Thanks, Kato. Welcome, everyone. Can you see my legs behind the cat? I think you can. That's good. It's important. So this is Zazen instruction. And I think probably what I'm going to do is introduce why the question or the proposition of why anyone would want to sit in the first place. And then we'll talk a little bit about how to do it. And then we'll sit some. And then at the end, there'll be an opportunity for people to ask questions. And I'll try and make enough space so that we can talk about what's going on and how it works. and get into the details and so on and so forth.

[01:01]

So without further ado, the question is, why would anyone want to sit Zazen? And what kind of motivated in the first place? And the latter question is really hard to get a handle on. who's a, if people don't know him, he's a pretty venerable and well-known Zen teacher. He was the abbot of San Francisco Zen Center for a while. He now has this kind of roaming and peripatetic teaching practice where he teaches all over the world. And he's also a... extremely accomplished poet. And actually, if you go to the Beat Museum down on Broadway, right down the street here, there's a picture hanging in their photo gallery of Norman Fisher, probably in his early 20s, just looking as sort of skinny and geeky as it is long, sitting with various people

[02:20]

and Allen Ginsberg cranking a harmonium, and everybody's chanting something at the top of their lungs. It's a marvelous picture. It's really good. So if you happen to be on Broadway at some point and standing near the Beat Museum, I recommend, if for no other reason than that, going in and checking it out. It's pretty awesome. Anyway, so Norman Fisher once said that he thought Zazen just arose because people way back in the day, so, you know, sort of in the early portion of the Neolithic or something like that, realized that when they really needed to sit down and listen to what was going on, Zazen was a good thing to do. That might be true. My take on it is this. the practice of sitting in a sort of comfortable, sustainable posture that brings into the body a kind of energy and engagement, because that's what Zazen posture is intended to do, brings a certain

[03:54]

energetic and if you just let it do its work, brings a certain energetic and curious engagement to the mind that is both in itself restful and healthy and also is revelatory in the sense that over time it reveals some really crucial aspects and features of what it is to be a human being and live a human life and offers the opportunity to live a life that's free, comfortable, skillful, and Helpful. So that's kind of the idea.

[05:02]

That is my sense of what motivated the discovery and practice of Zazen back in the day. And it's been around for a while because we have at least some historical documentation of it There are coins from Mohenjo-Daro and the various cities of the Indus Valley civilization, which was a pretty early Neolithic civilization in the Indus Valley, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro and so on. of what looks like the coin is stamped with what looks like some guy wearing a really funny hat and sitting zazen.

[06:06]

So there you go. At least that long. So what does that make it? 4,000 plus years. That's a venerable tradition and a long history. And well predates the Buddha. Zazen is obviously most closely associated with Buddhism, but as a practice, Zazen probably predates the Buddha by a lot. And speaking of the Buddha, so this is the Zen school, this San Francisco Zen Center. as you might guess from the name, is a Zen school. And Zen is a Buddhist sect. And the motivation for practice that was developed by the Buddha has a particular flavor.

[07:07]

And it arises from an observation that he made that certainly wasn't new to him either. And that observation is that human life and perhaps life in general, but certainly human life is kind of charged with suffering. In some cases, it's less obvious. In some cases, it's more obvious. But I think we can all agree that From looking at the newspapers, our experience of living in a human social framework, our experience of living in a family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[08:11]

Oh, let's not forget work. That there's a lot of suffering to go around. if you look a little bit more carefully at how it arises, we both bring it up in ourselves by worrying, obsessing, self-doubting, and so on, generating expectations and then failing to meet them, et cetera, et cetera, right? And also, we kind of pass it around to each other pretty liberally by, well, through conflict, recrimination, shame and blame, et cetera. So life is pretty full of suffering. And we're pretty good at messing things up through our preoccupations, delusions, and blindness.

[09:16]

Humans, that is, are pretty good at messing things up. Cats kind of have a different profile. They make a mess of things, but they do it in a limited. The mess they make is only a mess really when it's interpreted by humans. If a cat scratches the tatami, which this cat does pretty regularly, Only I think that's a bad thing. The cat thinks it's kind of awesome. It's like, you gave me this massive surface that if I dig my claws into it, it feels really good. But humans are pretty good at making a mess of things. And that's been well understood, again, way before the time of Buddha. If you look at the earliest literatures of the world, like the Epic of Gilgamesh or the...

[10:18]

the Odyssey, or et cetera, et cetera, all of which I think are derived from oral traditions that even predate them. What you see is a long-form discussion, sometimes in pretty straightforward form, sometimes in more metaphorical or mythological form of the questions, why do humans make such a mess of things and suffer so extravagantly, and how can we do better? I'll just say this.

[11:20]

The Odyssey, for example, starts with a conversation between Zeus and Athena, where Zeus basically says, ah, these humans, such a pain. We give them free will, and the... this beautiful world to exercise it in. And what do they do? They make a total mess of things. And then they blame us, the gods, for their woes. I think we should just kill them all and start over again. And Athena kind of argues with them and says, oh, but they're not all bad. There's this Odysseus guy. He's pretty OK. Why don't we give him a break? And that's the beginning of it. of the Odyssey. But it's also kind of a good summing up of what people thought about humans, even back in the day when you could argue that humans and civilization and so on were pretty new, and that you might have expected a certain kind of exuberant enthusiasm.

[12:38]

look, we're civilized. It's so great. We can grow wheat and barley and have enough for everyone, and there's division of labor, and so this guy over here can make pots, and this woman over here can weave cloth, and we can exchange, and it's a marvel. But even by that time, even by the the kind of end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of, in some ways, the age of civilization as we know it, everybody was pretty clear on the setup that humans were running around making a mess of things and not being particularly good at cleaning up and causing each other to suffer. And people had also been trying to explain it for millennia.

[13:45]

And the usual early explanations were, oh, well, the universe is inhabited by these spirits, animal and incorporeal and maybe related to the forces of nature. And they don't really have our interests at heart. And we have to constantly remind them, one, that we're here, and two, that we think they're OK, and maybe reward them with sacrifices or rituals or other activities that will settle them down and allow us to live without being constantly vexed and trampled upon by By the time of the Buddha, that whole set of explanations, not just in India, but over a lot of the world at the time, was looking a little threadbare.

[14:56]

And people were running around cooking up different explanations and different solutions. And so you see this cultural ferment in the time of Buddha, again, both in India and elsewhere, where For example, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali was written down roughly at the same time. Jainism was invented roughly at the same time. There are all these... And similarly, in the Mediterranean world, there was a lot of... new religious practices, new theories about the nature of life and so on, all of that would be a little bit of an exaggeration to say it happened at the same time. But there was this sort of cultural moment in the world where the old explanation started to look

[16:07]

unhelpful or insufficient, and people wanted different explanations. And so the traditional story of the Buddha's life has this flavor where it's like he's this guy that had and had experienced pretty much everything the world had to offer. He was traditionally imagined as a prince, very well taken care of, powerful, educated, a good family, married with a child, and ready to take his place in the world of of power and influence. And then, vexed by questions about the nature of existence and the suffering that goes along with it, he kind of busted out, left everything behind, and ran off into the

[17:36]

this world of cultural ferment, and tried a whole bunch of it. So he tried out various yoga and philosophical schools. He tried various religious practices, and in the end, found all of them unsatisfactory in some fundamental way. And even though, by all accounts, he was pretty good at them. So he'd go study with some yoga teacher and the yoga teacher, after a while, would go, hey, you're pretty good at this. Why don't you take my teacher training class? And the Buddha would go, no, I think I'm going to leave and do something else. So after a bunch of this, the Buddha found himself in a living in a forest with a small group of forest ascetics doing very strict and stringent practices that involved not eating very much, not drinking very much, doing very demanding yogic and meditation practices pretty much all day long.

[19:04]

he kind of wears himself out in this story and has this realization that even this, which in some ways was kind of the ultimate life of dedication to the pursuit that he imagined himself making, was kind of not working. And he famously says, well, you know, when I was a prince, that wasn't particularly satisfactory. And now here I am at the sort of other end of the spectrum living this life of extreme asceticism and dedication. And interestingly enough, that's not all that satisfactory either. There must be some other way, maybe somewhere in the middle there, there's a way that I can live and practice and realize an answer to the questions that have been dogging my entire life, at least since I've been an adult.

[20:20]

And so remembering some childhood experiences he had of sitting peacefully in the wilderness, goes and sits down under a tree and says to him, makes a vow that he's going to sit there until something happens. And he does, and it does. And that's the beginning of Buddhism. his first official act as the Buddha was to give a talk. And in his talk, he lays out his novel proposed solution to the question that we were talking about earlier, why do humans mess things up and suffer so extravagantly and how can we do better?

[21:27]

And the The talk essentially lays out four axiomatic propositions. One, as we've already said, life is suffering. Or you could translate that a number of different ways, but the usual way it's translated is life is suffering. And here's the novel part. What he says in the talk is something like, suffering arises from grasping and aversion. But if you look at this sort of larger corpus of, and it's a large corpus of Buddhist text, what you see is something like this. He says, suffering arises from grasping and aversion. But in the sort of larger body of text,

[22:34]

He digs into the causes of that grasping and aversion. And fundamentally, what you see is that he's saying it's kind of built into us in how we're put together, how we... in the course of our lives, really quite early on in the course of our lives, develop a self, an idea of self, a construct that we animate in the world in order to walk around without bumping into things and engage in social activity. eat and drink and get things that we need to eat and drink and acquire resources of other sorts and so on and so forth. So we construct this self, we animate it in the world, and we drive that animation in the world largely with emotion, with some combination of self-narration and emotion.

[23:55]

And that's an extremely powerful thing that humans do. And kind of, in some ways, unprecedented in the history of the world. I mean, maybe not. Maybe it turns out that 60 million years ago, there were dinosaurs that also made complex self-constructs deeply symbolicated and richly grammatical language to work with, animate them and narrate them and so on. But we don't know that. So in this era, we're the ones that kind of do that, for better or for worse. And according to the Buddha, in some ways, in a lot of ways, for the worse. because it causes this suffering and this propensity to make a massive thing.

[25:00]

And then he says, but there is freedom from that, which I think we also all experience kind of on a regular basis. I would say, if you examine your inner life at all, and that's one of the functions of zazen is exactly that examination of the inner life, you see the way in which that activity of self-construction, self-narration, of emotionally driven decision-making that's done by imagining some ideal future and navigating in the direction of it, of reaching back into the past and wrangling with the past, beating it into a narrative form that feels satisfactory and comfortable, and so on.

[26:05]

That activity, it kind of breathes. Sometimes it's really up, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it can feel relaxed and unobtrusive, if not utterly absent, actually. And some examples of that are imagine an intimate conversation with someone that you deeply trust. Where in there is the imperative of self-construction? It can kind of settle down, right? Or thoroughgoing engagement in energetic physical activity, or even maybe not so energetic physical activity, that the Zen school is fond of chopping vegetables as an activity that can lead to the settling and resting of this activity of self-construction.

[27:17]

In any case, these the opportunity to experience freedom from this particular kind of suffering that we generally carry around with ourselves are many and varied. And I think we can all agree that it would be nice to have a bit more of that and a bit less of the other. And the last axiom that he proposes in this talk is, OK, and if you want that, here's this program you can follow. And you could sum up the program by saying, essentially, wise up, become knowledgeable and curious about the mechanisms and

[28:19]

manifestations of exactly this activity, the activity of making yourself and animating yourself in the world in this way that's both, let's be clear, tremendously helpful and successful and also deeply problematic. And then shift the parameters and conditions of your life in such a way that it promotes more wising up. If you have a job where you're chronically deprived of sleep and food, it's going to make it hard to do this. So if you have a choice, and let's be clear, some people don't have a choice, and that's a huge problem in the world.

[29:20]

But if you have a choice, move in a direction that allows for more wising up. And then finally, he says, meditate and be mindful. Practice mindfulness and meditation. as the vehicle whereby this wising up and the sort of tropisms that allow your life to shift can manifest. These three top-level bullet points, which are actually extracted top-level bullet points of an eight-point program, they all... interact and feed into each other. They're not separate in any way. They're just different ways of looking at the problem and the process.

[30:23]

So that's the motivation. That's why we sit. That's why Zazen is a practice that has been so persistently employed, and is on offer here in the Zen School, and in particular at San Francisco Zen Center. So let's talk about how to do it. Unfortunately, I might have to move this cat. Hold on a minute. You know, well over a thousand years after the time of Buddha, there was this guy in Japan who was already a Buddhist monk by this complicated circuitous route that we don't have to go into.

[31:35]

But during his career as a Buddhist monk, The temple he lived in initially, eventually the senior priest said, you know what, you should go study with this other guy. And so they kind of, I'm not sure they exactly booted him out, but they strongly suggested he go study with somebody else. And so he goes and studies with this other guy who was a... very early practitioner of Zen in Japan, of a particular Zen school, not this school, but the sort of other large Zen school in Japan. And that guy, after hanging out with him for a while, said, here's what I think we should do. Let's go to China and study with the Zen masters in China. And at the time, there was a lot of Zen in China.

[32:36]

And there were very successful and wise teachers who were sort of dotted all over the country. So they took about to China, and they ended up eventually at this place, sort of in eastern China, near what is now the town of Ningbo. And there, Dogen met this guy who he kind of resonated with and who helped him wake up through sitting zazen and trained him and passed on the teachings to him. And he came back to Japan, and he was pretty fired up. And he went to Kyoto, and he said, hey, everyone, I've been in China practicing Zen.

[33:37]

It's really awesome, and let's all go do it. And pretty much everyone in Kyoto said, no, we're not doing that. So he left town, and he went off and lived at a remote country temple on the fringes of Lake Biwa and was sitting there. And he decided he needed to write a manifesto. And so he wrote a couple of documents that constitute a manifesto. But one of them is this document called, well, you could roughly translate the title as Everyone Should Be Sitting Zazen Like This. And so it's the canonical instructions for zazen in Japanese. And we still use it to this day and chant it pretty regularly in the temple. Basically, it goes like this. It says, one, zazen is great.

[34:40]

Two, it's the solution to this problem that we've been discussing of human suffering and difficulty. Three, here's how you do it. And pretty much almost the entire rest of the document is about logistics and posture. He says, kick everyone out of the room. Tell them to stop bothering you. Put some matting down on the floor and put a cushion on top of it. So I sit on these. So this is a skinny little Zafu. Most Zafus are thicker than this. And under it, I put a support cushion. And we'll talk about the uses you can make of these support cushions in a bit. He doesn't say anything about a cat, but that's a later edition.

[35:48]

So once you've settled yourself, you've found yourself a quiet place to do this. He says, so you sit either in full lotus posture or half lotus posture. So full lotus posture, I don't know if you can see me or not. But here, hold on. Maybe I'll. Maybe I'll move my camera. That's probably a little better. So I'll demonstrate Full Lotus just because there's a certain lesson in it that's worth noting.

[36:55]

OK, so he says you put your right foot on your left thigh and your left foot on your right thigh. The good thing about this posture is because of the way it's constructed, your knees are really solidly planted on the mat, and the pressure on them is pretty even, right? And they're also relatively close together, which is good. The closer together your knees are, the lower the stress on your psoas muscles and upper quads, is when you're sitting. And that's a good thing. So he says, you can sit in that posture or you can sit in half lettuce. So I'll demonstrate half lettuce. So he says, if you're in half lettuce, let's see.

[38:01]

No, let's see the other way around. Sorry. You just press your left foot against your right foot. Okay, so you'll notice that my knees are a little further apart now, which is okay, and that the stress on them is a little bit different, which is also okay, but it's just worth noting, right? And also, you know, this half lettuce has a number of variants. You can have your leg, your foot all the way up here on your thigh. It can be down here on your calf, or there's even a posture that's, I think... strictly speaking, called Burmese posture, where this foot is all the way down on the mat behind the cat, right? And so which one of those, if you want to try half lotus, which one of those you pick depends on and is comfortable, depends on how much twist there is in your hips and your knees.

[39:02]

But you'll notice that as I... As I move my left foot down, my knees go out like this and the stress up here increases a little bit. So it's a balancing act to find a posture, a cross-legged posture that is comfortable for, you know, that has this quality of having your knees be solidly planted and is also comfortable for your knees, hips, and upper body or sort of psoas and upper quads. Since the time of Dogen, who was the guy that wrote this particular manifesto, we've added a couple of other postures. First of all, you can do this in a chair. So if you're sitting in a chair, the injunction is is at least similar. You want to have your feet solidly planted, just the way your knees are solidly planted if you're sitting cross-legged.

[40:08]

And in all cases, you want to have your butt solidly planted on whatever it is that you're sitting on, on a Zafu or something else, or on a chair, such that you really feel the contact of your sit bones with whatever it is that they're sitting on. And so that... So that in some ways, every point of contact, your knees and your butt, feels like it's contributing to the task of holding you up. So just to talk a little bit more about cross-legged posture. So if one of the things you have to play with in order to make this possible, is the height of your seat. So if I'm sitting down like this without anything under me at all, I don't know if you can tell, my right knee is pretty solidly planted.

[41:16]

My left knee is a little bit elevated because that joint is slightly stiffer than my right. And so in order to get that sense of being supported equally all around, you can either elevate that joint, and so that's one of the things that support cushions are for. I could just stick a support cushion underneath it, and that way I'm getting supported there and here, right? Or you can raise the height of your seat, because obviously here I'm not quite as solidly planted, but if I'm up here like this, you know, my knees are obviously pretty... solidly planted and equally distributed. The weight is equally distributed. So these things are useful for that, too. You can stack a bunch of them up and put yours off on top of it. Some people also sit on two softwares if they like. So just to play with that.

[42:18]

If you're sitting in a chair, then the main request in terms of height is you want the chair to be low enough so that your feet can be solidly planted and you want the chair to be simple enough so that your butt can feel solidly planted on the chair and the chair isn't somehow inviting you to lean back. You want to be sitting upright and the main point of contact with the chair should be your sit bows. The other posture that that's been introduced over the years is this posture, which is called Seiza. And it's a variant of the yoga posture. I'll do it sitting sideways. I think the yoga posture is called Varyasana.

[43:21]

There. So the simplest form of Seiza And the way you sit, for example, if you're doing a tea ceremony, is you just tuck your legs under you and you sit essentially on your feet. Some people experience this posture as extremely comfortable. And some people, it puts some stress on their legs. But even the people that experience it as comfortable will tell you, that after a while, your legs fall asleep if you sit like this. So the idea to prevent your legs from falling asleep is you put something under your butt to elevate it. So here's one thing you can do. You take a Zafu, and you insert it here in between your legs, and you sit down on it such that the edge of the Zafu is supporting your sit bones.

[44:25]

So that's one variant. I actually hand built this. It's a yoga block that I sculpted so that it kind of looks like a bike seat. I sometimes sit says it like this. This is pretty comfortable. And then the last way you can do it, they make these benches. You just put the bench. underneath you and sit on the bench. This is really good because it has this, it allows you to keep your legs together. And that actually is more comfortable. So in my experience, anyway, the most comfortable if your legs can be pretty close together when you're sitting, say, and your knees can be close together too, right? So anyway, so those are all the available

[45:27]

lower body postures that people normally use while sitting zazen. Somewhere in Duggan's manifesto, he says, actually, this has nothing to do with whether you're sitting or lying down. You can also sit zazen lying down, and people do, particularly if you have back trouble. All of that's a possibility. But anyway, so that said, here we are. So I would encourage everyone to find themselves a lower body posture that works for them. Explore. Change the height of your seat. See which, you know, how it's possible to have your joints the weight on your knees and your sit bones evenly distributed and so on.

[46:33]

And then having done that, we can work on the upper body posture. And I would say it's also the exploration of a lifetime. You know what? I will be back in two minutes. I'll be right back. I'm sorry. I apologize. So then there's an upper posture. And the upper posture looks like this. You make your back straight. And what that means, strictly speaking, is your back takes all of its natural curves.

[47:38]

So you want a soft curve in curve to your lower spine. You want a soft curve. out-curve to the space between your shoulder blades and up to the neck and then a soft in-curve at the neck. And the head should also have this relaxed sort of position with respect to the neck. Basically, the whole spine should feel soft and flexible. And what that means is that the muscles around it should be engaged but not So think about having the muscles in your lower back be engaged enough. If you put your hands, if you put your fingertips on these two giant ropes of muscle that run up along your back, right, on either side of your spine, and then rock back and forth, you can feel it. There are these two giant cords of muscle.

[48:42]

And if you lean back... They relax. If you lean forward, they clench. Somewhere in the middle there, there's a place where they're soft but still engaged, right? And the same is true for your stomach muscles. So just to notice that. Notice when you're upright enough so that the muscles in your lower back are pretty soft and the muscles in your belly are pretty soft and the... the tilt of your pelvis feels natural. It's neither straining forward nor bowing backward. So locate yourself in that sort of matrix. And then allow your head to kind of float up off your shoulders so that it feels like it's being attracted to the ceiling by some magnetic force, which, of course, it is all the time. You just never notice it. If you do that, your face naturally falls into a vertical plane and your nose lands kind of up above your navel, your ears line up with your shoulders.

[49:54]

Imagine a little bit of a lift in your chest and imagine that the direction of the shoulders is not... in like this or back like this, it's out and down. And there's a hand posture that goes along with that. So you curve your arms into a great big circle. And then you lay your left palm on top of your right palm. You bend your fingers around into another great big circle, although not as big as the one that your arms are making, obviously. And you place that such that you're The fingers, the small fingers of your hands are gently pressed against your lower abdomen. Your thumb tips are lightly touching and slightly above your navel and the rest of your hands are sort of hanging at or below your navel.

[50:57]

We sit with our eyes open and our gaze sort of relaxed and downcast so that it's just taking in what's below and in front of us in an unloaded way, not looking at things, not scanning around, not even necessarily interpreting things, just taking in the light, taking in the pattern, taking in the shapes. In this posture, try this. Bring your attention to this place in your belly that in Japanese they call the hara. It's sort of underneath your navel and kind of right in the middle of your body. And with your attention there, breathe all the way out, really deeply all the way up. And when you breathe all the way out, pause for a moment until your diaphragm says, okay, time to breathe in.

[52:20]

And then just let the breath come in. Just allow it. Keep your attention in your heart, but there's no tension in the in-breath. Just let it come in. And then, again, a little bit of emphasis on the out-breath. So do that a few times and then just let your breath take its natural depth and rhythm and watch it. Just watch as the breath collapses out of the body into your aura and then rises up and fills your body. Just watch that. Let it take its course.

[53:21]

And we'll sit for a few minutes, and then we'll talk a bit. So interestingly, if you stick around, you'll have a whole lot more opportunity to sit zazen in the next, because the thing that happens after this is a whole period of zazen, which is great.

[55:59]

And after that, there'll be a talk, which will also be great. So I figure rather than do a bunch more sitting now, people might have some questions. So does anyone have any questions? If you do, you could raise your hand and Kodo can unmute you or anyway.

[56:22]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.43