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. Welcome everyone here in the City Center Zendo and welcome to all of you who are joining us this evening online as well to any future listeners throughout time. Thank you, first and foremost, to the head of practice, Tim Wicks, for inviting me to give this talk. And a big bow of gratitude to my teacher, Renzo Ed Sadasan, who's joining remotely. Thank you for your years of encouragement and patience. And it's interesting, I was reflecting, I've been his student now for coming up on a decade so that's a lot of encouragement and a lot of patience so i'm going to cut straight to the chase tonight how many people here came to get enlightened it's okay you can be honest i got a couple all right so i'm going to start with a koan from suzuki roshi our founder that he spoke about in zen mind beginner's mind

[01:25]

and it's rather long, but I like it in total, and it's appropriate, so bear with me for a moment. And I forgot my glasses, so I may have to do some squinting. So he says, I have often talked to you about a frog, and each time everyone laughs. But a frog is very interesting. He sits like us, too, you know, but he does not think that he's doing anything so special. When you go to a Zendo and sit, You may think that you're doing some special thing while everyone else is sleeping. You're practicing Zazen. You're doing some special thing while everyone else is being lazy. That might be your understanding of Zazen. But look at a frog. A frog also sits like us, but he has no idea of Zazen. Watch him. If something moves or if something annoys him, he will make a face. If something comes along to eat, he will snap it up and eat.

[02:29]

And he eats while sitting. Actually, that is our Zazen. Not any special thing. Here's a kind of frog koan for you. And so he tells a koan about Baso. It was a famous Zen master called the Horse Master. Don't know why. He was the sixth disciple of Nangaku, one of the six patriarchs' disciples. One day while he was studying under Nagaku, Basu was sitting, practicing zazen. And he was a man of large physical build. And when he talked, his tongue reached his nose and his voice was loud. And his zazen must have been very good. Nagaku saw him sitting like a great mountain or a frog. Nagaku asked, what are you doing? I'm practicing zazen, Basu replied. Why are you practicing zazen? I want to attain enlightenment. I want to be a Buddha, the disciple said.

[03:32]

Do you know what the teacher did? He picked up a tile and started to polish it. Baso, his disciple, asked, What are you doing? That's my best Baso voice. I want to make this tile into a jewel, Nangaku said. How is it possible to make a tile a jewel? Baso asked. How is it possible to become a Buddha by practicing Zazen? Nangaku replied. And Basso was a great Zen master, but yet he was sitting with the expectation of becoming a Buddha. So I'm curious, what expectations brought you to practice? And this is a question that our prized and treasured senior Dharma teacher, Leslie James, often will ask students at the beginning of a Tassajara season when kind of an influx of them come. for the summer. And common responses usually include many reasons, but there tends to be a pretty constant component along the lines of, I'm going to come, sit, be quiet, in peace and ease.

[04:37]

And Leslie's recommendation is to take those expectations or your expectations in general and set them aside. Zen training is about being able to be who you actually are. Mostly we're unable to do that because it's clouded by who we think we should be. So that's a little bit about what I wanted to talk about this evening, is practicing with our expectations. And my hope is to describe a pathway that has worked for me on how to find practical application of Buddhist teachings by bringing inquiry and curiosity to the expectations that we hold. And I can't blame Basso. When I started practicing, I did not expect to become a Buddha per se, but I did have expectations of some sort of outcome. An enhanced version of myself that was more equanimous and virtuous, more collected, less vulnerable to the weights of the world.

[05:41]

And besides a sitting practice, eventually I started to study Buddhist terminology, I'm pretty sure that most of you are knee-deep in. And in exploring certain principles, such as impermanence, non-attachment, or not having a gaining mind, I found them somewhat abstract and distant from my daily experiences. And while these concepts felt profound, they tend to hover over the practicalities of my life. pointing towards the sources of suffering, but nothing that I could actually do to navigate them. So tonight, we're going to bring some curiosity and inquiry to our expectations, not only in formal practice, but in the practice of life. And Suzuki Roshi, many of you know, was famous for his teaching. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few. And, you know, it's interesting, I did some, you know, cool research on AI.

[06:47]

And there actually is a relationship between the words expert and expectation. Both, of course, have Latin roots. I'm going to fumble this word, expectar, I don't know, something of that nature. But it means to look out for or to await. And then, of course, the words split paths linguistically and took on their own meaning. with expectation coming more directly from expectar and referring to the act of looking forward to something or anticipating something, aligning closely with the original Latin meaning. And so both of these words reflect a sense of assessing or anticipating outcomes, but of course have evolved in kind of two distinct but subtly connected concepts. So for me, impermanence, non-attachment, and gaining mind is often experienced and takes form or is cloaked in my expectations.

[07:52]

And so I wanted to speak to some of these terms that I feel are represented in my experience of expectations. So the first is impermanence, which in short asserts that all of conditioned existence without exception is transient and inconstant. And for me, expectations are an act of trying to kind of concretize how things are and make them how they should be. And we usually get exposed to this early on in life by a parent or a caregiver or family member and then pay it forward as we get older. And these expectations can set limits in life or impede on our ability to be fluid in our path. with recognition, though, that people change. And so you can just take a moment to reflect on the impacts of expectations in the relationships you've had. You can think about how relationships in your life have been influenced by the expectations of others or yourself or usually the combination of both and how these expectations affect the dynamics of that relationship.

[09:10]

The second term and third term are a bit more apparent in how they relate to expectations. One being attachment or non-attachment, which is to engage with experiences with flexibility and without fixation on achieving specified outcomes. And then the third pertains more directly usually to practice of not having a gaining mind. But that's more or less when we practice in order to achieve something. Our practice becomes a means to an end and is operating in the conventional realm of cause and effect driven by grasping or desire. However, we know that everything we do is practice and can include any activity. So the three impermanence, non-attachment, and gaining mind are perhaps some of the more central concepts in Buddhism. But again, for me, have been hard to integrate in how they manifest in my daily life. And this is true for a lot of teachings I get exposed to in Dharma talks, and they sound poetic and almost, I don't know, they sound like physics to me, but in like a linguistic form.

[10:29]

And anyways, integrating them is a whole other practice. And without that practicality, I feel like I could point towards my suffering, but really couldn't do anything actionable about it. And practice must be actionable. Our practice is actionable even in the still of Zazen. We're engaging in non-action. And a great part of practice, as I understand, is engaging with the four noble truths. One, that we suffer. Two, there's a reason that we suffer. And three, there's a way to cease that suffering. And a path to do so is the last. So when we can identify what... this suffering and where it comes from, we're better suited to engage with it or take skillful action. And for me, that's hard with these Buddhist terms. And so to give you a quick example, many of you know that I have a six-year-old daughter, and I'm sure Abbot David hears this from time to time, but it's really hard to get her out the door in the morning.

[11:32]

And her mother and I try to bring as much routine as we can to her day to be supportive. So it's a nice little like wake up. Then we go through different stations, wake up, kind of do it nice and slow, put out some clothes, maybe put on some light music. Then we go to the breakfast table, then we comb hair, so on and so forth until we finally get to the last station and out the door. And usually we have about 35-ish minutes to do this. And I don't know how many of you have been around young children, particularly around that age, but developmentally they're trying to form a lot of, or deal with a lot of impulse control. And I know that many of us still deal with that reality in ourselves as adults, but for them it's very, very hard. So we will literally be trying to go from the room, the bedroom, to the bathroom, which is just a very short haul, and I'll turn around and all of a sudden she's gone.

[12:34]

She's going to collect something to bring to her friends. She wants to make Papa a card. She has a million ideas and they're completely wholeheartedly impassioned. And so I have kind of one or two options here. Once I start to realize that we're getting closer and closer to being late, I start to get flushed, a little bit rushed in my voice and usually a little bit charged. And so one of two things happens. Either I get more direct, which may cause an emotional kind of collapse from her, or I can kind of catch myself, notice that I'm suffering, and try to make it through the other three noble truths. But like I said, I have a hard time engaging with these aspects of impermanence, of her developing human abilities and needs, And it's very hard to recognize that she's forever changing and how can I tap into that?

[13:41]

Or it's very hard for me to understand, oh, I'm suffering because I have a gaining mind and I'm just trying to get her out the door and I'm not focusing on the relationships and bypassing opportunities to connect with her. And of course, my mind still, I don't want to get a purple ticket. I want to make my coffee. And this last yesterday, I was feeling good about my talk, and I tried to implement this, and I failed completely. She melted down. I was really late to work. And so meeting your expectations doesn't actually always bring resolve, but practice can give you the slight opportunity to slow things down just enough to not ruin things. So I'm glad to say that we worked that out. And rather than me going through the exhaustive practice that you just witnessed, in the case of studying suffering due to impermanence, having a gaining mind, and non-attachment, I found it helpful to just bring curiosity and inquiry around my expectations.

[14:52]

So inquiry and curiosity in general are kind of the stance of the heart-mind when engaging in practice. And I say that as we sit in Beginner's Mind Temple. However, when I inquire into impermanence, it can be a little unwavering or scary at times. When I have inquiry into attachment, I can see kind of what's going on a little bit clearer, but it's hard for me to say I don't want to be attached to Maya or maybe her having positive outcomes in her life. And it also becomes more clear if I think about not having a gaining mind and wanting more. But then I get into this little trap of like, do I really, should I not want that? Or isn't me not wanting a gaining mind, my mind actually wanting something more than what it is? And I get into these kind of like weird processing loops, which can make me feel tension between these teachings and how my felt experience is.

[15:59]

So again, what's helped me is to recognize a point of inquiry that can help me practice more clearly with what I'm suffering from. And so within that inquiry, it's been easier for me to not be in my head analyzing. So the inquiry is, what is the expectation I have, am holding, or am expecting? And with this inquiry, when I remove the expectation, I'm able to connect with a reality that doesn't have my story, bias, or expectation on top of it. It's almost like a way of subtracting and minus my expectation helps me connect more with a clear version of reality to respond more appropriately. And in the case with Maya, I'm able to meet her in the moment, see the situation for what it is, And I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting that we stuff away or push away our felt sense of an expectation.

[17:06]

But when I can kind of isolate it in that way, I have a chance to actually tap into what's going on in my body. How that tightness of the perceived expectation not happening can just be addressed. How I can bring my breath... and then respond from that point without responding from the point of constriction. And this is something that we do in Zazen. We're the process of being with rather than reacting from. And when we can relieve some of that, or ease some of that grip our expectations have on us, we're more likely to meet the moment with flexibility and openness. So I have a little exercise, if you'll entertain me. And half the people on a Wednesday night are already closing their eyes. So go ahead and close them if they're not already. Just a little bit. And go ahead and just take a couple of breaths to go inward a little bit. And I invite you to bring to mind an expectation that you had that did not get met and led to suffering.

[18:15]

Nothing too painful. So just bring to mind an expectation that you had that did not get met. and led to suffering. And just let that marinate for a moment. Before you bring an inquiry, just notice what's there. Just notice and become aware of any energy or sensation that arise in the body and allow them to just be met by your breath. just allowing the expectation to be what it is, not trying to change it or stuff it away, but just see it. And then with open inquiry and curiosity, ask, what is here if the expectation did not exist?

[19:22]

What is there when the expectation is removed from the situation? What is there if we remove the expectation? Just allowing the situation to be what it is. You're just simply removing the expectation and then noticing what qualities are present. Noticing what qualities have dropped away. And from there, perhaps from that place, there's a bit more space, composure, and appropriateness in your ability to respond. So you can go ahead and come back to the room or stay asleep.

[20:29]

Up to you. But I thank you for joining me in that experiment. And I encourage you to toy with that more. Life will give you a million and one opportunities to do so. And so before I get into the end of this, I wanted to share some other practice, ways to practice with expectations in kind of... keeping in mind our 12th century ancestor Ehe Dogen's instructions to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. And that is really just to reflect on the roots of your expectations. Consider where your expectations come from. Not in Zazen, on the side, maybe on a walk. Are they based on societal norms, personal desires? past experiences, or perhaps, and usually a combination of these. So you can go through a process writing this down, looking at all your unrealistic or unhelpful expectations and crumpling them up, throwing them away, or doing some other type of ritual.

[21:39]

It's also important to bring in self-compassion practices around the expectations we hold. Often we hold the harshest expectations are the ones that we place on ourselves. And not only do these impact our self-esteem and well-being, but also get into relation, not only how they affect our well-being, but it's also important, like I said, to get in touch with how these expectations show up in our body. How can we learn to notice and bring breath and healing to these sensations rather than react from them, which is usually what I do with my, come on, get out the door, we got to go. And before I wrap up, I also wanted to argue with myself because that's kind of what I do when others give Dharma talks. I'm like, well, what about, what about? And I wanted to say something about expectation versus intention setting. And so I'm curious, there was a book that got a lot of buzz to some folks.

[22:42]

None of the Yaz folks had read this book, but has anybody seen or heard about the expectation effect? Got one nod. Okay. Well, anyway, it kind of got a little hoo-ha. It was a book that kind of dived into the psychology of expectations and explored the power of positive thinking, how to manage our biases and use expectations to actually improve our lives and relationships. But this is very much, I think, in line with the placebo effect. You can take a pill and if you believe it's the right thing, there's times where it has actually... did better than the actual active ingredients. Also, there's studies about holding expectations when you do something like working out will actually lead to the exercise being more impactful. Shosan, I'm not sure if that's true with yoga, but I would presume possibly. And I do, I think both of those are... accurate summations.

[23:44]

However, I would say that that framework, I think, points more to how our thoughts shape our reality based off of belief and intention. And while I do think there's a maybe perceived benefit in leveraging the power of expectations, my belief and experience is that it works just as well as intention setting. And in Zen, our deepest intentions are expressed through our vow. And in this way, we're able to actually influence our body, mind, and environment. So without the need for expectations, I feel we can still engage with intention or with vow, which can invoke the same principles of the power of positive thinking, or how to manage our biases, and how to improve our lives and relationships. So like I'd mentioned, I've been in kind of more serious formal training for over a decade. And in reflection, I'm discovering that the bridge between these ancient teachings and my reality comes around a lot of my management of my expectations.

[24:58]

And so for me, rather than viewing life through a lens of just impermanence or my gaining mind, it's been easier to ask, what expectation did I have that's not being met? And this kind of shift from philosophical contemplation to actionable inquiry allows me to better identify practical steps I can take to meet my suffering. So I bet it's pretty clear by now. None of y'all are getting enlightened by me, at least tonight. And I have to admit, excuse me, Admit that at times I feel like Basso. I suffer when I take on the expectation of having to give a talk that's meaningful and worthy of others' time. It's an expectation that's not useful. I did the best with the intention I had, the sleep I get, and the halftime single parenting that I partake in. And since every moment is practice, I think it's important to do as Leslie put forth.

[26:07]

ask constantly, what expectations are we bringing to practice? What expectations do we hold? What should, excuse me, what we should be holding rather than being what is and being ourselves? And so I wanted to close with some more words from Suzuki Roshi about the expectation or lack thereof the Buddha brought to practice. And excuse me, it's another rather long one, but we're wrapping up. So he says, he was more concerned with about how he himself existed in this moment. And Suzuki Roshi is talking about the Buddha. That was his point. Bread is made from flour. How flour becomes bread when it's put in the oven was for Buddha the most important thing. How we become enlightened was his main interest. The enlightened person is some perfect, desirable character for himself and others.

[27:13]

Buddha wanted to find out how human beings developed this ideal character, how various sages in the past become sages. In order to find out how dough became perfect bread, he made it over and over again until he became quite successful. That was his practice. We may find it not so interesting to cook the same thing over and over again each day. It's rather tedious. If you lose the spirit of repetition, it will become quite difficult. But it will not be difficult if you are full of strength and vitality. Anyway, we can't keep still. We have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very observant and careful and alert. Our way is to put the dough in the oven and and watch it carefully. Once you know how the dough becomes bread, you will understand enlightenment. So how this physical body becomes a sage is our main interest. We are not so concerned about what flour is or what dough is or what a sage is.

[28:18]

A sage is a sage. Metaphysical explanations of human nature are not the point. So this kind of practice we stress, thus, cannot become too idealistic, filled with exceptions. If an artist becomes too idealistic, he will take his own life because between his ideal and his actual ability, there is a great gap. Because there is no bridge long enough to go across the gap, he will begin to despair. That is the usual spiritual way. But our spiritual way is not so idealistic. It doesn't come with expectation. In some sense... We should be idealistic. At least we should be interested in making good bread, which tastes and look good. And again, for me, that goes back to intention and vow. Actually, practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread. And there's no secret in our way.

[29:19]

Just to practice zazen and put ourselves in the oven is our way. So to that, I wish you all happy bread making. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[29:56]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.5