Both as head of practice at Green Gulch, but even before that, I believe Lou gave the first class on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness here at Zen Center, and the first week's assignment was to remember that we were walking as we were walking. I thought, that's silly. But actually it took me two weeks before I actually was paying enough attention to notice that I was walking as I was walking, and that was a great astonishment to me. Anyhow, Lou was here at Zen Center for about 15 years, and for the past 15 years he has been in business, he now has a software business in Mill Valley, and I'm very happy that he's here with us today. I think he will tell us something about his new book. Thank you.

[01:03]

Well, thank you very much. Is this an amplifier? It makes me bigger. Can you hear me all right, everybody? It's a much smaller room than Green Gulch, so it's not quite so difficult. I think I probably haven't given a lecture in this room for about 17 years, so it's a bit of an old home week for me to come back here. The room hasn't gotten any bigger. In fact, as always, when you haven't visited a place for a while, everything seems smaller. So the room seems just a little bit smaller than it did when I was here. Maybe we're all shrinking, you know. There's a classic cartoon about a man on a desert island. Just at the time when the great big Coke bottles came out, this is when Coke was still in bottles, and it was kind of a new innovation. The Coke bottle washes up on the shore, and he picks it up and looks at it, and he says, my God, I'm shrinking. I feel slightly odd to have in this formal surroundings and on this lectern my own book

[02:10]

rather than some text of the Buddha, but such is my fate. I do want to talk about it a little bit, actually read from it, and then talk about what's really behind the book. The book is called Work as a Spiritual Practice, and it is about Dharma in the workplace, particularly for people who don't know much about Dharma. I wrote it partly as a way for people to be introduced to Buddhism who otherwise might not be. In fact, that seems to be happening. About half the people that buy the book don't know much about Buddhism. But I'm making the assumption, I hope not erroneously, that you do, or at least many of you do. I want to talk about more the other side of the book, which is really, it's a book about Dharma in activity. Much as Blanche mentioned, the real point of Dharma is to apply it in the working out and activities in our life.

[03:18]

Those of you who might have been alive when Suzuki Roshi was alive, or who knew him, knew that the thing that was most striking about him was not somehow his powerful meditation practice, though it might have been, but just his presence as he walked around. There was something about that that innately drew people to him and made them understand, without a word being said, that he was the real McCoy, that there was something authentic about his presence. And that is what a lifetime of Dharma practice looks like. I want to talk a little bit about the cover, because the cover is kind of neat. You can see it's a green Buddha holding strange things. I'll tell you what's in it. There are six arms. One holds a paintbrush. One holds a pair of scissors, cake mixer, tube of something, like toothpaste, and then a brush, and then a caulking gun.

[04:20]

Okay. Tools. So it's a work Buddha. That's the first thing you notice. It's a Buddha holding really kind of construction tools or maybe kitchen tools. Hard to say. Now, this Buddha is a modern work of art by an artist named Kurt Stengel. It's made of urethane rubber, green urethane rubber. It is undoubtedly the only Buddha in the world made from green urethane rubber. And the publisher picked this. This statue is actually in a book called The Buddha Book, which probably you can get at the bookstore, a beautiful book of images of the Buddha, both ancient and modern. So there's a modern Buddha, an ancient Buddha, a modern Buddha, an ancient Buddha. And this is one of the images in that book. And I thought, well, that's nice. And it's a work Buddha, so it works well for the cover. But I kept wondering, and people do ask, what are these things that the Buddha is holding? Well, I finally figured out these are the tools that were used to make the Buddha.

[05:21]

These are the tools of a urethane plastic sculptor. You mix up the goop in the cake mixer, and then you have scissors to cut off the extra pieces. And the Buddha is holding the tools to make a Buddha. That's the joke or the metaphor of the work of art, which I think is very clever and very profound at the same time. Because that is, in fact, what the Dharma teaches us, that we are all Buddhas already, and that we at the same time have within ourselves the tools to make a Buddha. As Suzuki Roshi said in one of his lectures, you are all perfect, and you all need a little improvement. So this is the essence of Buddhism. We all, in a sense, have the nature of a Buddha, but it isn't revealed, it isn't manifested. And we need to hold up, with maybe more than two arms, the tools that are within us to make a Buddha.

[06:23]

And the fundamental tool, there really is only one tool that you really need, and that's the tool of awareness or the tool of attention or of being awake. The word Buddha means awake. And consequently, the real work of practicing Buddhism is the work of learning how to be aware and awake all the time. Now, when I left Zen Center in 1983 and went out to work in the corporate world, it was a very different world. It was a world that had no emphasis or interest in spiritual matters. It was a world that probably all of you spend most of your daytime hours in. This is our world. And the other thing about Buddhism that I deeply believe is that it is a practical method, which is to say, whatever situation you're in, that's your circumstance. So, and there is a teaching in our own tradition lineage in Soto Zen,

[07:30]

or really Zen as a whole, that speaks directly to this issue. And I'm sure most of you have heard the term Genjo Koan. I'm sure they talk about it here a good deal. I call it in this book the Koan of everyday life. The word Genjo means essentially what's in front of you, the present moment of time. The Koan, the Genjo Koan, means to treat whatever is in front of you as your spiritual challenge or your spiritual opportunity to be awake. Another way of putting it is that whatever circumstance you're in, that is an opportunity to awaken. And we don't make distinctions about good opportunities or bad opportunities or that it's better to be here at Zen Center rather than working for General Motors. If you work for General Motors, then you work on General Motors Buddha. If you work for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, if you continue to work there.

[08:30]

I talk about later on in my chapter on Right Livelihood about the world now is so materially interconnected that all of us are implicated. There is no pure work. And even somebody who works in a tobacco company, you might think, well that's fairly evil, tobacco kills. But if you've been following the story about how the tobacco companies were brought down, the key to it were loyal employees, career employees, who went and took the documents, the secret documents, and brought them out, whistleblowers. If all the people of conscience, every single one of the people of conscience had left R.J. Reynolds in year one, there would be no, you see how interconnected. Even that maybe 30-year career in R.J. Reynolds, in a sense, had a redemptive quality because of what those people were willing to do. So it's very hard to say, whatever circumstance that one is in can be an opportunity for awakening.

[09:33]

So I'd like to read you a passage from the book and then talk about it because it really is the essence of what I'm trying to bring out and accomplish here. I say, the world is full of spiritual opportunity. The trick is to be alert enough to notice it. That is the real work and the joy of work. And if we catch on to that trick, it doesn't matter in the short run what our day job is. But what kind of, in the end, if we are kind to ourselves, our efforts will be fruitful. But what kind of fruit will it be? A spiritual practice is more about questions than answers, more about searching than finding, more about effort than accomplishment. In one school of Buddhism, guess which, those who practice ponder spiritual questions called koans. There are hundreds of memorable stories, usually taken from the lives of ancient Buddhist teachers, that are used as koans. Some of them have even become part of popular culture. For instance, the question, what is the sound of one hand clapping,

[10:35]

was featured in an episode of the Simpsons television show. And if you see this episode where Bart goes around the whole show saying, what is the sound of one hand clapping? And you know we've really made it when Bart is, you know. Buddhism has really penetrated the culture. In addition to these prefabricated questions, there is another kind of koan called the koan of everyday life, the genjo koan. Human life itself, the mystery of being thrust into the world by birth and swept out of it by death, is an imponderable puzzle, one that we can try to ignore but cannot escape. So much of what passes for ordinary life is, when seen through different eyes, not ordinary at all, but full of potential for spiritual learning. To practice the koan of everyday life means to confront every situation as though it were a profound spiritual question. In that sense, every koan story is a specific instance of the koan of everyday life. That's a direct quote from Dogen. That's what he said. All the koan stories in the books are just simply specific examples

[11:38]

of confrontations of monks or practicers with some situation. And here's one. A monk asked his teacher, what is the Buddha? And the teacher answered, the cypress tree in the garden. What does it mean? What does a cypress tree have to do with Buddha, that is, our awakened self? Let's imagine this cypress tree spreading over the path in the monastery garden. What could be more ordinary or more familiar than the aged tree that each monk passed every day for the whole of his life? In that sense, the cypress tree means the most familiar thing. What familiar thing do you pass? Is it your kitchen table, your car, your good friend, your spouse or children, your co-workers, the copy machine in the office corner? This book is based on the premise that our ordinary routine contains numerous treasures and the details of our work day from the morning commute to the coffee break, the lunch hour, the afternoon meetings, the evening ride home, contain within them any number of gifts for our spirit if only we would allow ourselves to receive them.

[12:40]

And then I tell a true story about a customer service manager named Julie who was very annoyed by the ringing of the phone in the office and at some point spontaneously began to adjust the volume knob of the ringing in time with the ringing. So there was some connection between her own activity and awareness and the ringing. And somehow that was a transformative experience for her. She felt somehow that rather than the ringing being outside and impinging upon her from somewhere else, that the ringing was something inside. And that's a true, I think, Buddhist insight. And really the whole thrust of my effort in the past 15 years has been to figure out ways to somewhat creatively, because we live in a new world, take traditional Dharma practice and work it into the fabric of ordinary 21st century life almost. And it does begin with simple things.

[13:44]

There are a number of physical practices that we do in Buddhism, particularly sitting and walking, that we also do at work. And the effort to pay attention to our physical demeanor when we're at work, when we're sitting, breathing, walking, is very different than the kind of effort you might make here. This is a practice center, so everything here conspires to make awareness easy. So it's quiet, and there are bells and gongs to tell you what's going on, and there are sustained periods of time when there's nothing going on but just your own physical, mental, and emotional existence. And that's the essence of traditional Buddhist study, is to pay attention to our raw existence when nothing else is going on. As soon as we enter the world of the outside, the world of distraction, the world of work, everything changes.

[14:45]

First of all, when you're at work, you're supposed to be working, so you're being paid to pay attention to the work, presumably. So whatever attention you're paying to your breathing or your walking or whatever is not specifically what you're being paid to do. I mean, part of the way the workplace is designed in our culture and defined is really an unawareness center. It's a place not to be aware and to essentially pour your attention and energy into some kind of work. And in our knowledge economy, more and more of that work is mental work. You sit in a chair, you talk, you listen, you work at a computer, you type, you read email. You know, that kind of work. And that kind of work is even more conspiratorial against traditional Buddhist awareness because the speed of that work is very unphysical. It's very disembodied and you move very quickly into a space that is unrewarding

[15:52]

in terms of your physical being. So one of the first efforts in Dharma practice in the workplace is to remember that you have a body. And to do that enough times during the day that your body kind of begins to take on a certain skill to remember itself at various times and remember that you have breath and remember that you have some state of mind. So to me, the next challenge for Dharma in the West is to begin to radiate outward from places like Zen Center where traditional Dharma is practiced into all the other places in our Western world where awareness is not yet attuned. And the effort is rather different. The effort to, for example, when you stand up from your workspace and turn around and begin walking to go to the bathroom, the effort to put your attention back into your body

[16:53]

and forget for a moment the phone call that you need to make when you get back or whatever it is that's distracting you mentally. And to walk to and from the bathroom with some sense of sustained awareness. That's a very difficult thing to do. And yet the effort to do it even once a day does change you and does begin to lay down a different mode for your activity in that space. And so we have to become comfortable with and satisfied with discontinuous ways of practicing. You practice for a moment here, a moment there, and then you dive back into your workspace. And there has to be a real setting aside of judgment too. We can't say to ourselves, oh, now I'm kind of with myself, I'm calm. This is a better state of mind than how I'm going to be in five minutes. There's no better or worse than this. It's all you. And as we go deeper into that kind of work, that kind of spiritual effort,

[17:57]

more and more things open up for us. For example, an awful lot of what happens in the workplace is about talking. It's about communication with other people, talking and listening. There are lots of opportunities for Dharma practice in that situation too. How we speak, how we sound when we speak is even more important. Very often when we're in the midst of a complicated work conversation, it's hard to modulate our actual vocabulary, what we say. But so much of communication and so much of aware communication has to do not with the words that we use, but our tone of voice, our demeanor physically when we say them. Even deeper than that, a kind of underlying attitude of who is this person that's facing me? That could be a workplace koan of great potential, because, again, the workplace is one of the last bastions of authoritarianism in our society.

[19:03]

We live in a so-called free society, but not at work. At work, people have power over other people, and that is an accepted fact of society. You can be fired and nobody can stop it. As long as it isn't unfair or there isn't some discrimination involved, poof, it's your problem. There is a kind of ruthlessness about the society that we built, which presumably is making us richer and better and more materially secure and happier. Side question, is it really? But aside from that, the whole edifice of the modern workplace, going back, and I studied this, I read a lot of books about how we created the workplace that we're in, and it definitely was created. 150 years ago, nobody worked the way we work now. Work meant work, physical work, farming, the kind of work we do at Green Gulch or at Tassajara, and the kind of work that the ancient Buddhists who invented Buddhism were familiar with.

[20:06]

You know, chopping wood, carrying water, that kind of traditional archetypal physical work very definitely is a way in which you can continue the meditative experience, but not the kind of work that we do. We've created a kind of workplace where it's highly institutionalized. People have power over other people. Most of the time that power is not well managed. Sometimes that power is abusive. Often it's discriminatory. There's a lot of things in that environment which we have all learned to put up with, which if we step back and put our spiritual glasses on and look out at that situation, we might say, this is far from ideal. So the effort to bring the attitude of Dharma into that environment and to begin by transforming our own state of mind in it and then by extension other people's state of mind, I think is the next phase of Dharma work for our lives.

[21:08]

In countries where Buddhism has been around for centuries, the whole society is infused with the taste and experience of Dharma. And up to now, the way that's worked has been society has kind of hired, you might say, a certain group of people called monks or nuns and said, you go live in an ideal environment and build a wall. Keep us out, more or less. We'll support you. We'll give you rice and help you build and so forth. And you figure out the ideal way for human beings to be and then let us know about it. And we'll do the best we can to emulate you. That's been the deal. It was a kind of tradeoff because keep in mind until very recently, work meant survival. It meant 14 hours a day, seven days a week, hoping that the rains came, hoping the rats didn't eat your corn, hoping that disease didn't kill your family. I mean, that was work for most people. So there wasn't a lot of flexibility

[22:12]

in who would have time for sustained spiritual practice. Those people who were willing to give up family and give up the way other people lived and live a special kind of life could then figure out what this human frame and this human mind and consciousness is all about and then let us know. And in a sense, that's what Buddhism has been up to this point. It was created many, many, many centuries ago when, as far as I can tell, there were only five jobs on the planet. There was farmer. That was almost everybody. There was soldier. Sometimes those are the same people. When the soldiers came into town and said, We're going to war. Saddle up. Get your spears and hay forks and get going. So soldier, priest, monk, whatever, religious person, mom, that was a job. Almost all women, that was the job for women was to raise children and take care of the house.

[23:14]

And certain kind of artisanship, people that built the plows and the swords and the tools that people used. That was it. That was work. There weren't any other kinds of work until fairly recently. And now, of course, there are thousands of different kinds of jobs. So we're in a very transformative situation where human beings are living today in a way they've never lived before. And the traditional teachings that we inherit from the long tradition of Buddhism, which has primarily been preserved and developed by monks, has to be refashioned. It has to be refashioned because very few of us will be lifetime monks. And even someone like myself, who essentially lived a monk-like life for a long time, I didn't do it for my whole life. And I think we'll find that more and more the old division of monks on one side of the wall and lay people on the other side of the wall will break down and people will have some monk experience for some part of their life and then some non-monk experience for some part of their life.

[24:18]

And that mixture, for the first time, is creating a different kind of expectation of how life ought to be. And that's a very challenging and exciting state of affairs, but it also requires us to take some responsibility and also creativity for our own situation. The workplace is where we spend almost all of our daytime hours. And consequently, aside from family, it's one of the main places where we can begin to develop some Dharma experience inside that framework. Now, as Suzuki Roshi used to say, he used to be amazed when he'd look out at audiences like this and say, you know, you're not exactly monks and you're not exactly lay people, you're some special kind of people. And he was very excited about this special kind of people, but he himself admitted that he didn't know how this special kind of person that we were becoming or wanted to be

[25:23]

would work out what he knew was traditional monastic practice as he had been trained. And he said many times, you know, I'll teach you everything I know and learn it as well as you can, and then from that point onward it's your responsibility to figure it out. And I think we're at a stage where, for the first time in a long, long time, we have the opportunity not just to inherit Buddhism, but to create it. And that's a big responsibility and one that I never thought or felt I had permission to do when I was here. But out there in the big, bad world, I really had no choice. And I think that all of you who are out there, whatever it is that you do during the day with your day job, have a lot of opportunity, perhaps untapped opportunity, to apply some of the traditional awareness and attention practices of Buddhism in your own situation. The main hurdle to overcome is

[26:27]

the challenge to one's own state of mind in a sense that we are not in charge of our state of mind. This is the defining characteristic of the workplace. The workplace is a place where we don't feel in charge of our own state of mind. And the remedy for that, the way to work on that, is to essentially start with the conviction that we do have the ability to form and shape our own state of mind, even in very distracted circumstances. One of the things that, if you read Crooked Cucumber, which is the biography of Suzuki Roshi, which just came out, you will find that the thing that everybody remembered about Suzuki Roshi, people in Japan as well as people here, was that regardless of the circumstance, he seemed to be in charge of his own state of mind. That is, he maintained a calm, relaxed demeanor.

[27:30]

I've often speculated and fantasized how well Suzuki Roshi would have done in the corporate world. Perhaps not very well, although Japan is one of the places where corporate titans are also devout Buddhists. Something that's beginning to happen here in this country too, although it's a much better kept secret, there is quite a lot, for those of you who think that the workplace, particularly the workplace of large corporate environments, is the last place that Buddhism might arrive, you're mistaken. It's already there. Business people, I've developed a kind of more complex appreciation for the world of business since I've been in it, and now particularly since I'm a business owner. Back thirty years ago, business was one of the curse words of the counterculture. It was not a place that anybody wanted to be. There was a time here, I can recall, where even to have any sort of full-time job was considered quite unusual and courageous,

[28:31]

that one would actually work. Now I know it's very different. But business people, in spite of the stereotypical notion that business is about profit and exploitation and pollution, all of which is true, business people do share a couple of features in common with Buddhist practitioners. One is, business people tend to be very observant, within their own framework usually, but still very observant, because that's part of being successful in business, is seeing accurately what's going on. So being observant is also a good thing to have if you're a Buddhist, because that's the essence of Buddhism, is to be observant. The second thing that business people share with Buddhists is a sense of rational conclusion, rational thought, a sense of approaching the world rationally. The Buddha, if you think about it,

[29:33]

was probably one of the world's first teachers and thinkers who observed the world closely enough to notice that things didn't happen randomly. The second noble truth of Buddhism is that things happen for a reason. In 500 BC, this was an extraordinarily advanced position to take. Most of the people in that world deeply believed and experienced the world as a random, chaotic, rather cruel and heartless place. Storms came, disease came, grasshoppers came, bandits would come, it all just happened and there was nothing you could do about it except run to the altar and make sacrifices and pray to whatever gods ruled the cosmos to please not do it to me. That was religion up to that time. The Buddha grew up in that culture and sat down under a tree and said, I need to figure out deeply what actually is going on. And he was really one of the first people,

[30:35]

along with some of the pre-Socratic Greeks, to conclude that there is order in the world, and deep order, order that can be counted on and can be learned directly by observation, not just of the outside world, but the inside world. And that's one of the great breakthroughs of Buddhism. And now that science, in a sense, has become the dominant religion of mankind, the ancient insight of the Buddha that the world is a logical and rational place is meshing very nicely with our scientific worldview, which begins with the premise that you can learn something useful by watching things closely. This is something that the world of science and the world of Dharma entirely share. The only difference is the emphasis of, until recently, of the scientific model has been to observe the outside world, whereas the emphasis of Buddhism has been to observe the so-called inside world. Although, actually, Buddhism understands pretty quickly

[31:38]

that if you watch the inside world long enough, you discover there's no boundary between the inside world and the outside world. The inside world and the outside world are continuous. This leads to... Oh, before I get to that, I wanted to tell my favorite Zen story about Ikkyu. This is a story about paying attention. Ikkyu, do all of you know who Ikkyu is? Some of you may have heard of Ikkyu. Nobody knows about Ikkyu, okay. Ikkyu was an eccentric monk of the 16th century Japan. Some think he was the illegitimate son of the emperor, which may explain why he was allowed to get away with so much, because that made him kind of a god in that culture. Anyway, he was completely irascible and would do things like urinate on altars and stuff like that. But as they say, the son of the emperor, you know, you have a little bit of slack, I guess, in that culture. Anyway, later in his life, he became more conventional

[32:39]

and became the abbot of a big temple and was very eminent. And a wealthy parishioner came to visit him and, as often was the case, wanted Ikkyu to make some very nice calligraphy for his home. And so Ikkyu had the stuff brought, and he picked up the brush, and he wrote the character for attention. And the parishioner looked at it, and he waited a little while to see what more would come. And when nothing more was coming, he very politely said, perhaps the esteemed master is not quite finished with his poem. Because, you know, he wanted something about cherry blossoms or geese. You know, he wanted something impressive. And this attention thing, he didn't even know what it really meant. And so Ikkyu picked up the brush, and he wrote the same character again, attention. So now there was a little bit of tension in the room because this man had given a lot of money to the temple, and so he felt he really, at the very least,

[33:41]

Ikkyu could do some more conventional thing. So he once again asked Ikkyu as politely as possible if he would continue his calligraphic efforts. And so Ikkyu then picked up the brush and wrote three more times, attention, attention, attention. So his Zen scroll that the guy got to take home had five repetitions of the same character, attention. Now, what I like about this story is that, first of all, it's like a lot of Zen stories. It's very direct. There's no BS about it. It's just right there in front of you. The man wanted a Buddhist scroll. He got one. Not the one he was expecting, but the one that, if he paid attention to it, would really teach him something useful. And that is, this is the essence of the matter, is if you pay attention closely enough and long enough, everything opens. Everything is revealed. So I have a little slogan in here, which I'm only slightly embarrassed about because I think slogans are one of the ways that we teach in our culture,

[34:42]

and the slogan is, you are the boss of your inner life. You are the chief executive of your inner life. I think that we need to re-empower ourselves in the daily life as Americans to understand that paying attention is our birthright and that there is no circumstance that I can imagine in which it would not be possible or not be useful to pay attention. Now, when it comes to specifically how to pay attention, then we need specific practices. And I've come up with about 40, I think, more or less. I keep counting them differently, so it's hard to know how many there are. But I've come up with about 40 in this book, and many of them actually were not my invention. They came from people who I worked with, did workshops and so forth, who tried various things. It became a very experimental process. Well, suppose you were to go back into our workplace and do such and such. Suppose you were to work with anger in a particular way,

[35:44]

for example. Anger is a big workplace theme because, I think a lot because of the power relationships in the workplace. But needless to say, if you ask people, is anger an issue at work, most people would say yes, at least at some time or another. So how do we work with that? How do we make that into a spiritually potent experience for ourselves? As Buddhists, and if we are serious about practicing the koan of everyday life, every experience has some positive potential, even so-called negative ones like being angry. And how do you work with that in the workplace? It's complicated, more complicated than in most other environments because there are some constraints as to what you can do in the workplace. Suppose the person you're angry with is your boss, who has the power to fire you and may not like you very much, or may be competitive with you or favor somebody else.

[36:47]

Those kinds of situations are quite common. Some sort of straightforward mindfulness practice like sitting down with your boss and saying, you know, I had a mindful experience of being extremely angry with you yesterday, might not exactly be the right strategy. So one has to adapt what may seem to be a traditional approach or traditional attitude to the realities of what's going on and also to be somewhat strategic. I think that strategic activity is something that we don't read about much in the sutra and monk tradition, but in my own observation of Suzuki Roshi over the years I was with him, that was something that was always very apparent, is that in every situation he was prepared to be strategic,

[37:48]

to figure out what was the best way to convey the truth of the situation. I can remember one incident right out here, just after I was ordained, or just before I think, and I was out there enjoying the scenery and he walked out all by himself. It was just him and me, I thought. I thought, oh great, me and the master all alone, time for some FaceTime or something. I was really excited about, you know, that something might happen. So I kind of, I didn't actually walk toward him, but that thought kind of came up and he was standing right on the steps there and at the minute I had that thought he turned right away from me, so his back was to me, and walked away. And it turns out he noticed something that I missed, which is there was a woman sitting on a bench over in the far corner of the courtyard. And I hadn't seen her, but she was somebody who came in off the street,

[38:49]

she was very disturbed and actually she was waiting for somebody to drive her over to the crisis center. So she was a very, a person in real need. And Suzuki Roshi sat down next to her and spent the next half hour talking with her. And he made no acknowledgement that I was anywhere around. And that was kind of a big experience for me because, obviously it is, because 30 years later I'm still talking about it. But you see, that was, that was strategic, you know. He came into the situation, I'm there, you know, green, new monk, anxious to do whatever, you know, forget that. And this woman over here, obviously in need of solace, comfort. Who needed his attention more, me or her? It was a no-brainer, you know. I didn't need anything from him. I was his student and, you know. And he, you know, he, you'll read in the book,

[39:50]

Crooked Cucumber, ignoring people was one of his strategies. He did it frequently. And people that had this tremendous need to kind of get something from him or get the big word or have him notice them or whatever, they would be unnoticed for a long time until they just dropped that, you know. And then he would come up one day and say, Hi, how are you? So, you know, he was always looking for something that would open the situation. And to me that's the inspiration for how we can bring the Dharma forward out into our busy, distracted American life. And keep in mind, distraction is an essential component of our society. Distraction is bought and sold. It's one of the main commodities that make our life go. You get into an elevator, muzak. You know, you get into a bus, somebody's got a boom box. You're driving down the street, billboards. There is a quality of selling stimulation

[40:53]

almost like an addiction, which is the essence of the society we've created. And we need to have some strategy to confront that. It's part of our genjo koan of American society. Without saying, oh, that's bad. You know, I'd like to go to some place out in the woods where there aren't any billboards, there aren't any distractions. That's fine, and we should definitely do that when we can. But what about when we're right in the middle of it? What about when it's the middle of Friday afternoon and the work week has been miserable? What do we do? We can certainly, in each situation, if we're alert enough and paying attention enough, come up with some strategy, like Suzuki Roshi did. Even if we're not very skillful at it, the intention to do so itself is a practice. Intention is extremely vital. And really, Buddhism begins with a moment of intention. And really, Buddhism distinguishes between two kinds of thinking.

[41:57]

There's ordinary thinking, which is what usually is buzzing around in our head, and then there's intentional thinking. Intentional thinking, another name for which could be a vow, is the essence of what makes dharma go. And just to form the intention, I will try to see my colleagues at work as Buddhas, at least for one minute a day. I have a little visualization in here that we do in my workshops, where we actually explicitly sit down and close our eyes and visualize the people we work with and try to see them, each one of them, as pure, awakened beings of light. This is actually literally what they are. So it's helpful for us to form the intention to see them that way, even if in real life some part of our brain is saying, like that one, like him, like her, jerk, idiot. That's our usual thinking. And that's okay.

[42:58]

Maybe at some level they are jerks and idiots. We have that dismissive quality. Just as I was coming to work here, I wanted to get into a parking space on the street here, but there was somebody behind me that was there first. I didn't realize it because I was kind of dense. And she really wanted that space, and she shook her fist or whatever it was. But I was kind of dense. I didn't realize that was what was going on. And finally I drove away and she got the space. That kind of little annoying interchange is so normal in our American life. But that's the story of two Buddhas interacting, myself and that person. And whatever is going on on the surface, that's ordinary thought. That guy did a U-turn and took my space. I'd like to wring his neck kind of thing. And I'm thinking, what's this woman want? Oh, I get it. She wants the space. Where have I been? At some level we're also Buddhas interacting

[44:00]

in the time and space of Page Street. So the intention to find ourselves, to restore ourselves, to be creative and strategic in our workplaces, both in a general way and in specific ways, as we walk, as we move, as we speak to people, as we listen, as we run a meeting, as we deal with financial realities, as we work at the computer. How many people work in front of a computer here? Lots of hands. Actually, it's a bigger computer crowd here than most. I refer to people like myself who work in front of computers as tube people. We work in front of a tube. I'll leave you with one very specific little thing to do with a tube, which is turn it off. You can turn off the power to the tube without turning off the computer. It doesn't do any harm. So this is the practice. You sit at your chair.

[45:01]

You reach out with the forefinger, and you push the power button, and then the screen goes blank. And then for one minute, you look at the blank screen. The screen is actually vibrating. It's refreshing and flashing. There's a kind of neurological stimulus to that. So just to turn it off and stare into that gray space, you can immediately feel, if you're sensitive, the vibration in your own eyes and neck and everything. And then those of you who've had some experience with zazen, you know, ten breaths with the screen off. And there's a posture that you can adapt. I call it the workplace meditation posture. You know, feet flat on the floor. This is important because it's the only part of our body that touches the ground. So the feet on the floor, the hands palm down on the knees, with some feeling that, you know, there's a connection between up here, the hands, the knees, the legs, the feet.

[46:03]

A little bit like this. The whole point of this kind of a posture is to bring the physical body together so that you're on the ground. In this posture, you've got a lot more points. It's the three-point landing. You're on the ground. Sitting in a chair, it's only two points. And then find the breath. Maybe close the eyes or look at the gray screen for ten breaths. Find yourself. Find who you are. Find where your physical being is. Find the Buddha that you are and that everyone is around you. And then the moment is over, the forefinger reaches out and turns on the power, and the tube is back. That kind of interlude practice, you may feel, gosh, nothing happened. Just work thoughts spun around. I didn't feel calm like I do in the Zen. Nothing is going on at that moment. If the only experience you're measuring it by is kind of how you feel, of course you're going to feel weird. You've been working at a computer all day,

[47:04]

vibrating in your face, and not thinking or feeling about your body. Nothing's going to feel great. But just to notice that and be aware of that, something very deep is going on. And that moment does not end when the computer tube goes back on. There's a continuation. This is the deep meaning of the Buddha's understanding of cause and effect. Part of what it means is nothing disappears in the world. No action that you do disappears. No intentional thought. No moment of consciousness disappears. It all has ripples. It all moves. And the image of the jewel net, which in one of the traditional sutras sees the universe as a net of jewels in which every jewel reflects the light of every other jewel. The point of that image is that you are a jewel, and you are a shining jewel, and you're also a reflective jewel. And when you radiate out, the other jewels pick it up. When those jewels radiate in, you pick it up.

[48:06]

So any effort to find your own awareness and your own place in a busy situation, even for a moment, even for a millisecond, has an effect. Without that kind of confidence, it's very difficult to really practice. We think somehow that it's a kind of... like other activities, but it's not. There's a kind of... Well, the image that comes to mind is like the old-fashioned potter's wheel, not the electric kind, but the kind you kick. You know what I mean? You have a big wheel, it's a big weight, and you kick it, and then the thing goes. And even if you don't kick it for a while, it turns. Well, think of that potter's wheel as being almost infinite in size. And every time a moment of intentional awareness occurs because you make it happen,

[49:08]

because it's your intention to happen, it's like kicking that wheel. It's a wheel that you, in a sense, never directly experience, but it's a wheel that runs the whole universe. And that brings me back to what I started with, is that the meaning of this Buddha image for me is that we already have this... In this case, the publisher put the light in the chest. That's okay, in the heart. It's a little glowing thing. That's already us. But at the same time, we have all these tools, mental, physical, emotional tools. And if we activate those tools, this light will grow. And when that light grows, everyone else's light grows. So that's the vision that I have for how to move forward as Americans. I think that Buddhism has already penetrated the culture far more than most of you probably know.

[50:11]

The language of dharma, the fundamental concepts, the approach. There is now another wave of interest and understanding that is beginning to percolate, which is going to go far deeper and I think is already beginning to transform society in interesting ways. So the notion that I think some of us old-timers still linger with, that somehow we're part of a spiritual counterculture, that's obsolete. We're now part of a spiritual culture. And the whole society really is casting about for the next way to understand how to be human in this world. I think for the first time, at the end of the Cold War and certain other things happening, there's a kind of global awakening. We're rousing ourselves from our survival sleep and our petty concerns and realizing it's just us, it's just the planet, there ain't no outside. We have to take care of this. And that is the same starting point

[51:13]

that took the Buddha out of the palace and into the forest when he realized that even when you're the king, it's not enough. And that's the same realization that America is having. America is like the Buddha in the palace, with all of our wealth and material goods, lifting our head and saying, you know, money can't buy happiness. What to do now? So the institutional phase of places like Zen Center to have traditional places for Dharma practice, that stage is well established now. What's happening now is something far more diffuse and widespread and diverse. So I hope all of you can contribute something in your own ways to that deeper and broader penetration. And I want to thank all of you for coming today and for Zen Center for their hospitality and having an old-timer like me

[52:16]

who's gone out and banged around in the world a lot. And I'm very pleased to be back. I guess we'll have some kind of discussion, and then if any of you want to have me sign your books or whatever, we can do that in the dining room. So thank you very much.

[52:32]

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