Well, good morning, and welcome to Zazen Instruction for People and Cats. My name is Zachary Smith. I've been a Zen student, really, the whole time at San Francisco Zen Center, although I've been, I've lived away for a number of years in the middle there since about 1993. And I was, I took the precepts initially and, you know, thereby became a Zen Buddhist in about 1995, and then was kind of certified to teach sometime in 2007, got priest ordination in, I think, 2014, something like that, or maybe, yeah, but started working on that a little earlier.

[03:06]

And then about a year and a half ago, receive what's known as Dharma transmission. So I've been doing it for a while. I'm giving, not to be discouraging, this isn't intended to be discouraging, but I'm giving a talk and center on Wednesday night. I think the primary subject of the talk is that Zazen is impossible, and so you don't need to worry about getting better at it. So we're all here to talk about this impossible thing that people do, and particularly in the context of the Zen Buddhist school, that kind of everyone agrees is...

[04:15]

It's in some ways a mysteriously intractable proposition and in other ways is full of all the possibility in the universe. The meaning of the word zazen is obviously connected with the Zen school. So it contains the word Zen. It also contains the particle za, which just means sitting. So I'm sitting on top of a zabutan. I'm sitting on top of that. There's a zafu. These are all things that you sit on. And then Zen is a way more complicated word.

[05:17]

It's a... Japanese cognate for a Chinese cognate for a word in Pali and Sanskrit that is usually translated, was often translated as meditation, but actually means something more like concentration or absorption. So you could actually loosely translate zazen as Absorption and sitting. Interesting. I guess it's worth asking a couple of questions. Given that I've just said that that's impossible. I'll follow that one up.

[06:23]

Given I just said that was impossible, what could conceivably be impossible about it? Well, maybe we'll get into that later. But here are the things that are imminently possible. I think everyone... Pretty much everyone can sit, and even people with complicated and difficult medical conditions that prevent them from taking a posture that would normally be regarded as sitting can do this activity either lying down or standing up. The instructions for zazen include the phrase that zazen has nothing to do with the particular posture that your body takes when you're doing seated meditation.

[07:38]

So we're going to talk about posture a fair amount because, interestingly, that's a lot of the classical descriptions of zazen focus, oddly enough, largely on posture. So we'll talk about that a lot. But what's fundamentally possible is that you can pick a posture that allows you to you know, sit in air quotes, whether you're standing, lying down, sitting in a chair, sitting on a mat. There's a bunch of different ways you can sit on a mat. All of those things are possible in some fundamental way. None of them is any better than the other. The intention, though, and this is important, is that you

[08:40]

Take a posture that allows your body to feel both relaxed and full of energy and engagement. If you're full of tension and effort and sort of muscular effort, that's not particularly sustainable because you're going to wear out your body. You can easily wear out your body. in the first five minutes of a period of zazen. And then after that, just be struggling with the fact that you've already worn out your body. So that's not good. That's not the intention of zazen. But also, if your body is just sort of checked out, if you're... disengaged, you know, if there's no kind of energy and liveliness in your posture, that's also not good because it promotes a mental engagement that reflects that physical engagement.

[09:57]

And the mental engagement in zazen is supposed to be kind of, oh, good catch. sharp, powerful, and exacting. So that's one thing that's possible. Everyone can find a way of doing this that allows for both relaxation and a certain kind of comfort. although it's not always comfortable to send zazen. And also this kind of lively energetic engagement. And the way to find that is by doing it and exploring for yourself in the context of your own body and mind, you know, in the moment that you're, you know, taking it on right now at, you know,

[11:04]

I'm 66 and I've had a lifetime of hammering on my body and breaking things, my hands, my feet, various parts of my limbs, both shoulders, all that. Some of you might recognize at least some of these injuries as cycling injuries. But in any case, you bring all of those things to this moment when you sit and you work with your body and mind in such a way as to produce, you know, that sense of both relaxation and engagement and liveliness.

[12:06]

So that's one thing that's possible. The other thing that's possible is this. I think the fact that there's literature, and in particular that there are things called novels and stuff like that, indicates that one of the things we're kind of good at actually is observing the activity of the body and mind. If we weren't good at it, we wouldn't have literature, fictional literature, or our fictional literature would be pretty dry. And actually, there have been moments in the history of of literature where the prevailing attitude has been, you know, just talk about what people said and what they did, and then everything else will be taken care of, right?

[13:13]

Great. What it means is that the author is relieved of the duty of recounting the layers underneath what everybody said and what everybody did. But the only reason that trick works is that we're also good at observing our minds and the activity of body and mind in general, that just from a bare bones account, say in a Hemingway book, for example, of what people said and what they did, you can bring this whole inner world into being and imagine it for yourself. Amazing. Right. So we're really good at that, actually. And and that that capacity is one of the things that's that comes to the fore in saying not, you know, not trying to figure it out, not trying to analyze it, not trying to make up more stories about it, not trying to

[14:29]

determine whether we're doing it right or wrong because all of those things are kind of really fundamentally a distraction right the the just to just to both this is the the interesting thing about us is that we can both observe it and be a wholehearted full-on participant in it at the same time remarkable right um And that's the idea. We don't want to observe it in the sense of holding back from the experience of being alive in this moment and somehow, yeah, distancing yourself. Just to be, you know, it's like, swimming what do you do well you dive in right yes exactly dive in and at the same time be aware right um so that's also possible right um and and that's a good thing um maybe we can get into a little bit later the parts that are impossible um because you know again don't want to be discouraging

[15:57]

So the other question is, why anyone would want to do such a thing? In particular, you know, if after this morning you decided, I wish to become a Zen monk. and head off to a monastery, perhaps San Francisco Zen Center's monastery in the Ventana Wilderness. They're actually taking applications, as I understand it, for the upcoming winter practice period right now, right? So, you know, if you decide to do this, the opportunity is open in this moment. Pretty good, right? Matt can maybe correct me. Maybe the applications are... Maybe the roster is filled up. But the last time I checked, they were still accepting applications for the winter practice grade.

[17:00]

So you could go up to this incredibly remote, just gobsmackingly beautiful place in the Ventana wilderness where the weather gets really extreme in the winter, where it gets very cold, very wet. some combination of cold and wet, and then windy, and then some combination of windy, cold, and wet. And on the really wet years, incredibly noisy because there's this little creek that runs through the valley. And in a really wet year, it floods. And you can be sitting in the Zendo and listening to the creek rolling these house-sized boulders around in its bed. because it's such a um you know you know the force of nature right um you could do that and you could spend somewhere between you know four and i don't know 12 hours a day um sitting zazen depending on the particular schedule on the day right um uh in particular um

[18:16]

Why would somebody want to do that? That's a big deal. It's a lot of Zazen. The answer to that question goes back to the beginning of Buddhism. Without going into too much detail on the life of the Buddha, because We might not have time for that today, but there's, you know, the detail is available. When the Buddha after, you know, years of, well, after leaving home, abandoning his family, charging around India and studying all the things he could get his hands on and his mind around, to try and find a answer to the sort of problem of human suffering.

[19:24]

Finally, you know, decided he was just going to sit down and study the problem, which is to stay steady himself until the answer and a solution presented itself. And that went on for a while. And then he had a revelation about it. And sometime afterwards, after some initial resistance, because he was basically afraid if he tried to talk about it, he was just going to confuse everybody. He gave a talk and the talk says something like this, you know, or at least might be the way I would have paraphrased the talk under the circumstances. As we all know, life is full of suffering, right?

[20:29]

Yes, absolutely. No doubt about it. Just read the news. Think about your own inner life. Think about the nested relationships at all scales that we engage in. They're, you know, to be fair, they're full of delight, but also full of this particular kind of suffering and dissatisfaction that for some reason humans are pretty good at getting into. There's a lot of suffering to go around. We inflicted on ourselves. We inflicted on each other. And worse, we inflicted on each other in ways that scale up pretty big and are distributed very, very unevenly, which is bad, right?

[21:39]

And then, but... But that wasn't news to anyone in 500 BC, right? The interesting thing about that era was that everyone seemed pretty clear on the problem, on the nature of the problem, because it was observable. And it was a period in which all over the world as we know it, East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean, people were going, wow, this is really bad and we should cook up a different solution because the solutions that we've been trying to use for millennia are really not doing it for us anymore. The pre-Socratic philosophers, the Chinese classics, all that sort of thing arose out of this this period of ferment, right?

[22:43]

And Buddhism is no exception. So everyone was probably willing to buy the proposition that life is suffering. But the Buddha then suggests a really novel kind of explanation for the problem. And it's basically... He doesn't actually say this in his initial talk. He says a kind of short version of it. But if you look at the kind of vast body of particularly early Buddhist literature, what you see is that he's saying because of how we're built, basically, because of how we were... we were put together and the way we interact and react in the world.

[23:44]

And in particular, because of the way that we construct, maintain, and bolster this self-concept, this self-model that we carry around with us everywhere and animate in the world. And because of the way that Self-model is seen as separate from and in some fundamental way in opposition to or at least in this complex relationship that involves both cooperation and competition with pretty much every other thing and being in the world, right? We develop on a personal level, this sort of grasping after things that give us pleasure and that seem like they'll elevate our status or the value, right?

[24:57]

Averting from things that have the opposite quality and in conflict quite often with beings near and far who disagree one way or the other with whom we're competing for resources or status or anything else. So it's that thing, that self, which is entangled with all of the greatest gifts that we've been given by cultural and biological evolution. our ability to use a richly meaningful and grammatically complex language, our ability to do pretty decent long-range planning, and even to do it in groups. Amazing, because we've got this language, right? All of those things are entangled with this self-construct that we're talking about here.

[26:02]

And they... they are the cause of this suffering dissatisfaction conflict difficulty um and really kind of the the you know the multi-millennial train wreck that is human history right um and it's because it's it's built in it's it's It's part of who we are. Literally, it's part of who we are and how we imagine ourselves. And then he says, but, you know, it doesn't have to be like that. There's a way out. And I think everyone probably agreed with that as well, just because if you look at if you study yourself in the way that Zazen requests, you see that actually sometimes we're.

[27:03]

deeply entangled in self-construction and grasping an aversion, dissatisfaction, and so on. And sometimes it's not like that at all. Sometimes the mind is relaxed, spacious, lively, and full of possibilities. And there doesn't seem to be a problem at all, actually. And then the presumption is we'd rather have a little bit more of that and a little less the other thing. And he outlines a program, what's known as the Noble Eightfold Path, that will get you there. If you distill the Eightfold Path a little bit down to three kind of top-level bullet points, it's like, wise up. adjust the way you live such that it promotes more wising up and practice meditative and, you know, practice meditation and mindfulness, basically.

[28:18]

So then there was Buddhism and it spread all over Asia and, you know, some, 1200 years later or so, there was this guy Dogen in Japan who went to China and studied Zen and came back and tried to explain to everybody in Japan why they should be Zen practitioners. And he did it in a manifesto, which you could arguably translate the title of which as everyone should be sitting Zazen. in this particular way. So as I mentioned earlier, most of the document is about posture and logistics. He says, oh, yeah, this azan is great.

[29:24]

It's the real offer of relief from from suffering. The other practices that Buddhists of the day in Japan were doing really aren't going to cut it. So here's how you do it. And then he basically says this. He says, you know, tell everyone to stop bothering you. Stop bothering yourself with worrying about this and that. Find yourself a quiet room. Put down some thick matting, this is tatami, and put some cushions on top of it. So these days, usually you put this big square cushion called a zabaton down, and then you put a zafu, this round cushion on top of it. He actually, I think, in another document where he describes sitting zazen, he actually recommends a round zafu.

[30:30]

So... And so do that. And then arrange your body in the following way. And so here's the – let's see how we're doing. Good. Here's the postural part. And this is where what he says in these instructions has been – augmented by through the course of history since. So I'll talk about both what he said and what the other options are. He says, sit either in full lotus or half lotus. So let's say we were all just to decide to sit in full lotus. So he says, put your right foot on your left thigh. and your left foot on your right thigh.

[31:31]

This lower body posture is hard for a lot of people, both in Asia and the West, because it requires a lot of kind of twist flexibility in the hips and knees, and it's hard to do right off the bat. But here's the good thing about it that's worth stressing, right? When you sit in full lotus, the down pressure on your knees is very even, and your knees are pretty close together, right? And that's a good thing because you have a sort of solid tripod of support through your for your upper body, your knees and the whatever it is that you're sitting on are solidly supported, right?

[32:38]

For those people who can't sit in full lotus, he says, okay, so you can sit in half lotus. And he says, you just press your left foot against your right thigh, right? One thing to notice here is that my knees went out a little bit. The further out your knees are, the more strain there is on these muscles up here, your psoas muscles and a little bit of your sort of very upper quads near your pelvis. So that's worth thinking about, right? This is sort of... You know, classical half lotus with your foot all the way up here and your toes sort of pointing down your knee. You can also drop this foot down here. So it's on your calf. That's a little bit more comfortable for some people. You can even put it all the way down on the floor.

[33:40]

This is called Burmese posture. If you'll notice now, my knees are pretty far apart and and that. That, like I said, puts a little bit more strain up here. But all right. So those are the primary cross-legged postures. There's also a posture that's been added later. I'm going to do this sitting sideways. Just because it's easier to see. Called cesa. The basic form of cesa, I think, is... is a yoga posture called Varyasana, right? Like this. This is really great, but pretty soon for most people, because you're sitting on your feet, your legs start going to sleep, right? So the solutions that are proposed to that are you take a Zafu and you put it on edge like this.

[34:48]

And you put it under your sit bones. And that supports you. It makes it so that you're not putting all this pressure on your lower legs and feet. And so your lower legs and feet stay asleep. The other solution, which is actually even a little better, there are these benches you can get. you would just put the bench under your sit bones and sit seiza. And the advantage of doing it on a bench is that it usually allows you to pull your legs together and that actually works a little bit better than having your legs splayed out when you're sitting seiza. So, yeah, okay. And then I guess the last posture that's worth talking about is sitting in a chair.

[36:06]

In any case, the request is always exactly the same. You want to have, in the case of SESA or the cross-legged postures, you want to have your knees firmly planted on the mat, and you want to have your butt firmly planted on whatever it's sitting on, and there should be this sense of sort of a solid platform of support for your upper body, right? When you're sitting on a chair, it's the same thing. You want to have your butt firmly planted on the chair, and you want to have your feet firmly planted on the floor. It should feel solid. And it should feel solid in this way where particularly when you're sitting in a chair, some chairs are sculpted so that there's a rise that both in the front of the chair that both sort of invites you to lean back into the chair and

[37:18]

and kind of put some pressure on the bottoms of your thighs, those are probably not super good chairs to sit Zazen in because you really want to have the points of contact primarily be your sit bones and your feet. So pick a chair that allows for that as much as possible. The reasons for that become clear when you start talking about upper body posture. So, you know, let's say you've found a lower body posture that works for you. Then the upper body, the instructions written down by this guy in the 13th century essentially say, sit with your back straight and the What that means actually is allow the natural curves in your back to express themselves.

[38:23]

To sort of imagine the head is sort of floating up off the shoulders and floating back so that your back sort of goes like the back of the head, the neck, the shoulders, the lower back, the pelvis that has this natural kind of curve and alignment, right? And what you want to do is find a balance point. So rock forward and backwards, rock right and left until you get the sense that your body is really as balanced as it can possibly be. You're not really leaning in any direction. And what you'll notice if you do that is that the muscles in your belly and the muscles in your back relax as much as they possibly can.

[39:27]

They're lightly engaged, holding up your body, but your body is upright mainly because it's balanced. You can imagine a kind of lift in your chest that... that both lifts and opens your chest and simultaneously allows this sensation, this muscles and skin at your neck and your upper back between your shoulder blades can sort of relax and fall down your back. So that's kind of the main upper body posture. What happens when you allow your head to float up and float back is that your face, falls into a vertical plane with your nose more or less above your navel and your ears lined up with your shoulders, right? There's a hand posture and it goes like this. You put your left palm on top of your right palm.

[40:28]

You bend your hands around in a nice big circle and you place that such that your thumb tips are more or less at your navel. If you're sitting full lotus, your right hand can rest very lightly on your right foot. If you're sitting in any other posture, just make sure that your little fingers are lightly touching your abdomen and the contacts between your hands are very light and gentle, right? So we sit with our... eyes open and downcast, just taking in the light, just taking in the patterns, not looking at stuff, not picking out an object and saying, oh, look, there's my copy of the Blue Cliff record on the shelf right by my iPad, and so on.

[41:30]

So in this posture, try, let's do this. Why don't you, Put your attention in this place that's kind of two inches or so below your navel, maybe an inch and a half below your navel, right in the middle of your body, which is called the hara. Put your attention there. Maybe put a little tension there too, tightening your lower stomach muscles a little bit, maybe slightly tightening. the your the muscles in your pelvic floor and then breathe all the way out you've breathed all the way out Pause briefly, and then the diaphragm will naturally go, okay, time to breathe in.

[42:36]

Just let the breath come in and fill the body. And then do that again, maybe three to five times. Deep, concerted breath with a little bit of emphasis on the out-breath. And then just let your breath take its natural course in depth. But keep your attention there. No longer, you don't have to tighten any muscles, loosen any muscles, but just keep your attention down there in your Hara and use that as a platform from which to watch your breath. So we'll sit for about... minutes or so and then there'll be a little time I think for questions at the end.

[43:38]

Keep your mouth closed. Breathing through the nose. Tongue resting gently against the front roof of the mouth. I know some of you may have noticed that thoughts tend to arise.

[46:15]

And sometimes those thoughts are sufficiently engaging that they obscure the focus on what we're actually doing, which is sitting. That's okay. That's... nature of self-study of this kind. It's the nature of this particular kind of engagement. So when you notice a thought, if you can hold it directly in your awareness, just notice it. And then just let it go where it goes usually in that situation the thought just kind of dissolves and drops back into the pool of mental activity like a fish hunting for bugs in a pond in the evening sometimes a thought comes up and um

[47:40]

grabs enough attention and energy that it pulls you in and sort of obscures whatever and maybe even erases a little bit whatever was happening just before and brings your attention entirely to that thought. Okay. What you know from experience is that after a while, it'll let go and your attention will be back here. And when that happens, Really use that moment to be here. You've been given a gift. You're present. It's a present. And maybe in that moment, notice what the nature, the flavor, the texture of that thought and the mental activity that it produced in general. was as you settle in and meticulously observe what happens next.

[48:47]

That's all. There's nowhere to go. Nothing particular to do. Well, that's basically it.

[52:07]

That's Zazen. Does anyone have any questions about that, about what we just did, about what I was saying, about any of that stuff? You can just unmute yourself and ask if you want. I'm not sure we need to go through any protocol. Any questions?

[52:34]

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