This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. We've had a very intense week here. This is the seventh day of a seven-day sashin. It's called the Rohatsu Sashin, which celebrates Buddha's enlightenment. which was usually celebrated on December 8th, but because today is December 6th, right? That was the end of our sashin, so we had our Buddha's Enlightenment ceremony this morning. I thought I might talk a little bit about sashin, just for my own curiosity. How many people in this room, other than the ones that are sitting the sashin, have sat a seven-day sashin before? Not too many.

[01:00]

How many people haven't sat a seven-day sesheen? I see, excellent. How many people don't even have any idea what a seven-day sesheen is? And how many are here for the first time? Welcome. Well, so maybe what I thought I would do is share, we've been this practice period studying Shinra Suzuki's way of practice. Shinra Suzuki was the founder of this temple. He died in 1971, and so we've been going through some of his lectures, and I thought I would share some of the paragraphs or some of the ideas that we talked about during this last week with you. in a sense, to give you maybe a little feeling of what a sashin is. Maybe you'd get the whole experience of a sashin without bothering to have to sit 12 hours a day for seven days.

[02:05]

That's possible. Might be. So we'll try it. A sashin is... I think, fairly new to America. I mean, there were maybe some sashins that were done before Suzuki Roshi came, but Suzuki Roshi really was the first person that started a practice period. And sashins are a very traditional way that we do sitting, basically, most of the day, alternating between periods of sitting and walking meditation. And we even sit formally in the zendo and eat using... horioki bowls. They're bowls so you can be sitting zazen while you're eating, and there's this marvelous way that people serve you. So it's a way to keep very concentrated, and you're quiet the whole week. So it's a week of a chance to really get into what it means to sit zazen, our meditation style, to be in zazen, and to be quiet and find out if you can settle yourself a little bit on who you are.

[03:13]

So this is a quote from a chapter in Not Always So by Shindra Suzuki, our founder. And he says, the purpose of sesshin is to be completely one with our practice. We use two Chinese characters for sesshin. Setsu, which shortens to ses in conjunction with shin, means to treat something the way you treat a guest or the way a student treats a teacher. So the first half of sesshin, sess, is the way you treat a guest or a student treats a teacher. And another meaning of sesshu is to control or arrange things in order. So shin is a very common term in Zen, which means mind or heart. It's kind of a combined thing, heart and mind together. So sesshin means to have a proper functioning of mind. It means that we have our five senses, our will, and our small monkey mind are under control.

[04:18]

When we control our monkey mind, we resume our true big mind. When monkey mind is always taking over the activity of big mind, we naturally become a monkey. So Tsukiroshi is going on and he says... I'll repeat it from here. It is our five senses and our will, or small monkey mind, which should be controlled. When we control our monkey mind, we resume our true big mind. When monkey mind is always taking over the activity of big mind, we naturally become a monkey. So monkey mind must have a boss, which is big mind. That's pretty clear. Except for we really don't have any idea what big mind is. But anyway, we've got the general idea that monkey mind needs to be controlled by something bigger than our usual little small, narrow mind.

[05:26]

So he goes on and says, However, when we practice zazen, it is not that big mind is actually controlling small mind, but simply that when small mind becomes calm, big mind starts its true activity. Most of the time in our everyday life, we are involved in the activity of small mind. That is why we should practice zazen and be completely involved in resuming big mind. So basically, if you sit zazen long enough after a while, the usual activity of your thinking mind, your emotional life, which is very involved in just getting through the day, commenting on how well you're doing with this interaction or that person or... all the chores you have to do, all of that after about a day and a half drifts away, and you can sit quietly and see basically what it means to be alive, what it feels like to be a human being, and more particularly, not just a human being, but you, what it feels like for you to be alive without...

[06:38]

so much of the distracting aspects of our normal day-to-day living. So Tsukiroshi goes on and he says, we live in a city. If you sit in a zendo, as much as we do, we sit from five o'clock in the morning 9.30 at night or 9 o'clock at night, and the whole city is going on outside of you. You know, the sirens, the passerbyers, it's just quite something to be... We have two other beautiful practice temples, one at Green Gulch, and when you sit a sasheen at Green Gulch, you listen to the crows, you know, fighting it out. In the trees above the Zandor, you listen to the... you know, large pine cones from the Monterey Pines falling on the Zendo roof.

[07:43]

Or if you're lucky and it's raining, you get the wonderful sound of rain on the roof. And if you go to Tatsara, which is even further away, and you sit Sashin, basically you just fall into the sound of the stream, which just is running, you know, 25 feet away from the Zendo and runs through your mind and body constantly for seven days. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to sit with the sound of a stream running through you. So anyway, Sudoku Rishi goes on and he says, So in our practice, we rely on something great and sit in that great space. The pain in your legs or some other difficulty is happening in that great space. It is true. for those who've never sat Sashin, to sit in this posture, which is just an absolutely wonderful way to sit because you kind of have this tripod which gives you a certain amount of stability and allows you to sit up straight and keep your back straight and has a kind of alert quality, but it's very stable, so you're calm because you're sitting quietly, you're not moving.

[09:03]

But sometimes you have... or not sometimes, quite often, or almost always, or continuously, depending on what day of the Sashin it is, you have pain in your legs or some other difficulty. If you don't have any pain in your legs, you'll have mental difficulties. You'll think about all kinds of things. But Suzuki Roshi emphasizes that we want to sit in a great space. As long as you do not lose the feeling that you're in the realm of Buddha nature, you can sit even though you have some difficulties. When you want to escape from your difficulty or when you try to improve your practice, you create another problem for yourself. But if you just exist there, then you have a chance to appreciate your surroundings and you can accept yourself completely without changing anything. That is our practice. You know, it's a really wonderful thing to actually completely accept yourself, even for a few moments, with all your difficulties and all your wishes that it could be a little bit better, that you could be a little bit more improved, that all these problems in your life weren't there.

[10:21]

But if you just can sit and accept it as it is, it can be quite calming. And you realize that you really are sitting in a great space, a space much bigger than we normally allow ourselves to live in. Quite often we live in a world created by our mind, the thoughts about who we are and what the world is, and it becomes a very small world, a kind of prison that we live in. And if you can drop a lot of those ideas and about yourself and the world and sit not expecting anything, you can be in a very large space. And we do live in a very large space. This is a very large world to be a human being in. And we have much more freedom in this world than we ever sort of allow ourselves to experience.

[11:28]

And Sashin is one of those times when you get a chance to remember how extraordinary it is to be alive, how extraordinary it is to have a life and to be able to live it simply. So he says, to exist in big mind is an act of faith, which is different from the usual faith of believing in a particular idea of being. It is to believe that something is supporting us and supporting all our activities, including thinking mind and emotional feelings. All these things are supported by something big that has no form or color. It is impossible to know what it is, but something exists there, something that is neither material nor spiritual, something like that always exists, and we exist in that space. That is the feeling of pure being.

[12:30]

Sikiroshi uses that little phrase somewhat often, the feeling of pure being. Just being is enough. How often do we actually in our life just say, just being alive is enough? That was something that I didn't get to cover in the Sashin, so for those that were in the Sashin, I was happy I got to talk a little bit about that. The first day of the Sashin, I took a couple of paragraphs from the teaching is just for you, and I'll read you one of the paragraphs. Various ancestors and great sages of Buddhism have said, Buddha left this teaching just for me, not for anyone else. Various ancestors and great sages of Buddhism have said, Buddha left this teaching just for me, not for anyone else.

[13:51]

Buddha left this marvelous teaching just for that one person. And Suzuki Rishi goes on to say, if that side is forgotten, the Buddha's teaching is nothing but waste paper. Just for me is not arrogance. It means you have full appreciation of the teaching as your own. You know, we may think, you know, Buddhist teaching is marvelous. It's such a wonderful thing, really. But, you know, it's too good for me. You know, I really am never going to be able to practice then. I can't do this. It's too difficult. It's too sophisticated. But... Buddhism only happens if you make it happen in your life. Buddha taught his teachings and it was transmitted from him through probably by now 85 generations of teachers to us so that we could practice it, so that we could experience the freedom and joy that comes from a well-trained

[15:07]

oriented mind and body. So he goes on. This is the spirit we need in our Zazen practice. Everyone can be Nishiran. Everyone can be Dogen or Bodhidharma. Because I practice Zazen, there is Buddha, there is Dogen, and there is Bodhidharma. These are famous ancestors in our lineage. Dogen founded the Soto sect in Japan in the early part of the 1200s, and Bodhidharma brought Buddhism to China. You realize that you are the only being in this world and that no one can take over your position. This is true. All the teaching is just for you. But whatever you say about yourself, you are the only one. You cannot escape because the whole world is yours. This is beyond the truth we can talk about. This is ultimate truth. To practice is to open yourself up to everything you see as an embodiment of truth.

[16:13]

What a wonderful sentence. To practice is to open yourself up to everything you see as an embodiment of truth. This is why we practice Zazan, why everyone can join our practice, and why this practice includes every activity in our life. So the whole point of this little paragraph is that Buddhism is something you have to make unique for yourself. It's so hard to understand this. We're convinced that it is something external standard that we're going to measure our life against and our Buddhist practice against. There is a way to do this right, and we are going to do this right. But this is not that kind of thing. It's really from the inside out. You have to take the practice into your life subjectively and make it expressed through your life. Buddhism is created by every person through finding out the unique truth of his, her, or her own life.

[17:21]

Every person is an absolutely unique manifestation of the teachings. So how wonderful that Buddha decided 2,500 years ago to create a teaching just for you, just for you, to make your life better. We're doing pretty well. We're through day two of this machine. How are you feeling? How are your legs? Okay, good. So by day three of the Sashin, we have to figure out how to have a calm mind in the midst of our difficulties. So the Suzuki Roshi goes on, Shikantaza, our Zazen is just to be ourselves. Again, just to be ourselves. When we do not expect anything, we can be ourselves.

[18:24]

That is our way to live fully in each moment of time. live fully in each moment of time, how often in our life are we rushing from one thing to the next? Oh, I can't actually be enjoying this moment because I've got to get to this other thing that is more important, so I'm just going to rush through, you know, traveling to my next appointment, brushing my teeth, whatever chore I have to do to get ready for the really important thing I'm going to do. And then you can sit down at the end of the day and say, well, gee, about 95% of the day I actually missed living because I was so busy looking forward or looking backwards or not looking at all at anything, not actually being anywhere. So, of course, when you're sitting Sashin, the way you bring yourself into each moment

[19:31]

is a fairly simple activity. It's a kind of a basic thing. We practice breathing. We sit day after day and breathe. Now, of course, we all breathe all the time, but this is a chance to actually, as Suzuki Hiroshi says, first practice smoothly exhaling, then inhaling. Calmness of mind is beyond the end of your exhalation. If you exhale smoothly without even trying to exhale, you are entering into the complete, perfect calmness of your mind. You do not exist anymore. When you exhale this way, then naturally your inhalation will start from there. All that fresh blood bringing everything from outside will pervade your body. You are completely refreshed. then you start to exhale, to extend that fresh feeling into emptiness.

[20:37]

So moment after moment, without trying to do anything, you continue shikantaza. Shikantaza is our term for sitting zazen, just sitting. It means literally just sitting. So I think we spent that entire lecture talking about all kinds of ways to breathe. But mostly just for those who are new to Zen, our style of breathing is not to do anything special with our breathing. There's a lot of techniques around breathing, yogic techniques. You can breathe in different parts of your upper part of your chest, deeper, lower. Rhythmic breathing. You can do breathing with visualization. There's lots of things, but our style of breathing is just to settle into what breathing you want to do. That is, if you just are paying attention to your breathing, your breathing will find some rhythm of its own that is who you are and what you want to be.

[21:44]

And you'll notice as you're paying attention to your breathing that you start messing with it. or you start realizing how you're holding your breathing in various different ways. Breathing is a very interesting thing to pay attention to. And I would say the only area where Suzuki Roshi has ever said anything other than just letting your breathing settle into its own way would be possibly sometimes to exhale a little bit more fully. There is such a tendency for us to not exhale, it's like holding on to life. when we don't exhale. But if you just exhale a little bit more fully, you will get a nicer inhale. But mostly our practice is just to find the breathing that you want to settle into. We also talked a little bit about counting. Beginning practice sometimes starts with counting your breath.

[22:45]

One on an inhale, two on an exhale. Or one on an inhale, two on the next exhale. One on an exhale, two on the next exhale. So if you're counting, I usually recommend start by counting exhales. So the first exhale is one, the second one is two. When you get to ten, you start over again. Very good beginning practice for sitting zazen. And if you notice that you can't get to ten before you're starting to think about what you're planning for dinner that night, that tells you how concentrated your mind is. which is many times not very concentrated. So concentration isn't the point of zazen, but you do need a certain amount of concentration to sit. You need to be able to sit in your body and feel your breathing, and that requires a certain amount of concentration, relaxed concentration. So sometimes counting can be useful. That was day three.

[23:48]

Are we feeling calmer from the calmness of our mind now? Am I going to get through the whole seven days? I think so. I'm doing pretty good. Day four of Sasheen. Day four traditionally can be a difficult day. Your body's a little stiff from sitting this much. Your knees hurt. You've got various things going on in your head. So the emphasis on day four is how do you make your best effort? What does it mean to make the right effort in something that you're doing? And Suzuki Roshi had a marvelous lecture he gave in 1971. I took all these lectures from the last machine that Suzuki Roshi led. before he died, which was the summer of 1971, here in this building.

[24:48]

And the last lecture he gave in that tzashin was titled Freedom from Everything, and it recounted how a couple of years earlier he had almost drowned in the Tassara Creek. And so he was pretty ashamed of the quality of his practice during the time when he was almost drowning and decided to rededicate his practice and be more sincere. And he... gave a lecture, I guess, about that night after the swim, about how he was returning to counting his breath. He wasn't sincere enough or good enough in his practice to do sophisticated things like koan practice or shikantasa. He was just going to count his breath, one to ten, and he encouraged us to do that too. So, in case any of you are thinking that breath counting is too simple for you, returned to it but anyway after uh having uh as he said improved his practice uh he gave this lecture uh two years later and he says um when you are not thinking that you have another moment then naturally you can accept things as they are you can see things as they are you will have perfect wisdom at that time

[26:07]

When you are able to sit experiencing Zazen, then the meaning of your everyday life will be completely different. You will have freedom from everything. That is the main point. Usually we have no freedom from the things you have or see, but when you experience Chi Kantaza, our Zazen, you will have freedom from things. You will truly enjoy your life because you are not attached to anything. you become really happy and that happiness will continue, which is what we mean by non-attachment. So he's again emphasizing this. And of course, he was at this time in his life dying, knew he was dying. We didn't actually know it, but... So he was emphasizing how important it is.

[27:10]

We think we have so many moments left in our life that we can throw them away. Plenty of moments. I live another 50 or 60 years, so I don't have to take this moment so seriously. But speaking from someone who 40 years ago thought I had plenty of time, it's amazing how quick time goes by. So live each moment. Live each moment fully. Be in each moment. And the key to that is to accept what's going on in that moment fully. You may change it. I mean, you may decide that having accepted it, you want to do something, but first experience it. Be with yourself in that moment. And then you'll know something about what's going on. He calls it perfect wisdom. If you can be present with yourself in a moment, you'll have perfect wisdom, and you'll know the meaning of your life, and you'll have freedom from many of the things that bind you, and you'll actually enjoy your life.

[28:24]

Buddhism is, I mean, even though we were sitting with our knees being painful, Buddhism is a practice so that you'll enjoy your life, and that enjoyment he's talking about as one that is, which he calls it, you will become really happy and that happiness will continue. He says, most of the happiness you have is the kind you later regret losing. Oh, that time I was happy, but now I'm not so happy. But real happiness will always be with you and will encourage you both in your adversity and your happiness. When you are successful, you will enjoy success. And when you fail, it will also be okay. You can enjoy, well, I think I've lost that sheet. You can enjoy your failures. You'll say, oh, not as bad as I thought it would be. I'm going to add just one more paragraph here about his comments about making the best effort in each moment.

[29:41]

He says, the student asked him, what does it mean making the best effort seen most? He says, I don't mean sacrifice this moment for the future. I mean, don't sacrifice this moment for the future and don't be bound by your past life or try to escape from it either. This is the kind of effort you usually make. but there should be a more important point in your effort. What is that? To stand on your own feet is the most important thing. Stand on your own feet. In Zen what we mean is like be in your body. If you're sitting on a zafu, sit on a zafu. If you're standing walking, walk on the ground. If you're lying in bed, be in the bed. It's so important, this emphasis that we have on being in your body, because your body is so grounding for you. It brings you into the present moment. Your body is living in the present moment.

[30:43]

Your mind many times is wandering in realms that we actually have no idea where we are. We create worlds there. I don't think we're going to get through all of day four, but here we go. So I also wanted to share another theme that was going on in the Sashin, which was a theme of pilgrimage. In Buddhism, there's an enormous history of pilgrims. The first pilgrim was a Buddha who left the palace in search of... in search of the end of suffering. And he was on a pilgrimage for seven years and tried all the advanced ascetic practices of his time in India and eventually sat under a tree and woke up.

[31:51]

And I'll say something about that at the end of the lecture. So he was our first pilgrim. And then we had pilgrims that went from India to China, Bodhidharma. And then of course, There's 800 years of Chinese pilgrims. They'll study in a monastery for 10 or 20 years and then go on a 20-year pilgrimage to find out what the meaning of their practice is. And then, of course, we had Dogen, who went on a pilgrimage from Japan to China and brought Buddhism back to China. And then, of course, Suzuki Roshi brought Buddhism here to America. and um one of the qualities of of the way buddhism moves along through this is it does move along with scriptures but a very important part of the way it moves along is it's this sort of person-to-person contact warm hand to warm hand so we say the true essence of our practice is conveyed human being by human being into from way back then to here

[32:58]

But anyway, I got involved. I had gone to a marvelous poetry reading by David White that Send Center sponsored a couple of weeks ago, and he was talking about the pilgrimage that is called the Way of St. James, or there's a Camino de Santiago, a 40- or 50-mile pilgrimage going from east to a famous church in Spain, and then you can go on another three miles to the coast. And that's a very popular pilgrimage now. Apparently everybody I know is going on it or been on it. And after I read this little poem, several new people told me they'd been on the pilgrimage. So it's interesting how apparently 30 years ago nobody was going on it, but now they've got travel sites telling you how to do it. Anyway, this poem was written about someone who did a pilgrimage, and I'm going to read it to you as just sort of a sense of, because we were also thinking that this Sashin was a pilgrimage of some sort.

[34:12]

We were traveling from the beginning of where we were for seven days, moment by moment, on a pilgrimage. So I'll just read this short poem. It's titled Finisterre, which is the place, the town at the ocean, which is the end of the road on this pilgrimage. The road in the end, taking the path the sun had taken, you're going from east to west, into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you as you stood there... as you stood where the ground turned to ocean. No way to your future now but the way your shadow could take, walking before you across water, going where shadows go.

[35:17]

No way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass, except to call an end to the way you had come. to take out each frayed letter you had brought and light their illumined corners and to read them as they drifted on the late western light, to empty your bags, to sort things and leave that, to promise what you needed to promise all along and to abandon the shoes that brought you here right at the water's edge. Not because you had given up, but because now you would find a different way to tread, and because through it all, part of you would still walk on. no matter how, over the waves. So I'll go through it again. It's a beautiful poem. So the road ends, taking the path the sun had taken into the western sea. So you're standing on the ocean, on the western sea of the Atlantic Ocean, and the moon rising behind you. Apparently a full moon was rising behind this traveler.

[36:20]

And as you know, full moons rise as the sun sets. And they're so bright. that the moon actually, your body casts a shadow out into the sea. And the moon rising behind you as you stood where the ground turned to ocean, no way to your future now but the way your shadow could take. Your future lay across the water. And I might also say apparently on this pilgrimage, when you get to the ocean, it's very traditional for you to burn something. that you'd been carrying with you and throw it onto the ocean. In this case, this person burned some letters that she'd been carrying for a long time and burned them and threw them onto the ocean. And it's also a tradition when you get to this town at the end of your pilgrimage is to leave something of clothing there. And this woman left her shoes. And for those who've ever been on any pilgrimages, I did a few when I was young, your shoes are...

[37:21]

what carry you there, your most important possession. So she left her shoes. So to go back. To the future now, but the way your shadow could take, walking before you across water, going where shadows go, no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass, except a call to an end to the way you had come. to take out each frayed letter you had brought and light their illumined corners and to read them as they drifted on in the late western light, and to empty your bags to sort this and leave that, to promise what you needed to promise all along, and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here, right at the water's edge, not because you had given up, but because now you would find a different way to tread. And because through it all, part of you would still walk on, no matter how, over the waves.

[38:28]

So our life is a wonderful pilgrimage moving from things in the past to a future that we don't always know. Okay, we'll need to end now. This morning we had our celebration of Buddha's enlightenment, and I thought I would just read a couple of sentences from that celebration.

[39:33]

This is something the Kokyo chants in between the sutras that we chant. On this winter morning many centuries ago, after long and patient struggle to find the truth, a human being looked up and saw the morning star for the first time, and was set completely free, laying down his heavy burden once and for all. Realizing unsurpassable peace, heart opened wide as the sky, and from his mouth came forth a great lion's roar. I was, I am, and will be fully awakened. simultaneously with the entire universe. Those were Buddha's words when he looked at the morning star and woke up. May we all so wake up. That awakeness is with us all.

[40:35]

That's what he said. Simultaneous with the entire universe. Entire universe is awake. Awakeness is our universe. human birthright. Thank you very much. and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:18]

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