A special good morning to the smaller persons up here in the front. I want to welcome you to Green Gulch Farm and to the Zendo. I'm wondering, oh, there's more over there. Good morning. I'm wondering if any I don't know if any of you have done the nose and belly meditation with me before. Anyone remember that? I think I did it here once a year or so ago. I know I did it in the city, city center. But nose and belly meditation, I'd like you to join me. How many of you have two hands? Looks like... Pretty much everyone has two hands, so it's okay if you just have one hand, you have to, you can do either nose or belly, but with two hands you can do both.

[01:08]

So with one hand, put it over your belly or your tummy about, if you can find where your belly button is, then you can put it right over that, right? And then with your other hand, if you can kind of make a little circle with your thumb and finger like this, You can close your other fingers in, and then I just put this part of the finger here right under my nose. And just notice what you feel with your hand on your belly, and notice what you feel with your hand at your nose. So do that for five breaths. So from the smaller people in the audience, what did someone notice?

[02:25]

Anyone notice anything? Just speak up, okay? Say that again. Meditating actor. You can feel it. You can feel some action, some activity. Okay. Good. All right. Someone else? Notice. There's a hand up back there. Okay. Yes? Felt relaxing. Okay. Meditating, actor, felt relaxing. What else did someone notice?

[03:33]

So you noticed movement right here, particularly right here. What did you notice? What did anyone notice right at their nose? How did it feel on your hand, on your finger? Warm, someone said. What? Wind, warm wind. Someone felt warm wind. Yeah? Here's a test. Let's do this again. And then look at your finger after your five breaths. You see anything different?

[04:58]

You're over 12. It's hard to keep the bigger kids contained, right? Yeah, right. Moisture, yeah. I noticed that too. I noticed when I breathe on my glasses, We say clouds up. Forms clouds right there. So I just wanted you to notice that when you breathe, there's moisture. There's water that comes out with your breath. Do you get that? Do you notice that? And then I notice it's warm. I notice it's warm. But then when I take my finger away, then I notice it gets cool. It's warm while I'm breathing on it, but then if I take it away, it gets cool.

[06:06]

Has anyone else noticed that? So I'm just kind of amazed that with each breath I breathe out, I'm breathing out a cloud of moisture. but I don't see it. It's invisible, right? But you can feel it even though you can't see it. So does anyone agree or disagree? So, And I was reminded of, you know, usually we think of water as something that we can see or even get in.

[07:08]

We can see it and we can get in. We can swim in it, take a bath. We can drink it. I have an advantage here. I have water to drink. So the more I breathe, the drier I get. And I can take a drink. Moody Guthrie had a song about, it was really about taking a bath. And he sang, water, I like to swim in the water, I like to play in the water. Water, water and water, swim, [...] swim. And then I thought, okay, now I'm noticing breathing, so I thought, Water, water and water. Water, water and water. There is water, water and water. I breathe water in air.

[08:13]

You want to sing that with me? Or is it too silly? Water, water, and water. Water, water, and water. Water, water, and water. I breathe water in air. So I just want to point out one other thing, because I was considering fish. And fish don't even think of water as water, according to Zen Master Dogen. Fish think of water as like a house, that they live in it. So we think of water in the way human beings think of water. But fish, I actually think of, maybe the way I think of air, or the way you think of air, I think of air as more like space, or maybe like a field, open air.

[09:21]

And so maybe fish think of water as their space, as open space. So they may think of water as air. And we think, we think of water in the way humans think of water. So while we are breathing water with our air, they're breathing air with their water. So when you go out to the garden today and you're thinking of water, that there's water in you and there's water, think of all the places where you encounter water as you go out to the garden. You may notice that there's water in the air. You may notice there's water in the ground. You may notice there's water in the plants. How much we are actually completely involved with water.

[10:28]

And then sometime when you get annoyed with things and you want to look for some relaxation, you might sit down and do the belly-nose meditation for five breaths. Okay? All right. Time for you to go to the garden, I think. Mm-hmm. So now if anyone wants to come up and take some seats up in the front, you can.

[11:37]

And if you think you'd have a better chance of realizing Buddha's wisdom in the garden than hearing the talk, you can also do that. Here's some keys that were found. Do you know where they were found? What? Oh, they were found over here on the platform. It says La Maison. Maison, M-A-I-S-O-N. Over there? There's someone, you can take it back, yeah. some of us have been studying Zen Master Dogen's teaching on mountains and waters and he expands on this idea of the impossibility of completely seeing what water is and reminds us over and over again that our views are limited

[13:21]

that the view that we take is particular to our own particular organism, our own senses. And so to fully understand the totality of existence, we need to open our minds to the possibility that there are other ways of viewing whatever it is that we see He says to view water as still or water as flowing is an insult to water. To view water either as still or water as flowing is an insult to water. So I wanted to talk a little bit about stillness and activity.

[14:34]

So one of the teachings of Mountains and Rivers Sutra is the teaching of perspective. That right view, to have a view that is complete, means that it includes not knowing. It includes realizing that your view is limited in whatever it is. And he works with the notion of stillness and the notion of activity. Because mountains are usually viewed as being still. Mountains are usually viewed as being imperturbable, unmoving. But Dogen says that mountains are walking. Mountains are actually a dynamic activity. So what is it to say that something is still or that something is in motion?

[15:48]

There was a time after the war in Japan when a kindergarten teacher named Mitsuo was invited to attend some lectures on Dogen's Obogenzo by the Zen priest Shinryu. And after attending a few of these lectures, she realized that she didn't understand Buddhism. She didn't understand what was being talked about. And so she asked the Zen priest Shinryu, can you just say in simple words, what Buddhism is. And he thought for a moment and said, hmm, it's to accept what is as it is and help it be its best. So those two phrases describe

[16:57]

our practice, I think, quite elegantly, in very simple words, to accept what is as it is. And so I'm proposing that that's, in a sense, a practice of stillness. And to help it be its best, to help it be its best, we could say is a practice of beneficial action. To understand what something is is maybe not so easy. To accept what it is may not be so easy. There's a whole practice of the kind of discipline that we undertake when we say that I undertake to accept what is as it is.

[18:09]

Can you see what is without interfering with it yourself? To notice the freedom of something in its own being, to see it as completely free in itself, no matter what its condition, whether it's something being born, something dying. You may have some interference that comes up that makes it a real challenge to Accept what is as it is. Particularly in our practice, we are often reminded of birth and death. Because these are times that we tend to be blinded in a certain sense, that we can't quite see what's happening.

[19:20]

We get excited. Or we get depressed, discouraged. Here in our community, San Francisco Zen Center, in our sangha right now, we're working very hard to be clear about accepting what is as it is. In the case of one of our members who was seriously injured in a car accident about 10 days ago, very seriously injured, and is still surviving. And this was in a car accident on the Golden Gate Bridge. To see exactly what is, in this case, is to be able to see someone in terrible

[20:29]

say, distress, terrible injury. And it's hard to be present with that. We may think, well, how can this happen? You may want to blame someone. The other car, right? I notice we tend... to be more attentive to the person that we know in this case than the person that we don't know. So seeing what is actually then takes that into account. It takes into account that what we see, just as we see as human beings, see water as water, and fish see water as an open field. We see a person who we know differently than a person we don't know.

[21:34]

So part of what we're seeing is partly we're seeing our own connection, our own attachment. And so to see what it is means to include that, to take that into account. The practice of zazen I propose, is a great help in seeing things as it is. The practice of zazen includes stopping. In the traditional or classical Buddhist language, it includes shamatha. It includes stabilizing the mind. It includes abiding... in the present moment, stabilizing the mind in the present moment. Stabilizing the mind in the present moment is conducive to insight into what is occurring in the present moment.

[22:43]

Insight, or vipassana, to see what is present, to see into the arising of phenomena and the presence of phenomena and the different causes and conditions that contribute to what is and to appreciate that it is fragile, it is impermanent, that anything that comes into existence as a thing, as phenomena, has its limited arising, its time, its passing away. And at the same time, to have insight into it is to realize that the identification of something as a thing is a creation of one's own mental activity.

[23:52]

That the way you see it as a thing is something that actually you construct. And to take responsibility for that is a part of seeing what is. So this is insight into seeing that the things that we see are constructed and to also see that they exist in an unconstructed way, which we may call the unborn or the unconditioned. or we may call oneness, in which there are no things. And you may experience that there is then no separation. There is no you and it. This we sometimes call becoming intimate. When you realize then that you can let go of the constructiveness that separates you,

[25:02]

and be fully present with the unborn, with the matrix of reality that is completely dynamic and flowing and you can't even pick out things. Currently, there's a lot of interest in how this relates to the human brain. Some of you may have seen, there's a video that someone emailed the link to of Dr. Jill Taylor, who's a neuroscientist. Has anyone seen it? Yeah, maybe a dozen people or so raised their hand. So she's a neuroscientist, which gives her a particular way of understanding her experience. And so when she had an intense headache on the left side of her head, she began to realize that she was having a stroke.

[26:06]

She was beginning to realize that she was having a hemorrhage of the brain on the left side. And as she became aware of this, she recounts that her whole perception of reality began to change dramatically. And she kind of went in and out of a state in which her usual ability to think in terms of past and future was gone. Her usual ability to identify and separate things that stand out against the background was dissolving and the things were dissolving into the background. So when she looked, she said at one point she was looking at her hand and she couldn't pick out her hand in contrast to the background.

[27:07]

She just saw a pixel. She said she saw pixels. Just saw pixels. And so she began to realize that this is the way the left side of her brain is producing past and future, and the left side of her brain is producing objects, things. So it's a very interesting presentation, if those of you are interested in following up on that. You can probably track it down. Dr. Jill Taylor. Anyway, she's talking now about this experience. And it took her eight years, I think, to recover from the stroke. She eventually was able to call for help. She couldn't remember. During certain moments, she could realize that she needed help, and then she'd lose track of that, and then she would again recall if she needed help.

[28:18]

And then in the moments where she needed help, she realized there was someone she could call, and so she found the phone number, and then she started to punch in the number, but then she couldn't remember whether she had hit that, or not, because then she was losing that sense of past and future. And so then she had to mechanically cover up the number by one hand when she punched it in. And then she could move her hand to the next number. That way she could actually accomplish calling for help. So it's very interesting. We take for granted, most of us, the ability to do that kind of thing. But then in our Zen practice, we come in and we sit and we talk about non-thinking and letting go of any thoughts of past and future and stabilizing the mind in the present.

[29:25]

So it may be that part of what people do in this practice is develop a more complete say, interworking or interweaving of the right and left hemispheres of our brains, because we do see things in both ways. We see things as present moment, absolute, and we see things as discrete, individual, myriad things having past and future. So to accept what is as it is and then help it be its best. In this case, it was Shinryu Suzuki, who then later came to San Francisco and was the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, who made this statement to Mitsu, who was a kindergarten teacher.

[30:40]

And Mitsu discovered that if she... took this attitude, I intend to see things and accept things just the way they are, and then help them to be their best. She noticed that with that attitude, her life was easier. That the other kindergarten teachers that she was working with became friendlier. Amazing how they could improve. So at that time she began, although at that time she had considered herself a Christian, she was raised as a Christian, at that time she secretly began to think of herself as a Buddhist. So to bring this kind of approach into everyday life,

[31:42]

activity. There are many levels of it, some very subtle levels of it that you may engage in in your dharma practice and in how you cultivate your awareness that you may work out as you proceed in this practice carefully. You may work this out in discussion with your teacher. But everyone can apply this to some extent. And then in the mix of our lives, and as we get busy, we have many opportunities. I myself was in a meeting this last week with just several of my colleagues at Zen Center, and we were working on some written document that we've been working on for months and months. And after the last meeting, I had volunteered to do a little bit of editing on it.

[32:48]

So I came back and it was presented at this meeting. And one of the other members in the room said, I really think we're off track. I really think this whole thing is off track. And I noticed that it was hard for me to accept what is as it is at that moment. It was hard for me to accept that I was hearing this person I've been working with on this for months to say this is off track. And so for a moment I had this feeling that I should straighten him out. Remind him that, you know, we've had all these agreements and all these agreements, and we have come a long way with this, da-da-da-da.

[33:54]

And that there's no way he could possibly say that it's off track. So I was very grateful for the practice of stopping myself. The practice of stopping meant that I didn't exactly react and challenge what he understood. But I allowed that maybe I didn't know. Maybe there's something I didn't know. But it took me a little while. And for the rest of that meeting, it wasn't so... I knew there was something I didn't know, but I really didn't know what he was talking about. And then the next day, we talked on the phone.

[34:55]

And I told him I still didn't know what he was talking about. But then I sent... And then I sent him an email... After I had reflected on it a little more, I said that I'm investigating this and I'm realizing that for him to say what he said took a lot of courage, actually. It took courage. And that I knew that he was being completely sincere and that he was expressing something that came from his heart. And so for me to see what he meant, again, meant that I had this kind of step back and be willing to listen, be willing to open, to accept what is as it is, to accept that he has a different perception, and that there is some wisdom, there is Buddha wisdom in what

[36:08]

where he's coming from. So when you realize that there is no place that Buddhas do not dwell, there is no place that is not included in the awakening of the vast Buddha mind, there's no place that is excluded from that, then for me that means I have to take my friend seriously when he says I think We're off track. And so since then, I invited him to write something about what he felt. And then he sent me a three-page thing. And I still couldn't understand what he was talking about. And then I talked to a couple of other people who were in the same meeting.

[37:16]

And one of them really didn't want to think about what this person was talking about. And another one was really trying hard to understand and help this person who was trying to express something that they felt. The kitchen and various people are leaving. Thank you. It's a good sign. So I just, and then we did have another meeting, and I felt this is important, that we should meet again soon. And so we all, and most of the people in that committee, agreed and rearranged our schedules so we could meet again soon. And so we met on Friday. And at that point, this person had produced a seven-page additional memo, which I still haven't read.

[38:35]

But we were able to have a meeting in which the feeling that he was having about being off track was respected by the other people in the room. And then we agreed that it actually expressed a part of something that each of us was feeling that we could recognize but were not quite tuned into. So it took this person to bring that, and it took the courage for this person to speak up, even if it sounded kind of extreme, for us to say, okay, this is something that we want to listen to and include as we do go forward, so that we may be off track, but we're not completely, it's not a complete train wreck, right? We're able to notice that and bring that, include that into how we go forward.

[39:41]

So I mention this just to note that even at San Francisco Zen Center, where people are working together very closely, it's possible for someone to say, we're going in the wrong direction. And it may sound like we're going in opposite directions, but it may just mean that we need to have a little bit of a correction in what we're doing. And this takes this kind of time and attention. It's sobering to think that where people are largely in agreement, we have this challenge. When you contrast that with the fact that it's an election year. And there are many people who are very far from, at least seemingly very far from being in alignment.

[40:50]

So in the case of someone who you feel is really, you know, in a different place, and you hear them say something, you feel they're really off track. You can't even believe it, maybe. This is a tremendous challenge for how can we, human beings, work together in the face of that. When we also feel that we don't have much time sometimes. We don't have much time. Even so, I encourage you to take up this practice and study how it works for you. How do you see what is as it is? How do you participate in seeing what it is?

[41:55]

And then how do you help it? How do you help it to be its best? How do you help it from a Buddhist point of view, how do you help it to fully realize its own true awakened nature? When you're meeting another person, how do you help them? How do you help them realize their own true awakened nature? So this is a wonderful challenge. And it includes activity and it includes stillness. It includes carefully paying attention to one is the time to be active and one is the time to be still. One is the time to find stillness in activity and one is the time to find activity in stillness.

[43:00]

So I invite you to take up this practice without delay. Thank you for listening.

[43:16]

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