This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. I'm going to do something a little bit unusual for Wednesday night lecture. I would like to start this lecture with a question. Actually... Let's not call it a lecture. Let's call it a Dharma talk. And so the question is, is there anything about the forms of this talk or this evening, or if you're here for the practice period, anything about the Zen forms that we do that's either pleasurable or painful for you? So it's painful when the opening chant goes slowly, and it's pleasurably when it goes quickly?

[01:07]

With energy. Okay, so it's not so much the speed as the energy. Okay. Okay, anything else? Anything particularly pleasant or painful about the form? What we do. This might be your last chance to give feedback ever. Yes. I paid her to make that comment. Did you hear that? That sometimes the same thing can be either pleasurable or painful depending on what's happening with you. Okay. And anything else? I noticed that you were about to say something. Yes. What's painful to me is that as I get older, it's very hard for me to do some of the forms which I love. Okay. So the forms you love, and it's hard to do them physically so that each time that happens, there's pain.

[02:14]

Yeah. I can relate to that one. Yeah. Anything else? Yes. Uh-huh. Yes, the Nanju ceremony when we bow to each other. Yeah. Okay. It's painful on your back to bow and you'd wish it was limited to the people in the practice period so you didn't have to bend over that long. Okay. Oh, so they didn't deserve it. They just went to lecture. They don't deserve gratitude. OK, that's a good one. Anything else? Yeah.

[03:16]

I moved a babu forward before we bowed, and I moved it with my hand. And I always find it really pleasurable, that training to not move with the foot. But I also found it just slightly That's very interesting. Did you notice what Jane said? There were both pleasurable and painful aspects to that form, which Suzuki Roshi gave us a form. He said, don't move cushions around with your feet. So Jane is being very good about following the tradition and enjoying it. Yeah, enjoying that dignity and respect. But also there's resistance, which is painful. Thank you. Ilya, you wanted to say something too. Yes, I enjoy the noon service. It's small and pretty. So this is a plug for noon service.

[04:22]

And nobody come to noon service. If you don't already come, you didn't hear about it here. Okay? It's a small, intimate group that I'm not going to say you're not invited to it, but don't come. Because we do great things there, and you don't deserve to come because you haven't been coming all along. Okay. So tonight I would like to talk about unlocking the nuts and bolts of suffering. undoing the nuts and bolts of suffering. And we are in a Zen temple, and Zen is a form of Buddhism, and Buddhism is about relieving suffering. So Zen is a particularly form-oriented method of Buddhism. Have you noticed? There's lots of forms. And the thing is, if you really try to make an effort to follow the tradition of the form, there's a beauty...

[05:27]

There's a loveliness to that form. And also, I don't know if you've noticed this, but at the beginning, it's enough with the form just to get in there, not make a fool out of yourself and get out. And then a little bit later, you want to know more of the details, like stepping over the threshold with your left foot on the left side, or using this finger or that finger to open the knot. when you do the meal, or not walking through the kitchen because it's a practice place. So then you can enjoy the refinements of the form, and then later on still you enjoy those refinements, the refinements of the refinements, plus passing the form to other people. And it becomes like a giant project that we all work on, a giant... that we all speak, a language that includes body, speech, and mind.

[06:31]

And it's a language to help with suffering. And how does it help with suffering? Because when we can practice a form, we can actually experience the harmony of everybody practicing the same form at the same time. And we get a taste of... It's not the real thing necessarily, but what it might feel like to be in one practice samadhi. One practice samadhi means that everything that we do shares one characteristic. The characteristic that it shares is that it doesn't have a characteristic, that it's unpredictable, that it's not permanent, that it's not self, and that it's not that it's empty of value. So the same thing can be either pleasurable or painful, either wholesome or unwholesome.

[07:37]

And the ways that we see and experience these forms through body, speech, and mind, as pleasant or painful, or as just confused, I don't know, are highly conditioned by mind. Everything that we are, the Buddha says, comes from mind. It's conditioned by mind. It arises from mind. It's expressed through mind. And if a person speaks or acts with an unclear mind, bitter grief pursues her or him like the wheel follows the foot of a draft ox. or I should say in this time, like children follow an ice cream truck, or maybe like people line up for tickets to a special event. It's that close. Unclear mind carries its own pain.

[08:41]

And so mind bears some unpacking because we think that there's body. And we think that there's mind. That's one of the common ways that we think. But actually this, touch this for a moment. Not mine, but yours. Okay? And did you notice that there's something that you can see, which is motion. There's something you can feel on both sides. This part feels and this part feels. And there's a... an effect, a mental effect of increased alertness or like what's going on or something. And so it's a multidimensional, try it again, multidimensional action. Now, if you're a Zen student, Bob Ornstein in the 70s proved that if you were an experienced Zen meditator, every time you did this, it would be as if you were doing it for the first time.

[09:43]

So... Normal people who don't practice meditation tested out that if they did this a few times, you can try it yourself, if they did this a few times, if they did this a few times, that they would become accustomed to it. But the Zen students tested out that when they did it, they didn't become accustomed to it. I don't know what that says exactly about Zen students. And then the yoga meditators were able to go inwards, and it didn't matter what the stimulus was. So we're different results. And so we're not exactly, you know, Dogen Zenji talks about dropping off body and mind, but we're not exactly dropping off body and mind.

[10:47]

cutting it off or going away from it or disassociating from body and mind. But it's more that body and mind arises with a freshness. And this is the part of the mind that we call body. Try it again. Notice that this is not different from this. A different part of us gets touched. That's how we register. We have discernment. That here, this part goes, the ear part goes, and here the skin part vibrates. So we have that awareness that there's that difference. But actually, they're similar events. And when we look deeply, we can see how they're similar moment after moment. And we can pick a subject that's kind of a test subject to allow us to Test this out or see it.

[11:48]

There are many such subjects. If you want to pick a subject that will be pleasant for everyone, pick friendliness. If you want to pick a subject that will be soothing and rhythmic for you, pick breath. But there are many different objects, traditionally 40, but actually there are as many objects or subjects as there are people and states of mind. And what we have to do is commit to one. long enough so that we can understand what happens when we try it out. And when we do that, our way of perceiving the world changes. And it changes in a wholesome way if we maintain a pliable and curious mind. But that doesn't always happen. So, as a matter of fact, our consciousness is not, as human beings, is not always fresh.

[12:55]

If we're greedy, we fall into various states. If we're angry, we fall into various states. If we're deluded, we fall into various states. And those can become very habitual for us and not always conscious. Sometimes they come up because of what we were born with, the equipment we were born with. Sometimes they come up because of what happened to us and sometimes they come up because of what we did. And this is the way that the mind or the self is conditioned and there becomes kind of a, you can think of it as a kind of a storehouse in which or of which a storehouse of structural stuff of which our various moments of experience are made. And if our current mind is unclear, the storehouse forms one way.

[14:01]

If our current mind is clear, it forms a different way. So we can definitely condition future mind by how we act now. And I'd just like to talk about... the part of life which is the part of this storehouse that's unpleasant and uncomfortable for us. Because the part that's pleasant and comfortable, we don't generally think of as a problem until it ends. Or until it looks like it's going to end. Or until it veers off being exactly what we want. Then we begin to suffer. But... then that falls under what's uncomfortable and unpleasant for us. So I'd like to talk about that. So the part that I particularly like to focus on is the latent defilements of mind. So generally, you can think of the mind as proceeding like a stream, like a karmic stream.

[15:04]

And that stream has all of our experiences in it, and it conditions how we see the world and how we react, and whether, indeed, we can react or respond. And, you know, when we sit, when we make a decision to come here and practice, we're making a decision to stand still or sit still in the middle of the stream. And when we do that, we can feel the force and speed of the stream. We can feel the width and depth of the stream. So often when we make a decision to sit, we feel our difficulties more acutely than ever, and we think that we're less concentrated, but in fact it's not so. That act of stopping is the beginning of concentration, and it's a very valuable moment in time when we begin to feel the texture of our lives as it has come to be, of our life as it has come to be.

[16:10]

And a lot of times what we feel is just a big mass of stuff that's unpleasant or uncomfortable, hard to live with, or characterizes our general way of suffering. And then to actually work with it, to take refuge, is to renounce our habitual mind, our habitual activity in relation to that stream. So usually, you know, let's say... If life is a karmic stream, generally we walk downstream in it until we make the decision to practice and address our suffering. Then not only do we stop, but in this incredible act of courage and faith, we turn around in the stream and begin to walk upstream into that karmic flow. And if you think about how many people have actually walked upstream, all the way upstream in a stream.

[17:13]

So I'm thinking about Tassajara Creek and walking upstream in Tassajara Creek. And as you walk upstream in the creek, the water gets thinner and shallower, and it comes to a place where it's quiet and small. And actually, there may be some waterfalls where it comes from. And it's quite beautiful there. And you can actually watch how the mental events come to be. And by mental, I don't mean just what we usually think of as mental, because the experience of our physical life is a mental event. And so it becomes very still there, and we can see how it comes to be, and we can actually work with it. And we can begin to feel, to experience the one taste of experience as it arises moment after moment.

[18:22]

And from that moment, our life is never really the same. Because if we can... gain a direct experience, and I'm not talking about I must gain a direct experience, but if we can directly experience how it comes to be and we can keep pace with that process, we can actually begin to live our life in a very fresh way, very refreshed way, a very intimate way. a way in which we can respond instead of react, in which we can respond from a much bigger picture of how it all is. But usually, in usual life, what happens isn't like sitting, isn't like that. And I'm talking about sitting as it develops over the course of a person's whole spiritual maturity. So I've been sitting for 40 years, and it was really interesting in the first...

[19:26]

Jaco Cho Bill Kwong says the first 10 years are the hardest. I asked him, this is really awful. What's going on? And he said, he responded, the first 10 years are the hardest. And then I looked at him and I said, Bill? And he started laughing and laughing and laughing. I said, 10 years? He said, okay, the first 12 years are the hardest. And it's because really what actually happens when we're not in a settled place. The settled place of zazen is probably the simplest activity we'll ever do in our whole lives. It's like a test case. But in normal life, the experiences are flying thick and fast, 16 times a second. And we're not trying to do the same thing moment after moment. We're just trying to live.

[20:27]

And so as they're flying, it's very easy not to catch them with beauty, grace, and skill, and mental and emotional flexibility. It's very easy to react. And so the latent tendencies of how we are or how we have come to be are in full force, pushing us from behind, pushing the reaction from behind. Does this make sense to you, I hope? So it has to do with, if you think about this, when, you know, sometimes we've been talking about baseball a lot recently. And when a little kid learns how to throw a baseball, my nephew was like this. When he first learned how to throw a baseball, he would practice for hours. And at every moment, he would go out back and practice with his dad. And his dad had to throw the baseball.

[21:28]

And so that he could, or he had to throw the baseball. Someone had to throw it and someone had to catch it. And it was millions of repetitions. And the idea was that he would throw it, not like a girl, but like a boy. First he had this idea that girls throw this way and boys throw that way. He had to learn how to throw like a boy. So that was the first thing. And he had to learn how to catch. And then he had to learn how to throw fast. And he had to learn how to throw in a certain way. And he did that with such a dedication. I can't even describe his dedication. And we're talking about a seven-year-old or an eight-year-old learning how to throw. And the idea of that was that if someone just threw a baseball to him, that he would catch it. Or if someone said, here, he would just throw it without even thinking. And that's what we do all the time. Except normally when karma, when defilements are built up or when our reactions are built up, they're not built up with any particularly good intention.

[22:38]

They're more random than that. But when we take vows, when we take refuge, we're actually building a structure that's independent of the defilements. And we call that freedom. we're turning our lives in a different direction. We're actually letting go of reactive formations and turning our lives towards response. So Vasubandhu and the Abhidharmakosha Bhashyam, which is kind of an encyclopedia of Buddhism that was, it's a summary of the first several hundred years of Buddhist thought. says om, homage to Buddha. Now, it's established that the world in all its variety arises from action. Now, it's by reason of the anusheyas. Anusheya just means outflows or latent defilements. It's like the flowing of a stream, defilements that flow on, that actions accumulate.

[23:43]

In the absence of the Anushayas, actions are not capable of producing a new existence. Consequently, and this is the verse, this is the punchline, the roots of existence, that is, of rebirth or of action, are the Anushayas, the outflows. When a defilement enters into action, it accomplishes ten operations. I'll just read a few of them. This is how defilements work. In zazen, when you sit, you can watch these things actually occur in real time. So first of all, it makes solid its root, its prapti. Prapti is grabbing on the possession that a certain person already had of the kletia. So it means that, let's say, when you were a little kid, you stole something from a grocery store and you hadn't done it until now, and then somebody dropped a wallet on the street and you took it and kept the money.

[24:48]

You're solidifying that defilement of, you know, turning away from the fact that you were taking something that wasn't yours. Is that clear? So it means that it acts as if this thievery is part of I, me, and mine. So that's the first way that defilements operate. And then the second one is it places itself in a series that continues to reproduce itself. So with the act of taking comes the self-conception, I'm a thief, or maybe I'm a thief, or I take things, I'm the kind of person that takes things that aren't mine. The third thing is it accommodates its field, rendering the person fit for the arising of that glacia. So it turns you into the kind of person for whom that thing can more easily occur. Fourth, it engenders its offspring, that is the upacletias.

[25:51]

Upacletias are just the constituents of personality when they're suffering. So its offspring is the... mental processes as they arise for a thief. The sixth one is it aggregates its causes, namely incorrect judgment. So it turns the judgment into the judgment of a thief. It causes one to be mistaken with regard to the object of consciousness. So it means that you develop mistaken views. in relation to stuff, particularly stuff that isn't yours. It bends the mental series towards the object or towards rebirth. So it creates a tendency.

[26:51]

It brings about a falling away of good and, tenth, it becomes a bond, bandana. Banda means that it holds things together like a belt or like a band. and prevents the surmounting or transcendence of the sphere of existence to which it belongs. Isn't that interesting? That's the nuts and bolts of defilement. So I picked something really gross, like taking something that isn't yours. But there are more subtle defilements. The defilements of speech are more subtle than the defilements of bodily action. So, for instance, if you are in the habit on the highway of when things happen saying, jerk, idiot, that does the same thing, but in a more subtle way than if you were to actually get out and commit an act of road rage.

[27:54]

Okay? And the thinking is more subtle still. And even before the thinking, there's the... Before the thinking, there's something even more subtle, which is when something happens that you're conditioned to see as negative, immediately a feeling of displeasure will occur. So Jane is teaching a class on trauma, on healing from trauma. And part of healing from trauma is to work with sensitivity that arises from past experience, I think. So this is an example. Okay. And then even before the negative feeling ever arises, even before that in the mental series events, there's a kind of splitting away from the one taste, from the one practice that has to occur and be ignored before we can start that whole karmic stream.

[29:00]

So the moral of the story is if you want to not suffer... Stay in the midst of how things are and be willing to drop habits without dropping vow. If you want to be free from suffering, stay present with what's happening now and be willing to drop everything except vow. your intention to wake up for the benefit of all beings. And be willing for whatever you do to be a mistake. Because it will be. Someone will have some feedback about that, whatever it is. Or something will have some limitation, whether it's the lack of energy of your slow, mindful chanting.

[30:06]

Okay? Or, you know, it can be any of the things that we said, feelings of pleasure or pain or confusion come up in relation. I didn't ask about confusion because it's a lot easier to see pleasure or pain. Okay, I would just like to read a verse from the... 30 verses. Thich Nhat Hanh, I think this book used to be called something else, maybe Transformation at the Base. And it's a collection of writings on the Trimsukha and the Vimsukha, the 30 verses and the 20 verses of Yogacara. Yogacara is the mind-only school of Buddhism, and it's one of the ancestors of Zen Buddhism. It's a It's a kind of warm set of practices about the serene body of release that's based on an understanding of emptiness.

[31:17]

So it goes along with the emptiness school, but it's a different style of practice, and it's part of the background of Zen. And so Vasubandhu... and there were at least two Vasubandhus, but the legend says it was the same one who wrote this, who converted later to Yogacara, but I'm not sure that's true, wrote these verses, and here's one of them in Thich Nhat Hanh's translation. It's called The Gardener. Mind consciousness is the root of all actions of body and speech. Its nature is to manifest mental formations, but... Its existence is not continuous. Mind consciousness gives rise to actions that lead to ripening. It plays the role of the gardener, sowing the seeds. Okay, can I read it one more time? Okay, he's saying it's not continuous because if we really look even deeper than the metaphor of the mind is streamed,

[32:28]

we'll see that it actually is born and dies in every moment. But that's another story. But if you sit Rohatsu Sishin, you may be able to find a concentration, a taste, that single taste of practice, day after day, period after period, moment after moment, that allows you to notice that experience is not actually continuous. in the way we assume. And you can actually sit on the point where experience itself is born and dies. And the suffering then becomes like the leading in the stained glass window that allows you to experience the vividness of the art. So I'll read this poem again. Mind consciousness is the root of all actions of body and speech. Its nature is to manifest mental formations, but its existence is not continuous.

[33:32]

Mind consciousness gives rise to actions that lead to ripening. It plays the role of the gardener, sowing all the seeds. Okay. So I think that's probably enough for one evening, and I'll try not to, you know... ask you to sing or anything. But is there time for a question or two or comment? Does anyone know what time it is? Huh? 7.25? Oh, okay. If it were 7.25, I could talk for another hour. What do you think? Kategori Roshi used to say that his practice was to speak till everybody fell asleep. He said it was more important, the sound and rhythm of the voice was more important than the content. And that the sound and rhythm of the voice should inspire faith.

[34:40]

And the example, the presence should inspire faith in the practice. And that was more important to him. He said this... one time when we were talking. And that was more important than the content of the lecture, so that I didn't have to worry about the content of the lecture. I just had to worry about the one taste of Zen in the lecture. So any comments or questions on this? Painful, pleasant? Yeah. Mm-hmm. I mean, in a way that you said it, I really sort of have the, I think it was the vision of the screen and how powerful, how antithetical silly manifestation is to the culture of living and stopping, you know, because you're not doing something confusing and you're not doing anything.

[35:53]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. And when we dwell in this, we'll understand. Sitting is just sitting, but it's not just sitting. Because sitting is just sitting, it's not just sitting. So it also is going to the hospital and being present with somebody. It also is deciding what you need to do in this life. It also is deciding who to include. It also is deciding what it's important to transmit. So check it out. Anything else? Anything else? Yes. Can you talk a little bit more about the mind body that you were talking about? The mind body? And connect that to the mind formations.

[36:53]

Yeah. So the mind-body and mind formations, well, I think what I want to do is look at the body as Buddha mudra for a moment, if that's okay with you. Okay? Well, because that's the tool. So what we do when we siddhasana is we create a safe place for the entire causal body to arise. We say causes and conditions, hitupratyaya. And... So it's like everything within an enclosure. Everything comes up within an enclosure and shows its meaning. So this is the enclosure. It's not enclosure like closing it off. It's enclosure like a safe place. It's enclosure like, you know, when you put a fence around the garden so that the deer don't come in or the gophers don't come in, you...

[37:54]

You dig that fence down so that the gophers don't come in, or else you are willing to make a bed all around the garden, which is the first bed of the garden, so the gophers will eat that. But you have to do something to acknowledge the gophers. And the gophers aren't outside in Zazen. There isn't any outside or any inside in Zazen. So we keep the eyes open to emphasize that there isn't exactly outside and there isn't exactly inside. That's an example of the body-mind connection, but that the eyes are kind of the last thing. So first, you've been sitting for a while, so if you need to, we're not going to go on too long, but if you need to, change your legs or change yourself so that you're steadic. Not steady dominating yourself, but steady because the body actually has a feeling of steadiness.

[38:56]

And if you can't, don't worry. If you're already restless because you've sat too long, don't worry. It just shows what the condition is. And now you can find out how you're sitting, how you've met the ground by putting your hands, one on each side of your seat, on the cushion or on the floor, and lightly press down until you feel light. And we've done this before, but it refreshes how you meet the ground. So adjust yourself so you meet the ground exactly evenly on the two sides of the two buttock bones. And that lightness that you created with your hands is actually a space element in you. You can make a lift on the sides of the body that feels like the lift you had when your hands were holding you. Okay? And maintain that lift of the sides of the body all the way up. But release the skin of the shoulders.

[39:58]

Imagine, if you can, that you're wearing Superman's cape. It has kryptonite, whatever it was, woven into the weave of the fabric so that there's kind of heaviness and weight there. on the skin of the upper back and shoulders. Let that release down into the sides in a cape shape. Okay? But balance your ears over your shoulders, over your buttock bones. And as if you were Avalokiteshvara with many arms, you can try this. You take your hands just in a namaste position in front of your chest, and the fingers slightly away from the thumbs, but with the thumb bone, slightly touch the skin of the chest, pulling it down ever so slightly until the chest opens and lifts, lifts up and out. Now, keep that shape of the chest, but place your hand into the mudra with the upper arms heavy and the lower arms light.

[41:06]

Now, with the mudra... dows up and down and someplace between the belly button and the pubic bone. There's a place that feels warmer or more electric. And let the skin of the hands be equally sensitive to that electricity all the way around. And then dig the little finger bone, seat it firmly against the belly right there. Slightly bring the thumbs closer to your body or further away until you feel tension neither at the front nor at the back of your neck. And then release your eyes, your ears, the inner surface of the nose. Let your eyes be long, smooth, and deep like Buddha eyes. Skin of the forehead soft, the mouth half smiling like Buddha's smile. If you get confused, look at the Buddha image.

[42:09]

It's a teaching. from thousands of years ago to us today. And now you feel this posture is very safe. Anything that can come up. Anything can come up. With your eyes, let light come in, but don't go after the light. With your ears, let sound come in, but don't pursue the sound. With your nose, be gentle as the air comes in and out. Let there be a kind of a softness inside. And almost as if the pores of the chest are breathing too. And let the breath come all the way from the area where the hands are circling the energy center of the body. It's a cosmic mudra is what you're doing with the hands, but the Buddha mudra is what you're doing with the body.

[43:18]

Let's just sit for a couple breaths. This posture is called in Japanese, the characteristic is called sho. Sho, like in shobo genzo, means true. true-like truing alignment of wood when you build something. If the pillar isn't upright, the building is not firm. But also, if the skin of the building doesn't take its own shape, things can't happen inside. Everything that comes up in the study of the way is the true human body and the true human mind.

[44:28]

Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:00]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.26