This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I'd like to start off by sitting for a couple of minutes. This theme that I've been... suggesting during the practice period of directed attention, and then as directed attention makes contact, letting the attention widen, include receptive attention. And then they, as we continue to sit, they become, they integrate into each other. There's attention and there's receptivity. So if you could start by just bringing your attention to your posture, stability of your seat, balanced over your sit bones, lengthening the spine, opening the front of your body from your groin to your throat, widening your shoulders.

[01:23]

your face relaxed. It's like the mind telling the body what to do, and then the body wakes up. Oh yeah. And then from the inside out, the adjustment starts to happen. And as the body starts to adjust, the mind starts to adjust. And then start with a long, slow exhale. Just very deliberately, very gently extending the exhale. And at the end of the exhale, pause and feel

[02:30]

the impulse to breathe in. And then let the in-breath happen. Rather than the mind telling the body, let the impulse, the feeling of the impulse draw the breath in. And experience it wherever it's experienced in the body. Receptive attention. And then a pause, when the breath is full in, pausing and then feeling the impulse to exhale. And letting that guide, breathing out the release, the letting go.

[03:36]

Pause, and the inhale again, the whole cycle. And as the sensations of breath are experienced, letting that receptive attention include the sounds. Include what's being seen.

[04:47]

even the thoughts. And just part of the inhale, part of the pause, part of the exhale. So this afternoon was the final tea of the practice period.

[06:21]

On Saturday evening, we'll start Sashin sitting for seven days. And the final tea was a roundup of the content of the practice period, just a chance to debrief on that. And I offered a variety of questions. What did you learn? What changes have you noticed in yourself? What surprised you? Things like that. And then one question came to my mind, which I often ask at workshops at Tassajara, but I think I thought it wasn't Zen enough for hardened Zen students. But for some reason, I put it up there anywhere. Anyway, and I said, the question is, what have you learned about love? And then, of course, the answers were wonderful.

[07:28]

And wonderfully connecting and intimate. It's one of those questions, you know. Does any of us actually know what love is or what it's not? Do any two people agree upon definition of it? And yet in some ways it has a deep appeal. And I had planned, you know, when I was thinking about what to talk about this evening, you know, I had planned to talk about a koan, where Joshu, as I can call it in the Blue Cliff Records, where Joshu quotes the... And I managed to forget the book.

[08:31]

See what my mind can remember. Joshu quotes the Xin Xin Ming, something put together by the third ancestor in China. It's trust in the Xin, the heart and mind of being, trust in the way of the heart and mind, or the way of trusting the heart and mind. And then the first line of it says, the great way, the Tao, the way, is not a problem when there's no picking or choosing. Just the great way is without difficulty. Just refrain from picking and choosing. And in this practice period, I've been mentioning several koans.

[09:32]

The last one I mentioned was this very mind is Buddha. And then before that I mentioned every day is a good day. The similarity between them is that they mean what they say, and in a way, even though it's a simple statement, every day is a good day, it includes the days that are not good days. This very mind is Buddha, includes all the extravagances and distractions of our mind and heart. And similarly, with this coin, it says, just refrain from picking and choosing. Just refrain from discrimination and attachment.

[10:32]

And we can say the... The direct statement is like an ideal, an instruction, a guide that we can link our intention, our directed attention to. Just the way I said now, breathe exactly like this. Who knows what happened for you? Who knows where your attention went? or how thoroughly you engaged your breath. And yet, the ideal in itself, when you sincerely, in direct attention to engaging the breath fully, you learn something about fully engaging the breath, and you also notice more clearly when you're not fully engaging the breath.

[11:46]

and you'll learn something about that too. And so both of those are included. And a very important aspect of our practice is that integration. Without the directed attention, the mind will just be vague. It will loop back to awareness and then it will wander off. But with the direct attention, with the sincerity and perseverance, that effort of connecting will both reveal what connecting is and will reveal what not connecting is. And so one request of our practice is this having the moments of connection be more frequent.

[13:08]

As many of you know, I like to use the phrase continuous connection as a definition of samadhi. To make the moments of connection more frequent. And so directed attention, dedication, and skillful effort draw forth this way of engaging. And, as I said, in that engaging, the non-engaging becomes more evident. I said to someone recently, it looks like you're sleeping quite a bit in zazen.

[14:12]

And they looked a little kind of surprised, what, me? And then just having that idea in their head prompted them to pay more attention. And then the next time we talked, they said to me, yeah, I do tend to somewhere along the period sink into something that's not so aware. Yeah. So the directed attention reveals And then, of course, in our sincerity, we can start to create a right way and a wrong way. Being connected to every inhale, every exhale, is the right way.

[15:22]

But very interestingly, in particular with zazen, in particular with shikantaza, that's not the whole story. In some ways, that's just the initiation. And then, equally interestingly, in our human life, Not only is the inclusion, the receptive awareness, going to facilitate letting go of some fixed dualism, good zazen, bad zazen, successful zazen, failing zazen. The very same process is going to help us connect more thoroughly It's going to draw more of our experience into awareness. And in that engagement, there's an increasing integration of the aspects of who we are and how we are.

[16:36]

Not just our momentary consciousness, but also our emotions. And I'm going to read a poem by Emilia Earhart. in the flavor of Xin Xin Ming as trusting the way of the heart-mind, trusting the way of the heart. And the French word for heart, cour, is the root of courage, courage. And so, for those of you who don't know, Amelia Earhart was an aviator. 30s? Anybody know? Is she in the 20s or the 30s? But very early on. maybe 40s, but at a time, 30s, at a time when women were supposed to stay in the kitchen and wear an apron, she was out flying planes and being an adventurer and actually tried to fly around the world and died.

[17:48]

Didn't succeed. But she wrote this poem about courage. Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. How about that for a definition of courage? Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. No, it's not there. Without it there, No, without it there, there's no release from little things. It knows not the vivid loneliness of fear, nor the mountain heights where bitter joy can hear the sound of wings. How can life grant us a boon of living that compensates for the dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate?

[18:53]

unless we dare. Each time to make a choice, to pay with courage, to behold the resistless day and count it fair. You know, even though we might say receptive awareness, we give ourselves to the experience. We give attention to the experience. And that's both an abundance and a renunciation. And when the mind is steadied with the directed attention, when we connect the experience of now, there is within our being a stabilization.

[20:02]

And within that stabilization, some extraordinary knowing that we were born with, that prompted us to persist in learning how to stand up and walk into the world. first time we fell down, why didn't we just say, oh, well, I guess I'm not that good at that. No. We persisted. And we stood up and walked into the world. And we're still walking into that world. And it's still asking something of us. It's still asking for courage. It's still asking us to trust. the way of the heart. It's still asking us to trust the way of intention, attention.

[21:09]

So, this is the subject matter that Joshua presents. This saying is famous. It was famous in China in the ninth century when he lived. Joshua supposedly lived to 119. Started practice early and had his first awakening when he was 70. And then had another almost 50 years to practice. And then became a renowned teacher with hundreds of monks. So using that statement, it was one that everybody knew. The great way is without difficulty. Just refrain from discrimination and attachment. And how often do we do that?

[22:25]

how often do we refrain from discrimination or attachment? And then what is it to practice that both aspires to that admonition, and then what is it to include all the ways you can't find it, contradict that aspiration. And just right in our sitting, we learn the root of that. We aspire with our directed attention, and we accept with our receptive attention. And this... This flavor runs through our practice. The practice of patience includes the practice with impatience.

[23:34]

We could say the practice of patience includes being patient with your impatience. The practice of compassion includes the practice when your compassion is not there. The practice of generosity includes being generous with your stinginess. I heard someone say that generosity is the antidote to fear. Or maybe we could say our... Reluctance is an expression of our fear. Can we be generous with that? Can we be patient with the restless, demanding part of ourself, the impatient part of ourself?

[24:41]

Can we have compassion for the way we hold back and keep ourselves separate, that we focus more on ourselves, get more caught up in our own suffering and less attentive to others. So in the Soto school, right in the activity of Zazen, right in the activity of Shikantaza, something seminal about this directed and receptive attention is being learned. Right there. It's like learning how to integrate these two. because our discriminating mind will set them apart. And then, in our sincerity, where we hold up the ideal and imbue it with virtue, then we cast a shadow over that other part of ourselves

[25:56]

it doesn't meet that exalted request. But when it's in the shadow, it's unknown. And when there is discrimination, then actually we'd rather not notice. But when we sit inside and we start to create that stabilization and we start to see all the amazing things that happen in consciousness. And we hold them right there as we breathe in and breathe out. Then it extends out. And so this is the proposition. that, first of all, Joshua says, he quotes the famous quote, and then he says, and I don't hold on to this.

[27:13]

Even that has its taint of picking and choosing. Even that has its taint of discriminating and preference. And the monk says to him, one of the monks says to him, well, if you don't hold on to that, what do you hold on to? First of all, he says to him, how do you know you don't hold on to it since you don't hold on to that discerning mind? And Joshua says, well, I don't know that either. And the monk says, well, how can you even say that? Pretty good monk, yeah?

[28:23]

And then... the Cohen ends with Joshua saying, it's enough to bring up the question, now just bow and go back to practice. And my thoughts on that are, of course, when we bring our discriminating faculty into attending meetings, to the propositions our mind creates about practice. We're refining our understanding when we bring our discriminating mind to how we're engaging our effort. Does your effort tighten you? Does your effort in zazen give you a headache? Or does it make the mind tingle? There's something to learn. But there's a limit to it.

[29:32]

We're engaging a process that an important ingredient of it is going beyond thinking. Directed attention is engaging the sensation beyond what we think about it. I don't know how it was for you when you were sitting, but when we sit and we attend to the breath like that, and then we include the sound, the sound becomes more like surround sound. And it can also become more like audible sensation rather than something that's progressively and continually named. Oh, that's a car on Page Street, and that's a car on Laguna. That sounds like a motorbike. It becomes more wordless. Discrimination has its place, the discriminative faculty, and then going beyond it.

[30:44]

It's not something... we do directly. The directed attention leads us in that way. It's not the workings of a conscious effort to create a certain consequence. And the receptive attention creates the inclusion. as we attend to consciousness like this, something fundamental is learned. And I've been saying in the practice period, this is engaging the formless, going beyond the labels the mind creates. And then,

[31:51]

the mind continually recreates the form. It continually generates the next formulation, the next thought, the next memory, the next image. And when the mind that is, you know, sometimes in the early sutras it says adorned by awareness, sometimes it says perfumed by awareness, that has loosened up, then it can include the form that's created and it's in its own way just another experience. It's just another idea. It's just another image.

[32:54]

And the receptive attention learns that kind of flexibility. You open up, an idea arises. Then the sound of a car. Then an image. Then an emotion. Then a physical sensation. That adaptive, flexible attention. And as we engage in that, its capacity to hold the variety of experience is learned. And so Joshu says, and I don't hold on to the clarity. I don't hold on to that pristine state. I don't hold on to a fixed notion of what the consequence should be. So as we sit and we settle into sitting, our state of being becomes itself beyond what we think of it.

[34:12]

It's this courageous act to go beyond the known. It's Amelia Earhart deciding to fly solo around the world. And before she does, writing a poem called Courage. Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. Who would have ever thought that would be the second half of that line? For granting peace. Release from little things. How can life grant us boon of living, compensate for the great ugliness and the pregnant hate, unless we dare? Each time we make a choice, we pay with courage to behold the resistless day.

[35:24]

Trust in the way of the heart. Trust in the way of the mind. Trust in the way of consciousness. Chitta bhavana, cultivation of consciousness. And then it opens up and it includes everything the human experience can create. And as we continue, these two... they weave together. It's like we can find in our daily living that when we're doing and when we just do what we're doing, the directed attention, the formlessness of activity, of just doing. And then we can just do

[36:32]

And we can also hold the context. You think the person who rings the bell for the period of zazen is called the dawn. And usually the first time you're dawn, or the first several times you're dawn, you're too busy thinking about making sure you will ring the bell at the right time to settle into your zazen. and you look at the clock, restlessly look at the clock. Okay, 15 more minutes, 10 more minutes, 5 more minutes. But then as you continue to do it, your body and your mind and your breath discover, I can just give over to Zazen and somehow know the flow of linear time. My body knows it has its own connection to linear time.

[37:39]

And it will, when it's around the time to ring the bell, it will present the idea. It's not something you figure out how to do. It's something that occurs through giving over. this assimilation, this integration. We don't figure it out. So Joshua says to the monk, it's enough to raise up the question. We're not going to finalize it in our discussion of it. I can't give you an answer about a process that goes beyond thought. So, bow and go back to your practice. And with this attitude, with this way of engaging, our life becomes moments to drop into formlessness, moments to see

[38:57]

the extraordinary nature of the current form of what's being formulated. And when we see the extraordinary nature of it, then it becomes like a koan. You see yourself having a strong emotional response to something. How amazing. And then if you keep watching, you see... This event happened, and I shrugged and walked off, and this event happened, and I've thought about it five more times in the next couple of hours. Actually, it feels like a heavy weight on my shoulders, or a tightness in my chest. So the construct when these are integrated, the construct is both real and unreal.

[40:04]

It's both form and formless. It's the interbeing of the two. So Joshu in this coin is saying, the Dharma gate to this is just our core practice. Just don't get caught up in discriminating and attachment. And even that, don't get caught up in that. 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.

[41:07]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:10]

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