This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I have to say that it's really wonderful to sit in a Zen doll when it's raining, especially when it's raining really hard. We feel that it's washing our mind, washing all the garbage out of our mind, which helps me to understand that our meditation, our zazen, is brainwashing. We used to think that was a bad thing. But now we like it.

[01:00]

It's funny how everything changes. What was good one time is not so good later. And what was bad one time is really good later. So brainwashing is really in order. As a matter of fact, that's our practice here. And what I really want to talk about is what is our practice here? We come and we hear the for many of us, want to hear a talk about something. About what is them? What is the Buddha Dharma? And actually it's all about how you practice, how you live your life. As my teacher used to say, living our life one moment at a time, completely. So on this moment, we live our life totally and completely. And the next moment we live our life totally and completely.

[02:01]

That's all there is to it. You can all go home now. But I still have some more to say. So what do the students do all day? You come here and I would wonder, what is it they do all day long? We know they meditate. Boy, it's really hard to deal with it. I'll try to speak loudly. But all day long they work. Work is a big part of their practice. As a matter of fact, that's what they do all the time.

[03:03]

They work, they study, they cook, they work in the fields, they do farming, gardening, take care of guests. It's very kind of mundane activity. You know, even when we have a... so-called practice period of intensity, this practice period for a number of weeks or months, is a head student. And the head student's job is to wash the toilets or to take care of the compost, stuff that ordinarily people don't like to do. So our practice, actually, is all about mundane stuff. It's all about just ordinary day-to-day, moment-to-moment, mundane stuff. But it's about how we find something valuable in the mundane stuff.

[04:16]

We say, there's a saying, to find the jewel in that pile of shit to find the most precious thing in the most ordinary thing. So it looks like ordinary, just ordinary activity, but we don't seek something outside. We just look for that pearl in the pile of dung. Dung beetles really have it now. So in ordinary life, ordinary mundane activity, we find ourself, we find the jewel within ourself. So how do we do that? So it looks like our activity is just ordinary, which it is, but our ordinary activity is like, has certain

[05:31]

behavioral or activities that we practice at the same time. So one of them is concentration or mindfulness. Mindfulness is something we all hear about these days. It's like the new thing. Be mindful, which is great, you know. The Buddhists thought about this a long time ago. 2,500 years, mindfulness has been at the center of Buddha Dharma for more than 2,500 years and before that. So what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is returning. There's something called reminding. When our mind wanders, we bring it back to the subject. Our mind is geared to think all the time.

[06:35]

Mind is like a hose. It's sometimes referred to as a rushing torrent that never stops thinking. So it needs something to think about. So in our practice, we think about What am I doing? What am I doing now? But the mind just keeps wandering and wants to think about something more interesting. It's always looking for objects or subjects of interest, whether they're brought to fruition or just imagination. So we love our imagination. I love my imagination. Nevertheless, When we have a subject to pay attention to, we really need to pay attention to it. And often that happens in emergencies. In an emergency, you stop all your thought processes and focus on one thing.

[07:42]

So how do we focus, continue to focus on one thing? Bringing our mind back over and over again. In our meditation, We're supposed to let our mind be quiet. But thoughts are continually bubbling up. So we don't try to turn off thoughts or get rid of them. We just simply pay attention over and over again, coming back to the subject of attention. So that's mindfulness. So for us, mindfulness means being present in each moment, being totally present and aware in each moment without necessarily thinking about something else.

[08:51]

When our mind strays, we bring it back to the subject at hand. So for a sin student, our practice is a practice of, we call it way-seeking mind. There's something called desire, and we all have it.

[10:02]

The mind wandering is the mind seeking desire, seeking some place for our desire to follow. That's our life. We're born with desire and desire seeks a way to be happy or to be satisfied or to do something meaningful. And if we can't find something meaningful to do, we degenerate into various channels that are satisfaction for a moment, but they're not lasting satisfactions. So mindfulness for a Zen student means to bring our mind back to the path of the dharma. In ordinary life, we bring our mind back to whatever it is we're doing, but it's not necessarily the dharma. Dharma means non-self-centered.

[11:05]

He's free of self-centeredness, free of selfishness, free of gaining something for ourself. But ordinary life is gaining. And ordinary life is often based on greed, hate, and delusion. whereas dharmic life is based on generosity, goodwill, or love, and wisdom. So these are the two wheels of our cart. One is, we think of the wheels, the wheel of ordinary life is the axle The wheel turns on greed, ill will, and delusion, as you can see with our open eyes in our society.

[12:11]

It's also based on generosity, love, and wisdom. But Buddhist side is generosity, love, and wisdom, which includes the other side. So we have this dilemma of which side do we choose? The fact that we're human beings means that we have both sides within us. We have both sides within us. So delusion generates greed and ill will.

[13:14]

Delusion is the basis of greed and ill will. Whereas the path is based on wisdom. So both of these sides our nature. So instead of cutting off one side in order to have the other, which is usual in the delusion world, we want to cut things off that don't satisfy us so that we can have the thing that we want. But in the Dharma, we include both sides. Because if we cut off one side, we're cutting off some part of ourself. It doesn't work. There's the example of a branch. If you want to, there's a right side and a left side. And if you like the left side but you don't like the right side, you start cutting off the right side. But every time you cut off the right side, the right side is still there because it's the right side.

[14:20]

So we keep cutting, [...] pretty soon we cut off the left side. It's called suicide. So we have to include the right side with the left side and the left side with the right side. So it's one piece. Left and right are one piece. If we want peace, we have to include the one piece, the two parts as one piece, whatever we're doing. So mindfulness brings us back to the center. The center is where we live. For a Zen student, centering is called the middle way. Middle way has several meanings, many meanings. But basically, in this situation, it means finding the center and staying centered all the time so that you don't get biased to one side or the other.

[15:25]

Very difficult. And this is what our meditation is, to let go and stay in the center. So we also have something called caring for things. Caring for things means taking care of those things that help us. You know, when we use... We pay attention to the food that we make. We pay attention to the gardening tools. When we're working in the fields or in the garden, we take good care of our tools because our tools help us. So we have a deep respect and intimacy with those tools and objects that we are dealing with all the time as our helpers.

[16:30]

we washed the mud off of the spades. So after we stopped work, we washed the mud off the tools and cleaned them off so they are ready. It's out of respect, out of respect. When I was a young man, I was. A young man. I worked as a house painter. And what I was taught as a house painter was how to wash a brush and how to wash the paint pot and how to take care of the tools. And when you're an apprentice, at least in the olden days, when you were an apprentice house painter, for the first year or so, that's all you did. was wash brushes and wash your tools so that your paint bucket looked like it was brand new after you stopped work.

[17:40]

And you could actually eat out of it. And your brush had no trace of paint in it at all. When I watch people who are not house painters paint, I close my eyes. So anyway, that's how we take care of things. Because everything around us is our self. All of the things that we use are aspects of our self. So we are our self plus all these objects that are surrounding us. So our surroundings, myself and my surroundings, are my life. So we take care of our life in that way. In the kitchen, the Green Gulch kitchen, It's a wonderful place to work. It's not work. It's practice. I don't like to call these things jobs. I call them positions. A job is something you get paid for.

[18:42]

Position is just something you do wholeheartedly. It's good to have a job that pays you and you work wholeheartedly as if you weren't going to get paid. That's great work. That's practice work. So to be totally present in the kitchen, everybody's walking around. You have a group of people walking around, and they all have knives and objects that they're carrying and passing each other. It's a dance. Working in the kitchen is a dance. It's how you interact and flow with all the other people and the tools and the food. When you are chopping vegetables, You have your place, and maybe the next person has their place where they're doing something. And when you're done, to clean your place so that the next thing you do is totally open and receptive and doesn't get mixed up with what you did before.

[19:49]

So each section of your practice is a whole new phase of your life. And so you're totally immersed at one with that practice. And how we take care of the pots and pans, Master Dogen, in his admonitions for the cook, said, those things that belong on the lower shelf should be put there. Those things that belong on the upper shelf should be put there. So that taking care of those objects is taking care of ourselves, and it's taking care of each other. It's all one piece. So we think in terms of it's all one piece with many different aspects. So if I hold up my fist like this, that's all one piece, right?

[20:53]

But when I open my fingers, it's many pieces that are still one piece. So we all belong to the same society. But each one of us has a different personality, a different task, and a different way of doing things which harmonize with each other. So... There's something called energy, or vitality, or enthusiasm. Of course, we all have energy, but how do we access our energy? How we access our energy is to do something wholeheartedly.

[21:57]

So it's called wholehearted practice. When we do something, we merge with what it is that we're doing so that we become one with our activity. That's called fulfillment, being fully filled. When we do something half-heartedly, we get half-filled. If we do something quarter-heartedly. So to actually be fulfilled, is to take on and totally immerse ourselves and give ourselves to whatever we're doing without thinking about a reward. As soon as you start thinking about rewards, you're not fully fulfilled because you're expecting something more. When you're expecting something more, you're not fulfilled. There's always something lacking.

[23:00]

So our practice is to give ourselves totally to whatever it is that we're doing. When we sit in meditation, we just sit without expecting anything. There's no past and there's no future. There's just disactivity. And we don't expect a reward or think that something good will happen or something bad will happen. We give up good and bad, right and wrong, like and dislike, pleasure and pain. Everything is just what it is. This is being present in the moment with what is. without complaining just accepting everything as it is which is not the only way to live but it's the way to live totally so we release the energy when we do something totally we become a vehicle for that energy and the energy flows through us so

[24:34]

The way to not get tired is to totally give yourself. When you're only giving yourself half-heartedly, you get tired. But when you're giving yourself totally, you're emptying yourself so that the energy can flow through you. If you're not totally empty, the energy cannot flow through you. You get stuck somewhere. So that's our practice. vitality, inducing vitality. Then there is ease. Ease, tranquility, serenity, settledness. How do you be settled? That's what people usually think of when they think of meditation. Ease, settledness,

[25:38]

Serenity is like a sunset, beautiful sunset. Tranquility is like a lake, a clear pond without any ripples. So this is the passive side. of our activity. Activity includes both vitality and passivity. When we sit in our meditation, it's not just passive, it's active and passive. And it's the quintessence of passivity and activity doing one thing, totally. So the passivity allows everything to settle and come up.

[26:43]

And activity is to present yourself. You have to have a structure. If you don't have a structure for activity or for passivity, a boundary is what creates something. Without a boundary, We can't practice. We can't do anything. So the boundary of activity allows passivity to settle. Activity means you create a form. You sit up straight. And you allow the passivity to settle. So this is called tranquility. It's called ease. So ease within activity and activity within ease.

[27:46]

We say sitting in meditation is the great dynamic activity of stillness. You know, I don't know if you... I think we still have tops. When I was a kid, when you were a kid, we had... wind the string around the top and then throw the top on the floor. And the top would hit the floor and find its stability. And when the top finds its stability, it doesn't look like it's moving. But it's filled with great dynamic activity in stillness. If you hit the top when it's moving, it goes skittishing across the floor. because it's so filled with dynamic activity. So sitting in tranquility is actually the same as great dynamic activity. It's just contained within stillness.

[28:47]

That's great potentiality. And out of that stillness comes all activity. So ease is the complement for vitality. If vitality gets too strong, it wears us out. And if ease doesn't have vitality to control it, it becomes sluggish. And we call it sloth and porpor. then a really necessary ingredient that we practice is joy. We're always looking for happiness, the pursuit of flappiness or happiness. When I used to read the Declaration of Independence, flappiness.

[29:53]

Anyway, happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of happiness. of joy. You cannot create happiness. You can only create the conditions. Happiness, it happens. Just happens. And joy is the same. Similar. You can say one produces the other. But joy is a little deeper than happiness. Matter of fact, it's quite deep. Because happiness, or joy, is our natural endowment. And the reason we don't feel joyful is because we cover it. When we take the cover off, joy is there. Because that's who we are. So our practice is not to add something, but to take the covers off.

[30:58]

So that our natural endowment is there. So joy, I think of joy as a deep river. It's always there. But we don't always access it. And it has nothing to do with conditions. It's not subject to conditions, not subject to whether I'm feeling good or feeling bad or successful or unsuccessful. It's always there. We look for it all the time and we try to create it. And when we try to create it, it comes and goes. We play our games, you know, to make us happy and joyful. But it's beyond our games.

[32:01]

Something so deep that... It produces light. That deep joy is a product of deep light, deeper, our natural endowment of light. So, Joy also gives us lightness and agility, agility of body and mind. So we feel we can skip when we're joyful. You notice that children, when they feel joyful, they start skipping. That's a great feeling of joy because it's natural with children.

[33:03]

They just... are light and airy and flexible. So joy is the kind of fulfillment, the deep joy. And we express it instead of using it or getting carried away with it. We put it into our daily activity so that it transforms. It transforms into ordinary activity. But that ordinary activity has a lightness and a flexibility. Then there's concentration. Concentration.

[34:06]

Concentric. meaning centering. So we think of concentration usually as like a laser point in its extremity. As a kid we had magnified glass and a piece of paper and we let focus the light through the magnifying glass onto the piece of paper and it would light up. catch on fire. So in a concentrated way, we think of concentration as the epitome of concentration is one-pointedness. One-pointedness is a kind of concentration. The other side of concentration is wide concentration. Not concentration on any particular point, but total openness. Total openness.

[35:10]

without any, just being open and ready for something. It's like when we're open and ready like that, eyes see, ears hear, nose smell, tongue taste, feeling feels, but there's no person that is the center of that. It's just seeing sees, hearing hears, knowing smells, tasting tastes, seeing sees. This is our practice in Zazen. Zah is to sit. That's what that means. Zah is to sit. And Zen means a lot of different things. The way I start, The meaning for me is to sit in a radiant light, to be a day.

[36:17]

When we sit that way, we let go of everything and become a vehicle for light. Okay, already. So... We're just simply open. There's no person there. There's no self. There's no self. Self is when we are centered on a self, that's what we call our self. That's ordinary. Buddha means centering on Buddha. So for a sense student, Of course we have our selfishness, but we transform our selfishness into being Buddha-centered. So this is called

[37:36]

Samadhi. We have this term samadhi. Samadhi means various things because there are various samadhis. There's samadhi of radiant light. There's the samadhi of many meanings and so forth. But they're all the same. They're really all the same. They're just different names for the same thing. Basically, samadhi means being a vehicle for light. But that light is not like you're lighting up. It's like you're spreading that light evenly throughout your surroundings and your life so that it touches everyone. but it's not necessarily conspicuous. It can be very inconspicuous, except that people feel it.

[38:48]

So when we come to Green Gulch, we pick that up from the students, even though they don't realize it necessarily themselves. So how do we deal with greed, hate, and delusion to transform greed, hate, and delusion into generosity, love, and wisdom? I'll give you an example of greed, hate, and delusion. There was a little puppy, a small dog. This is kind of like when they had open-air markets.

[39:55]

And he's wandering in the market, and he gets to the butcher shop. And the butcher has the meat laid out on the table. So he looks up and, you know, and he sights this steak sitting on the end of the table. And he looks around. takes the stake and trots out the door. So then he comes to a stream and there's a little bridge over the stream and he trots out onto the bridge and it's very close to the water, the bridge. And he's got this stake in his mouth and he looks over and he sees a dog with a steak in his mouth staring up at him. And he says, I want that steak.

[40:56]

So he opens his mouth to get the steak. And of course, do I have to tell you what happened? So, the steak drops in the water, of course, and he loses everything because of Greed, hate, and delusion. The greed part is wanting too much. The ill will part is taking it from the other person, taking it from the other dog. And the delusion part is thinking that he can do all this. And it's okay. So then there's something called equanimity.

[41:57]

Equanimity, we have four what's called Brahma-viharas, love or kindness, encouragement or sympathy for others, and compassion for others. These are four kinds of love. And the fourth one is equanimity. Equanimity, we can see the other three as forms of love. Love and self, love and kindness, encouragement. Compassion, these are all forms of selfless love. It's not about us, it's about others.

[42:59]

And equanimity. So equanimity is actually a form of love. It means no partisanship. Non-partiality. My old teacher used to say, everything is falling out of balance and regaining its balance moment by moment. So equanimity is the ability to find our balance on each moment and also to not to see all sides without being biased, even if we have a bias. which we all do. It's impossible to live without bias. Nevertheless, to be able to see clearly, even though we have bias, even though we have partiality, and to understand our surroundings and all the different aspects of what causes things to happen, that's called non-duality.

[44:27]

Non-duality is to be able to see clearly everything just as it is, even though we have our own bias. Otherwise, there's no such thing as peace. So equanimity is called peace. Everything is equal, even though everything is different. Even though everything is different, everything is totally equal. So this is called wisdom. And wisdom has four aspects. I can explain it quickly. The first aspect is Our mind is like a mirror in which we see everything, everything passes in front of the mirror, but the mirror simply sees everything the way it really is, without bias.

[45:43]

The mirror does not react, it simply sees. So the hardest thing for us to do is to see things just the way it is, because... When we do see something, we internalize it. And we see a picture. And we color the picture according to our own way of thinking about things. So it's hard to see everything clearly. So the mirror mind is totally open. Just open to everything without any reaction. And then there's the wisdom where everything is equal. Everything is totally equal. Even though there are differences, everything is totally equal because we all come from the same society.

[46:53]

Someone called it the same nose hole. We all belong to the same nose hole society. We all breathe through our nose, hear through our ears, think through our brains. We're all one person. That's equality. And then there's the equality, there's the wisdom of differentiation. Everything is different. Everything, it takes its place in a hierarchical way. People don't like the word hierarchy because it smacks a how you control people through hierarchy. But hierarchy just is. Everything is in a different place and relates to everything else from that place. So there's the horizontal and the vertical, and where the horizontal and the vertical meet is where we are.

[47:56]

And right where they meet is called big mind. Big mind, which includes everything. And we all have that. We all have access to the big mind, but we don't necessarily know that or use it. And then the horizontal and the vertical balance each other out. Then we have... the wisdom of appropriate activity. And our appropriate activity is based on the other three wisdoms. The wisdom of seeing everything just as it is, the wisdom of seeing the equality among all things, and the differentiation between all things. And those three balance each other out as appropriate wisdom. And then the fourth wisdom is understanding all of that and acting according to it.

[49:10]

So that's what a Zen student does all day long. I think that was my point. All day long a Zen student acts in that way and is concerned with all that. So thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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