Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Right now, I was...

[10:01]

torturing myself with the notion to start off with what I was planning on ending the talk with. Did I start with that or should I leave it at the end? I decided to leave it at the end. It's a classical by Dogen. that I mentioned yesterday on Zaza, surprisingly. He introduces a lot of amazing and wonderful, and if you're not used to them, somewhat complex. So I thought I'd start off with something that hopefully Everybody will get. So here's what I, the image.

[11:05]

So at Tassahara, during a formal practice period in the fall or winter, the sangha is broken up into crews. And there's a kitchen crew, there's a shop crew, there's a garden crew, and there's the dawn crew. The Doan Rio. And then. But the whole practice period. The Doans. Who have been assigned. They will. The four. The six of them. Usually there's six. If there's enough people. That's what they will do. They will work on. The. The roles. For the ceremonies. four roles would be, the four primary roles would be person who hits the bells in Buddha Hall, the person who plays, hits the Mukugyo, the person who announces the chance, and the cheat.

[12:22]

And then throughout the practice period, you learn all those roles. Each day, such as the way the day is structured there, you have the chance to practice the roles individually, collectively, and get feedback on how you did that morning or the day before. It's a very interesting situation. Because usually different people have an ease or difficulty with certain roles. Someone might be just right off the bat a good kokyo, for whatever reason.

[13:30]

their physiology or their background in other things. They have a good chanting voice. Some people might have a good feel for the bells. And their mind works well in terms of knowing exactly when to hit them. Some people... have a nice sense of rhythm. So when they hit the makugyo, it just comes naturally to them to kind of get the rhythm. And one of the most fascinating parts is almost everybody has a kind of a strength, something that comes easily, and then something that doesn't. Some people just don't have a good sense of rhythm.

[14:33]

And so when they play the makukyo, it's really a challenge for them. I remember once, a long time ago, when I was Eno, here at City Center. And there was someone, he didn't live here, but he came and practiced regularly. And he was terrible at the Mukugyo. And he'd play it for morning service. And he'd do a pretty terrible job. His pacing would alter between too fast and too slow. And it was really hard to follow. And at least a couple of times a week. someone delicately and politely would suggest to me, do you think Robert should be allowed to play the McCugel?

[15:43]

Have you given him any training? I had. I had told him. I'd give him suggestions. I had... Actually, it got to the point where he would say to me, could I just give up? I'm pretty lousy at this, aren't I? Yeah, you are. Should you give up? And I'd say to him, never. Never. One of the things you learn at Tassajara is if you do morning service here at City Center, and maybe you didn't do so well, in the five or seven minutes they have to review, they'll give you a little bit of feedback.

[17:00]

Masahara, the Eno, has several hours to give you feedback. Explain to you in exquisite detail. Did you notice when in the third bow you hit the bell really hard? usually, almost always, the inno is on your side. You know, it's not like they're trying to shame you or blame you. They're just trying to, did you get that? Is there a learning that you could take from that? And it's somehow in the midst of inadequacies.

[18:07]

In the midst of having your mistakes public. When you hit the bell at the wrong place, everybody hears it. And there's no option of rewinding. Like it used to be with emails. You press the send button. And it wasn't coming back. It was sent. But somehow, it turns out to be, in the realm of practice, very helpful that each person something they're good at but even more than that much more helpful that there's something they're not so good at every now and then you know it does happen that there is a dawn who can do any dawn job and it just seems like for them it's a breeze you know some people are just like that

[19:29]

a sense of meeting something, some experience, some activity, some interpersonal exchange. It's asking you to go a little deeper, to go beyond your natural competencies, your karmic attributes. to go beyond it and work with it. Over the years, that Robert, the person who was terrible on the Mukugyo, and he did it once a week. And over the years, we became quite close. It became for Robert a very refined teacher.

[20:47]

He was academically inclined and a great scholar. And he had his field of expertise. And that's how he made his living. And that's where he could express his competency. And then he would come and hit the Mukugyo. And discover, you know, there's something I would really like to be good at. And I'm not. And I really try sincerely and diligently. And it shifts a little bit, but not very much. On a good day, Robert was just bad. On a bad day, it was like unbelievable.

[21:52]

But that way, he stuck with it. way he engaged it and let it challenge him challenge him deeply you know there's such a crucial lesson there for every one of us you know every one of us you know you run into something you don't like your incompetency is demonstrated and usually we like to keep that I don't know if we like to keep it a secret but we like it to have minimal impact on our well-being and how others thought about us and one of the

[23:11]

One of the powerful things about being on the dawn reel, the dawn crew at Tassahara, is that you're immersed in that world. And for the three months of the practice period, you're going to live in that world. And the challenges and somewhat the triumphs. I mean, it's kind of lovely when you get it. of you just hit everything the way they should be hit, the time they should be hit, and with the right tone and the volume. It does happen. But almost always, there's still something there,

[24:12]

you to work with. And usually, your first practice period, you're just on general labor, what we used to call general labor and we now call temple care. And then you would have some, you'd be on a crew and then Eventually you would be a dawn. So. Those other practice period. Help us. Kind of. Get into our bones. What practice asks of us. In a way. It does ask of us a certain competency.

[25:17]

Hit the bell when you're supposed to hit it. It's not a free-form event. Just hit it whenever you feel like it. This world is not a free-form event. It asks something of us. It asks us to meet its structure, its conventions, its expectations, its difficulties. Harmonize. And so in a way, in Shashin, we create Maybe we could even say an artificial environment in which we can look carefully at what's the core principles of our practice.

[26:28]

That we can give ourselves the time to look more deeply and feel more deeply and practice more deeply with the essential ingredients. And that's. And eventually. Robert. Got assigned. To another. and he left time. And Robert, if you ever hear this talk, I'd still say, don't give up. Keep going. You can come back and hit the Mukugyo. And then how do we, given the fact that we're a limited human being, how do we nurture

[27:42]

Poster within ourselves. That kind of. Capacity. To just say yes. To what's happening. There's so interesting. How. We. Can. Say. Maybe. how suddenly we can say no. All over the place. Often in our diligence, we say, well, my zazen is not so good. And sometimes, you know, we blame our body. If only I could sit in full notice.

[28:45]

Or if only I'd taken more yoga classes and been able to do whatever. But the nature of the karmic world, the nature of being a human, is that we're not utterly competent at everything. a variety of notions. You know, can you establish a vow that has this fundamental principle within it? You know, it's not about success. It's not about creating within yourself all the necessary skills to awaken.

[29:54]

Crucially, it's something about how is the moment being related to. And within that moment will be the expression of your competencies. And your lack of competency. Your settledness and your unsettledness. your sincerity, and your distractibility. When I started to think about this this morning, I started to think about the Indian approach. And of course, these are broad strokes and could be readily challenged. But I'm going to say it anyway. In the Indian approach, you have this kind of penchant for analysis.

[31:06]

The Four Noble Truths, the Five Betters, the Six Paramitas, the Eightfold Path, the Seven Wings of Enlightenment. an analysis to help us have a vocabulary for the human experience. The vocabulary arises from the perspective of practice. When you go for a job, they want to know, are you good at hitting the Makugyo? And if you're good, they'll hire you. And if you're not good, they won't hire you. There is a good and a bad. There's an acceptable and an unacceptable.

[32:11]

And in the Dharma world, the criteria is awakening. Awakening to the nature of conditioned existence. very process of relating to that and discovering a vocabulary for it and a form of engagement so the Indian methodology seems to me to say okay well let's lay it out you know let's lay out The seven factors of awakening. The first one is awareness. Be present. Experience the experience.

[33:16]

And that's the work of a lifetime. with the first factor and keep practicing the first factor right within the first factor is competence and incompetence persistence and willingness to live with your own inadequacies so-called inadequacies in some karmic way they may well be The second factor is to engage in an investigative way. What's happening? What's the particulars of it? And what's the impact of it? What does it stir up? as I was talking a little bit about yesterday, what's the energy of it?

[34:36]

What's the emotional energy of it? How does it impact the physical? You know, sitting with physical pain is a skill. There's a way in which there's an impulse to tighten around pain. But as we keep exploring it and we can learn, there can be that unpleasant sensation. And it doesn't necessarily have to spark the contraction, the mental distress. the energy can still flow.

[35:39]

And then the next factor is when those three come together, awareness, investigation, and energy, when we start to palpably feel them, When we see a demonstration in our own experience, there is, as I mentioned several times, a sense of joy. Sometimes that joy has a quality of relief. Sometimes it even has a quality of sadness. Oh, how much time I've struggled and worried. And agitated. And blamed. For what? Did it do me any good? Did it do anybody else any good? That sense of joy.

[36:50]

Invites two wonderful qualities. It invites. A sense of ease. Okay. Maybe I don't have to be so up. about succeeding. Maybe it's not true that I won't be happy until all my needs are perfectly met. A sense of ease and a sense of tranquility. Something in us exhales. Okay then. So those are four and five. And then.

[37:51]

The capacity. The enhanced capacity. To just be. intentionally sink into it. In some ways, we could say the practice of Zazen, seated Zazen, is to do nothing and just sink into what's already happening. as I was mentioning yesterday, that has two qualities. One is a singularity of sinking in to a particular experience. And as we sink in, as we immerse, we go beyond the concepts, the judgments, and we experience more fully what we might think of as the essence.

[39:02]

as its own energy. And then the other aspect of samadhi is the flow of attention. The sign of the plane doesn't interrupt presence in the Buddha hall, it complements it. It becomes part of the symphony of experiencing that's flowing through. And then the seventh quality, kind of equanimity. So be it. This is a conditioned existence. We're influenced by sorts of things.

[40:09]

Almost everything that arises into our perception, into our experiencing, whether we perceive it, whether we are aware of it or not, it influences. It has an impact. The equanimity is okay. That's how it is. it is to be a human being this is how it is for me and this is how it is for others and this is how it is for the whole planet we all intervene all the time so the indian process of laying it out And the wonderful Chinese, Japanese process of sort of letting it be the material for a good poem.

[41:19]

What I might get to, which was in the Song Dynasty, started somewhat in the Song Dynasty, but in the Song Dynasty and later on. you thought you'd accomplished, well, maybe this is not a kind way to put it, but then it became prone for teachers to write a poem about Zazen. And that poem had a very interesting play on words. It was called Zazen Shin. And the word Shin there, you know, Kaz Tanahasi, Translated it as. The point. The point of Zazen. Zazen Shin. The point of Zazen. But the CM Shin. Can mean. Like the acupuncture needle. You know. So in a human body.

[42:26]

When the energy is blocked. You put in. An acupuncture needle. To help the energy to flow. So. It's as if the activity of zazen is to facilitate energy flow. The activity of zazen is to touch the point of blockage. Touch the point where we're saying no. No, I'm not going to be aware. I don't like that. It's not enough. Or it's not. It's too much. Sometimes that can come from our physical being.

[43:31]

Sometimes that can come from our mental constructs. in our practice, something in our Zen training. Maybe even though you're not so good at hitting the bells, maybe there's a gift in discovering how to practice with something you're not so good at. Maybe there's a gift in discovering the perseverance the humility, the stick-to-it-ness, the going beyond success and failure. This is a very hard, this big bell, it's a really hard bell to hit just right.

[44:34]

It's just the way, some bell, like the bell, the big bell at Tassara. It's a different kind of quality. And it reverberates. Much more readily. Sometimes I wonder. How it is to be Dawn. Seems to me it's quite easy to go away thinking, oh, what a great job I did. I think this bell is more of a taskmaster. Most people go away thinking, well, I sort of clanged it a few times and I hit it too soft a few times.

[45:42]

the second and third big bow for the first nine bows. I thought, oh, that was very resonant. A judging mind. Success and failure. And then there's something in that impulse when we can see the beauty. To my mind, that's what a poem is. It sees the beauty in something. And with that in mind, I'll read you. So in this fascicle, Zazen Shin, Dogen, First of all, as I mentioned slightly a little bit yesterday, he used this story between Nangaku and Basso.

[46:54]

And then he turned it on its head. You know, the traditional way would be to say, oh, Basso was goal-oriented, and Nangaku pointed out to him, it's not about the goal, it's about how what's arising is related to. Dogen says, it's about realizing the nature of effort and allowing the effort to be wishless. And so Dogen says, but the nature of effort includes making the effort. And if your effort is to be Buddha, well, sit with your effort.

[47:58]

And then he says, and if your effort is to polish a tile so it's a mirror, sit with your effort. Whatever your effort is. And then when he gets to the point where Nangaku says, well, if the cart and the horse and cart won't move, do you beat the cart or do you beat the horse? And Dogen says, you beat them both. You keep making your effort. That reveals the human condition. That's what reveals how you're relating. That's what lets you see what's coming up for you. So is Dogen saying, Any goal, any effort? I mean, the conventional way of looking at it would be, oh, well, polishing a tile is ridiculous.

[49:08]

It's never gonna become mirror-like. So there's a very interesting inquiry there for each of us. I would say, making our effort wholeheartedly, sincerely. But is directing your effort anywhere? Is that it? Yeah. Was it really okay to have Robert hit the Makugula? That often, for years. Wasn't that often, it was once a week, but for such a long time. Is it okay to say, never give up?

[50:11]

Is that a factual statement, or is that a... Would it have been better if I'd have said, yeah, let's just accept, Robert, that you're no good at this. Let's just accept it. There's lots of other things in life. So can the very nature... of our effort can the particularity of our effort be something we look at something we study something we learn from not so much as an intellectual pursuit as a lived practice pursuit you know the verb in Japanese to study in to study the way

[51:22]

It's learning by doing. It's an experiential process. You play the piano to study playing the piano. So we do it, we make our effort, and we attend, and we learn. And we can call forward a disposition that balances, okay, there's diligence, there's sincerity, there's continual inquiry, there's some ease in the middle of the process. We usually call effortless effort.

[52:27]

And there's this subtle way in which when we contract, we attend to the process of contraction. One of the things I like about Hatha Yoga is when you stretch at a certain point, Something in your physiology says no. Can you, within no, can you find yes? Not that you're striving to achieve a goal, but it's just you're discovering more deeply the nature of yes. within the challenges of your life, within the so-called deficits of your life, can you find yes?

[53:38]

I'll stop in a moment. I'll just read this first sentence. Tanahashi's translation. Oh, maybe I'll read Shuhaka Kimura's. The essential, this is Wong Zhur. These translators are translating Zazen Shin, written by a teacher, Wong Zhur, who lived about a hundred years before Dogen. And Dogen, being Dogen, in this fascicle, said, many, many people, thousands of peoples have written Zazen Shin, and most of them are rubbish. And here's a good one. I don't think he used the word rubbish, but he got pretty close to, I'll look it up tomorrow. He got pretty close to just saying, of the sentences, this is Kaz's translation.

[55:14]

It's not that Zazen had completely avoided them. It was that they were carelessly intoxicated and they did not aspire to genuine effort. That was his critique of the thousands of Zazenchins. And then he went on and extolled the virtue and the accuracy. It has this translation. The essential function of the Buddhas and the functioning essence of all the ancestors. Knowing without touching things. Illuminating without creating objects. I'll read it again. The essential function of the Buddhas. and the functioning essence of the ancestors, knowing without touching things, illuminating without creating objects.

[56:22]

So we're entering that phase. It's an interesting point to end on. What was I about to say? I think it had something to do with Zazen Shin. entering that point in Sashin, where we start to, with wonderful creativity and ingenuity, we start to create a there and a then.

[57:43]

And not only do we create it, but we infuse it with energy. And as we infuse it with energy, it dances. being in our mind's eye and often ripples the very same dense ripples through our body with influences our emotions can there be a spirit of practice that can engage that too realm of practice. Not to say we indulge it and get swept away by it. This notion of zazen is doing nothing.

[58:47]

Zazen, seated zazen, is doing nothing. It's being fully present for what's already happening. So when this dance of there and then arises, can it be fully experienced? Can it happen here and now? As Dogen Zenji says, when it happens here and now, it actualizes the fundamental point. Sometimes it can be extraordinarily informative sometimes we something arises that we've seen in ourselves many times it's not so uh like what we're worried about oh and then i've got to do such and such but sometimes especially at this point in sishin we can see it more deeply we can feel it more deeply

[59:57]

And we feel, oh, I've got to do that. And that brings up a tinge of fear, a tinge of concern, a hopefulness, a yearning. That sort of doing nothing, that deep receptivity. Thank you. Thank you.

[61:40]

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