This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. Sound working okay? Everyone can hear? Excellent. Well, being here is a lot like returning home for me. I first came to Tassahara in the summer of 1976, and it was love at first sight. I had this fabulous summer as the dishwasher at the time

[01:04]

when there was no electricity in the kitchen at that time and the dishes were done in the kitchen and by hand. We really had a blast then. You guys don't know what you're missing now. All the electricity machinery. And then In 1983, I was a director here, and also kind of a magical time for me. And what I want to talk about actually is a word that I already mentioned, is the word love. I'm here doing a workshop with a group. The workshop is called Know Yourself, Forget Yourself, the mindful leader and we were having a session in here yesterday morning and someone asked the question what about love what about Zen and love and what what I said and I want to talk a little bit more about it is that

[02:32]

I think that Zen doesn't talk so much about, doesn't use the word love very often because it's assumed in everything. That everything about this practice is essentially an expression of our love. Why else would people sit facing a wall for hours and days if they didn't love it why else would we get up early in the morning and come to the zendo if it wasn't about love someone also asked another question maybe as a way in I was asked the question about what is the difference between mindfulness meditation and meditation and Of course, being the good Zen guy I am, I answered it with a question.

[03:39]

I said, well, let's start with the question, what is meditation? And I was saying that I think that there's two very different, maybe more than two, but I think of two very different viewpoints about meditation. And these two different viewpoints have been being talked about and argued about over the last... many thousands of years, actually. There's the sudden view and the gradual view of meditation. The sudden view says, just sit and you are a fully awakened being. Don't try to get anything. In fact, Zen teaching talks a lot about that the One of the distinctions of Zen is that it's moving from attainment to non-attainment. Just sit. Just take this posture.

[04:41]

And don't try to improve. Don't try to get anything. Don't try to be anything that you're not. In fact, just be your complete, authentic self. So this is one kind of love. This is maybe a love at first sight. Just fall in love with the practice and just sit and be sincere and trust in what will happen just by sitting. The gradual practice is more what we think of, I think, as transformative practice. criticized Suzuki Roshi on the one hand I was noticing that Suzuki Roshi sometimes would call it a stepladder Zen this idea putting it down but a few paragraphs later he makes a reference to that practice is like walking in the fog and that if you practice little by little you may not even know it and you'll find that you're wet so this is sometimes it might take a while

[05:58]

to fall in love. And I'm kind of amazed to find myself these days teaching meditation in the corporate world. And I spend much of my time what I call bringing non-attainment into the realm of attainment. That you know, businesses and corporations by definition are trying to get something. But they're starting to, I think, understand that there's this whole other side, this whole other side of just being, just enjoying, just appreciating, just loving. And I find myself hanging out at places like Google, where I helped develop a program at Google called Search Inside Yourself.

[07:07]

It actually, yes, good, it was a joke. When the name... Very sensitive. When the name Search Inside Yourself was first thought of, people in the room laughed. And it said they knew that this must be the right name. But it's a program that integrates mindfulness, emotional intelligence, leadership and science. And there have now been 2,000 Google employees who've taken this program that's delivered over a seven-week course.

[08:19]

And Google has embraced mindfulness as its path to well-being for its 44,000 employees. And I'm glad I hear that Tasuhara has also embraced mindfulness as the path to well-being for its employees. Someone, I remember, someone once asked me, I was sitting at lunch here in the summer with a woman who was a business professor, and she turned to me and she said, who is the business brains behind this operation? She said, this is one of the most smoothly run businesses she'd ever seen, and And I looked at her and I said, Buddha. That the business brains behind this operation is that, in general, people don't think of it as a business.

[09:20]

People are here to practice. It's amazing how out of a sincere sense of love and purpose and the desire to just be an authentic human being, how well that makes organizations run as a starting point. I also think of myself as having grown up mostly in the kitchen here. I spent many years cooking and I wrote, the first book that I wrote was called ZBA, Zen of Business Administration. And there's a chapter in there called Run Your Business and Your Life Like a Zen Monastery Kitchen.

[10:25]

Because I felt there were so many things about how the kitchen runs. mostly the sense of working with a sense of love and sincerity that the idea is just just love what you do and good really good food will appear and it seems to work amazingly amazingly well even today thank you all for incredible food and service and all that happens here in the summer times Quite spectacular. One of the things that we've been doing at Search Inside Yourself is training people to teach mindfulness practice, to teach meditation practice in many different settings. And we've developed this. We've talked a little bit about this the first day in our workshop.

[11:32]

seven principles for how to be a mindfulness teacher, which we've now adapted as seven principles for how to live your life. And I'd like to offer them maybe as seven principles for how to be a Tassajara in the summertime, or as a student or a guest. They're like seven principles for being a more full, loving human being. And these actually were based on some teachings of my good friend and one of my teachers, Norman Fisher. We brought Norman into a training session that we were doing with some Google employees in which we were teaching them how to become meditation teachers. And we asked Norman to come in and say a few words. And he came up with these seven ideas, which we've then kind of embellished some. But the first principle, and this is right at the heart of what I want to talk about, the first principle is love the work.

[12:38]

Love the work. So in this case, he's talking about the work of meditation practice or the work of developing more clarity, more awareness, the work of becoming a more authentic human being. So love this work. Love this work. but also simply again if for students here it's love love meditation like love the practice of sitting and then the second principle is to do the work to not only love it but to enter into the practice of of clarity the practice of meditation the practice of of transforming oneself, whether it's all at once or little by little, but the practice of inner and outer transformation. The third principle is be amazed by the work.

[13:47]

Don't try to become an expert. And again, this really cuts across the grain of conventional thinking. But again, this goes back to a beginner's mind, to keep a sense of amazement about what we do. Again, whether we're cooking or cleaning cabins or working out in the world. To develop the sense of amazement with whatever we're doing. The fourth principle is don't avoid suffering. Don't avoid your suffering. Don't avoid difficulty. And again, it's interesting how where the love tends to be is right in the midst of difficulty. That to see that it's not so easy being a human being. One of the things I notice as I'm teaching people in the corporate world, I find myself saying quite a few times that being a human being is a tough gig.

[14:59]

That it's pretty tough to to be born in this human body and this mystery of the human body and to not know what will happen other than to know that one day our life will end. Only humans have this particular challenge and opportunity. The fifth principle is don't avoid the suffering of others, feel the suffering of others. And it's interesting. So often when I'm, wherever I teach, usually the first time I meet people in a group, especially if I'm in a business setting, everyone seems to have it so together. People show up as really having it together and people introduce themselves with their

[16:02]

their names and their titles and and what they do and it always sounds so important and then little by little you get to see that most people most people's lives are quite messy sometimes call it looking under the hood of a human being usually see a lot of a lot of messiness and how everyone is surprised to find out that almost everyone is in transition in some way. Even if they've announced themselves with some big title working at some company, they really don't know what's going to happen next. So feeling the suffering of others is the fifth principle. The sixth is to depend on others. Depend on others. I think you can really feel that principle being played out here at Tassajara. that the dance of the schedule and the bells and the altars the food there's this amazing interdependence that happens and the practice the practice of allowing ourselves to depend on others I do I do a lot of co-teaching I'm almost always teaching with another person and I was some

[17:30]

I was thinking of a time when I was co-teaching once with a young woman who was a Google employee. And we were about to deliver a workshop, an all-day training, for a group of about 50 executives on emotional intelligence. And this woman, just as we were about to start, she came up to me and she said, I'm feeling really ill. I am so nervous, I feel like such an imposter, that I'm going to go teach emotional intelligence. I don't think I can do it. And I told her that I often also feel nervous, but that she could depend on me, and that my job was to make her look good, and that her job was to make me look good. and that she had a much tougher job.

[18:32]

I said that I trust that you have my back and I have your back and let's just go out and actually try to love the people that we're teaching. It was very sweet. We went out together and she began speaking and we made eye contact. kind of gave me this thumbs up that she was good. So it's interesting, this depending on others, putting that into practice. And the sixth principle, seventh and last principle, is keep making it simpler. Keep making it simpler. Things can feel complicated. It's easy for, you know, the human brain is an amazing... storytelling machine. I've been studying quite a bit of neuroscience. And that's actually one of the things that neuroscience is discovering, is that our brains are made to produce stories.

[19:45]

And we seem to produce more and more complex stories. And that if we can drop down more into our own heart center and into our own belly, the world can be simpler you can find a way to keep making it simpler so love the work do the work be amazed by the work feel your suffering feel the suffering of others depend on others and keep making it simpler and in some way all of this feels like a all different formations, all different forms of love, loving ourselves, loving practice. A kind of cultivating, cultivating a kind of inner sincerity to be more and more a wholehearted, a wholehearted practice is something that we talk a lot about in practice.

[20:54]

To be fully in alignment with yourself, to understand who you are, what you are, to understand how we serve, how is it we're serving. It's also thinking, I'll just mention There's this, when I was thinking about different practices that had to do with love, there's this practice, ancient set of teachings called the four reflections. The four reflections. And the first reflection is that life is precious, which feels like another way of saying that if life is precious, then we...

[21:58]

You should pay attention to loving each moment of our life, of the preciousness of life. The second reflection is that death is inevitable. Again, this is very much connected, the preciousness of life and the inevitability of death. You know, right in the beginning of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Roshi says that if we think when we die this is the end of our life, this is incorrect understanding. And if we think that when we die this is not the end of our life, this is also incorrect understanding. So there's some mystery about this death and yet our life as we know it.

[22:59]

Death in a very practical way is inevitable. The fourth reflection is that our actions are indelible. Our actions are indelible. And that by action it includes our thoughts and our words as well as our deeds. And the commentary on this A particular reflection is that we have no idea how far and wide our actions spread, that what we do, what we say reverberates. So to take our actions seriously. And the fifth is kind of similar to these kind of seven principles. The fourth principle is that suffering is a part of life, and that our joy resides in our suffering.

[24:00]

So these are four reflections, which again, they all, you know, preciousness of life, inevitability of death, our actions matter, and suffering is where we find joy, all feel to me like a description of love. It feels like There really is love in Zen after all, I think is what I'm finding. I wonder if anyone has a question or a reflection. We have a few minutes. I was thinking of the time that I spent with Steve Stuckey, who was the abbot here up until he died on December 31st last year.

[25:17]

And it was quite the example of fully dying, fully embracing the impermanence. And he was often dealing with a good deal of pain and difficulty. And there was so much joy in that acceptance of the shortness of his life. And I find that for me, if I look back at the various suffering in my own life, whether it's my own failures or relationships that were painful or deaths, there's so much joy in that. So much joy that almost feels beyond joy.

[26:20]

It kind of feels very loving. There's something about what happens when we toward impermanence, difficulty, our own pain and difficulty. Does that help some? Yeah, there are comments or questions. Come on, group. Yes. You talk about love, you know, in many, many situations. Is that the same sort of love you feel towards a person, a child, a spouse, parents?

[27:22]

In a very deep way, yeah. I think the... The unconditional love that we feel toward people, toward our parents, spouses, children. There's also a... I wrote down this word because I didn't think I'd remember it. I looked up this Japanese word. Shosoku. Shosoku. Only the Japanese would have a word. That means the feeling you have when you receive a letter from home. The feeling you have when you receive a letter from home. So it's that kind of love. The feeling you would get that's kind of deep, unconditional love.

[28:28]

And Suzuki Rishi uses that word and that metaphor to talk about emptiness and that love comes, that love and that feeling comes from something that's, you know, when you think about it, like where does love come from? Where does the feeling of love, where does it come from? How could it be? We don't produce it. We don't make it. Again, it's a little bit like everything else about us, our breath, our body. So it's interesting how much we take for granted. So I think of love as a profound seeing what is, a profound not taking our lives away. practice others, seeing the magic.

[29:32]

Suzuki Roshi said, the world is its own magic. We don't have to create magic. So I think the love is in there someplace. Yeah, Kimiko. inside the Pandora's box, so we don't dare say it. Like, let's say, if I said to my mother that I love you, she would say, am I dying? And I would say, no, no, no. And then she would say, are you dying? And I know, I probably, for most of Chinese people, I would say, I love you. And yet it's really good.

[30:35]

Yes, so it's assumed. Again, I think sometimes there were times when I was living here and practicing Zen here, I occasionally thought maybe we're practicing to be Japanese. Because actually there's so much Japanese culture and Zen are so embedded. And I'd be happy to be Japanese, actually. It's actually funny, you know, that when I... I can remember... I can remember I was... I was a teenager, and I was looking through... My mother was showing me some old, old picture albums. And I remember looking at these picture albums... and saying to my mother, who's this oriental guy here? And it was my father who looked like he must have had some Japanese or Chinese blood in him.

[31:44]

So I feel, yes, I'm part Japanese. Or maybe in a previous lifetime. Yeah. Yeah, so some of you, I know, you have studied Zen, would be familiar with this term, know yourself, forget yourself, comes from Dogen, 13th century founder of Zen in Japan who somewhat famously said right to study the way is to study the self to study the self is to forget the self to forget the self is to awaken with everyone everything feels like a formula for love to me right that it's a kind of right this that fully knowing yourself is away means fully loving yourself includes I think fully loving yourself

[33:07]

And then this forgetting yourself, in a way, is even deeper. Again, it feels a little bit like this shosoku, this letter from home, that something mysterious, something beyond our usual consciousness. So I think, yeah, the sense of love and I think Dogen. Again, it's interesting how I notice Zen literature uses the word sincerity. and finding your true nature. So I think if you kind of put sincerity in finding your true nature, again, maybe culturally they don't use that word love. But for us, I think love is a really good word, even in Zen, to bring a kind of warmth, warmth and beauty and yumminess into our Zen practice.

[34:10]

I think it can really be supportive and inspiring to see that right in the midst of these black cushions and hard tans is a kind of warmth and yumminess and love. Thank you very much.

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