Good morning. Thank you all so much for coming. I was thinking that the last time I spoke here, I had really just begun my Zen practice. I had moved in upstairs just a few weeks before, and I guess Paul must have invited me to give an informal student talk here one morning. And we were all just sitting on the ground in a circle, so much less formal. But still, I was very nervous. And I guess I'm still a little nervous. It's really a great privilege to be speaking here with all of you and sitting here where so many other, frankly, much better teachers have taught. It's humbling. And yet all that history at a Zen center like this is really just a tiny blip in the long history of our practice.

[01:02]

Imagine all of Buddha's history condensed into a single day. So Buddha's enlightenment occurs at dawn, and our present moment falls at dusk. The great teacher Bodhidharma would set off from India to China comfortably before lunch, and Ehe Dogen would bring his vision of Zen to Japan just in time for afternoon tea. There would be less than an hour of daylight left when the first Chinese immigrants brought Buddhism to America, and this temple would have been founded in those final 20 minutes before dark. We stand at the end of a very long journey. Today I want to talk a bit about something Buddhists have talked about throughout that history, which is the practice of meditation. It's possible Buddha himself would be a bit surprised to see how much we focus on meditation here and other Zen temples. Most of you probably know the broad outlines of Buddha's life story.

[02:09]

He was born an Indian prince. He led up a very sheltered life in a beautiful palace, surrounded by really every imaginable luxury. But then around the time of his 29th birthday, he ran away to become a wandering ascetic. He then spent six years crisscrossing India, practicing all sorts of austerities under the various noble teachers of the day, before he got fed up with that life too, convinced that it wasn't bringing him any answers to life's great questions. So at last he decided to just sit by himself and meditate. And that's when he had his epiphany, his awakening. That's when he earned the title of Buddha. And Buddha's first inclination at that point was to stop. He had done it. He had accomplished his great goal after all those years, all those years of effort. He was enlightened and he could finally stop his searching. But in the end, he decided to teach and he started gathering followers.

[03:15]

If you're wondering how we know any of this, how we know any of the history and words of Buddha himself, they were passed down orally by his students for several centuries, perhaps as much as 400 years. Buddha himself didn't There's no stories of him reading or writing at all. It's not clear even that he was literate. In those days, reading and writing were a specialized skill like carpentry or tailoring. You needed a few people in each village who knew how to do it, but it wasn't something everybody learned. But finally, his teaching started to be written down. By the time students decided to do this, Buddhism had spread across India and beyond. And it seems students in a few different spots started transcribing the oral tradition independently. In northern India, monks compiled Buddhist teachings into a dialect of Sanskrit. In what is now part of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the locals wrote it down in a language called Gandhari, which is where this great Buddha is from, also from around that time.

[04:22]

But the oldest complete collection we have comes from Sri Lanka. where the monks recorded it in the ancient language of Pali. They wrote it on palm leaves, which don't last very long. But when one set of leaves started falling apart, they would transcribe it onto a new set. And this process has continued uninterrupted to the present day. Of course, eventually people printed the texts on paper, but you can still find real palm leaf manuscripts in libraries in Burma, Thailand, other parts of Southeast Asia. We don't tend to focus that much on the Pali Sutras in Zen Buddhism, I think for a few reasons. First, if you look at a map of Asia, you can see that someone like our ancestor Bodhidharma, traveling from India to China, would never have stopped in Sri Lanka. It's just not on the way. Sri Lanka is an island to the south and China is to the north. So those early missionary monks carrying our tradition didn't have the Pali Canon with them.

[05:27]

They had those Sanskrit versions, which are a little different. Second, Zen grew out of this later Buddhist movement called the Mahayana, or Great Vehicle, which added a huge number of sutras to those original ones. To be fair, the early Mahayanists wouldn't describe it that way. They would say they discovered more of Buddha's original sutras, which had been hidden away by the gods for several centuries until people were ready to hear them again. This is even a little more confusing than it sounds, because as I mentioned, Buddha himself didn't write anything down, so someone else would have written it, had to write it down, and then hidden it. But I guess if you're positing the action of gods and such, you don't sweat those sorts of details. Anyway, regardless of when or how the Mahayana texts were written, in Zen we tend to focus much more on these later sutras, like the Heart Sutra that we chant every morning in our service. Most of the original Pali sutras are incorporated in these Mahayana sutras through these Sanskrit transcriptions.

[06:37]

But there are so many additional sutras that those older ones don't tend to get as much attention. And the full set of Mahayana sutras hasn't even been translated into English yet, which is maybe another reason why we don't study them. You can't buy a complete set of Mahayana sutras in English to keep in your home. There is actually a group trying to translate the whole set, I think over in the East Bay. But they're estimating it could take another hundred years to finish. And most of us aren't willing to wait. But beyond these practical considerations, another important factor is that our tendency in Zen is to focus on practice rather than study. It's not unusual to find even long-time Zen students who have never read much of the sutras beyond what we chant in our service. And I'm sympathetic to this. A lot of us are much more comfortable reading than meditating, and so sutra study can become a bit of a crutch. It's easy to get lost in the sort of intellectual exercise of studying the sutras, and we soon find ourselves mostly reading instead of just sitting.

[07:45]

But at the same time, I find reading Buddha's words can help me focus my practice and to understand why we practice. The sutras aren't puzzles to be solved or deciphered. They're basic instructions Buddha gave to his followers to help them find the same awakening he found. Of course, he found awakening without the sutras, simply through committed practice, and some of us find it that way too. But for others, certainly including me, we seem to need a bit more guidance. We can get that guidance from a living teacher at a temple like this, the sutras are another way to find that guidance. They are the guidance passed down from our original teacher. In the Pali Canon, we have the very first lecture Buddha gave after he decided to teach. And one thing that's interesting to me about this first lecture is that he barely talks about meditation at all. Although he experienced his own awakening after an all-night sit under that Bodhi tree, he doesn't tell this story in the first lecture.

[08:50]

I think if that first lecture was all you knew about Buddhism, you wouldn't think meditation or mindfulness was particularly important. Buddha starts this first lecture by describing the middle way, which is basically the path of avoiding the two extremes that he had followed in his life up until that point. The key to life is not to run away from suffering, as he did as a prince for his first 29 years, or to wallow in suffering, as he did as an ascetic for the next six years, but to navigate in between. At an intellectual level, you can think of this as not avoiding suffering and not courting suffering, but accepting it and dealing with it. Then he gets into a little more detail and explains that there are eight parts to this middle way path. We need to cultivate right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Buddha doesn't go into much detail beyond listing out these eight things. And here at the outset, it isn't clear that he considers mindfulness any more important than any of the others.

[09:53]

Then he walks us through what we now call the four noble truths, that while suffering exists and is inevitable, there is a path to accept and ultimately overcome it. And again, he explains that the way to overcome suffering is that same eightfold path. And that's it. That's the end of the first talk. I think it's probably less long than I've been speaking already today. Mindfulness is mentioned twice, but only toward the end of that list of his eight important parts of practice. And meditation is not mentioned explicitly at all. I mentioned before that Buddha had not wanted to teach at first. And the main reason he gave is actually the reason many of us have for not wanting to try something new. He thought he would fail. He thought no one would understand his teachings. And it turned out he couldn't have been more wrong. Because at the end of his first talk, the ascetics who heard it immediately experienced awakening themselves. Right then and there. So not only did he not emphasize meditation in his first talk, his first students didn't even have to meditate.

[11:01]

They could just listen to Buddha speak and experience awakening. You still hear stories of this happening now and then. And if it happens to any of you, come see me after the talk. But it is very rare. For most of us, it doesn't seem to work this way. Awakening doesn't just seem to come to us. We hear a talk, maybe even a very good one, and perhaps we have an aha moment or two. Perhaps we feel something click, but somehow it isn't enough. That feeling doesn't last. We go back to suffering pretty quickly. We don't find permanent liberation. Most of us seem to need something more than this sort of explanation Buddha gave to feel truly free. Over time, Buddha seemed to accept this. As he continued to teach, mindfulness and meditation started to take on a much more central place. Probably the best example of this is the Satipatthana Sutra, which can be translated roughly as the foundation of mindfulness teaching.

[12:07]

This is actually repeated twice in the Pali canon with only slight variation, and a Sanskrit version made its way into the Mahayana canon as well. This probably gives some sense of the importance those early Buddhist monks placed on this teaching. And it's here in the Satipatthana Sutra that Buddha explains that developing mindfulness is what he calls the direct path to realization. The rest of the Eightfold Path is important, but here he reveals that mindfulness is sort of the first among equals. There might be other paths to awakening, more roundabout routes, but if you want to get there quickly, mindfulness and specifically mindfulness meditation is the key. But why would mindfulness be any more important? than, say, right speech or right action in freeing us from suffering. If you step outside the Buddhist context for a moment, it isn't really obvious at all. Isn't mindfulness a state of mind? Surely our actions cause more suffering than our thinking.

[13:11]

We've all had the experience of causing suffering either to ourselves or to others, either intentionally or unintentionally, with our words and actions. but can we really cause suffering with our minds? And the answer is yes, we can. And we do all the time. Because mindfulness is sort of a linchpin for the rest of the Eightfold Path. There's really no way to cultivate right speech without paying attention to how we're speaking. There's really no way to cultivate right action without paying attention to what we're doing. Without mindfulness, we're stuck. like trying to follow Buddha's instructions in our sleep. Maybe this wasn't obvious to Buddha when he first started teaching, or on the other hand, maybe it was so obvious that he didn't even think he needed to explain it. But this is much of why we tend to focus on mindfulness in Buddha's practice today, because mindfulness is the key that unlocks that whole path.

[14:13]

And mindfulness turns out to be really hard. Our world is filled with distractions. But it's not just cell phones and screens that distract us. Because mindfulness was hard 2,500 years ago when Buddha lived. People struggled with distraction back then. And that wasn't just before cell phones and computers and television and radio. As I said, Buddha lived before paper. Just think about that for a moment. If you were to sit here and make a list of all your daily distractions, virtually none of them would even have existed in Buddha's time. And still, mindfulness and distraction was a real problem. So, what was distracting them? And the answer is pretty simple. Because it is the same thing that's actually distracting you. You aren't actually distracted by your phone or your noisy neighbors or rambunctious kids. You're distracted by your mind, just as Buddha was before his awakening. For most of us, overcoming that distraction isn't easy.

[15:16]

It wasn't easy centuries ago, and maybe it's even more difficult now. For most of us, mindfulness takes practice. And this is where meditation comes in. And this is actually the main focus of that Satipatthana Sutra. Because that is where Buddha explains how to use meditation to cultivate mindfulness. But now, by the way, we can sort out the relationship between three things that in sort of everyday speech sometimes get lumped together. mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhism. Buddhism, or what Buddhists would call the Buddha Dharma, is Buddha's path to awakening. Mindfulness is the foundation of that path, the essential piece that allows us to find it and follow it. And meditation is the practice to cultivate and develop that mindfulness. This is an important point. Meditation is the way we practice mindfulness. And I mean practice here literally. It's the same way we might use finger exercises to practice piano.

[16:19]

If you've ever tried learning piano as a kid, or if you've had the misfortune to listen to someone else practice piano, you know that practicing the piano is not the same as playing the piano. When we practice, we might hit the same few notes over and over and over again. We're developing this sort of muscle memory in our hands and training our minds to read the notes. But that's not playing the piano. It's the same with driving. You might practice driving in an empty parking lot or try to parallel park between two cones on a quiet street. But you're not really driving until you go out into traffic. And meditation is hard for most of us for the same reason practicing the piano is hard. It feels awkward and unnatural. Just as our fingers seem to have a mind of their own shooting off in all the wrong directions, our minds also seem to have minds of their own. We tell them to settle down and relax, but they don't listen. The instructions Buddha gave in the Satipatthana Sutra get a little complicated, but the essence is very similar to what you would hear at a Zen temple like this, or many others.

[17:27]

You find a quiet place, sit still and upright, and pay attention to your breathing. It sounds simple, but somehow it isn't. Meditation certainly never came easy to me. I remember a fellow student talking with me after I sat in my very first seshin, which was down at the Zen Center of Los Angeles with Meizumi Roshi many years ago. As most of you probably know, we hit these large bells at the start and end of every meditation period. And in a seshin, there are lots and lots of these periods. It's three bells at the start and then one or two at the end, depending on what's coming next. So you hear the bells, one, two, three. Then you sit still for usually 40 minutes, and then you hear the bells again. One, two. And for me, those 40 minutes in between could be very difficult. But this student that I was sitting with, he told me that he didn't experience the sittings that way at all.

[18:35]

The periods to him, the way he would feel them, experience them, he would hear the bells as one, two, three, four. There was no pause. The 40 minutes of silence after the third bell until the bell to end just went by in an instant. That period of sitting passed as if no time had passed at all. And I really hated that guy. Because for me, sitting was always a struggle, especially for long periods. My back would hurt, my knees would hurt, but more than that, my mind would drive me crazy. It would beg me to get up. It would cling to every imaginable distraction. If a song would wander into my head, I would go through the whole thing, every beat, every lyric, over and over, anything to just avoid sitting there by myself.

[19:38]

I remember another time here in this temple, sitting in Sashin, and I had Dokusan, a private interview with Paul Haller, who was just mentioned, was Tonto, who was the head of practice back then. And I think I basically just complained on and on, like 10 or 15 minutes of straight complaining, listing all the miserable pains and distractions I was having during these periods. And when I was done, Paul just sort of nodded his head, and he said, Dan, I forget sometimes how difficult sitting can be for you. Thanks, Paul. But like anything, meditation got easier with practice. And that seems to be true for most of us. We come back to the same basic instructions. With each breath in, we're aware that we're breathing in. With each breath out, we're aware we're breathing out.

[20:39]

We're aware of long breaths and short breaths, quick breaths and slow breaths. And it's not just a mental awareness, it's a physical awareness, too. We feel ourselves breathing. We notice the way the breath enters our bodies and leaves our bodies. We feel it against our mouth or nose. We notice the way our chest rises and falls. From there, we begin to cultivate mindfulness of our entire bodies. When we sit, we're aware of our whole body sitting. We feel each point where our body touches the ground beneath us. We feel our legs folded against each other. We feel our arms resting on our lap. We notice the air against our skin, and we feel this air, warm or cold, still or moving. And finally, we start to take our mindfulness practice off the cushion. Buddha says when we walk, we should be aware we're walking.

[21:41]

When we stand, we should be aware we're standing. When we sit again or lie down, we should be aware of our bodies there too, our whole bodies. Walking, we feel the way each part of our foot touches the earth, the way our weight shifts with every movement, the way our bodies respond to every step and every breath. How powerful are these mindfulness meditations? Buddha thought they were pretty powerful. In that Satipatthana Sutra, he starts by stating that anyone who practices these mindfulness meditations for even just seven years will be guaranteed awakening. That's pretty good. I mean, if you think about that, seven years might sound long, but we spent 12 years in grade school, four just in high school. And what do we have to show for that? My daughter, younger daughter, is a senior in high school right now, and she'd be the first to tell you that it's not that much. And many of us spend another four or five years in college just to prepare for a job.

[22:43]

Buddha is saying that in just seven years of practice, we can do so much more than that. We can unlock the key to overcome all suffering. We can literally find nirvana. And then here in the sutra, despite Buddha's enlightened state, Buddha established himself as a truly terrible negotiator because he immediately starts bargaining against himself. Maybe six years would be enough. Or maybe five or four. And he gets all the way down to one year. And then he decides even that is too much. And says maybe just seven months would be enough. Or six. And he gets all the way down to one month and then half a month until finally he settles on seven days. And that's it. That's as low as he'll go. But if we can fully practice mindfulness meditation for just seven days, we are guaranteed awakening. And that's a good deal.

[23:46]

But how is it possible? How can practicing these exercises for seven days or even seven years bring us closer to that awakening? Again, it's like the analogy with the piano. Over time, by practicing mindfulness this way, in meditation, we start to bring that mindfulness into our daily lives. We may not be aware of every breath or every step throughout the day, but we stop sleepwalking through our days too. That awareness we cultivate in here starts to manifest itself out there. And that mindfulness makes the rest of Buddha's Eightfold Path possible out there too. We start practicing right speech in our daily lives because we're mindful of the way our speech affects others. We start practicing right action because we're mindful of the consequences of our actions. And on and on. That mindfulness is the key to the rest of the path. Let me be clear, I can't promise seven days will be enough.

[24:50]

It certainly hasn't been enough for me. Some people take to the piano more quickly than others. Some may never become virtuosos. But you can be sure that all start with practice. That's why we come to temples like this. This is where we can start to cultivate that mindfulness that we can then bring into our everyday lives. This is why we sit in meditation, both here, at home. It isn't easy, but it is possible. That's another reason to read the old sutras now and then. They remind us that others have walked this path, that others have been walking it for centuries. they were able to develop enough mindfulness to truly wake up and realize enlightenment. And if they can do it, we can too. Tomorrow is the start of Women's History Month.

[25:52]

And so before I close, I want to jump back for a moment to where I started, with that image of Buddhist history as a single day, where Buddha's awakening is at dawn and we sit here now at dusk. The first Westerners would not ordain until the sun had already begun to dip well below the horizon. But women would have ordained in the first 15 minutes. And the words of those first Buddhist nuns, students of Buddha himself, are preserved in that Pali canon. Those bits didn't make it into the Sanskrit, but you can find old translations of the Pali canon. downstairs in our library here. And I thought I would end here with the words of Puna, who ordained at age 20, and whose words are kept in that polycanon. She practiced all her life. And I thought I'd read from a new adaptation of that scripture, which was just published by Shambhala, and which Takuto has available in the bookstore.

[27:01]

Fill yourself with Dharma. When you are as full as the full moon, first open. Make the dark night shine. Thank you.

[27:22]

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