This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. As you may have noticed, this evening we have someone signing the talk, if that's the correct verb. Keith, who is a priest here at City Center, is hard of hearing, I guess. Correct term is deaf. And so, this evening we're having someone who's signing the talk as we explore how to integrate that into our programs.

[01:01]

So let's start by sitting for a few minutes. If you would, sit in your Zazen posture. If you don't know what that means, sit in an upright manner. It allows you to feel balanced. Not leaning forward or back. Balance from side to side. Sense of uprightness. Sense of your spine rising up from your sit bones. Up your back. Past your chest. Tuck your neck. Up into your head. Your shoulders wide and relaxed. releasing and relaxing down your arms, into your hands, into your mudra.

[02:14]

Front of your body, long and open. And your face, relaxed. your mouth, behind your nose, across your forehead. Feeling the rhythm of breathing in the body. of air as it comes in and I pause in the passage of air as it leaves the body this continual rhythm of breath the breath of life

[03:27]

noticing the mind. Noticing if there are any dominant thoughts. And more subtly, noticing the disposition of mind. Does the mind feel to be alert or dull. Active or agitated, relaxed or quiet. Feeling your mind the same way you might feel your shoulders Noticing that the shoulders are tense or relaxed.

[04:40]

The mind tense or relaxed. Allowing the sound of the plane to saturate what's being experienced. Noticing the shift as it fades. deliberately with the inhale letting everything in the breath the sound the physical sensations the experience of mind and with the exhale release

[06:07]

More like surrender than a subtle aversion, a subtle pushing away. More like a sigh. And as you sit for a few moments, Quietly breathing. Deliberate attention on the exhale. That quality of release. That quality of letting go with the sigh. just turns into the inhale, allowing in.

[07:28]

Not trying to suppress the mental activity, the sounds or anything. More like letting them just be the texture the palpable texture of the moment. Letting both the inhale and the exhale be so it is. This arises, this falls away. So it is. Thank you.

[10:01]

So that's what I want to talk about this evening. So it is. At the start of the Heart Sutra it says, Bodhisattva, when practicing deeply the Prajnaparamita, perceived the emptiness of the five skandhas. Prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom. So it is. Who can dispute what is, is? but how deeply ingrained our responses to it are, the way in which we want to comment upon it. We want to subtly shift it one way or another.

[11:16]

The subtle workings of attraction and aversion. how to come into an intimate relationship that not just reveals on the level of intellect, but reveals in a deep visceral level. So it is. And just to make a very simple notion complicated, I'm going to read a poem. As we attend to what arises for us, as we attend to how it takes shape, how it takes meaning, how it infuses an emotional, is infused with an emotional response, the subjective world comes alive with all its complexities and

[12:35]

and involvement. In Zazen, awareness is not so much that somehow they're like a supercomputer, you sit, decipher it all, and resolve it all in some manner. It's more that you sit there with this utter, so it is. More a sense of wonder, than a sense of mastery. More sense of deep acceptance than some sense of control. Not in denial of our human response, but in a deep, thoroughgoing relationship to it. as the heart surgery says, the perfection of wisdom.

[13:41]

In avilogitesvara, the manifestation of compassion. Compassion sits with this deep so it is, and the nature of our human existence, the nature of all existence, reveals itself. And then the heart surgery goes on and says, And when this happens, the mind is no problem. And the particulars of what arise for us, they're like a metaphor. They're like a metaphorical expression of the world according to me.

[14:43]

How it comes into being in this moment. Maybe it comes into being like when that aircraft flew over. I felt a kind of weight and density. Some way that I conjure up what I'm made of in relationship to a sound. Come into relationship with it. Co-create some sense of being. And how this is the continual activity of our consciousness. Each of us in our own unique way. Not so much to stop that, not so much to decipher it, not so much to bend it and shape it according to our design, but somehow to sit in the midst of it, so it is.

[16:03]

Either getting caught up in grasping it or caught up in aversion to it, or caught up in the stimulated responses to it. Something of this. And so I read this poem because, to my mind, it expresses something of this disposition in human life. It's called The Words Under the Words by Naomi Shihok Nye. and it says under the title, for Siti Qadra, north of Jerusalem. My grandmother's hands recognized grapes, the damp shine of a goat's new skin. When I was sick, they followed me. I woke from a long fever to find them covering my head like cool prayers. My grandmother's days are made of bread. A round pat pat

[17:09]

and the slow baking. She waits by the oven, watching a strange car circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son lost in America. More often, tourists, who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines. She knows how often mail arrives, how rarely there's a letter. When one comes, she announces it, a miracle, listening to it read again and again in the dim evening light. My grandmother's voice says nothing can surprise her. Take her the shotgun wound, the crippled baby. She knows the spaces we travel through, the messages we can't send. Our voices are short and would get lost on the journey. Farewell to the husband's coat, the one she has loved and nourished, who fly from her like seeds into the deep sky. They will plant themselves.

[18:10]

We will all die. My grandmother's eyes say, Allah is everywhere, even in death. When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press, when she tells the stories of Yoha and his foolish wisdoms, he is her first thought. What she really thinks of is his name. Answer... as if you hear the prayers under the words. Otherwise, it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones. So as we sit in this constant flow, of human experience. To hear the words under the words.

[19:15]

And I would add, to feel the feeling of the words under the words. To sense the mental disposition. This extraordinary way as we become aware of, as we stay aware of the physicality of being, the breath of being, the mental processing of being, the emotional processing of being, something reveals itself. And in the language of Buddhism, what is revealed is shunyata. This that gives rise to the particularity of each moment.

[20:17]

You know, I've noticed now, as I teach zazen, as I encourage people and instruct people to do zazen, I don't so often mention counting the breath. Counting the breath can be helpful in creating a certain kind of mental acuity. But allowing the breath to flow, feeling the breath in the body, is a wonderful way to connect the body, the breath, and the mind. So the mental acuity is embodied mental acuity. rather than something that's happening in the brain. And this catches a lot of the flavor of zazen. Zazen is an embodied activity. The body practices awareness. In contrast to our usual way of being, where we think of the mind as the primary organ of our being.

[21:40]

And it says then, the mind is not the primary organ of our being. It's a co-participant in our being. And this is a very helpful engagement to help us literally sense the words under the words and the feelings of those words. This deeper way of relating to what's coming up draws us into a more wordless relationship to our experience. And sometimes that's an unfamiliar, maybe even awkward territory. And what prompts me... read a poem like this is not so much to offer you the particularity of living north of Jerusalem as to give you is to catch the feeling.

[22:55]

The feeling that comes when someone has lived a life, when someone is opened by life. The process of zazen is that life opens us. You know? The very energies of your own existence as they're coursing through you at this particular time reveal something. And as they reveal it we start to see the deep ingrained way in which we want to change it. Sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle expression of attachment, attraction, and rejection, aversion. So in the practice period, the past week we've been looking at wanting, desire.

[24:03]

How does it come into being? What are the objects of it? What's the energy? What's the motion? What's the direction of it? And then next week, we're going to look at aversion. There's no notion in this activity of, you know, and then we should judge ourselves and somehow... purify ourselves beyond attraction and aversion. And maybe there's some notion to discover how you get lost in either and carried away by them in a compulsive way. Some of that, but more in a way an appreciation of how the energy of life is directed and what happens when it's directed.

[25:08]

And can that wisdom, can those insights inform what is it to do zazen and simply let that energy flow without an agenda to direct it one way or another? What is it in a precise and subtle way to let the mind and the body release and open, let the energy flow, and to just bear witness with Prajnaparamita, with this kind of deep, insightful so be it. What is it to let that flow And let the nature of existence express itself and be related to both in terms of an illustration of our human life and something beyond our words, beyond our ideas.

[26:22]

This is the request of Zazen. And as we engage this process, we'll start to see, both in Zazen and outside of Zazen, the contrast between this more acceptance of so be it and the intrigues and demands of what we want and what we don't want and the way it conjures up the dramas, the intensities, the disappointments, the excitements of our life.

[27:31]

Then it's as if we live in two worlds. One, this flow of energy. This other, densely particular, complex in its understandings and responses. Form. and emptiness, shunyata, the flow, and form, the particularity. And then how can they move together? How can they discover harmony? How can the very energies and trajectories of our wanting and our aversions How can they illustrate something?

[28:38]

How can life, as it comes through our own body and mind, how can it open us rather than wrap us up in the agendas of self? This truly extraordinary thing is that the simple practice of embodying breath, of releasing with the exhale and along with the inhale, enables this process. And as it does, so be it. Suzuki Roshi, I read Suzuki Roshi said, he said, when we say things are okay, that's because we don't think they're okay.

[29:46]

So we say it, it's okay. When it is okay, there's nothing to say. There's no impulse to say anything. So this so be it is the so be it we don't say. And so sometimes we fool ourselves because it feels so simple. It feels so ordinary. It's the one we're struggling with and declare with enthusiasm or determination, so be it. Everything's okay. Arising out of some unsettledness. But even this has its own value. It's like an expression of our vow.

[30:49]

We vow to practice because something in us is struggling with enacting the practice. When we're just doing it, There's nothing to say. There's no need to add anything. So in a strange way, the practice of deep settling embraces the unsettled. The practice of just being the moment opens up and includes all the activity that comes forth in our mind and heart and body. And that we breathe out, allowing the next inhale.

[32:04]

constant process of renewal. This constant process of release. In the Heart Sutra, it ends up by saying, it's like a mantra. A mantra is potent through its repetition. the repetition of the breath, the repetition of the mantra of allowing and releasing. It draws consciousness beyond words, beyond the understandings, beyond the declaration of okay and not okay. This is Zazen.

[33:12]

So let me end by reading this poem again. The words under the words. For Siti Kadra, north of Jerusalem. My grandmother's hands recognize grapes, the damp shine of the goat's new skin. When I was sick, they followed me. I woke from a long fever to find them covering my head like cool prayers. My grandmother's hands were made of bread, a round pat-pat and a slow baking. She waits by the oven, watching a strange car circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son, lost to America. More often, tourists, who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines. She knows how often mail arrives, how rarely there's a letter. When one comes, she announces it, a miracle, listening to it read again and again in the dim evening light.

[34:26]

My grandmother's voice says nothing can surprise her. Take her, the shotgun wound, and the crippled baby. She knows the spaces we travel through, the messages we cannot send. Our voices are short and would get lost on the journey. Farewell to the husband's coat, the ones she has loved and nourished, who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky. They will plant themselves. We will all die. My grandmother's eyes say, Allah is everywhere, even in death. when she talks of the orchard and the new olive press, when she tells the stories of Yoha and his foolish wisdoms, he is her first thought. What she thinks of is his name. Answer, if you hear the words under the words.

[35:28]

Otherwise, it's just a world with lots of rough edges, difficult to get through. and our pockets filled with stones. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[36:09]

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