This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Thank you all for coming to Green Gulch. Appreciate your making the effort. I know it helps that it's a beautiful day. but I really appreciate the sincerity and intention that you manifest by driving that road and figuring out how to get from there into this room. So thank you for being here. My name is Ji Ryu. I live here at Green Gulch and am involved This weekend, a big transition we're going through here at Green Gulch this season from our summer practice of working and finding our way in everyday life to our season of practice period of more settled retreat.

[01:18]

So both are equally Zen practice, but in the summer we focus more on running around and finding Zen, expressing Zen through running around. And now in the fall and spring, we have a chance to do more the Zazen, the sitting kind of Zen. So we do quite a bit of it. I'm noticing, I'm remembering. So our first period happens at around 5 a.m., We sit for 40 minutes and then walk for 10 minutes and then sit for another 40 minutes and chant for a while. And then we offer some Zazen instruction, which some of you may have attended, and then another period of Zazen. Meanwhile, this morning, we also had a class about Zazen. It seems like it's kind of, we're kind of into it. It's kind of our thing.

[02:20]

There was a scholar here a bit ago who spent some time with us, lovely. and he was studying with us and kind of asking around, especially among the senior practitioners here, for what was our understanding? What did we understand the Buddhist tradition to refer to? What do we see as emptiness and dependent, arising, and mind-only? And he left feeling like, hmm... I'm not so sure that you guys even know what you believe. Lots of different answers to these Buddhist questions, lots of different perspectives on the Buddha Dharma. And he was looking for a doctrine. What's the teaching that unites you all here? What's the orthodoxy of this place? And he couldn't find it. One teacher says it's mind only, and other teacher says it's emptiness, and they're not sure if that even works together.

[03:23]

Anyway. But he said, but there's what he called orthopraxy. In other words, you're all doing the same practice. I was looking in the wrong place. I was looking for what was the belief that held you together. But actually, that's not so appropriate in this context. What's the practice that holds you together? And that practice really does hold us together, really does unite and direct this community. And that's the practice of zazen. So I wanted to talk a bit about zazen, and my hope is to encourage you to sit zazen now and again. Now would be okay, come to think of it. The encouragement of zazen could be an encouragement to practice zazen right now. in this room with these people.

[04:25]

That's a very appropriate and traditional way to experience a Zen talk, is to do Zazen while you listen. Makes it a little hard for the Zen lecturer to know sort of how they're doing, because when it's a great talk, everybody is sitting Zazen. unmoved by external conditions. And when it's a terrible talk, equally, everyone is composed in upright sitting. But I'm willing to take that risk and invite you anyway to just sit zazen right now as you listen. And later would be good too. to part of what Zen Center is about, is promoting and encouraging the practice of Zazen. We have great faith in this practice, even though we can't quite say what it is.

[05:34]

We know we recommend it. We trust it. So the three main aspects of Zazen, sitting meditation in this tradition, are the posture, the breath, and the mind. So we take care of the posture, we take care of the breath, and we take care of the mind. I see some people seeming to be doing zazen. Thank you. I'm touched. Maybe I could end, actually. That was my intention, to promote zazen. So posture, breath, and mind are the elements that we work with in zazen. Also, zazen has a principle to it, or a principle.

[06:38]

So I'd like to talk about each of these aspects of zazen, and a text that I'd like to refer to some as I do this morning is called Fukan Zazengi, which is an old text that we recite here often, by our Soto Zen school founder in Japan in the 12th century, Eihei Dogen Zenji. So Fukanza Zenji is the universal recommendations for the practice of Zazen, the wide promotion of the practice of Zazen. And this is recommendation that Dogen offers is universal, or wide. That's the Fu part. It's all-inclusive, all-embracing. Fukan Zazangi, universal recommendations. Therefore, everyone.

[07:41]

Dogen says, there are as many minds as there are persons. And yet, each one can find the way through Zazen. And this fu, this universal wide, is maybe even more than just persons. It's that wide. Wider than just for people. The other day, early in the morning, I was coming down to the zendo. We were on a slightly modified schedule at that time, so it was maybe about 5.30 or 20 to 6.00. And there were two horses standing right outside the Zendo door. There was no humans around, but there were these two horses standing over there. Practicing horse Zazen.

[08:52]

And maybe trying to get, you know... to be directed to a seat, which our kind inu would certainly accommodate. So horses doing horse zazen. That's the universal. So this is one of the principles of zazen that I want to talk about, which is expressed in this universal. This is universal activity. So the horses were there maybe trying to get into zendo or maybe just enjoying their life by themselves very early in the morning. And I, in thinking back, I noticed my anxiety around these very large animals. So I, you know, I kind of went around to the other doors. And then later I remembered that often in our tradition, when there's kind of animals around trying to get into the Zendo, you might consider that they're old friends. So this morning I thought, you know, I bet that was Daigon Luke and Lida Barros.

[09:54]

checking in, you know. But I did not rise to the occasion. I did not engage them with the Dharma report on how things have been here since they've been away. So in the ultimate sense, the principle of zazen is that it's life itself. So horses are doing zazen. Horses are zazen. And we are doing zazen. We are zazen already. The frogs are doing frog zazen. The bamboo in the garden right now is doing bamboo zazen all day and all night. The eucalyptus doing eucalyptus zazen. Dogen never neglects to include those things we've made, also roof tiles.

[10:56]

The roof tiles are doing roof tiles as in. The cars are each one doing cars as in. So this wide, vast principle is expressed in Fukanza Zen Gi as the way is basically perfect and all-pervading. How could it depend on practicing something? The Dharma is free and untrammeled. What need is there for concentrated effort? Horses were not being strict with themselves, I don't think. They didn't have to be. Indeed, the whole body is far beyond the world's dust. So who could talk about brushing it clean? It is never apart from one right where one is.

[12:02]

And he also says, Zazen is simply the manifestation of ultimate reality. So wherever we are, and whoever we are, The truth of our life or the ultimate reality of our life, the boundlessness, is never apart. The spiritual source or the spiritual light doesn't need anything from us. I'm going to brighten the spiritual source. It doesn't need anything from us. It's doing fine. Life itself is doing fine. We don't need to... to brush it clean, you know, through some concentrated effort. Our true body is perfect as it is. So we say that each thing fully being itself, life being itself.

[13:09]

And so we can't really miss. This is a principle because it's just what's happening, that we are all exactly ourself. Our ancestor Kobanchino Roshi famously expressed this by setting up a target to demonstrate his amazing archery skills and then firing an arrow off into the ocean instead. You can't miss, you know? We can't miss our life. Don't miss your life. Okay, how would we miss? and yet. So Dogen goes on, and yet. We here at Green Gulch and we just refresh this practice as we settle ourselves into practice period. We just refresh this practice of trying to avoid the word but whenever we can.

[14:16]

We try to say and instead of but in order to honor multiple realities, and not smash the truth that was before the but with the truth that's after the but. So we practice this. And yet, here's Dogen offering, the truth of our life is already fine. It's just life itself. It's the roof tiles being roof tiles, and you being you, who could even talk about doing anything or getting anything. But that's incomplete. So he says, and yet. And yet, if there's the slightest discrepancy, the way is as distant as heaven from earth. If the least like or dislike arises, the mind is lost in confusion. And he tells us the story of the great efforts of ancestors in this tradition, the great effort they made to fully become themselves. And he says, since even the ancient sages had to do this so much more, how could we dispense with doing some practice?

[15:28]

So that's the second aspect of this principle, is that we have to do something. Zazen is something that we do. It's a kind of effort we make. I sometimes... reflect that this whole religion seems to be based on what, in some context, is a cliché called, just be yourself. It's like the most basic and irritating advice, perhaps, that a human being can give to another. Just be yourself. This is dating advice. This is job interview advice. And it happens to be the foundation of the Buddhist religion. And that tension, those two principles are right there. Just be yourself. Okay, how can we not be? And yet we feel we can experience practically that there is something we can do to be fully ourself.

[16:36]

It doesn't really make sense to practice being just this person. These teachings are all over in the Zen tradition. I'm appreciating. how solid this note is as it resonates through the centuries, to be fully yourself, to just be exactly who you are. Suzuki Roshi saying, when you are you, then Zen is Zen. Or Fa Yan saying, when asked by a monk named Hui Zhao, what is Buddha? He said, you are Hui Zhao. Or Yunnan saying, just this person, just this person. So there's this wonderful creative tension there in just that teaching to be yourself. Try it. Try it. Try to be a little more fully yourself right now. What is that? It's something. So briefly to talk about each of these three aspects of Zazen practice, the practice of being fully yourself.

[17:54]

in this form. And so first is to take care of our posture. So we sit and we don't just sit any old way. We sit upright. This is the character of formal Zen practice is upright sitting. So Dogen says, thus sit upright in correct bodily posture neither inclining to the left nor to the right, neither leaning forward nor backward. Be sure your ears are on a plane with your shoulders and your nose in line with your navel. I think I read that a thousand times before I actually pictured what he meant. The ears on a plane with the shoulders. It's just what he says. The ears are over the shoulders. And then the nose and the navel are in a line.

[18:58]

So Suzuki Roshi says, the most important thing in taking the zazen posture is to keep your spine straight. Again, your ears and your shoulders should be on one line. Relax your shoulders and push up towards the ceiling with the back of your head. Some years ago, this room was... refitted for earthquake proof, big beams, but maybe just we could do it with each of our heads. Push up towards the ceiling with the back of our heads, holding it up. And you should pull your chin in. So the chin in and the ears over the shoulders are kind of the same idea that the head's not forward. We're in balance in this posture. Suzuki Roshi says, also to gain strength in your posture, press your diaphragm down towards your hara or lower abdomen.

[20:03]

So we're pressing down into our belly slightly and lifting up to hold up this rickety old ceiling. You should be sitting straight up as if you were supporting the sky with your head. So once that posture is established, and there are many instructions for how to do that in more and more detail, then Dogen invites us to settle into a steady, immovable sitting position. So it's important to point out that upright can be a confusing idea. So we sit upright in this practice. There are some meditative traditions. You may find someone who has very deep meditation and not practicing upright sitting. But it's a feature of Zen practice, this upright sitting.

[21:08]

But we might assume we hear upright and we might assume that there's an external standard, that that's someone else's picture of what upright is. looks like. But this sitting upright that we're talking about in this practice is in alignment with your own upright body, whatever that is for you. This internal alignment. There's a full exertion in this posture of being upright. There's total energy, totally energized, maintaining and supporting this upright posture. Try that. Give your full energy to just sitting upright. We sometimes teach here. We do these Zen and yoga events. And when it's my turn to instruct yoga students in Zen, it's quite amazing how responsive they are. Sit upright.

[22:12]

Okay. Sitting upright. Mel Weitzman, former rabbit, talks about the total dynamic activity, the total energy in this upright posture. It's perfectly still, but he says it's like a top spinning. It's perfectly still, but if you tap it, it goes flying across the floor. It's total energized, all of our wholehearted effort just to be in this posture. And then we say, and then what do I do? now that I'm in this posture. But the yoga students don't say that so much. And I don't think dancers say that so much. Like, here, do this dance. And they say, OK, but now what do I do now that I'm doing the dance? So Suzuki Roshi says, this upright posture is not a means of obtaining the right state of mind. When you have this posture, you have the right state of mind.

[23:13]

The mind is absorbed and taking this posture. When you have this posture, you have the right state of mind. This idea we have that we then would need to do something with our mind, I think is worth questioning. What if our mind is just wholeheartedly, wholly, fully involved in the sitting? just like it would be if we were doing a challenging pose or a dance. Yeah, but where do I place my mind? I just told you. Upright. So burning up all of our energy in just this upright sitting. So then, Dogen says, once you have adjusted your posture, take a deep breath.

[24:21]

Inhale and exhale. So this is sometimes called regulating the breathing. And It's a little bit touchy of a subject in Soto Zen, how we deal with the breath, this regulating the breath. It's quite calming and quite wonderful to breathe very deeply. And Suzuki Roshi sometimes encourages it, saying, as many of you have heard me say, exhale fully. And the complete calmness of your mind is just past the end of that exhalation. Go ahead. Get it by just exhaling fully all the way out into the utter stillness of the mind and then receiving an inhalation.

[25:29]

So we do appreciate deep breathing in Soto Zen practice. But we don't practice a manipulation of the breath. So the Zazen that we teach here is about natural breathing. You just breathe naturally. There are many traditions of manipulating the breath, including some in our, say, sister sect of Rinzai Zen. There's more of an emphasis on manipulating the breath, on regulating the breath, and sometimes it's tempting and wonderful to do so, to breathe really long breaths. In Soto Zen, we follow the instruction of the Buddha who said, well, yeah, I have something to say about long breaths. If you have a long breath, you should know that it's a long breath. And if you have a short breath, you should know that it's a short breath. That's my teaching on how to regulate the breath.

[26:33]

So how do you regulate the breath? Well, when it's long, you know that it's long, and when it's short, you know that it's short. You're with whatever's happening. You're not trying to make something happen. So we breathe naturally through the nose in this upright posture. So then the last element that seems to come up for people is the mind. What do I do with the mind? The term Zen derives from the word for concentration. So there is an aspect of mental energy, mental effort that's involved in this practice.

[27:36]

So where do we put the mind? Should we put the mind on something? We might and are often recommended to count the breath. Maybe some of you have done this practice or are even doing it now. Counting the breath. We count each breath wholeheartedly from one to ten. Just giving the mind something to do. Helping the mind to rest on the breath by giving it a number. Or we might just follow the breath as it goes out and in, the mind, the attention on the breath. Or we might just rest our mind, our attention broadly on the whole situation of being alive in this moment. We call this objectless meditation, where we don't need to pick out a particular object, but we're just resting the mind on... this pretty amazing thing of being alive.

[28:45]

So we don't need to necessarily pick something out of the field of awareness and put the mind on it. We can just have the mind rest in the full field of awareness, of experience in this moment. You say, well, what do you concentrate on in Zazen? You concentrate on whatever's happening. That's the object of concentration. Whatever it is. I would say you're either doing zazen or I have lost you. or maybe a little bit of both. So here we are in this old barn together of fully being human beings side by side.

[29:57]

Can we fully register that? Can we fully come into that experience? That's all. And does sitting up straight and noticing that we're breathing help with that arriving here in this moment in our body, in our mind. One of the main things that seems to get in the way of our life is this mind and these thoughts. So one of the instructions we sometimes offer is to just stop doing that. to kind of cut it out with respect to the mind. So we can just stop. So that's one of the ways that we deal with the mind. Dogen says, oh, just don't think good or bad. Don't evaluate anything. Cease all the movements of your mind. The gauging of all thought and views.

[31:03]

That's worthwhile. just stop moving the mind. Bodhidharma says to not activate the mind around objects. So we can notice this, some object comes into our mind or awareness, and then we activate, the mind is activated, usually by grabbing on or pushing away. It's like, ooh, an object. Ooh, what do we do? I want it, I don't want it. The mind gets activated. So the stopping in this teaching, the stopping that we do with our mind, isn't that we stop some object from arising, but that we stop that trying to do something with it. Uchiyama Roshi famously and wonderfully sort of graphically describes thoughts as secretions of the mind, this kind of oozing of the mind. We don't stop that. But once we have an object in our mind, what do we do with that?

[32:11]

So we stop interacting, we stop being involved in those objects. We don't pursue or try to escape from what arises in our mind. So we're not in this practice, you hear things like not thinking and non-thinking and no mind. You get the idea that we're like anti-thinking. But our practice is really oriented towards grounding our life in something deeper than thought. Can we ground our life in something deeper than our thoughts and our views and our conceptions? which doesn't mean, like, don't have any thoughts or views or conceptions.

[33:15]

That's still looking at that layer of thoughts, views, and conceptions. Does that make sense? We actually ground our life in something other than, deeper than our thoughts and our views. And that's what the practice of Zazen is. We come into our body, we press gently down, into our belly and sit up straight and in that way ground and express the ground of our life in this embodied way expressing that what we are is deeper than everything we think or don't think all the ways that we see the world it includes all of that but the ground is deeper and we practice coming into alignment with that deep ground to reorient from our head to our belly, actually, from our thought-oriented way of being into an embodied, grounded way of life that rests on our basic nature, our basic aliveness, rather than the many things we think about that and how it's going and what it should do next.

[34:41]

So we manifest and celebrate and come into alignment with this true ground of our life through this practice of Zazen. And I encourage you strongly to do this practice. And if and when you do, please know that we here, Green Gulch in the residential training are doing it with you. And when we here in the residential training, practice it, we will know that we are doing it with all of you who are practicing elsewhere, and that all of us together are doing it with all beings, with all of the ancestors who have done this practice of sitting upright and still, and with the horses and the frogs and the bamboo and the cars, each being fully themselves, practicing zazen.

[35:47]

So our faith and our experience is that this truthful practice of zazen engages us more fully and wisely with our life and the world when we stand up So with a mind of compassion and care for all living beings, we take up this practice of zazen and we dedicate any good that comes of it, we offer to the well-being and ease and freedom of suffering beings. And so too with our time this morning. the ceremony we've done of coming together to talk about La Zen, we offer out way past this room that it may somehow be of benefit to suffering beings. Thank you very much for being here and for your patience and stillness this morning. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[37:05]

Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:31]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.65