Good morning. We are blessed with another one of those days which come in January when we have this remarkable clear light and can enjoy sun in the way that is particular to a cold time of year. I always feel a little bit like a lizard when I sit in a corner of the house out of the wind or cool air and can enjoy the January sun. For me anyway, it's particularly delicious, I suppose because of the contrasts. Anyway, I feel blessed to be here in this beautiful valley and in particular to be at Gringolch this morning. A friend of mine talks about the process of unpacking a practice or unpacking a teaching

[01:10]

and I'm in the midst of unpacking something. What I want to talk about this morning is something that I'm looking into and doing what I've been told is a kind of figuring. Two people sit out by the woodpile. Before they start chopping the wood, they do a lot of figuring and it involves standing around and looking at whatever one is going to chop up or plant or whatever it may be. I want to talk this morning out of mid-process or mid-stream. The minute I say that, I realize that that's probably always the case, but it's more particularly so for me right now. Specifically, I'd like to talk about the practice of bowing and surrender.

[02:15]

I've been thinking about looking into the experience of surrender and the language of surrender and noticing how much trouble it seems to cause us. In particular, I've been thinking about the trouble as it pertains to some of our acculturation as Americans. I think this has all bubbled up to the surface because I feel like I'm immersed in bowing these days. It really began for me some years ago when I first came to Zen Center and noticed that service, what we call service, which is in the morning about a half an hour of bowing and chanting and in the late afternoon, ten minutes or so of bowing and chanting.

[03:21]

What I noticed, and certainly others have noticed as well, was that that was the one part of the schedule at Zen Center that everybody disappeared for. There was the most bodily rejection, if you will, for bowing and chanting. That's been continually true over the years. I found it very interesting. What is it that is so troublesome about bowing and chanting? For a long time, it had to do with chanting things in Japanese, so we didn't have any idea what we were chanting. More and more, I began to see that for a lot of us, a number of us have great resistance to bowing. What are we bowing to? What does it mean? What is it about? And I can remember Suzuki Roshi would sometimes say, don't try to figure out what it means.

[04:30]

It doesn't mean anything. Just do it as a practice that is a kind of physical, a yoga. Treat it as a yoga. Just bow and see what it feels like. See what your experience is. More recently, I have been living with a bower. My husband has taken up the practice of one hundred prostrations a day, except when he gets behind, goes on a trip somewhere and doesn't do his practices, and then for a while, he is doing two hundred prostrations a day. And this fall, when I was going through various ceremonies in Minnesota with Katagiri Roshi, one of the things we did there for a while was two hundred plus prostrations a day. And since then, I have been looking into and unpacking prostration practice.

[05:33]

And I think it is actually related to this practice of allowing surrender to arise. It has more recently come up for me to try to figure out what do we mean by surrender because I am teaching a class on the teacher-student relationship. And so, this particular aspect of a possible relationship comes up. Am I giving up to what someone else thinks I should be doing or tells me is going on with me, etc., etc.? So, if you will bear with me, I want to kind of wander around in this thicket for a little while. And what I would like to do is to begin with looking into bowing, the way we do it here, and to think about what is involved.

[06:37]

In the morning, after sitting for two periods of Zazen with a short interval of walking of Kinhin, we have about a half an hour of service. And the first thing that we do is nine bows. And I think for most of us, going from a long period of sitting to bowing feels great. There is a kind of stretching and moving after sitting, especially when it is cold, as it is these mornings, that feels like a way of balancing and including other aspects of body, speech and mind, in particular body and mind. What I notice with bowing in particular, doing a long stretch of bows, say a hundred at a stretch, is that there is a way in which I don't go off in my mind quite as easily.

[07:42]

I can stay more particularly focused in the actual physical detail of bowing, of kneeling on the floor and then bringing my hands and head to the floor, and the kind of movement and stretching and opening up that happens with this practice of bowing. Because we often, certainly when we are bowing together, we are bowing facing towards the altar, one of the most troublesome things that comes up for many people, especially in the beginning, is the question, are we bowing to something? And in particular, are we bowing to these figures that are on the altar? And I think for people who come from the Jewish tradition, where there is such a strong admonition against bowing down before graven images or idols, bowing brings up a lot of difficulty.

[08:44]

So for me, when I bow in front of the altar which has a figure of Buddha or the Bodhisattva of Wisdom and or of Compassion, I find it very helpful to keep in mind that these images, these figures, are helping me see and remember the capacity for enlightened mind, for wisdom and for compassion which exists in each of us. And that if I'm bowing before anything, it is bowing to remind myself of my intention and vow to cultivate those capacities in myself and to support and help others in their practice, in their being on the path to cultivate these qualities. So, especially in the morning after sitting,

[09:53]

what I notice happens for me is there is this bowing that is another aspect of practice, of a meditation practice that has to do with movement and opening up and stretching. Very different but very complementary to sitting still. And particularly after a long period of bowing 200 or more times a day, what I've noticed is that my heart feels more open, that there's a way in which my mind is softer. What I mean by that is that my mind is not so resistant. So I'm beginning to discover directly that bowing is a practice which is a kind of antidote to resistance. The other quality that I notice and that I hear about from people who do a lot of frustrations

[10:55]

is a quality of feeling open in a way that has to do with awakening, what for want of a better word I would say, awakening more subtle, sensitive mind, a capacity for sensitivity and subtleness. And what I notice is that sometimes the first language that comes up is that of, oh, I feel more vulnerable. But when I've been investigating that more, what I realize is that I don't really mean that I feel more vulnerable in terms of feeling exposed or vulnerable with the sense of, oh, I should protect myself, but vulnerable in terms of a kind of willing readiness to be present with whoever or whatever arises in front of me. So what I'm still searching for is,

[11:58]

what is the language for talking about that quality of increased openness? I think that for us as Americans, with our cultural, historical, psychological and emotional commitment to being individuals, we can get locked into a place of nobody is going to tell me what to do, a kind of resistance that can imprison us, can be problematic. And, of course, what's interesting is to notice how much with our emphasis in our culture on the individual, on going our own way, on being informed by having lived on the edge of this vast continent which was wilderness

[13:01]

for so much of the formation of our shared cultural mind, we also seem to have, in the right circumstances, a possibility to give ourselves away to authority outside of ourselves. So that particularly over the history of religious communities in the United States in this century and in the last couple of decades, we see what happens when people join a teacher, a guru, some community of practitioners that we now describe as a cult, where people individually and collectively give themselves over to someone who is an authority in a way that doesn't seem so wholesome. So I find it very interesting that for all of our capacity and inclination for being individuals, we also seem to carry with us

[14:04]

a possibility for giving ourselves away. It's interesting to think about the relationship between those two attitudes, if you will. And I think when we talk about, in a practice, cultivating our ability to surrender, what comes up is some, for many of us, is some fear that we will find ourselves going down some alley, down some path which turns out not to be wholesome. Recently, I remembered an experience that I had many years ago when I was in my late teens, when I was swimming off of the coast down near Santa Cruz. I was spending the summer in an extended seminar in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and every afternoon, the group of us who were in this seminar went down

[15:07]

and swam in the ocean. And this one day, in particular, I got caught by a riptide that was pretty strong, strong enough so that my initial reaction was to fight it. And I very quickly realized that I was going to drown because I was very quickly getting very tired. I don't really know exactly what happened in that moment of recognizing that what I was doing was not appropriate to the situation, but somehow I got it, that what I needed to do was to float and assess the situation. And, of course, very quickly what I discovered was that the riptide was carrying me away from the shore,

[16:08]

but that it was carrying me at an angle, and somehow I just rowed it for a while. And, of course, in doing that, I arrested because I wasn't fighting it. And at a certain point, I had some strength, but I also realized that I didn't feel the tide holding me quite as strongly as it had been. And at that point, I was able to swim out of it at an angle. I then swam parallel to the shore and at a certain point swam back in and was fine. And I didn't think about it really again until recently when I realized that that was an experience that what I have come to understand is surrender in a way that is useful.

[17:14]

I then went to the OED to look up the word surrender to see what the etymology of the word is, and I was struck by how much of the notings in the dictionary are in terms of military experience. You surrender when there's an army bigger than yours or whatever, anyway. There's somebody or some force bigger, stronger, better equipped than you are, so if you have your wits about you, you surrender or you die. In a lot of ways, absent the difficulty with being conquered, which is what we think of in military experience, in terms of the riptide, I didn't feel conquered by the riptide

[18:15]

as much as I felt educated by it. So there is, in spiritual practice, a kind of surrender, I think, that has to do with not resisting, not fighting, cultivating a capacity to be present with things as they are in some way that is open and alert and not resistant. The literature suggests that there is something in this experience of surrender in a religious practice that happens in a way when we're not looking. We creep up on such a condition of being present with things as they are and knowing when it's appropriate to be energetic

[19:16]

in what we are meeting and when we need to go along with things as they are. So, of course, all of our issues about control come up. My dear friend Shantideva, the great meditator and yogi and philosopher who lived in India in the 9th century at Nalanda University, says in verse 10 of his chapter on patience, why be unhappy about what you can remedy and why be unhappy about what you cannot remedy. So for me, with that riptide, I couldn't change the nature of the riptide. What I could change was my response, my reaction, my relationship to the riptide. And in the process of paying attention

[20:16]

to the particular detail of what was going on as I was in the water moving farther away from the shore, I began to see what I could do that was appropriate with the goal of eventually getting back to shore rather than drowning. And I'm struck by how much what I experience out of the practice of bowing has to do with cultivating an attitude, a state of mind, which allows me to surrender in my life and in my practice in this sense of giving up resistance. I suppose I can talk to myself about that in the language of conquest but I don't find that language particularly useful because it's the language which leaves me focusing

[21:19]

on what I'm losing or what I don't have. And I can also, when I pay attention to the giving up, the quieting of resistance, discover that in meeting wholeheartedly things as they are, what comes up for me is a much wider range of possibility than I can ever see when I'm resistant or fighting. When I think about this language of surrender, I think that we often are afraid of surrendering, practicing, cultivating our capacity for surrendering because we're afraid what that means is being submissive, going along with something

[22:20]

that we are not wholeheartedly wanting to go along with. I'll go along with what someone who is stronger than I am wants me to do in a particular situation because I feel like I don't have a choice or the price of fighting is too high, but the day will come. So what I'm talking about is not submission. It's not compliance, which, using both of those terms, there's some quality of, well, I'll surrender but only part way. I'll reserve. At some conscious or unconscious level, I'll reserve myself, I'll hold back. So there is still a continuing tension or resistance in those situations where I would describe myself

[23:23]

as going along with what someone wants or what a situation seems to dictate. It's interesting stuff. It brings up a lot of troublesome thoughts about situations we've been in. And what I would like to invite you to do is to pick up the practice of bowing and to find out for yourself what you experience in bowing that is not thinking about what it means but the physical activity of bowing itself. And let the physical activity of bowing itself introduce you to your own experience, free from ideas and feelings,

[24:27]

but paying attention to the physical experience and to the breath. I know that after doing a long sequence of bows, of prostrations, I find that my physical body is relaxed, that I have some quality of ease, that whatever tightening up in my lower back or my hips or legs that may have occurred towards the end of sitting is eased up as a result of bowing. These days when I bow, I am bowing to the names of the Buddhas and ancestors. So for me, what is coming up, because with each bow I recite the name of someone who has carried the insights and teachings

[25:33]

of the Buddha to the present, and in particular to the present in such a way that I have access to these insights and practices in a way that I feel deeply grateful for. So as I do prostrations, I recite the names of these various ancestors, Buddhas and ancestors. And what comes up in me is a kind of openness to this quality of gratitude to be on the receiving end of untold practitioners over many centuries. But at some level, that gratitude is not starting in my mind, in my head, in my thinking about it.

[26:34]

It arises out of my whole body, my whole being. And if I were to describe the locale from which that sense of gratitude arises, it is as much from my stomach, from the bottom of my breath, as from anywhere. I would invite you to consider the word surrender with an eye to what is that surrender that you experience in your life, what is the experience of surrender that I experience in my life that has as much as anything to do with giving up fighting, giving up fighting mostly things as they are, giving up turning towards the way I wish they had been

[27:38]

in the past or the way I wish they would be in the future, surrendering resistance to what is directly in front of me, which if I just stay with whatever it is and look deeply, I discover over and over again the richness and possibility of the situation in each moment as it is. Thank you. When I talk about one of the consequences of surrender in the sense that I am talking about it, bringing with the practices that cultivate surrender

[28:43]

that there seems to be a kind of shift to a more positive state of mind from a negative state of mind, I don't mean by that a shift to everything is great as much as a shift to a willingness to seeing things as they are and refocusing my attention not to what's happening outside of myself but noticing what is my response to things as they are. I think we've all had experiences where we see that on one day we get up and discover that there's no milk in the refrigerator for the morning cup of coffee and we feel irritated and want to get mad at somebody for the milk not being there. And there are other days

[29:46]

when we get up and we go to the refrigerator and there's no milk and we are more kindly. We realize, oh, I forgot to get the milk. I guess I was distracted. There's some friendliness in not seeing the milk sitting there in the refrigerator. How some days our good friend will get upset and angry and we will feel terrible. We'll feel like we've done something wrong or our friend doesn't appreciate us and doesn't see all the wonderful things we've been doing. We somehow take it on and take it personally. And how on another day when my good friend is angry my response is, oh, my friend is having a hard time. Well, we'll experience my friend's anger

[30:48]

as something about my friend and not about me. What's the difference? In both instances there was no milk in the refrigerator or my friend was angry. What is different is my response to what happens. So what I'm bringing up, what I'm thinking about and seeking to unpack is how this quality, this capacity for giving up resistance brings me back to a state of mind where I remember, I stay in touch with how much what I can do, what I have some say about is in this realm of my response to things as they are, not to things as they are, which I may have some small say about,

[31:51]

but by and large things are as they are. So there is, in this giving up of resistance, in this giving up of the fantasy, the dream of controlling more than what we can control, the liberation, the opportunity for paying attention to what we can cultivate and attend to, which is our state of mind. That we can cultivate attitudes and states of mind that are conducive to wholesomeness, to happiness, to allowing, or we can keep recreating those habits which reinforce our capacity for suffering, a kind of bondage.

[32:53]

And this is, of course, the essence of the path which is based on the teachings of the Buddha, the essence of what Zen practice is about. While we sit, while we practice Zazen every day, when we sit still, we discover all kinds of things, including all of the range of possible responses to physical discomfort. When we practice bowing, we discover that there are all kinds of ways of experiencing this physical activity of getting down on the floor or the ground, knees, hands, forehead, touching, or if you are in the Tibetan style,

[33:55]

your whole body, top to bottom, touching the ground. And you can describe yourself in that posture as being submissive, but you can also enjoy that moment of full contact with the ground, being supported fully, where you feel your entire body and breath. In such a vivid way. And in my experience, what arises out of this practice of bowing is some sense of, some reminder, re-meeting of my connection with all things and all beings. Often, at the beginning or end of a practice,

[35:12]

you may have some statement of your intention or some statement of your dedication of the practice that you've done. And traditionally, in doing the practice of bowing, in prostration practices, in doing bowing, there is at some point, at the end of bowing or if it's done in combination with chanting, some dedication for the practices that have just been done, of bowing and chanting. Some enactment of one's intention stated openly putting into words what it is we are doing with our activity. So here is a dedication as an example. By the truth and virtue of this practice,

[36:15]

may all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May all never be separate from the sacred happiness devoid of suffering. May all live in equanimity without too much attraction and too much aversion. May all live believing in the equality of all that lives. So if you find yourself having some resistance to bowing, if you have some resistance to doing whatever practice you are following right now, you can, in your dedication, flag the very point where you feel a little heat or resistance and incorporate that into your dedication.

[37:16]

So for example, this line about may all live in equanimity without too much attraction and too much aversion. I think bowing practice gives us an opportunity to cultivate equanimity. If I have aversion to bowing, maybe I can look into it. And what I have discovered is that actually doing it allows me to meet the state of mind that I actually have and to become interested in my response and to begin to separate my ideas about what I am doing and the direct experience of it. And so this practice becomes a specific instance of cultivating that quality of surrender which is giving up fighting,

[38:19]

giving up resistance. Not submitting to some unknown force that will lead me astray. Not turning away from myself, but turning towards whatever is my actual direct experience. People have been doing this practice of bowing in many religious traditions for a long time. If I have some confidence in the wisdom of practitioners who have gone before me, the least I can do is to do some of these practices, to look into them for myself and to allow myself to investigate directly, well, what happens when I do bowing practice

[39:21]

for a while? Never mind what someone tells me it might be about. What is my own direct experience? So I would invite you to look into bowing practice and to look into the cultivation of surrender in this wide and deep sense of giving up resistance, but only giving it up at the pace at which you're ready to, since that's, of course, the best we can do. Thank you very much. May our intention

[40:08]

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