Good morning. Welcome back. Avoid evil. Do good. And purify the mind. This is the teaching of all the Buddhas. Right now, we begin again. Today. And we always begin again. Right now. today there's no other choice but that's not how we think so it might be good for us in order to really engage fully in this new beginning to reflect on the past and what's come before and perhaps we can recognize in that reflection how little power any of us have ever had to direct the course of our own lives.

[01:05]

Certainly we've all tried. But I think it's likely that most of us have gotten to a place in our lives where we really would appreciate some help. So when I was thinking about meditation and Sashin, I remembered an image that I often have at the beginning of a Sashin of myself all alone in a tiny boat on the open ocean with no land in sight. As Dogen says in the Genjo Koan, a circle of water as far as the eye can see, the eye of practice. You know, and that maybe isn't such an intelligent place. to put oneself. But years ago, my therapist said to me, ships are safe in the harbor, but that's not what they're built for. So then I started to think that maybe a better image would be a bigger boat.

[02:19]

A boat that might be big enough for all of us, and maybe even for all beings. You know, kind of a Zendo-sized boat. And in a boat like that, maybe we can begin to recognize how much we are helped and give help to others. And how important it is for us as we make this journey across the mystic waters of the present moment. a journey that none of us ever truly makes alone. So I was thinking that all of us here volunteered for this adventure, and I thought perhaps it would be a good idea for us to seek the advice of some of those wizened sailors who not only survived the voyage, but came back and recommended it to us.

[03:24]

We call them the Buddhas and Ancestors. So my plan for the next five days is to tell you some stories from the ancestors, and particularly our first ancestor, Shakyamuni Buddha. He had a lot to say to us. He passed it forward about the mind, about meditation, and about the journey, and the passageway that he found to escape from the prison of his own imagination. create a circle of water once again from the Dhammapada what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow our life is a creation of our mind and so is this talk

[04:28]

And so is everything that we're going to be doing together for the next five days. A creation of our mind. So we have the choice to make it a good one. I just thought it's amazing to drink water to the sound of running water. So I'm going to share stories about the Buddha's enlightenment that come from the old teachings, the old wisdom teachings that were gathered, treasured, and preserved for thousands of years in what's called the Pali Khanna. Many of you have read from the Pali Khanna. And among them, there's a story of how the Buddha was able to inspire his own disciples through his teaching to enter into the same realization that he had, which is why we have a Buddhist tradition at all.

[05:39]

He passed it on, passed it forward. Just as the ocean, O monks, has one taste, the taste of salt, my dharma has one taste, the taste of liberation. So these stories from the Pali Canon are the foundation of the Buddhist tradition. It's the rich soil from which many centuries later Chan, or what we call Zen, sprouted in China, flourished throughout East Asia, and then showed up here for us to think about today. And along with the teachings from the Pali Canon, I also plan to give you some more instructions about Zen practice, some practical instructions. And today I think I'm going to mention something about your hands. The hands, you know, this amazing evolutionary thread defining, pretty much defining what became human grabbers.

[06:45]

I'm not sure that all of you know that sotozen is characterized by two characteristics, two qualities. One of them is softness. And the other is attention to detail. There's a phrase, Japanese phrase, it's menmitsu no kafu. And this expression means that the family style of sotozen, or in other words, the wind of the house, no kafu means wind, my name fu is wind, no kafu. The family style or the wind of the house is thoroughness, care, scrupulousness, and attention to detail. And this word menmitsu comes from two Chinese characters. One of them, the first one, it means cotton, ball of cotton. And the second one means minuteness. So I've also heard it's a way of describing very finely woven cloth, cotton cloth.

[07:59]

Dogen says in the fascicle Daigo, Great Enlightenment, the great way of the Buddhas has been transmitted with intimate attention, using this term menmitsu, with intimate attention. The work of the ancestors has been unfolded evenly and broadly. And in the Japanese dictionary, menmitsu is defined as something that's done in detail, however, and this I think is the important part, with tenderness, friendliness, wholeheartedness, kindness, with no mistakes or oversights, nothing neglected, precise and accurate. So, I think for this reason, in our school, sometimes you'll hear the first precept, the first pure precept, avoid evil, translated in the way of the Chinese translation, which means, they say, embracing and sustaining forms and ceremonies.

[09:06]

Avoiding evil is to embrace and sustain forms and ceremonies, which, first time I heard that, I thought that seemed very strange. How so? But I think The way this works as a training tool, training mechanism, by embracing and sustaining forms and ceremonies, we become engaged in the minute detail of the things that we're doing with such things as our hands and our feet and our bodies, the sounds we make, and so on. And in doing so, by making that effort, pretty quickly we begin to see what kind of self-clinging we're into. This isn't the way I do things. And I think for all of us, pretty much, we fall on one of two ends of the spectrum. We're either too loose or we're too tight. And neither one of those is better than the other. They're not ways of judging each other. It's ways of noticing for ourselves what kind of clinging we're doing, where we're attached.

[10:13]

Because this is the same clinging that's in the First Noble Truth, or the Second Noble Truth. It's the cause of suffering. First noble truth, suffering. Second, the cause is clinging out of ignorance of the non-dual nature of reality. The non-dual nature of reality, there's nothing to get a hold of. There's nothing to worry about and there's no mistakes. You just do your best. That's all. Suzuki Roshi said that this practice is so serious we must not take it too seriously. This is the middle way between the extremes of too loose and too tight. So this is really for us to see for ourselves, not for others. Others are not our business. Eyes cast down. We want to see for ourselves, where's our clinging? What kind of clinging are we doing so that we can let it go? And once again, find that joy that we had in having a body, a body to play with, as we did when we were children.

[11:20]

These forms and ceremonies should be enjoyable for us. Even when we fall down. So, I will say something about the hands, but first of all, I want to bring up these teachings from our first ancestor, Shattrini Buddha. From the time of his birth, Shakyamuni Buddha lived a life filled with love and all of the advantages of the upper classes. Sort of like the Downton Abbey of his day. He says, I was delicate, most delicate, supremely delicate. Lily pools were made for me at my father's house solely for my benefit. Blue lilies flowered in one, white lilies in another, red lilies in a third. I used no sandalwood that was not from Banaras.

[12:24]

turban, my tunic, my lower garments and cloak were all made of Benara's cloth. A white sunshade was held over me day and night so that no cold or heat or dust or grit or dew might inconvenience me. So he was trained as a warrior. He had a beautiful horse. Servants. He had a lovely young wife, his cousin, Yosudara. They were married when they were both 16. And together they gave birth to a young boy who they named Little Fetter. Poor guy. Rahula. Little Fetter. Come here, Little Fetter. So we've heard, we know that the prince was disaffected with this life. He became very disheartened. And once he learned that his seemingly perfect world, perfect wife, perfect horse, and perfect child, and perfect body were destined to decay.

[13:31]

There's a version of this story of his home leaving that was discovered some years ago by Norman Fisher. I don't know if any of you have heard it, but in that story, which is also quite old, Yasudora knows her young husband very well. They grew up as children together. They played together since they were infants. And she knows that he's miserable and that he wants to leave, and so she helps him. She said, don't worry, we've got plenty of help here at the house. You go ahead. Go off and find out what's making you so unhappy. I rather like that story. Seems more real, very likely. No, she was his friend. So he says, whilst I had such power and good fortune, yet I thought, when an untaught ordinary person who is subject to aging, sickness and death, sees another who is old, sick or dying, he forgets that he himself is no exception.

[14:36]

Since I too am subject to aging, sickness and death, it can't benefit me to be shocked humiliated and disgusted on seeing another in such a state. When I considered this, the vanity of youth, the vanity of health, and the vanity of life entirely left me. Before my enlightenment, while I was still an unenlightened bodhisattva, I thought, it's not easy living in a household to lead a holy life, as utterly perfect and pure as a polished shell. Suppose I shave off my hair and my beard, put on a yellow cloth, and go forth from the homeless life into homelessness, seeking the supreme state of sublime peace. This came to me as a rather late realization about him leaving his wife and child, which I never really felt very good about. As he says himself, as yet I was unenlightened, I thought, well, there it is.

[15:37]

If he'd been enlightened, he would have stayed home. taking care of his family, right? So I took care of that problem. So he left. He left his horse, his servants, his wife, his child, his parents, and with his sword, he cut off the jewel topknot from his head. And being a wise man, he went and found teachers to help him, yogis and meditators who were quite abundant in his day in India. His first teacher, Alar Kalama, trained him in a meditative sequence that culminated in the seventh jhana. Seventh jhana. This is one of the six perfections, the jhanas, samadhi. The seventh jhana is one in which both awareness of the body and of space drop away, leaving the meditator for some period of time with a perception of nothingness. This is a trance which at times through the ages has been mistaken for nirvana.

[16:43]

So once he mastered this trance, the young prince declared, this teaching does not lead to dispassion, to fading of lust, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to nirvana, but only to the perception of nothingness. I am not satisfied with this teaching. And so he left. There's a story that I heard once about a yogi who had spent 20 years in a cave mastering this particular trance. And then he came down to the village and a mangy dog came up to him and rubbed his leg and the yogi kicked the dog. And so his teacher said to him, 20 more years. I think we can hear in that story how the precepts are coming to life, you know. The proof is really in the pudding. Your enlightenment is not something you declare for yourself, it's in your deportment, how you treat others, your gentleness, your attention to detail, your expression of your understanding.

[17:53]

So, you know, don't kick the dog. So following his dissatisfaction with nothingness, the young prince left Alara Kalama to continue his pursuit of perfect freedom. His next teacher's name was Uttaka Ramaputta, and he taught him an even higher trance, in which the meditator sheds the perception of nothingness, thereby entering into what's called the eighth jhana. The eighth jhana is neither perception nor non-perception, and it's often likened to a razor's edge. Is there something or isn't there something? If you choose, you fault. So he also mastered this one quite easily, but once again he was dissatisfied. Because as with all things, these trances don't last. And I think it's often the case for all of us when we taste some great pleasure, you know, any kind, but particularly bliss.

[18:57]

And meditative bliss is considered to be the highest pleasure of them all, as many of you may already have noticed. So sweet. But as with all things, the primary law of the universe is impermanence. And once we fall out of bliss, sometimes we can be quite irritable back here in regular old human life. Many want to talk about enlightenment, but very few want to hear about the sweating horses. And so it was for the young prince. So from this time on, he didn't work with teachers any longer. He went off on his own and he began experimenting with some exceedingly painful methods for subduing the human condition. He began with a very lengthy period of austerities and going alone to the jungle to confront what he called the arising within him of fear and dread.

[20:06]

On special holy nights such as the half-moon and the quarter-moon, I dwelt in such awe-inspiring abodes as orchard shrines, woodland shrines, and tree shrines, which make the hare stand up on end. And while I dwelt there, a deer would approach me, or a peacock would knock off a branch, or the wind would rustle the leaves. And then I thought, surely this is the fear and dread coming. And then he said to himself, why not subdue that fear and dread while maintaining the posture that I'm in when it comes? If I'm seated, to remain seated. If I'm walking, to remain walking. If I'm standing, to remain standing until I have subdued that fear and dread. So in terms of our own understanding in the present day, I think this is one of the most important discoveries that he made and decisions that he made as well, you know. But basically, if you find yourself in a situation where your feelings are overwhelming you, just sit still.

[21:16]

Maintain your posture. Maintain the structure of your body and your upright sitting. And watch how these formations of images and responses and feelings begin to creating you this sensation of fear and this impulse to run. And just sit through it. This is part of our practice to this very day. If you're walking, keep walking. Walk through it. Sit through it. The first night I got here, and this is a true story, I was just about to sleep, and I heard two very, very loud knocks on the roof of my cottage, my cabin. That was it. I asked Lauren the next day, did you hear? I didn't go to sleep for a while.

[22:17]

Did you hear those two loud knocks? She said no. I think I know who it was. I'm not sure, but anyway, I have an idea. I was being welcomed to Tassajara. Where have you been? Lazy monk. So now what? Oh, yeah. So if you start to see fear arising in you, I think it's a good recommendation is to open your eyes a little wider. Keeping the eyes closed is called entering the cave of the demons, where you give your imagination free reign. So if you're walking, just open your eyes a little wider, look at the ground up ahead of you. If you're sitting, same thing. Open your eyes, straighten your posture, and look at the ground in front of you and breathe. Just like the Buddha.

[23:26]

So once he gained confidence in the repeating pattern of sound, image, fear, and release, he was no longer afraid of his fear. And with his same determination, he confronted the sensations of lust and sensual desire in the following way. Suppose with my teeth clenched and my tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth, I beat down, constrain and crush my lustful mind with my mind. Then as a strong man might seize a weaker by the head and shoulders and beat him down, constrain him and crush him, I beat down, constrained and crushed my mind with my mind until sweat ran from my armpits as I did so. Well, I don't think it worked out very well, actually. You know, he was really trying very, very hard, you know, to master his own feelings. And then he tried, once he'd beaten up himself for a while, he said, well, that didn't work.

[24:32]

I'm going to try the seventh and eighth jhanas that he'd mastered under his teachers, only this time without breathing at all. Again, using the same kind of energy and effort that he'd used in attempting to crush his lustful mind, with his mind, he says, I stopped the in-breaths and the out-breaths in my mouth and my nose. When I did so, there was a loud sound of wind coming from my ear holes, as when a smith's bellows are blown out. Violent winds racked my head and carved up my belly, and I was exhausted by the painful effort. So these techniques have not been passed down, as I think you all know. Although I think a lot of us have tried such things. Not breathing. There are cautions against getting too close to death consciousness when you meditate. I've actually read about that. You know, you can get to a place where you actually feel as though there is nothing left of the breath.

[25:37]

The breath becomes nearly imperceptible. And you have to be really careful you don't do that. Because if you stop your breathing, you will die. That's not the point of this practice, to end our lives. So we have to kind of know the terrain and know what the, you know, wizened sailors of the past have recommended and not recommended. Not breathing is not recommended. But he wasn't quite done with himself, so the prince then decided on one last course of austerities in order to abolish his lust. He imagined that if he weakened his body to such a great extent, it would lose its power to generate lustful thoughts. And so he ingested the smallest portions of food imaginable, barely enough to sustain his life, until he reached a state of extreme emaciation, which he later described in this way.

[26:37]

My limbs looked like bamboo stems, my buttocks a camel's hoof, and the projections on my spine like a beaded cord. The gleam in my eyes sunk far down in their sockets, and my hair rotted at its roots. If I made water or evacuated my bowels, I fell over on my face. There was a time when I actually found this story inspiring, but I don't anymore. Maybe I've just gotten too old and too fond of young people to imagine the torment that they put themselves through, even for such a worthy cause as enlightenment. And yet I think the heart and the spirit of young people isn't any different now than it was in the time of the Buddha. They do do things for various reasons like patriotism, passion, love, for values, for ambition, or simply to have fun.

[27:45]

In the last five years, I've buried two family members, young people who became addicted to heroin when they were teenagers, and they both overdosed, one within about five years of the other. The younger one was my daughter's mother. And when we had these funerals, a lot of their friends came, not looking very healthy, And they sobbed. And I thought, it's not just for their friends, they're crying for themselves. They had such hope and faith in the possibility of a pain-free life. The primary law of the universe is impermanence, whether we like it or not. Nothing lasts. And so all too often we bury the young. But it is our great fortune that this one young man did not die. He managed to survive his own misdirected efforts at self-mortification.

[28:53]

And he said, this is not the way. By this grueling penance, I have attained no distinction higher than the human state. Nothing worthy of a noble one's knowledge and vision. Might there be another way to enlightenment? I think radical candor is one of the most important tools in this quest that we're undertaking, you know, to find our own way. I think the easiest person to fool about our spiritual attainments is ourself. I think we've all been trained on the report card system to compete with one another. And I think probably most of you in this room did pretty well under that system. At least you did what you were supposed to do and got good grades. at least for a while. But that isn't the work that we're here to do together. We're not in competition with one another. There are no winners or losers, better or worse.

[29:55]

In fact, anything that makes us special in either way, as the worst or the best, is called Zen sickness. Enlightenment is what we are right now. This is the enlightened life we have. We are so blessed to live in awareness, to be alive. You know, this is it. We didn't bring ourselves here and we're not going to take ourselves away. We are creations of the mind and there is no one to praise and there is no one to blame. Master Dungshan said, even if your words cause stones to nod their heads, do not value your own affairs. And yet, because we are free, because we are creating something every moment, we can create things that are very dumb, like holding our breath, or giving up food until we nearly die.

[31:03]

Or we can create something Kind of amazing, like right now, right before our very eyes. Which I know isn't all that great, you know. It's okay. But so far, no one's found anything better. Not even the prince who tried as hard as he could. Still, he came home to just this, just this is it. You're already there. What are you dreaming? And then he had the greatest realization of them all.

[32:10]

might that be the way to enlightenment? Then following up that memory, there came the recognition that this was the way to enlightenment. So tomorrow I'm going to continue with some of the teachings from the Pali Canon and the recounting of the Buddhist enlightenment experience. And to close today, I do want to mention something about your hands I may. Hands are very useful, but they're prone to this thing we call grasping or grabbing, little grabbers. So a lot of the training that we do with our bodies, body practice, I think some of it is intentionally designed to neutralize the opposable thumb. Like shashu, for instance, you hold your thumb. And then you place the other hand on top of.

[33:11]

And in the cosmic mudra, you know, the thumbs are touching one another. So I'd like to invite you to pay attention to these things in detail. You know, it took me a long time. I sometimes look at my mudra to see if I like it. So you might do that too. Like, do you like it? How does it look to you? For years, my mudra was like this. I mean, I think that's okay. It was this big circle. I got the instructions wrong somehow. And I don't know, nobody told me until finally Reb said, that's a really big circle. And then he had me kind of flatten it out, make more of an oval. So the thumb tips are more or less, you know, on a... horizontal plane and the fingers are overlapping and the baby fingers for me i just press them gently uh into my abdomen rather than resting my arms on my legs which is very tempting and um but then your arms don't get to practice they're kind of just hanging out

[34:29]

So if you will try, and you may say, but that causes some trouble in my shoulders, and that's right, everything is connected. So you may find that you get some stuff in your shoulders happening, but then you work with that. So these are all, you know, discoveries. So if you like, you know, don't rest your arms on your legs, but hold your mudra up, and so that your thumbs are at the height of your navel. If you were to turn your hands inward, you could touch your navel. My thumbs are facing upward like a shelf. My hands are not turned this way. They're turned this way. So that's one thing about the hands. I mentioned shashu. Shashu is the arms are, again, horizontal to the ground. Shoulders are relaxed. Thumb in the left hand, just below the heart. And this hand is like a cup placed on top. Gashou.

[35:31]

I've been interested for years in watching Gashou, how we Gashou. You know, we're not Japanese. Well, some of us are. A few of us are, but most of us are not Japanese. And we didn't grow up in Japanese culture. So, you know, we've tried our best. And I know these are not natural forms to us. In fact, in our Western societies, we have been carefully trained not to bow to the king. It was a big part of the revolution. You don't bow to people. You don't lower your head. Obama was criticized for bowing to the emperor of Japan. He bowed. So we're taking on this practice from Asia, which is respectful, but it's not something in our family. Most of our family is of origin. So gashou is called the clasp of the firm heart. And so I basically make two flat paddles with my hands. One of the things I see a lot is this thumbs out. So if you wouldn't mind bringing your thumb in when you got show, so that you have just these two hands, the same, mirroring one another.

[36:42]

They're pressed together. I also see this. That's a style in some traditions, making a lotus with your hands. I've heard that. But in this school, the palms are pressed together. The fingertips are at the height of the nose. about a fist away. And the arms are not like that, but relaxed. And when you bow, you bend from the hips. You don't need to roll over. You just keep your hands right where they are and bend forward about 45 degrees, no more than that, and back up again. holding things with your hands. So I noticed when we're eating with our orioki bowls, there's a tendency, Mrs. Suzuki used to, she didn't really yell at us, but she was first voiced. She said, always I tell you, put your fingers together. So a lot of times we were all splaying our fingers when we were holding things.

[37:48]

And she kept saying, your parents don't teach you. So you hold things with your fingers together. So when you're drinking your water out of your bowl, and so on, as best you can, rather than splaying the finger. Same thing with the offering trays. Sometimes I notice the dons. Most of you are doing it with the fingers together, but sometimes you see that. So just think about that when you're holding the offering tray. And the last one I wanted to mention is when you bow to the ground, many of you should be able, because you're young and springy, to go to the ground without using your hands, without leading with your hands. Sometimes I can't do that, not so springy anymore, but I try just to lower yourself quietly on your knees with your hands still when we're doing our prostrations. But if you do need to use your hands, rather than, again, slaying the fingers, you might try using your knuckles so that you bend your fingers under and you lower yourself down.

[38:55]

That way, the same thing with lifting yourself back up again. And that's all I have. So thank you all very much for your kind attention.

[39:07]

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