is not applied, second plan. When tea is served, drink the tea. When meals are served, eat the meal. So, in other words, awakening or enlightenment, if you want to use that word, can be seen in our daily life, in our daily practices. It's nothing special. It's the practical Dharma teaching that can be practiced in our daily lives, just doing what we have to do, tending to what we have to do, when we have to do it. So showing up and meeting things as it is, in and out. Keesan actually never became the abbot of Heiji, like oftentimes successors would become. But his major accomplishments were And the one that we give rise to him being regarded as the second ancestor, Soto Zen, was the founding of two significant temple. One was Jokoji, and the other was Sujiji. And Sujiji, in a very quick time, began to overshadow Dogen's Ehiji.

[01:06]

Ehiji started to not be as well regarded, and Sujiji started rising up in recognition and importance And it really wasn't until the late 1800s when the two temples, the Haitians, the Gigi, were completely for a long time. They decided to put down a difference and recognize each other as equals and become partners in the leadership of Soto Zen. And that relationship still continues to this day. They actually take turns, the Haitians, the Gigi, dedicating an abbot to or to the main soto shui. And so it's wonderful to have that continue. Keizan's influence on the soto sect is often described as a kind of point to doge. So Keizan is remembered as a warm-hearted fellow. whose Dharma presentations were a lot less mystical and more down-to-earth than Dogan.

[02:13]

I don't know how many of you have read Dogan, but sometimes you're like, what is going on here? And I'm going to share some Kezon with you later. You might have the same thought, but that's the general take. Kezon was more accessible. And where Dogan is described as strict and fatherly-like, Kezon was described as compassionate and motherly. And also where as much of Dogen's energy was, you could say, internally focused, you know, he was writing, going into writing and teaching on behalf of the monastic community, the community in residence. Kezon was primarily concerned with widening the reach of Zen practice. And so many consider him a visionary and aesthetic. He was very active his whole life, trying to make the tradition more accessible to everyone, not just to the monastics. And so he very much was connecting to the lay community and said that Kheizan did the precepts of over 70 lay people, which was extremely unusual at this time.

[03:24]

And one of the ways he was able to make Shota Sen more accessible was by synthesizing much of what was being done previously, like in the ceremonies that we chant and the way that merit was being offered into a ceremonial form that could be more widely participated in. So, for example, today, they just did a service together, you know? And in the past, lay people couldn't participate as well. So Kezon changed that and made the ceremonies much more accessible and resonant. He also championed women practitioners, having always been very vocal about the gratitude that he felt to his mother and his grandmother for his own spiritual development. In fact, he was the first to give Seltar the Dharma Transmission to a woman, to then Becky. So I don't know if many of you, sometimes we chant the women ancestors here, and Becky was included in that list.

[04:26]

And he later went on to retain at least 30 female students and to establish a convent. That's pretty significant for his time. And it was because of several of Keizan's dharmic errors, including Gaosan Joseki and Taiping Soxin, that Soto Zen's influence and presence in Japan was extended and expanded and was able to actually fly for a number of centuries. There are many scholars who, perhaps nearly all, believe that without Keizan and his particular impact, Soto Zen would never achieve the prominence that it holds within Japanese Buddhism today. So we have a lot to thank Keizan for. And since this tour, I've been wanting to study Keizan much more and get a better sense of feminist teachings. He wasn't as prolific as Dogen in his writing, but he did write several things of major importance.

[05:31]

His masterpiece, some of you may have heard of, the Denku Roku, which is the record of transmission of the lights. And that's a series of 53 sermons that are detailing, say, the Sotosan lineage from Shakyamuni Buddha all the way through Dogen and his immediate successor, Ajo. And there's another significant test. text, what's called the Keizan Shingi, which was his set of monastic centers that he established. And he did this just a year before he died. And he died at the age of 62. But what I understand is this Shingi was so prevalent and so important that actually to go to Japan and practice today and go to a temple, you will basically be participating in Keizan Shingi rather than go doing Shingi guidelines. And the third in the context, text like Kazan, is the Zazen Yojinki.

[06:32]

And what translates that as Notes on What to be Aware of in Zazen. And Zazen Yojinki, it's pretty short. It's about eight to nine pages. And as you can guess from the title, centers on the practice of Zazen or seated in Zen meditation. So literally, the word Yojian means Be cautious or careful. And chi means record or notes. So notes of what to be aware of. And then zazen, of course, zazen. And in many ways, it's very similar to Dogen's Pukhan Zazenki. Anyone familiar with Pukhan Zazenki? These kind of instructions on zazen. But in Pesan's text, he offers meditation and practice advice that's both immediate and practical. and as well as more general envelope. For example, he writes, to practice sitting, find a quiet place and lay down a thick mat. Don't let wind, smoke, rain, or duke come in.

[07:38]

We're doing our best to avoid that. Keep a clear space with the left room for your knees. How's that done, folks? There's also a lot of instructions in his text about how to conduct for monks to conduct their daily lives in a way that's conducive to practice, such as what to wear, frivolous activities to avoid, and what to eat and how to deal with various unusual experiences in meditation. And as you read through his text, you might find some of his advice kind of quirky and maybe even amusing, such as, don't wear luxurious clothing nor dirty rats. Do not sit where there are fires, floods, high winds, or thieves, nor by the ocean, near bars or brothels, where there are widows or virgins, or kings or ministers, or people of many desires, or would like to argue meaninglessly.

[08:41]

Well, I guess that leads out San Francisco, right? Well, many parts of his essay are kind of fairly straightforward advice, you know, again, instructions related to supporting practice and meditation. There are other parts that are more difficult to understand, I could say a bit dense, particularly the sections where Kazon is trying to convey the deepest meaning and purpose of Zazen. And given that this day for many of us is dedicated to studying in Zazen, I thought I would take the rest of my book and share with you a few points of guidance from K-Zone's text. I want to keep in mind when practicing. I'll let you know now that the section I'm choosing, because it's on Zazek, is a little denser. So just bear with it. Keep an open mind and just allow it to kind of wash over you if it gets too dense. And you could spend a whole sushi on this particular text a week long.

[09:44]

series of talks but today we'll just do just the first couple paragraphs so he starts off Zazen means to clarify the mind ground and dwell comfortably in your actual nature this is called revealing yourself and manifesting the original ground in Zazen both body and mind drop off Zazen is far beyond the form of Siddhi or lying down. Free from considerations of good and evil, Zazen transcends distinctions between ordinary people and sages. It goes far beyond judgment of deluded or enlightened. Zazen includes no boundary between sentient beings and Buddha. Therefore, put aside all affairs and let go of all associations. Do nothing at all.

[10:45]

Don't fabricate, do not fabricate anything with the six senses. What is this? Its name is unknown. It cannot be called body. It cannot be called mind. Trying to think of it, the thought vanishes. Trying to speak of it, words die. It's like a fool, an idiot. It is as high as a mountain, deep as the ocean. Without peak or depth, its brilliance is unthinkable. It shows itself silently. Between sky and earth, only this whole body is seen. Though, while it might not be immediately apparent, what Kazan is trying to convey throughout, all of Zazen, you know, Jinki. What he's trying to convey in this case is the case of the non-dual experience that both Zen and Zazen unabashedly separate.

[11:58]

So right from the start, Kezan, like Dogen, emphasizes that the Soto Zen view, the Zazen is neither a meditative technique nor some volitional practice that we can do from that. In his Fukan Za Zengi, Dogen tells us, Zazid is not step-by-step learning meditation. It is the culmination of totally realized enlightenment. And then later on, Dogen says, Zazid is the Dharna Gate of Joyful Ease. How many of you have experienced the Dharna Gate of Joyful Ease of Zazid? How many have not? Yes. Kazon puts it another way here in his, and the first two openings said to this. I'm going to offer a slightly different translation. So Zazen is the way to clarify the ground of experiences and to rest at ease in your actual nature. And then he adds, this is called revealing yourself and manifesting the original ground.

[13:03]

Another translation puts it like this, revealing your original face. and the landscape of the basic ground. You hear this often. What is your original face? What was the face before you were born? Much like Dogen Khezan, doesn't espouse zazen as the kind of perfected practice? If you do it enough, you get it just right. You know, so that's not it. Not some practice to be accomplished. And it's also not some technique by which you're going to achieve enlightenment. I'm sorry to tell you, if you came here thinking, by just doing that zazen, I would become enlightened. That's not what they're advocating here, right? In fact, according to both these instincts and ancestors, Zazen is not a meditative technique at all, but rather a process of revealing and resting in our true nature. Or as Kisan puts it later in Zazen, Dwelling content within your own Buddha nature.

[14:06]

And then elsewhere, he also says it this way. He says that Zazen is entering directly into the ocean of Buddha nature and manifesting the body-mind of the Buddha. Sounds pretty amazing. Now, of course, you know, the minute we take our seat and attempt this dwelling comfortably or contently in our particular manifestation of our body-mind, you know, this body-mind of Buddha, we realize it's not so easy. Almost immediately, all kinds of thoughts and emotions and sensations kind of just flood in, and they're leaving us feeling anything but content or at ease. Not only is Zaza not easy, but as our Septuagint tradition tells us, only a Buddha can do Zaza. That's to say that Zazen is not a path to becoming a Buddha.

[15:11]

We can't make ourselves into Buddhas by sitting Zazen anymore than one can make a mirror by polishing a tile. So we need to disabuse ourselves of any notion that Zazen is a technique or a means or a tool for becoming a Buddha, much less for achieving something called enlightenment. So what then is Zazen? Well, as Kezan and others and Esau have repeatedly put forth, Zazen is a gesture of awakening. It's a profound expression and a verification of who you already are. In fact, what each of us already is and what Everything and all phenomena already is. A verification of that. So as such, zazen is an act of concurrently revealing, manifesting, and resting in ease in and as our basic ground of being, our fundamental nature, our Buddha nature.

[16:31]

So again, the opening sentences of zazen. Zazen means to clarify the mind graph and dwell comfortably in your actual nature. This is called revealing yourself and manifesting the original graph. And when I reviewed a number of different translations of these two sentences, each of them more or less kind of say a similar thing, that zazen allows something to be revealed, to be illuminated, to be clarified or realized. And what is it that's illuminated or clarified? Well, again, depending on the translation you're looking at, it's called the mind. So the mind is clarified. The primordial mind. Another translation says it's the ground of experiences or the foundation of our minds. Shohako Kamara identifies it as the mind-ground.

[17:33]

But you want to ask him, what exactly is this primordial mind or mind-ground? And how is it that Zanothi clarifies it or reveals it? Another name for it that I tend to gravitate to, even if it's not perfect, is simply the word awareness. And all the same, we want to be careful about fixing any kind of a definitive label to our ground of experience, right? Because it cannot be fixed. We can't capture or fix or sum up in any way your ground of experience, the fundamental nature. Nor is it an object that we can somehow experience or identify as separate from ourselves. So our mind-ground, our fundamental nature of awareness, can just be experienced.

[18:36]

It's impossible to deeply name or grasp. Jason points this out a little further down in his text, which I read. He says, what is this? Its name is unknown. It cannot be called body. It cannot be called mind. Trying to think of it, the thought vanishes. Trying to speak it, the words die. So whatever this mind-ground is, there isn't a living word for it. And thinking about it or using thought to get to it only actually makes it disappear. You can notice this when you try to actually look at your thoughts, they can't go away. It just kind of evaporates when you turn the light of awareness onto them. And yet, all the same, we need to use words and language as supportive pointers to the Dharma. This is how we share the Dharma with each other, right? Help us in our practice, our path of practice.

[19:41]

That's why we have all these wonderful words and teachings from various Zen ancestors. Dogen himself goes on later in the opening section, to call this unameable, unaggressable, a body. So he says, between the sky and earth, only this whole body is seen. And he also calls it mind, saying that it is this mind which is enlightenment itself. So I think by using these terms, Caesan's pointing to the relationship between body and mind and their place in our experience of being here. Body and mind together give rise to our experience of being. As one commentator noted, mind points to the role of our awareness in our experience of the non-dual. Body points to the reality of our life that's beyond words and concepts, but is always pervasive and present.

[20:43]

Yet no single word or concept captures the whole deal. So all we can only do to truly experience and manifest this body, mind, ground of Buddha is to take up the activity of Zaza and to allow it to be revealed. Zaza is an act of revelation. Now, we want to be careful about not making this mind ground into some kind of mind that is separate, that's somehow maybe buried below our everyday mind, and which can finally be revealed if we get the everyday mind out of the way, right? And so, as Mao Zedong reminds us, this very mind, I don't know why I'm pointing out here.

[21:44]

This is what we're doing to say. This very mind is Buddha, right? This very mind is it. There's not another or a different or a better mind that's waiting to be exposed when you do zaza. I'm sorry to tell you. So it's this mind, the mind which is experiencing itself, experiencing the moment in its totality that is the very mind ground being. And just to clarify, we're not saying that the ever-changing content of our minds our thoughts, our images, et cetera, is the objective reality of our minds. But rather, it's the very quality of luminous knowing that is Buddha. So when we take our secret asa, it's not a different or better mind that is waiting to be revealed. Rather, what is revealed or realized is this very mind

[22:48]

The one that you're sitting with right here and right now. The one that's illuminating all of your experience. Kind of like the sun. Everything is illuminated. Everything is you could propose made of that illumination. So rather than starting off his instruction for what to be aware of in Zazen, like talking about where to sit or what kind of posture to take González in, which is usually the kind of focus of González's instruction. When you come to, like, other temples, they'll give you basic instruction, which is how to, you know, sit up, posture with your body, maybe talk a little bit about the posture of the mind, right? That's a traditional González instruction, and that's important, and that's helpful. It has its place, you know? But Khaizan is saying something different here. He begins by saying that First, realize your true nature. Know who you are and your place in the universe.

[23:52]

Then do Zasa. So he's recommending that we begin by connecting to something that's more essential than our physical and mental posture, even our breath. Even though they're helpful touchstones. He's pointing to something else. And what is this? Even though its name is unknown, as Kazan said, we can nevertheless venture one. We have to. We have to use language. As I suggested earlier, we might call it awareness. Now I'm going to venture to call it something else. I'm going to call it the direct, unmediated experience of being alive. The direct, unmediated experience of being alive. Can you taste that right now? Don't think about it. Don't look for it. just drop into this experience of being alive, full here. And sometimes it helps if you drop into your heart, right down here to the center of your body, and you rest there.

[25:03]

Then you can feel this aliveness reverberating through you and beyond, if you will. The whole universe is reverberating in this way, this aliveness, right? So Kezan is suggesting, even before we begin Zazan, to first connect with our fundamental feeling of aliveness, of I-N-ness. I-N. Touch that I-N-ness. The very fact of our being. The experience of being right here, right now. It's the fundamental ground of experience. Or you could say, the field in which everything arises is a no. and is now. This fact of being is the field in which everything arises and is now. And it's also non-dual. It's not divisible. You can't divide into a self or another or an object of any type. And it can't be separated out of your experience whatsoever. And once connecting to this feeling, feeling into this field of universal aliveness, it's then that we're

[26:13]

invited by Keisach to engage in zazen. He continues. He says, in zazen, both body and mind drop off. Zazen is far beyond the form of sitting or lying down. For those of you who are familiar with Adobe and what I've heard before, this description of body and mind dropping off as a key experience in zazen. And he gave a short Dharma Hall discourse in his A. Kuroku, and he says that body and mind dropped off is the beginning of our effort. Dropping off body and mind is a very important technical phrase for Dogen. In Japanese, Shinjin Datsuraku. And body and mind dropped away is what the name that Dogen uses for Zazen. So you're sitting here engaging Zazen, you're sitting here engaging, dropping off body and mind. And for him, Zazen is simply dropping off body and mind, but this dropping off is dropping off your concepts and your identification with your bodies and minds.

[27:22]

And instead, dwelling, again, in this non-dual awareness, which is beyond body-mind fabrications. And it's also Dovin's name for Anattara-Songyak-Sanburi, which is complete, unsurpassed, Khezan next points out in his text that zazen transcends dichotomies or dualities. He says that zazen is a matter of going beyond such forms of sitting or lying down. And so don't think that zazen is only taking a sitting posture or lying down posture. You can do zazen in many different ways. It's beyond any posture. He writes, Free from considerations of good and evil, Zazen transcends distinctions between ordinary people and sages. It goes far beyond judgments of deluded or enlightened. Zazen includes no boundary between sentient beings and Buddha.

[28:26]

Now, I don't know about you, but I think it's kind of second nature for human beings to create dualities and dichotomies, right? It's what our minds do. It's how we... interpret and make sense of the world, right? It's a useful tool. It's not a problem in and of itself, but if we misuse the tool and believe in these separations, dichotomies, and dualities, then we're in trouble. And again, this is, we're not creating dualities and dichotomies in Zaza. We're not trying to make sense in Zaza. Zazen is not a sense-making activity. It's rather an activity of being at one with our senses, or directly sensing if you hold a body-mind, you know, what's going on. And sensing into, you could say, beyond any physical or mental posture.

[29:28]

Sensing into space itself. Space within and space without. Right? And I like to think of it as a liminal space, as an in-between realm. It's a non-dual realm that's without boundaries, without parameters, without any thing here or there. And as such, it transcends or goes beyond evaluation.

[30:00]

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