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. Good morning. So this is the seventh day of the Rats of Sashim. which is the sashin in which we celebrate and appreciate and occupy with our bodies Buddha's enlightenment, Buddha's waking up. And it's also the last sashin of this practice period And this is a very tentative talk.

[01:03]

Like everything. It's a tentative form. And I would like to encourage you to see if you can Listen more with your body than with your mind. So that whatever I'm saying, your mind is not going, do I agree or do I disagree? Or what is she talking about? But just to let the sounds come to your body. When I practice in Switzerland with a Deshimaru group, they give their talks while people are in the middle of Sazen. For a long time it was disturbing because I was used to sitting like you're sitting now, listening to talk and trying to understand what they were saying.

[02:09]

That was pretty hard to do while in the middle of Zazen. I felt like either I'm doing that, then I'm out of Zazen, or I'm in Zazen, then I can't listen in that way. So till I started to, I had to surrender and give up. And just sit there and let words arrive and fall wherever they did. And not get engaged in that being. Positioning myself in relationship to what I'm hearing. So Buddha... was born and was born into conditions like we all are. And his father tried to control his life so that he would become, because it was said that he would become either, he would become a big leader, but it wasn't clear whether a spiritual leader or a worldly leader.

[03:26]

And his father, of course, was interested in him being his successor as a king. So he tried to control Buddha's life. And it worked for a while. And then it didn't. So we all try to control our lives. And it works for a while. And then it doesn't. So he was very same as we are. And I hope and think that all of us came here with some sense of ourselves, and maybe by now we are not so sure of that sense of ourselves anymore. I definitely am not.

[04:26]

And when I listen to people in Doksan, it feels like they're kind of meeting things that they don't quite know what to do with or how to relate to. And I would just like to encourage us all to appreciate that rather than scramble around trying to immediately know what to do or how to be with or... what does this mean for my life, or who am I now, or to really... That's what life is about. I mean, if you look around, it just doesn't stop, and it keeps moving and changing. You know, not so long ago there were leaves on the trees. Now there are a few that still hang on tight, and some may make it through the whole winter, but only very few, most of them... And then also the few that have hung on through the whole winter, which sometimes happens, when the spring comes, the new ones push them away.

[05:34]

So at some point, even those can stay the same. And we are living organisms, and everything keeps changing. So that's when it says the Bodhisattva has no abode. It's kind of willing... to be changed and change and be changed and change and be changed ongoingly. So Buddha went on a quest to find out what this was about suffering, about getting old and sick and die old or die young, lose things, people. And first he went to everything that was known, to all the teachers that thought they knew how it's done, all the famous teachers, and tried, and it didn't help. So the known things didn't help.

[06:38]

And then he tried the last six years before he finally stepped back and relied. just on this unique body. He tried asceticism for six years, where he tried to get rid of all desires, of all physical manifestations, kind of thinking that if he denies the body, the matter, then he will be free. That that's what binds him. And he found But that didn't work. But they tried hard for a long time. And we do the same. We deny here and there, we do deny, all of us deny parts of our lives that we have decided are troublesome or we don't like or we think other people don't like or whatever, for whatever reason, we deny those to us.

[07:49]

We starve ourselves of those. And then we come here, and then some of those kind of start knocking at the door, because here we sit, we spend a lot of time just with this body, with this life. And so we have a chance to encounter them. And when they come forward, we have all sorts of reactions. We want to run away. We want to fight. We freeze. We hate them. We try to get back to the old pattern and it's just failing us. We tense up. And, you know, when Buddha finally said, I'm just going to sit down till I understand. He didn't just sit down with his mind.

[08:52]

He sat down, actually, to sit down you need a body. He sat down with the body he had, and he trusted that everything that he needed to know was within, with this body. That was everything that he needed. This body, this heart, this mind, If he was openly looking, he would start to understand. And it's interesting, the word understand is actually also a physical word. You stand with your body to understand, to grasp. We have the word begreifen in German, which means you touch everything with your hand till you know what it is. And that's different than just conceptual knowing.

[09:54]

So he decided to just be with his body. And to be open-minded, which means in some ways we always hear inquiring mind or way-seeking mind. That's the way of looking at things with curiosity. Even if we think we know what they are, we keep looking. And we keep being surprised if we keep looking. You know, if you tend to the garden and you look at the plants, if you keep looking at them, they keep surprising you with something. you know, or something around them, or how they respond to something, or now they're making little buds, or look, now it's blooming, or so to, and now it's eaten by a snail.

[11:01]

So am I glad I saw it yesterday? I looked at it. So it's that open, non- conceptual perceptions, being in our bodies and perceive. So there are seven factors of enlightenment, and there are mindfulness, investigation. It's formulated where I read it. It's formulated investigation into phenomena, which feels different than investigation of phenomena.

[12:13]

When I think of phenomena, it's over there, and I look at it, and I go, oh, yeah, that's that. into phenomena. That means we have to actually really become very intimate. Energy. Bliss. Isn't that surprising? That's a factor of enlightenment. Tranquility. Concentration. And equanimity. So we have been doing that for three months together almost. And so you all have your very own version of going through different experiences and arriving where you have arrived right now while you continue moving on.

[13:22]

And when Buddha sat down and decided to not leave, he encountered everything we encounter. You know, it's described in Mara, sending beautiful girls to distract him and sending armies to stop him and, you know, questioning his rights. to do that, to wake up, to distract him. So we could say Mara is our sense of self that wants to, that is kind of engaged in wanting to be the one controlling our life and thinks that's its task, to control and manage and strategize our life. So it's moving in the tracks that we think it should move. And it should express itself. So those parts will come up and say, well, it's very, very, ooh, look over there, it's really wonderful.

[14:36]

If you would not only get a little distracted, you would have a better time than just sitting here. Or, you know, this is really, really dangerous. If you go over there, you know, nobody will love you anymore. You better not go there. Or, you know, who are you? Haven't I told you for years that you're not worth anything? So why would you suddenly be so uppity to try this? So when we sit and we have those feelings, can we meet them kind of fully? And the way to really meet them is in our bodies because that's where they happen. And then the thoughts are with them or come from them or bring them up.

[15:37]

We can create feelings through thinking. We can follow particular thinking patterns and go right to some feelings, which we know we will get to. Or we can have a feeling and then the thinking gets triggered. as Rilke says, you know, perhaps everything that frightens us or that we don't know, we don't know, is not familiar and frightens us, is in its deepest essence something that once our love, that wants our undivided attention, our presence.

[16:41]

And when people talk about Suzuki Roshi and about the impact on him, what strikes me is not so much necessarily what he said, but how he was. how he was, how he looked at people, how he moved, how he moved rocks, how he responded but as an embodiment. So So for me, what I am saying, I'm not in the same place as I was when I came here, that this embodiment thing has become such a theme and a question. And when I now read something or think about something, it just is shifting.

[17:45]

And it's not like I've understood it. It's more like I get that it's, for me, it's something... important and it's opening a lot of questions and a lot of curiosity and wonderings, not certainties. But there's no, I mean, and it's very interesting because I mentioned it in the mountain seat ceremony, so it's always been a complete clear truth that what matters is what we do. how we are much more than who we think we are how we are and that embodiment is really the ultimate manifestation of our understanding so that was always clear but it's coming in a new way that kind of what does it mean and how does it happen and what helps so it's

[18:52]

It's a new journey that I feel. And I think you probably all are in your own way, kind of got moved to a new place in these three months. And I just want to encourage you, because that's what the Buddha did. He allowed his life, he left worldly affairs, which means also you can understand us. You know, in the Ehekoso Hotsugan One, worldly affairs are all our concepts that we have about what needs to happen, what we have to do, how we are, how others are, all those conceptualized ideas we have about everything. And those we have to leave, those we have to renounce. And let's see if I brought this with me. You know, I looked up, there are also seven perceptions, and in those that belong to the enlightenment, and one is impermanence, one is egolessness, one is, I don't know, maybe.

[20:39]

But one, then it says, impurity, and then in parentheses of the body, and then wretchedness in parentheses of the body. And I thought, who put that in there? It's in parentheses, so it's added. The actual translation is not of the body. in the original of the body is not there. That's the interpretation. And I thought, well, if you leave that away and say impurity, then that makes sense. It doesn't have to be of the body. It's impurity of that things, if we contaminate them with a fixed idea, then it becomes impure. It becomes wretched.

[21:42]

So I thought that was so interesting. So, you know, in the Sandi Nirmarjana Sutra, which Rep has been studying for years, the implication is if we wake up, we will see that everything has always been pure, completely free, completely naked, completely open and liberated. That what happens when we wake up or on the path of awakening is that we start seeing and realizing that. And we see it with, you know, in the little prints it says, you see only well with the eyes of the heart. With the eyes of love, with the eyes of non-conceptual wisdom. So it's already there.

[22:46]

That's when it says we're already awake. We just don't realize it. And Reginald Ray says, you know, in early, in that book, Touching Enlightenment, he says in the early time in India, all the people that sought spiritual life moved to the jungle. where there were no securities, all those worldly affairs and those things were not there. You had to actually be completely, totally relying on your senses to be safe. You can't walk somewhere when you don't notice when something dangerous is around, or you won't live long. And he says the place where we now, the jungle we can now explore is our bodies.

[23:50]

Because there are wild, there's wild territory. We don't have so many jungles. We have wilderness around here. And some of you go on long hikes, and I think you can feel something about how you actually have to be in your body in a very alert way to be when you're out there. to come back, to find your way back, to know when you need to drink and to watch out for rattlesnakes and holes in the, you know, movable stones that are not stable to step on. And I do think our forms in this tradition also are, their main aim is to help us be fully embodied, to be completely present in this body, putting your hands in a show, bowing, entering.

[25:14]

moving our Oryoki utensils and moving amongst other bodies. And when you look at I don't know if you have looked at the photograph of Suzuki Roshi behind the altar, but if you haven't, too. I mean, something of his, how his being was embodied comes through in a photograph years, years later. I find it really quite amazing. And that's what people remember, the way he met them.

[26:16]

completely open and undeterministic, neither to himself nor to the being he was meeting, open to all the possibilities. And he had things he had to grapple with, you know. He had things he regretted, I'm sure, in his life. I think he didn't get stuck there. I don't have anything more to say. Anybody wants to say something? Otherwise we just go back to exploring our own wildernesses.

[27:20]

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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[27:44]

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