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 from people like you. Good evening. It's nice to see you all. Some old friends and new faces. My name is Jiryu. You guys have the coolest stuff at Tassajara. I live at Green Gulch where our stuff is all a little more run down. Thank you. But it's wonderful to visit, to be back here at Tassajara and an honor to be invited to speak with you all

[01:02]

for a bit this evening. I was told that I would speak unless Manjushri or the Dalai Lama happened to come. So sorry for you. That did not happen. I'm here, as some of you know, co-leading a Zen and yoga retreat with my friend Rosemary. We're having a very nice time. and have created a little sacred space out in the tree hall. And it's nice to join you two in this space, this meditation space, where for many, many years now, people have done something

[02:04]

that I'm not sure what it is. Sitting, Zen. So, you know, sometimes we wonder what this is that we do, that we're supposed to be doing in a meditation hall, in Zen, and sometimes we wonder what the person next to us is supposed to be doing, or what they are doing. And so we get curious about meditation technique. There's something going on here. They built this room and set up these nice cushions. There's something we're supposed to be doing. What is that thing that we're supposed to be doing? And so we're curious about that, and we want to learn the techniques of sitting Zen. So we sort of scour our own Zen tradition for some guidance, for some technical assistance.

[03:07]

on what we're supposed to do and we search and we search and we find instructions like inhale and exhale rock your body right and left settle into a seated position and think of not thinking which doesn't give you much to go on. There's this moment in Zazen instruction where I notice it dawn on people that there's not going to actually be any instruction. We take 20 minutes, 25 minutes getting into the room and taking our seat. And then we move into how to get off from the seat and exit the hall. So there's something missing here. There's some... some technical instructions that seem to have been misplaced, maybe collecting dust in the library somewhere, but certainly not available to most of us.

[04:16]

And our teachers are no more help, generally. So why is Zen so thin on technique? For a tradition that's named meditation, you would think there'd be a little more guidance, a little more technique. I think the reason that we're sort of thin on technique is that, well, we're the sudden school. We are suddenly here. We suddenly have a body. Wow. And it suddenly goes away. We suddenly get a new one. The teaching of Zen is very clear that enlightenment is right here. right now. What we are is awakening itself. It's not a matter of purifying, kind of peeling back the layers psychologically and emotionally and spiritually and gradually getting a brighter and brighter light until finally all of the dust is pushed aside and we're one with the radiant glow.

[05:30]

It's sudden. It's that in all of that dust is exactly enlightenment is exactly Buddha a technique we want a technique I want a technique I've looked desperately for techniques and have settled on some but they're hard to back up scripturally technique is always a technique for something you know So we have a technique because we want to do something, we want to get somewhere. So if you want to do something or get somewhere, it's good to have a technique to get there. But if there's nowhere to get, because we're here, then it's hard to... Any technique, in a way, leads us astray. Any technique that we pick up will give us some idea of somewhere we're going. where it's all okay, or even just where it's a little better.

[06:37]

So in this tradition of sitting Zen, we just sit not moving towards anything, not moving away from anything. We sit expressing by our sitting, expressing and enacting the Buddha-ness that we already have, that we already are. So we're not, most strictly speaking in Zen, we're not trying to become calm or peaceful or even really kind or wise through our sitting practice. Our sitting practice is simply to express the Buddha that we are. And that Buddha that we are is called the Dharmakaya Buddha. So there's a specific Buddha that we are and that we're expressing. And that's the Dharmakaya Buddha.

[07:40]

I was looking through some teachings of esoteric Japanese Buddhism. There's a strong esoteric or tantric Vajrayana stream in Japanese Buddhism. Even though we tend to associate tantra and Vajrayana more with Tibet, there's actually very strong Vajrayana tantric tradition in Japan and has been for a long time. Anyway, I was looking through some esoteric Japanese Buddhist materials and came across a mudra, the Dharmakaya mudra. Maybe some of you are familiar with the mudra that makes you mystically one with the body of the Dharmakaya, which is the Dharma body, the truth body of the Buddha. And that's this one. So in Dogen, our Soto founder in Japan says that just to sit is to be Buddha, is to express Buddhahood.

[08:45]

I'm appreciating and sort of surprised to notice that he's coming from this very strong esoteric Buddhist tradition where to take this form and hold this mudra is a kind of tantric rite of becoming... the Dharmakaya Buddha. A feature of Tantric Buddhism, Tantra in general, is maybe what's called deity yoga, where you become a deity, you invoke a deity, and then you welcome it and sort of dissolve the boundaries between yourself and that deity, you become that deity. So when Dogen says, just take the position and you are Buddha, there's this very strong Tantric sense of doing a ritual, a Tantric rite of becoming the Buddha. So I've been meditating a long time, thinking that I've been working on getting calm and peaceful.

[09:47]

And nobody told me that this whole time I've just been doing a Tantric rite of becoming one with the Dharmakaya Buddha. I feel we should tell people that that's what's going on here. So anyway, we come into the meditation hall and we try to do something with our body and our mind. We apply various kinds of effort, some of which we've picked up along the road from other traditions, from our own modern traditions, pre-modern traditions, and we're stuck feeling that we should do something, and we are doing something when we sit, and our neighbors are doing something when we sit, and there may or may not be a relationship between what we're doing and what our neighbor is doing.

[10:52]

So what is it that we should do, and how can we understand these various techniques or ways of approaching seated meditation? So I have come across the key to explaining all of meditation, and I'm quite excited about it, and I would like to share it with you today. But it involves doing something very un-Zen, which is that I have a handout. So I would like to pass something out And I... It's never happened. And I want to hand this out because it feels so wonderful and...

[12:03]

surprising and clear, and I just feel that I can't possibly do it justice by just explaining it. It's a visual image for all the ways that we could understand the kinds of efforts that we're making in meditation and the kinds of efforts that the different traditions instruct us in. So often we have students here who come to Zen Center from another tradition, and it can take months or years to figure out, what are you guys doing differently? I thought meditation was this, now it seems to be this. Where are we? So, do we need any more? We do. I'll just keep going. There should be plenty.

[13:40]

Though lacking meditation techniques, there are plenty of ritual instructions for repentance in Zen. So I will later repent this transgression of handing out during Dharma talk. But as you can see, if you can see this... this picture, there's a very kind of clear and I think quite wonderful and helpful, deeply helpful image that is not helpful yet. Is it helpful already? It's not helpful yet. So I'm so sorry we're out of time. So there's a problem. There are so many problems. One of the smaller problems of the world right now is that there are people trying to study what the effects of meditation are. And the people trying to study the effects of meditation are, what the effects of meditation are, have by and large skipped the step of figuring out what they mean by meditation.

[15:03]

So there's a lot of information that's been... drawn about what meditation does for you, but without sufficient care or appreciation for all the different things that meditation is. So to me, meditation means one certain kind of effort, one certain kind of awareness, one certain kind of attention. For someone else raised in another tradition, it means an entirely different set of things. So I think that the community of people researching meditation have discovered that it would be useful to get more specific about what they mean, what the different kinds of meditation instructions are, and also what the different experiences of doing meditation are. Because even if you're very specific on what the meditation instruction is that you give your wired-up undergraduate students, Even if you're very specific, each person is doing something, is having a very different kind of experience.

[16:10]

So how do we instruct people in meditation? And then what's going on in our own meditation? Useful things to consider if you're studying meditation and useful things to consider if you are meditating or, God help you, if you're trying to teach meditation. So my hope is that this newly discovered scripture here will be really of great benefit, even though it's intended for this kind of scientific community. I think it has amazing potential to clarify a lot of misunderstandings about the kinds of efforts that are applied in the different schools of meditation, and also just for ourselves to understand where we want to be in terms of the kind of meditation we're doing and where we actually are. So I'd like to walk you through this chart briefly. It's pretty simple once.

[17:12]

It shouldn't take long to explain. So this is from an article that's soon to be released that's in press in American Psychologist, a journal. It's called A Phenomenological Matrix of Mindfulness-Related Practices. It's in a certain non-English language called Psychology Journal by Lutz, Jah, Dunn, and Saren, Cliff Saren, who's been one of the leaders in the study of meditation and has crafted some amazing studies, including long retreat studies of meditators. So they... In this matrix, this cube, there's a few dimensions. So the primary dimensions going on are on maybe what are called the x, y, and z axes.

[18:19]

So maybe you see this object orientation at the bottom. That's one line of the cube of the graph. And then there's dereification is another primary aspect, and meta-awareness. So these are very technical terms that have been sort of coined for this paper. but I think we'll recognize them immediately, what they mean. So object orientation is how oriented is the mind towards an object of meditation? So is the mind looking for a meditation object? Is it oriented towards a meditation object? their description of this object orientation aspect of meditation is that it's not about the features of the selection of the object of meditation, but it's about rather the sense that the state is strongly or weakly oriented towards an object, even when no object is clearly selected.

[19:47]

So, for instance, if you're in a crowd trying to find somebody, In a crowd of people you're trying to find somebody, you're really oriented towards finding some object. Even though the object's not clear, your mind is oriented towards it. Does that make sense? So in our practice, say, of breath concentration practice, your mind is very strongly oriented towards finding and staying on the breath. In an objectless awareness or open monitoring or shikantaza practice like we do... like we are set to do in this meditation hall, there is not a lot of object orientation. The mind isn't sort of looking for the object that it's going to graph. So different styles of meditation are asking you to have more or less of a looking for the object of meditation. One test I thought of to test this, how object-oriented you are, is can you be interrupted? How interruptible are you?

[20:50]

If your meditation can be interrupted, it's because you were oriented towards an object and then something else happened and you got mad. Does that make sense? So spacing out, zoning out is very low object orientation. You're not looking for anything. And also our Shikantaza is like that. You're not looking for anything. This graph may change your life, but you have to stay with me. OK. So dereification is the second. So you can see, you could rank yourself in terms of the instruction you give or the practice you're doing. How strongly oriented towards an object is my mind? Second primary dimension here is called dereification.

[21:53]

And I'll read just to give you a taste of how wonderful they've crafted this article. So the dimension of dereification reflects the degree to which thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are phenomenally interpreted as mental processes rather than as accurate depictions of reality. For example, during rumination, which is sort of dwelling on some thought, generally maybe wholesome or unwholesome, a script including thoughts such as, I am a failure, may arise. And when it does, it can appear to be an accurate description of oneself such that a depressed mood is enhanced or sustained. Likewise, when thinking about one's favorite food, skipping a bit, the thoughts that represent the food can be taken to be real in such a way that one salivates. So dereification is how, most bluntly or perfectly, how do we believe what we think?

[23:17]

Do we believe that... Well, let me give another line from this. At the highest end of this dimension, so at the highest levels of dereification, which is a very strong aspect of our open meditation practice, at the highest end of this dimension, thoughts lose their representational integrity and are experienced simply as mental events. situated and embodied within a field of sensory, affective, and somatic feeling tone. So when training in dereification is what they call a cognitive reappraisal, which amounts to saying, this is just a thought. So do you believe that, you know, if you're meditating on the breath, do you believe the breath is out there? Do you have a thought? Do you believe that your thought is real? So how strongly are you reifying, making real, whatever... is coming up in your meditation. So there's times to... For instance, you may see that this... In the middle, sort of right side, there's the letters FA, parentheses, NOV.

[24:34]

There's a dot here, or a diagram here. And you'll see it's placed... In the spot on the chart, the FA stands for Focused Attention. So a lot of us assume meditation is about focusing the mind. And there are kinds of meditation that focus the mind. And in those kinds of meditation, as you can see, the mind is pretty strongly oriented towards an object. And to do that, it sort of helps to think it's really, it's there. As you get better at it, you notice that it's not what you thought it was. So an expert-focused attention meditator will have equal orientation towards the object, but as you can see, a little farther up here on the scale of dereification. Really, it's not my intention to have this be like a psychology class.

[25:38]

I'm very sorry. But I feel this is so useful, personally, for meditation. I really just want to share this model with you. The third is also quite interesting. It's called meta-awareness. And it's a sense of background awareness. So you have some object. Are you aware of other stuff than the object? What's the background attention? you hear the crickets when you're following your breath. When you're giving a Dharma talk, do you hear the crickets? The timekeeper, the Dohan or the Tenkin in a meditation hall, who can be aware of the time without losing whatever intention in meditation they have.

[26:39]

So usually when newer students, we don't make the timekeeper. It's just mean. It's just mean to take a new student and make them keep the time for meditation. Because it's too hard, it's too much. It's like counting my breath, but oh, what time is it? You know, it's not the ability to have a kind of background awareness that the object, whatever object or even however objectless the meditation is, that the mind is able to be panoramic in the sense of picking up on things that are outside of the field that's been described or circumscribed as the field of meditation. And say this is what this quality of meta-awareness, the awareness around awareness, is what, if we didn't have that, we would never snap out of mind-wandering, right? When our mind wanders and then we somehow notice that our mind has wandered, it's because there's something in our awareness that's wider, this kind of background awareness. So these are the primary dimensions on this chart.

[28:00]

And then there's these strange pictures, and they're pretty easy to explain, so I'll do it quickly. The first quality, and you can see there's a little key here, the first quality is aperture, which is the spotlight of attention. And this is also a real sticking point, a real point of confusion, I think, and interest. And for people especially coming into the Zen tradition, where we're taught to have a very wide object of meditation, the aperture is very wide. So where should the attention be? To get very focused, very concentrated, we narrow the attention. So in this diagram, the way they've worked it out, a small circle means a narrow aperture. So you can see, for instance, the people practicing focused meditation or those practitioners of... addictive craving, have a very narrow spotlight of attention.

[29:02]

It's a very focused beam on one thing. The breath, or the earth disk, or the fix, or whatever it is. In open monitoring or choiceless awareness meditation, our Shikantaza practice, the object, the the spotlight of attention is very wide. So often we teach that you start with an arrow. Once you can kind of have some kind of beam going, then widen it. The second is clarity. And clarity in this diagram is within the circle how dark or light it is. So if you kind of like follow your breath, you kind of can't even find your breath. or again, this person in the crowd, you know, you're getting these glimpses of the object, you're oriented towards it, you get these glimpses, how clear, how bright is the object of attention.

[30:05]

You sit, you may have some feeling for the breath, but as your mind gets very concentrated, the clarity with which you're proceeding your breath becomes much brighter, much stronger. So you'll see, like, in this focused attention novice, the clarity is not great, but the object becomes very clear as someone advances, becomes more expert. The clarity of someone with addictive craving is very strong. The object of attention is extremely vivid. There is no blurriness at all. The third is stability, which is expressed in the darkness of the circle. And that's the ability to continue whatever meditation this is. How stable is it? So does it persist over time?

[31:07]

We have this line that just to do this continuously, to achieve continuity, is the culmination. So how stable is the, I was super focused on that breath, super focused on that breath for a second. So there was a strong clarity, strong focus, strong attention, but the stability was weak. So do you see how with all of these elements putting together in different ways, we can learn, study the details of our own meditation and identify what it is that we would like to work on if we're not satisfied with simply doing the tantric rite of becoming Dharmakaya Buddha. So this is kind of plan B for those of us who are uncomfortable with that direct path to Buddhahood. Or feel it's not, it's immodest or something.

[32:08]

So the fourth is effort, the last. And effort is this little basket thing under the pictures. And the idea is that... The authors of this paper say this is the phenomenal impression that something is easy or difficult, which is just wonderful. They don't say whether it's easy or difficult. It appears to you that it was difficult, that it's difficult. I think it's hard. So do you think it's hard what you're doing or do you think it's not hard what you're doing? So this is also a place we talk about effortless meditation and this also can be a real point of confusion. How strong should the effort be? Ideally, in all the kinds of meditation, in Buddhism at least, they mature into less and less effort. You can see that in this diagram, the dotted line being a kind of minimal effort. So how hard do we want to be working? How hard should we be working?

[33:09]

And how hard are we working? And does that effort move? Does that effort shift from strong effort to light effort? So for those seeking liberation for themselves and others, liberation is not plottable on this chart. Any mental state, I think, the authors think, any mental state can be plotted on this diagram. Liberation is not something that can be plotted on this diagram. This is a way of understanding experience. of meditation and the meditative states, states of mind and states of effort and intention in meditation.

[34:18]

And each of these is a doorway. Each of these is what we call a Dharma gate into a possibility of noticing the groundlessness of all these states we move through. Thank you for your patience tonight. It's my sincere hope that through the mastery and miserable failure in various kinds of meditation and meditative techniques, and flexibility to explore a variety of techniques and move through them.

[35:21]

We learn about ourselves and one another in such a way that we become useful to beings. So we dedicate our practice to the well-being of others. 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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[35:58]

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