This is the room of simple power, of true practice, of the true mind, of faith, of the true body of faith. Good morning. Good morning. The chant that we just chanted is translated as the great vows of A.H. Dogen, and there have been practice periods where we've chanted it before every Dharma talk, but we haven't been doing that this practice period. But I think people miss chanting it. I know I do.

[01:01]

So I thought during the Sesshin we would chant it before the talks every day. Okay. So, during Sesshin the Dharma talks are just another time to sit Zazen. So you take your place and you cross your legs and you just listen, just listen, sitting still. There's a story about Suzuki Roshi that I've always loved and I want to tell it because I feel like it's a teaching about Sesshin and also about everyday life.

[02:06]

Suzuki Roshi was at Tassajara working in the garden, his rock garden that he created behind the cabin, his cabin, the abbot's cabin, and he was, I don't know how old he was at the time, but he was not all that well and was at Tassajara. It might have been the last summer that he was at Tassajara. And he had young strapping American tall young men working with him in this rock garden moving large boulders, Tassajara boulders into place. And just the way an artist would, you place it, it's not quite right, you move it a little here, how about that? Let's add this one, no that, the balance is wrong, let's do this. And so they were working all day long moving these boulders and shifting them. And by the end of the day, the big tall American guys were exhausted.

[03:09]

It was hot summer at Tassajara and Suzuki Roshi looked, you know, fresh as a daisy. And one of them said, Suzuki Roshi, how is it that we're so much younger than you are and we've been working all day and are exhausted and you're not even all that healthy right now and are older and you seem to be not tired at all. And Suzuki Roshi said, I rest in every moment. So all day long while they were working away, Suzuki Roshi was working too, but he was resting within the work, resting in every moment. So as a Sashin teaching, we do need to make effort, but what kind of effort is it that sustains us

[04:20]

where we're not exhausted and disgruntled, annoyed and irritated? What kind of effort is full effort and full resting in every moment? Like right now, are we resting just in the sounds of these machines? Green Gulch sounds, my voice, how your body feels on the cushion. Can you feel your body on the cushion? The Sabaton against your legs, are your legs just resting there? What isn't resting? And if there's no resting, what is there?

[05:27]

So this practice is a body practice, and when you're serving, when you're doing your orioke practice, or practicing orioke, see if you can find out how to rest there. In orioke practice, one way of resting is to use both sides of your body, to pick up the gamashio off the tray using both hands. You don't really need to use both hands, you can do it with one. But what about bringing the left and the right together to lift the gamashio off and bow to the person and set it down using both hands? And when you're serving, are your thumbs resting?

[06:34]

You know, I noticed someone's thumbs carrying the bowl and their thumbs were like at attention, up! Can the thumbs just be resting with the rest of the fingers? Those of you who teach tea and practice tea, when you carry bowls into the tea room, or those of you who have been to a tea ceremony, the hand, it's a very natural hand that lifts the bowl, carries it in, sets it down in front of the guests. So pay attention, we can pay attention to maybe everything's resting with these thumbs. What's going on with these thumbs? This kind of detail, noticing this kind of detail as teaching, as showing us something. So this morning I went around and did posture adjustments,

[07:47]

and also during Khenan I went around and looked at this mudra, the mudra of Shashu, and it seems pretty simple to do Shashu, the left fingers curled around the left thumb and placed with the arm parallel to the ground, the right hand on top, but there's a million, trillion variations, and there's all the way up like this, there's like this, I don't know if you can see everybody, and the beauty of being, I feel, being offered a form to practice with is the form is for us, the form, it's not a morally better way to have your hands one way or another, it's just, this is the form, and you directly practice with the form to find out,

[08:49]

can you rest there, or is there drowsiness, or is there tension, or a new form that you've made up. So, all during Sashin we have the forms of Sashin that are given to us to practice with, to wake up upon, wake up with. I've been recently talking about shadow, the shadow, and in Jungian psychological terms, there's a whole huge literature about shadow, and in a book that Wendy, the Shuso, gave me, I came upon this phrase that said,

[09:54]

in the shadow is the most vital, vital to me meaning alive, living, life force-ness is in shadow, and the shadow is that those parts of ourselves we don't want to look at, or we want to get rid of, and don't want other people to see, and yet the shadow functions, and when we're able to look at those parts of ourselves, the hidden, or the pushed aside, the unhonored, the unheld, the unrocked, you know, unrocked parts, when those come to the forefront, and we can look, and hold, and study,

[10:54]

there's enormous amount of energy there. But that's difficult work, that can be very difficult work, because along with shadow is, you know, shame, and feeling that you're a despicable person, or a terrible being, these kinds of negative, terribly negative thoughts. So how can we rest, how can we rest when we feel those very strong feelings about ourselves, and others as well? I'm leaving that floating here as a question,

[12:16]

because I feel like the whole of Seshina, the whole of our practice, addresses this. In Doksan the other day, someone referenced a story that I had told once, and I want to tell, even though many of you have probably heard it, I want to tell it again, because it's about, I feel this shadow side, and how to work with it, and the vitality that's there. And I'll try not to make this, usually when I start the story, I get so involved in it, I kind of enter the story, and I embellish it with all sorts of details, so I'll try to refrain from going overboard. This is a story that I know from Italian folktales, but it's found in different versions, the way folktales are in different countries. It's a story called Olive, or Olivia, it's the name of a girl,

[13:17]

who after she was born, her mother died. Once upon a time there was a girl, a little girl who was born, and soon after she was born, her mother died, and her father didn't know what to do, and he brought her to a family in the village where he was and said, could you please wet nurse the baby and take care of her, and I have to go and take care of business and try to get my affairs in order, and if I don't come back by the time she's 18 years old, please, you can just assume something has happened to me, and I won't be coming back. And they gladly took the child and took very good care of her and loved her, and she became part of the family, and as she grew up, they were hoping he didn't show up, he didn't come back year after year, and her 18th birthday came and went, and they thought, oh, thank goodness, she can be part of our family, there's no fear that she'll be taken away. But soon after that, the father came back,

[14:24]

and he had grown bitter over the years, and he demanded her to return, and they tried to reason with him and brought it actually to the village council, and they ruled in favor of the biological father that she must go to live with him. And before she left, her foster mother, adopted mother, gave her a special book of prayers, religious practices, and she kept that as a very precious thing. And when she went off with her father and was living in a strange place, she would take out this book and read these prayers, and it would be of great comfort to her. But he didn't like that. He felt that that connected her too much with this other family, and he demanded she not read that. And so she would do it in a hidden way. She would take it out and read it at night when she thought he wasn't around. And he warned her that if he ever caught her reading that again,

[15:27]

he would do something terrible. So one day she thought he had left, and she took the book out. In fact, she had asked her maid to warn her, but the maid had forgotten, and the father came back and came into the room, and there she was reading that. And he was so angry, he took her and put her hands out and cut off her hands. And then he brought her into the forest and just left her there. If you disobey me, then this is what you get. And so she was cut off from him with these hands that had been cut off. And there she was in this forest all by herself, completely helpless, powerless, and distraught. And she wandered in these dire circumstances, and she came upon this pear tree that was with ripe pears hanging there,

[16:34]

and she couldn't get them because of her hands. So she just longingly looked up at this wonderful pear tree, and the pear tree bent down so that the pears were right close to her mouth, and she just ate all the way around the core, one after the other, all these pears. And then she fell asleep and rested in the forest. Well, this happened to be the pear tree of the king of that country, and the pears were ripe and ready to pick. And so his gardener had gone out to pick them, and oh, my goodness, there are all these pears that had been eaten up. So he went to the king to say, an animal, a wild animal must have gotten into the pear tree and eaten these pears. And the king said, well, let's go and lay in wait and see what wild animal that could be and do away with that animal. So they went and hid, and in the nighttime, this beautiful woman came with these terrible wounds,

[17:35]

and the pear tree bent down again for her, and they saw what had been happening. And the king fell in love with her and came out from hiding and took her with him to the palace. And she didn't tell him anything about what happened. She was very quiet. And his mother didn't like her, didn't trust her, and thought she was some kind of a witch or a witch in the bad sense. And vowed internally to make her life difficult, the mother of the king. Well, lo and behold, like often happens, she became pregnant after they were married, and the king had to go to war and was gone. And she gave birth to twins. And the mother sent word to the father of the twins

[18:41]

that these babies had been born, but a dog and a cat had been born, that she was a witch because this is what happened and she must be killed. And when the letter got to the king, who was on the battlefield, he was very, very upset about this. But the mother was afraid to kill her and just ended up taking her and the newborns and bringing her back into the forest and telling the townspeople some other story and burying some animals. So there she was back again in the forest with these newborns tucked under her arms and even in a worse situation than she was before. And she was wandering and she was thirsty and she needed help, and she came upon this pond, a kind of pool, clear pool, with an old woman sitting by the side of the pond

[19:42]

scrubbing clothes, washing, scrubbing. And she said, Oh, old grandmother, please help me, help me, get me some water, I'm so thirsty. And the grandmother said, There's the pool there, get it yourself. And she said, Oh, but look, I have no hands and I have these babies, and please, please, you have to help me. And the grandmother said, Go ahead, get the water yourself, bend down and drink. So she realized she wasn't going to help her and so Olive, Olivia, bent down to the water to drink out of the water with her mouth, and when she bent down, the babies fell out from under her arms and fell into the water. And she began crying, Help, help, my babies, my babies, they've fallen into the water, and help me, I need your help. And the grandmother said, Plunge in your stumps. And she said, I have no hands, I have no hands. Plunge in your stumps. And she plunged her arms into the water

[20:47]

and she could feel these hands growing, [...] and she grabbed the babies out and had them safely. And the grandmother said, Now you can take care of yourself. And the end of the story is, she did take care of herself in the forest with her children and they grew up, and by and by, the king, who had never gotten over this, was wandering in the forest and there was a reunion at the end. And they recognized each other and all was well. So each one of us has shadow, or each one of us has some part of us that is undeveloped, that is weak, that we don't want to look at, that is part of our blind spot, that we feel in some way obstructs us from practice,

[21:53]

that is in the way of our practice, and that we have to get rid of it in order to practice. But the story says differently, and these kind of folktales, you know, I feel like they get passed on through years and years and from one group of people to another because the story speaks to human beings, speaks to the human condition, speaks deeply. And the image of plunging in with whatever and whoever you are, that's what you are. You can't trade it in for a new model. And to hold back from your life because you're not all there, you don't feel you're all perfect or the ideal or how you wish it were or like so-and-so, to hold back from your life is suffering.

[22:57]

And not only suffering for yourself but for those around you because we all want, we want to meet the full being, the light and dark, the whole being. We want to meet each other with wholeness. We want to meet ourself with wholeness. And wholeness is to plunge in your stumps, to plunge in with whatever is there, not waiting for it somehow to get better next year or to lose ten pounds, as they always say. So when you plunge in with everything that's there, with the light and dark, you plunge into your life, you plunge in, just the way she plunged into this water, this is like the living water of your life, the living, life-giving waters. That's where you plunge in, and that's Sashin.

[24:01]

That's actually each moment, but Sashin helps us to see that that's each moment. And we plunge in with full body and mind. This body practice is, it's not just a mental thing. It's just like in the story, the arms go into the water, up to the shoulders, fully, total immersion. And our deepest self, or our innermost request, as Suzuki Roshi says, is to plunge in with our whole self and to meet our life fully. We actually truly want to not hold back. I truly do not want to hold back. And what holds me back?

[25:02]

Well, thinking it will be so embarrassing, you know, because I'm not this or that or the other, and I will be found out, and I will be accused of this, that, and the other, and all sorts of things. You know the story too. So, the story of Olivia, she goes into this forest, you know, and sometimes we, with our wounds, you know, must go into the forest to take care of ourselves. We can't, and this is not running away, this is not escaping, this is taking care of our life fully and thoroughly and skillfully to go into the forest. The forest is, you know, it can be a real forest or it can be a practice period of the monastery of Sashin. We take that time to go physically, but it doesn't have to necessarily be physically,

[26:06]

into a situation that will help us, an environment of calm that will help us look at what we need to look at, look at our stumps and take care of those wounds in the most thorough way. And in our lineage anyway, one doesn't stay in that environment forever and ever and ever, although you take the monastery walls with you, but the monastery walls go with you rather than you staying within. That might be escaping after, but you have to decide for yourself or maybe you need your friends to help you decide if it's turned into escaping rather than meeting. So we use whatever we have. If we have stumps, we use stumps. That's it. And that's our uniqueness.

[27:11]

She was unique. Olivia was unique. And each one of us is completely unique. And we each have our own world, our own world of our inner and outer world. Nobody can tell you what to do, really. So I brought something to read by Uchiyama Roshi that was published in this Wind Bell of Fall, Winter 98, Wind Bell of Zen Center's little magazine. And Uchiyama Roshi passed away, and this was written by a student of his, some of his last teachings that really speak to Seishin and to what we get caught on.

[28:15]

So Uchiyama Roshi says, wanting to feel good or desiring to have some satori, satori or enlightenment or kensho, some satori experience while sitting zazen is nothing more than the work of human desire. What transcends such desire is the work of Buddhadharma. So transcending desire, where does one advance to? It is the depth of life. Doing zazen has nothing to do with the value judgment of deciding between this or that. Rather, sitting is facing the depth of one's own life. This is the most important point of zazen, functioning as Buddhadharma. So wanting to feel good

[29:24]

or desiring to have some special experience, satori experience while sitting zazen is nothing more than the work of human desire. So we may notice that, that we want to have, you know, boy, that was a good sit. Somebody will say, that was a good sit. That wasn't a good sit. What does it mean? Was it that I felt really good? Is that what I want? Is that what this is all about, feeling good? And Uchiyama Roshi says, that has nothing to do with it. That's just more human desire. That's just being on the samsaric wheel of trying to get things that we like and trying to keep away things we don't like, feeling good. But what is it that's beyond that

[30:31]

or let's go of that? And he says it's facing the depth of our human life, the depth of our human life, the depth of life, of our own life, the depth. We are much, much more than wanting to feel good, you know, and look good. He goes on, nor is zazen a kind of mental training or improving one's skills or discipline. Such things are merely devices for being self-satisfied. Zazen as Buddhadharma is not a matter of setting some scale of measurement in front of oneself and then measuring the progress. It is just settling on oneself,

[31:31]

sitting, facing the depth of life. What Shakyamuni Buddha realized is that doing zazen is exactly that kind of thing, meaning settling on oneself and sitting facing the depth of life. So I think he's, Uchiyama Roshi is mentioning various pitfalls that happen and in Sashin, I think they happen too, which is setting out some kind of measurement scale and then putting it in front of you and then measuring how you're doing according to the progress towards this goal you set for yourself, goal one has set for oneself. And this may be some goal like, I'm not going to move this entire period no matter what.

[32:35]

Now that might be a fine thought about effort, but is that laced with competition with your neighbors, embarrassment that you're moving a lot and you don't want people to see that? Is there some kind of measurement scale that's thrown in there that you're measuring against that's extra, really? It's not that having a vow or intention to sit still is off, it's is there some measuring, comparing mind that kicks in? And then what ultimately happens is, whether you accomplish it or didn't accomplish it, then there's, oh, what a good girl am I, you know? Or I'm a terrible person, I couldn't do that, I'm a terrible Zen student, and the people next to me are so wonderful

[33:39]

and I'm so terrible or that kind of thing. Or I'm so great, look, I'm sitting still and they're all moving around, a bunch of slackers. This kind of, this is all extra. This is setting up some kind of measurement in front of you, in front of me, and then measuring the progress. It's not settling oneself on oneself. It's very busy, actually, busy mind, and extremely painful. So we sit facing the depth of our life or the profoundness of our life and the mystery of our life. He goes on.

[34:42]

One thing he mentioned, which I found very helpful, is sometimes we talk about monkey mind, which is a mind that leaps around like a monkey, but he has another term, which is fuhoitsu, which has to do with a rabbit, a rabbit that's jumping and hopping around. I haven't seen that many monkeys, you know, out running around. I think monkeys run around in India a lot, and I think that image comes from the sutras in Shakyamuni Buddha's time. But there's rabbits, you know, if you go up and take a walk at Green Elk, you see these wonderful rabbits scurrying here and there and leap-de-dooing around. So this word fuhoitsu means, the character is, there's a rabbit in the character, and then the radical means to move, so the way the character is, it's to move like a rabbit. And then fumi is a negation of that,

[35:47]

so the admonition is to fuhoitsu, or not move around, and indulge yourself in kind of haphazard leaping around, chasing after the objects in our mind, chasing the objects of our desire, what it is that we want. So when we stop chasing around the objects of our desire and our fantasies and this comparative mind and this measurement, what's left, you know? And what Yama Roshi says, it's the depth of our life, facing the depth, profound depth of our life, which is this settling on ourself. So the desire realm of wanting special experiences

[36:48]

and wanting things is very narrow, is a kind of narrow, so it's not wide enough for actually who we are. It doesn't encompass everything, which is inconceivable, the Buddha Dharma. So for the next seven days, we'll be sitting together in this wonderful sitting space, this old bar in Zendo, and we'll be chanting together and eating together, walking. Please, let's find out where our desires are, where the shadow is, and bring our full body, body and mind there.

[37:53]

Be willing to, be willing to plunge in our stumps. And if there's fear that arises, and scary feelings, we can talk about that, talk about that with someone. We'll be chanting at noon today the Phukan Dzazengi, which is the Universal Recommendations for Sitting Zazen by Dogen, Ehe Dogen Dayo Sho, and we've been chanting that all practice period at noon. And I will try to include that teaching in the session lectures as well. Thank you very much.

[39:03]

May our intention,

[39:09]

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