Good morning. Before I begin my talk this morning, I want to remind you that there's a one-day sitting next Sunday. It's a little soon after our five-day Sashin. But I think it's very good for people who haven't sat a long sitting before. When we have a sitting on Sunday, it's usually shorter than usual and it ends around five-thirty or so, six. So it's really a good opportunity for new people, for someone who hasn't sat before to experience for the first time a longer extended Zazen practice.

[01:01]

So I encourage you to Today, this morning, we had our monthly Founder's Ceremony for Suzuki Roshi, our founder and teacher. And usually that Founder's Ceremony comes on the evening of the 3rd and the morning of the 4th. founder's ceremony on the 5th and 6th instead. So since we had the founder's ceremony this morning, I thought that I would talk a little bit about Suzuki Roshi and maybe read a little bit from one of his talks. When Suzuki Roshi came to America in, I think it was 1959 or 60, there was almost nothing.

[02:33]

Actually, there was no Zen around the Bay Area. people started sitting with him after they found out he was around. And Suzuki Hiroshi's way was to always stay where he was. At that time in the 60s, after around 1964, there were other teachers who came to America, but they would just go around giving sashins mostly, holding sashin. And for a long period, sashin is maybe five or seven days of practice, zazen. And we used to call them jet set roshis. Their teaching was good, but their style was different than Suzuki roshi.

[03:37]

And they'd fly back and forth from Japan to America and then fly to New York and all over the country holding sushis. And there were many students who used to also follow them around just doing sushis. And Suzuki Roshi's way was very different. Suzuki Roshi emphasized ordinary, everyday practice. So there were two different styles, two different approaches. One was a kind of Sachine style, which was very pushing practice, practice to gain some breakthrough and have some Kensho experience. And Suzuki Roshisoi was more even. in everyday and consistent and constant.

[04:39]

So what Suzuki Roshi emphasized was constancy and consistency in everydayness, more than having some kind of special experience. He said, if you have some special experience, that's okay, that's good. to think that your practice depends on having some unusual experience is deceptive. So our practice has evolved from Suzuki Roshi's steady daily practice way, which is not actually so easy to do.

[05:47]

But Suzuki Roshi emphasized that our practice should be completely one with our daily life, to the point where you couldn't see it as something special. So in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, there's an excerpt from a talk which is entitled here, Zen and Excitement. He says, my master died when I was 31. Although I wanted to devote myself just to Zen practice at Ehhe Monastery, I had to succeed my master at his temple. I became quite busy, and being so young, I had many difficulties.

[06:49]

These difficulties gave me some experience, but it meant nothing compared with the true, calm, serene way of life. When Suzuki Roshi was 31, his master died. And before he died, he asked the members of the temple to have him succeed, to have Suzuki Roshi succeed him. And the members of the temple were very reluctant because he was so young. And, you know, when you have a teacher who's been in a place for a long time, very difficult to have someone else replace that person, especially some very young person. So the congregation actually rejected him. And then the teacher said, well, just give him a year.

[07:53]

Give him some trial period of a year or some short period of time, some period of time like that. And so they said, OK. And so after that time, they decided they liked him. he became the abbot of the temple. So that's what he's talking about here. And it became very busy. If you're the abbot of a temple, you're very busy. Especially in Japan, because in Japan they have family temples. And the temples They have many families connected with them. There's a student of mine who left in the 70s and became a rabbinical student.

[09:00]

And he returned just a few months ago to be the rabbi of a congregation in San Francisco. And he says, this congregation is 500 families. And he says, I think I'm going to be very busy. And I said, yes, you'll be very busy. It's just like in Japan. We're very unique. Zen in America is very unique. We have this daily practice. The priest doesn't so much take care of the families, but just takes care of the people who are here. It's very different. So he says, it is necessary for us to keep the constant way. Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.

[10:09]

I don't know if routine is a good word, but he says routine. If you become too busy and too excited, your mind becomes rough and ragged. This is not good. If possible, try to be always calm and joyful, and keep yourself from excitement. Usually, we become busier and busier, day by day, year by year, especially in our modern world. If we revisit old, familiar places after a long time, we are astonished by the changes. It cannot be helped. But if we become interested in some excitement or in our own change, we will become completely involved in our busy life and we will be lost. But if your mind is calm and constant, you can keep yourself away from the noisy world, even though you are in the midst of it. In the midst of noise and change, your mind will be quiet and stable. Zen is not something to get excited about. Some people start to practice Zen just out of curiosity, and they only make themselves busier.

[11:14]

If your practice makes you worse, it is ridiculous. I think that if you try to do Zazen once a week, that will make you busy enough." He's being very kind, very lenient. "'Do not be too interested in Zen. When young people get excited about Zen, they often give up schooling and go to some mountain or forest in order to sit. That kind of interest is not true interest. Just continue in your calm, ordinary practice, and your character will be built up. If your mind is always busy, there will be no time to build, and you will not be successful, particularly if you work too hard on it. Building character is like making bread. You have to mix it little by little, step by step, and moderate temperature is needed. You know yourself quite well, and you know how much temperature you need. You know exactly what you need. But if you get too excited, you will forget how much temperature is good for you, and you will lose your own way.

[12:16]

This is very dangerous. Buddha said the same thing about the good ox driver. The driver knows how much load the ox can carry, and he keeps the ox from being overloaded. You know your way and your state of mind. Do not carry too much. Buddha also said that building character is like building a dam. You should be very careful in making the bank. If you try to do it all at once, water will leak from it. Make the bank carefully and you will end up with a fine dam for the reservoir. Our unexciting way of practice may appear to be very negative. This is not so. It is a wise and effective way to work on ourselves. It is just very plain. I find this point very difficult for people, especially young people, to understand. On the other hand, it may seem as if I am speaking about gradual attainment. This is not so either. In fact, this is the sudden way, because when your practice is calm and ordinary, everyday life is enlightenment.

[13:19]

So here, Suzuki Roshi is making an effort to emphasize the ordinariness of practice, and he's saying not to push too hard, not to do too much, and to balance zazen with the other activities of your life. And I always tell this to people when they start practicing. People ask me, well, how much zazen should I do? How much should I practice? Or what kind of activity should I do in order to practice? And what I always emphasize is, that you have to balance your Zazen practice with the rest of your activities so that your whole life becomes harmonious around Zazen.

[14:36]

If you do Zazen, then it's inevitable that Zazen becomes the center of your life. Even if you only do it once a week, if you really do zazen wholeheartedly, correctly, then it has to become the center of your life because our life centers around stillness. All activity centers around stillness. So when we sit, our life centers around stillness in a very dramatic way. So, and all of our activity comes out of the stillness.

[15:38]

And no matter what we're doing, we're always, all of our activity is always coming out of stillness. And stillness and activity are the two sides of our life, which can't really be separated. So in stillness, sitting in stillness is great dynamic activity. within the dynamic activity of our life is profound stillness. But if Zazen is just one of the other activities that you do, then it doesn't mean so much. But we don't have to do some special activity.

[16:56]

Zazen looks like a special activity. Looks like an unusual thing. But once we practice over and over again, Zazen becomes quite usual. And we don't think of it as an extraordinary thing that we do. or some special kind of activity that we do. It's just a usual activity in our life, like eating. You know, we eat breakfast at a certain time, and we eat lunch at a certain time, and we eat dinner at a certain time, and we don't think so much about it. We don't think these are unusual activities. We eat breakfast in order to nourish ourselves physically, and it sits us in, in order to nourish ourselves spiritually, so to speak.

[18:06]

So, in the same way that we eat breakfast at a certain time and eat lunch at a certain time, any dinner at a certain time, we sit zazen at a certain time, in a certain way, and it becomes part of our usual activity. So we don't sit zazen in order to have some special experience. some extraordinary experience, but extraordinary experience is just a contrast. We say, oh, I had an extraordinary experience, but the extraordinary experience you had is just a contrast to your usual experience. When you have the extraordinary experience, then you just get used to that.

[19:11]

we will always have extraordinary experiences in our life. And if we continue to sit zazen, we will undoubtedly have extraordinary experiences. But we may have an extraordinary experience in which we see how life is completely one piece. But if we just continue to sit zazen, it will become clear that our life is one piece, or a piece with everything. So some people may need to have some extraordinary experience. in order to see a contrast in their life. But someone else may not need to have an extraordinary experience.

[20:23]

Not necessary. There are various types of people. Some people are doubters, and others are faith types. Faith types usually don't need extraordinary experience, but doubters often do. need some kind of experience in order to turn their consciousness. But in Soto Zen, or in our practice, I don't want to say Soto Zen, in our practice, Sugiyoshi used to say it's like walking in the fog. Your clothes become wet. You reach down and feel you're close. You didn't know that you were getting wet, but there you are. So our practice of zazen in our daily life are not two different things.

[21:38]

And when our practice becomes so ordinary, that there's no difference between eating breakfast and going to the Zen Dojo, sitting Zazen. Then you have your true practice. So in the early, in the 60s, many of the teachers who came to this country emphasized having some special experience. And they really pushed very hard, it's a shame to have some very special experience. But so many of those special experiences People were neglecting to see the reality of their daily lives or the worth of their moment by moment daily life.

[23:03]

You know, if you're always looking for something else, it's hard for us to appreciate what we have or where we are or what we're doing. So the more you try to look for something special, the harder it is to see the value of where we are or what we have. So Suzuki Roshi emphasized appreciating moment by moment. just appreciating our life moment by moment, no matter whether it's happy or unhappy, or good or bad, or we like it or we don't like it. Whatever is appearing on each moment is our life, which is to be appreciated beyond the experience of enlightenment.

[24:41]

And this steady, calm, steady, settled mind which runs through all activities. So that no matter how things are going on the edge of your life, in the center, there's always stillness, which runs through all of our activity. This is Zazen. That's why when we sit, whatever happens, we become more and more calm and still, rather than agitated and excited. So to always be within our calm, still mind,

[25:43]

no matter what's going on. This is to practice Azen continuously. People say, well, how do I practice when I'm gone from here? I come to the Zendo and sit Azen, and then I leave, and then the world is just full of constant motion, and I get lost. we always have to keep coming back to calmness of zazen. So we practice zazen wherever we are, moment by moment, in every situation. Some situations are very difficult to handle, but this is the great challenge of our life and test of our practice in any situation. Where are you? So, in zazen, we don't make some kind of progress as far as change goes, but our zazen becomes deeper and deeper, until we find the very depth of our being.

[27:15]

So this is what Suzuki Roshi is talking about. He's not very demonstrative, and he doesn't make a lot of promises, and he doesn't offer some wonderful, exciting thing. He just says, be calm and steady. Don't let anything upset you. Sounds very simple, but it's very deep and very profound. Yesterday I was in a record store and I saw a videotape of Toscanini conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that was made when he was conducting the NBC orchestra 20, 30 years ago, 40 years ago.

[28:48]

And he hardly moved at all. He was hardly... he wasn't... he just had the minimum movement. Just little gestures. And now very undemonstrative. I was rather surprised. He was very calm and completely at ease. It was a very famous recording because it really brought the whole thing to life in a way that nobody else had done before. So one thing that Suzuki Roshi emphasized

[30:00]

was doing the same practice over and over again, just two zazen over and over again as a daily practice. And I've been doing that for 27 years. And one of the problems with that is that you get into a kind of routine and you can only take care of certain aspect of life, certain aspects of life. Whatever, you know, Suzuki Yoshi suggested or emphasized a kind of narrow practice that in order to really understand yourself, you have to have some limitation in your life.

[31:02]

If you want to just do everything that comes along, then you just get carried away and it's very hard to understand yourself. So he said, in order to understand yourself, you have to have a narrow, circumscribed, limited activity. And within the limitation, you can investigate in a very deep way. But if you don't have some fence or some limitation, it looks like freedom, but you really get lost. So real freedom comes from living your life within a certain limitation. But when you live your life within a limitation, it's true what he says, but I've been doing that for a long time and I can only, there's certain things I can't take care of when I do that.

[32:21]

Especially since an abbot at Zen Center in San Francisco, in Tassajara, and maybe that's what he meant. We should limit ourselves without too many activities. Maybe I've extended myself too much, even though I thought it was all the same activity. But when we have this routine, I can only take care of so much. And there's certain kinds of things that I can't take care of because of that. So for the first time in many, many years of practice, I'm going to stop doing what I'm doing for a couple of months. From the 20th of July until around the 15th of December.

[33:30]

No. I'm going to not have any schedule. I'm just going to do the opposite of what I've always done. I'm not going to schedule anything in a routine way. I'm just going to do what I feel I want to do that I haven't been able to do because of following my routine practice. I think it's necessary for me because there's certain... I can go to Zazen and I can give Doksan and I can think of lectures and so forth, but there's certain areas that cross over those scheduled times, which I just cannot, I've never been able to take care of. So, that's what I want to do for those two months.

[34:35]

And I can spend all day with somebody, or I can study for a week without being interrupted. I can go somewhere. So I'll be around, but in a different way. And so it's a kind of experiment for me, because my term as abbot at Zen Center is coming up at the end of this year. And I will probably continue for another three years, but I don't want to do it in the same way I've been doing. And so I have to figure out how to do it. And so these two months, I hope to figure it out how I want to do it. And so that's my plan.

[35:37]

So I believe in what Suzuki Roshi says, but every once in a while you have to do something else. Do you have any questions? About anything? Andrea? As you were talking, I thought of a new name for Zen practice, mud wrestling. How did you come to that? Because I always seem to be just wrestling with this kind of stuff that you can't come down. It's neither the earth, it's neither water, it's all sort of, you know. There's a word, you know, for the elusiveness. Japanese word, which I don't remember the word, but it's the word for a fish. out of water that's, you know, flapping around and you try to grab it.

[36:47]

Rebecca? Then the sangha is our muddy buddies. Our muddy buddies. I won't take it any further than that. I had a question, there's a little passage in there where he brings up the subject, you know, of if sin practice makes things worse, you know, it shouldn't do that, or something. Now I'm wondering if he really, if he ever said more about that topic, you know, whether in some cases the sin practice by I don't know, by bringing a different perspective, or shaping things loose, or requiring a different sort of discipline, whether it clarifies things, but in the process, there are periods, I mean, I think maybe everybody's experienced that, where things get worse rather than better, but they're getting better, but you can't see it, because things are brought to a head in some way.

[38:06]

Well, there are two things that you're talking about. One is trying to do more than you can. And the other is that life is not so predictable. And that we often go into a kind of confusion or tailspin, but then it pulls out. the little airplane finds itself. And that's, those are two different things, I'd say. See them as two different things. Here, he's talking about, don't quit your job. Don't stop going to school. Do as you can, you know, so that you're not changing your life radically in order to practice.

[39:08]

This is what he's telling people. Some people, at some point, should change their life radically to practice. But he's talking to people in general. He came to America, and all these people wanted to practice, and they were saying, well, how shall I do it? And they're from all walks of life, and all ages, situations. And he's saying, don't quit what you're doing. Folks, just stay right there and practice Zazen according to how you can. Then, little by little, the practice evolved and a lot of young people went to Tassajara and started practicing as priests and so forth. But still, has laid people to keep the balance of your life and not let this be a burden to you, right?

[40:12]

But your life should be enhanced, not overburdened by it. That's what he's saying. So he was concerned about people getting very enthusiastic and kind of throwing everything else over the enthusiastic, throwing everything aside and plunging in. I said, don't do that. And take care of your wife, you know. Don't think because I get up in the morning and go to Zazen that my wife is lazy or your husband is lazy. He said, You're sitting Zazen early in the morning and your wife is doing Zazen in bed, or your husband is doing Zazen in bed, doing his Zazen or her Zazen. So, don't become discriminating in that way.

[41:21]

You should take care of yourself and a great compassionate understanding for everyone else, and not try to force everyone else to practice. Well, he's not saying you should try to force some special state of mind on yourself.

[43:19]

But if you practice in this way, then joyful mind will arise as a result. So, you know, a lot of times people think that if you're a Zen student, He should not smile or be very stern and strict and serious. So he's just giving, you know. Joyful mind doesn't mean to try to cultivate or try to impose something, but It's a kind of sweetness of mind. A sweetness of disposition.

[44:25]

If you have a sweetness of disposition, then you usually have a joyful feeling. No matter whether things are going this way or going that way. Because joy has many different aspects. But deep joy doesn't depend on circumstances so much. Deep joy is like a kind of river that runs through our life. And on top of that is sadness and happiness and all the events of our life. But the deep joy is an aspect of the calmness of mind. During your two-year absence, you're welcome to visit us at any time.

[45:30]

Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll take you up on it. I was going to give you this. That's what you told me to do. There are two words that I would like to mentioned here. One is a word that you have used before as a synonym for the calmness and stillness at the center. And I really love that word. It's imperturbability, which strikes me as even more exact for Anything that happens that comes at you or doesn't come at you, you are not perturbed and knocked off your base, either with ecstatic joy or with a great tragedy that we decide we're not perturbed.

[46:36]

The other word that I would like a little amplification from you, Howard's question is connected to what I was going to. The word I heard was appreciation. that no matter if things are good or bad for you, like or dislike, you appreciate your life. It's not the same as being joyful about it. Well, there are different words that bring out the different subtleties. So if you don't like what's happening, how does that appreciation feel? You don't like what's happening. But you don't say, gee, I really appreciate this. Nevertheless, because our real life is not so attached to circumstances, we still have some place to go.

[47:49]

I don't know if I can explain it exactly, but even while completely engaged, responsibly, the activity, whatever it is, still it's with non-attachment. And that really makes us appreciate our life. If we have that, we can really appreciate our life. Not attached.

[49:05]

Attachment is also part of our life. But we have some freedom within our feelings, within our thoughts. That's called non-attachment, is to have that freedom without escaping. So if you have some pain in your legs, probably you do right now, you can still appreciate your life. Because that's not all there is.

[50:11]

So what we say is, I don't like this. As soon as we say, I don't like this, then we have attachment. And then you say, how can I get out of this? Because you feel caught. So how can we live our life moment by moment, given all the activities that we engage in, and still have freedom within each activity, no matter what happens to us? That's the practice.

[51:21]

That's called equanimity, imperturbability, joyful life. So that in the midst of whatever happens, whether it's good or bad, we're not a victim of life. Peace.

[52:41]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ