This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations by people like you. Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me? Okay. I want to talk this morning about simplicity and... the art of doing less, simplicity and the art of doing less. And I want to illustrate this with a kind of a classical Zen story or Zen koan that at first may not appear simple, but bear with me. My attempt is to try and make something that seems not so simple, simple. This is a, this story, some of you I'm sure have heard this, it's very, and some not.

[01:00]

It's story 19 in the Gateless Barrier collection. Jia Zhou asked Nanxuan, what is the way? Nanxuan said, everyday mind is the way. Jia Zhou asked, how should I try to direct myself toward it? Nanxuan said, if you direct yourself toward it, you will go in the wrong direction. Jiajiao said, but if I don't direct myself toward it, how will I know it? Nanxuan answered, the way has nothing to do with knowing or not knowing. Knowing is an exaggeration, and not knowing is stupidity. When you find the genuine way, you'll find that it is vast and boundless. What does this have to do with yes and no thinking? So I hope that's clear. Well, this story, these two Zen teachers in this story, Zhao Zhao studied with Nanfuang for, it's said, for 40 years, and he started at age 18.

[02:16]

So this dialogue that has been passed through the ages, through hundreds and hundreds of years, of Zen tradition, Jia Jia was probably in his early 20s and Nanquan was probably in his early 40s. It reminds me a little bit of the subject of simplicity. I was thinking of how when I was in my early 20s and I first came to Zen Center, actually a few... When I was even younger, before I came to Zen Center, one of my teachers once said to me that he thought that I had an intelligence about simplicity. And I had no idea what that meant. I like the intelligence part. But I didn't so much like the simplicity part. It didn't sound so positive to me. And yet now here I am kind of talking about simplicity.

[03:21]

So this story is a lifetime prescription and direction for practicing, for a way of being in the world that is essential and heartfelt, a way that may not make sense to our usual complicated minds. Zen practice is so ordinary and so simple, it's difficult to feel and embrace just how simple and ordinary it is. This question, what is the way? What a simple question. Isn't that the question that we all want to be asking? What is this life? What is this life? Who am I? What does it mean to be a human being? What is this life, old age, sickness and death stuff anyway that we read about and hear about if we study? Zen study Buddhism.

[04:27]

What is it really? How can we penetrate this? What is our real power? How can we find our real essential power as a human being? When I was a young Zen student, first living out at Green Gulch, there was a teacher, one of my teachers, a woman named Yvonne Rand, said to me, she looked me in the eye one day and said, you have a way of pissing away your power. And again, I took this as a tremendous compliment, because I had no idea that I had any power to piss away. And I think really, in some way, what she was talking about was how I made things complicated. and how I didn't drop down into my own body, into my own simplicity, that I was always, in some way, riding above that.

[05:30]

So this is the answer to this story, the question, what is the way? Everyday mind, or ordinary mind, or the mind of simplicity is the way, the mind that isn't clever or cluttered, not filled with our usual prejudices. You've probably all noticed how just completely our minds are cluttered with these prejudices, how immediately fear comes up so easily in so many situations, how we brace, how we create space between other people in ways that we become used to it and we forget that we even have these biases and prejudices. So this is kind of a shocking answer. The everyday mind is the way. And the word, I really like this word, simple.

[06:33]

And what it means, the word simple means one or unfolded. Unfolded. So we tend to, in our lives, fold ourselves, hide ourselves, find ways to not be transparent. There's this beautiful few lines from a Rilke poem where he says, I want to unfold. Nowhere do I want to remain folded. Because where I am bent and folded, there I am a lie. Say a lie? A lie. There I am a lie. Thank you. And I think if I were to ask Do any of you lie? Do any of you ever tell lies? I've actually been in... I've done some workshops where I've asked that question, and when I ask that question, everyone says, no, I don't lie. I don't lie. But then if I say, well, do you ever sugarcoat the truth?

[07:37]

Do you ever say one thing and mean something else? Do you ever have a motivation and... find yourself acting in a completely kind of, you know, a round way, a way that's folded. And then if I go back and ask, well, does anyone lie? Well, everyone raises their hand. That it's this practice, right, this finding, this everyday mind, this mind of unfoldedness and transparency is so difficult. It's a lifetime practice. Right, so this question, the next question that Jajo asked is, you know, how do I find it? This is great. So he, you know, so the answer is everyday mind. But then he says, how? This is a great question. How? You know, I think so many of us in people who are interested in spiritual practice and the whole realm of what gets put into the realm of self-help or improvement

[08:47]

It's so easy to get, we get kind of almost addicted or this sense of flightiness, all these wonderful prescriptions and words that we like hearing and they make us feel good. But underneath that, I think, is this question, how? So how do I find the way? And the answer is not what you think, not by directing yourself toward it. So in a way... It's not by directing yourself toward it, but somehow by dropping down into your own body, dropping down into the simplest, unfolded places in our bodies where we're not filled with fear and prejudices. And this answer, this is, of course, paradoxical. There's something paradoxical at the heart of this story about how do you find it?

[09:48]

Well, not by going toward it. I wanted to read, just as I was getting ready to come down here this morning, I thought, well, what would Suzuki Roshi have to say about this subject? And I wanted to bring him with me into this room, and I feel like he is here in his way. But I just opened up, not always so, and I thought, well, this is a great little passage on this subject of simplicity, and it's from one of his lectures called The Zen of Going to the Restroom. So what could be simpler? It says, in our everyday life, we eat many things, good and bad, fancy and simple, tasty and not so tasty. Later, we need to go to the restroom. Similarly, after filling our mind, we practice Zazen.

[10:51]

Otherwise, it can get pretty smelly down in the Zendo. Otherwise, our thinking will eventually become very unhealthy. It is necessary for us to make our mind clear before we study something. It is like drawing something on white paper. If you do not use clean white paper, you cannot draw what you want. So it is necessary to go back to your original state, where you have nothing to see and nothing to think about. Then you will understand what you are doing. The more you practice zazen, the more you will be interested in your everyday life, in your everyday mind. You will discover what is necessary and what is not. What part to correct and what part to emphasize more. So by practice, you will know how to organize your life. This is to observe your situation accurately, to clear your mind and begin from your original starting point. This is like going to the restroom.

[11:58]

So this answer, and I think what Suzuki Roshi is saying, is that what we expect when we ask the question, how, is we expect something to do. But instead... what we're told is do less, simplify, settle your mind. The answer to finding our way is to do less, to find real simplicity. In our usual way, right, we go around and are, you know, a nice, metaphor that I like, or a way to think about this in our bodies, is that for many of us, we may be holding our shoulders. And we go around in our life holding our shoulders, but we don't even know it. So this Zen paradox is kind of a way, I think of it as this, almost like this Aikido, of asking us to raise our shoulders up and then let them down.

[13:08]

Let's all try that. So raise your shoulders up and then let them down. So you may, this is a practice of just experimenting with was I holding there? And was I holding in some way that I didn't even know it? And by raising my shoulders and then letting them get down, I can learn something. It's a way that I can observe. in my life that, oh, I didn't even know it. I was holding in my shoulders. And I'm using this as a metaphor for how I think our prejudices and the way that we bring our ideas and how cluttered our minds get, that sometimes we need different kinds of feedback. And it can be the feedback that we get from our own bodies or the feedback that we get in our meditation practice, by having that time of having space to allow whatever comes up to come up.

[14:14]

Sometimes we need the feedback of other people, of teachers or therapists or friends or sangha members, to people who say, gee, your shoulders are, you're holding your shoulders. Did you know that? And this can be a great gift. And this practice of In a way, it's the practice of doing less. It's a lot of effort to hold our shoulders up. It's unnecessary effort. The prejudices and ideas that we bring to our relationships and to our lives, it can be just a lot of extra energy. And just somehow returning. It's like Suzuki Roshi saying, I'm returning to that back to our... white piece of paper to our original nature. In our culture, I've noticed, I spend much of my time, I go back and forth between the world of Zen practice and the world of business practice.

[15:25]

So everything about my life is kind of a complete paradox. I wrote a book called ZBA, Zen of Business Administration. And now I'm working on a book called Accomplishing More by Doing Less. Accomplishing More by Doing Less. And I've been talking a lot in the business world about the importance of laziness and the practice of laziness. And this is pretty radical in business. But I'm finding people are really getting it because so many people are just so burnt out. I know in my world, whenever I go up to one of my fellow business people and you ask how people are doing, it's always, I'm busy. I'm really busy. And this is like said as a kind of a badge of honor, how busy I am. Imagine if you weren't busy, you would be the worst thing that you can be in our culture. You'd be a loser. You'd be not busy.

[16:27]

So I want us all to be losers. and to be willing to be not so busy. There's a wonderful quote from Kaz Tanahashi, who is a world-renowned calligrapher and translator and Zen Center scholar, and one of his quotes, he says that industrious people... build industry, lazy people create civilization. Industrious people build industry and lazy people create civilization. But it's the lazy people who are painting and writing and dancing and doing music and poetry because this is what, as we relax and we're not so busy all the time, we can be

[17:28]

We can create things. We can meet. We can take care of each other. So we want everything to be nameable and understandable. We don't like to look foolish. We don't like to be a loser. We don't like to make mistakes or look lazy. We resist having our worlds turned upside down or be unpredictable in any way. We really want comfort. This line is a way to help us be not so comfortable. Knowing is an exaggeration. Not knowing is stupidity. What is that? Of course we want to know, but we don't want to exaggerate and we don't want to be called stupid. What is that about? And then that pointing to that it's beyond that Practicing is beyond yes and no thinking.

[18:32]

So knowing is an exaggeration. Not knowing is stupidity. The way is beyond yes and no thinking. So again, it's just pointing, I think, to a kind of simplicity, a kind of laziness. And I'm using laziness in a very positive way. This is what I love. I've been hanging out a lot with Kaz Tanahashi, and I... I used to run a publishing company, and one of the series that Kaz and I, it was on the drawing board, but we never had the courage to do it. It was going to be a whole series of books and calendars and reading cards called Lazy and Stupid. Somehow, I didn't think it would do so well yet commercially. I didn't think that the world was quite ready for that. But there's some way, I think, that we all try and avoid our laziness and our stupidity, the part of us that doesn't know, that we don't know.

[19:37]

It's so amazing when we drop down and start to have any sense of this everyday mind is the way. What does this mean, everyday mind is the way? And how is it that we can begin to see the holiness and sacredness of this everyday mind, the holiness and sacredness of our bodies and minds and everything that we see around us? There was this, I want to bring in this story. There was a study that was done about happiness. They were trying to measure happiness. what it was that made people happy. And there was a group of psychologists who kind of arranged this study. And they gave people these questionnaires on happiness to copy.

[20:40]

And for half of the group, when they went to the copy machine, these psychologists planted a dime on the copy machine. And for the other half of the group, there was no dime. And the group... that when they went over to the copy machine and found a dime and then filled out this questionnaire, they were significantly happier than the group that didn't find anything. Clearly, this was not about the money. This was that when we find something that we don't expect, it makes us feel better. It makes us feel happy. But we have so much resistance to seeing what we don't expect. So this practice, line after line of this koan, is what we don't expect. We don't expect to hear that everyday mind is the way.

[21:42]

We don't expect if you direct yourself toward it, you'll go in the wrong direction. And we don't expect knowing is exaggeration, not knowing is stupidity. So in part, there's a teaching happening here which is let go of your expectations. What if you found dimes everywhere? What if you saw that wherever you go? Just kind of looking at your hand or just seeing how unexpected your breath is or looking at the sky. So often we We completely miss even the, you know, we just kind of, we just want to know if it's going to be good or bad weather. You know, do we need to bring an umbrella or not? And don't just look at the sky and see how completely exceptional it is. So one way to talk about Zen practice is the practice of making yourself ordinary.

[22:50]

The practice of making yourself ordinary so that you can be useful. And meditation practice is having this space. It's creating this space in our lives. And it's a little bit, it reminds me of, when we look at a bowl or a cup, it's the space that makes it useful. And yet we tend to just look at the form part and we forget the part that makes it useful, the space part. Or like, you know, this... this beautiful room that we're sitting in with its beautiful chandelier and windows, but yet what makes this room useful is the space, the part that we don't pay any attention to, the ordinariness of this room. So we tend to gloss over that birth and death are ordinary events happening every second, all around us.

[23:55]

And in our culture, we hide. We're so hidden from birth and death, and we give people drugs so we don't have to feel pain of difficulty. We have lots of TV and music and surfing the net, all kinds of ways to distract us and make it much more difficult to drop down into our everyday mind. Yes, so there's something a little bit uncomfortable about Zen practice and something uncomfortable about this practice of simplicity. And at the same time, as we embrace this discomfort, there's tremendous sacredness and tremendous joy. Our lives are, we get so filled up with the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and what our problems are.

[25:03]

And if we only had this or we only had that, this is that yes or no thinking, is thinking that if we just had this job or that relationship or that next thing, then we'd be happy. And whenever we get a no, and I know this for myself, whenever I get any kind of rejection, I can feel my body kind of tighten up. And I can feel the sense of how easy it is to not trust our own essential worth, our own essential worthiness and sacredness. And this line about that entering the way is... vast and boundless. I was thinking of the last talk that I did out at Green Gulch.

[26:06]

This was a few months ago. After the talk, I went to my car and put on my running clothes, and I remembered that I needed to buy a book in the office, so I came back to the Green Gulch office in my running clothes. This was right after giving a talk. And there were these two women in the office who were scurrying around, and they both came up to me and said how much they appreciated my talk, and there was some real wonderful meeting. And this woman, this was kind of this small, gray-haired woman, And we were standing there face to face in the office, and suddenly she burst out laughing. And she looked at me and she said, you looked so enormous up there talking. And I've been thinking about that, and I realized that my hope is I don't want to look enormous.

[27:14]

I want you to all feel enormous. I want you to all feel the... everyday mind as enormous mind and as this white piece of paper, this simplicity that we return to how powerful and wonderful it is, this practice of returning to this simple, simple way. I want to try something this morning that I I heard was actually done recently, maybe even last week, which was, I want to have you all talk a little bit. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to ask each of you, don't move yet, but I'm going to ask each of you to turn to the person next to you.

[28:14]

And each person is going to have three minutes to talk about your own, how you practice with, or how you might practice with, everyday mind is the way. What does that mean to you? What does that mean to you? Everyday mind is the way. How might you practice with what I'm talking about? Or, you have three minutes to talk about anything you want to. You don't need, this is, so this is not, This is not about looking good or saying something clever or impressing the other person or yourself. This is about saying, maybe even being surprised by what you say. Because you probably, I'm guessing, this probably isn't something that you've thought about today so far. How do I practice with everyday mind is the way. What does that mean? I might need a little help from the Doan.

[29:18]

Do you have a watch with a second hand? So find someone. Find a partner. Everyone find a partner. Okay. I need a bell. This is what I do all the time out in the world, but I called Michael Wenger this morning and asked, can I do this in the Buddha Hall? Will they ever invite me back if I ask people to talk to each other? He said, oh, Jordan did it last week. He broke the barrier. So thank you. Boy, there's a lot of energy in this room. It's great. I think I just want to end.

[30:20]

I'm torn because I have a lot I'd like to say in action. You all clearly have a lot you'd like to say. I think I'm going to end with reading this poem by Thomas Merton. Be still. Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent. They try to speak your name. Listen to the living walls. Who are you? Who are you? Whose silence are you? Who? Be quiet. Are you? As the stones are quiet. Do not think of what you are still less of what you may one day be. Rather be what you are. But who? Be the unthinkable one you do not know. Oh, be still. while you are still alive, and all things live around you, speaking I do not hear to your own being, speaking by the unknown that is in you and in themselves.

[31:38]

I will try, like them, to be my own silence, and this is difficult. And so I will be, this is like the stones, to be my own silence. And this is difficult. The whole world is secretly on fire. The stones burn. Even the stones, they burn me. How can a person be still or listen to all things burning? How can a person dare to sit with them when all their silence... is on fire. So please, let's all have the courage to feel our deepest simplicity and silence and feel how the world is on fire and it's okay and we can help heal ourselves and the world and

[32:48]

practice beyond any ideas of healing. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[33:23]

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