This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Evening. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. My name is Katie Lian Schutt. I'm co-leading this mini-practice period with my Dharma brother. David Zimmerman. In the middle of a practice period on wise effort, one of the factors of the Eightfold Path, and I gave one on Saturday, however long ago that was, and I talked about a dog. Do you remember the story? Sure. The story was about ex-girlfriend had said that I was like a dog.

[01:03]

And I thought about it, that's what I said before, and I thought, oh yeah, I'm like a dog. They just run all out with a whole heart, so it's really wholehearted. And so I really like that idea. And I was making the point at the time about effort as over-efforting. or under-efforting, because dogs run all out and then they get tired, and that I had a tendency to do that too. So tonight I'd like to explore with you wise effort as ways of enhancing our capacity to be with things as they are. Which is fitting, because in our study of wise effort, we're placing it in what we call four realms. First we did it on meditation, and now with this talk we're moving to relationship. Then we'll cover work and then engaging with the world. So on relationship.

[02:06]

And actually when I told this story before, I forgot kind of the punchline. I made up my own punchline for you that time. But here's the full version of the you're like a dog story or statement. So she said, you're like a dog. Because when you meet someone, you trust them 100%. Just like that. And then it takes a lot for you to not trust them. But when they really do hurt you, then it's easy for you to let them go. And she was contrasting that, whereas she said, well, I don't trust people right away. I have a really hard time trusting them. And it takes a long time for them to earn my trust But then after that, I rarely let them go, no matter how much they hurt me. Which one are you? Which one are you? So, as I shared last time, this comparison to the dog I really liked, and I really took it on, and it became like an ideal for me, like an inspiration.

[03:22]

And I also had brought up that in Zen, when we come to Zen, the sense of wholeheartedness is also really big in Zen, and in particular in the Bendowa, Dogen's teaching on the efforting of the way. And it starts out like this. All Buddha Tathagatas, who directly transmit inconceivable Dharma and actualize supreme, perfect enlightenment, have a wondrous way, unsurpassed and unconditioned. Only Buddhas transmitted to Buddhas without veering off. Self-fulfilling samadhi is its standard. Sitting upright, practicing Zen, is the authentic gate to the unconfined realm of this samadhi. So Buddhas are continually transmitting... Anyudara samyaksam modi, which is the highest perfect awakening or enlightenment.

[04:28]

And that method is samadhi or concentration practice. And Dogen frames the samadhi as chichyuzamai. And it's translated as self-receiving and self-functioning concentration. And sitting upright, practicing Zen, is the authentic gate to the unconfined realm of this samadhi. So it's really lovely to be told to sit, to take this posture, this seat, is to be Buddha. And we're told this all the time. I even say it in my introductory meditation class. And I love it. It fills me. It's really inspiring. And the problem, of course, is that most of us have a really hard time connecting to this Buddha nature, this Buddhiness, and also we have a hard time just sitting. And if you read closely, though, it says, sitting upright, practicing Zen, is the authentic gate to the unconfined realm of the Samadhi.

[05:46]

So we realize that Picking the posture is to be open, right? Like a gate into a realm. Now, Norman Fisher, in his commentary on this, and this is in the Zen Center collection of Moon and a Dewdrop, or his commentary is on the Bendawa as translated in there. He said, sitting upright, practicing Zen, is the authentic gate to the unconfined realm of this samadhi. Everything that Dogen said about transmitting the Dharma, Buddha to Buddha, comes down to jjiju-zamai, self-fulfilling, self-opening samadhi. The gateway to self-opening samadhi is just this plain, simple thing of sitting upright in zazen. Although this is inconceivable, Dharma is abundant in each person's It is not actualized without practice and is not experienced without realization.

[06:48]

It's already in each person. This inconceivable, lofty sensibility of our lives that Dogen is speaking of is not something that only the holy are open to. It's abundant in every creature. It's our nature. It's our real nature. We are limitless consciousness. We are inconceivable Buddha realms. So this is really an important thing, his emphasis. This is really an important thing. It's not that we have to make something happen, that we think something is wrong with us, and we've got to change that to improve. That's not the case. We are, each one of us, a manifestation of the perfection of reality. Each one of us is a different locus and a different expression, unique and unrepeatable.

[07:50]

An absolutely necessary expression of the perfection of reality. That is the fact. And yet, and yet, again this is his emphasis, and yet, if we don't practice, if we don't let our intention manifest this Even though it is so, it won't really appear in the world as it should. So in other words, it's dialectic. So what is this dialectic? I want to propose to you that it's dialectic between inspiration and aspiration. So inspiration is defined as the process of being mentally stimulated, to do or feel something, especially to do something creative. The quality of being inspired, a person or thing that inspires you, a sudden brilliant creative or timely idea, a divine influence believed to have led to the writing of the Bible or other religious texts, the drawing in a breath, inhalation,

[09:09]

an act of breathing in. It's from the middle English. It means a sense of divine guidance. Now, aspiration is a hope or ambition of achieving something, the object of one's hope or ambition or goal, the action or process of drawing breath, the action of drawing fluid by suction from a vessel or cavity, and the action of pronouncing a sound with an exhalation of breath. Now, inspire and aspire are both verbs in English. So while inspire is a transitive verb that denotes the involvement of an influence, aspire is an intra-intransitive verb. It is a personal ambition. It's about dreaming to accomplish something.

[10:12]

You know, my friend Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopar were here, so of course we've been talking about the practice period, and they're translators of Tibetan texts. And so it came up as we were walking out of, when they spoke at my sitting group on Monday, the difference between Inspire and Esper and then aspire in Tibet, and here's really interesting. She says inspiration is a tricky term in Tibet, and it can relate to different words, this is Yeshe, depending on the translator. What we refer to inspiration is the Tibetan word troa, which also means enthusiasm and delight. This is the delight part of the delighting and virtue definition of diligence we discuss on Saturday. The Tibetan encompasses all these English words. Tibetan, for aspiration, is mon, to wish, aspire, intend, plus lam, path, approach, or way.

[11:26]

There is the powerful tradition of aspiration practice, most commonly seen in the aspiration prayers, mon lam, which which follows dedication of merit, but which is full and rich practice in and of itself. She said it would take a long time to talk about it. So inspiration is a grand ideal, which gives us breath. It fills us up. But it can be amorphous, and so we need to give it shape. We need a path. We need some kind of structure so that we can... Know it. It's fine to have the grand idea and the grand sense of things, but how do we know it? The aspiration is the wish and the action to know it. So the wiseness of effort comes with the ability to identify when the energy needs to change and having the ability to make that change.

[12:34]

being able to shift from ideology to engagement, from theory to activity. Again, perfect in the realm of relationship because when you first meet somebody or when you're attracted to somebody, it's all about the idea. When you say, right, that's why we have this expression like rose-colored glasses. When you're in love, they can't do anything wrong. Now, here's another piece. So that idea I have of the dog, right? As trusting or not trusting right away. You can fill in your own, you know, this or that, your own animal. And you can ask yourself, which one are you? That's what I asked you. And I will also say that in answering myself, I wanted to say to try to find the balance between the two.

[13:35]

Not trusting too little, but not trusting too much. Pretty reasonable, wouldn't you say? And then I thought, a better answer, perhaps, is another question. Very Zen there, Della, for the answer to be another question. Very Zen. And that is, what is the wise response within any given relationship? Not the who in the relationship, but what is the how What is the how? Now, I remember when David and I were talking about what we call the arc of the practice period as we were playing it out. I said, why is that for it? We focus so much on the what, when, where, why. And the answer is to move really towards the how, and relationship is the perfect time to do that. And of course, though, in relationship,

[14:39]

roles are part of a relationship without a doubt. But what makes it enlivening, as opposed to deadening, is the dynamic between two or more parties. It's the process of interaction between us. So here's from Pat Enkyo Ohara Roshi. This is from her book, a Zen approach to life's challenges on relationships, she says. Relationships, what might intimacy, we all want intimacy in relationship. What might this intimacy look like for you or me? Would it be like this poem by Daito Kokushi, a medieval Zen master who lived under a bridge among the homeless in Kyoto?

[15:45]

Rain. No umbrella. Getting soaked. I'll just use the rain as my raincoat. I'll say it again. Rain. No umbrella. Getting soaked. I'll just use the rain as my raincoat. She goes on to say, Facing yourself intimately and without judgment is like finding yourself in a sudden downpour without an umbrella or a shelter. You try to escape the cold and wet by huddling into your clothes, head down, but there's no way to move away from the rain. own issues, sorrow, or anger. If you can just let go of trying to escape and acknowledge, this is me, this is what I'm experiencing, the need to escape vanishes.

[16:50]

You're free to be truly there for yourself and others. It's like standing in the rain with nothing to lose. Yourself is the raincoat that will protect you from and protect your loved ones through your honesty. If you can see that you are not the world, but that the world is actually you, then you can begin to experience an intimacy with all things. That all things come forth and experience themselves, as Dogen would say. The key is to train yourself to see this in your moment-to-moment life. to consciously dissolve the makeup boundaries between self and other, to appreciate that we are all linked together in this magic circle of relationships. This might sound rather airy-fairy, but it is what gives us freedom, and freedom is what we really want.

[17:56]

We want to be spontaneously alive, not stuck in our old habits of body and mind. So we flow with change, we nurture awareness, we listen with open heart-minds to ourselves and to each other. We recognize our own selflessness and our own self-fulness. It was interesting, last night in the class, we were talking about the hindrances and the energies of the hindrances. And it was at the... Doubt people, I believe. Burke, yes. The doubt people felt that their mind was just so full of thoughts. And so it was unskillful. And on one level, that's true. It's good to notice these patterns, these habits of mind. And that's what the hindrance is. They're habits of mind.

[18:58]

And the habits that gets between us and reality. But that's all they are. They're like, like I like to say, they're like five different pair of glasses that you have. And when you wear them, right, they, on one level, obviously when you need them, they make things clearer, but at the same time it's limited, right, because I still have edges to them. So it's a very limited view of things. So when we realize that they're not a problem, right, they're there, And when we can recognize them, then we can also see that we can take them off or we can know that views are different, right? They're different variations. And we're not stuck in believing that this is our reality. So this is the program of our relationship with family, friends, co-workers that can lead us to this continuous path of awakening.

[20:00]

The key... is to train ourselves to recognize how we are in our moment-to-moment lives and to honestly connect with others without shame or fear. Because strange as it may seem, we learn more from relationship than from any other source. And they are not always easy. Buddha's teachings tell us that suffering arises from grasping. for things to be different than they are, from not meeting the moment just as it is. We're so preoccupied with the idea of what we want or who we think we are or someone else is, that we miss what's really alive in the present moment. We always want to be safe and happy and to avoid any suffering, so we try to control our own lives and the lives of those close to us. We don't feel safe enough to just let things fall apart and reassemble.

[21:04]

We try to fix other people when that's not needed, and so we create more suffering. We've been, in class in particular, working with this model of how to work with effort that the Buddha came up with, right? Working with unskillful qualities and working with skillful qualities. And I put it in this framework of pace to prevent and to abandon the unskillful or to cultivate or extend the skillful. So, here's an example, I went through with someone about relationship in this way. Now, the aspect of relationship that you would like to practice with at this time is being too helpful when my partner is sharing a difficult experience.

[22:18]

Anyone done that? Try to be really helpful. Isn't that what a partner is supposed to be? You're supposed to be there for them, right? What have you been thinking or doing around this that you find unskillful or not useful? Offering too many suggestions or solutions. So how can you prevent or guard this from happening again? So clearly knowing what is mine in the interaction or situation. And how do you do that? By noting or identifying my dis-ease through in terms of the body, where is their tightness? And thoughts. For instance, when they're sharing that they're suffering, the thought that often comes up is, this is too much. This is overwhelming. I'm not sure I can fix it. And the emotion is anxiety and fear about my sense of helplessness.

[23:23]

Not being able to alleviate her suffering. Fear and anxiety that I'm not good enough, partner, since I can't help. So how can you abandon or let go of what's happening? Again, you know, body sensation, the tightness. How to work with the tightness? What can you abandon? You focus. Ironically, you stop and focus on the tightness. See how it is. Often it's on the chest. Often I experience as holding breath. So when I realize what I'm doing, then I take a breath. What about the thoughts? How do you abandon thoughts, right? A lot of time, I think part of the overwhelming is you have a thought and then you judge yourself on the thought, right? It's too much. It's overwhelming. Wait, I should be able to open up. Especially, you know, this is my thing being a practitioner. I just keep thinking I should just open up.

[24:26]

More metta, just do more metta and feel really open. And then I judge myself when I don't feel open and that I feel tight around it. So then I note the tightness and then I say, well, given your background, you know, most of us have had difficulties, so it's natural to tighten. And then you ask yourself, oh, what else is here? What else is here besides this experience? What else is here right now? And then the emotion, right, that fear and anxiety of not being good enough, again, comes back to the Buddha's teaching, which is that it's okay for dis-ease to be here. So much of the time we think we shouldn't have tightness. There must be something wrong, that I feel tight, that I feel fear, that I feel anxiety. It's part of life. So it's okay to feel that there's disease, both for myself and for my partner.

[25:32]

That fear and anxiety are normative responses. And then, often, there's fear and anxiety when you have empathy. When someone's hurting, and if you hurt, then your heart's going to squeeze too. There's a strain around that, so that's normative. And as a response to pain and suffering. So what responses are skillful or useful for you? Pausing or stopping, focusing or refocusing, and acknowledging. Now, how can you cultivate or access what you want? The what is ease through spaciousness and allowing. Another way to put that is equanimity, a balance of mind, a mind that allows for things to be as it is. The phrases for equanimity is, may I be able to accept things just as they are? So, in terms of action, how does one act to enact spaciousness and allowing?

[26:44]

For me, it would be to listen. And for her, it's to create the space to express and to share. Now, can you extend or maintain what you've been doing that's already working for you? For myself, this is when I remind myself of my inspiration. You could say you take in the breath of what you want. Tongling is like this. Tongling, you take in the opposite and you put out the good. So it's similar. So my inspiration in this case is self, for myself, is self-compassion. And the aspiration is caring for my anxiety and fear around helplessness. So when I know that that's how I could do it, then it helps me, almost it determines what to do next, which is by acknowledging that fear and anxiety are present. And again, that is an appropriate response, especially given my life circumstances, or conditioning, you could say.

[27:53]

Breathing into it, to be with it, with my experience, with myself, and to let myself wonder and then choose how I want to respond now. It's always my experience that when I can acknowledge my own, what I think generally is what I don't want to be doing, if I can just acknowledge it, that's the magic. hesitate to use that word, or the wonder, perhaps that's a better word, the wonder of awareness. Bringing awareness in itself shows you that it's okay. That it's just as it is. And then, once you're settled in that, when you're equanimous in that, then the response comes naturally. And not a reaction. I find that I react when I don't pause.

[28:55]

acknowledge what's going on, allow for it. Now, in terms of for us, for my partner and myself, the inspiration is the interconnectedness of being together. The aspiration is to show caring by being there for her. So how? Again, once you know what is the aspiration, For me, the how comes easier. I pause, I listen, and I ask. I let her inform me what she needs to express and how she needs support. As opposed to thinking, I know what she needs. Assuming I know what kind of support would work for her or that she needs. And in doing so, I empower her. That's one example.

[29:59]

Let's see. What time are we at? Now, in our practice, I myself say Zen is all about relationship. Everything in Zen is about relationship. Yes, lots of inspiration and what we chant, you know, our teaching. And then it's all about The things we do is about relationship. First, the very obvious thing is relationship to things. As Emma demonstrated, we have form around how to carry things because it's to show honor. In the very precise way she did, we bowed to each other. It was an engagement with things. Part of it is the sense of respect for the teachings. And the respect of this position and this role and how the Dharma comes through.

[31:08]

Lou, Blanche's husband, used to be like the cheating head. And he taught so many of us how to cheat and how to carry things. And he would get rather mad if we were kind of trying to rush through it, like it's a task only. So handling of things forms, again. For instance, I was thinking this morning, the fukudo is the person that hits the han. Or the fukudo, actually, since a tenken, I only tenken at Tassahara, who hits the drum for the time? The fukudo. The fukudo. And then there's the, well, I would call it the tenken, but the shoten. It's the densho or the time. So Vicky will probably know this, but we won't get to it yet.

[32:13]

I don't know how the Japanese came up with this, but the way they tell time is on the taiko drum, one hit is for the hour, right? And then for every 20 minutes, there's a... So between one minute or, yeah, just past zero, and 20 is one bell, and then the next is two bell, total 40, and then three, right? Now, in the doing that, let's say it's 5.30. So how many hits on the taiko drum? And two on the gansho, the bell, right? That's how one person does the whole thing. So... When you're doing the five, you go, let's say, one, two, three, four, five. Now, someone else is hitting the little bell, and it's supposed to be at the same pace. So the people have to work together.

[33:18]

It's a relationship. It's not, well, you hit your five, and then I'll hit my two at whatever pace I want. The space between the hits is just as important. You care for the space between the hits just as much. I apologize, I can't pull up his name. A taiko master came here, Tony from L.A. Tom Kerai, yes, you're right. And he went down and he told us, yes, it's not the sound you make, it's the space between the sound. That's just as important. I think it's called the ma. Is that the word, ma? That's my memory of the word, which is wrong, probably. So the idea is that we have to work together. It's the time. Sharing the time with us is something that comes together. It's not just my doing or your doing.

[34:19]

The jiko and the doshi works together. Also, when we chant... I am not chanting. As Greg, is Greg in the room tonight? Greg, who trained me as head doan at Tassajara, he said, you do not chant with your mouth, you chant with your ears. And chanting, I am not trying to make my sound above everyone else, unless you're the kokyo, you're setting the chant. But the rest of us, we're not chanting to stand out, we're chanting to harmonize. So we chant with our ears to connect with each other. So it's a relationship. Of course, we've already talked about working with our insides, our emotions, having a relationship with that. And then, of course, all the relationship with actual sangha members. It's a hard part of Zen.

[35:19]

You know, I love Vipassana. I still go to one retreat a year. because it's so quiet and so restful. But I stay with them because it's super hard for me to keep on showing up and interacting and exposing yourself instead of hiding. You can't hide in Sangha. People see you and people bug the heck out of you. I would say that one of the things I geared up when I moved back in here for this practice period, do you know what it is? It's always the little things. We have shared bathrooms here. And nobody, I swear nobody, all the women in the room, in the building, never change the toilet paper. They're like four stalls, but they always have empty toilet rolls, right? And I used to go, right? Because my mother would never have let me done that.

[36:20]

She just drilled it into me, right? That if it's empty, you... put another one on it. By the way, my mother taught me over the top. This is also very important. Right? And so, Sashin, I came here in March, you know, and Sashin, I swear, every time I went in a stall, it was empty. Right? And then I find myself going, these people, wouldn't they train right? Right? You were supposed to care for things. Right? Then I came up with a cultivating practice, because I knew I was coming back here for six long bathroom weeks. So I'm calling it toilet paper meta. I, with loving kindness, will take out a role and undo it. And actually, you know, it sounds funny, but once I start to do it, I actually smile every time now, and I actually feel like I'm carrying...

[37:20]

for the sangha. I know it's silly, but just turning the mind towards just the littlest thing. By that, I do not mean that you need to help me practice anymore. So we can't get too tight. Here's from Mark Epstein. So remember that effort is in the grouping with concentration and mindfulness in the Eightfold Path. The link between concentration and mindfulness is the mental factor of rapture. Rather than being a kind of out-of-the-body experience, in Buddhism, rapture is defined as intensified interest in the object of awareness. Instead of becoming blissed out, as I had naively imagined, a meditator who strengthens the factor of absorption develops the ability to be blissed in.

[38:34]

Thus, in concentration meditations, interest or fascination with the central object of meditation keeps the mind involved with it. In mindfulness, this same quality of interest keeps the mind open, engage with shifting objects of awareness, with the same fascination that a baby exhibits with a new toy, turning it every which way, as the composer John Cage once summarized. In Zen they say, if something is boring for two minutes, try it for four. If it's still boring, try it for eight, 16, 32, and so on. We've been so lax on you guys. David, this is our new meditation instruction. Eventually, one discovers that it's not boring at all, but very interesting. Boredom and doubt is the inability to stay connected.

[39:42]

Energy, mindfulness, concentration, and faith all depend on high degrees of rapture. It's one of the engines of meditation. For me, it was this quality more than any other that surprised and delighted me in my early retreats. I was eager to learn what the classical text had to say about it, since there was very little attention paid to it in Western psychology. Rapture has a specific function of suppressing hatred, while joyful feelings inhibit worry and restlessness. It is difficult to be angry when your body is pervaded by a rapturous Of the five spiritual faculties, the only one not directly encouraged by this quality of rapture is wisdom. It's possible in the Buddhist view to have much happiness but little understanding. But the reverse is also true. We can have insight without happiness.

[40:45]

So I sometimes say just forget insight, you know. Everyone wants to meditate to get insight. Just forget insight. We can have insight without happiness. This is borne out in many long-term relationships. As couples start to notice, they can have tremendous wisdom about each other's characters, but little of the idealization that once marked their love. The balance is easily lost. To reach for insight and love, meditation, or therapy without a corresponding ease and balance is often a recipe for anxiety or destruction. So, the meditator has to stop straining. We need to return to the simplest of concentration practices and develop the balance and ease that grows naturally out of one-pointedness.

[41:57]

The couples have to find a way to let each other become mysterious again. They too have to return to a simpler stance before they knew everything there was to know about each other. In both cases, people have to let go of their fix notions, and return to the state of fascination. He says, I learned from meditation how to be with my entire range of my emotional experience, with the faith that joy and rapture were always within reach. So here is Norman Fisher again. I'll just repeat this part, the part I read before, and then how he ends it. Again, this is on the Bendawa and on Gitu Yuzamai in particular. We are, each one of us, a manifestation of the perfection of reality. Each one of us is a different locus and a different expression, unique and unrepeatable and absolutely necessary expression of the perfection of reality.

[43:13]

This is the fact. And yet... And yet, if we don't practice, if we don't let our intention manifest this, even though it is so, it won't really appear in the world as it should. So in other words, it's a dialectic. Intention and aspiration is one of the same. He ends the section with, we don't have to make it happen, but unless we release ourself into it, not only will our own lives not be complete, but we will have prevented reality from fully manifesting itself through our lives. I'm going to repeat that. We don't have to make it happen, but unless we release ourselves to it, unless we can rest into it, if we can find the ease of it, settle into it, not only will our own lives not be complete, but we will have prevented reality from fully manifesting itself

[44:19]

through our lives. It's interesting in the Zen Center version, the moon and the dewdrop, in the glossary, it says, it's the joyful samadhi shared with other beings. So it's not, with the self-receiving and self-functioning, it's not a small S, it's a big S, you could say. It's the inclusive self. like to tell my students that Zazen is the enactment of awakening. It takes bodies to enact. In the sitting, we are enacting. We enact Zazen. Is there a Zazen without enactment? There's a Zen koan. Beings enact Zazen.

[45:20]

and Zazen enacts us. Here's from Pat R. Through the quiet awareness of meditation, I began to realize the freedom of experiencing myself as relationships rather than as an entity, a separate being. The courage meditation gave me is the courage of my wholeness. Say that again. Through the quiet awareness of meditation, I began to realize the freedom of experiencing myself as relationship rather than as an entity, a separate being. The courage meditation gave me is the courage of my wholeness.

[46:22]

We tend to think that we are independent of our environment, of the people and things around us. But when we sit in meditation and experience ourselves completely, breath by breath, we realize that we do not exist in a vacuum. We coexist with with the elements, and with all those with whom we've connected consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, in time and space. This is what wakes us up. Thank you for your attention. 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. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[47:29]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:31]

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