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 morning. I think the Eno Shundo said that there was a photographer here and explained that there's going to be a front-page story in the New York Times. The title will be, the caption will headline, Zen people, sit quietly. Nothing happens.

[01:01]

I thought of that. I thought that was very funny. Then I thought, wouldn't it be great to have articles in the New York Times about nothing happening instead of all the terrible things that are usually reported? And also I'm testing out this new Maha setup here that I'm sitting on. My knees have... I heard a song yesterday by Leonard Cohen and one of the phrases that... that was in the song was Invincible Defeat. My knees have been invincibly defeated by, I think mostly by 40 some years of Zazen.

[02:17]

So for a while I was sitting in a chair and then I decided I would try this. Feels good. So, I'm very happy to be here. And what I'd like to talk about this morning is way-seeking mind. Do-shin in Japanese. Do from Tao, from the way. And shin in the spelling that's done in English now. Shin is X-I-N. So it's D-O-X-I-N, but it's pronounced Do Shin. The X is like S-H. And Shin means mind.

[03:21]

So Do Shin is way mind. Shin also means heart. That character means in Chinese means both mind and heart. So dou shin refers to the mind of the way, way-seeking mind, and the heart of the way. Way-seeking heart. Excuse me. How our mind and heart seek the way. And we understand that dou shin, that way-seeking mind, way-seeking heart, is innate in us.

[04:33]

as human beings. It's a natural inclination that we have to seek the way, to seek the way of wisdom and compassion. One way that I like to think of it is as a tropism. If you're not familiar with that word, so tropism means inclining toward. So there are no plants here, but plants are heliotropic. They incline quite naturally toward the sun. If you put a plant by the windowsill, it will start to lean toward the sun. Similarly, We are do-tropic.

[05:36]

We are way-tropic. Our inclination to seek the way, to seek the way of wisdom and compassion is our, as Suzuki Roshi used to say, our hearts. Inmost request. So, our job in our practice is to awaken and nurture and cultivate our way-seeking mind. Some of you know that in... practice period here in the city center and at Green Gulch and at Tassajara, one of the traditions that's been going on for 20 years, Blanche, way-seeking mind talks about 20 years have been that each person in the practice period has the opportunity to give a brief talk, 10 or 20 minutes, and they talk about

[06:57]

They're called way-seeking mind talks, how they came to practice, how they came to the way. For example, for myself, I've never given one in that circumstance, but I have talked about this kind of thing. But an example is in 1967, the summer of 1967, I was doing civil rights work in rural Alabama. At that time, it was called the Summer of Love. And there was love, as well as various other things going on.

[08:07]

And when I returned to New York City, I moved to the Lower East Side, and I took a job at the National Sharecroppers Fund on East 12th Street. And I was finishing college, and I took a part-time job. And the fellow who was leaving that job in the mailroom was a fellow named Jeff, Jeff Broadbent, and he was leaving his job there to go to a place in California, deep in the mountains of California, called Tassajara, which sounded very, oh boy, what's that? Very exotic. And he told me that the job that he was at, leaving and that I was about to take was extremely boring. And the only way to survive would be to learn how to do Zen meditation. Because then you get used to... Then you get quite used to being extremely bored with the contents of your mind.

[09:25]

No, you didn't say that part. That's something I learned. So that was an accident. You know, it was an accident that I happened to take that job and Jeff happened to be there and so on. And that's usually the way it is with way-seeking mind. There's some... which usually has to do with some feeling of disturbance, some feeling of dis-ease, some suffering, some difficulty. And then a fortuitous circumstance arises. And then 40 or 50 years later, you're sitting here. That's the way it works. So in one way, our job in practice is to nurture way-seeking mind.

[10:31]

That natural inclination Katagiri used to say, Katagiri Roshi used to say, to let the flower of your life force bloom. He's referring to this tropism, to this natural inclination. So one way is to cultivate, one way to talk about it is the cultivation of that. And then the other way to speak about it is that the main job we have in practice is to get out of the way. See what I mean? It's quite natural. Our wisdom is quite natural. Our compassion is quite natural. Our loving kindness is quite, it's already there. We don't have to make it up. But mostly what we have to do is allow it to flourish. So in the teaching, this is often represented because, for example, there's the teaching of the five hindrances.

[11:48]

So this is very typical of Zen and Buddhist teaching is they hinder, they hinder, they don't say this exactly, but in the language that I'm using today, they hinder that natural inclination. They hinder our life force from blooming. The five hindrances are greed, hate, sloth, torpor. And I can never remember the fourth one because I'm always very focused on the fifth one, which is doubt, corrosive doubt, especially doubting oneself. It's very hindering of our life force blooming, very hindering of our natural tropism in that direction.

[12:49]

So you can see by the structure of it that there's something, this getting out of the way. We've got to get those hindrances out of the way to let the full moon shine brightly. Take the clouds, remove the clouds, or at least reduce their dominance. Let's be modest. It's in the teaching and it's in the practice because zazen, is, one way to understand it, our fundamental practice of shikantaza, of just sitting, is getting out of the way. Stuff gets in the way, called thinking mind, called concept mind, called klesha avarana, called lots of different things. It gets in the way, hinders us. And our practice is very simple.

[13:57]

When those clouds come up, when that hindering arises, when we notice it, we let go of it and we return to simple existence, to just sitting, without any adornments, without any decorations. We're big on interior decoration. Lots of interior decorators. No interior decoration. So do you get this sense that I'm trying to convey of how practice is getting out of the way of something that's naturally pretty good already? However, this is hard to do. This is difficult to do.

[14:59]

It's difficult to get out of the way. Perhaps for many reasons, but I think one main reason it's difficult to get out of the way is because we are afraid. And we feel insecure. From that, lots of things come up. Lots of stuff comes up due to our fear and insecurity. And there may be personal roots for that fear. Fear. and insecurity. Many of you know I work as a psychotherapist and there's a whole branch of psychotherapy called attachment theory that has to do with the nature of the attachment that as children we form with our parents or caregivers.

[16:22]

And there's a wide range of what's good enough in that. But if there are problems there and we don't feel securely attached, we don't have a basis of secure attachment, this creates a kind of insecurity that then has many, many different ramifications and expressions in our life. So I would guess that many of you are familiar with this personal etiology, personal origin of our insecurity and dis-ease, worry. However, aside from any particular personal insecurity, we also...

[17:25]

have the insecurity of being a human being. Regardless of what our life story is or what it was like growing up, et cetera, et cetera. As human beings, we've got plenty of reason to be insecure without any of the details. I was thinking that there's an evolutionary... It's in our genes, right? This feeling of insecurity. What I mean is, we're the descendants of the people who worried a lot. Right? People who said, uh-oh, there's a saber-toothed tiger out there. What are we going to do? People who said, oh, what do I care? I don't care about this saber-toothed tiger. Those are not the people whose gene pool we are part of.

[18:32]

Our gene pool is the ones who are really worried. What's outside the cave? Uh-oh. So... So in an evolutionary way, we have this insecurity, dis-ease, which I am translating today, this is the word dukkha, usually translated as suffering, but maybe more accurately means dis-ease, insecure, things don't work the way they're supposed to. So from an evolutionary point of view, it's in our gene pool, and from a Buddhist teaching point of view, this is anitya, anatman, dukkha, the three universal marks, the three universal characteristics of our world, of our conditioned world, which is the only world we know, the only world we can know.

[19:53]

Anitya is impermanence, change. And anatman is nothing has a self of its... Nothing keeps itself. Nothing has a self that stays itself for very long. So, I drove here this morning and... I don't have an electric car. I have a gasoline-powered car. So I had to use gasoline to get here. And as we know, 350 million years ago, that gasoline that I use now was some dinosaur, right? Some dinosaur, you know, walking around. Bob. And maybe he weighed 350 tons, he or she.

[20:59]

Hey, I'm pretty substantial. 350 million years later, I'm sticking Bob into my gas tank. Right? On that scale, which is the scale of our actual life, It's very insubstantial. Where will we be 350 million years from now? Maybe somebody will be using us for gas to get somewhere. that same song of Leonard Cohen's, another phrase that he uses is something about your little winning streak.

[22:05]

It's very, it's really strong. Yeah, it's a winning streak, you know, you're doing well. It's really small. Your little winning streak. Did I mention the other phrase from Leonard Cohen? Invincible defeat? Did I already say that? So, there are two responses in a broad stroke kind of way, there are two responses to our invincible defeat. To the end of our little winning streak. There's two ways that we generally respond. When we feel insecure and frightened and disturbed. One, which must also have its evolutionary root, is that we clench ourselves. we grip, we grasp, we stiffen, hoping that that will protect us. We do that with our body, and we do that with our mind, and we do that with our heart.

[23:12]

That's when we get stuck. We get stuck somewhere. We get stuck on some idea. We get stuck in some something, some way, some belief that we think We don't even think about it, but we believe that it will help us, will keep us secure, will protect us from the ferociously frightening quality that's inherent in our life. And in the teaching, we call this ignorance. or greed, hate, and delusion, the three poisons, which maybe is giving them unnecessarily a bad name. That is, it's very understandable.

[24:15]

It's very understandable when we feel threatened, which we do all the time, to just, you know, how do we respond? And if we don't have any better way to respond, then naturally we're going to hold on. Hold on to something. The second, the other response then to this invincible defeat is way-seeking mind. That's the other way that we that we respond, which moves toward openness and harmony. Harmony means going toward what's frightening, embracing what's frightening, living with what's frightening.

[25:19]

Not in some, you know, embracing, you know, some How can I say it? Not as some kind of fancy idea of what you're supposed to do if you live in California. It's not love, something embracing, all of that. Just some real way of doing it. Some real way. Mostly of not gripping, not tensing, not... That's enough. Not gripping. This is what we practice in Zazen. This is our Zazen practice called not holding on.

[26:25]

And what we practice in our life called the six paramitas called generosity, morality, patience, energy, concentration, and wisdom. When we move in that direction, that innate direction, that tropism direction, then that's what happens. That's the practice of it. So Suzuki Roshi

[27:50]

Suzuki Roshi used to talk about way-seeking mind, the heart that seeks the way, often. In 1965, in a Dharma talk he gave, he said, It is not only enlightenment that is valuable. Failure by true spirit is also valuable. It has the same meaning. That is why even though your zazen is not perfect.

[28:52]

It has the same meaning as perfect zazen if your practice has the spirit of way-seeking mind. If you don't have way-seeking mind, even though you attain enlightenment, that enlightenment will be, so called it, dry enlightenment. And then he left. Dry enlightenment. It has no meaning. So I think this is really terrific. Very, very helpful to us. about way-seeking mind, the nature of way-seeking mind, what's important.

[29:57]

And interesting, I noticed, oh, this is 1965. 1965, that's why the photographer is here, right? It's the 50th anniversary. 1965, Suzuki Roshi just came to the United States just a second ago before that. He came in 1959. You know, now there are people like Blanche Son and many other people who have been practicing for decades. Practicing Zen, doing our best for decades. But then he had just gotten here. There probably wasn't this many people that he was talking to. It's probably half. Newcomer. Everybody was new. It was all new, all beginners. Very, very powerful that he'd say this. It is not only enlightenment that is valuable.

[31:08]

He said that because that was what everybody wanted. That was what we all wanted to do, get enlightened. We're all going to get enlightened. and then the problems, right, we're going to get enlightened, then the problems that we had previous to that would no longer be there because we're enlightened. Katagiri Roshi called this vending machine zen. You put in the coin, you put in the practice, and you get enlightenment, you know. In fact, I was going to suggest this to the development department here. We have a soft drink. We could have a soft drink and it could be called enlightenment. Then you could put in a dollar, maybe a dollar fifty, you know, it's worth it. You get enlightenment.

[32:13]

Vending machines then. So we were all very interested in enlightenment. It is not only enlightenment that is valuable. And then this is the real kicker, as it were. Failure by true spirit, and he means failure with way-seeking mind, is also valuable. But then he wanted to be sure we really got it. It has the same meaning. It's not just an also-ran. It has the same meaning. Failure has the same meaning as enlightenment. Who would have thought such a thing? So I think that what he's saying is that the nature, the quality, the depth of our practice has...

[33:18]

way, way, way more to do with our effort, with our way-seeking mind. Not with the mind once we've sought the way and got there. Not that mind. The way-seeking mind. The active way-seeking mind. So, So that's what's valuable. It has the same meaning, not the result, not the accomplishment, not the attainment. As far as I can see, that's what he was saying. If you just get the attainment without this spirit of sincere practice, then it's dry. It doesn't have any meaning. It's...

[34:19]

You know, it's what it is really is one more thing. And there are lots of things. It's just one more thing. Fancy thing, you know, spiritual thing, beautiful thing, ugly thing. It's just one more thing. Put it in our collection of things. Put it on the shelf with the other things that we've got. That we think, oh, why is this? A reason why this is important is because when we put it on the shelf, it's one of those things that we think is going to protect us from our insecurity, from our insubstantiality. We think enlightenment or this or that or some attainment or some accomplishment is going to be, then we will be protected. And then we won't have to worry anymore. We won't be afraid anymore. And Suzuki Roshi is saying, nuh-uh, no way.

[35:21]

That's not the way it is. And that's not the point of practice. We understandably sometimes come to practice thinking that that's what's going to happen. That the protection is going to be that way. But it isn't. But something does happen. even though it's not that. Sincere means of one growth. Isn't that fabulous? Just one thing. So it's really like a synonym for wholehearted. Sincere, wholehearted effort has the same meaning as is enlightenment. This is quite different than our cultural, subcultural, and our own personal ideas of success.

[36:38]

Failure by true spirit is also valuable. So I think I had two more things to say about this. One is that... So I hope I've conveyed this sense of natural flowering and our practice as... getting out of the way of that flowering. And our self-conscious evaluation is completely irrelevant.

[37:56]

Did you hear me? Our self-conscious Conscious evaluation. What I mean is, some of us, I think it's the minority, or at least these people don't usually talk to me, have a very elevated sense. a very elevated self-conscious evaluation. Oh, I'm doing really well, you know? The people who I talk to, both in my head and outside of my head, they say, this is terrible. You don't know what you're doing. I can't do this. I'm no good. This is awful.

[38:57]

This is what I mean by self-conscious evaluation. So it's really useful, I think, to get it in our heads that this is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the endeavor that we're involved in. Which is, I guess I'm talking about another kind of removal of a hindrance. We shouldn't mistake our effort for our self-conscious evaluation of our effort. And we can't see our effort. We can't see it. It's over here. As soon as we see it, it's something else. It's an idea that we have. We're good, we're bad, we're this, we're that. It's some idea. True effort, we don't know anything about it.

[40:04]

It's none of our business. It's only our business to make our best effort. That's our job. And then the last thing I would say is related to that, which is that we're easily fooled having to do with this insecurity and... fear that we have. We're easily fooled and we easily, oh, I was thinking I was going to change the pronoun there. I am easily fooled, you know, and easily taken in by something that looks really, wow, boy, that looks really good. I should be like that. I should be, I should, you know, that's not exactly what I mean. We're easily fooled by something that's charismatic, fancy, looks really sleek, cool.

[41:15]

Do you know what I mean? We're easily fooled by that kind of thing. And that takes us off our path. Instead, we should follow our own path, even if it's a failure, even if we miss the boat completely. So our sincere practice is we're running down the dock and the boat has left. We miss the boat. We keep running. And then the dock ends and we fall into the water. This is way-seeking mind.

[42:20]

This is sincere practice. And the reason why this is a good idea is because it's very... It's durable. It's much more durable than catching some fancy boat. It's durable and it's dependable. It's trustworthy. It doesn't depend on success, for one thing. That's really helpful. Completely trustworthy. Thank you very much. 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.

[43:33]

For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:44]

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