baby bird flew out. And then the next one did. And can you imagine, like you've never flown in your life, and you're this big, and there's this huge, and you jump out. I mean, you've been watching Mother go and get the little worms and bring them back to you, and something in you tells you your moment is coming, but you actually do.

[21:33]

Jump off, and wow, you can fly. God, what that must be. I just felt like, wow, that was thrilling for me to see it, you know. And we're fortunate here at Zen Center, we have a child, Maya, who is one of our students' child. She's one years old, and she's learning to walk, and she's starting to say things. And that level of study that's going on, she is observing carefully everything that's going on around, and she is so busy studying. She's not studying with her intellect. She's studying with her whole being, her whole mind, her whole body, her whole... emotional thing that's studying. That's the kind of studying we're talking about. We're talking about throwing your life into the project of being intimate with yourself and studying yourself that way. I am going to really get to know myself and be honest about it and face it. Of course, Maya isn't as... She gets emotionally disoriented sometimes because she doesn't have the same kind of composure we have when we don't get...

[22:41]

what we want. Yes. Suzuki Roshi says, if you try to understand who you are, it is an endless task and you will never see yourself. It is very difficult to try to think about yourself. To reach a conclusion is almost impossible. And if you continue trying, you will become crazy and you won't know what to do with yourself. So... Wow, if you try to understand yourself, you go crazy. So it's true, in some sense, you can drive yourself crazy. That's why zazen isn't just a matter of understanding yourself in that way. Zazen is a way of settling into yourself, just becoming who you are, accepting anything that comes your way as, oh, that's what it's like to be a human being. Oh, that's who I am in this moment. So don't try to see yourself objectively.

[23:45]

Don't try to seek for information about yourself. That is information. The real you is not that kind of thing. And he had a wonderful story that he used to try to describe who the real you is. He says, when you see someone practicing sincerely, and that happens a lot around here, we'll look at somebody and go, wow, her practice is so good. You may say, oh, she's doing very well. That she is neither she nor you. When you are struck by someone's practice, you see yourself. That is the real you. That you is the pure experience of practice. To be able to see someone else's practice is your practice. And what you're seeing is your connection to that person. The real you is just connection. There is no you outside of connection. And when you're struck by another human being, that's the real you. So this is experiencing life without that subject-object separation.

[24:49]

It's not me over here observing you, but together we have made something. I think we've got a pretty good handle on studying ourselves. To study the self is to forget the self. Let's begin. To forget the self is to see your own craziness and not take it so personally. That's the first thing. Be with your experience in a non-presidential way, and you may notice how much of your experience is around yourself, your self-concern. Oh, it's too hot in here for me. Oh, that person is noisy and bothering me. Oh, I was disrespected by my friend yesterday. Oh, it's... wow, a lot of my thinking is about me and whether I'm getting everything I need to be completely happy and content here in the world.

[25:55]

To forget yourself is to give that up. Now, of course, generally in the world, we have to do a lot of that. We have to get a job and do our job well so we get paid. There's a lot of things we have to take care of ourselves. make sure our needs are taken care of. That's a very real thing. But wouldn't it be nice if every once in a while, just for a little while, maybe on a day that you're sitting, a day of zazen, you just let it go. I'm just going to quit taking care of myself. The bell rings, I'll walk down to the zendo and I'll sit down. The bell rings, I'll get up and do some kinhen. The bell rings, I'll go eat some food. And whatever they serve me, oh, excellent, I'll eat that. Not, well, it's too salty, it's not salty. It's endless. So we would say in Zen, the source of our suffering is the clinging to ourself, the clinging to all of the stuff we need to take care of ourself. To forget yourself is a matter of dropping all your self-concerns.

[27:01]

What a relief. Oh my God, I'm just going to let it go and just whatever. It'll be such a relief. I recommend it for a few minutes during your day today. Suzuki Roshi says, When we forget ourselves, we actually are the true activity of big existence or reality itself. When we realize this fact there is no problem whatsoever in this world, and we can enjoy our life without feeling any difficulties. The purpose of our practice is to be aware of this fact. So, I mean, we're going to set this down. It doesn't mean that we don't experience the suffering of the world and we do what we can about it. But when we do what we can about it, it's for the benefit of the world, not for ourself. Okay, we've studied our self, we've let our self-concern go, now what happens?

[28:15]

To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. Myriad things is actualized by everything that's happening. When you let yourself go, you can appreciate the world you live in, even the tragic part, no longer dividing it into things that are good for me and things that are bad for me. This is renunciation. There's a famous quote by Wang Bo who pictures enlightened patriarchs in the real-life situations effacing themselves so that the true contour of the situation comes to disclosure in them. They encounter the world not through acts of will and mind primarily, but through relinquishment. Opening their minds and will, the larger context of the situation comes manifest through them. If you let go of yourself and you let the world speak through you, let the world create you, you are at that moment the whole world.

[29:23]

You are one with everything. And you will know how to act in that moment. You will know how to respond to the situation that's occurring in front of you. If you let go of yourself and you let the world speak to you, in that way. So that's to forget the self and be actualized by the myriad things. And now we get to the fourth sentence. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. dropping a body and mind is a very famous saying of Dogen's and he used it in many different circumstances. It's a translation of Shinjin Datsuraku. And he learned it in a famous, there's a famous story about when Dogen was in China studying with his teacher. In China in those days, this is what I've heard, it seems hard to believe, but I've done some research and it seems to be true.

[30:32]

Sometimes in some monasteries, they would sit 24 hours a day, all day long. And all night long, sometimes they had little sticks that they could prop their chins on to hold them up at night. People think it's hard, the way we practice in here. We let you go to sleep at night. I mean, you're only sitting from 5 o'clock in the morning till 6 o'clock at night today. Then you get to have dinner, go home, sleep... Anyway, apparently some students would fall asleep and the teacher, who of course didn't stay up all night, he probably would take a four-hour nap and get up at two in the morning and walk around and see what was going on. Because that's the life us teachers live. It's the easygoing thing. And he saw someone sleeping and he took his slipper off and he hit him on the head saying, Zazen is dropping body and mind. Why are you just sleeping? Well, this supposedly Dogen was enlightened. Because Dogen was sitting next to him, probably.

[31:35]

Maybe he was so terrified that he was going to get hit, it just sort of jolted him. Anyway, so this enlightenment story got told by his successor in a biography he wrote about Dogen, and it became sort of famous that Dogen had this enlightenment experience. But further research, and that's the beauty of all this research, turns out that Dogen... never claimed to have had any special psychological satori experience. He just said, and if you look at all his writings, he never talked about it. For Dogen, zazen is dropping body and mind. It is not some special psychological condition resulting from zazen. It is the practice of zazen. Doing zazen is dropping body and mind. Dogen's whole thing was just to experience the moment and the poignancy of the moment, every moment that you live.

[32:44]

That's enlightenment. Anyway, what would it mean to drop your body and mind while you're sitting zazen? And the metaphor that Shoaku Okamura uses is, we have all kinds of clothes we put on during the day, and the clothes sort of represent who we are. If you're a businessman, you might put on a business suit, or if you work for Apple, you put a T-shirt on, whatever, you wear a uniform. And if you're a yoga instructor, you put on a yoga outfit and you become, your personality sort of is expressed with your clothing. And it's not just your clothing. You have titles. I'm an executive vice president and I'm a whatever. And you have all these titles that describe you. And besides the titles that describe you, you have personal opinions about you that you've experienced. I'm a very capable person. I'm a very incapable person. I'm a good-looking person. I'm an ugly person. I'm a person that likes to relate to people. You have a whole description of yourself. Dropping body and mind is to drop that.

[33:45]

I'm going to sit zazen as just an ordinary human being, not as a person who's capable or incapable or... something else or something else. Just forget that. You're just with a whole bunch of other people that are just ordinary human beings sitting here. So you might be saying, well, I'm not sitting so good today and I'm a person that always does things well. Forget it. If you're not sitting good, that's who you are today. You get what I'm talking about here? And of course, all of these clothing that we wear, as I'm describing it, is in our body. we hold all of those ideas about ourself in our body. And to sit without starting to let those ideas go is to... In sitting, you'll notice sometimes parts of your body start to change and let go and move around. Now, I don't want to be unrealistic here.

[34:49]

We all know we've got deeply held beliefs about ourselves, many of which... all of which formed through the trauma of our childhood and which cause us pain and suffering, called pathogenic beliefs. And those are mostly unconscious, and they're not going to come out just by sitting down and saying, oh, I'm just going to drop all those beliefs that caused me suffering today. No, that's a lifetime of work, and so I'm not asking that you completely revamp yourself, but just the obvious things that are coming up, let go as much as you can. And you might notice... that some of the suffering that you're having is actually related to some early childhood stuff, and maybe you can release some of that, too, when you sit. Hmm. Letting go of your thinking in these areas doesn't necessarily mean that there's no thinking.

[35:57]

People think, oh, Zazen, I'm just going to stop thinking. That's not what happens. It means that you quit sticking to the thoughts. If a thought comes up, fine, they'll come up. They come up so fast you can't stop them. It's the narration that you add on to it. It's amazing. Even though I rush through the first part, already it's getting late and I'm not nearly to the end. So we should pause. Well, since we've dropped our body and mind, the body and mind of others because we're so intimately connected to the world that that's what we're dropping when we drop that. Now ready for no trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly.

[37:01]

No trace of realization remains. Shohako Kimura's translation of the line is no trace of realization remains and this no trace continues. No trace of realization remains. Excuse me, I got the wrong thing. There is a trace of realization, oh good, that cannot be grasped. That's his translation. So there's a trace of this realization we've attained, but you can't hold on to it. You can't have it. Because this realization we're talking about is not something you get. Trungpa used to call it spiritual materialism. Well, we've got all our cars, let's get all our enlightenment experiences. No. Realization is a process of living life. You know, bowing is one of our practices here in Zen, just like I bowed at the altar before I sat down here. And I remember the first time I really experienced a bow was at Tashara.

[38:10]

Sugiro, she was still alive. And as I started down, all of a sudden my entire body was swept over with the feeling of gratitude. Such a beautiful, pure, exquisite, clear feeling, gratitude. Gratitude just to be alive, just to be a human being. A moment of grace. And boy, do we want to hold on to those. But that's not how it works. We all have these moments of grace. Or we wake up to the fact that we're alive and living this way. And we want to hold on to it, but we can't. Because once you grasp it and hold on to it, you kill the next moment. And you want to be open to live the next moment. Suzuki Roshi says, when you do something, you should burn yourself completely like a bonfire.

[39:11]

you attach to what you've done or experienced, you're involved in selfish ideas. I want that experience more for myself. You will leave a trace or shadow in your mind that will limit your actual experience in the future. I have some more stories to tell, but I think I will come to an end because it is 10 o'clock. I guess the final comment on no trace of realization remains, the most important things about our life cannot be known by us in the ordinary way of knowing. We don't have to know it, we just can live it. So, to review, to study the Buddha way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.

[40:16]

When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the body and minds of others, drop away. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly. Look and see what's going on in this moment of your living today. Every moment is a death. Whatever your problem is, difficult relationships, a grieving heart, an aging body and mind, or some mysterious longing, this is your life. We don't notice how marvelous it is to be alive because we are so busy.

[41:17]

We don't notice how marvelous it is to be alive and to share our life with other people and how brief and how great it is that we are all in it together. We forget. We forget to be grateful to live a human life. It's natural that we forget. It's part of being a human being. But if we practice, it will be more difficult to forget. So I hope you have a moment of grace sometime today. 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.

[42:22]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:25]

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