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. Oh, I'm really enjoying being with you. I'm really enjoying seeing you. And people online, I have to infer you, but that doesn't mean we're not sitting together. So whether we're here in this room or whether we're in the larger virtual space, I welcome you. And I'd like to start with a comment from our friend, William Shakespeare, about his experience in the middle of the night. Okay, so you may not know, but William Shakespeare had a big crush. And he wrote a lot of sonnets about it.

[01:02]

This is sonnet number 27. And it's his experience in the deep of the night. Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed. The dear repose for limbs with travel tired. But then begins a journey in my head. to work my mind when body's works expired. For then my thoughts, from far where I abide, intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee. And keep my drooping eyelids open wide, looking on darkness which the blind do see. save that my soul's imaginary sight presents thy shadow to my sightless view, which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night, makes black night beauteous and her old face new.

[02:21]

Lo, thus by day my limbs, by night my mind for thee, And for myself, no quiet fight. So translation, he's lying in bed. He's really, really whipped by the events of the day. And he closes his eyes. His mind goes to his crush. He can't sleep. But... the image of the person he loves makes that event beautiful for him, even though they're far away. Why don't I try reading it again? Because his language is really a lot better than mine. For people who don't know me, my name is Shosan Victoria Austin, and I'm a priest here at San Francisco Zen Center.

[03:24]

And... I love these words. Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed. The deer repose for limbs with travel tired, but then begins a journey in my head to work my mind when body's works expired. For then my thoughts from far where I abide intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee. and keep my drooping eyelids open wide, looking on darkness which the blind do see. Save that my soul's imaginary sight presents thy shadow to my sightless view, which like a jewel hung in ghastly night makes black night beauteous and her old face new. Lo, thus by day my limbs By night my mind for thee and for myself no quiet find.

[04:29]

So thanks, Shakespeare. So tonight I'd like to speak because it's evening and I'm incredibly jet lagged from an economy flight from Sydney, Australia to here. I thought I would talk about evening sitting. evening sitting, what's it good for and why do it? And often, not only when I'm jet lagged, but when my injuries or aging or the events of the day are disturbing to me or I just can't sleep, I turn to night sitting and sometimes I sit for hours in the night. So I made a vow to myself when I had some health problems and I was up in the middle of the night that I wasn't going to turn on my iPad, that instead I was actually going to try to rest at night.

[05:43]

So when the sun was down and when everyone was sleeping, that I would try to sleep and that when it was light, Even if I hadn't slept much, I would wake up and do the things of the day. So Suzuki Roshi talked about this. He loved the koan. When the bell rings, we get up, we put our robes on, and we go to the zendo. But what does that mean for the night? What do we do, especially if we can't sleep, if we're disturbed by something, if something hurts or, you know... In the night, the desires and the aversions and the confusions come up very readily. What do we do? How do we sit? I found yaza, or evening zazen, nighttime zazen, to be really an important practice for me and a refuge in the night. And that's why I want to share it, because often

[06:48]

It's only taught during seshin, or only offered during seshin, where we have the option to come back after the end of the day, after a hot drink, and to sit. But it's so much more than that. It's so much more than, you know, our zealous effort in seshin going further. So that's what I'd like to talk about. So the tradition of yaza is to sit with the challenge of physical exhaustion. to deepen the practice in a way that's free from outer demands such as ding-ding or the bell or a deadline of work and any other demands that might be on us. And it's free from peer pressure. It's self-directed, so you can entirely direct what you do during night sitting. And I wanted to remind myself of when night sitting started.

[07:52]

And it actually started with the Buddha, with our original teacher, Shakyamuni Buddha. And the reason that he started it was that in his climate in North India, it was hot during the day, like super hot, too hot to really sit. And so also his awakening happened during the night after many years of effort. So he established a monastic schedule that went with that, that accepted the climate, that accepted the conditions of his own night of awakening. So in the first watch of the night from 6 to 10 p.m., they saw that as the best time to sit. And the second watch of the night, from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., they would do walking meditation or take care of themselves physically. In the third watch of the night, from 2 a.m.

[08:55]

to 6 a.m., they would study to bring the teachings to mind. So you could sit, you could do kin in, you could chat, you could read. And I couldn't find a sutra source for this, but I found various references that... said this. And at dawn, the monks would get up and do their alms rounds. They would collect food, and then they would share whatever it was that they received, eat together, and that would be the nighttime and the beginning of the day. But in our climate, in this climate, and in Europe, and in Japan, in China... in Korea and Vietnam, it works to sit in the morning and then to rest at night. And we're used to sleeping at night. Our body is in the rhythm where we wake during the day and sleep at night in general, unless we work at night.

[10:02]

So if we stay up in the night, we are subject to different events. different sorts of mental events than might come when we're sitting during the day. And so if you try this sometime, if you just happen to be up in the middle of the night, there are times when you'll be sharp as a tack, but there's also times when you'll be lying in bed and you'll drift in and out of various states. I don't know if this is your experience, but it certainly is mine. And there is a phrase in the teachings that I did find called pathangasota, which is the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. And so there are many models that Buddhism has gone through about how the human mind is structured, but basically there's an experiential level

[11:09]

and there's a level of reflection, and there's a level at which the mind is deeply structured. And you can feel this if you take a vow or make a promise. David, do you want water? Okay. So if you take a vow or you make a promise, it changes the structure of the mind. For instance, when you say, I do. you know, in the marriage, it changes the structure of our mind. Or recently, two people I know quite well had a baby and they were trying for a baby for years. And suddenly, even though they've been trying for years and learning how to be parents for years, suddenly the baby was born. And suddenly their parents You know, I've seen people become parents before, and, you know, they put the baby in your arms, and this thing happens where you go, oh.

[12:27]

And then, wow. And then, I'll do anything for you, baby, anything. You know, there's this thing that happens, and then suddenly... the baby's going, and you're going, oh no, oh no, what do you do, what do you do, what do I do now? Again, that's my experience with the transition. But there's a big boundary between what we consciously know and what we unconsciously know. So as soon as we calm down, we can tell the baby is concerned about something. And then... We try different things. We don't necessarily think, oh, oh, let's see, diapers, I should get diapers or something. But we try different things that we know the baby can relate to. And so what's really interesting is to see this unconscious knowledge become conscious knowledge when we're exposed to different experiences that become different mental events.

[13:27]

and even more importantly become different types of responses that we intend and do. And it's this boundary that we can explore in night sitting. Why? How is it that in night sitting we can uniquely explore this boundary between conscious and unconscious mind. How is it that we can use it as a kind of a koan on the subject of awakeness and our dream life? How can we do this? And what does that say about us as beings in this society that we live in? Because there are other societies in which dream life or the life that we don't think of as real exactly is the most important thing.

[14:34]

So for instance, last year I had the good fortune to be at Uluru, the red center of Australia. And I had the good fortune to listen to people speak, and particularly how they spoke about conflict was really interesting because... There was a conflict and they weren't talking about matching the two sides or somebody giving up something and somebody getting something. That's not how they saw it. They were trying to weave people back in, to weave the conflict and both of those people back into the bigger story that everybody shares. That isn't a story outside of us, but is a story that structures us. It's a really different point of view from the point of view we have here in which we sometimes are pushed around by our stories but don't know how they come out.

[15:39]

They're not conscious. They're not something that's intended as a group necessarily. And it's our stories, a lot of times our conflicting stories are what gives us conflict in our society. But I think that the way night sitting helps us is that we can calm ourselves at the root of our obstacles because we're closer to them in these moments when we're so vulnerable. Whether the obstacle is something that came up during the day or whether it's something that's big and has structured our whole life, like being of a certain... background or living with a disability that you haven't accepted or something like that, whether it's a day thing or whether it's a lifetime thing, you can sit at the root of that obstacle and calm it down.

[16:43]

And you can also, when you're lying down, if you find a comfortable position, Because the body is ready to rest, you can practice extending the time, the amount of time, the duration of stillness, physical and physiological stillness. So that's another feature of night sitting. And a third one is that you can find a meditative state that's different from what we find during the day that we can even try for again, try to recall during the day. And I think this is because, as I said, because of the circadian rhythms that our body already has. So during the beginning of sleep, if it's a normal cycle, think about what the body does or feel in yourself what the body does. How you lie down and then there's a kind of a space of relaxation that's transitional.

[17:50]

And you try to breathe rhythmically and regularly so that that relaxation can begin to run the show. And then the body, the rhythm of the body, to set down its burden takes over and we're in a different space. And we can also say that during this space, when we go into really deep non-dreaming sleep, non-REM sleep, our the distinction between I and thou or between I and it dissolves completely. That sometimes the sleep is so deep that we go to sleep and then we wake up and there's no memory of anything in between. And I would say that if we wanted to practice zazen during the transitional time or with a deep sense of consciousness during the times we can't usually remember, that that practice builds concentration and also a contemplation of silence.

[18:59]

The periods of silence extend. And then there's also REM sleep, which is the time when we dream. And during that sleep, our motor activity's still down, So we're not grossly responsive. But there are like sparks of activity that happen in the brain, in our sensory areas, in our emotional areas, in our memory of experience, and sometimes strung together in completely different ways. And so we call those moments dreams. And it rebuilds the distinction between subject and object, between I and thou, between I and it. Sometimes in very creative ways, sometimes in habitual ways, like for instance, like if we're addicted to something or even addicted to a pattern like vengefulness or revenge, we'll dream and our dreams will support or reinforce the pattern that we have.

[20:11]

but sometimes completely different ways. Like I remember one dream when I was about 18, and it was a dream that happened right after the near-death experience that led me to practice. And in that dream, I was in a courtyard. I was in a courtyard, which had a round door, a door with a round top, and it had trees on the side and Anyway, now I know that it looked like this courtyard. And a woman in a black robe stepped down and handed me a bright jewel and said, this is your sacred trust. Okay, I was a Jewish American princess from Long Island concerned with getting 800s on my SATs at the time.

[21:14]

That was my concern. Also earning money for college and being successful, popular, and happy in life. I was not at all concerned with sacred trusts, but I don't know. So my mind got restructured in some way in that dream, and I don't know. I can't explain it. I just know that it is. But the distinction between now and then, between I and you, all those distinctions are rebuilt in new ways. And so I would say that in most of life, in most of human life, the way that it rebuilds, that dreams rebuild our consciousness, is completely unconscious. But there's also lucid dreaming. And we can practice lucid dreaming or lucid sleep just even in very simple ways. If you take a mala, Buddhist bees, and you hold them loosely in your hand as you're sleeping, you'll feel that the quality of sleep and the quality of dream is quite different.

[22:28]

So just a very simple practice like that. Or going to sleep with a gatha. dedicating the sleep, which I'll talk about later. So yaza during the REM time is different because just like the non-REM time yaza helps us build a tolerance for silence and dharmas that fail to be produced. Zazen during REM times helps develop two things. If I can be so bold as to generalize from my own experience, that it develops, in my experience, it develops an awareness of the deep patterning that I have. So for instance, when I was a kid, I used to have this dream where all my dreams opened the same way, so I was in a pink Cadillac and we would stop at a gas station

[23:34]

And you could get good gas or bad gas. And it was either given to you by a good gas attendant or by a bad one. And that was the days when the gas station attendant would come out and fill your tank. And so that's what I dreamed. And so I remember that sometime during the dream, I would realize, oh, that was bad gas given to me by a bad person. And in my dream, I would kind of go break and ratchet it back to a certain point in the dream. And then I would make it go the other way. Good guess, good person. And so that's a form of lucid dreaming. And we can actually be deeply aware, even if we're not aware on the surface in the night. So that's for normal sleep cycles, like those transitional stages, five to 10 minutes of going to sleep, 20 minutes or so of deeper relaxation, rhythmic breathing establishes itself and so on, and then deep sleep, which restores us active dreaming.

[24:54]

But what about problems? So in our disordered sleep, You know, we might be so scheduled in the monastery or in the temple that we do this kind of vengeful staying awake just so that we can experience just the slightest bit of freedom. This used to happen to me when I was working downtown as well. I kind of felt like I was entitled to a good four or five hours of non-directed time. And so at night it was very hard to go to sleep because I felt like I had earned... this time at the end of the day and I should be able to do whatever I wanted. Anyway, life doesn't necessarily work that way unless you structure it. Or I couldn't let go to enter the transitional stage or I was physically restless or I was physiologically or emotionally restless or anxious or now I more struggle with deeper issues like

[25:59]

aging or injuries or the state of X, Y, or Z. So it's more deeper issues that keep me awake. Anyway, that's enough of an overview. I only want to speak for a few more minutes because I want to leave it open, but please make yourself comfortable because we are sitting at night And I hope my voice is soothing enough that if you needed to rest or sleep, that you could actually get some. Kategori Roshi and many other teachers would make Kobanchino, their voice, very, very slow and soothing so that people would sleep. But we can use imagery and chants as we go to sleep. And there's some chants that really help.

[27:02]

And the chants that really help me in the middle of the night are the Shōsaimyo Kichijo Dharani, which removes hindrance, and the Enmei Juku Kanon Gyo, which is about hearing the cries of the world. I can give a... a lecture on those chants sometime, why they're important to me, why I think they work. But I think for me enough would be said if I said that the Enmei Junkukkanon Gyo is a, what should I say, it's an excerpt from two Chinese sutras and it's recited by millions of people a day. And in Japan it was brought over sometime in the 700s and then lost for about a thousand years. And then Hakuenzenji, just a few hundred years ago, was taught it by a samurai. And Hakuenzenji was very concerned about the kind of disturbances that arise in meditation.

[28:08]

So he went all around to find out how he could work with those disturbances, and he got... meditation instructions like sit still and imagine that there's warm butter, you know, melting throughout your body and mind. So he was very concerned with how do we lay down our burdens in sitting and what is sitting for? And when he heard this, he was so struck by it that he decided to teach it in ceremonies all over Japan, and he wrote a book about it too. Anyway, the Enmei-juku Kanan-gyo, highly recommended, on the website in the chants, sutras and chants section, and it's the ten phrase Avalokiteshvara Sutra, the Sutra of the Hearer of the Cries of the World.

[29:09]

And then the Shosai Myokichi Jojurani is also highly recommended But it's not translated. Usually it's not translated. But I went through the Sanskrit of the chant to find out what the seed syllables were and what part of the body they calm. And so I would like to show you. So in this, this is Shosai Myokichi Jojarani, and I'm not asking you to memorize it, just to see the colors. So... What I want to say is that the Roy D. Biv, the red, orange, and yellow, are the lower energy centers in the body. And then the blue, green, indigo, and violet, and white are the higher centers of the body. And what do you see when you see the seed syllables of this Shosai Myokichi Dodorani printed out in color?

[30:14]

There's a lot of lower body energy in this dharani. The lower body is about our basic functions, our basic sense of safety, our basic sense of intimacy, our basic sense of nourishment, and our basic sense of intention. And then I tried to study about this Shosai Myokichi Jodharani. And I found out that it's actually dedicated to Lakshmi. Lakshmi is the... Lakshmi was born... The way Lakshmi was born, I'll tell you about it sometime, but not tonight. But what I want to emphasize about Lakshmi is that she had new life all through the history of our practice... I don't think I have my... Oh, yeah.

[31:17]

So in the 7th century, she becomes Vasudhara. So gold and Tara, or stream of gems. And the idea of Lakshmi, both in Hinduism and in Buddhism, and even in all the way through Chinese and Japanese Buddhist practice, is abundance. That the areas where we feel lack... the areas where we feel challenged are actually treasures for us. That everything that comes up in the study of the ways the true human body is the gift of abundance, no matter what it is. And that weaving together our experience in dream time or, you know, sitting when we're tired can give us this sense of abundance and this sense of nourishment. So I had prepared a bunch of suggestions for different things that happen, different mishaps that happen during sleep.

[32:25]

But I think what I'd like to do instead is to open the conversation because I have way more notes than I can actually speak about, way more preparation than I can actually give you tonight, so I want to close the general part. Shall I just close with the, do we do the chant first and then Q&A or Q&A? Q&A first, okay, well I'll just close the presentation part of the lecture with the gatha that Suzuki Roshi gave us for sleep. And this gatha you'll find in the Avatamsaka Sutra, also rated 10 out of 10 on the sutra scale. Because the Avatamsaka Sutra is the abundance of flower, garlands, gems, Buddhas, worlds, thoughts, dreams,

[33:32]

questions, doubts, everything is in the Avatamsaka Sutra. And there's a chapter in it, purifying practice, which gives a gata or verse for everything that we do. So this is what I recite at night before I go to sleep. This evening as I sleep, I vow with all beings to still all things and clear the mind of confusion. This evening as I sleep, I vow with all beings to still all things and clear the mind of confusion. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost 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. May we fully enjoy the Dormer.

[34:35]

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