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 see many old friends in the audience today, but and some new faces how many of you are here for the first time today oh quite a few welcome to beginner's mind temple a perfect place to begin something so uh many of the people here are halfway through something which is our fall practice period we started our fall practice period five weeks ago It's a 10-week practice period, a time when we intensify our practice, join together to focus more on our practice.

[01:04]

And since it's the halfway point, we celebrate that by sitting all day long today. So about 80 people in this room are sitting zazen from 5 o'clock in the morning till 6 o'clock at night. Five weeks from now, or four weeks from now, we'll start a seven-day sushin where we'll sit all day for seven days. For those of you who are here for the first time, you might think this is some kind of strange practice. I think it probably is a bit of an acquired taste. But I would hope those of you who are new would come some time if you didn't come this morning to Zazen Instruction, come some Saturday morning and take Zazen Instruction and join us for some Zazen and see if it appeals to you and maybe possibly sit one day all day long to sit still in an upright posture, whether it's like this or in a chair, and have nothing to do all day long so you can drop your

[02:21]

self-concern, all your issues about yourself, and you can put your to-do list somewhere else, and you can just pay attention to your physical posture, your breathing, and give your mind a rest. Set down the burden of running your life for a day. it can be quite a relief to just put that down with nothing to do but feel the feeling of being alive. That's your only task, is to pay attention to what your life is like as a human being for 13 hours. Dogen, actually, who we're studying this practice period,

[03:23]

It says zazen is the same thing as life. You know, sitting this zazen is just life, just life being itself. The practice of sitting zazen is the practice of accessing the deepest way of being alive, accessing life itself. If you've never actually, I mean, we have many ways of sort of experiencing our life. running and sitting in meetings, but to just sit still. The stillness is a kind of composure that's brought to your experiencing of your mind that settles you. So anyway, I would recommend those who haven't tried it to try it, and I would recommend those of you who are sitting all day long to make your best effort. to bring your mind back to your sazan, bring your mind back to your physical posture, bring your mind back to your breathing if you've wandered away somewhere.

[04:33]

Anyway, the theme of the practice period is the koan of everyday life. That expression comes from the title of the essay, Dogen Rote, which is our subject for study this practice period, the Genjo Koan. So one translation is the koan of everyday life. Koan, we all know what a koan is. It's the question that everyday life presents you. What's my everyday life about? What's my life about? Another translation is the koan of the present moment. Each moment of our life, there's a question presented you. How do I live this moment? What's my life about? What's my responsibility to act? It's a question. It's a question all of us face, Dogen would say, in every moment of our life. And the only place where you address that question, according to Dogen, is in that moment. You can have future thinking, obviously, and you can evaluate past activities, but the true question is how you actually act in the present moment.

[05:46]

Another translation is actualizing the fundamental point. I like that. The fundamental point of your life, how do you actualize it with your whole being? So anyway, what we have been doing in our classes is we've been taking a paragraph at a time and discussing it. So I'm going to leap forward from the class and go to the paragraph just before the end of the essay, and we'll discuss that a little bit this morning. So I'll read you. There's two paragraphs. I'll read you the first one now. A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims, there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies, there is no end to the air. However, the fish and the bird have never left their elements. When their activity is large, their field is large, When their need is small, their field is small, thus each of them totally covers its full range and each of them totally experiences its realm.

[06:55]

If the bird leaves the air, it will die at once. If the fish leaves the water, it will die at once. Know that water is life, air is life, the bird is life, and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish. It is possible to illustrate this with more analogies. Practice enlightenment and people are like this. So it's very common in Chinese Zen. We got Zen from China and Dogen picked it up from China and brought it to Japan that we use these nature metaphors or analogies and Dogen is using the analogy of the life of a fish and a bird as an analogy for our human life. He's comparing us to the freedom of a fish and the activity of a flying bird and the connectedness of fish to water, their environment.

[08:00]

They're very connected, and birds to the environment of air. And we're similarly connected to our life. He's so sort of graphic in this. First of all, we know, of course, I have no idea what Dogen's understanding in the 13th century of how big oceans are or how high the sky is. We know now that, of course, the sky is just this tiny, thin layer over the earth that is just even threatened at this very moment by our activity here on the earth. So it does not go forever, and we know the oceans are the same way. They don't go forever. In fact, we may already be overfilling them with trash. But anyway, aside from at negative start to the morning. I'll go to a cheerier subject, which was, I remember, it was maybe 35 years ago, I'd just gotten out of living at the Zen Center for 10 years, four years down at Tassar, and I went on a vacation down to Yalapa, which is a little village south of Puerto Vallarta, and somebody had a pair of snorkel masks, these old...

[09:13]

black rubber things, and they loaned it to me, and I went out snorkeling in the bay, and it was the first time I'd ever seen fish in the ocean living. Amazing. How many of them, how they move in different ways, schools of fish moving together, hundreds of them, and large fish and turtles and just the life. I hope all of you have had some chance to see the life under the ocean. And there's a sense of freedom in the way the fish move, and at the same time, a kind of connectedness to each other and to the world they're living in. This little statement, their activity is large and their field is large. When their activity is large, their field is large. When their need is small, their field is small. So we know now we've studied dolphins and sharks. And we know how many of these fish can migrate halfway across the oceans or across the oceans entirely, and yet we know that reef fish can just hang around in their small area.

[10:24]

So there's an analogy here to our life. Some of you are running empires, traveling around the world, controlling millions of people. Others of you are leading a monk's life. And some of you are doing both. There was a period in my life after I left my 10 years at Zen Center where I got in the software business for 20 years. And at one point in time, I was managing thousands of people and flying in airplanes all over the place, like a big bird flying here and there. And now, in my old, more settled time, I spend most of my time just walking up the four floors of this building. This actually may be a more complicated time in my life, since there's so many things going on on the four floors of this building. He's also in this paragraph talking about, you know, the bird is life and the fish is life.

[11:38]

Life must be the bird and life must be the fish. He's talking also about how the bird leaves the air. He's talking about the connection between fish and water. And where does the fish end and where does the water begin? Is the water and the fish together the same thing? How does a bird fly without the air? What's that connection to the air? And to what extent is the air manifested through birds? So this is different than just... air is there and birds are flying through it. It's more like birds and air together create that event. And of course, this is the question for us. The medium we're traveling in is not water or air. The medium we're traveling in is life. And just as fish may not experience water, most of the time when you're looking at fish, they're busy finding food, nibbling off the coral reefs, or they're busy avoiding predators or chasing after them, do they actually know that the main medium of their experience is water?

[12:50]

Because they've never been out of water. That's their main thing. And birds mostly know the main medium of their life is air. But they maybe forget about who knows what birds or fish are actually experiencing. But the analogy here is... Our main medium is life. Life flows through us. And we're busy connecting to life all the time, but we forget it. We don't really notice our life so much. We're pretty busy doing the same thing the fish are doing, finding some food, figuring out how we're going to take care of the rent, doing the various things that we have to do to live a life, and we forget that we're immersed in our life. We are immersed in lives just like the fish is immersed in water. So that's his kind of premise in the first section. And I also wanted to make a comment about a fish swims in the ocean and no matter how far it swims, there's no end to water.

[13:53]

And we've been reading this wonderful book that has three commentaries on this essay by Dogen. one by Akosho Uchiyama, and one commentary by Suzuki Roshi, and one commentary by Bokusan Nishiari. It's really been a wonderful read. And I just was sort of looking at what Suzuki Roshi had to say about this paragraph, and he said, when a fish swims in the ocean, there is no end to the water. This is a very important point. there is no end to our practice. So as fish swim in water and there's water everywhere and there's no end to it, in the same way our living life, there's no end to our practice in life. So he says, because there is no end to our practice, your practice is good, don't you think so?

[14:55]

Well, I thought that was, what is he talking about? I guess if practice is immeasurable, goes on forever and there's no end to it, wherever you are in the stage, you're the same distance from the end goal as everybody else is, right? So, you know, like if you were only running a triathlon or something like that, you could measure how well you were doing against other people that were in the triathlon because eventually you would get to the end of the triathlon and you would know where you came in. But we're involved in something for which there is no end to our practice. This practice continues forever. Even Suzuki Roshi, who was the most accomplished Zen teacher I've ever met, talked at the end of his life about how he had to improve his practice and how he had to try harder. So there is no end to our practice, so that should make us feel good. Wherever we are, we're just like everybody else, a long way from the end. And I'm just going to share this with you.

[16:01]

This has nothing to do with the lecture this morning, but it just amused me. And I had never seen it before. He went on to say something about, the other day in morning service, he does wander a bit when he gives lectures. Maybe I picked it up from him. The other day in morning service, I thought it might be better to bow nine times. But they said, if you bow this way, people may be discouraged. It is very true, very true. I know people will be discouraged. I bow nine times, and I know exactly how they feel. I don't know if you... I mean, I bowed three times here, right? Every morning in service, we bow nine times. Sometimes I think, well, six times is maybe enough. I don't know if I want to do three more this morning. I'm feeling kind of creaky. But we bow nine times, you know? And, of course... that's not what they do in Japan. I mean, Suzuki Roshi trained at Eheiji.

[17:02]

They do services at Eheiji that they bow three times. And, you know, I just find this interesting, of course, because ever since Suzuki Roshi died, we have spent 45 years, you know, getting to know where he learned his rituals from, and we go, our service is very much like Eheiji's service, and we do all, we have translated the chants mostly into English, but we're pretty, you know, close to official Soto Zen services here, except for the fact that we do nine vows instead of three. I was at AAG in June. I was having tea with the abbot of AAG, and he had visited here a couple of years before some period of time. At the time, I was, I think, away, and I didn't meet him, but he said, oh, it's nice to meet you finally. And what was the first thing out of his mouth, which is, I couldn't figure out what was happening. We were bowing three times, and then you guys just kept bowing.

[18:08]

And I just kept, I didn't know why you were bowing nine times, you know. And it appears from what's, this is a quote from a lecture he gave, that just one morning... I thought it might be better to bow nine times. And I know it would be more difficult for you, but I, you know, and now that has become our ritual here in this temple, which is one of the major temples in Soto Zen in America. We've kept it, maybe either out of a great loyalty to Suzuki Roshi or because we like nine times and because he says... I bow nine times and I know exactly how they feel. Buddhism wants our effort always. Eternally, he wants our constant effort. That is why I like Buddhism. So maybe we bow nine times because it's an endless practice and we need to exert a boundless effort.

[19:11]

And we sort of symbolize that by bowing an extra six times. Or maybe he thought Americans are just I don't know. Needed a little more humility, possibly? I could speculate, but I'm beginning to think it was just an idea it came up with. I've wandered, and I shouldn't go on too much more here because we have lots to cover. So I will, yes, we do. I will quickly go to, so in short, it is enough if you do one thing with sincerity. That is enough. There is no need to try to know the vastness of the sky or the depth of the sea. We're going to get to this later on, but so it is enough. If you just do one thing with sincerity, he liked that word sincerity. We don't use sincerity much, but he loved it. Okay.

[20:12]

So we know that Dogen, for Dogen, Zazen is the pivotal point of practice. He described this in the Bendo Wa when he said, when we sit in an upright posture, the entire universe becomes enlightenment. And the first essay he wrote after he came back from China was an instruction manual for Zazen practice titled Universal Recommendation for Zazen. And what's interesting, we've been studying the Genjo Koan, the word Zazen doesn't exist anywhere in the Genjo Koan. Curious, huh? It's more curious for those who are actually studying the Genjo Koan, maybe not so curious for those who have just arrived. But anyway, even though Dogen does not use the word zazen at all in the Genjo Koan, it's clear that the analogy of fish and birds is about our zazen practice. We know this from the poem Dogen wrote called The Point of Zazen. He wrote a beautiful poem about the point of zazen, which I don't have time to go through this lecture, but the last stanza of that poem is, clear water all the way to the bottom, a fish swims like a fish, vast sky transparent throughout, a bird flies like a bird.

[21:29]

And then his commentary on that is, water hanging in the sky does not get to the bottom. Furthermore, water that fills a vessel is not as clear as the water mentioned here. Water that is boundless is described as clear to the bottom. When a fish swims in this water, it goes from myriad miles. The activity of zazen is just like the fish swimming. Who can measure how many thousands and myriads of miles there are in zazen? Its journey is the entire body going on the path where no bird flies. The activity of zazen is just like the fish swimming. Who can measure how many thousands and myriads of miles there are in zazen? Who can know the measure of zazen? Well, you can since it's an endless practice. I remember one of the early wonderful students of Suzuki Roshi, Blanche Hartman, who was abbot here at City Center and died a few years ago, was quite an eager student.

[22:36]

And when we start practicing, we follow our breath. That's the first instruction. You count your breath. Count from 1 to 10 and start again. And after you get good at counting, you can just follow each breath you do for 40 minutes without ever losing track of your breath. I don't know. Some of you may possibly get distracted by your thinking mind, lose track of your breath. If that does happen to you, just please return to your breathing and don't give yourself a hard time because we all do that. Anyway, Blanche had gotten pretty good at following her breath and sat down and told Suzuki Roshi that she could follow her breath entirely for 40 minutes without losing track of it. At which point he said, somewhat strictly I think, don't ever think you understand what zazen is. Zazen is a incredibly deep and mysterious practice. that is beyond our capacity to understand.

[23:39]

So, also Dogen, commenting on the last sentence in this little poem, vast sky transparent throughout, a bird flies like a bird, says, the vast sky does not hang above, what hangs above is not called the vast sky. Furthermore, what encompasses all space is not called vast sky. What is neither revealed nor hiding, neither inside nor outside, is called vast sky. When you speak about the investigation of flying, it is right here. This is the point of steadfast sitting. Even if you go myriad miles, it is right here. So when he's talking about vast sky and boundless water here, he's talking about our life of emptiness, our life of boundless connection to everything. the boundless, interconnected nature of reality ourself, of which we are a part.

[24:42]

And he's obviously making the point that steadfast sitting and what goes on in zazen is the best expression of this boundless reality we live in. Now I'm going to go to the heart of my lecture this morning. Now if a bird or a fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it, this bird or fish will not find its way or its place. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs actualizing the fundamental point.

[25:48]

When you find your way at this moment, practice occurs actualizing the fundamental point. For the place, the way is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others, The place, the way, has not carried over from the past and it is not entirely arising now. Accordingly, in the practice enlightenment of the Buddha way, meeting one thing is mastering it, doing one practice is practicing completely. Now, if a bird or fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it, this bird or fish will not find its way or place. He's starting off by saying, if you want to know what the end result is before you start, you'll never go anywhere. If a bird or fish tries to reach the end of his sphere of water or air before moving in it, this bird or fish will not find its way or its place.

[26:52]

Well, the analogy we're talking about here, of course, is how do we find our way and our place? And he's saying, if you want to figure out the end result of where you're going first, before you start finding your way or place, it's hopeless. That is, let's say, I want to get enlightened, so I've got to figure out what enlightenment is, and then I'll start practicing. But Siddhartha says, true practice will be established in delusion, in defilement. You can't wait until you have an insight into enlightenment before you start practicing. The actual movement of practice is what creates your awakened mind. You have to do something. Meaning is created in our lives when we find our place and path and begin to do something. Until that time, there is no ready-made meaning or purpose in your life. Your purpose in your life is created through this path.

[27:58]

practice activity that you take on. If you wait to have some enlightenment before you start practicing, you will never find any enlightenment because enlightenment flows from the practice activity of your life. This little paragraph sort of circles around this in different ways approaching this same theme. So the next sentence, when you find your place Where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. What does it mean, finding your place? It means right now, in this place, are you here? Do you know who you are here? in any given moment.

[28:59]

In fact, this is the only moment. If you're not here, if you haven't found who you are in this moment, in this place, you're not practicing. Practicing is finding yourself, waking up to yourself in this moment, in this place. This is the realization of Ganjo Kohan, to find your own unique place in this moment, in your element, When you take your unique place, practice occurs. Ganjo Kōan is realized in that moment and the whole world is illuminated. So this is a particularly important thing to emphasize. Each one of us is completely unique. So what your practice is, how you actualize this moment and this place for you is your unique question and your unique challenge and your unique activity.

[30:10]

And when you're sitting zazen like you're sitting today, you're a unique person. Your mind, I'm sure, is not much like anybody else's mind down there. And at the same time, We're so connected to each other. We're so alike in so many ways. We're all breathing the same air. We're all living a human life. And when we sit in Zazen all day long, we're supported by the other 60 or 70 people we're sitting with. It's not easy to sit all day long. I know people that do it all by themselves and can do it for years all by themselves, but most people, need the encouragement of sitting with other people to do this. So it's both a sitting where you're connected to other people and you feel the support and connection, and at the same time you realize in this place, in this moment, my practice, my unique practice is created.

[31:16]

Dogen goes on, when you find your way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. For the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others. The place, the way, has not carried over from the past and is not merely arising now. His way and place is a big way and place. Our way in place is a quieter way in place, except for me, who's making lots of noise. The fundamental point for the way is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others. So this is, again, emphasizing it's not a matter of whether your practice is big or whether your practice is small, whether your practice is yours alone. It's not yours alone. It's not others. Others, I mean, you know how our practice can be others, right?

[32:22]

Our father's practice, our mother's practice, our society's practice, our spouse's practice, our teacher's practice, our student's practice, our friend's practice, anybody's practice but our own. I mean, I think sometimes thought as in practice just comes down to accepting the karma of our life, actually accepting that my life, the karma from my parents, the society I was born in, the culture I live in, the various encounters I've had through my life have created a person, most of which I have totally very little control over. Most of it happened when I was six months old. But this is who I am. And this is the karma of my life. And if I can accept that and explore that with depth and poignancy.

[33:29]

I say that because suffering is a part of all of life. If I can explore that and accept that, then I can become a mature person, an adult, because I can live with, take responsibility for the life I'm leading. And my opinion is that we need more adults in this world. We need more people who can actually live their life, be the author of their life, actually take responsibility for the karma of their life and act out of that with the depth and sincerity that comes from knowing what your life is in the present moment, in life. Accordingly, I'm going to go on with Dogen some more here.

[34:33]

It's just interesting the way he circles around this theme. Accordingly, in the practice enlightenment of the Buddha way, meeting one thing is mastering it. Doing one practice is practicing completely. Here is the place that hear the way unfolds. So he's saying doing one thing, everything is realized. If you just sit in Zazen, everything is there. We just give ourselves to any moment of activity and our living, everything is there. This is standard Zen, right? If you're washing dishes, you just wash dishes. If you're chopping vegetables, you just chop vegetables. If you're walking Kin Hin downstairs, you just walk Kin Hin. That focus on your place and your place in that moment, it's kind of a strange thing that at one hand, you become kind of one with this singular activity and everything else is excluded.

[35:47]

You're just dishes. You're just dish soap. You're just the sound of the bell ringing in the air in the temple. And yet, at that same time, there's a way in which you are connected to everything. I think we've all had that experience, haven't we? Where we hear, there's many famous koans like that, the sound of a pebble hitting the bamboo, the monk that sees the peach blossoms on the side of the mountain. with a concentrated focus on that one sense visual thing or that one auditory thing, and then all of a sudden the whole world explodes and you're with everything. This is just a kind of experience we have that reminds us that we are not just this small person that our mind imagines we are, but something much bigger, much more of a life in us than we ever could imagine.

[36:52]

These experiences, of course, encourage us to continue our practice. So within this idea of focusing on one thing is the idea of how do we find freedom in our limitations. It's a limitation to sit all day long. You don't have the freedom to go out and get an ice cream cone if your mind imagines it. I mean, you do have the freedom. Of course, any of you can leave, but you probably have decided that even though you imagine you want an ice cream cone, you're going to sit there and follow your breathing and decide whether maybe feeling your breath might be just as good as having an ice cream cone. But we all have actual limitations. We all have financial restraints. We have physical limitations. We have emotional limitations. We have... all kinds of limitations. And the point is not that we can run around with our life and try to adjust the entire world to get rid of all of our limitations, because that is impossible. The point is, within the limitations that we have, how do we find our freedom?

[37:59]

How do we find the freedom? And we find it by focusing on our moment-by-moment life that we have. It is amazing how time flies here when we're having fun. It's 10 o'clock. I don't remember, David. Do I have a few more minutes here? He's the Tanta. Huh? Okay, I'm going to... We usually wrap up at 11, which means that's his subtle way of saying, Ed, can you, you know, land this plane? And you get this thing on the tarmac. We're going to forget about the boundary of realization not being distinct. I'll skip to the very last thing. Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is grasped by your consciousness. Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be distinctly apparent.

[39:08]

Its appearance is beyond your knowledge. I'll read that again. Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is grasped by your consciousness. That's too bad, isn't it? Wouldn't our realization be something we would like to have as our knowledge? Stick it in the bank and say, if anybody asks us, have you had some realization? Yeah, I'll pull it right out here. It's this big and this much. It's not even grasped by your consciousness. It's not even happening at the conscious level. Although actualized immediately, although it's happening right in your life at this moment, the inconceivable may not be distinctly apparent. It may not be apparent to you. I would almost say is not distinctly apparent. Its appearance is beyond your knowledge. Strange state of affairs to try so hard to figure out this... called Zen practice and then not even know whether you've got it or not.

[40:12]

So, you know, I'll try to just, there's a lot that can be said about this and I'll just sort of say a few things. First of all, if you're practicing, obviously this question comes up for you. Am I practicing? Is this the right thing for me to do? How do I know? You know, and I think fundamentally you intuitively know. You have a feeling whether this practice is actually carrying your life in the right direction. But it's also a sort of a development of a faith. You pay attention to how your life is going in practice. And your experience of your life changing with the practice starts to reinforce the fact that you have faith that this works for you. It's faith in the practice. But it's not just faith in the practice because that would be a faith maybe in a method or an institution.

[41:20]

It's faith in life itself. One of the fundamental tenets of Genjo Kohan and of Soto Zen Buddhism is that we have Buddha nature. That is, fundamentally, we are awake beings and that life is most of which goes on totally outside of our realm of consciousness, is taking care of us. And the faith in that is what helps us to continue to make our best effort, even though we have no idea whether we're realizing the results of our practice. And this doesn't mean that we don't have difficulties. We have plenty of difficulties. There's that famous sentence from the beginning of the genjo koan, yet in attachment blossoms fall and in aversion weeds spread. Things we love go away. Things we dislike seem to grow fast, spread.

[42:23]

But our practice is to trust and accept all of it that we're experiencing. As you're sitting today, this effort is to accept everything that's coming in as part of your awakened activity. It doesn't mean to say if a weed comes up, that is certain thoughts that are just causing you suffering, that you don't pull it out. I mean, obviously, if you're a gardener, you pull up weeds. You don't just say, oh, weeds are wonderful. Take over all my rose bushes. No, you take them out. And also, if you're having some of those repetitive thoughts that go on endlessly and they're just making you suffer and you go, I've been thinking that way since I was 10 years old. I think I'm just going to quit doing that. You actually can. At least you can say, I don't believe it anymore, which is a way of pulling the weeds out. So how to practice moving forward without having this gaining idea of a finalized realization that you're going to be able to put away in the bank is, I think, a combination of three things.

[43:39]

Faith that this practice works for you. An appreciation of life as it is, not as you hope it would be or other things, but just as it actually is. There's plenty to appreciate in life as it is. And humility. A humility to recognize that we see so little of what's going on. We have no idea what the effect of our life is. on the world and it requires a kind of humility. Suzuki Roshi was the humblest man I ever met. This is just my experience of him. He was the wisest man I ever met and he was the humblest man because he recognized the challenge, the incredible responsibility of living a human life. One has to be humbled in the face of that responsibility. So I would recommend those three. aspects for today's effort.

[44:42]

Well, we got the plane down. Thank you very much. I've appreciated your time today. 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 sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:21]

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