Wonderful zendo, especially sitting here. I've never seen it from this side. And it's also nice because, maybe because of the rain, I guess I'm kind of nostalgic. And I remember that the first priest I ever had practice discussion with, formal practice discussion, was Mel, 14 years ago. And I was so nervous that I came in there to see him and he had to tell me to breathe deeply because I couldn't speak. But 14 years later, here I am. I'm still a bit nervous. I don't have to breathe deeply so much anymore. I wanted to talk about Zazen this morning because I love Zazen a lot and so I want to talk about my love. And the main point I want to make somehow is that Zazen practice, Zazen is very simple. It's probably a lot simpler than most of us realize.

[01:00]

If we go to Japan and ask for Zazen instruction at a monastery in Japan, it often happens that you don't get any instruction at all. You show up at the gate and you say you want to learn to sit sazan and they'll put you on a cushion facing the wall and leave you there. And they might leave you there for years. And there's something really wonderful about that kind of instruction because I think as we grow up we acquire all this conditioning and all these ideas about who we are and what we should be doing from our culture, from our families. And Zen practice is more about shedding some of those cultural conditionings rather than assuming even more. And so if you come to a Zen temple and they give you even more ideas about life and even more ideas about who you are and what you should be doing, it's just adding more baggage to it all. So just to come and show up and not to be told anything is maybe the purest way. But they realized in Japan after a while, especially in kind of more recent decades, that this didn't work so well.

[02:10]

And people would spend years in the monastery not knowing what they were doing there. And kind of struggling along. So now in some monasteries in Japan and also in a lot of temples here in the West, they give kind of preliminary instructions. They give instructions. You come in and you're told how to sit in a certain posture, Zazen posture, and often we're told to follow the breath and the counter-breath. And in some ways, I mean, that's all we need to learn is to stay with the posture and stay with the breath. But in some ways, a lot of people have the idea, especially in Japan, that counting the breath and following the breath is a preliminary practice. It's preliminary to give you enough stability and calm so that you can do Shikantaza. And Shikantaza is really, that's where the meat of Zen is. And Soto Zen is doing this practice called Shikantaza. And because there's this dichotomy between preliminary

[03:14]

instruction and actually sitting in this pure Shikantaza, Shikantaza sometimes attains a status of being very ultimate, being very difficult and hard practice. And some of the Western literature on Shikantaza kind of add to that kind of feeling that Shikantaza is an extremely difficult thing to do. And in Japan, the status of Shikantaza is so exalted that Japanese monks won't talk about it, because there's nothing to say about it, so they don't talk about it at all. I talked to a Japanese Soto Zen professor, scholar, last spring, and I was asking him questions about Shikantaza, and he would give me kind of standard responses about how it's, you know, there's no intention, no purpose, just pure sitting, choiceless, purposeless kind of sitting. And I'd ask him various questions. And his answers were all kind of unsatisfactory. And I kind of pursued the questions so much mischievously.

[04:16]

And he didn't really know what he was talking about. And finally, he finally said to me, you know, the subject of Shikantaza is taboo in Japan. And no one talks about it. And partly, you know, if you talk about it, if you have to talk about it, then you don't know it. Kind of the whole thing. So he said that's been changing a little bit, especially among professors in the last 10 years. They're beginning to venture into this very dangerous territory to talk about Shikantaza. And he said among the monks in Japan, they're still not interested to talk about it so much. And maybe that's a very kind of gross generalization about Japan and the state of Shikantaza in Japan. But I think it's true. And I saw even at Zen Center, people at some points were very reluctant to talk about their zazen, feeling if you talked about it, you're somehow missing the point. Anyway, so I want to venture into this area and talk about Shikantaza.

[05:18]

And this is my view of Shikantaza. And I think, again, Shikantaza is eminently a simple thing. It's difficult and it's kind of exalted because it's so simple, just an incredibly simple thing to do. And one angle that I thought of talking about Shikantaza today was to say that a Zen practice, Shikantaza, is a practice of purifying our relationship to what's going on. And that when you're sitting in Zazen, It doesn't matter at all what's going on in a realm of experience. And it doesn't matter if we get calm, if we get concentrated, if we have deep insight, if we're agitated, if we're angry, if we're depressed. None of those things have any bearing to do on what Shikantaza is about. All those things happen in the context of sitting. And what really kind of the heart is, what's our relationship to it? How are we receiving this experience and what are we doing with it? And I think that the purification of a relationship to what's going on is coming in some sense to a place of non-reactivity, where we could just be present for what's happening.

[06:36]

And that's all we are, without any aversion, any pushing away, any dislike of what's going on, and any desire, any pulling and holding on to what's going on. Just simply staying there, kind of in the middle, without any pushing or holding. and allowing whatever comes up in our experience to simply be there in an open and friendly way. It means just simply, very simple way, just being in the present and staying in the present with whatever our experience is, and our experience changes all the time. I think of all my years of Zen practice, one of the lessons that I've learned, one of the things I'm very grateful for, is to have learned that the present moment, the present is a place that we can trust. It's a very deeply trustable place, just to be very carefully and completely in the present. And I kind of, we have, we often in Buddhism, we take the triple refuge.

[07:39]

We say, I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, and I take refuge in the Sangha. And I kind of reworded it for myself. And the triple refuge is, I take refuge in the present, and I take refuge in the present, and I take refuge in the present. And I think that in some ways it is difficult to do this kind of practice, just to be present in whatever is going on in the realm of experience without choosing it at all. without trying to manipulate it and become something different than who we are. It's actually kind of difficult. And one of the reasons it's difficult is it can be very painful at times. If we just completely open ourselves up to experience our full humanity, our full life, anything can happen. Anything. The whole realm, what happens in our daily life outside of sitting, will pass through ourselves and experience. And that means there are times, there are times when we're very calm and concentrated and joyful and wonderful things happen to us.

[08:44]

And there are also times when it's very painful. Deep-seated holding patterns start becoming released, and we feel depressed, we feel a lot of despair, we might want to cry. All kinds of things might happen. I've noticed that a lot of Zen students feel like it's not okay to cry during Zazen. I think that if our Zazen is really full, if our Shikantaza is really full of our life, really present for our life. Sometimes we'll cry, also. And sometimes we'll be happy. Maybe sometimes we'll laugh. And it's difficult to stay in the present moment. I think our mind has a tendency... I think sometimes it's like a Polaroid camera. And reality is just flowing along nicely on its own. And our mind takes a snapshot of this and makes kind of an instant photograph. And then we go around holding on to the instant photograph we have for a while, rather than kind of keeping up with the flow and how things are developing and opening up, how things are unfolding.

[09:54]

And I think that I've seen in myself, and I've seen in a lot of other Zen students, that there could be times in our practice where actually we avoid the present moment. Actually, in some ways, maybe not consciously, but actually quite actively. And I think one of the most common ways to avoid the present is sleeping And I think a lot of older students have been around for a while probably have spent probably Probably almost fallen asleep a few times during Zazen And there's many reasons why we fall asleep during Zazen But in talking to a lot of people about their experiences and also in my own I would kind of venture to guess that maybe 50% of the time, 50% of the reason why we fall asleep in the zazen is because there's some kind of internal mechanism, some kind of internal, maybe kind of protective mechanism to protect ourselves from opening up to some deep, painful area in our life. And sitting and being in the present and being very open

[10:58]

As I said, things can unravel, things that we don't know about, old-seeded pains. And sometimes they can be overwhelming. And one way to avoid being overwhelmed by this difficulty is to fall asleep. And sometimes people will stay asleep for a long time in their zazen practice until slowly whatever pain they have or difficulty they have can slowly surface and be worked out in its own way. And in some sense, maybe this kind of falling asleep has some kind of wisdom to it, and the wisdom of not being overwhelmed more than we can handle. But I think that if we can really trust the present moment, and really trust what's going on, and trust that it's okay to feel difficulty, that these things will work themselves out quite naturally and quite quickly. Another way that people avoid being in the present is daydreaming. And I think all of us in our Zazen practice are quite familiar with thoughts and the way that thoughts can take us away somehow from the present moment.

[12:03]

But I've noticed that sometimes if the daydreams and the thoughts and the planning of the future are quite strong and continue for a long time, then that's often a sign of avoidance, that there's something more subtle, deeper going on, some kind of fear and anxiety and worry, and that the daydreams are a way of avoiding touchings and being present for that fear. And we kind of go off and off for days sometimes thinking about some plan, thinking about some talk we have to give. And there's another way which Zen students avoid the present. This is not exactly avoiding the present, but that's becoming concentrated. And there's a lot of talk about concentration, I think, in Zen circles. And it's my opinion that concentration is overrated in Zen. Especially concentration is kind of fixed. Fixed concentration on some particular object.

[13:05]

And that could be fixed concentration on our posture. It can be fixed concentration on our breath. So concentration is fixed on something and not really open to receive all the experiences around us and inside of us. And I know I've used my concentration to avoid difficulties and pains. And I know other people have too. It's very easy. Once you kind of get a knack of being concentrated. I've had a lot of physical pain at times. For example, in my knees. And I wanted to avoid it. I wanted to avoid the pain. And I avoided it by getting really concentrated on my breath. By getting really focused on the breath, my body somehow begins to dissolve and kind of disappear. And there's no pain. But that's a kind of avoidance of the presence. In some ways I'm very much in the presence, very much in the presence of that breath, but it's avoiding everything else. And it's also possible to do that with our emotions and our feelings, is to rest there on our breath and concentrate it away and not really experience our full life. And there's a very famous Zen story that I think kind of illustrates this, of how it's easy to avoid our life in many, many years of practice.

[14:06]

the story of a monk who lived in a little hermitage up in the hill behind the house of an old woman. And she took care of him. She was his benefactor. And for 20 years, she took care of him and gave him this hut to live in. Every day brought him food. And for 20 years, this monk was sitting up there meditating. This woman wanted to know what what progress this monk had made in his practice, what benefit he had, what had happened in these 20 years. And so she sent up her beautiful daughter up to tempt the monk. Sent up the monk with a tray of food and said, please go up there and try to seduce that monk and see what he does. So she went up there, the beautiful daughter went up there and she gave him the food and she laid her head down on his lap. And I kind of looked up at him very seductively and said, how's this? And I don't quite remember.

[15:08]

I'm going to have to look at my notes, too. I want to get it right. So this is what he said. The withered tree is rooted in an ancient rock in bitter cold. There is no warmth and no life. The bitter tree is rooted in ancient rock in the bitter cold. So that's kind of a pretty strong thing to say to anybody, whether she's trying to seduce you or not. And that's what the old woman thought when the daughter came back and repeated what the monk had said. And the old woman got furious at 20 years of supporting this monk, and that's all she got. It was this cold, lifeless, warmless monk. So she ran up to the monk and kicked him out and burned down the hut. And I think maybe that, you know, maybe they're both wrong a little bit.

[16:12]

I mean, I think it's a little bit wrong for the woman to go up there and be so violent to the poor monk. But also, it's possible to spend 20 years avoiding our life during sitting and just being concentrated on the breath or being concentrated in some very powerful way. It'd be quite satisfying because it can be a lot of bliss and a lot of joy in that kind of concentration. But it's also avoiding our life, the wider aspects of our humanity. So I think in Shikantaza is being present in the moment to whatever our experience is in a very direct way, not thinking about it so much, thinking about the story behind what's going on, but really just being present for the direct experience, for the direct emotions, the direct sensations, the direct experiences in the mind and the body in a non-reactive way. And coming to this place, coming to this non-reactive place,

[17:14]

is actually quite wonderful and very special because from that we can act. I think often in our life we're reacting to situations around us quite habitually, kind of automatically. And to have the creativity and the wherewithal, to have a choice of not having to react, then we have some choice to creatively act appropriately or however way we feel is nice in our life. A couple of weeks ago I gave two practice discussion meetings where a student comes and talks to a practice leader about their practice. This is also a somewhat taboo subject to talk about what goes on in practice discussion, I think, so I want to break the taboo and tell you what happened. And what I want to explain is I found that often when I'm talking to people in practice discussion that we kind of stay in a kind of conceptual level.

[18:16]

They come with some difficulty or they present their practice and then I talk about it. I talk about it, I explain something, I explain how it should be done or how it's better or what's wrong. There's always explanation back and forth. Maybe that's useful at some level but I find it actually more useful to give people a direct experience because Zen is about a direct experience and it's possible in practice discussion to have a direct experience in various ways. And this is the way I did it with these two women who came and talked to me. One of them, the first one came, and she said that when she sits zazen, she feels a lot of constriction and tightness here. And since we often follow our breath, she felt kind of some pain and difficulty here, and she wanted to talk about it. So I asked her to sit zazen, sit there for a while, just sit there quietly, the way she usually does. And after she sat there for a minute or two, I asked her to feel, to be present for the constriction here, and feel what it was like, and to really be in the middle of it, to really enter into it, and just to be there, present for it in the middle of it.

[19:18]

And I asked her just to describe it to me, what the sensations was, as a way of helping her to be present for it. And she talked about tightness and vibration and hardness, and various kinds of sensations. And then I asked her what feeling, what emotion was present with that constriction she had there. And the feeling she had that was present was fear. And she had talked to me earlier about being overwhelmed with fear, about a lot of problems she had with dealing with fear. She had a lot of resistance to fear. She didn't know how to be present in the present moment with fear, with fear in her life. So I asked her, just stay there with fear. Just be present. Be in the middle of the fear. Just stay with it. And see what happens to it. And after a while, she said, the fear changed. And the fear became sadness, deep sadness and feeling of rejection. And I asked her then, OK, fine, just stay with the sadness. And where do you feel the sadness? If you're present for the sadness, where is it? Where is it in your body?

[20:19]

She said, oh, it's this kind of tight ball or tightness in my stomach. I said, OK, well, just be present. Just be present. Don't think about it. Just be present for it. And then she kind of said, well, it feels like a ball, you know, kind of all knotted up. And I said, well, that's a story. That's not being the direct experience. Just stay with the direct experience. Don't make up a story that it's a ball tied up in a knot. Just feel it. Feel the hardness or whatever. Just be present for it without making a story. And she was. And the sadness, then she felt that this hardness began to become very soft. And as it became soft, she started feeling a lot of space and a lot of calm. She had a spaciousness and calm. At that point, the ostrich would go back to her breath. And then she found her breath had become quite calm and quite soothing, and that the constriction had gone. So that was quite nice, because she was able to see that she could stay present. She could stay present in the middle of her fear, in the middle of her sadness, in the middle of whatever sensations she had in her body.

[21:20]

Just stay present in a very intimate way with it. Trust it. Trust in the present moment. And in doing that, just things would change and she could handle it. And it was quite nice, you know, it changed and became kind of calm. Well, the next woman who came and talked to me, she came right off and said she had a lot of fear. And we did the same exercise, and staying very close. She was an artist, and she had even more tendency to make stories about what was going on in her body. And she felt all this tightness and heaviness in her shoulders. And she was saying it's like being a football player with football kind of shoulder pads on, weighing her down. And I said, that's a story. Don't make up a story about it. What is it directly? She said, oh, it's just heaviness and tightness. Just stay with it. Just stay with it about making a story. So she stayed with it. And the fear changed to anger. And we stayed with it. And the anger changed to hate. And she said, it's all very fine. We stayed with it the same way, feelings in the body, emotions, just staying present.

[22:24]

And then the hate changed to fear again, and the fear to anger, and the anger to hate. And it went around in a circle, around and around and around, for about 20 or 30 minutes we sat there doing this. And after a while, I said, uh-oh, what's going to happen? And in some ways, Being a good Zen student, I knew that it didn't have to change, it didn't have to become something different, it didn't have to become calm and space, or it didn't have to change, it didn't have to go away. It's enough just to be present for it. In some way, she'd gotten that lesson. She had learned that she had some ability through that exercise, just to be present for the fear, be present for the anger and the hate. And just the simple act of being present for it, that was okay, and it would change and become something else. And maybe the next thing that happened was also kind of painful, but that was okay, so you could just be with it. It's okay just to be with her. She learned that she didn't have to be overwhelmed. It just was really in the present of it in the moment. But still it would have been nice if it was a happy ending. And somehow I had the feeling that the lesson would be better learned if it was a happy ending.

[23:32]

And in the end there was. In the end she was resting or staying present with the fear. And it became soft and she felt very calm after a while and kind of warm. And I think that a lot of us have this experience that when things are quite difficult in our zazen, we have a lot of physical pain, or a lot of emotional difficulties, or a lot of thoughts, we can be quite diligent with our practice, diligently staying with the present moment, staying with the breath, staying with what's going on. But as soon as things settle down, things change, and things always change, and sometimes things change to become much more pleasant. that we feel, oh, now I'm concentrated, and now things are pleasant, and it's easy to stay with the breath. And since we're often told to stay with the breath, ah, now I'm doing the practice, because it's easy to stay with the breath. But it's too easy. If there's concentration and calm, which often happens in our life, It can be very easy to stay with the breath, and we're not really being present for it, because it's so easy, we think we're doing the practice. And actually, the person or the times when we're having difficulty and we don't think we're doing it because it's real hard, our practice and their sincerity is much better then, than when things are really easy.

[24:43]

People often come in practice discussion, and they say, oh, I'm such a bad Zen student, it's so hard, I can't sit Zazen. And at those times, I'm just really happy, because I really feel that they're really trying to be present. And when people come and say, oh, I'm so concentrated and everything's going so smoothly, I kind of wonder whether their effort to be present is really so good. So I still would argue that even though it's difficult in some sense, or it feels like it's difficult for us, to stay in the present moment, this kind of zazen is extremely simple. Just somehow staying with whatever is going on in our life, just being there for it. Often in Zen practice, there's a lot of talk about letting go.

[25:45]

And often that's kind of one way people describe zazen or Zen practice, just let go, let go, let go. And that's maybe a good way of practicing, because if you just let go all the time, Eventually you'll come to kind of a non-dwelling mind. And to really be in the present with whatever's going on and allowing it to come up can also be described as having a non-dwelling mind, a mind that doesn't dwell on anything, just moves with the changing events. But I would argue that practice or zazen or awakening is much closer, much more intimate than letting go. If you have to let go, you're a little bit behind the game. Awakening is much closer. The present moment is much closer than letting go. It's just simply being there with whatever's going on. And if we feel that something's going on that shouldn't be going on, rather than letting go of it, we just be in it, be there. We be there for it. We are it. And that's enough. And we often judge.

[26:46]

Dogen says, don't judge in your zazen whether it's good or bad or whether it's right or wrong. Just be present. We often judge. And partly letting go has to do with judgment. It's not supposed to be happening. just to be present, to let the present moment, let the ten thousand things manifest themselves as they wish. This is Shikantaza, just to be their present. And just one image I have in thinking about this is if we go into a party or a crowd of people and we want to get to the other side of the room, one way to go through is just to kind of let go of everybody as you go, just kind of bump through and just kind of ignore everybody and get to the other side of the room. We can do that with our experiences. And in some ways, concentration exercises, we stay concentrated in our breath, it's a kind of just going more straight through the room, and kind of letting everybody else kind of clear away on the side, as you kind of go through like a bulldozer. And I think that Shikantaza is more like you're going to go through the room, but as you come up to someone, you just are present for them. You're present for them for a moment. Then you go on, next person, you're present for the person.

[27:49]

And I think all of us have some sense of what it's like when we're met by someone, and they're really present for us. And that kind of presence is what we bring to our zazen. It's maybe a kind of friendliness. So we're present for it. And then we move on. We're present. We move on. We're present. And then we move on. Rather than rushing ahead. Shikantaza, by the way. The word shikan, for those who might not know, it just means only or just. And taza, the za, means sitting. And the ta, taza, means to hit or to strike. And so shikan taza is the taza, is zazen or sitting, which really strikes home, comes home, hits home, and hits home right in the middle of our experience. How are we doing on time?

[28:52]

Maybe some of you don't believe this, that Zazen can be so simple and that it can include all our frustrations and our difficulties and our fears. That can be part of Zazen, Shikantaza. I mean, isn't Buddhism after all being awakened? Isn't awakening some wonderful enlightenment, some wonderful pure state where you're just sitting there in bliss or sitting there in wonderful choiceless emptiness? So I'm going to use the precedent of the Buddha as to say that that's right, that's the way it should be. And I recently reread the story of the Buddha's life, reading the early Buddhist sutras which describe his life. And what surprised me in reading them was how often Mara appears to the Buddha. And I had known that Mara, Mara is kind of like the devil in Buddhism, the temptress or the tempter. And I knew that this temptress, this Mara, the devil had appeared to the Buddha as the Buddha was sitting under the Bodhi tree to become enlightened. And then Mara showed up and tried his or her best to keep the Buddha from becoming enlightened.

[30:04]

Because that's what Mara hates the most, is someone who becomes awakened, someone who can be present for their experience. What I didn't know was that after the Buddha got enlightened that night, Buddha kept showing up. Over and over again in the Sutras, in the 40 years after Buddha became enlightened, Mara shows up. So in rereading it and seeing that, I began to wonder, well, who is this Mara? Up until that time, I kind of just ignored it. I'm not going to believe in strange deities like Mara and the devil. There's no place in my world for that. So it didn't really register for me. But I thought I had to take it seriously when Mara kept reappearing to the enlightened Buddha. And the way I kind of understand it for myself is that Mara is the external projection of the mind of the Buddha. And that even after the Buddha was enlightened, Mara, these tendencies, these temptations, and desires, and frustrations, and fears, and anger, all those things appeared to the Buddha. And they were just put outside of him because Buddha's life is a little bit of a myth.

[31:10]

So these things all appeared in the mind of enlightened Buddha. But what the Buddha did when these things appeared and Mara appeared, the Buddha just said, Mara, I know you. And that's all we... Buddha was present for it in a non-reactive way. He just was there and recognized these things happening. And that's all we're asked to do. We don't have to purify ourselves in the sense of purifying our defilements and our angers and our frustrations and all these things and come to some wonderful calm place. We purify our relationship to what's going on. We purify it by Just being able to be there for it and recognize it as it comes. Just being there and recognizing it and being present in a non-reactive way. The same way the Buddha was when Mara came. Mara will go away. That's enough. And that's Mara. When Buddha said, Mara, I know you, Mara ran away. Every time. So I thought maybe I'll end with this wonderful, I think a wonderful small poem.

[32:19]

by Sung San Im, who's a Korean Zen master. And he composed this poem when he visited the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, where the Buddha was enlightened. And I think it somehow illustrates how simple this practice is, just to be present in the moment. I just want to mention one thing before I read the poem, for people who don't believe how simple it is. It's not simple when we think we should be having our zazen, our experience, our concentration, and our awareness should be somewhere else than what's really happening. And often we're slow in catching what's really happening. If we have our idea that we're supposed to be following our breath, like with Zen students, and really what's happening is some kind of frustration, we should really be present for the frustration. And often we're frustrated because it's difficult to stay with the breath. Frustration is really what's happening.

[33:20]

We stay present for that, really present for that. So no matter how difficult it gets, no matter how frustrating, how much you feel you're not doing the practice, we're doing it if we just turn ourselves, turn our attention and be there for whatever's most difficult, whatever's going on. And that's really easy, just accepting. Sometimes, in my early years of Zen practice, it wouldn't be until the third day of Sashin that I finally admitted what was going on and stayed present to what was really happening. And I was a good Zen student and I was trying to get concentrated and had this idea that I would stay with my breath. get calm. So the first day of Sashin would go by, and the second day, frustration would build up. And the third day, the frustration would build and I'd get kind of angry. But I'm not supposed to be a person who gets angry. I don't have a self-image like that. So, you know, I couldn't admit it to myself even. But, you know, really I was getting more and more angry with myself because I couldn't stay with the breath. I couldn't get present. I couldn't get concentrated. It took a third day of Sashin for me to finally give up and acknowledge what was really going on.

[34:21]

And that what was really going on was my frustration and anger. So sometimes it's not so easy. But as we get the habit of just really noticing what's predominant, what's strongest in our present experience, we can just be there. We can learn to trust that we can be there in that experience. So this is his poem. Once the great man sat under the Bodhi tree. He saw the morning star and was enlightened. He sat there and absolutely believed his eyes, his ears, his nose, his tongue, his body, and his mind. He absolutely believed his experience, his direct experience. He absolutely trusted what was going on in the present. And that's all there is to do. So that's my presentation of Shikantaza. I guess there's a little bit of time for it to be your turn to present what you think Shikantaza is, because it can be presented other ways.

[35:32]

And we can have any questions or discussion. Yeah. What would you do if you were a monk? I would have stroked her hair. And I would have said, I'm sorry, I can't, I can't. If you were a Thai monk, you cannot touch a woman? So maybe the question is, if I was a Thai monk, what would I do? Well, she's already touching me. Her head is in my lap. I know some Thai monks would just jump up and run away. Not because they're cold-hearted, but because they take the precepts very seriously, and that's maybe to be admired. But if I was a Thai monk and she threw herself on my lap, and I couldn't touch her hair and just say, I'm sorry, I would say, I'm sorry, but I don't smile.

[36:36]

Look her in the eye and say, I'm sorry, but I can't do this. I think my experience with concentration is that it's not too dangerous because it's inevitably eroded. But I wondered, what do you do when you're not present? And how do you know when you're not present? This is an interesting question. And one that I find, there's something quite wonderful, quite magical about sitting. And that is, sometimes, often, we're not present. And for example, we're thinking a lot. And at some point, we wake up and we realize we've been lost, been thinking a lot. And then sometimes we judge ourselves and say, oh, I was really bad there. I was missing it. And so we really try and we put ourselves back in.

[37:38]

try really hard. But what I find really magical and wonderful is that when we're lost and not present, we're lost in our daydreams. That's what's happening. We can't judge ourselves or criticize ourselves at that point because we don't have enough wherewithal to judge ourselves because we're lost. The moment we wake up and we're present, we're present. We realize we've been daydreaming. We're present at that moment. We're doing the practice at that moment. We're present. There's nothing to judge. You can judge your past if you want. You can judge in the past, oh, I was daydreaming. Boy, was I a bad meditator. But that's kind of besides the point. That's already, that's missing it again. Really, we're already present and we just stay present in what's going on, forgetting the fact that we were daydreaming. Because that's kind of besides the point at that point. The point is to be present with whatever's going on. We don't have to take a snapshot of our daydreaming and hold on to that for a while. So the great thing about practice is that you can't really do it wrong. There's no judgment involved.

[38:41]

If we're lost, we're lost, and that's it. It's fine. And if we're present, then we're present. But if we notice that we're constantly repeating ourselves, constantly losing the present moment, Partly just a matter of practice, coming back and coming back, and with time we come back and the habit of being present builds, and the dedication, and I think that it helps if we know what we're doing, we know why, or we have some deep inner motivation and sense that being present is where we should be, that it's our home. In some sense, I think that's bodhicitta, the awakening, the thought of enlightenment. And somehow, to really reflect deeply on why we want to sit, what our motivation is, that kind of deep reflection will help us and give us the motivation to come home to the present. But also, it's often very useful to have the exercise of following the breath. And the breath is a very useful object of our awareness to bring some kind of stability, so that if we're very scattered and thinking a lot when we first come and sit, if we kind of anchor ourselves and settle on the breath, the mind can settle down enough that it can start being more intimate with what's going on.

[39:59]

How's that? What would you say? Someone asked you. Probably about the same thing. Can you live a life with Shikantaza without sitting Zazen ever? Is Zazen necessary? The right answer is Zazen is not necessary. You can live a life with Shikantaza without it. That experience of just being genuine, being genuinely who you are without trying to change it and just manifesting that in some way, that can be done and should be done in all our life. And Zazen is just a place in some ways to learn that and to learn to do it really well. The idea is to bring that practice, bring that intention to our whole life and not to divide Zazen with the rest of our life.

[41:02]

And one of the great watersheds in my practice was to realize that and realize that my life and my mind and my body was fundamentally not different than Zazen and outside of Zazen. And so you shouldn't really need to sit Zazen to do it. I mean, it can be done anytime, anywhere. I think in kind of a pragmatic way, a practical way, this is a really good place to come home. It's much easier in this kind of posture and this kind of sitting and this kind of calm, this kind of environment, than it is running around in the subways and the buses and the freeway and running around trying to do all the things we have to do. That's kind of how I'd answer it. I think you don't really have to. The right answer is you don't have to sit Zazen, but we have to anyway. And also I think in my life, you know how an artist wants to express themselves and they have their painting or their artwork and they feel like this is their deep kind of inner expression of who they are comes out in the art?

[42:12]

And I feel for me that the deepest expression I have of who I am is during Zazen, and it's kind of like my art. And of course I should be able to, I can, to do it everywhere my whole life, and there's no sharp distinction, it shouldn't be. But to be honest in some ways, the way I feel about my life, for Zazen, this is where I feel it's my deepest home, deepest place of my deepest art. This may be the same question as Maylee was asking, but I feel like you lifted the lid on a can of worms by talking about avoidance. And it's hard to know when you're avoiding something, when you're experiencing something else. at the same time avoiding something. It's a very, sometimes a very difficult distinction to make.

[43:19]

And it seems like we have an opportunity in Zazen to accept every experience, accept our sleepiness, and at the least, without sitting there trying to analyze what we're avoiding, except the possibility or the question of our avoidance, of avoiding something at that moment, and of that being our life at that moment. It's real difficult. If then what happens is you start engaging in the process of questioning, then you can really miss something, I think. I think so. I think that's a very good point. Zazen is not therapy. We're supposed to kind of look for these things and understand them. And the point to bring it up is just to bring it up and make a point. That happens sometimes. And to mention that, that there's a problem of avoidance, is not to go looking for the avoidance, but it's to encourage you.

[44:28]

to be more diligent in being in the present, and that when there's daydreaming or when there's falling asleep and all these things, it's not that we need to analyze why that is and look for what we're avoiding. That's our Western... That's our Western idea. Right. The thing is, enter the present moment, whatever's going on, and at that moment, it's the daydreaming, it's the sleepiness, and really be present. If you're really present, In the heart of your sleepiness, you're not going to fall asleep. So just always return to the present moment. You don't need to figure out why. And then as you return to the present moment of the sleepiness, of the daydreaming, or whatever, you're back in the present moment, and then the thing that you're avoiding will maybe, sometimes, naturally come up by itself. It'll poke its head up, if you stay in the present moment. But you don't have to look for it, and that's Nathasana. I guess went away.

[45:39]

But it seems to me that whenever that happens, people are in some kind of a plateau or a sticking place. What it is exactly, I don't know. But just to sit there, fighting off the sleepiness or sleeping, seems to be enough. That's actually a very good point, is that often we have these unworked out things or deep things inside of us that are painful to see directly. And in Zen practice or Zazen practice, It's not necessary to deal with it directly at times. Sometimes these things take care of themselves, even without our knowing. And I've seen people, I've met people who you could see that fear of something is a big issue in their life, and it's really holding them back in some ways. And it's not useful to point it out if they just keep sitting. that somehow, at some deeper level, subconscious level or something, sometimes these things just work out by themselves. So we don't necessarily have to go and make Zazen, we shouldn't make Zazen into therapy. But sometimes these things come up also.

[46:41]

And again, as they come up, we don't have to make them into therapy and analyze them, it's just to be present for them, and they work themselves out. And then I kicked him out because he was still, actually, he was too passionate. He was still attached to his, in other words, he related to the young girl on the basis of sexual desire. He was just saying, well, that desire is sort of on low flame, or almost died out. But still, he was relating to her on that basis. A little bit different.

[47:48]

But that's also somehow avoiding our life. Sometimes a lot of monks will avoid their sexuality. That's one of the reasons to become monks sometimes, is to avoid their sexuality. I would have related to her for my sexuality, for my desire, my passion, if I was a monk. I have those. But hopefully I would have enough sense and wherewithal to kind of stroke her head and say, sorry, this is not right. The interpretation that I read in that story, the one that the interpretation maybe I gave to it, was that the woman kicked him out because he couldn't get beyond himself. He showed no compassion and no understanding of the young girl's feelings or where she was at. I think it's a very good point. It sounds very subjective, the story of this movie.

[48:54]

And sort of like that, it makes it very hard to practice not to react. Because we are very subjective animals. That's OK. Part of being a Buddhist, a Buddhist practitioner, is to personalize Buddhism. So it's appropriate that we have these stories. In some ways we can. Still, we should read the commentaries and understand them and learn from them. But also, it's a very useful exercise to read these stories and make them our own. And in some ways, when you do koan practice, for example, when you're giving these stories to the teacher and you do koan practice, that's what you're told to do, is to make them your own. See, to make it our own somehow, this can be dangerous too. Because what is the best one? That's why we have a teacher in our sangha. So we make it our own and then we go and talk to our teacher. So we still need someone to validate. It's very difficult.

[49:57]

It is, it is. It's easy and very simple. I mean, it's difficult and very simple at the same time. Thank you very much.

[50:20]

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