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. Today is August 6th. And it struck me as I was beginning to prepare for this Dharma talk that today is August 6th, which is Hiroshima Day. And over the years, I've been in ceremonies that, memorial services that commemorate that...

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day, that never-to-be-forgotten day. And it permeated really my study today for this talk. So on August 6th, the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima and dropped a little boy, was the name given to the atomic bomb. And then three days later, Nagasaki was bombed with a bomb named Fat Boy. the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed instantaneously and in the days following because of the aftermath and sickness and so forth.

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And still to this day there's a legacy of that. This is particularly poignant to me because my new relatively new daughter-in-law comes from Hiroshima. And just in thinking about it today, that brought a new dimension to it. So since that time we've lived in the nuclear age, and it's been as people who are closely involved with this, with the Strategic Air Command and so forth, it's been a matter of luck and skill, and as one person put it, divine intervention that's kept us from some huge disaster in these years since then.

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So our world is still filled with war. I haven't been, since I've been here these last days, keeping up with what's going on in various parts of the world. But as we know, there is violence and war and misery. And where is the peace? And where do we find peace? Where do we live out a peaceful life? This is also the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. And I'll be going to England in a couple weeks. And I was told by my niece that there's a of ceramic red poppies and one for each English or British soldier that died in World War I. I think it's 888,246 ceramic poppies, bright red, that are placed and spilling out of the Tower of London.

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And if you see photos of it, it's It's incredibly striking what it looks like, this red pouring down to the surrounding area. So this question of peace, peace in the world, peace in our families, peace in our workplace, neighborhood, peace in our own hearts, is a huge issue. ever-present inquiry. So in the meditation text called The Universal Admonitions for Zazen, it says about Zazen, Dogen, the Zen master who wrote it, says about Zazen,

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It's not learning meditation. It is the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. The Dharma gate of repose and bliss. And this is one translation of the characters, anraku. Anraku. It's repose and bliss or joyful ease. And the first part of that anraku, the an part, can mean peace and is in the name for a practice period, ango, peaceful, abiding. And the character is a roof with the character for woman under the roof. This is peace. When someone can stay peacefully at home, without becoming a refugee or having your roof burnt over you.

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This is peace. A woman sitting under her roof and in her house. Or a man sitting at home or gardening. This image is on our anraku, and this is the image of our or the characters for our zazen practice, for our sitting practice, for taking our seated posture, or bringing our zazen into everyday life, we're invited to imagine, or inquire, What is joyful ease? What is repose and bliss? I don't know so much about bliss, actually, but I'm learning about repose, learning about repose.

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And in our Yoga Zen workshop that I'm co-leading with Patricia, where are you? Patricia, we have the afternoon devoted to restorative healing. posture restorative poses and these are supported poses that are supported where a person feels supported and thus able to completely relax deeply relax and explore deep relaxation The word repose, I wanted to look at what that comes from. And there's two meanings. One repose is the act of resting, the state of being at rest and relaxation.

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Also, peace of mind or freedom from anxiety. This is all repose. calmness and tranquility. So you can see why this repose and bliss, this translation of anraku and zazen might be connected. And also, repose means to lay oneself down, to repose oneself, and to lie supported by something. It actually says, in the dictionary. Support is perfect for our restorative poses, lying over a bolster, supported by something. And this repose comes from pausa, to rest. There's another repose which comes from the root to place.

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And this is like repository, or repose our trust in something. Both of them work, I think. So this question, how do we find peace? How do we find repose? What is true repose, which might be different from avoiding something, avoiding our life, using our spiritual practice ourselves in practice, to turn away from our life rather than to deeply be supported and explore in relaxation. In the Buddha's time, when the Buddha was asked by a philosopher who said to him, I've heard that you have a doctrine of enlightenment.

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What's your method? What do you do? What do your followers do? And the Buddha said, we walk, we eat, we lie down, we sit, we bathe ourselves. And the philosopher was quite puzzled. He said, well, everybody walks and sits and bathes themselves and eats. I don't understand. And the Buddha said, yes, everybody does these activities. However, our practice is when we walk, we are aware that we're walking when we lie down, we're aware that we lie down. When we eat, we're aware that we eat. And when we bathe ourselves, et cetera, we are aware. This is the, there's not, what is the difference?

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Everybody, everyone, Human beings lead very similar lives, and yet if the awareness of our activities, our speech, where our bodies are in space, if we're not aware, then we are not alive, really, not fully alive to our life. And when we're not fully alive, we're not at peace. So coming back to our sitting, coming back to this posture, and starting with our posture, to take a posture where there is repose, where we feel supported. And it may take a while to find that.

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It may take a lifetime, I would say, to find that repose and joyful ease every time we sit. There isn't a once and for all, and took care of that one. It's day after day and moment after moment, which sounds very cliche, doesn't it? I think it can sound cliche when we're separated from the practice, when we haven't entered what it means to feel thoroughly our posture. So the Dharma gate of repose and bliss and finding this peace within our own hearts is necessary for any kind of peace between ourselves and our fellow workers, family, friends, in a community.

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When there isn't peace within, it gets played out between people gets played out in all our activities. So there's something that I wanted to bring up in relation to this, which some of you are familiar with, and I brought it up to the Yoga Zen retreat group this morning, which is, and with some other people too, which is a term that was coined in 1984. It's not a new term coined by John Welwood, and the term is spiritual bypassing, or spiritual bypassing. And some of you may be familiar with that, and some of you may be hearing it for the first time. And I bring it up because it seems to me

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more and more something that needs our attention. Practitioners, not just who are living in practice centers, but I feel like this spiritual bypassing, which is very pervasive, may be something that creates a situation where people don't want to practice or, or if they think if that's what practice is or a spiritual practice is, I think I'll do something else because there's, um, there's something unsettling and not joyful ease about practicing in the midst of spiritual bypassing. So I wanted to say something about it, um, It's not just Eastern religions or Zen. I think it's very pervasive in all sorts of different practices, spiritual practices and endeavors.

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So one definition of spiritual bypassing is using spiritual practices of all kinds to avoid facing our life, which is often avoiding facing the pain of our unresolved issues, of our actions, of our disappointments, of our emotional, psychological pain. And avoiding this very successfully by using the practice, using concentration practices, using the practices of all the forms of a practice center to very successfully keep from actually opening to meeting, inquiring into our issues, the issues of our life.

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And I just want to say at the beginning of bringing this up that I feel I'm very familiar with this from my own life, and I'll have a couple of stories about that. And this is not to criticize or expose anyone or shame anyone or shame myself. It's more to awaken myself to this. and to help others notice something that is hard to see because of the normalcy of it, that it's this pervasive quality, that it's hard to tell. So some of the ways that this particular, there's a book called Spiritual Bypassing, when spirituality distances ourselves from what really matters by Robert Masters.

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So reading this article, I kept having these little mini sort of remembrances of days gone by and maybe days that haven't gone by so long ago. So I wanted to tell some of these stories about myself for you to get a feel for it and to help maybe look at one's own practice, too. So some of the kind of hallmarks of spiritual bypassing are an exaggerated detachment. And I remember there's two stories about that. One is when I was working in the front office at Zen Center in the 70s, and we got this postcard from someone, and they said, I've sold all my belongings, my car, and all my things, and I'm coming to Zen Center. And I remember thinking, oh no, oh no.

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And he did arrive, and he lasted for about a week. He had lots of ideas, lots of, and a kind of exaggerated detachment from material things, and he was going to practice. So that was this fellow. But then I thought of when I came to Santa, and this is what I was reminded of today. Before I left St. Paul, Minnesota, I had what I called a bedroom sale, and I put all my belongings out. on the bed and all over my room, my jewelry, gifts from my mother, clothing, books, stuffed animals. I was in my early 20s and then I invited my friends and sisters to choose whatever you like. Please take, I would call this sort of an exaggerated detachment that I was entering a kind of

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I was going to have a spiritual life and this stuff. Many years later, I thought, gee, why didn't I give away that really nice watch? It was really a good watch. And then, oh yeah, there was that dress. That would have been very handy for an occasion. Anyway, but at the time, I was above it all. This is a kind of exaggerated, but one gets accolades for that. Oh, How selfless. And there are stories. There are real Zen stories, like the Pong family. Mr. Pong and Mrs. Pong, layman and laywoman Pong, and their daughter Lu Timo. I think there was a son. And Mr. Pong brought all their belongings out to the middle of a lake in a boat and sunk the boat. Of course, they were all enlightened, this family, and they were just fine with that. And they sold bamboo utensils on the street very happily, giving each other Zen koans all day long.

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But that was the real deal, you know. I think my bedroom sale was kind of spiritual bypassing. So one might think about, hmm, is there any, am I caught in that... Another kind of hallmark of spiritual bypassing is, oh I have to keep, oh my goodness, I can't go on too much longer with this, staying with the schedule, respecting your sleep time. Emotional repressing emotions. You know, there are concentration practices and probably yoga asanas and other kinds where the emotions can be not let go of, not inquired into and finding that you're letting go of, but actively pushing them down.

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You're not going to feel this one. And I will do that with my concentration on the breath or on whatever. And I've had people tell me that for years that was the nature of their practice was very successfully keeping any emotional pain at bay. And they could do that because they were successful in a certain kind of concentration which I wouldn't call our way or our meditation practice. And it really was avoiding the pain, avoiding the pain of one's life. Another hallmark that's mentioned is overemphasis on the positive. And this can happen, you know, oh, Green Gulch, it is paradise. It is the best, you know. or Tassajara or any place. And these people are the most wonderful.

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Well, you know, you know, it's, there are problems, you know. Green Gulch, Tassajara, there's no place that's paradise. Paradise, we create paradise by our accepting fully this human life and That's an engaging fully, that's heaven, you know. Or it's a heaven that's grounded in our life, not some lifted-off, floating, inflated view of, you know, so, you know, touching the earth groundedness and clear-eyed Another is overly compassionate, kind of compulsive caregiving.

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And I think people are familiar with this. Like, you didn't ask your friend to, you know, come over and bring a hot dish, you know, or whatever they feel like you need to feel better. There can be a confusion between our Bodhisattva Lao and true compassion, so a kind of compulsive caregiving and compassion, I put that in quotes. There's also niceness, a kind of tyranny of niceness. Weak or too porous boundaries, inability to say no, when actually the answer that you actually need to say is no. This, no. And when we are unable to say no, all of our yeses, what are the yeses then?

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They're not true yeses. Because we can't say no. So you both lose the yes and the no, the truth, the authenticity of yes and no, unless we're clear about our boundaries. And there's many of these that have been very helpful for me to look at, you know, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual. I don't need a day off. This is my practice. I will work seven days a week. I will work all night long or whatever. There are people who don't take their vacations, don't have self-care as part of their spiritual practice, don't know how, and it's all couched in language of, you know, this is the spiritual way, but it leaves out true looking at our own needs of all kinds.

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I don't know if any of this feels familiar to you, or if you can relate to it, but for me, Yeah, I remember feeling I shouldn't take my day off because I'm so needed in the kitchen. And the Tenzo very wisely said, you're not, take your day off, you're not indispensable. Go, get out of here. Which was, it was like a splash of cold water. I was going to be working on my day off and helping. I think I didn't want to take my day off because unless I was following the schedule, and this people tell me too, the day off is the hardest day because you don't have the schedule and the zazen and the bells and this is for living in a practice place. And then all this stuff that you've been successfully keeping and avoiding, keeping happy and avoiding, it's like there it is because you're left to your own. It's very difficult.

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So I think the other thing thing that I want to mention is the possibility of real aggression and when these things are kept in a box or in a cement repository not a place of repose but a sealed thing they will come out and they'll come out often as aggression I know someone who had a wonderful practice to look like to me, confessed about actually beating a dog, you know, and was surprised at herself because she was practicing bodhisattva way, you know, sitting every day. This is a perfect example, you know. Something was missing, something alive,

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authentic and difficult. Something that needs to be faced, entered, acknowledged with care, with compassion, and we may need help. We may need help with this. And part of the other ways to think about this is our body itself feels ungrounded, unable to relax, find repose in the posture. And there may be, for me, I think this is also another story about myself, for 10 years I had involuntary movement in zazen. I couldn't sit still. and moved rhythmically and big movements, little movements, but I could not actually rest and find repose and bliss, find joyful ease.

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There was no ease. I just kept going and until finally the wisdom of the body, you know, helped me to see I need to take care of these other issues that seem to be pushed back somewhere. Just cast away, get away. I don't know. I'm doing my practice. I don't have to look at these other things. Beautifully, I think, the wisdom of the body didn't allow that. It did for ten years. It took a while. So what is a spiritual life, really? What does it look like, true spiritual life? And what is it that another one of these characteristics is talking about one's spiritual attainments and one's experiences and that this is something to be aware of.

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So Maybe I'm sure it's time to end here. It's just about 9.20, so I'm going to leave you with a story. Actually, there's two stories, short stories, koans, about the teacher Zhao Zhou, a Chinese Zen master who had many realized disciples and This one story, a new monk, somebody new to the monastery, came and met with the teacher and said, I've just entered the monastery, please guide me. And Zhao Zhao said, have you had your breakfast? And the monk said, yes, I have eaten. And Zhao Zhao said, wash your bowl.

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in the commentary on this, you know, were pointed to everything is there. This wanting more and wanting some special experience and wanting, this is not repose and bliss, this is not joyful ease to sit with grasping, trying to grasp some experience other than What we got. What you've got is enough. And he asked for guidance. Have you eaten? Have you eaten the plain rice porridge of our morning meal? Have you had your breakfast? Oatmeal. Amaranth. Have you had your breakfast? Yes, I have eaten. Washable. To me, that's the groundedness of that story.

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And in one translation, it says, the monk understood. So there's, in the gateless gate, it says, the monk understood, meaning he realized his true self from that exchange. In another collection, it doesn't say the monk understood. So there's a question, did he understand? He's not named. But the real question is, have you eaten? Wash your bowl and wash your body with awareness. Have you eaten? Have you washed your bowl and your body? And with awareness, are you walking and sitting, lying down with awareness? And this is the other story, which to me seemed like a kind of spiritual bypass story, maybe. It's about Zhaozhou as well. So Zhaozhou, it says in the story, the great worthy, he was a famous Zen master then, was sweeping the temple grounds.

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And a monk came up to him and said, the master is a great worthy, why are you sweeping? And Zhaozhou said, the dust comes in from outside. And the monk said, this is a pure temple. Why is there any dust? And Jaojo said, there's some more. The reason I say spiritual bypassing is, you know, some big ideas about what practice is, what Zen is, what's worthy activity for the Zen master. And you can feel the You can feel the ideas there that are crowding, you know. There's other stories like this, you know. And I'm sure I've got stories like that, too. So, coming back each day to our repose and bliss, you might say, what is she talking about, repose and bliss?

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I have so much pain in my sasen, you know, or discomfort, or restless mind. Give yourself to the posture. Allow yourself to be supported by your life force. Settle yourself just where we are, just this body, mind, right now, without wishing it were something else, or they've got a better one, or maybe next week, or if I just try harder. That will really guarantee... repose, this peace, not passivity and turning away from the world in passive bypassing, but true peace where we are ready to be in the world with all beings and all situations

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as best we can. Maybe not the most skillful, skillful, skillful, but grounded enough to do our best. So in that same text, where it says, the Zazen I speak of is not learning meditation, it is the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. It also says, have no designs on becoming a Buddha. There's nothing you need to go after. 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.

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Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

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