Good morning everyone. Welcome to Green Gulch. I wanted to start this morning by talking about a Zen moment that I had the other day. And I was telling someone about this and I realized that The way that I use this expression, Zen moment, has become part of our culture. I don't know if you've noticed that, but I've noticed it. It comes up a fair amount. Where people say they've had a Zen moment, meaning something, a place where they were feeling calm and serene. And I realize that I use it to mean just the opposite of that. And my... My Zen moment that I was describing the other day to a friend was I was hired to facilitate a retreat in Tokyo of CEOs and their spouses.

[01:07]

And this was a group that meets regularly in different parts of the world. And I had meticulously planned this three-day retreat that was billed as a Zen retreat. And I was flown to Tokyo, and there I was in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Tokyo. And in the second day of this retreat, I got the sense that things were not going so well. When I went around and did check-ins, words like bored. Unhappy. Confused. And I used my Zen perceptive powers to know that something was not quite right. And then what came out was the group was very clear. We don't want to sit in a stinking meditation. And I was completely... That was my Zen moment.

[02:10]

Was realizing that... my idea of what I was doing and the reality of what was happening were completely out of sync. And I had this moment of feeling terror. I felt like I just completely failed. I've built this up, and here I am in Tokyo, and I've not... There's something really, really off here. I felt that I was able in that moment to, within my own fear and feeling like a failure, turn to them and apologize and say that clearly I know that I trust completely in this teaching, this Zen teaching. there must be something that I'm not doing.

[03:13]

Because clearly I'm not delivering it in a way that's working. It's my job to deliver this in a way that's working. I apologize. And then we went around the room and I asked each person what it was they really wanted to do. What was it that was most pressing and meaningful for them? And I think that... They really appreciated, they could see, you know, they could see my Zen moment. And the rest of this retreat actually went quite well. It turned out what they really wanted to talk about was their relationships with each other as couples. And that they were just eager to do that. And I think it was that Zazen that got them eager to... What I really want to talk about, and I think it will become clear how that story is related, maybe it will become clearer to me as well, but what I want to talk about is a couple of lines from Dogen Zenji, who is one of the core teachers in the Zen lineage.

[04:33]

Dogen was a 13th century monk who is credited as having brought Zen to Japan in the 13th century. And without going into lots of history and details about Dogen, I'm just going to jump right into some of his words. And this is a fairly known quote in Zen history. and even in the world. In fact, I used to run a greeting card company, and I think we had this as a greeting card. And the quote is, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drops away. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly.

[05:36]

So I want to just, I'm going to focus this morning just on these first two lines, which are to study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. Because I think there's so much, so much there in those first two lines of what does it mean to study the self and what does it mean to forget the self? So first of all, the line says to study the Buddha way. So I want to start with, well, what is the Buddha way? And the Buddha way is our lives. It's our lives at work, in relationship, anywhere. These are our lives. There is, you know, even the term Buddhism was something that came into being In really recent, you know, in the last, I think, three or four hundred years, there was no Buddhism. And in some way, I think it's, you know, Buddhism is a tool or medicine, but the practice is about studying yourself.

[06:46]

So I think it might be useful instead of saying to study the Buddha way is to study the self, to substitute, you know, to study business is to study the self. or to study art is to study the self, or to study teaching or therapy. Whatever it is you're doing, this is a vehicle for studying the self. Suzuki Roshi, in one of his talks, he spoke about small mind or monkey mind. This is the mind that hops around and jumps around and is getting caught by things. And in contrast, he would talk about big mind or wide mind, and this was a way of contrasting, kind of encouraging people to step outside of themselves and take a wider view of things.

[07:47]

And in one of his talks, I was reading one of the original transcripts, he kind of laughed at this point and said, you know, you should just forget about small mind and big mind and just be normal. Why don't you all just be normal? And you could see, you know, he continued to kind of laugh and in a way the message was, well, since none of you are normal, let's practice. We have to practice. So this line, to study yourself, what does this mean? And what's the motivation for studying ourselves? Well, Dogen often, one of the things that he talks about a lot is the uncertain world of birth and death.

[08:51]

The uncertain world of birth and death. You know, Dogen... Just a little story of his is that Dogen's mother died when I believe he was nine years old. And it's recorded how he was sitting at his mother's funeral and watching the smoke of the incense come up in the air and disappear. And this was a powerfully moving event and moment in his life, this combination of that he had just, as a young boy, was seeing the death of his mother and was also seeing, really getting a sense about impermanence and how transitory our lives are, seeing this smoke from this incense appear and disappear. So what is this event that we call birth?

[09:52]

And what is this event that we call... and being a human being, and what is this thing of death? So this is, I think, a very primary motivation for taking on this study to study the self. In the story, the original story of the Buddha, the historical Buddha from 2,500 years ago, it's said... that part of his motivation for studying the self was he was very much protected as a young child and as a young man and lived in great wealth. And the story is that his parents really wanted to very consciously shelter him from the difficulties of life. But somehow he found a way out of the monastery, not of the monastery, but of this wealthy...

[10:55]

And it's said that there were four different viewings that changed his life and led the Buddha on this path of self-study. And these were seeing an old person, seeing a sick person, seeing a corpse. So these three, seeing old age, sickness, and death, and letting those in. And the fourth thing, for the Buddha was seeing a monk, was seeing this image of someone who seemed to be living with serenity and equanimity and real depth and meaning right in the midst of this old age sickness and death. There's some paradox here in this getting a glimpse into seeing this uncertain world of birth and death and somehow this being a sense of practice and where real freedom might be.

[12:07]

The sense of how this can help us in acting with a sense of certainty and a sense of humility in every moment. I was driving in the car a few days ago with my 19-year-old daughter, and she looked at me and she said, it's so simple. Why can't everyone get it? Why is it so difficult to live in peace? Why is the world such a mess? And she turned to me and she said, children understand it. Children understand it. And she was saying that children understand it. this connection that we all have around birth and death. There's a way that children still, we all, as children, had a foot in birth. There's a way that as we're born, we relate and feel the sense of still having some foot in this mystery of where was it that we came from?

[13:21]

and that somehow as we get older, we forget. So practicing this practice, to study the self, is a way to remember. And I think Zazen practice, or Zen meditation practice, provides a kind of container, provides the kind of structure and method for this study of the self. And within... It's hard to study ourselves without there being some kind of structure, some kind of container, some kind of rules. And I was thinking of the kind of four structures or four rules of zazen. And I would say that they are... Acceptance, so to accept whatever comes up while sitting meditation.

[14:26]

Accepting thoughts, emotions, fears, hopes, dreams. Accepting our own birth and death. The second is curiosity, is the practice of just being curious in the study of ourselves. The third is curiosity. the practice of appreciation, of just appreciating being alive, appreciating this body and mind, this moment, and appreciating these strange human creatures that are around us. And the fourth kind of structure for meditation practice, I would say, is fearlessness, which is seeing our fear and acknowledging our fear learning and studying our tight spots, our shadows. And little by little, through fearlessness, moving towards what's difficult, towards the darkness, towards what we're afraid of.

[15:32]

Fearlessness is this kind of bridge between studying the self and forgetting the self. And one of the images I have about And this is the image I have about our lives. And I think this is an image I had, the story that I told about my Zen moment in Tokyo. It's being able to step forward in each moment, not quite knowing if the ground is firm enough to support you, but taking that chance, that little step into the unknown. So for me in that moment, it was... I felt like I could have run and hid and gone out of there in my fear, but I didn't feel like I could do that. I needed to step into some place where I didn't know what would happen. I didn't know what would happen if I apologized and asked for what people wanted to do.

[16:37]

And what are other ways that we can study ourselves? an important way is to study our emotions and our feelings and our moods and to pay attention to our own sense of identity. What are our patterns, our shadows? What are our nicely carved ruts in our behavior? This is, I think, what Dogen means by this study of ourselves. And even more, I think, even more than just studying ourselves, it's about penetrating and transforming and developing understanding. And this isn't easy. I mean, I think we all see how difficult it is to become familiar with our own patterns and triggers. It's much easier. We tend to be really good at seeing other people's patterns and triggers.

[17:44]

to ask ourselves always this question, what is my contribution? How am I contributing to this situation? Becoming familiar with our temporal, shadowy selves, becoming familiar, more and more familiar, turning towards ourselves in this way is not an easy practice. Forgetting This other line, so to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. What does this mean? I want to say first what I think it doesn't mean, because I think there's some caution here. I think we can get lulled into this idea of forgetting ourselves. In a In a very oversimplified way, I think that I've noticed there's basically two kinds of people in the world.

[18:53]

And there are people who are narcissistic. And these are people who think that, who are overcompensating for some kind of lack of self-worth and are always putting themselves forward at the expense of others. And the second kind of people are people who are self-deniers. And these are people who do the opposite, who, for lack of self-worth, put themselves behind and don't take care of themselves. And so this forgetting yourself is to not get trapped into this place of lack of self-worth. So it's knowing yourself. deeply feeling your own innate worth as a human being. I would say that maybe the third kind of person is someone who goes back and forth between overcompensating and undercompensating.

[19:56]

So this forgetting the self, I think often people might be attracted to this kind of a practice, this Zen practice about Oh, forgetting yourself, I'm pretty good at that. I've always been good at forgetting myself. But this studying the self has to happen in a very, very powerful way. This seeing your own sense of real, innate worth. I think one of the physical things that I think of in this to study self the self and forgetting the self is every once in a while I have the great privilege of teaching meditation instruction at Zen Center in San Francisco. And usually we start upstairs. This is at 300 Page Street.

[20:57]

And I'll give a little bit of history of Zen Center and Zen and Suzuki Roshi and how these temples came to be. And then we'll go downstairs to the meditation hall. And we're As we're taking off our shoes to go into the meditation hall, I realized that I need to teach people how to do a gasho bow, because that's what we're all going to do when we go into the zendo. Let's all do this right now. The instructions I give are take your hands and put your palms together. And that your fingertips should be about a hands-width away from your nose. Your arms should be out with energy, but not stiff and not flabby. And then you just bow. And so this, I think, is a great practice of studying yourself and forgetting yourself.

[22:02]

That you can put your hands down. Such a great audience. You know, there's something so wonderful about the forms in this. And this is, I think, why the kind of brilliance of these Zen forms is that, you know, the first time that you bow, you might be kind of overcompensating. There might be a little bit too much self there, too much kind of self-awareness and trying to bow just right, you know, and wanting to do it just right. kind of wanting people to see that you're bowing right. But the hundredth or five hundredth or thousandth time that you enter, you completely forget about it. And you get to this place where you've forgotten yourself, but it might be not the kind of forgetting yourself that I think Dogen is talking about. It can become a habit. So this studying yourself and forgetting yourself are happening in

[23:06]

In each moment in our lives, how can we study ourselves and how can we forget ourselves? And I think it takes this kind of structure, so this structure of sitting, and even like there are many structures in Zen, so like the structures of the precepts, these different kind of rules that we follow. But Zen, of course, in Zen practice, There's so much depth and flexibility and paradox even in things like, for instance, the first precept says, do not kill or do not take life. This is the first precept. But as you look at this precept more clearly, you'll see that commentary will say, The way to practice with this precept and the way to practice with these structures is to see, on the one hand, yes, don't take life.

[24:12]

Just flat out, do not take life. Don't kill. This is clear. The second way to interpret this precept is that we're always taking life. That wherever we go, we're inadvertently... killing bugs or animals or bacteria, that we're always taking life. And the third way to practice with the precepts is that it's not possible to take life, that things can't appear and then disappear. We don't have the power within us to take life. So all three of these are ways to create a kind of structure and lack of structure in terms of practicing life. this study of self and forgetting of self. When I was looking at various approaches to this practice of forgetting the self, I was looking up, there's an interesting book called Flow that some of you may know about by a Czechoslovakian psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

[25:28]

or something in that realm. I have a lot of trouble pronouncing his name. But he talks about, he's kind of devoted his life to studying what he calls flow. And flow is a lot like this Buddhist practice of forgetting yourself. And he talks about it as this really feeling the, when you're challenged, when you're challenged, the level of challenge And the level of your skill are in this balance. So that when you're doing something that is quite challenging, but that you're able to do it, there's a way that he's noticed that this is what he calls flow. And to look for places in our lives when we're in this flow place. So it's about looking for challenge and finding just that right level of challenge. Also in this realm of studying self and forgetting self, I've been... There's an interesting paper that is actually referred to in a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink, which I imagine some of you have read.

[26:42]

But I've been reading some of the research that he used to write this book, and there's a really interesting paper called... the unbearable lightness of automaticity, the unbearable lightness of automaticity. And it's this study of how much of our behavior is outside of our consciousness. And like in the book Blink, for example, he says, if I were to say the word yawn, just saying the word yawn, see you're yawning, but just saying that word will have an effect. And he talks about, in this paper, about automaticity. He quotes a particular study that this person who wrote this paper is a psychologist named John Barg. And he does lots of interesting studies. And one he did was, and this is about priming.

[27:45]

So saying the word yawn is a way to prime you for sleep. So I will say the word energy and enlightenment and focus. So now I've primed you for the opposite of yawning. But in this study, one of the studies he does is he primes a certain group of people for interrupting and for being rude, for being hostile, So what he does is he gives... Often you don't know that you're being primed, so people will read something, and in what some people are reading are words about hostility and rudeness. And another group of people are reading a similar paper, but in this paper are words about calmness and acceptance and openness. And both of these groups, they don't know that they're being tested.

[28:48]

And they're each given an assignment of going to a professor in this building and getting an assignment from them. And this professor is part of the test, and the professor is having a conversation out in front of his office. So the question is, how long will it take each of these groups to interrupt this professor to get the information they need? And he did many of these tests, and people who are primed for being hostile and rude will interrupt many, many more times faster than people who are primed to be calm and serene. And in fact, in the book Blink, he talks about how this was in New York, and it was amazing how there was a large group of people, New Yorkers, who when they're primed, for calmness and equanimity, would never interrupt. This was quite something for New York. And I think that a lot of... And this is maybe obvious and surfacy, but I think it's also very powerful, this idea of priming and this idea of how much of our behavior can be influenced by things and words and ideas around us.

[30:10]

So... I think that walking into this meditation hall, we're primed by seeing these Buddhas, by seeing these objects. You learn to associate the smell of incense with slowing down and getting calm. And so I want to suggest a practice of priming yourself through reading and through slogans, through paying attention. I think television primes us and movies prime us for... for violence and negativity. So I think it's particularly important that we prime ourselves and use slogans and words in our lives. And there's different ways to prime ourselves. It doesn't always mean that it needs to be about slowing down. I was thinking that these practices often have to be done right in the midst of a lot of activity.

[31:13]

An interesting example of this, I find I'm often looking at sports examples. This may be my first sports example from this morning. I thought a really interesting example of studying the self and forgetting the self was an interview I read of a baseball player who the top hitters in professional baseball are standing up at the plate, and their balls are coming at them, you know, 90 to 100 miles an hour. And in fact, I looked this up, and I think they have about one-tenth of a second is the time that baseball players have to make this decision about swinging or not swinging. But if you interview a baseball player, they'll describe... that in that moment they feel like they have plenty of time, that the world has slowed down, and there's a way that this studying the self and forgetting the self is happening right in the midst of a tenth of a second, without having to actually stop and slow down, but it's having that ability to slow down our worlds.

[32:30]

The third line, which I'm not going to say much about, is... So it's to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad of things. And I would just say that another translation that I've seen of this third line is... To forget the self is to be intimate with everyone and everything. And I really like this word, intimacy. And I think at its heart, this is really what studying the self and forgetting the self and what Zen practice is. It's really about the practice of intimacy. And intimacy is so action-oriented. Actualized feels more like it's something that is going to happen to you.

[33:40]

But intimacy feels like something that we can do to become intimate with other people. And I think intimacy requires, real intimacy requires that we know ourselves and forget ourselves. And all of this, I realize, is very much a paradox, right? So a paradox, I looked up the definition of the word paradox, and it means something that appears to be impossible or contradictory, but may in fact be true. Like studying the self is to forget the self. Or almost everything in our lives is paradoxical. Like I wrote down some paradoxes in my own life, I'm a Zen priest, and I'm an executive business coach. I'm shy and introverted, and I'm energized by speaking in front of people.

[34:45]

At work, I'm completely myself, and I'm always playing a role. I'm very careful and slow, and I can be quick and decisive. The more that we study ourselves, I think we see how much of a paradox we are. I think this is a practice I would highly recommend, is to write down these things. You don't have to be one way. Of course, you might notice you have certain tendencies, but I think in general, we as human beings, the closer we look, the more we see how much of a paradox we are, and to allow other people to be a paradox. There is a study in the world of business that this was published, I think, last month, or in recent months in the Harvard Business Review, where someone studied the best business leaders.

[35:53]

And it was said that one of the skills that business leaders had was... the ability to hold two completely oppositional ideas in their minds at the same time, and to not be cornered into feeling as though they had to make a decision to choose one or the other, and that they were able to find a way to take from the best of these ideas. I feel like we're doing it in some way, as we're studying ourselves and forgetting ourselves, We're doing that all the time, holding these contradictory ideas and not being torn by feeling like we have to make those choices, but to look for some more creative and interesting and paradoxical solution. So shifting from a world of just taking care of yourself to a life of simultaneously studying yourself and forgetting yourself,

[36:55]

The more that you study yourself, the more you see places that you need to wake up. The more you wake up, the more possibility you have of being totally responsive, flexible, intimate with each moment. This is a life of practice. This is shifting to a life of practice. This is a life of depth and meaning. And this is a life that makes real intimacy possible. two quotes that I want to end with. And one is one of my favorite quotes from Rumi, a 13th century Persian poet who said, Why do you search futilely for a loaf of bread when there is a bakery on the top of your head? Why do you search futilely for a loaf of bread when there is a bakery on top of your head?

[37:58]

And this morning, the last thing I did this morning as I was getting ready for this talk, I said, I wondered if Suzuki Roshi had something to say on this subject of studying yourself and forgetting yourself. And I opened up Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, and there it was. And it's this actually wonderful, wonderful quote. It says, Dogen Zenji said, To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves. When you become attached to a temporal expression of your true nature, it is necessary to talk about Buddhism, or else you will think the temporal nature is it. But this particular expression of it is not it. So this expression

[39:00]

this temporal nature, this temporary nature, we have to study Buddhism because we think this temporal nature is it. But this is not it. And yet, at the same time, it is it. And yet, at the same time, it is it. For a while, this is it. For the smallest particle of time, this is it. But it is not always so. The very next instant, it is not so. Thus, this is not it. So that you will realize this fact, it is necessary to study Buddhism. I'm certain this is really clarifying it all for you. It did for me. But the purpose of studying Buddhism is to study ourselves and to forget ourselves. When we forget ourselves, we actually are wrong. the true activity of big existence or reality itself.

[40:02]

When we realize this fact, there is no problem whatsoever in this world. And we can enjoy our life without feeling any difficulties. The purpose of our practice is to be aware of this fact. I would have read that at the beginning, but that would have given it all away. LAUGHTER Thank you very much, and enjoy your day at Green Gulch. May our intention equally to every being and place let the true merit of the God's way be

[40:50]

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