Saturday of the month there's a special children's program. So welcome children and as I said children, all of us as children. I'm going to start this morning by reading, telling a children's story. And this is a story from a book called Tibetan Tales for Little Buddhas. So today we are all little Buddhas, and it has pictures. I don't know how well you'll be able to see the pictures. I think mostly I'm going to try and illustrate this story the best I can. And, okay, this is a story about a little girl named Jomo. And this is Jomo and Jomo's aunt. And I'm just going to start. So this starts with Jomo's aunt who says, to Jomo, this floor is filthy, yelled her Aunt Pita, sweep it again.

[01:04]

And then Aunt Pita looked at the pot that Jomo cleaned and said, why is this pot still dirty? And Jomo said, I was busy doing other chores. I was milking the yaks, just like you say to your parents, right? I was busy milking the yaks. That's why the floor is dirty. And her Aunt Pita said, That's no excuse. And as you can imagine, Jomo felt really bad. And she wandered outside. And she went out to a field, and she started hearing some bells. She heard this sound, ting, ting, ting. And it reminded her, it reminded Jomo of some bells that her mother used to wear. And as she was walking, she saw this cave. in the field, and this cave was usually blocked by these big boulders, but somehow, today, there were no big boulders in front of it.

[02:05]

And she walked inside this cave, and just as she went in, she heard this loud, awful voice, and it kind of went, and it was this big, ugly-looking sow. You see this sow. And Jomo shrieked and hid behind a boulder, and her body trembled. And hearing this loud roar of this sow, she put her hands over her ears. Then she heard this sow started to talk, and it said, I'm not what you fear. Lift the veil. And Jomo was frightened, but she still, she looked over the boulder, and she saw that the sow was coming towards her.

[03:06]

Don't hide or fight me, said the sow. I'm not what you see. Are you talking to me, said Jomo? Cast your fear aside and open your heart wide. said this ugly-looking sow. There was no doubt now this was the sow talking to her. What do you want? cried Jomo. Just look in my eyes to see the lies, said the sow. Jomo thought, she better do this or else she might get hurt. See me as a friend, then your fear will end. said the sow. I'll try, but please don't come any closer. So the sow stopped. And just then, when Jomo looked up, that ugly, horrible-looking sow was this beautiful woman, this beautiful dakini queen.

[04:15]

I think of a dakini as a female Buddha. This beautiful female Buddha called a dakini appeared. And the Jomo said, who are you? And the queen said, at last you have seen. And the dakini said, how I look to you depends on your view. You mean you're the beast too, Jomo said. I am what you need to nourish the seed, said the dakini. And Jomo kind of puzzled, said, what seed? The seed to overcome fear with your love, my dear. And as she said this, the dakini handed Jomo this scroll, this rolled up kind of piece of parchment paper that was rolled up and said, here, take this.

[05:22]

Jomo went back to her house, back to her aunt. And as soon as she got there, her aunt said, clean that stove. And Jomo remembered what had just happened. And she said to herself, don't be afraid. Things are not always what they appear. Look beyond the veil of what I'm afraid of. Open my heart. And she said that to herself, and she went and cleaned the stove. And again, her aunt would be mean to her, and Jomo said to herself, at last you are free to love and let be. These were some of the words that were on this scroll. At last you are free and love to let be. And she just kept doing her chores, and at one point, her aunt came over to her and said, can I take a look at that scroll you've been reading?

[06:32]

I think it's time for me to learn whatever lessons you've learned. And that's the story of Jomo and the Dakini Queen. And it's a story about change and fear and transformation. Does anybody have any questions about this story? Here's the picture. This is Jomo out milking one of the yaks. Well, this brings my children's part of the program to conclusion. I think the children are all about to go do some Buddha's birthday stuff. Is that right? Thank you, children. Good morning, everyone, and happy Buddha's birthday celebration.

[08:21]

I think Buddha's birthday is actually tomorrow. April the 8th. I want to talk today about one of the Buddha's first teachings. This was a teaching part of the Eightfold Path called... sometimes called right effort or wise effort, and I'm translating it today as creative effort, the practice of creative effort. Maybe just to give a little bit of context, when the Buddha was awakened, when he had his awakening experience, his first teaching was, was the teaching of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. And the Four Noble Truths was his realization that, as he was trying to penetrate what it means to be a human being, what it means to be a human being in the midst of life and death, in the midst of old age, suffering, sickness, and death.

[09:44]

And the first of these noble truths is that there's no avoiding suffering. There's no avoiding difficulty and anxiety. And the second of the noble truths is that we are part of creating this suffering through our own attachment, through our own getting caught by our ideas. And the third is that there is a way to find peace. Peace and happiness right in the midst of our difficulty and suffering. So this is really the good news. People often think of Buddhist practice as being about suffering and dour. But really, Buddhism and Zen is the practice of finding peace and happiness and equanimity right in the midst of our own right in the midst of our own difficulty.

[10:47]

And the fourth of these Four Noble Truths is the Eightfold Path. And today, what I'm going to talk about for a few minutes is the sixth of the eight. It's called, as I said, Right Effort. And I'm going to talk about it as Creative Effort. Zen practice is not bound by any doctrine. And it's really about seeking a visceral encounter with the truth of our lives beyond all conventions. This is what the Buddha taught, and this is what, in particular, is the uniqueness of Zen. And Zen brought a way of waking things up. bringing things to life, awakening. Zen is about shaking up our lives.

[11:51]

Its message is to live deeply and truly and to see ourselves and life as life really is and as we really are. And this means that we have to start over, that each time we have to start over. We can't rely on being safe, on things that might have... worked in the past. We need to always be starting over. This is what the founder, the patriarch, the founder of Zen, Bodhidharma, when he said, when he was asked about what is Zen, his answer was empty without holiness. And this means that we can't rely on anything. Much of my life has been about integrating Zen practice and practice of leadership and practice of business.

[13:02]

For me, it came as quite a shock after living at... Zen Center for 10 years and Tassajara, waking up one morning 20-something years ago, being director of Tassajara, and realizing that what I was doing, in addition to being a Zen monk, was running a business. And this came as quite a shock to me. And I felt in some way that I needed to do what for me would be the most difficult... thing I could do and shake up my world. In some way, even being a Zen student, for me, had become a bit comfortable. And I needed to shake up that world, so naturally I went to business school. And this really did shake up my world. And then it didn't take long for the experiences for me of

[14:14]

life outside of the San Francisco Zen Center to shake up my world. This was back in New York, just outside of New York City. The very first job that I got was in a small restaurant looking for a waiter. They were looking for an experienced waiter. I thought to myself, well, I had done a lot of waiting tables at Tassajara. I was pretty good at putting stuff down on tables. So I went in and said I was an experienced waiter and got the job. And I think I lasted about 45 minutes. I was scrambling around. Basically, I was assigned to wait on eight or ten tables. It was lunchtime in this busy restaurant. I didn't know what I was doing. the owner came right up to me and said, you're fired.

[15:15]

You're clearly not an experienced waiter, and we don't have the time to train you as a waiter. And this, you know, I had just gone from being director of Tassahara, where... And I could feel there was a lot of ego for me in being director of Tassajara. Often doctors and lawyers would come up to me and say, boy, this is really what I want to be doing. If I were really serious about my life and practice, I would come here and be at Tassajara. And I felt really proud and really good. But then being fired as a waiter and having to go home and explain to my wife that... that I couldn't get a job as a waiter. This was terrific practice, which I highly recommend. So over these past many years, much of my life has been taking principles from Zen practice and trying to find how they work

[16:36]

in the context of business practice, in the context of our busy work lives. And I've been doing retreats out at Green Gulch and coaching and training and writing a book about this subject. And it's always a little hard for me in that, because in some way, what a strange idea that there'd be any difference between spiritual practice and practice of business or leadership, as though these are two separate things. I mostly don't think of these as being two separate things. But there may be some differences, some different kinds of ways to think of it. And so often I'm involved in taking these Zen principles and putting them into business practice. And a little bit of what I feel like I'm doing today I want to talk a little bit about some things that I've learned being out in the world of business and leadership that I think can be applied to Zen practice.

[17:47]

Isn't that a novel idea, that business might have something to teach the world of Zen and spirituality? And as I thought about this, though, I realized that these ideas, these practices that I'm going to talk about, and the way that I'm going to talk about the practice of right effort or creative effort. These are ideas and practices that were kind of pulled from spiritual practice and then have been kind of worked, and now I'm kind of teaching them as ways that come from the world of work that can be used in our daily practice. And I think of there being, so these are four particular practices for how we can practice with this right effort or creative effort. And the first of these four practices is to believe or have faith in your own creativity.

[18:54]

To believe or have faith in your own creativity. So this is a good question to ask yourself. Do you think of yourself as creative? Do you think of meditation practice as a creative practice? And this is one where I think meditation practice is an amazingly creative practice. The practice of sitting down, eyes open, gazing at a wall or at the floor, and just seeing what arises. Just being with whatever arises. So this is a way to look at meditation as an extremely creative practice. And also in Zen practice, we talk about way-seeking mind, or the idea, like when was it that you first thought of this idea of transforming your life, this idea that you could...

[20:07]

really find your own true nature, your own awakened self, that you became aware. When was the moment that you got in touch with some kind of conditioning, some sense that maybe a lot of the conventions that our parents told us or the teachers told us or that the world told us that maybe a lot of these things that we had taken in and accepted weren't true, weren't useful. And to be able to identify how we've taken in a variety of these ideas into our body, and the creative process involved in just letting these things, these ideas arise, and seeing our own creativity. I went... A couple weekends ago, I went to a piano recital over in Marin that was given by Louis Richmond, who's a Zen teacher there and also a terrific musician and pianist.

[21:17]

And he played a few notes from Bach, from Goldberg Variations. And he just played, he was trying to describe how it was that Bach wrote this music, these Goldberg Variations, and how it started with three or four or five ordinary notes, and Lou played these few notes, and said, you know, these notes by themselves are kind of boring. But then he said, if you just take these same exact notes and put just a slight twist in the music, suddenly these notes start to wake up. And then, he then began to play the full Goldberg Variations, and you could feel and hear that it was just these few notes that were being played in all these wonderful creative melodies. And he said, this is a lot like what our meditation practice is like. This is a lot like what Zen practice is like, that you sit down and start to pay attention to your own inner landscape.

[22:25]

And at first, it seems kind of boring, just a few notes here and there. But then, if you start to pay some more attention, these notes suddenly start to come alive. I was at a lunch yesterday where someone was telling me that one of the things that they do for a living is they lead wilderness trips all over the world to all these amazing places as a way of self-discovery. And I thought that, oh, that's what I do too. I lead wilderness trips to the inner discovery, to the inner... inner landscape, and that's really what Zen practice is, this wilderness trip to our own inner landscape and exploring our own inner landscape. So I want to ask you all to think about your own, how you think of yourself in terms of being creative. Most of my life, I never thought of myself

[23:30]

as being creative in any way. I generally thought of myself as being quite completely not creative, even downright boring. And then one day after I went to business school, I had this idea, this crazy idea of starting a greeting card and calendar company. And the next thing I knew, I was in charge of the creative team of artists and writers, and it was really pretty wonderful to see the power of them thinking that I was creative. It's a little bit like being in this seat, right? You all make me look good, or at least I hope I look good. That part of what happens here At Zen Center, we all take turns.

[24:33]

We all take turns making each other look really good. Sometimes I think, like when I was thrown into the kitchen back when I was in my early 20s, I didn't think I knew anything about how to cook or how to bake, but people had such trust and faith in my own creative ability that I found that I still didn't exactly think that I really knew how to cook or bake, but people just seemed to love the food and love the bread. And over and over again, it was this wonderful creative process and exchange. So I want to encourage you to not only to believe in your own creative ability, but to try on really believing and having faith in the creative ability of people around you, people in your life. particularly people who you love and who love you, your children and family, but anyone, to really believe in people's creativity.

[25:42]

The second practice of creative effort is to be aware of and not be caught by your own voice of judgment. This is the voice of the expert, the voice that This seems to be the human condition. I do a lot of coaching of executives and a lot of work with a lot of people, and nearly everyone that I've come in contact with has this voice. So if you think you're unique in having some voice of judgment, forget about it. As I say in New Jersey, forget about it. You're not unique in this at all. And the question is, what can we learn What can we learn from this voice of judgment, and how can we not get caught by it? The third practice of creative effort is the practice of precise observations. And precise observations.

[26:44]

And this is one of the things that's really built into Zen practice, is a sense of precision. Sometimes... Suzuki Roshi, the founder of these temples, used to say that in our practice we have rigid forms, but we have a very flexible, wide mind. And the relationship that many of us want to have some resistance to these rigid forms. One of my favorite... activities that I do here occasionally is teach meditation practice on Saturday mornings. One part of it that I like the best is after doing an introduction up here, taking people downstairs to the meditation hall and then realizing that in order to enter the meditation hall that I need to teach people how to bow and

[27:52]

and then start to go into the details of bowing, and I usually kind of almost laugh at myself as I tell people, well, here's how you bow. You put your hands together, and your hands should be at nose level, and they should be about a hand's width away from your nose, arms not flopping and not too rigid, that there's this... there's this amazing precision with this simple little activity of bowing. And then I would ask, there'd be 25 or 30 people, and I would ask them, okay, let's try it. Let's all bow. And it was just wonderful to watch people bow for the first time. That first time that you bow, it will never happen again. That first time will never happen again. And I say to people, Every time you come in the zendo, you come in and you bow.

[28:57]

And if you start coming in a lot, at some point you'll stop paying any attention to it, and you'll just do it automatically. And then that's part of our practice. How can we maintain a sense of precision and a sense of just how creative it is, this practice of... Bowing, putting our hands together in a way that has some precision to it. One of the things that the Buddha taught was that the way to release sorrow, the way to penetrate pain and grief, is to practice the practice of mindfulness. One way to describe mindfulness very simply is when you... When you take a long breath, notice that you're taking a long breath. When you take a short breath, notice that you're taking a short breath.

[30:00]

And then apply that to everything in your life. This kind of precision of noticing the activities of your life. And the fourth practice is the practice of penetrating questions, or insightful questions, or... what I like to call dumb questions. And this maybe is, I think, the best. Each of these four practices, in a way, includes all the others. But I think this one, particularly if you can have some belief in your own creativity, this practice of having the courage to ask dumb questions, to ask questions like... How can I love you? Help me. How can I love you? The question of what is my purpose? What am I doing here? The question of what's next?

[31:01]

What happens next? What do I do next? Whatever those questions that you have to be still enough and quiet enough to let some of those questions come up and to be willing to notice them and ask them. One of the questions I have for you is, do you have faith in your creative effort? What gets in your way? And what are some of the penetrating questions that would be most useful for you to ask about your relationships, your work, your life? Just the questions. Just let the questions come up without having to have answers. I want to read something, and then I want to leave a few.

[32:08]

Because of Buddha's birthday, there won't be a question and answer period as there normally is after the talk, so I'm going to try and leave a few minutes. There's not a lot of time left, but I hope to be able to have enough time for a question or two. I want to finish my part of the talk by reading something that my good friend and Dharma sister, Marcia Angus, who was just Chusot, gave me the other day. And I wonder if she read this here, The Way of Transformation. I wondered. I thought of asking her if she'd been reading it all practice period, but maybe not. I'm just going to read a piece. This is from someone named Carlfrid Graf von Durkheim. And I'm going to read a piece of a paragraph that's called The Way of Transformation that I think really captures the sense of creative effort and the sense of Zen practice.

[33:13]

Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows a woman or man to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble her. I'm just going to read this from the female point of view. Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows a woman to acquire a state of harmony and peace, wherein nothing can ever trouble her. On the contrary, practice should teach her to let herself be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken, and battered. That is to say, it should enable her to dare to let go of her futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain and a comfortable life in order that she may discover, in doing battle with the forces that oppose her, that which awaits her beyond the world of opposites. When this is possible, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and welcome the demons which arise from the unconscious.

[34:26]

a process very different from the practice of concentration on some object as a protection against such forces. So that's what von Durkheim had to say about practice. I think when we learn to let our nature free, the boundaries, these boundaries of opposites, these boundaries between teacher and student, between letting go and holding on, they can disappear. And we can feel a deep flow and joy and the unfolding of our own Buddha nature. We have approximately three minutes which is a lot of time in my world.

[35:27]

Is there a question or two that someone would like to ask or comments anyone would like to make? Yes. So that's great. Thank you. Yeah, I sometimes brag that I have a PhD in resistance. Yeah, I think, you know, I think of, again, wonderful expression from Suzuki Roshi that we all have just the right amount of problems.

[36:30]

That we all have, again, this is a kind of faith, that we all have just the right amount of problems. And how, you know, I think how we can really completely embrace and know and understand and penetrate that resistance. How can we, you know, I sometimes advise people to, literally, to have tea parties with your demons. Like if you can name, you know, the more you can actually name your resistance, what are your particular, you know, like I'm great at denial. Like I have a lot of tea parties with denial over and over again, you know, not wanting to see what is. Thank you for that. How about one other question? Does anyone have a burning question? Yes. I didn't have to pay him more than $10 to... The name of my book is called ZBA, Zen of Business Administration.

[37:41]

And I just yesterday received an offer to do another book called Accomplishing More by Doing Less, but I don't have time to write it. Okay. That's a tough question. I'd be happy to, well, I bet that if you do a search for Van Derkheim, this may show up. If not, come see me. I'll get you a copy of this somehow. That's right. This is probably from the book. Thank you, Blanche. From the book, The Way of Transformation. The Way of Transformation. This is a piece from a book. Thank you.

[38:43]

And thank you all very much. And happy Buddha's birthday.

[38:47]

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