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. As some of you know very well and some of you may not know, this is... the last week of our practice period here at City Center before Sashin. And so this is the last Wednesday night talk. I was just thinking about Sashin and I was thinking the marvelous and terrible thing about Sashin is it doesn't really matter at a certain point It doesn't matter what you think practice is or isn't, or what your ambitions or goals for Shishin are, or what you would like to avoid in Shishin.

[01:12]

Somehow the nature of it is it just draws you in and tells you, you're here on my terms. And of course, this is actually what life is suggesting all the time. It has its own intensity. It has its own energy. I heard the poet David White say once in a talk, it has its own fierce need to change us. But since we're still at a safe distance from Sasheen, we will continue to proceed.

[02:14]

Like, the things we think and the things we consider we will do and won't do still can hold sway in the purpose, in the process of life. So recently I had been suggesting this notion of a dynamic tension between what arises for us as a self, from the internal workings of our being, from navigating, negotiating with the context of our life, our relationships, our agendas, our priorities. how that stands in relationship to the request of practice.

[03:18]

And then I matched that up with questions and statements from koans. And what I matched it up with was, what do you want? Someone said to me recently, in a one-on-one interview, they said, you know, I look carefully and I don't know what I want. And then we discussed between the two of us, was this progress or was this some great failure? What do you want? And then, from the Koan perspective, just avoid picking and choosing. And then, of course, in the context of our life, in the context of the diligence of our practice, we can set them up in opposition, good and evil.

[04:22]

Or not. Or we can see how they inform and form each other. what we want, the expression of being alive, the way of engaging life with passion, with involvement, with commitment. And then, how we can overdo it. How the very way we're engaging our life can be about me. Other becomes an object in the play of me. Other becomes inanimate as the product of my desire. Then, just to make matters worse, I offer the question, how do you suffer?

[05:33]

this fundamental Buddhist teaching that Shakyamuni offered in his first Dharma talk. When you base your endeavors in your human life on your wanting, something goes out of balance, and you suffer. Where in your life are you noticing the way in which it's going out of balance, the way in which it's being hindered, the way in which it's too much or too little? How do you suffer? I was thinking of this just in preparation for this talk. And what occurred to me was a beautiful line from Naomi Shihabnai's poem, Kindness.

[06:46]

Before you can know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know suffering as the other deepest thing. How do you suffer? And then, Yunven's absurd, profound statement, every day is a good day. What is it? How does resilience spring forth? How does a willingness to be who we are, living the life for living, in meeting the context the particulars of our life and the relationships of our life? Do we need to suppress or deny our suffering?

[07:52]

Do we need to resolve all the things that cause us suffering and then we can have a good day? And then, maybe more elemental, I offered the question, what's happening now? Right now, how is the world being put together? How is it being constructed? And then I offered a phrase from Kaz Tanahashi's translation of a statement in Dogen Zenji's Jijiu Zammai. Unconstructedness, in stillness. Just here, just letting it be what it is without making up a story.

[08:54]

So those three, what you might call existential statements. What do you want? How do you suffer? What's happening? And then three contrasting, complementary notions about the request of practice. Just avoid picking and choosing. Or just don't get stuck in picking and choosing. Every day is a good day. unconstructedness. Don't get lost in making up a story about it. In some of the early Buddhist lists, they tend to have a sense of progression. Initiation, engagement, perseverance,

[10:09]

mindfulness, concentration, and then sometimes insight, and then sometimes equanimity. You know, the sense of involvement in a human life that has a balance, that has an equanimity to it. And not an unmoving balance, not an uprightness that can resist the winds of life, but more a balance that loses and finds itself, that responds and engages and rediscovers uprightness. So the proposition I've been suggesting is that in the tension between, you know, in one way we could say, how do you suffer, what do you want?

[11:19]

The constructs of the self. And then on the other hand we could say the request of practice or going beyond the self. So the relationship between the assertion of self and going beyond the self. and how, as we explore that, as we engage that, we discover equanimity. And we discover the same way we discover incisheen. We come at it with sincerity. We come at it with intentionality. But inevitably, it's about immersion in the stuff of life. It's immersion in what goes on, and it takes us beyond what we say it should be, what we hope it will be, the way in which we define success and failure.

[12:25]

And it's in that territory, it's in that way of being that we discover equanimity. Just in sitting. You know, when we start to sit often, in our deep sincerity, we conjure up a notion, successful sitting. It looks like this, it feels like this. It should be this pristine state of mind. It should be this steadiness. It should be this non-grasping fluidity. And then we endeavor to manufacture that. And we fail. I have a dear, lifelong friend who says, I can't do Zaza.

[13:27]

I just can't. And I, being a clever Zen person, saying, that's right. I am can't do zazen. Self can't produce zazen, it can't do it. Zazen undoes I. But I did own that as cleverness. I think in her constant endeavor she creates a practice jewel. And then every now and then she'll surprise me and say, oh, I can't do something. And I'm surprised, like, after decades, you're still saying that?

[14:32]

And still she lives a life of shining practice. So is that equanimity? Is that the balance between self and no-self? And this is the territory of koin. It draws us into closer examination. It draws us into more intimate involvement. It draws us into this curious dilemma of a human life. At its very cellular level, it has an urgency to assert its being.

[15:42]

And if we get caught up in it, if we let that dictate and dominate the expression of being alive, that very adamant, it's all about me, obscures what it is to be alive. And then in the course of this practice period, what I was trying to present to get to this point was intention. Some way we steady ourselves, we ready ourselves to enter into the life we've always been living. Then I offered the notion, pause, willingness to experience, and let what's happening happen.

[16:54]

There's some way in this stream of activity, in the busyness, in the engagement of our life, something like a slogan, something that reminds us. Pause, willingness to experience, and experience what's being experienced. There's always the possibility of just this. Just this is. And then I offered two fives. Five faculties, five hindrances. Here's what a shining Buddha does, five faculties. Here's what a terrible, terrible human being does, five hindrances.

[17:59]

And how amazing that we are innately capable of both. We can open, we can contract. push away, or we can allow to be. We can say and feel not enough, or we can open and experience what is. And each of them has their own truth, has their own expression of existence. And the interesting thing about practice is it's very helpful to explore both.

[19:12]

It's very helpful to explore open presence. Just try to taste and touch how it influences attitude, or state of mind, or emotions, or breath, the sensations in the body. Each of these faculties has its own Dharma jewel, its own precious teaching. And then the same with the hindrances. Each of them has its own Dharma jewel. Often, how we learn how to open

[20:15]

is learning about how we close or contract. How we learn not to be so caught up in our wanting, we learn by watching the ways in which we do get too caught up in our wanting. How do we learn about heaviness? How do we learn about aliveness and energy from noticing heaviness and numbness, the ways we space-side, disconnect. How do we learn about curiosity and a wonder? By examining and experiencing the ways in which we demand the right certain answer. Which, of course, we don't have. So we doubt.

[21:17]

We worry. Well then what is real? How do I know I'm doing exactly the right thing? When we're filled with wonder and curiosity, everywhere we turn is the right thing. And so these two are relating to each other. This exalted aspiration for awakening and this stubborn persistence of human condition. And then the play between the two. So, that's my preamble to Dogen Zenji's Genjo Koan. The koan of life. The koan of being alive. I thought I had played a wonderful trick on myself and brought the wrong fascicle.

[22:36]

My mind was immediately thinking, hmm, can I do this from memory? certainly read it enough. So I wanted to say what I said, hopefully, as a way to see that, you know, what Dogen's talking about here, he's talking about the very stuff of our life. I would say every one of us, all day, is engaging in this interplay. Sometimes someone does or says something to annoy you, and you watch your mind and your emotions, and sometimes even your body, sort of contract around the discomfort of it.

[23:42]

then you can watch how your attention and engagement engage that discomfort, engage the particularity of the interaction that caused you the pain. And you feel its energy, you feel its aliveness, and yet something in you usually, often I would say, is not totally convinced. We can feel the certainty of our emotion through its energy. We can feel the certainty of our thinking by its persistence. But something in this goes, hmm, it's not the whole story. doesn't totally describe what happened or who this person is or what I think and feel.

[24:54]

So that awareness it both allows what arises in a human life and in an interesting way it gives it space. And so Dogen starts off by saying, when there is that awareness, when there is that space, everything that is possible, everything that comes up in a human life, comes into existence. We could call that space, as Dogen does in this classical, it's Buddha Dharma, it's the awakened expression of being. When all things are Buddha Dharma, there's enlightenment, there's moments of realization, seeing it what it is, there's illusion, there's just getting fixed in a particular perspective, there's practice,

[26:13]

There's opening to it. There's the energy of life. There's the denial of life. There's the non-self. Just meeting it as energy. And there's the me. And there's the terrible other. All these things come into being. when it's not grasped, when it's not turned into a fixed thing, then none of it is permanent. And Dogen says, when all things are not seen as the self, there's no illusion, there's no enlightenment, there's no Buddha, there's no sentient being, and there's no coming into being and going out of being. It's just this constant play of existence.

[27:13]

And then he says, the Buddha way gets stuck in neither. It's the interplay between self and non-self. Originally, the Buddha way transcends the notion of abundance or lack. the notion of success and failure. The notion, this should and that should not. And when we pay close attention, we realize this in every period of Zazen. A very interesting thing happens when you keep sitting, you know? You can have an experience where you're somewhat concentrated.

[28:21]

And then you have this marvelous, exalted idea. This is it. This is the real Zen. This is what it is. And then you keep sitting. You keep practicing. And then you realize A couple of things. One is, that wasn't permanent. And the other one is, as you keep paying attention, you realize you're just scratching the surface. Yes, you were a little concentrated. Yes, you were somewhat present. But as you pay close attention, you see, even in that state, the mind was moving around, grasping this, pushing away that, As Dogen says in another fascicle, you were around the borders having glimpses of the Buddha state.

[29:36]

In one of his fascicles, actually in this fascicle he says, When you start to glimpse it, you think, yes, this is it. And then you pay closer attention and you see, this is not perfect. This is a step on the path. Originally, the Buddha way transcends itself and any idea of abundance or lack. And in that interplay, both the self and the non-self express themselves. We get annoyed and we see the nature of annoyance. We have a yearning.

[30:46]

Oh, I wish this would happen. We see and feel the territory, the construct of yearning. And the interplay teaches us both compassion for the human condition and wisdom. We see how it puts together the world, how it puts together the self. And Dogen closes this paragraph by saying, and in our chagrin flowers fall, and in our resentment weeds grow. And then to illustrate his point, he says, our practice is not about conjuring up some mythological notion of what should happen or what should not happen.

[32:10]

Our practice is not about some extraordinary strenuous effort to overcome the human condition. Inevitably we bring the hopes, the aspirations, the fears that are part of us. We bring them to practice and have this tendency to let our engagement in practice be the expression of those hopes and fears. The challenge of our practice is to see them. In the very process of seeing them, seeing how we act them out, that's how we wake up. The phrase Dogen uses is, the awakened are awakened about delusion.

[33:14]

They're awake to what it is that causes us to get stuck. Then there's a wonderful existential dilemma for us. We can listen to the, we can hear a teaching like this and we can think, okay then, well then I'm going to do this. I will endeavor in this way. I will practice like this. And then, of course, that endeavor, that aspiration invites us to actualize what it's proposing. Each day, each expression of our being,

[34:24]

Can it all be experiential learning? Can it all be Ganjal Kon? Can it all be this amazing engagement in going beyond my ideas about it and living the experience of it? Yesterday morning as I was just waking up, I was having an intense dream. And I was dreaming, I was wrestling with my cousin who, when we were young, because we were more or less the same age, I grew up in Ireland where there were large families, and how you manage the children is you pair them up and say, you play with him and go away and don't bother me.

[35:34]

And you play with her and you go that way. Don't bother me. So we spent our boyhood years together. And then he died about four years ago. And if you'd have said to me, well, have you settled with his death? I would have genuinely said, Yes, I have. It was sad, I grieved it, and I've settled with it. And then I woke up from my... and in the dream we were wrestling, and actually he went on to become a champion shot putter, an All-Ireland champion shot putter at that time. So you can imagine when we wrestled, you can imagine who won.

[36:36]

Then I woke up in that moment of waking up, this utterly poignant, heartbreaking sense of loss. And then there's disorientation, you know, coming back into this reality with all the capacity to see the floor and the walls and the ceiling. But in that moment of being undone by the very workings of being alive, how it stood in contrast to my own convinced story.

[37:47]

Oh yes, I'm over that. To discover in a moment, that's still there, that can undo you in a moment. What shall we do? Contract, try to stay safe from the unruliness of our own emotions. Shall we develop strategies that hold the world in a predictable fashion? Shall we practice Zen so that it saves us from such frailty and vulnerability. Dogen Senji says, the deluded are deluded about enlightenment.

[38:56]

We pick up consciously and unconsciously our strategies. This is what will hold it all together. This is what will keep me safe. This is what will produce the desired outcome. can we meet, as David White says, the world's fierce need to change us? Maybe we could add to that our own fierce need to be completely who we are and what we are that bursts forth in our dreams. to this expression of practice that the Buddha Dharma sets in front of us, equanimity.

[39:59]

What is it to open up to all that life offers, outside and inside? What is it be willing to experience what's being experienced with each inhale, with each exhale, with each interaction. And what is it to let that be more of an inquiry than a demand, an assertion? is what Dogen Senji called, the Genjo Kahn.

[41:04]

Thank you. 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.

[41:31]

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