This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Today, happily, I've been given the opportunity by the media to form my thoughts around the myriad circumstances of these past two weeks. that resulted in the rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach, also known as the wild boars, from a dark and water-filled cave in Thailand. Each day from when the boys were first reported lost until they were found and then brought out safely was a real-life cliffhanger and the first bit of news that I checked on every morning. And as you know, sadly, one of the men who was trying to rescue the boys died in his effort to help them.

[01:03]

His name was Saman Munan. And he's also honored and embraced within this warmly human story. I can imagine most of you saw the photographs and images of the boys being found and then the long planning process that led to their rescue, including teaching them how to swim, to breathe with scuba gear and so on. That part was deeply engaging for the world press. However, I was somewhat amazed at how little attention was given by the mainstream reporting to the fact that the coach of these boys, Ekapol Chantha Wang, had spent most of his young life from the age of 12 until 22 as a Thai monk. There was one little news feed that appeared on my cell phone called Vox, which posted an article entitled, How Buddhist Meditation Kept the Thai Boys Calm in the Cave. The article goes on to say that when the British divers first discovered them on the tiny shelf where they had been waiting for many long days in utter darkness, the boys were meditating together.

[02:17]

As one rescuer reported at the moment the boys were found, They were sitting there calmly. No one was crying or anything. It was astonishing. The article then explains that Ekapol, their coach, had taught the boys to meditate to keep them calm and to preserve their energy through the nine days of pitch-black isolation. On Thursday, the day of the rescue, each of the boys did an hour of meditation with the coach before they were brought out of the cave. So the article included a cartoon that has been circulating widely in Thailand by an artist who shows Ekapol with a lap full of 12 tiny wild boars sitting peacefully in upright meditation. I think this story may be as close as we Buddhists will ever get to winning a World Cup. You know? Yay for meditation, you know?

[03:19]

Let's hear it for doing nothing. And as you may already know, it's a bit of an uphill slog to market the virtues of silent sitting in the face of what seems to be an ever-rising tide of worldly sorrows, a world in which the silent sitting of those boys in a dark cave is given only the slightest mention. And because marketing of a product such as meditation is such a challenge for us as it was for the Buddha, with so little to show for itself, we Buddhists not only sit here together, we also talk about sitting here together. We talk in order to encourage one another to give it a try. As it says on this clever bumper sticker of recent years, don't just do something, sit there. Only by doing that something that we call nothing can we discover for ourselves how an hour of silent sitting, even in the darkest of times and the darkest of places, might literally save our lives.

[04:29]

Or even if our lives are not in the end to be saved, the quality of the time that we have left may be brighter, sweeter, and more dear. So I don't know as yet what kind of instruction the coach gave to the young team, and I'm going to be very curious to find out. But in the meantime, I thought I would offer to all of you here today a few words of instruction for seated meditation from the Zen tradition. Also, I want to add some encouragement, if you haven't already, to give it a try. As with many endeavors that we've set out to learn in our lives, sitting still for a period of time is not as simple as it may sound. I can recall quite vividly the first time a friend of mine suggested that I try sitting still, as she'd recently been taught on a visit to Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama was in exile. She gave me a pillow to sit on, a few suggestions for my legs and arms, after which she sat there next to me having set a timer for 35 minutes.

[05:38]

What I mostly remember of that experience was that her dog, Shuba, an Alaskan husky who had not been friendly to me at all, came over, laid his big head in my lap, and went to sleep. It was a very nice surprise, but also he helped me to settle my own body and mind into what became a few quiet moments within my otherwise chaotic young life. It wasn't until some years later that I found my way to the San Francisco Zen Center to receive Zazen instruction in the Buddha Hall of the city center. The instructor on that day was a young woman with a shaved head, wearing black clothing, whose name she said was Linda. I can't remember exactly what she said, and yet I have been trying to rediscover those instructions ever since, to rediscover the freshness and the openness of that first visit to what would become my spiritual home for the next 40 years.

[06:44]

I do remember that once Linda, who turns out to be our very own Linda Ruth Cutts, the central abbess of the Zen Center, had finished giving us instructions, I thought, that's it? Just sit there? which reminded me of a young boy who came here with his class of fifth graders a few years back and sat here in this room. And I gave them pretty much the same instructions that Linda had given to me and then told them to try their best to sit quietly for about 10 minutes until the bell rang. Most of them were pretty quiet. A few of them couldn't stop wiggling. But one boy sat there the entire time, quite upright and quite still. When I asked them how it had been for them, He raised his hand and he said, no one has ever asked me not to do anything before. And I said, how was that? He said, it was really nice. So that really is the core of the instruction that I'm going to give to you now as well.

[07:47]

The invitation not to do anything at all. Not so easy for us busy people. Unless, of course, you're sitting in a dark black cave. with no other choice than to take the advice your dear coach is about to give you. The basic instruction for seated meditation is concerned with quieting our restless minds and our restless bodies of calming down, which in the Buddhist tradition is called shamatha or tranquility practice. Shamatha is familiar to us from all those moments that we've spent gazing at the moon or at the ocean or at the dying embers of a campfire. During tranquility practice, the breath deepens, our eyes soften as they do each night before heading off to sleep. The first step in the practice of meditation is to find a quiet room. This very suggestion appears in a text written by Dogen Zenji called the Fukan Zazengi, the Universal Recommendation for Zazen.

[08:52]

Dogen was a 13th century Zen master and the founder of our school of Zen, and he wrote this just after returning from his studies in China. Many of the specific instructions in this text are echoed eight centuries later here in California by my dear friend Linda on my first visit to the Zen Center. Eat and drink moderately. Cast aside all involvements and cease all affairs. Do not think good or bad. Do not administer pros and cons. Cease all the movements of the conscious mind, the gauging of all thoughts and views. Have no designs on becoming a Buddha. Sanzen has nothing whatever to do with sitting or lying down. These lines are instructions concerning our attitude as we learn how to sit. Often people like me want more elaboration about just what it is we're supposed to do while we're sitting there waiting for the bell, resulting in a belief, as many people tell me in those first few months or years of practicing meditation, that they're pretty sure they're not doing it right.

[10:13]

So as you can hear from Master Dogen's instructions, just don't. Whatever it is that comes up in your mind, don't. Don't fall for it. So then, is there something that we can do? And there is. We can, as Dogen further instructs, spread out thick matting and place a cushion above it. We can sit either in the full lotus or the half lotus position. with our clothing loosely bound and arranged in order. We can also sit upright in a chair. Our right hand can be placed on our left leg and our left palm facing upward on our right palm with our thumb tips touching. This is called the cosmic mudra. Thus, sit upright and correct bodily posture, neither inclining to the left nor to the right, neither leaning forward nor backward. Be sure your ears are on a plane with your shoulders.

[11:17]

Your nose is in line with your navel. Place your tongue against the front roof of your mouth with your teeth and lips both shut. Your eyes should always remain open. And you should breathe gently through your nose. Once you've adjusted your posture, take a deep breath Inhale and exhale. Rock your body right and left and settle into a steady, immovable sitting position. So that's pretty much the basic instruction for making of our bodies what Dogen later on calls the Buddha Mudra, about which he has this to say. When one displays the Buddha Mudra, with one's whole body and mind sitting upright in samadhi, even for a short time. Everything in the entire Dharma world becomes the Buddha mudra, and all the space in the universe completely fills with enlightenment.

[12:25]

So that's a pretty big assertion of what we come to do when we sit, and yet for Dogen Zenji, it is the truest and most basic instruction for a human being. Display the Buddha mudra with your whole body and mind while sitting upright in samadhi. And yet, what is perhaps assumed but not stated in this particular teaching is that we do this together. In fact, the word samadhi literally means placing together. Placing the self, the falsely imagined and isolated self, together with all things. and thereby becoming who you really are, and that is the entire universe filled to the brim with enlightenment, even for a moment, in a joyful and instantaneous reunion. And for me, this placing together is the most important thing that the Buddha saw at the moment of his awakening.

[13:28]

He saw that he was the Buddha mudra, and that the Buddha mudra was and still is reality itself, just like this. The inescapable presence of the present moment, in which we human beings are at once either trapped or free, depending entirely on how we see it. On this day, and every day for that matter, we are given this opportunity to reflect on the present moment and to see for ourselves that there is nothing whatsoever outside of this, separate from this or excluded from this. And given that, nothing whatsoever can be done about this present moment because it is what we are, what we truly are. And that is that we are alive together. It's all we've got and it's all we'll ever have and therefore we have to take care of it.

[14:32]

the Buddha mudra, with all of its horrors and delights, just as Ekapal did with his lap full of tiny wild boars. And yet it's in the present moment that we all are called on to respond, thereby altogether creating the moment to follow. This is our life of karma, meaning action. How we act in the present moment is how we change the world. A concern for the suffering of humankind is what motivated the Buddha to sit down under the Bodhi tree with great determination in the first place. He didn't know what would happen as he sat there, but he had a great hope of finding a pathway to freedom from the suffering he had witnessed in the society in which he lived, not so different from the one in which we live today, with its killing and stealing and sexualizing and lying and slandering and so on. Therefore, we too have come here to sit with great determination and to study ourselves, our actions, and our motives in the same hope of finding relief from this seemingly tireless cycle of greed, hatred, and delusion.

[15:50]

Without such an understanding of what we are doing here each and every day, sitting would be, as far as I am concerned, an enormous waste of time. So although our sitting practice may have been of help in saving 13 young lives last week, it's not so clear how many lives it might be saving this week or this year or even in this lifetime. And yet finding the path of freedom for all beings may still be the best chance we have to alter the course of human history, just as it did over 2,000 years ago in a small village in the foothills of the Himalaya. when a young boy was born. And yet I think we all know that this request from inside of our hearts to alter the course of human history is very tender and may take quite some time to be revealed, even to ourselves. I've heard it called our utmost or deepest request, expressed in the Buddhist tradition as the bodhisattva vow, the wish to live for the benefit of all beings.

[17:01]

by showing up completely just how you are, with no gaps and no excuses. How to live for the benefit of all beings was for the Buddha, as for all of us, something that needed to be learned, which is why many of us brought ourselves to a place such as this, where there are teachings and teachers and something unfathomable and seemingly mysterious called by us the great matter. something that we long to learn about ourselves and about each other and about the world. And yet approaching the great matter directly isn't possible, since, as I said before, it's just what we are, a great and wonderful mystery. Outside all notions, such as gain or loss, self or other, birth or death, upside or downside, what we really are isn't like any of that. isn't like the way we usually think. The great mystery of reality itself simply doesn't submit to the limitations of human language.

[18:09]

So the best we can do for each other is to use our limited words carefully and precisely in order to create the conditions for realization, conditions that have been practiced for many thousands of years, such as those that Dogen Zenji enumerated in the Fukansa Zengi. The word realization means the act of becoming fully aware of something as a fact, such as when the Buddha proclaimed at his birth, I alone am the world-honored one. It also means to cause something to happen or to give physical form to something. In other words, to become what you have realized. In this case, to become the Buddha mudra with your whole body and mind while sitting upright in samadhi. And then, as that young boy observed after sitting quietly for a few minutes, not to do anything at all. Someone once said that Zen can be discovered best by going through an exhaustive list of what it is not.

[19:17]

I think some of you have already gotten a sense of that by chanting the Heart Sutra here in the early morning. For those of you who are not familiar with the Heart Sutra, it goes something like this. No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no sight, no sound, no taste, no touch, no object of mind, no suffering, no cause, no cessation of suffering, no path leading to the cessation of suffering, until finally there's no attainment with nothing to attain. Whatever's left over at the end of that recitation is what the Buddha is said to have realized the morning of his awakening. when everything he thought he was had completely vanished. According to the Heart Sutra, what was left over was a mantra. The word mantra itself comes from a Sanskrit root, man, meaning mind.

[20:19]

So a mantra is the thought behind our speech or action. That impulse or intention deep within our hearts to do something. But what? To kill people or to protect them? To love our neighbors as ourselves or to hate them? We all have to choose and then we all have to work for it to the end of our days. Although the mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra sounds a little less mysterious when it's translated into English, gone, gone, completely gone, gone beyond, bodhi, svaha, still, it leaves us to wonder who's gone and gone where. But most importantly, how does this have anything to do with me? Which is why the word bodhi at the end comes from Sanskrit, means to completely understand the ending of all our questions. The word bodhi that shares the same meaning as the word Buddha. I think what's true of the Heart Sutra is true of our Zazen practice as well.

[21:26]

Whatever is left over after you have settled into your seats will best be discovered by what it's not. Again, from the Fukanzazengi, Zen master tries to help us to understand. He says, it's not pursuing words or following after speech. It's not learning meditation. It's not the practice or realization of supernatural powers. And it's really not the wasteful delight in the spark from a flintstone. until finally, at the very end, he tells us what it is. It is simply the Dharma gate of repose and bliss, the practice realization of totally culminated enlightenment, the Buddha mudra, whole body and mind sitting upright in samadhi, if only for a moment, just like this one. The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain in me, until only the mountain remains.

[22:30]

Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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