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. I don't think this is all... I'm not used to being amplified. So tell me if my voice is too loud or too something. I don't know. It's okay? All right. I don't think this is the place for me to apologize for the extraordinary mess I made of things here in 83. But I can say I'm profoundly sorry for what happened. We're sitting here. I really can't get used to this. Maybe I'll try. I mean, I will try. We're sitting here together in the legacy of Suzuki Roshi and the lineage and legacy of Suzuki Roshi and the legacy of Suzuki Roshi has taken this form but how has it taken this form?

[01:26]

Well, I mean, first of all, of course, Sekiroshi had to come to the United States. And at some point, we had to incorporate or form an organization. And when you form an organization, you... We did it for practical reasons, and there were numbers of people who wanted to do it. Connie Lewick and Della Gertz and Betty Ross and... Betty Warren and Gene Ross. And I think Graham Petty was instrumental in kind of getting it to happen. But when you form a group, you, I mean, it's an incorporation, and you hear the word body in incorporation, you create a kind of new body. I mean, we did it for legal reasons having to do with California and the federal government and so forth. reasons that have nothing to do with the tradition of Buddhism in Asia but we had formed it so we could support Suzuki Roshi but we ended up also of course forming a group which supported Suzuki Roshi and then which Suzuki Roshi could begin to relate to as practitioners and that form

[02:57]

And the way we began to support each other in that form, and the way in which Suzuki Roshi clearly was supporting us too, giving form to our lives, I mean really giving form to our mind and body, led us to look for a place to practice more fully with Suzuki Roshi. And in fact he said, I need a place to show practice to those who want to practice here. I can't just explain it or talk about it. And so I need a place where I can be with people face to face. And that led to Tassahara. And in Tassahara, of course, we began to find out how to... breathe within ourselves and also breathe with others.

[04:04]

So the others are not a they-ness, but more of an us-ness. And let me just say something about breathing right now. And what I'd like to talk about, we'll see what happens, what I'd like to talk about is mental postures. Because Suzuki Roshi spoke, I mean, I remember once listening to him and I said, what is he talking about? What really is he talking about all the time? And I realized he was speaking, everything he said, he was teaching us attitudes. And now I would say he was teaching us mental postures. But it took me a while. I mean, I think how we describe practice to ourselves makes a huge difference. And so, but it took me a long time before I sort of thought, okay, well, I knew that Zen practice was a joining of mental posture, a yoga of mental postures and physical postures.

[05:12]

And so, but those mental postures, you know, it took me a while to see that he was teaching us not just attitudes, but mental postures. Now, what do I mean by that? Because it's one of the ways I have found most effective to also bring practice into our lay life. Because there's no question in my mind that Western Buddhism is going to be primarily a lay practice. How we pass on a lay practice, that's another question. But... It's going to be a lay practice partly because lay life is so developed and attractive. And so how to bring practice into our lay life is at the center of what we're doing.

[06:16]

But when Suzuki Rishi said, you know, it's not really, I'm not really finding I can... reach the students the way I'd like to, so I'd like to have a more face-to-face way to practice with people, led to Tassahara. And what I was astonished by, and was a life-changing experience for me, is Tassahara changed everything. Suddenly a kind of loose group of people, all interested in liking and loving Suzuki Rishi, suddenly were practicing in a new way. And it not only affected the ones who practiced there, it affected the others who didn't practice there, but were part of the community. So, I mean, the simplest thing I can say about a mental posture is zazen, of course, is a physical posture. We try to sit in a way that has some stability and in which we can relax, let

[07:22]

disappear, almost disappear into the posture, in fact disappear into the posture. But also it is a mental posture, and the mental posture is don't move. Now, you can just think of that as an instruction, don't move. But it's actually, I would say, better understood in trying to find English for these things as a mental posture. In other words, you're holding the mental posture of don't move, and the body is helping you hold that posture, and the mental posture helps you hold the body. And if we didn't have the mental posture of don't move, that would not be the same. So the effort to not move, to enter into... A stillness in which you can disappear is, I would say, a way to define zazen.

[08:29]

Bringing a mental posture and a physical posture together and the mental posture of don't move actually begins to change. I'm convinced changes not only the functional structure of the mind, but pretty surely changes... biologically, the structure of the mind. So I'd say something about breathing in this regard. I would describe breath practice as, well, you try to count, for instance, you try to count to ten. You try to bring your attention to your breath. Everyone knows this. But what's interesting is... Anyone, I mean, I think virtually anyone, can bring their attention to their breath once or twice or three times in a row. But usually, often, your breath goes, your attention goes to your thinking.

[09:30]

And sometimes I call it the practice of counting to one. You get to one, and then one, and yeah, like that. Anyway. So then we can ask the question, why is something so easy to do for three or four breaths, or ten sometimes, so difficult to do for 30 minutes or 40 minutes? Or right now, can your attention be on your breath? Well, my own feeling is it's because it's not because our thinking is so interesting. It's because in our thinking, in the continuity of our thinking, we establish our sense of continuity, our sense of identity, our sense of place in the world.

[10:34]

Because if the world is just nothing but momentary, momentariness, the duration that's established is established within your senses, within your sensorium. So how do we... We have to establish some kind of continuity. So one of the functions of self is to establish continuity. And if you don't establish continuity, you're lost. Okay. So after a while, this is my way of speaking about very basic breath practice. You... you bring your attention to your breath, you form an intention, I could say a mental posture, you form an intention to bring your attention to your breath. And it's not so important that you, whether, you know, I failed, I didn't bring my attention to breath, etc.

[11:40]

What's important is that you strongly establish the intention, you strongly establish the mental posture that you will bring attention to the breath. So if you keep strengthening the intention, deepening the intention or the mental posture to bring attention to the breath, eventually in the myriad 10,000 things, more and more it begins to happen. Now, attention, let me just say something about attention. Attention, we think of it usually as something to do with... and of course it is a dynamic of consciousness. And again, I'm going into this detail because Suki Roshi brought us a yogic, Buddhist, Asian tradition. That is his legacy, but his legacy is also what happened to that, like this is one of the things that happened to it, what happened to that legacy

[12:49]

And the categories of thinking about practice in Asia and in yoga traditions in Asia, they don't quite work into our thinking. For instance, the basic teaching of interdependence, it's the most basic teaching of Buddhism, interdependence. But the word interdependence isn't sufficient to convey what really this central teaching is about. So I would say we need also inter-independence. So you practice with inter-independence, and again, practicing is not so much a matter of understanding, but of incubation. You take some word, and a word is a way of focusing attention. If I say, who are you? That focuses attention some way.

[13:55]

If I say, what are you? Well, it's just two words starting with W, but there's a big difference. And you say, what am I? Who am I? Already there's a difference. So that we can use words, not to believe the world through words, but we can use words as instruments of attention. So you bring attention together to your breath. And as I said, I think... Oh, let me go back to interdependence. So we have the word interdependence, we can have the word inter-independence, and I think we also need the word inter-emergence, because each of these moments that we live in some durative, creating some durative sense of the present, is... A practice, the Dharma practice is to notice appearance, and appearance is to let things appear and release them.

[15:03]

And to know or feel the uniqueness on each moment. So if I look at you, you look now, I look over there, you look like, but I look back, Reb is different, tension in Roshi is different already. So to find your way into the uniqueness of each moment. So I would say inter-emergence, inter-emergence, but I use inter-emergence because at each moment something new is emerging. So I find it useful to use interdependence, inter-independence, inter-emergence, and inter-emergence all of to kind of catch the feeling of what's really going on and what's really meant by the word that's usually translated as interdependence. So likewise, I'm now looking at, speaking about breath, attention. Attention, attention. Attention is, I would define it as a dynamic of consciousness, but not limited to consciousness.

[16:17]

I mean, I can be conscious of this room. And yet I can move attention from there to there and so forth. And I can also move attention into the process of falling asleep and let it go across the boundary into sleep and become lucid dreaming. And in lucid dreaming, there is attention, but that's not attention anymore. That's consciousness. So there's a dynamic or power or incredible gift that we have of attention. So you form an intention to bring attention to the breath. It's like, you know, you try to bring attention to this, and it goes away. You bring attention to this, it goes away. After a while, it comes back easier, and it comes back easier. And then finally, at some point, it starts to just rest on what you're bringing attention to. It's almost like a rubber band snaps

[17:20]

And you no longer need to establish your psychological continuity, your bodily sense of continuity, mental sense of continuity, in your thinking. I mean, if you always establish continuity in your thinking, there's no way to be free of thinking. So somehow you have to let that rubber band snap back to the body. And attention rests then in the breath and in the body and very easily then in phenomena. So you begin to find your attention is resting in the breath, resting in the body, and resting in phenomena. And once you really have that feeling and you know it is a bodily feeling, all mental, all our mental and the bodily aspect, you find yourself in immediacy naturally and certainly much more easily.

[18:37]

So, what happened at Tassara, of course, and we had quite a lot of people who started being in the world in a different way and being because if you're in your body and mind in a different way you're in the world in a different way and you're with others in a different way and Sukoji in the Bush Street community was no longer Bush Street buildings and so forth were no longer sufficient to house or wasn't a good place for all of us to go back to So I think mainly Nanda Dullingberg, I don't remember, I was living in Japan at the time, found this building. Luckily found this building, this beautiful building. And so we began to practice together here. So somehow Zen Center has an urban center, a sub-urban farm center in Green Gulch, and maybe a

[19:51]

monastic wilderness center, Tassahara. And each of these centers is... You know, when you have an intention to do something like incorporate as Zen center in order to support Suzuki Roshi, you don't know what that form... You're creating a form, but you don't know what that... What futures are concealed in that form, are implied in that form? And in fact, some futures that are sourced, that arise from that form, arise through future conditions, and we can't know. There was no way to know that when we incorporated as Zen Center to support Sukirushi, that it would produce Green Gulch. But it did produce this. It produced us art. It produced Green Gauss. I mean, we can have our best intentions.

[20:54]

And in our best intentions, we don't know what future is going to come from those best intentions. But if we nourish them with wisdom and compassion, and we express them as much as possible with wisdom and compassion, futures we couldn't have imagined appear. that we start to live. And really, it's a combination of things, but one of the seeds certainly was the simple incorporation, bringing people together with Suzuki Rishi to support him, and realizing how much he was supporting us. Yeah. So... Now, at some point in 83, I went to, in the early 80s, I went to first Tana Fe and then Europe.

[21:58]

And there, here, I was mostly practicing with a monastically experienced sangha. Because Tassajara, monastic experience and sashines, which is a form of monasticism, was the majority of who we were practicing with. I was practicing with. But when I went to Europe, it was mostly lay people who had no monastic background. In fact, I resisted for some time doing sashines in Europe because once I did sashines in Europe, I knew I'd have to stay. And And I'd have to stay or find successors. So that's what I'm doing in both Crestone and Yossov. Because I, you know, maybe I'm getting older. And so I have to somehow start dealing with succession.

[23:04]

But one of the things I discovered in, you know, when I was here, in the context of more... Japanese connection, and Suzuki Roshi, of course, and But Okusan, his wife, and Japanese visitors, I taught more, practiced with people more in a don't explain anything, don't be too clear, just as much as possible as I said, show the practice. But when I got to Europe, I found I didn't have a there was no monastic or sashin experience even, and I found I had to find a way to be clear, more clear, more explicit. And so I began to see if I could find ways in which the fruits of monastic experience could be put into language which people could... bring attention to their daily life through the language.

[24:09]

Well, I mean, a simple one is just no other location mind. So if you take a phrase like no other location mind, I mean, that's the best I can find a way to say it in English. I mean, of course, you can feel it. And once you feel that, you don't have to say it anymore. You just feel it in your body. but no other location mind, any place, going up the stairs, down the streets, etc., you can have a feeling of, you can keep that as a mental posture, like don't move. And if you incubate that phrase, this mental posture, in your daily life, it begins to work. Now, let me... Take another example of a mental posture. Again, what I thought of was these very basic teachings that Siddhartha Rishi gave us, instructions and teachings, which I, you know, it's taken me 50 years to, and still I'm in the middle of trying to plumb the depths of simple instructions when you don't try to understand them, which closes them off.

[25:33]

but you incubate them. So one of the most common things Sukirishi said in those early days was, don't invite your thoughts to tea. You will probably all know the phrase. Don't invite your thoughts to tea. Well, how can you even think that? Because don't invite your thoughts is... To tea is a thought which you're not supposed to invite to tea. Oh, this is a problem. Well, of course, they're mental formations, but they're not necessarily thoughts. So let's say that the don't invite is a mental posture. Don't invite is a mental posture. like an intention or a resolution. And the thoughts you're not inviting to tea, we can call discursive thoughts.

[26:39]

Now, everyone can, I think, understand this real simply. You do zaza and you can have the experience of not inviting your thoughts to tea. But when you do something like not inviting your thoughts to tea and you get in the habit, a habit you inhabit, not inviting your thoughts to tea, you're actually, again, restructuring the way the mind functions, and in fact, I think physiologically, the way the mind exists. So you're changing the energetic emphasis, you're changing the attentional dynamic of mind from discursive thoughts to the mental posture of not inviting. And discursive thoughts get less and less power, less and less presence. So when you practice something like don't invite your thoughts to tea, you're actually changing, as I said, the way the mind functions, and you find yourself more and more located in the not inviting, although our practice really should also be

[27:59]

in every situation to say yes, at least at first, or welcome, welcome. This is another mental posture you can take. In every encounter with someone, you have the feeling, or anything, a treat, you know, welcome. Because welcome allows appearance to appear, and then allows you to release appearance. So if you find yourself, if you find your experience resting more in mental postures than discursive thinking, the whole question of what is self, what is the agency of self, what is who am I, changes. Now one other teaching that took me a long time to get was I was the Doan for the first year or so in Bush Street.

[29:28]

And in 61 or so or two, And so I tried to do the mokugyo the way Sukiroshi did. So, you know, I'd start out... So I talked to Sukiroshi about it. And he said, you don't speed up. Oh, okay, Sukiroshi. You don't... You're the Zen master. You're my teacher. You don't speed up. And then the next morning I listened to him. Well, so I've been incubating that for 50 years. And it suddenly dawned on me, and I got it from, also understood it better from,

[30:31]

Asian crafts, like the tea ceremony and all, how you whisk tea. But I realized, because what I'd been teaching all these years, which wasn't entirely wrong, which is that, you know, mind and body are, of course, in our lived life, inseparable. But mind and body are experienceable separately. So you can have an experience of mind and an experience of body, which are separate. And I often describe Zen practice as a particular way to weave the separate experiences of mind and body together. And there's other ways. I mean, yogic practices of various kinds may emphasize weaving the experiences, the separateness of mind and body, together in other ways. And that worked for me, you know, to understand it that way. But once I got, once I explored mental postures more, I realized Suki Rishi was saying to me, you have a mental posture of not speeding up.

[31:53]

But then the situation speeds up because you start chanting, But pretty soon, everyone's together. And when everyone's together, it just naturally, naturally, starts to speed up. So now I would say yogic practice, Zen yogic practice, is to allow for the... observing mind, the agency of mind, to allow the body freedom. Now, we could talk about Benjamin Levitt and all kinds of people and others who've done research, which shows that your body knows what it's going to do in most instances before you consciously think it, and the consciousness is mostly an editing process and possessive process. Well, I made that decision, but actually your body was several seconds ahead of you.

[32:56]

So your body has its own intelligence as in gathering information from the 10,000 things all the time. So how to allow the body its own freedom. So there is a relationship between mind and body, but you can begin to let your body make decisions. And you can begin to let circumstances make decisions. I think we're more like plants sometimes. I mean, we're not genetically, we animals are genetically formed, but plants aren't genetically programmed, and they have to keep making decisions in the midst of the circumstances in which they can't move because they're rooted there. When away Zen with no other location in mind, maybe you're rooted in a particular way, and circumstances, I think the adept practitioner more and more is inseparable from circumstances and body and the agency of mind simultaneously.

[34:02]

Now, that's a shift in my understanding of how body and mind are affected by practice, which took some 50 years for me to, well, probably 45, to... That's a long time. Some of you aren't that old, I think. And... to recognize that it's more accurate and allows more engagement with the teachings, the more developed teachings, to see it in this way I just described. Sukirishi also died in this building, December 4th, 1971. And shortly before he died, I stood at the foot of his bed, and I didn't know what to do.

[35:18]

I was hoping for another 10 years at least with him, and I said to him, Where will I meet you? And he took his hands from under the covers and brought them up and made a circle and bowed into it. And this circle in the air is also, you know, something like an incorporation, something like when we first incorporated the Zen Center, because this circle in the air is also his legacy, and we can evolve by incubating this circle in the air. This circle in the air is also our practice, and one of the ways our form, well, form and emptiness...

[36:20]

Form in openness, openness in form, form in openness, openness in... Because we can practice that. Keep opening up each appearance. Thank you very much. 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 sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:01]

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