This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. How may I direct your call? Thanks for having me tonight. My name is Jiryu. Really appreciate the invitation from David and Abit Ed. Thanks for having me from the far reaches of Green Gulch Farm, Green Dragon Temple, where I live. And serve as assistant to our abbess, Fu Schrader, and help to raise the children of our director, Sarah Tashkar, who look a lot like me. So on the way over here in the rain and traffic, one was given to sort of mournful thoughts.

[01:10]

And I was remembering an incident in my past when I was on the soccer team in high school. And I had played soccer growing up quite a bit. And my coach took me aside one day, you know, well into the season. And he said, you know, I don't care what the other guys say about you. I think you're just fine. So I think it was, my recollection of that incident was maybe over-determined. But tonight, I was thinking of it in terms of our Zen way, and not to suggest that Zen is the laughingstock, exactly, of the Buddhist world, but our friends do kind of mutter about us behind our backs, and occasionally to our faces.

[02:27]

Thank you. And I think their muttering, their whispering about Zen is something like, you know, we're obviously vulnerable on many counts. But I think the main thrust of muttering among our wider Buddhist friends is that for the so-called meditation school, right, Zen is the meditation school, we're actually kind of thin on like the meditation part. Those of you who have done meditation instruction here, it varies. Sometimes it includes some actual instruction in addition to getting into the room. But often it doesn't. It seems that for this meditation school, with meditation as supposedly the centerpiece of our practice, there's not a lot of instruction, not a lot of technique really, at the end of the day that's offered.

[03:27]

So I guess we could be defensive about that. I think there are good reasons why we're kind of thin on the meditation thing, even though we are the meditation school. And I think there's lots of ways to talk about those good reasons why we wouldn't have much to say about the thing we're about. One reason, one way of talking about it that comes to mind is our founder, Shinryu Suzuki Roshi, saying, Strictly speaking, any effort you make is not good for your practice. So this is our founder telling us that anything we do is pretty much missing the point. Any technique in meditation is a technique to get something. Any technique we do is a technique towards something. which is also away from something, namely what's right here.

[04:38]

So anyway, there are many ways to talk about this issue that Zen has. One I've been thinking about a lot that I've been talking to some folks about is this idea of, or this appreciation, say, of our Soto Zen founder, Dogen Zenji, in Japan. His... his formation, his training in the Tendai Buddhist tradition. So our Soto Zen founder, Dogen, was a Tendai monk. And the practice of Tendai Buddhism, already at the time of Dogen, for some hundreds of years, had been Vajrayana tantric practice. So you read sutras on the one hand, and then when you go to do the practice part, you're doing Vajrayana tantric rituals where you become... the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas through these kind of rites of, you know, this Vajrayana tradition that we mostly associate with Tibetan Buddhism, but has deep roots in Japan too.

[05:42]

And Dogen really comes out of this. So in that, you know, if our founder in Japan is actually doing a kind of tantric rite of just becoming the Buddha by... by holding the shape of the Buddha, just enacting the Dharmakaya Buddha by kind of mystically becoming one with the Dharmakaya Buddha, technique is already sort of beside the point, right? So this is just sitting as just sitting. We often hear that just to take the posture is to express... the enlightenment that we are. And I think it's interesting and powerful to understand that as a kind of tantric rite. It's a becoming, by holding the posture of the Buddha, we become the Buddha. We are the Buddha. We express that we are that Buddha. So I

[06:53]

I think that's a very true and very deep teaching, very deep aspect of our practice. And then what happens to us is that we actually have to do our practice, which is to say be in a meditation hall for a while. And I don't know if we can just enact the Dharmakaya Buddha without trying to do something a little extra. Maybe for a period we can, or for half a period, you know. but we have a whole day of sitting, much less a whole week of sitting, we tend to kind of revert to some sort of technique. We need to do something. However we understand the place of technique or what's this kind of core, most important point of just sitting, really most of us, I think, when we ask about our zazen, we're doing some kind of technique. We just are. There's no other way to get through a week of sitting than some kind of technique. So I sometimes think of this like just sit and become the Dharmakaya Buddha as like plan A. This would be like, this is plan A. And then plan B is what actually happens when we have to sit there and not go crazy for a few minutes, right?

[08:11]

And then we just start like grabbing some tools out of the box to keep ourselves from going crazy. Yeah. You know, one example of this, or one way to think about this, these two sides of our practice, or two pieces of our practice, is the mudra. I've been thinking about the mudra. And often, or always really, when I talk about the mudra, I talk about the mudra as a kind of a point of posture, you know? And it has this technical aspect. So we hold this mudra with our hands as a way of... monitoring our energy in Zazen. So there's this sleepy mudra and the hyper mudra. So this idea that we can see the mudra as a mirror where we can see what our mind is doing. But I've noticed that that way of thinking about and talking about the mudra is talking about it as a technique, right?

[09:15]

So how do we think about that? Are we using the mudra... for what it gets us, you know, as part of our technique? Or do we do the mudra because that's what the Dharmakaya Buddha does? That's the Buddha mudra. That's the shape that the Buddha takes, and we're becoming one with the Buddha, so we take that shape. So in any case, there's what we kind of most deeply value, and then there's what we actually do in our practice. One way of thinking about what it is that we actually do... Like if someone says, practice. What do you do? We reach for something. We have some techniques in our toolkit. Or when the teacher walks in, you know... We turn on something.

[10:16]

We start some technique. We fall back on some kind of technique. You know, we're called to dokusan. Ever happened to you to interview with a teacher? And you, like, suddenly realize you have to, like, step it up, you know? You have to kind of get on the beam. So you just start doing something with your mind. Probably. Or it's an interesting test, you know? If we think that we're just sitting manifesting the Buddha, what happens when we're called to dokusan? You know, do we... start reaching for, like, I'm going to be held accountable here. What was I doing exactly? So, you know, we do do these techniques. We recognize them in ourselves. We recognize them in each other. And we may be doing the same technique as our neighbor. We may not be. So I think, given that we're already doing techniques, it would be good, I think it's useful to have a good language with which to talk about the techniques that we're doing. And I don't think this undermines the other sense of our practice, this wider sense of just sitting or just enacting, becoming the Buddha.

[11:27]

But how do we talk about all the different things that we could be doing in meditation? How do we talk about and understand all of the practice intentions, all of the meditation techniques, and even the meditation states and experiences that we undergo in meditation. So how do we talk about these things? And I think we don't have, even though the Buddhist tradition is filled with this kind of wealth of resources of how to talk about meditation and how to talk about meditation technique, I think sometimes our language could use some refinement in terms of what it is practically that we're doing in meditation. So what are we talking about when we say we meditate? And what are the aspects of that practice? So we have this problem of figuring out what meditation is exactly and how we want to be doing it. And we share this problem with all of our friends in the Buddha Dharma going back millennia.

[12:35]

And we also share this problem with a kind of unlikely group of people namely those people who are trying from the outside to figure out what it is that we're doing in meditation. So there's a lot of people who are researching meditation and researching the effect of meditation on the brain, right? I'm sure you've all heard of these studies and this kind of research of what happens inside meditators. And it's quite fascinating and interesting and flawed and problematic and lovely, right? That... people want to figure out what's going on in our bodies and minds when we're doing these practices. But what some of the people doing this research have noticed is that you sort of need to know what you mean by meditation or mindfulness before you can really study it so accurately. Does that make sense? So that you can give a bunch of people an instruction,

[13:37]

say, a mindfulness instruction. So researchers say, you know, we're at a research lab and we're all hooked up to various electrodes and are being studied. And then someone will come in and tell you to do some practice. And then the results of that test are going to tell the researchers what goes on in the brain when you do that practice. But the problem is I could tell you all to do something and you would all be doing something completely different, you know. Have you noticed that about receiving instruction and then asking your friend what they're doing with that instruction? So on the one hand, this research community lacks a language to talk about the different kinds of instructions that people are getting. So mindfulness is used as kind of like mindfulness correlates with all these different kind of brain states are associated with mindfulness. But mindfulness is so broad, it's almost kind of like unworkable. Not to mention, so the set of instructions is very broad, and then the set of experiences is also very broad.

[14:45]

So anyway, a lot of people have this problem of not knowing exactly how to talk in detail about what meditation is. And it's their job to figure that out. And so some of them, there's this one group of researchers in particular, led by this guy Cliff Saron, who's a great kind of leader in meditation research and got this team together. of various neuroscientists and Buddhologists, if you can believe it, to figure out how can we talk about, with some precision, how can we talk about the different kind of meditation that people are doing so that we can then make more sense of our data, basically. And they came up with this amazing sort of neuroscience abhidharma of... meditative effort and meditative states. And they have a graphic for this that is really what I want to share with you all tonight. So forgive the lengthy apology.

[15:48]

Any Zen talk that involves technique needs a substantial preface. So forgive me for that. I'd like to show you all this graphic, and I think the easiest way to do that is going to be to hand it out. So I'm going to hand something out, if that's okay. And then it may look... But it's actually quite simple, and I hope you'll find it quite inspiring and enlivening and interesting in giving us a vocabulary to talk about our meditation practice. And I know we don't have so much time, so I'll move quickly. We need some more.

[16:57]

I have some more. Everybody have one? I've handed this out before, and some people have wondered which is the front and which is the back. So this is plan A. On one side is plan A, and on the other side is plan B. So this is what we say we do, and this is what we do when we have to do it for seven days.

[18:00]

So you'll see right off that one of the most kind of beautiful things to me about this diagram is that meditation is multidimensional. I think that the way... It's easy to think of meditation as like, well, it's just concentration. It's like that you could chart meditation on some straight line, you know? And that this... I mean, this is obviously itself a very... an extreme simplification of what meditation is, but that it's multidimensional. So there's this cube, and it will become clear, I think, quickly what's going on here, if it's not already. There's a cube with three dimensions, and these are kind of the primary dimensions, the kind of dials that we have under our Zafu. We have these three major main dials that we can tweak. Although sometimes they're overrided by the Eno or something, or by your past karma.

[19:09]

Some of them don't, like the knobs don't work. But the knobs are available. With training, we can activate all of these knobs. So the first axis here, and again, I do have more of these if anyone, do we need a few more? Okay, just one more. I suppose it's not. So the first, the bottom here, it says object orientation. So this is the sense of a mind being oriented towards or directed towards some object. You could ask yourself right now, for instance, is the mind reaching for something? Or is there some reaching for some object? in the mind. So not necessarily is the object clear, but are we trying when we sit, are we trying to find and focus on some object?

[20:17]

So like, are we looking for our breath? Are we, are we trying to pick an object out? The example they use is like, if you're trying to find a face in a crowd, even though you don't see the face yet, you're reaching, you know, So this reaching quality of mind, that I'm looking for some specific object out there, and even if my breath, like, geez, I can't even find my breath, but I'm reaching for it, you know? And this, already we have an issue or an axis on which different styles of meditation actually differ. And this is some of the confusion that I think this chart also helps clarify. Those of us who have some experience training in a variety of styles, you may go somewhere and get some instruction that says meditation is like you're supposed to be reaching for some object, like the breath.

[21:20]

And if you're meditating well, you're reaching hard and successfully, right? And then you come to a place like this and we say you're not supposed to be reaching for anything. If meditation were only on one axis, and they were just saying you're supposed to be reaching for something, and we're just saying you're not supposed to be reaching for anything, then they would have the problem that you can see on this chart, which is addictive craving has quite a bit of reaching. But no one really calls it a meditation practice. And that mind-wandering... has a fairly low, or, you know, couch sitting, has a fairly low object orientation. Like, I'm not looking for anything in my mind. Just reaching or just not reaching is like a piece of meditation, right?

[22:25]

It's a dimension of this. And they say, actually, in this piece that low... low magnitude of this object orientation occurs with, quote, zoning out or in shikantaza, you know, just sitting. So again, we have to get a little more refined. Our practice has this quality of low object orientation, but so do some unwholesome mental states. So they also, in this article, suggest that some Buddhist traditions, I think like our own, maintain that this object orientation is can be suspended entirely, that you can actually be completely not seeking an object. Choiceless awareness. So the next axis here is called dereification.

[23:32]

And I love this word. It's a mouthful. I don't love the word, actually. Now assessing my level of like or dislike of the word dereification, it's kind of a mouthful, but I think what it points to is really the heart of our practice in a way. The way they talk about it is that thoughts and feelings are experienced and understood as mental events rather than as accurate depictions of reality. So to reify is to believe that there's things out there that our thoughts and feelings are like corresponding to them. And to de-reify is to think that that thought, no matter what it is, the most basic one being I am, that that thought corresponds to reality. I'm an example of this. So part of my practice life, a core part of my practice life is our Buddha Dharma Sangha over at San Quentin State Prison where we do...

[24:37]

meditation now for many years. We've had a very lively, lovely group. And there was somebody recently who joined our group, this beautiful, quiet person who is really appreciating meditation and really feeling transformed by it, who told me the other day that no one told him that you didn't have to believe your thoughts. If he had known... If he had known that he didn't have to believe what he thought, he wouldn't be in prison. It was just that one teaching. Oh, really? That's just a mental event? It doesn't correspond with reality? So the liberation of that, the freedom that that teaching offers, I think maybe can't be overstated. They say, you know, at the extremes of this, thoughts lose their representational capacity entirely.

[25:48]

So thoughts, it's kind of the connection between thoughts and reality is just sort of severed, you know, at the extreme of it. So they... I love this paper that this chart is based on or comes out of... It's just filled with these sort of Dharma gems, so I just want to share one. For example, during certain states like depressive rumination, a script including states such as, I am a failure, may arise. And when it does, it can appear to be an accurate description of oneself. Such that the depressed mood is enhanced or sustained. So dereification, is this kind of not believing it, don't believe it, and applies even to something like the object of meditation, even like the breath. We're working with the breath. Do we believe that we know what the breath is? So you'll see in this chart, these little bubbles, these circles, the F.A.

[26:57]

novice, that's the focused attention novice meditator, still has some reification, you know? Anyway, I'll talk more about those points that are plotted on. But that's the second dimension, is not believing it. The third one here is meta-awareness. That's the vertical dimension, which is the ability, this kind of background awareness, the ability of the mind to be able to pick up on things that are not what it thought it was going to be picking up on. So if you're doing a concentration practice, if you're following the breath, are you also aware of the feelings and the thoughts? And you hear the people outside while you're listening to a talk or giving a talk. So what's the space around?

[27:59]

There's some task. In the language of these researchers, there's some task. And then what's the capacity, what's our background awareness? After doing the task, if they ask us a question about, did it sound like people were working in the kitchen during that talk or not? We would know if the meta-awareness... And I have this... I've noticed people with this skill. Maybe you have. You can feel that someone has your full attention... But then they're able to respond to something from behind or beside, right? So the sense we often talk about our practice is this kind of panoramic attention. Shikantaza is having this element of choiceless awareness or panoramic attention. And I think this meta-awareness, background awareness gets to that. I think the, you know, the... I came in through the side door and there's someone sitting in meditation by the side door.

[29:01]

of your zendo here, cultivating meta-awareness, right? So they can't... Does the person lose their concentration every time somebody walks in the door, you know? That they have to then see, like, who's walking in the door and should I do something or whatever? Can that person stay on their task, on their meditation, while still including that wider field of what's happening? Yeah. good gauge of meditation for object orientation and for this meta-awareness is can you be interrupted? Is your meditation the kind that's interruptible meditation or uninterruptible meditation? If it's kind of object-based and there's not much meta-awareness, then an interruption is like breaking something.

[30:04]

If there's less object orientation and there's more background awareness, then what's an interruption? It's just another piece of The unfolding, right? Is this not the key to everything? I really feel that this... I'm quite inspired by this chart and hope that this language somehow, you know, can contribute to our efforts here. So I just... Briefly, there are these four secondary qualities which are... make the pictures make more sense. So aperture is this dimension, which is shown graphically by how big the circle is. So that's the spotlight of attention. So focus, you know, you can focus, for instance, some people in concentration retreats, you know, get an extremely narrow beam of focus on to say, like, just the sensation at the tip of their nose.

[31:08]

It's a very narrow focus. And then in our... Maybe we'll focus on the breath. Maybe the attention of the breath will include a body awareness. So how wide is the aperture or the spotlight of the attention that we're applying in meditation? You'll see that the FA people over here on the right side of this chart, the focused attention people, they have a narrow, they're focused attention. It's a narrow, it's a narrow aperture. So part of this for me is when we sit down, what do we want to do What do we want to do? What kind of state do we want to have? What is our actual effort in meditation? Are we trying to have focused attention? In which case, if we find ourselves in a very wide, attentive state, maybe actually off the beam, or are we trying to focus? So what are we trying to do? Part of this is for our internal instruction. As we sit down, where do I want to be today?

[32:09]

What's my technique? What's my practice? Another dimension here in terms of what's going on in this person's mind as we're reading the neurological data on them. What's the clarity? So how clear is the object? So again, the face in the crowd is a good example. I'm reaching for the object, but it's not so clear. Or like, wow, that breath. I felt like every little particle of that breath move in and out, right? Very clear. The other is stability, and this is expressed, so clarity is expressed by the lightness of the inside of the circle. Stability is expressed by the darkness of the outside of the circle. And stability is like, well, so that was a very clear sense of the breath. How long exactly was that clear for? How stable was that concentration? Or even that dereification, you know?

[33:10]

How stable is whatever the state is? You know, are we jumping up and down like, hey, I didn't believe a thought. I didn't believe a thought, everyone. Or is it actually an ongoing, how stable is this practice or is this state really that we've achieved? And there's a difference between a sustained state and a kind of in and out state. And then this last one is really important and interesting, which is kind of this basket that's underneath these pictures. And that's effort. And this is also a point of real confusion. Are we supposed to be making an effort or not making an effort? People down the street say we're supposed to be making an effort. People here say we're not supposed to be making an effort. Is it just that we're doing their thing wrong or they're doing our thing wrong or what's going on here? So this sense of effort, again, we might say, well, effortlessness is our practice. And we have this lovely counterexample on this chart where addictive craving, again, is quite effortless. Not a lot of... Effort, you know, going into maintaining that state of mind of addictive craving is sort of effortless.

[34:16]

So to put effortlessness, to extract that dimension, you know, and put that up on the altar as our practice, misses the point. So you can see, you know, the focused attention novice here is making a great effort towards a narrow object that's not so clear. As they become more expert, the object stays relatively narrow, but there's more of this dereification, which also helps with concentration. It helps to not believe your thoughts while you're concentrating. Meta-awareness, you can see the focused attention person also needs this meta-awareness. You need to notice if a disruption is starting to arise in your mind. If your mind is starting to get on the distraction train, you need to be able to notice that. even though it's not the object of my meditation. My object of my meditation is my breath. But if I don't notice that my mind is about to get on the, like, I can't believe my soccer coach said that, train, then I need to notice that my mind is starting to do that.

[35:25]

So this meta-awareness really supports this focused attention. So an expert-focused attender will also have high meta-awareness. Open meditation, which is kind of a way of open monitoring. This is kind of a way of talking maybe more about our practice of just sitting or panoramic shikantaza. It's less effortful, kind of by definition. It's less of a focused effort, you know. Any effort we make is not good for our practice because it creates waves in our mind. So it's a little backing off of the effort, even from the get-go. The aperture is wider. De-reification and meta-awareness are kind of the core of the practice, not so much object orientation. These are states, you know.

[36:27]

These are states of meditation and states of mind and efforts we can make in meditation, and I think it's useful to know where we are and where we want to be, whether we're trying to tell someone how to meditate, or whether we are trying to tell ourselves how to meditate, or whether we're assessing how we are meditating. Another thing this diagram is useful for pointing out, I think, is that there's no right place to be on this chart. Awakening is not on this chart. Awakening is like each state of mind. as itself, awakening to itself as the suchness of all things. So these are states to explore, and that's all... There's sort of no more and no less than places the mind can go, and places that the Buddha ancestors' minds have gone, and each kind of holds some insight, you know?

[37:31]

So part of this invitation for me is also this fluidity in our meditation practice to not be kind of... first of all, to not just assume we don't have a technique, and then secretly we do, but also to not assume that the technique we have needs to be fixed or stable or is right, but that we can move through these techniques and explore all of these little Dharma gates that are at each of these spots on this chart. And understanding, too, that there are some trade-offs here. We may... We may want to make less effort, even though it's going to make our concentration less clear. We may want to widen the aperture, even though it might make us less stable in terms of our concentration. So what are we looking for? What are we trying to do? What are we valuing in our practice? While we enact and embody the wider truth,

[38:37]

that we are. So I hope that there would be plenty of time for questions and discussion. I'm sorry there's not. So I will close just by dedicating our efforts on either side of this paper to the well-being and peace and equanimity of all beings. Thanks so much again for having me and for tolerating the neurological Abhidharma. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org. and click giving.

[39:40]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[39:42]

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