This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So, welcome everyone. It's a huge treat and honor for me to be here. There are a couple chairs, if you prefer, I think. No, there are no chairs. Chairs. You're good, okay. Tassajar is a magical place, and one that I've been to, however, for 31 years. I was here a long, long time ago, and the chance to come back, the invitation was wonderful for me. So... I'm pleased to be here, I'm sure you are, in spite of heat.

[01:01]

So let me just tell you a little bit about me, background, credentials, things like that. Credentials for talking about meditation, basically pathetic, hopeless, I shouldn't be here, any number of people should be in the seat. But I did at least start early in my life by complete accidents. I lived in a small, medium-sized town in northern San Diego County. I grew up in this place. And my family, my two sisters, mom and dad, and they volunteered to accept a foreign exchange student. Every year, one high school student would come from abroad. In the past, it was always Europe. Back then, Asia didn't exist. Africa didn't exist. But... So there was somebody from Switzerland, England, and Finland. So my parents assumed that. But much to their shock, it was a young woman high school student from Thailand, Chinese Thai. And I remember my father's reaction, where's Thailand? It's like, really?

[02:05]

So anyway, I was 13. She was 17. Gorgeous. So I immediately fell in love with her. And I was going through puberty. It was, I admired her and I teased her. She teased me. She could mortify me in an instant because, you know, at that stage in my life. Anyway, one day I saw her meditating and I said, I know nothing about meditation. What are you doing sitting on the floor in this weird posture? And she, there wasn't, the word meditation wasn't really that much around in English yet. Meditation meant what Descartes did and Marcus Aurelius did, but not what people did sitting on the floor. So she didn't have a word, but she said, okay, well, we do this in Buddhism. And you sit in this way and here's what you do. And I said, well, teach me. You know, I'm interested. Mostly I was interested in her. So she did.

[03:07]

And she challenged me initially. She said, okay, now this sounds really simple. All I have to do is, you know, concentrate. And I was, piece of cake. She said, okay, start up. You just be aware of your breathing and count to 10 and then start over. That's it. I can do that. No problem. So I start, I go, one, and I'm already thinking how gorgeous she is. And I try again, and I try again, and I couldn't get past three, a 13-year-old brain. And so finally she says, see, and before I even admitted that I couldn't do it, and I said, okay, I couldn't do it. You're right. But she said, well, the point of doing this is you can learn to do this, right? Concentration is a skill. You know, she was articulate enough. She could actually say these things to me. And you can develop it. So that year was pivotal in my life. Really a major year. And beyond that, you know, I go through high school, go to college.

[04:09]

I began to experiment. Now we're in the 60s. And people are beginning to engage in meditation. And so more... Hinduism and Buddhism in that era. Hinduism was a huge tradition of meditation. Americans were attuned to by way of the British connection from the British Empire. So I studied Hindu styles of meditation and then later Buddhism and Zen was in the mix. But Taoist and Sufi Islamic and a range of Buddhist styles Eventually, because of this fascination, I went off to get a PhD in Buddhist philosophy. I thought the two were related. I still think we are, although it's an open question. At some point, I got a job in Los Angeles, an early point in 1980, teaching at Occidental College, where I still teach. So you can count the decades that have gone by. And the LA Zen Center was just beginning then, kind of following the San Francisco Zen Center.

[05:15]

as a Soto Zen tradition, so I became a student of Maezumi Roshi, and so on. Many things have traversed, but anyway, meditation has been an important part of my life, however unskillful I am at it. The mortifying thing at this point in my life is I now have given three knee injuries, and I'm sitting in a chair to meditate. So I can't tell you how embarrassing that is. So you go in and all these beautiful young people are twisting up at the half lotus and lotus and one of the old farts sitting in a chair. But Buddhism is good for anything. It's for getting rid of ego and you just deal with it. You live with it. So meditation is... So people come to Buddhism in a general sense. Zen, yeah, but... Buddhism more broadly, with really two purposes. There's two things I hope to get out of it. One is a suitable philosophy of life, right?

[06:17]

A philosophy to live by, you know, principles. Something that gives rise to a life of ethical integrity and compassion and somebody who has wisdom. The other thing is meditation. And Buddhist meditation is the foremost tradition of meditation in the world, even though every religion now does some kind of meditation. Buddhism is the heart of that. And it all comes from India. All of the traditions of meditation throughout the world really are deeply influenced by India. Most of them begin, like Christianity, as a meditation tradition, but they get it only after being influenced by what was coming out of India. Same with Stoics in the Roman Empire and so on. So India is the heartland of meditation. And meditation is pre-Buddhist, as you probably know. People were meditating in the era when the Buddha was born and came to prominence. And so he was just inheriting a set of traditions.

[07:18]

It's interesting to think about where that comes from when you go back into origins. Actually, we don't know where it comes from in most distant origins. But one place we know it came from were that priests... they weren't called Hindu, but Ramanical priests, would do forms of meditation in order to prepare themselves to do the ritual to the gods. They were scared shitless of the gods. The gods could do great damage. If you didn't do the ritual properly, they would smite you. Not just you, but your old community. The crops wouldn't grow, the rivers would break through the banks. So in their theistic traditions of polytheism, They learned to do meditation as a way to get themselves in a state of mind that would allow them to do the ritual properly with the right kind of reverence and the right kind of care and concentration and attention. So, fast forward a few more centuries. You have all these priests doing meditation.

[08:19]

A few priests begin to think, actually, meditation's better than the rituals. Meditation has its own powers. It has its own depth. that whether I then take the meditation into the rituals for the gods or not, it doesn't matter so much. Meditation is potent in and of itself. So you have certain priests called forest dwellers going off and meditating as an end in itself, not as something you do in order to please the gods. And that's the era the Buddha is born in. So, as you know from the life of the Buddha, he travels around and to all the great teachers, and they're teaching philosophy of life and meditation, both of those. And he's learning all of these different styles of contemplative practice, and master's each goes on to the next with gratitude, and finally develops his own. So that's its immediate origins in a kind of unlikely way.

[09:22]

But what is it overall? Meditations, think of it as a discipline or exercise of development or building inner strengths or a discipline of self-sculpting. Or a good phrase is it's a discipline of freedom. And I'll explain why it's a discipline and freedom later on. But there are all kinds of positive outcomes that are linked to meditation. And if you do meditation, you get some of these. If you do it in an appropriate way, these are the outcomes. Things like relaxation, emotional intelligence or emotional maturity, vitality, resilience, compassion, kindness, endurance, wisdom, ease, the ability to relate to people, confidence, vision, the scope of vision, all these are related to meditative practice. And so these are reasons to do it, right?

[10:25]

Now, as we go through talking about meditation, I want to be sure I get to the point where we understand the limitations of that way of thinking about meditation. That is, we're thinking about meditation. like it's an instrument that gets me good things, right? So there's a selfish motive built into meditation. But you have to have that at the outset. You have to have reasons why you think it's a good thing for you to do to begin doing it. It's just that, especially in Zen, but in all traditions of Buddhism, it's the point where if you don't grow out of that, you're stuck and you're in a feedback loop that will begin to be problematic at some point. Okay, so meditation is a way to work with the mind. Now, remember I'm talking about Buddhist meditation largely, and Zen being one specific version of Buddhist meditation, one very focused version of meditation. It's a way to train yourself to face the world in ways that you've chosen, as opposed to facing the world out of default mechanisms that are just sort of built into you.

[11:34]

You have these ways of reacting and you just react that way and that's who you are and meditation is a discipline of freedom in the sense that you can change those modes of reactivity. You don't want to react that way, you don't have to. So, that's the instrumental side of meditation. It's an instrument for bringing back certain very positive effects. Now, how does this happen? How does it work? Well, The Buddhist word for how is, in Sanskrit, never mind Sanskrit, it is dependent arising. Pratyasamutpada. Dependent arising, or used in early translation, dependent origination. That is, everything that is, originates, or arises, comes to be what it is, dependent on other things that are the way they are. Everything's caused and conditioned to be the way they are.

[12:36]

Nothing is what it is in and of itself. Nothing just is that way, including you. Everything is what it is depending on circumstances, depending on what's happened. And so that's the basic philosophical principle that guides Buddhism and that is behind meditation. So your mind works the way it does, yeah, and you are that way, but... it will continue to work that way dependent on what you do with your mind, dependent on your using your freedom to do something else, or if you do. And your mind works the way it does right now. You're stuck doing what you do right now because you did things in the past and because other things happened to you that weren't you're doing and because you're in a certain historical epic and it makes your mind work in a certain way and so on and so forth. But so dependent arising, we now have a neuroscientific term for this. It's called experience-dependent neuroplasticity.

[13:39]

Some of you have heard this word. Have you? Say it one more time. Experience-dependent neuroplasticity. Here's what it means. Neuro, your neurologic system, is your brain and all the sensors that run throughout your body. Your brain has a quality of plasticity or malleability or changeableness that is dependent, remember the Buddhist dependent arising, dependent upon experience. So what experience you have is always shaping your very brain, right? And that in the future then shapes your experience. So... We now know a lot that Buddhists didn't know, but their intuitions were absolutely on the money, and we're now discovering this. It's just this brilliance at the very heart of Buddhism. You can also call it self-directed neuroplasticity, where you still get the neuroplasticity. Your mind is changeable, but you can direct the sculpting of your mind through meditation.

[14:48]

or by just shaping what you do. I mean, it doesn't take just meditation, right? You can direct the shaping of your mind if you say, I'm going to learn to play the piano. And you just make yourself sit there day after day. You are sculpting the neurological structure of your brain, right? You're making yourself, you're making your brain change. You're becoming a different kind of person in a very limited skill. You say, I'm going to learn Spanish, I'm going to learn Chinese or Japanese. You're changing your mental structure, right? By choices you're making. So, there is, we now know a lot about the brain, although we will, in 20 years, what we know about the brain now will look pathetic and minimal, but we now know that the part of your brain you're using, and there are all these different parts, we won't go through details there, but the part you're using is growing, right? There's blood flowing to that region, there's oxygen coming there, And if you're playing the piano, the piano playing sector of your brain is really growing new neurological connections.

[15:55]

It's getting bigger. It's getting stronger. Same thing. If you're doing zazen, the zazen part of your brain, your focus part, your deep ability to concentrate is growing. That part of your brain is growing. You're getting better and better at it. From my experience, I didn't... think I was getting better and better, but yes, of course you're getting better. Everything you do changes your brain, changes the way your mind works. So the phrase now that's crucial is that mental states become neural traits. It's good because it rhymes, right? Mental states, what you're doing with your mind, becomes a neurological trait. You're building it into your brain structure, okay? So whatever you do, Positive or negative, and that's what's going on. So let's focus on the negative first. Let's say my reaction to being insulted or being slighted is that I built deep resentment.

[17:03]

And I run that insult through my mind over and over, and I can't get out of it. I'm in a rut now. And not just today, but tomorrow, you insult me, I'm just steaming with resentment and anger over that. What am I doing? I'm building the resentment-anger part of my brain. I'm making it such that the next time somebody insults me, I'm going to be much better at being resentful and angry. I'm going to be really good at it. It's going to be deeper anger. It's going to be quicker anger. And then the next time, and then the next time, and all this, I haven't chosen to do this, right? This is just what I do. But the same principle is in effect. I'm building that part of my brain. I'm getting really good at that. So self-directed neuroplasticity is to decide what kinds of experiences you want to be affecting your neural structure. What do you want to be good at? Okay. Then think of stories in the Buddhist tradition or in any tradition of great compassion.

[18:10]

And think of the story of the Good Samaritan under the Bible. Think about what your mother once did for you that was deeply wonderful and you didn't even notice it when you were a kid. Think all those things through and run those through your theater of the mind. Okay. And what you're doing then is building that part of your capacity for compassion, your ability to react to that automatically when a situation comes up, or you might be compassionate, or you otherwise wouldn't, but you might be, that is built. Or get to a situation where you really need to concentrate, you really need to focus. If you've done that kind of training, it's there, you've got it. Okay, so on the negative side, you know, we destroy our lives. The Buddha had a little parable. He said, well, bad things happen to us, right? You fall down and skin your knees when you're a kid and you cry.

[19:14]

Or, more seriously, break your arm and it really hurts. Or somebody does insult you or you don't get credit for what you really did or whatever. Okay, so that's, he says, Buddha says, that's like getting hit by an arrow, right? It hurts. But then what you do with that, if you run that same story through your mind over and over and over, it's as though the Buddha said, now you're not shooting an arrow and not being shot by an arrow, now you're shooting an arrow at yourself. A second arrow is shot, but you did it, right? Your, the pain of the injury, whatever the injury was, is one thing. but now you are reliving it over and over and over and resenting it, being afraid of it, being fearful in relationship to it, that is making it worse and worse and worse and building that part of your brain structure. So the second arrow of suffering, the Buddha says, is self-taught. Then there's the third and the fourth and the fifth. In other words, the pain, physiologists tell us the actual pain for most injuries is

[20:19]

Counts for about 20% of what we actually experience. And the other 80% is our fear. It's our reaction to it. We won't face the pain. We won't relax in relationship to the pain. We can't accept the pain. Why me? You can't accept this happen to us. We go on and on telling these stories in our mind that refuses the pain and makes the pain greater and greater and greater and greater. Okay. So... When you're doing positive meditations, it's not a matter of pretending that bad things don't happen. They do. The question is, what do you do when they do happen? How do you react? Have you developed in your character, and this is what, meditation is in fact premeditation. You premeditate the things that are going to happen in your life such that when they do happen, You deal with them differently. That is, it's a discipline of freedom. You don't have to react the way you were made to react naturally.

[21:24]

You can react some other way if you sculpt that into your character. Okay, so that's the self-directed part of neuroplasticity. Okay. Now, I'm going to blather on for maybe another 10 minutes or so, and then I want to open this up to everybody to talk and ask questions and make comments, so keep that in mind, okay? I should have said that at the outset. Whatever you'd like to add here. So, in Buddhism, as you know, there are two primary kinds of meditation, or traditional Buddhist divided meditation of two sorts. One was called shamatha, and we call it calming meditation. Other words for it, the word little means like stopping. It's stopping the frenetic activity, and a great deal of initial zazen is doing that just shut up you know calm your mind down learn to be able to concentrate initially in your breath then further on something else um so it is a a great discipline of calming down your thoughts and as my story as a 13 year old i could not get past the number three three breaths and i just i couldn't

[22:29]

because that's the way your mind works in default mode. It's not just you, it's just me, it's everybody. We have to learn to concentrate, and we do it through disciplines. We do it through lots of different disciplines. In fact, the example my Thai hero said to me, she said, well, okay, you can't get to number three here, but when you're playing, she knew I was a great baseball player, I loved to play, I was great, I loved baseball. She said, when you're up to bat, what happens? Does your mind want to say, no, it's totally just me and the ball, that's it, you know, for two minutes. She says, okay, that's it, right? You were developing the skill to focus and concentrate, right? And so that's what meditation is, just meditation is much bigger. So that's calming, that's shamatha. It develops, it starts with conscious breathing or respiration, right? You know, the physiology of breathing, really important to understand this. I won't go into it in detail, but it's governed by a muscle.

[23:31]

You have two really important muscles in your body. One is ticking here, and the other one's the muscle right here, which is called the what? Right. So it flexes out, and it's not like you're breathing through your nose, or the nose is just the passageway. The diaphragm goes... forces your stomach out and the air gets sucked in and the more that muscle flexes out the more air goes into your lungs the the the blood vessels veins are near the bottom parts of your lungs if you breathe deeply you're really getting a lot of oxygen out of the blood out of the air, into the blood, which then your heart's pumping and it circulates throughout your body, eventually gets to your brain. That's why when somebody runs up and says to you, oh, you want to believe what happened? Okay, take a deep breath. That's what you say to them. Okay, now I can explain why. Well, you don't have enough, you know, your reaction to an event is to breathe in a really shallow way like this, and you're not getting enough oxygen.

[24:35]

So, Conscious breathing and slow, rhythmic, meditative breathing is one of the great things that everybody learns in meditation. I'm sure most of you are somewhat skilled at that. If there's one thing I have to say that meditation did for me is it allowed me to be aware of my breathing and realize that respiration is the one bodily function you have control over. It can either go on unconsciously, or you can control it. And respiration is related to state of mind, right? But usually the relationship is state of mind affects your breathing, right? You're anxious or you're frightened. That affects your breathing. Your breathing is going to be jumpy. But you can do it the other way around. You can have your breathing affect your state of mind, right? By just... Get some oxygen in and consciously breathe deeply and slowly and rhythmically and your state of mind will go... just enlarge.

[25:39]

And if you do that enough, your attention to the world just grows. So oxygen, that's the physiology of meditation, shamatha meditation. The other kind, vipassana, is... insight meditation. It's focused on the embodiment of ideas. So it's a thoughtful form of meditation. Initially, in traditional Buddhism, it focused on what are called the three characteristics of existence, meaning human existence is structured around three things that are really important. They are, you know these, most of you, impermanence. Everything's in flux, right? You're in flux. Recognize that. Understand that everything's moving and can be moved. That's the take-home message, right? Including your brain and your character. Can be moved, can be changed. Nothing's fixed, nothing's set. Everything's moving, and dependent rising tells you how it changes.

[26:43]

That's one. Second is that there is an unsatisfactory quality of life that's built into existence, called dukkha in Sanskrit. usually translated suffering, that you will not get out of here without suffering. And you already know that. That life goes through cycles of being really tough and being okay and being joyful. And then it's going to be really tough again and really tough again and again. And don't spend much of your life daydreaming that that will be any different. No matter how good a Buddhist you are, you will still break your arms, skin your knees, be insulted, and the initial pain will always be there. even the pain of world suffering and world hunger and so on, that you will experience that as you enlarge yourself to take it in. And there's no getting away from it. And Thich Nhat Hanh says brilliantly, turn your mind to the suffering of the world to the extent that you can. And everybody has different abilities, right?

[27:46]

So somebody like Thich Nhat Hanh or Gandhi says, has enormous capacity to open to the suffering of the world. Mine is much more limited. To most people, it's very limited. Thich Nhat says, as you grow, learn to turn to suffering, because suffering is reality, and there's no getting around it. No enlightenment doesn't get you out of suffering. But it totally changes the way you relate to it, and the way it feels, and you accept it, and that makes everything different. Okay, the third is, in Buddhism, an-atman, or anatta, or no self. There is no self, and there's no self to anything, right? There's no self to things. There's no self to water. That is, there's no fixed set existence, right? Everything's moving. Everything depends on something else. The way you are totally depends on other things. So those three qualities are the focus of vipassana meditation initially.

[28:46]

But then it grows and expands. You might do meditation on death. You might do visualizations on a heavenly realm. Or you might visualize yourself stretched out on the beach in order to relax yourself. Or visualize yourself in Tassajara when you're back in the city and things are really hectic. Or do what Thich Nhat Hanh does in meditation. He has a visualization. It goes like this. I bet many of you know this. Breathing in, I know that I'm breathing in. Breathing out, I know I'm breathing out. Breathing in, I imagine myself to be a flower. You picture yourself a flower. Breathing out, I feel the freshness of that. Breathing in, I visualize myself a mountain. Breathing out, I feel solid, foundational. unmovable, I feel, just really solid. And it goes on. In other words, those are just little, short, conceptual visualizations.

[29:49]

You run through your mind, and they do something to you. And if you do those over and over again, you're programming your very brain structure to do something. So, Vipassana exercises, or Vipassana exercises, Teachers are creating new ones, and there's new ones, and there's new ones. And they are expansive in all directions. As you learn more and more about the different parts of your character, you can invent your own Vipassana exercises to target those particular traits. Because nobody's a person in general, we all are, but everybody has particular characters because... Your upbringing was different than the person sitting next to you and different than mine. And so who we are depends. Depends on what happened. Depends on what your parents did to you. Depends on your genetic structure. Depends on what you did. Depends on where you lived. Depends on which friends you got, which teachers you got. It totally depends. And so everybody's different. And everybody's meditation, then, can be structured differently in Vipassana.

[30:56]

Okay? Let me just talk about two more things and then stop to let you engage. Difference between awareness and attention. Now, those words can mean anything, but they've come to mean this, that attention is your ability to focus and really concentrate, the skill of the brain surgeon, total focus, the skill of the great batter, the skill of the great pianist, etc. in many cases built in meditation. Awareness is the breadth of attention, the ability to be aware of what's going on. And these are very different skills, and people have different amounts of these. You may be very aware of what's happening around you and not able to focus, or maybe you're good at both, but these are different in all kinds of ways. So the brain surgeon

[31:59]

You don't want the brain surgeon to have awareness of everything around you. You want the brain surgeon totally focused on your brain, right? Not aware of the music in the background or aware that her husband's birthday is today or aware of who's handing the scalpel. She's like, scalpel, you're totally focused, total concentration, right? Other times you need great awareness, right? Race car driving, you need both complete awareness and of attention to what you're doing and awareness of where everybody is. Or basketball is a sport that has total focus on the ball, but awareness of where is everybody, right? And who's moving where and why? You have to be aware of all of that to be a good basketball player. So very important skills both, but developed in different ways. Okay, mindfulness. Mindfulness is a kind of meditation that's so prominent now, but it's always been part of both of Samatha and Vipassana meditation.

[33:08]

And it's the ability, basically, to be mindful or attentive or aware of everything that's going on right now. Just open, non-judgmental consciousness of what's happening. Inside of you, outside of you, everywhere. Just aware. So mindfulness is applicable to anything. And we're discovering that now. They're teaching mindfulness in the military. You want your soldiers to be really able to concentrate and mindful of what's going on around them. Mindfulness is being taught in police departments and in schools and hospitals and everywhere for lots of good reasons. Because these are skills that make you better. Whatever you do, these skills make you better. If you're a burglar, mindfulness is a great tradition. You need both attention. You need to be totally focused. You're picking the lock.

[34:10]

You need to be really focused. But you also need to be aware of every sound and everything around you. So it's not like there is necessarily an ethical, moral... thing that's built in. These are just mental skills you're developing here. Now, what's great about Buddhism is you get a whole system that makes sure that the moral ethical is built in it. You are training yourself in compassion and awareness of others and in other traits of character. The lists in Buddhism, like the six perfections, are traits of character that you're developing through meditative technique. Okay. Let me tell one Zen story. This is a story about awareness, and then I'll shut up and everybody join in with questions or something. Okay, there's a young man who, his dream is to be a great samurai. It's a famous Zen story. And he wants to be a samurai swordsman in Japan. And so he finds that there is a famous samurai swordsman in the mountains, and he goes to find the samurai to learn the tradition.

[35:18]

And he... He does stand and begs to be taken in as a disciple of the samurai. But this guy's living as Herman at the mountain. And he says, no, of course not. Go away. Why do you think I'm living here on my own? And he keeps coming back. He comes back several times and begs. It's always three in Zen stories. And finally, the Zen swordsman, the samurai says, okay, you can be my disciple. But what that meant in medieval Japan is you are an apprentice. And the deal is you do the manual labor and I teach you what you need to know. So he gladly accepts that set of circumstances. And he does all the manual. He chops the wood, cooks, cleans up, does the sweeping. gets the water out of the well. But months go by, and he's not getting any lessons in swordsmanship. And he's getting a little annoyed. Finally, two years have gone by, not one word about swordsmanship. And finally, this is building up into the resentment.

[36:18]

And he bursts out and says, when are we going to do swordsmanship? I'm here to be a great swordsman. I'm just doing all your work, and I'm not getting anything about swordsmanship. And the Zen swordsman says, hmm. So you think you're really ready for lessons in swordsmanship? He says, yeah. I mean, you know, come on, let's go. And so the master said, okay, we will begin soon. But for right now, the patio needs sweeping. And so he's sweeping the patio. He's pissed, you know, sweeping the patio. And meanwhile, there's a master's thinking behind him, stick. right and wham hits him over the top of the head and um he's all bloody and he turns the zen master disappears and um you know doesn't know what happened and then later he's doing another turn wham he gets hit in the neck it's just bleeding all over the place the zen master disappears and it happens every day every day the zen master's always wham um and um you know it's bloody, he's scarred, you know, he's taken this incredible punishment, but gradually, at least he can get his arm in the way, right?

[37:25]

The Zen master's stealth, so, you know, he's really hard to hear, but when he's sweeping the patio, he's, you know, there's an awareness. There is an awareness. And so he can get his arm in the way, get the broom in, you know, something. So the story culminates. Finally, he's cooking food. He's up at the fire. And, you know, he's cooking. And that's your fault. Zen master is ready to wail him in the head. But he's cooking, takes the lid from the pan, the top. And when the stick comes down, boom, blocks it immediately, stands up gracefully. bows to the Zen master. The Zen master, impressed, bows back and says, congratulations, your training is complete. That's the end of the story. But there is a simplification here. Now, none of us would recommend that the swordsman go out and start doing sword fighting. He hasn't even touched a sword yet. But the point of the story is that at least half of

[38:27]

of being great at anything, is mental. Mental training in advance. Concentration, focus, and awareness. And that discipline of meditation is what will do that. Okay. Let's talk. I have one more thing I didn't say about Zen, but I'll save it to the end. Yes? Yes? talking about arrows. Okay, which sutra? I'm not going to remember right offhand. Does anybody else know? Sutra... And you'll... So Dhammapada talks about the one chapter about anger, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, there's a very specific story about the two arrows that were not... I will get it to you.

[39:29]

I promise. Would you please give me an email address or phone number? But it's a great story. It's a really important story that is really true about pain. You introduced your lecture by saying that people come into Buddhism to get a way of life. That's the ethical aspect. And the other one, I guess, meditation. Correct. Yeah, the first one is not just ethics, it's also metaphysics, a philosophy of reality. Right. But with ethics. Go ahead, sorry. What's, in your view, what distinguishes Buddhism really? We have Aristotle, we have Islam, Christianity, etc. Yeah. Please tell me what distinguishes Buddhism. What distinguishes Buddhism? A great number of really interesting things, but... Buddhism shares with Hinduism meditation, and now with Islam and other traditions that have borrowed it.

[40:32]

But the most distinctive parts of Buddhism are that there is no soul. There is no deep self. That you are what you are, dependent on what has come to be through the past. And there is no entity that is you. And that's because everything is... impermanent everything's changing including you every part of you is changing and will change and everything depends ultimately everything depends so the buddhist world view is of total interdependence of all things everything affecting other things and the quest is to ethically to discover how to situate yourself in this network so that you can be a cause of on the world that is compassionate and wise and so on. So the teaching of no self, the focus on change rather than on what's permanent or among factors that distinguish Buddhism.

[41:44]

I missed one word there. Yeah, and when you do meditation... When I meditate. Let's say the relation of meditation to ethics in this. Yeah. I would like to understand if there was a connection. Yeah, strong connection because meditation is training your mind. It's training your mind to be a certain way. And when situations arise in the world, you will just react however your mind... has been structured, whether it's by default, just what you are who you are, or whether you have undertaken a discipline of self-sculpting to make yourself a certain kind of human being. If you've done that, then your reaction will be one you've chosen. That's why meditation is a discipline of freedom. You don't have to react the way you were programmed to react. You may react, if you're a good meditator, in ways that you've chosen.

[42:45]

Yes, I'm going to go back all the way to the back first. Thank you very much. This is regarding self-deception. I'm a massage therapist, and I notice a lot of people speak about their body as if it's not their body, so it's come back to no self, as in knee leg or now it's shoulders killing me, and I wish it was not part of me. So what about that in language and neuro-linguistic programming? The ownership of one's body. Right. Yeah, good point. And most religions do a mind-body dualism in order to, well, for one, to ensure longevity. You know your body's going to die. But also to get out of the situation in Spain. But the Buddhist claim is another distinct part of Buddhism. You are five components. They're called the five skandhas. And the five skandhas are body with... perceptual apparatuses, feelings, thought, will of religion, and self-consciousness.

[43:49]

And so you are your body. You can't really legitimately as a Buddhist say you're not your body, but your body isn't your whole self. Nothing is your whole self. You are your state of body, mind, feeling, self-consciousness in this particular moment as it's developed through circumstances that have been imposed on you and ones that you've imposed on yourself. So, So, Buddhism is brilliant at the outset because it comes to be in the time of mind-body dualism. And the Buddha rejects that. And, you know, it still will appear throughout the history of Buddhism because it's such a convenient thought. But dualism runs aground. And better to accept that you just are this body. And as you know, once you do that, especially in your occupation, you begin to treat it better. And if your body is being treated better than it was, your mind will be better off and everything will be better.

[44:54]

I understand dualism is ground, almost like a figure of ground, what I present, but behind the scenes is that ground of... But dualism. Yeah, and it's true in all of us. We've all got it. We get it out of Greek metaphysics that goes into Christianity. And in religions where there is a soul that's going to leave the body, you've got to have mind-body dualism in a stark way because you really aren't your body in those traditions. Please, yes, you... I want to go back to the initial thing that you said about a non-instrumental relation to your meditation. Because as Zen students, as students of Dogen, that's what we are signing up for. And it's also related to the thing that you said about the unnaturalness of Buddhism. So if we are naturally reactive beings... it is therefore unnatural for us to learn to be non-reactive beings. And yet, Buddhism teaches us that we should accept things as they are, which is to say we should accept ourselves as reactive beings.

[46:01]

Yeah, that's right. So, A, how do we get rid of our instrumental relation to our meditation, and B, how do you understand this problem of the natural and the unnatural? Because I think if you practice for a while, pretty soon you start wondering, why am I doing this deeply unnatural thing? Well, because there's a way in which Buddhists will call that nothing is natural per se. So that when you develop second nature, that is now your nature. That the way you were before was natural, but there are causes, dependent arising again. There are reasons why you were that way. And if you change those basic background factors, you're going to be different. So there is no human nature in a Buddhist sense that's fixed. So Buddhists have no problem theoretically with evolutionary theory. The nature of human beings may be fundamentally different in another millennium.

[47:03]

If we became meditators, certainly it would. If we don't, certainly it will. Okay, the second part, how do you get into non-instrumental relations? How do you meditate so that I'm not getting things for myself, right? There's the ego there. How do you get out of that? Well, I don't know how, because I'm not out of it. But there's a way in which you never entirely lose it, nor should you, because... the principle of causality, you need to be aware of that, and that doing this causes this, and doing this causes this out in the world. But in Soto Zen, you get to the point in training of doing Chikantaza, or just sitting. So if you ask an advanced practitioner, well, what are you doing when you're doing, why are you doing that? And she will say brilliantly, I'm just sitting. You know, I'm not on a self-improvement regime. I'm just sitting.

[48:04]

And so it's that you meditate not in order to be enlightened or to get the Buddha nature. You meditate because you're enlightened and because you have the Buddha nature. It's inscribed in you, right? And so that there is a twist that happens at advanced... Soto and Rinzai, and, you know, other traditions too, stage where getting something for yourself ceases to be the motive. There's something deeply natural about just doing that. And in the Christian tradition, there it's you know where monks meditate nuns meditate um it's it's there's a great conceptual setup too because it's grace right you don't think that i'm achieving something you think in islam as well um that um this blissful state is being granted to be by god right so it's not like i'm achieving it ego ego it is there is this state that comes to me as a gift

[49:09]

And that's one way to do it in Buddhism. That devotional Buddhism is brilliant on this, pure land Buddhism, that you accept everything that you've achieved, not as your achievement, but as the grace of the Buddha or the Buddha nature that's built into reality. Okay. So taking off from right there, I'm wondering if you would be willing to unpack a little more that dualism between will and and being present with. So you've spoken about the ways in which meditation can be a way of making one's life better by training one's reactions, by deciding to respond a certain way, by disciplining, by choosing. So this seems very much like an extension of the will. Look, it can affect not only what's happening out there, but it can affect my own reactions. They can be trained in this way.

[50:10]

I can short circuit my individual suffering. On the other hand, we have, you cited, don't spend your life imagining that things are going to be different, right? That suffering is going to happen. And in that case, suffering is happening not because we're not controlling things well enough or we need to extend our will further inward or further outward, but that we need to let go of that. So I'm wondering, in that regard, if individual will is an antagonist to the idea of interdependence or acceptance for being with. And I'm wondering if you could help me unpack that. Okay, well, that's hard. It's related to things we just said, but the will is one of the five components of who you are. To be without a will is hopeless so that that it's related to desire and it's related to determination and discipline and you have to it's fundamental and you need it and if you can build your will in the right ways you're doing something that's very important

[51:21]

But there are limitations to that, especially insofar as it's your will, my will be done, as opposed to your joining your will into the will of the community, for example, or into not what is for you, but what is for the greater good. Those are various ways where you're still willing. I will the end of poverty and hunger in the world. I have plenty of food, it's not a problem for me, but there is suffering. So, the will disappears only at inconceivably high levels of accomplishment. I've met some great teachers in my life, but I've never met one who's will-less. Nor can I even imagine what that means.

[52:21]

But still, you aspire, to the extent that the will is egocentric, you definitely aspire to go beyond it. Have I also done the second part? Another question. Yes, please. Sorry to be pointing. So you spoke briefly, or you mentioned, you know, that this question really may be outside of the scope of this discussion. Right. You spoke briefly about, you know, the military is beginning to use mindfulness practice. Google's known for incorporating an article, I think it was a tricycle, not too long ago, about protests that happened recently at Google. I guess Google's involved in... moving some people off their land so that they can have more housing. So they can build a meditation center there. Yeah.

[53:23]

And the author of the article sort of said, you know, Karl Marx described religion as the output of the masses and must be in a number of different ways in which Buddhism is a contemporary American Buddhism anyway, with its focus on mindfulness and perhaps not so much on ethics, may in some ways be just a great vehicle for that. And it's possible to imagine, you know, Societies which are very grounded, very mindful, very centered, very peaceful, and continue to manufacture hell realms in the way that our current society does. And I guess I'm just sort of wondering, as meditators, as Buddhists, that's a question that I wrestle with just pretty deeply. I feel even a little frightened bringing it up. But I'm sort of wondering what thoughts you might have on this. Yeah, well, a lot. It's a concern for Buddhism because Buddhist techniques are being taught in places where the word Buddhism never appears. In many cases, thank goodness that the word Buddhism doesn't appear.

[54:25]

So it's being taken over. And it's being taken over in order to build the capacity of people to do things that may or may not be ethically sound from a Buddhist point of view. And so Google wants better programmers. They want better people too, but they want people who are more imaginative, who can concentrate better, and who produce more money for the time they put in. And the military wants better killers. But they also want people who can distinguish between when to shoot and when not to shoot. And they also want people who are aware of injuries to their comrades and so on. So that... You know, meditation can be perverted, but the goods of it will come through no matter what. But it's true of all religious things. It's true of everything, not just religious things. But any religion can be twisted in a way that will produce evil results.

[55:30]

Not only can be, has been and will be. And it is a matter of concern. But I wouldn't go leap from there to saying to anybody, I don't want to hear you talking about mindfulness in the military or in the hospitals or wherever. You know, this is Buddhist. It's ours. We're keeping it. No. I think, you know, let it go. And maintain the purity of... of a great tradition, but that purity entails impermanence. Buddhism has to grow. It has to expand. It has to change. It has to be able to incorporate things that are coming out of the future that we can't predict. But dangers are not to be taken lightly, and there are issues coming up. Yes. I don't know if his name is Christopher Latch. mean anything to you. Latch? Latch. So the sociologist in the 70s denounced the advent of a narcissistic society at this moment of glory.

[56:38]

Yeah, yeah. He's coming back a little bit, like, you know, certain circles. And irritated a lot because essentially he had one idea and he just kept howling. It was a good idea. It was a good idea, according to that. Yeah. Yeah. An irritating one in a lot of ways. For sure. And I wonder to what, you know, Buddhism with its insistence on the non-self, to what extent it is an antidote to that development or in some ways accompanies that development and even favors it. Yeah. Paradoxically favors it to something. Might take it to be a huge antidote. But as anything, you know, dependent arising means anything can be moved in a way that you can't predict in advance, so you never know. But that you are not the real you, that you are not permanent, that you are not a soul that needs protecting.

[57:42]

I mean, to really deeply, profoundly encounter that realization is going to do marvelous things. it will transform me. Now, whether people who encounter the idea really get to any kind of deep realization, or whether they can come up with some story about it that will pervert it, of course that's possible. But in the general sense, can Buddhism be a form of self-indulgence? Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, there is an extent of that that I find in myself, if I... you know, knew you well enough, I'll bet I could find some. But, you know, the point of Buddhism is to get you to realize that and start to mature out of it, right? That these are disciplines for self-transformation to grow up out of self-indulgence. And we do to greater or lesser extents. Yes?

[58:44]

So in the beginning of your talk, I believe you've hinted, at least to make the link between Buddhism and philosophy, and I guess you have some authority to speak on that subject, so would you, it's not entirely clear to me, I mean, I think philosophy means different things to different people, but I couldn't really, you know, get a grasp of it from you. Yeah, well, in my take, what I did was to philosophize about meditation, which, where philosophy just means trying to think comprehensibly and broadly and clearly about what is it, what is its essence, how is it affected by things in the world, and so on. Where does it come from, and where is it going? And so, you know, that was a short version, but that's where you begin philosophically. Well, okay, what is this thing? And that's what Socrates would do to somebody. somebody would come in bragging about courage, and Socrates would say, let's think about this for a minute. What is courage? And the person would say, I know what courage is, and they would say, and Socrates would, okay, he would take it apart and demolish that theory of courage.

[59:53]

So, you know, you begin by bringing out, we all have an unconscious understanding about what anything is. We know what things are. But as soon as we get him out onto the surface, we begin to take it apart and realize that... There are limitations. And then, if you're thinking philosophically, you think further and further and deeper and deeper and deeper and so on. Yes? Last one. Okay, this is it. Okay. That was... You were quoting Thich Nhat Hanh. I don't know if you're familiar with the horror movies teaching if you notice. Yes. All kinds of stuff. in the three marks and he makes a point here of talking about the difficulty he has with accepting suffering as one of the marks and mentions that in several sutras and in a commentary by Nagarjuna they actually cite Nirvana as the third mark instead of suffering and I'm wondering if you have anything to say I do yeah I do it was one of the parts of Buddhism that initially frustrated me I didn't like it

[60:57]

In fact, when I first started to teach Buddhism, I sort of changed the three characteristics of existence. Me, you know, as a kid. And I left suffering off and I put dependent arising in it. We've got impermanence, we've got dependent arising, we've got no self. Those three go together, suffering. And many people accuse Buddhism of being kind of demoralizing for having that as a basic principle. But the... The more I was able to look into it, the more depth I saw, and the more I could see the relationship between the other two characteristics of existence, change, impermanence, and selflessness, on the other hand, and suffering, and the degree to which you both have to accept suffering, As inevitable, you can't not suffer as a human being. You're a finite, limited being. Because you can't control everything. We've tried to control everything, but we can't. But what you can control is the extent to which you make yourself suffer when other suffering happens to you.

[62:05]

So the pain of an injury, the pain of an insult, the pain of being afraid... your reaction to that is controllable by you through meditative exercises. So suffering belongs, I finally yield to the Buddha, and realize how important that is. I mean, these are the characteristics of human existence. What got me at first was the other two... everything being impermanent and nothing having a fixed essence, that's true of everything. That's true of rocks, trees, houses, sky. But suffering? No, not really. Except in an extended sense that, yes, this building will suffer when a tree falls on it, when it burns down. But it's not going to feel that suffering, I think. Plants feel suffering.

[63:07]

So the three characteristics of existence are fabulous. Then there are others. There are more. There are more. There are more. Existence is characterized by lots of things. But those three are just so basic to human existence. And unless you deal with those, things are not going to go well for you. They're not going well for you. Everything changes. You must deal with that. There is no fixed you. That's a gift, right? You don't have to be the you of the past. Things are open. It depends who you become. It depends on what you do, what you choose. It depends on lots of other things, too, things that will happen to you. But the part you have control over, that's freedom. Take it or don't take it. Most people live their lives in default mode and they just are who they are. But if you learn this one... you gain freedom as a result.

[64:08]

That's why meditation is a discipline of freedom. It's a way to free yourself, to make yourself freer than you were previously. All right, we've probably gone over time. I wanted to say something about Zen. Well, I did. I snuck it in when I was asked about the instrumental relationship. The brilliance of Zen is that there are so many different ways to say that at a certain point, you've got to get over your meditating in order to be the better me. I mean, there are ways to transcend that, and you haven't really broken into a deep zazen unless you've experienced a couple breaths where that goes away. 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.

[65:09]

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

[65:23]

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