I love to taste the truth of the Tardigrades' words. Good morning. Is that loud enough? In the back? Everywhere? Oh, everywhere. Everywhere? Oh, that sounds good. I don't know if I can do this consistently, though. No? Okay. It's okay. Okay. Today, I'm going to start with the first talk in this, not always so, Suzuki Roshi's first talk, and it's called, named, we called it, Calmness of Mind.

[01:04]

Calmness of Mind is one of the things that Suzuki Roshi emphasized over and over again, maybe almost as much as anything else. So, in this talk, he talks about what is Shikantaza. He starts right out with talking about what Shikantaza is. When we had our last class, I said that silent illumination was Shikantaza, or Shikantaza is what was called in China, silent illumination. So he says, Shikantaza, or Zazen, is just to be ourselves. When we had our class the other night, Jeremy asked, what is our practice?

[02:10]

What is the purpose of our practice? And I said, just to be ourselves, just to be yourself, which is not my… I didn't invent that. Suzuki Roshi says, Shikantaza is just to be yourself. So, the purpose of our practice is just to be ourselves. If you ask a question, you get some kind of response, but you may ask the same question the next day and you get a different response. So, when you say, what is the purpose of our practice? At that moment, that's the correct response, but tomorrow it may be a different response. So, don't hang on to a response as the answer. When we do not expect anything, we can be ourselves. That is our way to live fully in each moment of time, and this practice continues forever.

[03:22]

So, to live in each moment of time, to live on each moment of time, actually is Shikantaza, to thoroughly live each moment of time. So, this is why Suzuki Roshi is always saying, just be one with your activity. When you are one with your activity, then you are living completely on each moment of time. So, in some sense, it doesn't make any difference what your activity is. It does and it doesn't. You know, there's the old saying, it doesn't matter what you do, but it's the way you do it. But I've changed that to, it matters what you do and it matters the way you do it. Both are important, but the way, what you do, how you do something is the most important point. So, for us, in our practice, the most important point is how you do something.

[04:26]

How you cut the carrots, how you chop the wood, how you carry the water, how you sit zazen, how you step. I noticed, I had a kind of revelation this morning. I realized that when I walk, my feet are out to the side. I walk kind of like this. But actually, in order to strengthen your knees and keep your knees in shape, you should walk like this. Keep your knees, your feet straight ahead so that your knees are right over your feet. And then you don't have, it eliminates knee problems. And I tried doing that. I did some kin hand in my room with my feet straight ahead. And it really felt wonderful for my knees. So, this is like really paying attention to your step.

[05:32]

Paying attention to every step in each moment. Paying attention to how you do something in each moment. You know, Suzuki Roshi said, Shikantaza, or practice, is just living your life little by little. Just each moment of time, to live completely on each moment of time. And to approach each moment in a fresh way. So that's why the less thinking you have, the easier it is to do that. Because when we get caught up in our mental constructions, it's hard to focus on what's actually happening. So, to live fully in each moment of time,

[06:40]

then we have to understand, well, what is it? . 1140, 1140, that was good, thank you, 1140, but actually it's just now.

[09:13]

So past, present, and future are all now. Anytime we say, where are you? We say, or when is this? We say, now, of course, but then we also add the other, oh it's two o'clock. So how to be timeless is to be always involved in now. The essence of time is timelessness, and the essence of timelessness is time, just now. So how we live our life moment by moment is in now, and to be aware of now. So for a period of time each day, a discontinuous period of time each day, just try to sit in Shikantaza without moving and

[10:17]

without expecting anything. But this expectation is the problem, is a big problem. As if you were in your last moment. Moment after moment you feel your last moment, your last instant. In each exhalation and each inhalation there are countless instants of time, and your intention is to live on each instant. So if you're living on each instant, then nothing is next. You just don't expect anything. The way to satsang is to not expect anything. Sometimes people say, or new students will say, how do I prepare for sasheen? And I always say, there's no preparation for sasheen. It's just that when sasheen arrives in the morning,

[11:21]

you just get up and go to the zendo, as if you are not expecting anything. If you expect seven days of painful legs, you have a big problem. It's just this moment, this moment, this moment. So we think in consecutive moments, but actually it's just this moment. Consecutive instance of this moment, the renewed consecutive instance of this moment is samadhi, or shikantaza. So he says to just die on this moment, but although you die on this moment,

[12:26]

you are reborn on this moment. So unless you die on this moment, you can't be reborn on this moment. So in Zen, it's called something like the great death. How do we die the great death so that we can be born? So this is also bound up with rebirth. In Buddhism, there's all kinds of theories about reincarnation and rebirth. Rebirth is not reincarnation. Rebirth is more like actually no birth and no death. But when one thing lets go, another thing appears.

[13:40]

Something cannot appear unless something is let go of. And when we know how to let go, we know how to come back to life. So he says, first, then he starts talking about breathing. He says, for 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 completely,

[14:47]

this is called, and he talks about this, called letting go. And when you inhale, it's called taking up. So inhaling is coming to life. Exhaling is letting go of everything. So he says, exhaling is the most important. Our usual effort is to stay alive. But he says, it's more important to let go. He's putting emphasis on more important, but actually they're both equal. When you bow, you put your palms together and then you go like this. And the actual bow takes place at the bottom when you stop. This is coming to bow, and this is the bow, is when you stop. And when you stop,

[15:53]

everything stops. It's just letting go of everything. This is, when you stop and you bow, it's like there's nothing left. There's nothing more to do. But then you stand back up again, and the world starts again. But you let go of everything. And when you bow together, you both enter emptiness, where you're not holding on to anything. This is perfect communication. When we do service, I time my bow during the chanting so that when I come to the bottom of the bow, that's when I would like the bell to ring. Bong, not bong, bong. Wait for the end,

[16:56]

bong, so that we come together in that instant. It feels good, feels right. And when we bow to each other, same thing. It's not like we bow perfunctory. Because we bow so much, it becomes perfunctory. So in a sense, I don't like to bow so much, because when you do something too much, you just get used to it. And then you're kind of not present in it. That's one of the problems encountered with bowing. So in order to really be present in bowing, we have to make some effort. So I want to look at my notes here. So he says,

[18:05]

when you exhale in this way, then naturally your inhalation will start from there. All that fresh blood bringing nourishment from outside will pervade your body. You are completely refreshed. Then you start to exhale to extend that fresh feeling into emptiness. So moment after moment, without trying to do anything, you continue Shikantaza. So one breath is one life cycle. Inhaling is inspiration, and exhaling is expiration. And it's one life cycle. So you live your life moment by moment on one breath after the next. And this is how you study birth and death. It's right there every moment in your breath. If you know how to study

[19:15]

your breath, you'd be studying birth and death. The end of one thing is the beginning of another. So we don't know what the next beginning will be. One of the problems with dying, so to speak, is that we don't know what the next beginning is going to be, and we're afraid of losing something. We're afraid of losing consciousness, what we think of as consciousness. So it's a great mystery, and we have to be able to just let go. This is called great faith. There is nothing you can do about it except have great faith in nothing. You can think of all kinds of wonderful things that will happen, and that's very comforting. I will be reborn as a whatever, a Raja, maybe next time.

[20:23]

Or I will go to heaven, or I will be sitting on the right hand of the Lord, or something like that. We have all these wonderful ideas that are comforting, but to just let go into the mystery without knowing anything, shikantaza. So shikantaza is the basis of our life in reality. It's not just some exercise. The meaning of our life is shikantaza, just doing, just being one with our activity, just being totally connected to the cycle of birth and death. Dogen has a wonderful fast school called birth and death, shoji. There is a Buddha within birth

[21:42]

and death. There is no Buddha within birth and death. This is just koan. Just living our life within birth and death is enlightenment, because if we live our life completely within birth and death, there is no birth and death. Emptiness is another term meaning no birth and no death within birth and death. So moment after moment, without trying to do anything, you continue shikantaza. Complete shikantaza may be difficult because of the pain in your legs when you are

[22:45]

sitting cross-legged, but even though you have pain in your legs, you can do it. Even though you feel that your practice is not good enough, you can do it. Your breathing will gradually vanish, and you will gradually vanish, fading into emptiness. He's talking about when you're sitting zazen. Little by little, the breathing will become more subtle, and you will become more subtle. You will gradually vanish, fading into emptiness. Inhaling without effort, you naturally come back to yourself with some color or form. Color and form is a kind of technical term, which means existence. Exhaling, you gradually fade into emptiness, like an empty sheet of white

[23:53]

paper. Exhaling, you gradually fade into emptiness, empty white paper. That is shikantaza. The important point is your exhalation. Instead of trying to feel yourself as you inhale, fade into emptiness as you exhale. So this is a pretty radical way of speaking. It seems nihilistic. What about our active life? So at this point, he's emphasizing exhaling. He's saying, because we cling so much to life, he's emphasizing the other side, or presenting the other side. So when you practice this in your last moment, you will have nothing to be afraid of. You are

[24:55]

actually aiming at emptiness. You become one with everything after you completely exhale with this feeling. And if you are still alive, naturally you will inhale again. Oh, I'm still alive, fortunately or unfortunately. Then you start to exhale and fade again into emptiness. Maybe you don't know what kind of feeling it is, but some of you know it. By some chance, you must have had the feeling, that kind of feeling. So when you completely let go, then you can completely come to life, come back again. If you only half let go, you only half come back. So to live your life is to let go completely, and then come back completely. The swing this way determines

[26:00]

what the swing this way will be. So if we only live half-heartedly, we can only die half-heartedly. And then, how to live out our dying, how to be with our dying, our extermination, so to speak, our out-breath, a long out-breath, because each one of us has to experience this. So in a sense, learning how to live is learning how to die, and learning how to die is learning how to live. So what you do, when you do this practice, you cannot easily become angry. When you are more

[27:08]

interested in inhaling than in exhaling, you easily become quite angry. You are always trying to be alive. The other day, my friend had a heart attack, and all he could do was exhale. He couldn't inhale. That was a terrible feeling, he said. At that moment, if he could have practiced exhaling as we do, aiming for emptiness, then I think he would not have felt so bad. The great joy for us is exhaling rather than inhaling, maybe. When my friend kept trying to inhale, he thought he couldn't inhale anymore. If he could have exhaled smoothly and completely, then I think another inhalation would have come more easily. To take care of the exhalation is very important. To die is more important than trying to be alive. When we always try to be alive, we have trouble.

[28:16]

Rather than trying to be alive or active, if we can be calm and die or fade away into emptiness, then naturally we will be all right. Buddha will take care of us. Because we have lost our mother's bosom, we do not feel like her child anymore. Yet, fading away into emptiness can feel like being at our mother's bosom, and we will feel as though she will take care of us. Moment after moment, do not lose this practice of shikantaza. So the question is, what is this mother's bosom? All religions are based on this. God will take care of us. Buddha will take care of us. Whatever. All people are looking for, where will I find this comfort after mother? And so, where is the big mother? Heaven, Jesus, God, Buddha,

[29:28]

Buddha nature. Katagiri Roshi used to talk about religious security. He said, everyone is looking for religious security. Where do we find our security? Where do we find our true comfort, our true feeling of belonging, and our true feeling of where we can actually rest? It's a good question, because that's what everyone is looking for. So he says, various kinds of religious practice are included in this point. When people say Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, they want to be Amida Buddha's children. That is why they practice repeating Amida Buddha's name. The same is true with our zazen practice. If we know how

[30:39]

to practice shikantaza, and if they know how to repeat Amida Buddha's name, it cannot be different. You know, in Japan and in China, this is called self-power and other power. The Shin sect in Japan, their practice is to chant Amida Buddha's name in order to be born in the pure land. They don't have to do anything else. That's called appealing to other power. And zen is usually sometimes called self-power. Stand up on your own feet, find your own salvation, which is Buddha's original plan, his original teaching. But actually, it's not self-power or other power. Other power is self-power. Self-power is other

[31:42]

power. So we have enjoyment and we are free. We feel free to express ourselves because we are ready to fade into emptiness. When we are trying to be active and special and to accomplish something, we cannot express ourselves. Small self will be expressed, but big self will not appear from emptiness. We can easily express our small self. When we talk about expression, expressing ourselves, what we think about is expressing my personality or expressing my ego, doing what I want. That's not what he calls expressing yourself. Expressing yourself means letting go of ego so that big mind will be expressed. So from emptiness, only great self appears.

[32:53]

That is shikantaza, okay? It's not so difficult if you really try. So my comment here is, when we know or have faith in the ground, then we have freedom to play out our lives in the sky. We do live in the sky. We have our feet on the ground and we live in the sky. So to know where the ground is all the time, then we have some freedom

[34:01]

because we're not attached to birth and we're not attached to death and we can live out our life with some freedom. Do you have some question? Yeah. Well, the ground means emptiness. Even though there's no ground, not an inch of ground to stand on. We say there's not an inch of ground to stand on. That's... and not relying on that is standing on the ground.

[35:06]

You said that you don't like to bow too much because it becomes routine. If it be... no, I said... I didn't say I don't like to bow too much. I said we should be careful. When you bow too much, it becomes too routine and then you lose your... You know, I feel that way about sitting. Yeah. Well, you do a lot of sitting. It's not like I can stop. How do you work with that? Well, you just work until you get so tired of it, it doesn't matter anymore. That's the answer. Tim? It seemed like Suzuki Roshi was giving a meditation instruction that felt to me like the breath is kind of creating a sort of a wave of activity or inactivity in the meditation.

[36:21]

And I have an idea of meditation as a little less weedy. I just wondered if you could say anything about that. What do you mean wave? Well, it was kind of like, you know, you're kind of... it was suggested like, you know, you're going down with your exhale and then you're coming back up with that activity. And it felt by going up and down, it felt like it was always active because it was always moving. Yes, right. It's always moving. We say sit still, but you can't sit still. You can only approximate stillness. But within that stillness, what looks like stillness is great activity. So, activity is always... sometimes, you know, activity is like a big, a solid ball

[37:28]

with like the sun, and sometimes it's like, you know, it's spread out fire like the sun's activity. So, in the middle of the sun, it's just stillness. And on the periphery, it's leaping flames. So, within our stillness, the more still we become, the greater our dynamism is, because it's all concentrated. All of our energy is concentrated in this dynamic stillness. And when you're balanced and relaxed, it just feels like light. So, and then when you are moving in what looks like activity, when your activity is being

[38:44]

disseminated in movement, the core of that movement is dynamic stillness. So, within stillness is activity, within activity is stillness. We just look at it from one point of view or another. So, the same thing is sometimes called stillness and sometimes called activity. But it's the same thing. It's like when you look at the moon, one side is light, the other side is dark. But the moon itself is both light and dark, and neither light nor dark. It just depends on which side you're looking at. So, when we sit, satsang, you know, to really make good effort to sit up straight, not lean

[39:52]

backward or forward, you should, when you sit zazen, best way is to give yourself zazen instruction every time you sit down and throughout the whole period, because you're subtly moving. Body is not, although it looks like you're sitting still, the whole body is changing. Your mudra is changing, your mouth is changing, your shoulders are changing, your spine is changing subtly, and you have to subtly correct, I don't say correct, but subtly re-establish your posture. You have to keep re-establishing your posture all the time. The thing to concentrate on in zazen is posture. Then you can pay attention to your breathing. But posture is the most important. Posture is first. And so we continually go over and over

[40:54]

the posture, checking out all the points of posture. How is the mudra? How is the spine? How are the shoulders? How is your tenseness? That's a big one. Tenseness in zazen. There's tension, which is what keeps the form, maintains the form, but tenseness is what's extra. You don't need it. So what is it that you don't need? And you should take care of that. Well, I don't need all this tenseness in my back. I don't need all my shoulders coming up to my ears. Let go of it. How do I let go of it? Let go. Feel the tenseness draining out of your body. So if somebody comes and moves you, you just move like a puppet. But at the same time, you have this wonderful tension that's holding you straight up. And it's all in balance. So you have plenty of work to do when you're sitting zazen. Lots of work to do to maintain

[41:57]

this posture all the time. And if you really pay attention to that, it takes your attention off of your painfulness, because it's not the only thing. Painfulness is not the only thing going on. It's just one of those things that's going on. But we tend to focus on it, and it becomes the main subject. Actually, the main subject is posture and breathing. If you pay attention to posture and breathing, you can deal with the rest, because you can let whatever comes pass through. So you have a good foundation for whatever it is that's passing through. So zazen is not just being passive. It's being active and passive. The active side is sitting up straight and paying attention to posture, keeping your mind busy, so that it's not just wandering around. You have the thought of zazen, maintaining the thought of

[43:05]

zazen, maintaining the thought of posture, and the thought of following breath. So your mind has something to do. If it doesn't have something to do, it will just fantasize. So you keep bringing your attention back to posture and breathing, and let go of the fantasy, without blaming yourself that you have a fantasy. Because the fantasy at that moment is zazen. But it's not what your intention is. So you bring your intention back to posture and breathing. Yeah? I had two questions regarding posture. One is, is posture so important? Why is there not that much posture adjustment? And the other is, throughout the period of zazen, coming back to posture, does that actually become positive, that you always do the adjustment?

[44:07]

Yeah. Yes. Because it means you're always aware. And the first question is good. Good question. I think about it a lot. But people seem to have pretty good posture. It's hard to tell a person's posture in the winter, because everybody's wearing a lot of clothes. So sometimes it looks like somebody doesn't have good posture, but it's due to how much clothing they're wearing. But it's a good point. And I will pay attention to that, think about it more, and go around and adjust posture. It seems like part of the construction about how to relate to the breath involves putting some extra energy, or maybe just extra attention, maybe extra energy into the exhalation. And I recommend it as a powerful practice, but it also seems a little contrived, like you can get into

[45:12]

controlling... That's a good point. Basically, you let the breath be. You just let the breath be. But it should be down here. Letting the breath be doesn't mean you just let it be shallow. It means that from your hara, you just let the breath come and go. If you're not breathing from here, you should be aware of that, and allow your breath... If your posture is good, posture is open, then your breath will more easily fall down to here. Actually, if you want to get your breath down, just open up your posture, lift up your sternum, and open yourself up, and then your posture, and then your breath will more easily come down to here. But there is a way of breathing when you exhale, to put some effort into exhale, like silent... That's acceptable. Tomorrow, I'll talk more about breathing.

[46:22]

may I enter...

[46:45]

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