I vow to chase the truth of the departed. Well, we're having a one-day sitting today, and then in two weeks, practice period begins. So I want to say just a little bit about practice period. It is a six-week period of time where there's the opportunity of intensifying your practice, of making a bigger commitment to what you're doing.

[01:00]

And we don't ask for... there are guidelines for what you can do. And we don't ask that you make any commitment that you don't think you can make. So you can adjust your schedule just a notch or two above what you're doing now, or you can adjust it way up, whatever you want. So next Saturday, no, two weeks from today, there's going to be the Jukai ceremony. About a dozen people just finished, I think, sewing their rakusus, and on that Saturday afternoon of May 3rd, there will be the ceremony of lay ordination. And that's really a wonderful ceremony that everybody participates in.

[02:03]

It gives us all a chance to be given the precepts, again, with the dozen or so people who have sowed their raucouses and made that commitment. And then the next day, Sunday, is a one-day sitting. And so this purple schedule continues on. for the next six weeks and will be, there's the head student who Karen Dakotas will be the head student and she's sort of our representative and she is put, the head student is put into a kind of high profile So the head student sets an example and also talks a number of times. So we really get a chance to see what the head student's mind is like. And then there's the ceremony at the end of practice ceremony, the shuso ceremony, where we all ask questions of the shuso.

[03:08]

And then we really get to see what her mind and our minds are like, and it's kind of a big meeting. So this practice period is a way of really walking into the three refuges that we just took in the ceremony. I take refuge in the Buddha, the teaching, the teacher, and the Sangha. And so keeping up to the schedule of events and making a little bit more of a sitting commitment. Or a lot more. So, you know, often people say to me who are kind of new here, well, I just come and sit and then I go home, but I don't know what my relationship is to the Sangha, really. Well, if you join the practice period and join it with wholeheartedness, I can promise you that your relationship with the Sangha will be different at the end of it.

[04:17]

So these forms are available. They're on the shoe rack, and you can fill them out and follow the instructions, put them in Karen's box. They're not on the shoe rack at this moment, but they will be after sashaying. Yeah. And if you have more questions about it, ask Karen or me or somebody else. So I've been giving a class on the life of Buddha and for some months I have been quite immersed in Theravada material, the old Pali sutras and Buddha's life. And it's been, I've never really done that before. It's been a very kind of Dharma grounding experience to just go back to those roots.

[05:29]

And I want to talk today, because it's Sesshin day, about concentration. In the last years of Buddha's life, again and again and again, he talked about shila, or virtue, or diligence, or sometimes we call it the natural way of order, the natural order of mind, the kind of diligent effort that keeps us. Talked about shila, discipline, about kanya, wisdom, and about concentration, again and again. He said those three factors are the ground of practice, like the tripod that the practice sits on, and they depend on one another, and are kind of the foundations of practice.

[06:37]

It is said by a Theravadan Bhikkhu, Bhikkhu Nanamoli, that you can say that the Buddha teaching is sort of like an aerial map, a picture of a map taken from an airplane. that it's so, the Dharma teaching is so enormous and there are so many schools and there are so many different emphases and so many sutras that there's all kinds of overlappings and contradictions and different emphases and it's this great ocean And so, it's a little hard to say just what it is. You know, some people say Buddhism is a religion. Some people say, no, it's a method. Some people say, well, it's a system of ethics. Anyway, it can be said that it's this map as seen from an airplane.

[07:46]

And within this map, we all, each one of us, has our own little map that we make out of our practice. we all have this little map that we are experimenting with, but that all the maps in this big map are kind of oriented in the same direction. And the common orientation of all of these individual maps are the Four Noble Truths. that there is suffering and that there is our causes of suffering and there's an end of suffering and there's a way to end it. So that's kind of our basis and our jobs as practitioners is to notice where we are and kind of orient ourselves

[08:53]

through this map, we can kind of look at what we're doing and then look at what the teaching is and titrate ourselves, figure out what's lacking and where we want to go. So, coming back to these last fundamentals of diligence or virtue and how we apply ourselves and pāññā, understanding, wisdom. You know, we all have a wisdom root. I was talking with a friend yesterday and she was remembering a terrible incident in her young childhood where there was a tumbling class and there was a long plastic mat flung out and she was told to do handstands all down the mat and it was utterly impossible and the teacher said, well, that's alright, I'll walk you through and she couldn't understand anything the teacher said and it was like

[10:15]

just a nightmare of incompetence and humiliation. And she was really in touch with that kind of hopeless state. But then remembered that there was also something about her as a child that was quite certain. And it was like one of these wonderful spring irises that's just coming up. the way an iris just knows how to grow. It just does. That as well as this experience of not being able to tumble on the mat, she also had this kind of clear, innocent understanding of who she was and where she was going. So we all are like that. we do have that root somewhere.

[11:16]

And so wisdom, our practice job with wisdom is to discover and clarify that root, connect it and integrate it. And then the quality that I want to talk about mostly today is concentration or samadhi. one-pointedness, staying with one thing, or absorption, or one thing at a time, doing one thing wholeheartedly at a time. So because we're having a sitting and we're doing a lot of zazen in a certain way, I'm talking about these three qualities, concentrations. Samadhi is connected with Zazen. But of course, our lives are much more off the cushion than on the cushion.

[12:25]

So everything applies to the whole life. Sometimes when people come for practice discussion, and I say, well, what's your practice like? Often, newer people will say, well, I sit X number of times a week, or I have a terrible sitting practice, or whatever. But the question seems to be, how much do I come to the zendo, or how much do I sit? Whereas for people who have sat longer, the question, what is your practice? about some kind of practice theme in their lives that they're working with. Some kind of question or theme, which is what the whole practice is about. And that's what happens.

[13:29]

begin, practice seems to be more oriented around the formal aspects of the Zen Do, and as we continue, like a stone with the concentric ripples around it, the practice becomes wider and deeper and more pervasive throughout our lives. So, concentration, samadhi, making the effort, making the right effort and so it's a little tricky concentration because whatever we do has to be done skillfully. Now if we really get zealous and ambitious about concentrating our mind or concentrating our practice If we overdo it, if there's some kind of goal that's there too hard, or some kind of expectation about result, there's just a different kind of suffering that arises, because we don't get what we want, we're disappointed in some way.

[14:51]

On the other hand, if There's too little concentration, samadhi, in the practice. We just get kind of languid and routinized and distant from it. So that it's just easy to kind of drift away. There's a sign over the zendo door, calligraphy. And the calligraphy says, samadhi is king. So that's kind of the certain way, it's the Zendo motto. How do we use samadhi? How do we use concentration? How do we develop and cultivate it in a way that is skillful and that leads us deeper into the practice? So the traditional

[15:58]

way of cultivating Samadhi concentration has two aspects. One of it, the first aspect is to recognize and acknowledge the five hindrances. And the second aspect is to cultivate Samadhi. So I want to talk a little bit about the five hindrances. The five hindrances are manifestations of the center of our dharma wheel, greed, hate and delusion. So a manifestation of greed, the hindrance is desire, sensuous desire, or just desire. And the manifestation of ill will, is of hate is ill will and the manifestation of delusion, greed, hate and delusion are torpor and restlessness and doubt.

[17:19]

So those are the five hindrances. Desire, ill will, laziness, restlessness and doubt. So if you get used to kind of living with the noble truths as not just a list, suffering, end of suffering, cause of suffering, end of suffering, way out of suffering, not as just a list but as a kind of mode of perception or way of looking at your mind. If you really begin to just use, to devote yourself as much as you can to practice then you will notice that most of the things that pass through the mind are one kind of suffering or another and that even the innocent little excursions about all that will be fun and I will do this and this and I will look good and

[18:28]

You know, those little excursions, even those little excursions have a kind of suffering motif underneath them. So if you sit, or don't sit, but do apply yourself to watching the mind, these five hindrances are a pretty good way of noticing what you see. noticing what comes up. And if you can notice what comes up, then you can take a little step back. And then you're a little bit out of the stickiness and bewilderment of the mind suffering. would like to read a little passage that is similes for the hindrances.

[19:37]

You know, the Dharma, these old sutras were tuned to making good contact with audiences and so similes were used that were very familiar. And in listening to these similes of the hindrances, they're useful because they evoke something of the feeling of the hindrances. So the first one is about sense desire. Imagine a bowl of water mixed with yellow dye. red dye, crimson dye, such that a man with good eyesight examining the reflection of his face would not be able to know or to see his face exactly as it is. In the same way, when one remains with awareness, possessed by sensual passion, desire, overcome with desire, one neither knows nor sees the escape as it is actually present.

[20:49]

Then one neither knows nor sees what is for one's own benefit or the benefit of the others or benefit of both. So that's the difficulty with the hindrances. When we are in them, when we are immersed in the desire of some kind or another, we are lost. We are out of touch with who we really are. So looking at one's face in this colored water comes one becomes that colored face. Now imagine a bowl of water heated on a fire, boiling and bubbling over, such that a man with good insight, examining the reflection of his face in it, would not be able to know or see his face as it actually is. In the same way, when one remains with awareness possessed by ill will, he neither knows nor sees the escape, and so on. ill will, the bubbling, boiling water. Now imagine a bowl of water covered with algae and slime, such that a man with good insight, examining the reflection of his face in it, would not be able to know his face as it actually is in the same way.

[22:07]

When one remains with awareness possessed by sloth or drowsiness, One neither knows one's own face nor sees the escape from it. And imagine a bowl of water ruffled by wind disturbed and covered with waves such that a woman with good eyesight examining the reflection of her face would not be able to know it. In the same way when one remains with this awareness possessed by restlessness and anxiety Overcome with restlessness and anxiety, one neither knows nor sees the escape. And finally, imagine a bowl of water stirred up, turbid, muddied, and left in the dark. Such a woman with good insight, examining the reflection in it, would not be able to know whether her face, what her face is. And in the same way, when one remains with awareness possessed by uncertainty, overcome with uncertainty, one is lost.

[23:11]

So these are the hindrances that we spend a great deal of time in and often are quite unacknowledged. You know, sense desire, that's sometimes very present and other times not so present. And sometimes you really lack for something and it almost hurts And other times it's just a kind of daydream. It's always around. And then all the varieties of ill will from outright anger to some kind of aversion or creating an opposition when there's no opposition. It's really quite a common one, I find. There's nothing wrong, but you can make something. You can imagine there's something wrong. low-grade irritability.

[24:16]

So the thing about these is, if they're hard-edged, then you know them. And if they're soft-edged, you don't know them so much, but you're acting out of them. And they are really directing your thinking. And you don't even know it. And then torpor, the bowl covered with slime and algae. That's really a pretty good description. How one just sinks. The Tibetans say, don't indulge in sinking. Just kind of the gentle sinking down. And actually, a lot of a Sashin can pass in sinking. that you're not exactly asleep, neither are you awake, and the periods go quite smoothly.

[25:21]

But you're sinking out of them. And then the water's stirred up, turbid, muddy, the skeptical doubt. I'm sorry, the water ruffled up with anxiety and restlessness. And two, fear. We talked about fear in one discussion period a couple of weeks ago. It was quite interesting. And those of us who are essentially fear types had a lot to say about how one is driven, how you can be driven by fear. And sometimes Sometimes fear is pretty good, sometimes it mobilizes one. But the pressure, the sense of pressure and anxiety, again, especially in its more subtle phases, is very distorting.

[26:35]

And then finally, doubt, lack of faith. Well, this is a pretty good practice for some people, but it doesn't work very well for me. I'm a sort of hopeless case. And I will just sit here and sit here and nothing much changes. Kind of be a very corrosive doubt, skeptical doubt, and be very corrosive. This great doubt, which is different, this great doubt, which is helpful, which pushes you to examine your experience and ask, what is it? What is this? Is it what I'm making of it, or what is it without whatever I'm making of it? That's skillful doubt. but skeptical doubt is just always pulling the ground out.

[27:42]

And often it has the voice of real authority. Don't be foolish. Don't be naive. This isn't going to work for you. So, the value of this map, this aerial map, When we have teachings like this, we can memorize a little list, take an inventory of our experience and orient to it and work with it in a clarified way. Concentration, samadhi. Part of it is acknowledging what's there, noticing what's there, knowing the hindrances and letting them go. And then the other part of it is just cultivating samadhi.

[28:51]

Now we talked about, in the discussion about fear, we talked about the fear of fearlessness. We all have an enormous fear of space, I think. Somebody said, God is what you have to move away from. That we are so oriented to content, this is me, this is it, that when there's no content, when there's just ease, possibility, nothing going on, we tend to get a little anxious and look around for something that we can make happen. So, learning how to enjoy the space. When Buddha was entering, preparing for his enlightenment experience, you know, he went into the jungle forest and he lived as a forest monk and he essentially encountered the hindrances

[30:04]

fear first and as he pushed as he pushed to deepen his concentration to work with his intention he pushed harder and harder and after a while he decided he was just going to stop eating and we have a little figure of the emaciated Buddha and he There's a wonderful passage in the Sutras that talks about how extraordinarily thin he got. And then he realized, this isn't it. There's something missing. And he remembered a time when as a child in his father's field, by accident, he'd just fallen into a very pleasant kind of concentrated experience. Just sat there under a tree. and everything had kind of opened up and was full of ease. He just remembered that experience and it taught him something that he realized.

[31:09]

It was the first thing about the middle way that it's not harsh effort and it's not indulgent effort. It's the middle ground. So it's something that has both effort and ease in it. So how do we accustom ourselves to ease? It seems an odd question, but yet in many ways we're unused to it. We're used to kind of driving ourselves or criticizing ourselves, but just feeling the pleasure of hearing the bird chirp, slightly moist air, just enjoying So, from time to time, wherever we are, the pleasure of the present moment that Thich Nhat Hanh is so good at describing, you know, just take a breath, and there's ease, sense of well-being.

[32:14]

Thich Nhat Hanh says that the third noble truth, the end of suffering, is the sense of well-being. So cultivating that. as we sit, noticing the times when, oh, you know, just sitting, that's all. And sort of noticing what the, then being skillful with that, noticing what the components of that are. Concentration. Now our school says that to be concentrated it is very important to be embodied. Very important to feel body sensation. Very important to sit with a little arch in your back and your hips and your butt pushed down and your chest bone up so that you have this feeling of grounded freedom of energy.

[33:21]

Our first teacher Our closest teacher is our body because bodies stay very much in the present. And the wandering mind always has the opportunity of coming back to the present breath and body. So that's a big component of our samadhi, concentration, experience. And, you know, as you sit a day, sometimes we sit five, seven days, there's a kind of steadiness of mind that happens after a while, and it's always accompanied by a rather different experience of body, a much more settled and uncomplaining grounded sense of body.

[34:23]

So that's a big factor in concentration. And off the cushion, you know, you can make little deals with yourself about, I'll walk this block and every step, my feet, each foot will know what it feels like to be on the ground. So working with body concentration And then, as mind settles down, just becoming more intimate with the present moment. You know, experience, we tend to think of experience as event-oriented. Such and such a person has had many experiences in his or her life, But the point is, how do we, practice point is, how do we take experience apart?

[35:31]

Now before practice or early in practice we think of our experience as coming in kind of blocks. That I am is a kind of solidity about the way we see the world. And then after some practice there's a tendency, you can see your life more as episodes, also especially as you get older, you know, you look back and there are all these episodes, 10 or 11, 15, 45, these episodes of being such and such and such and such in age. And then there's just a kind of flowing, you know, life just begins to flow, it's not even episodic, it's just happening all the time and the moves change and the thoughts change but it's like a stream and so when we sit and the concentration deepens we can watch much more intimately the flow of our experience one thought arising and how the body very slightly

[36:52]

feels the arising of a thought and then what the mood is in the body if the thoughts persist and then the thought's going and what it feels like to know that there's a thought that's kind of scratching at the door but hasn't entered yet and what it feels like when a thought has ended and there's a little space all these very smaller and smaller categories of experience to be able to attend to them. That is the cultivation of samadhi, concentration. So I'd like to finish by reading one passage about a wise cow. skill and concentration.

[37:59]

Suppose there was a mountain cow, foolish, inexperienced, unfamiliar with her pasture, unskilled in roaming on rugged mountains. And she were to think, what if I were to go in a direction I have never gone before to eat grass? I have never eaten before, to drink water I have never drunk before. She would lift her hind hoof without having placed her front hoof firmly and a result would not go in a direction that she had never gone before to eat grass she had never eaten before or to drink water she had never drunk before. And as for the place where she was standing, when the thought occurred to her, what if I were to go where I have never been before to drink water I have never drunk before, she could not return there safely. Why is that? Because she is a foolish, inexperienced mountain cow, unfamiliar with her pasture, unskilled in roaming on rugged mountains. See, we do often have that tendency if we are four-footed and want

[39:05]

to get somewhere else, a little appetite for result happens, and the back feet push and, you know, we've lost the ground. We don't go anywhere, and we're lost ourselves. But suppose there was a mountain cow, wise, experienced, familiar with her pasture, skilled in roaming on rugged mountains, and she were to think What if I were to go in a direction I have never gone before, to eat grass I have never eaten before, to drink water I have never drunk before? Aspiration. Kyle is going to have aspiration too. She would lift her hind hoof only after having placed her front hoof firmly. and as a result would go in a direction she had never gone before, to drink water she had never drunk before. And as for the place where she was standing when the thought occurred to her, what if I were to go in a direction I have never gone before, to drink water I have never drunk before, she would return there safely.

[40:13]

Why is that? Because she is a wise, experienced mountain cow, familiar with her pasture, skilled in roaming on rugged mountains. Let us develop our skill and concentration and also know how to come home. Thank you. So we have a few minutes for responses, questions. especially for the people who embarked on this day of concentration. If any of you have particular questions. Yes? I have a question for a response. Your last bit reminded me of a poem I heard recently and it's, I guess it's a modern adaptation of some old Native American advice for children when they get lost in the forest.

[41:20]

Advice goes, stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger. You must ask permission to know it and be known. Listen. The forest breathes. It answers, saying, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back, saying, here. No two trees are the same to raven. No two branches are the same to wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, then you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. I would love to receive a copy of that in my box. It's in the book The Heart Aroused by David White. I love it. Yeah, that's just... That's all.

[42:22]

Next, Simile. Well, I have the... My challenge is not to do too many things. And there are all these little things that people call and say, Andrea, I'm leading another vision class. so I must go, you know? It's so easy for me to just get into these things. So I've been thinking a lot about lately, there's a pine tree in front of my old house out there, and at one time, there were two tops, and Susan Green and Mel were out there, and it was really hard to decide which one to whack off, which really would have been the best thing for the tree.

[43:23]

And I finally did decide. I don't think it was necessarily the straightest one or anything. So I kind of keep that as a metaphor for myself. Just keep going straight. Because I found when I do all these various things, there's something in it. It's greed. It's greed. And living here just bans that greed. I mean, how many people we don't know, how many people... Do we know people who don't complain about being too busy? It's a kind of epidemic. And so it really is very hard to say no. I'm not going to the peace conference. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Clarify your intention, Richard Baker used to say.

[44:26]

Clarify your intention. What does that mean, I thought. So, how, you know, there is this ocean of opportunity and invitations and they all sound so good and how somehow in the middle of it do we clarify intention and know who we are like that iris just coming up. Did you want to say something Greg? way.

[45:31]

Normal things like a roof over one's head and maybe a dog family or something. The ongoing challenge. Ron? When you were talking about the hindrances, what I thought was the word pressure. It seems like Yeah. Internal pressure. Effort. It does. It does. I was at Jikoji, Kobinchino's old zen dojo, a couple of weeks ago. And there were five or six really old students who lived there.

[46:34]

I could have practiced more than 20 years. And they've decided they don't want to be caught up in the world of consumption, and they live very simply, taking care of the Zendo, and it's really a wonderful group. But they raised the question, one of them was plateau. Been practicing for 20 years, and sometimes people just kind of wander off and leave. Or sometimes you just hit a plateau, and you can keep sitting and you can keep the structure of practice going but, you know, there's something that is not alive. So, there's always that possibility and that's the way I would answer it, that how how do I keep my practice alive?

[47:36]

And also, I really don't want to suffer. And when I fall into these hindrances, I do suffer. I mean, just these idle little thoughts about, oh, I'll give a nice talk. You know, you just get, it just gets you. So, if you really don't want to suffer, you just have to take extraordinary care that you don't let your mind Drift off. That's my response. Maybe others of you have a response. Yes. So the question is not to just not do. Here you are giving the talk. So can you talk to us about the process of seeing that arising? Absolutely. Yeah, the process of seeing.

[48:39]

Well, if you look at your experience, it's all in the five hindrances, just about. You know, if you really look at it, that's what's going on. And, okay, so when you do pay attention, you know, you can take on one hindrance. That's my practice. If one of them really jumps out and sort of you know, is very annoying. Impatience, say. I take it on for a week and I just notice, try to notice every single time I'm impatient. And at the end of the week, my relationship to it has changed. It may, it, you know, it won't have gone forever, but my relationship will have changed and there is more space. And there is more sense of well-being. Because None of these things like to be looked at very hard. Mara is always appearing, you know, the deceiver. Right up to the last hour that Buddha died, Mara was trying to peek over his shoulder and make little suggestions.

[49:49]

But whenever he does, Buddha recognizes him. Oh, there you are, Mara. And Mara hunches over and slinks away and says, Oh, the world honored one has seen me. He has no more juice. So, you know, you make the effort and then there is space and there's a new kind of effort that just arises. That's the natural order of mind. It's just healthy. All energy. There is a What should it really mean then to live to the full?

[50:56]

Not to do everything that you can possibly do with 24 hours a day, but something else, I suspect. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, as you practice more, this concentration factor just gets deeper and there's a kind of steadiness. you know, and conditions come and go, including age, and this sort of steadiness that's there. When Buddha had his enlightenment experience, you know, he said for the first time, it's done. Everything is over. He said that when he'd had his experience when he was 30 or something. And he said it, but he kept saying it. It's done, everything is over.

[52:00]

And I must say, when I turned 60, I thought, well, I really could die any time, and it would be okay. I mean, most of my ancestors did not live to be 60. And... It's kind of a dessert to live after 60. You've done your work, you've done what you thought you were supposed to do, or you know, or you haven't done it, but it's too late. I mean, you've just, you've done, you've lived your 60 years and that's that. And now whatever comes, just comes. And so there's not that, for me, there's not that sense of pressure or greediness. Except I do love these projects. I guess for me there's a sense, and it would be nice to hear what other people say to this too, there's a sense of, I know my map pretty well, and I know what fits and doesn't fit.

[53:15]

I don't know yet. I have found out a few things. This last two years, I took another retirement from my job and then I said, okay, now I have the desert, I can do anything I want. But after searching a little bit, It's my profession. So I'm still working. Not necessarily for money, but I'm still working. So that's one decision I took. But there are so many other things that I like to do and I don't have time to do. So I'm just constantly trying to struggle with keeping a garden, learning Morse code to talk to people, collecting radios, all kinds of things. I just don't have enough time for it. Yeah, but hopefully it's fun to do what you do. There's some anxiety for not being able to do everything.

[54:23]

Yeah. Okay, one more question, then we should stop. Yes. This is a really good question. Thank you for your time. The similes, the five hindrances, where are they located? Is that a sutra? Well, there's this lovely book, Wings to Awakening, it's a compilation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who's an American Theravadan monk who lives in San Diego, and he just excerpted the sutras along certain themes. And I think it's a wonderful book. The thing is that Theravada and Dharma books are not sold because they're Dharma. So you can't buy it in bookstores. But I'll find a way of getting a copy for our library. Right. Fine. If you find a donation. He'd love to find a copy in his mailbox.

[55:28]

Okay. We should stop. Thank you. Yeah.

[55:34]

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