There are two... I'm amplified. There are two faces, Suki Roshi used to say, to our practice. One is practicing as we are, just as we are, and the other is observing everything as it is. Actually, we're not able to observe everything as it is, usually. So when we begin a sasheen, you should begin it from, you might say, the highest level of consciousness, because you should begin a sasheen without any idea.

[01:01]

of the Sashin. I suppose last night, I don't know if everyone goes, but I guess last night there's some kind of Zazen instruction or some kind of introduction. Do they give Zazen instruction and introduction on Friday evening? No sitting posture, things like that. Supposedly, all of you know how to sit, so I guess... Part of assessing, of course, is knowing how to sit, but a great deal of it is your attitude. Actually, having no attitude, If you have some expectation in the sesshin of something, you can't really sit at sesshin. And the best thing is to just, you don't know if you're going to be able to do the sesshin completely, but you just start. You don't really think about what the third day is going to be like. You just start.

[02:28]

So you really have to just have a kind of willingness to try. If your posture is straight or clear, your mind is clear and vice versa. One of Suzuki Roshi's favorite stories was about Nagarjuna. saying the mind is like a snake, very curvy or wiggly or something like that, and how do you make a snake straight is you put it in a bamboo. So that's how we practice zazen, is we make our body straight. try to practice. When you sit, you should start each period as straight as you can, which means you should spend some time trying to find your posture.

[03:57]

That process is not just to make yourself straight, but it settles you. It settles you together, mind and body. So, I think the easiest way to check on your posture is actually, some of you have trouble reaching, I know, but it's actually just to put your hands down to your side and push straight up. I've said this before, so most of you know this, but if you put your hand straight to your side and push up, you can find, even off the cushion, you can find how your back should be. And the curve of your back here, the way you curve in, it's not a pushing the hips forward so much as lifting from that place. And here through the back of the neck also, which is another kind of like a waist, it's a kind of lifting in through here which also pulls your chin in. So it's also a kind of feeling of being of lifting from this point. It's not really your posture so much as your energy that's lifting. And then when you have that kind of feeling you relax, you know, you let your shoulders go down and

[05:27]

Let your weight go down. There's some dignity in our posture and it requires some dignity to do a sashin. I don't know if you know what I mean by dignity. I don't know what word to use, but some... Later on in a session, when it becomes kind of painful sometimes, you tend to lose your dignity. People's faces are all screwed up. Some of you look like Bodhidharma. Your eyes are rolled back. Your hands are thrust through the floor. fingernails are pressed into the thumb, you know. Anyway, when you feel that way, if you can sort of regain your composure or dignity and just sit there, you know, no matter what it feels like. When you can do that, there's some presence of mind or consciousness which

[06:58]

we don't really abide in usually, but is part of what is meant when you talk about sambhogakaya or bliss body. It's funny, it's strange the way you often get a sense of that through the door of pain. so-called bliss body, you get a sense of when your zazen feels the worst and your legs feel the worst and you want to move, but you find some composure anyway. So how to, when you have that state of mind It's pretty difficult to fall asleep in your zazen, too, if you can sit comfortably and you can fall asleep in your zazen, you know. It's... unless you're really tired, you know, like you've not been sleeping or you've been extremely busy or something. Mostly, even with little sleep, if you have that... if you abide in that presence,

[08:25]

You're quite awake during zazen. It's like no matter how muddy the stream is, the water is still there. So even when you're sleeping, you know, some people sleep like a log. And if you practice meditation regularly, you more sleep like a stream or some still water. So there's a kind of light in our practice that you Some steady light you notice. I don't mean... I hesitate to say things like that because then you look for light in the usual sense.

[09:52]

And actually, your experience, if you look for a word, there's no word for it exactly except light. Anyway, that's the first kind of experience. So, Buddhism talks about eight from the Yogacara school. the mind-only school, which is two major schools in Buddhism, one Yogacara and one Majamaka, which go together to make most of Zen, the background of most of Zen. And many koans are either based on one school or the other school or both. Anyway, the mind-only school posits, mind-only school says everything is mind. Majamaka school says everything is empty. Anyway, the mind-only school talks about eight levels of consciousness. And the eighth is the storing consciousness. The seventh is

[11:19]

individuating consciousness, and the sixth is cognition, and the other five are the consciousness of our eyes and nose and ears and taste and touch. Anyway, when we practice zazen, we're we start out without any attitude, nesessine. Can you hear me way in the back? Start out without any attitude. Maybe you start out with just number eight, storehouse consciousness. So you're not taking any activity, you're not doing anything, you're just there. So at first there's a great deal of effort in your practice to create something that's there. At first you have a lot of physical restlessness and mental restlessness. You're not used to not having something to do, so your mind and body produce all kinds of things to think about or do or worry about or wish the period was over or something. Anyway, that's all sort of some kind of playground.

[12:44]

So when you stop, when your attitude changes or your something changes, I don't know what to say exactly, but you don't need to be in the playground anymore, then you have some sense of this storehouse consciousness, some big warehouse or repository or some big Anyway, that's just there, not anything exactly. Not even the seventh, which is differentiating. It's there. So we start out in a sashin with that kind of

[13:47]

attitude of, I'm not going to do anything or receive anything or think anything or expect anything. I'll just be whatever I am here, you know. We just practice as we are, you know, and also try to practice seeing everything just as it is. There's some difference there, you know. But we want to go one non-active step further than that. You want to, in a sense, we say, you want to reverse the eight consciousnesses. You want to reverse the storehouse consciousness.

[14:53]

When we speak of it as reversed, we speak of it as the highest of the four wisdoms, the mirror wisdom. Just reflecting everything. Or maybe better is absorbing everything. The four wisdoms are mirror, universal, observing, and perfecting in action. Again, if you see the order of this, it always starts at the highest. You know, we're not so interested in the stages to get to the top of the mountain. how you return to the world. So our practice is not based on stages but starting at the top and then how you return. So Suzuki Roshi was partly talking about that in the lecture he gave about the waterfall at Yosemite. How the water starts out as one and then separates out into drops.

[16:22]

and then is one again at the end. So, we don't try to perfect our, you know, perfect our action first, actually. If you have this ability to, this practice of absorbing Then, instead of action, we talk about perfecting action in the world. I don't know if you see the difference. Anyway. So, how you open yourself up to this is to is to open yourself up, is to stop discriminating, stop differentiating. So really, the whole idea of non-differentiation, not discriminating, doesn't mean that you don't discriminate between McGovern and McCarthy or something like that.

[17:55]

but that you open yourself up to absorb everything. So when you're sitting, you don't discriminate between whether you feel good or bad or painful or not painful. You try to sit, same calmness, same presence, no matter how you feel. A mirror isn't quite right, and absorb isn't quite right, but the experience is that you include everything. When you look at a person, you include that person, just like you include your nose, or your ears, or a tree, or whatever.

[19:39]

And that comes when you open up this ability to absorb everything. And as long as you make a distinction between good and bad, or what you like and don't like, or what you want to do and don't want to do, you never know what this consciousness is. So in a sesshin we try to start the sesshin with as few ideas as possible, perhaps just a willingness to try and some courage to risk trying and some resolve to follow the schedule. Maybe that's even too much to start with. Start. Maybe the way you feel on an autumn eve, evening, in which there's no flowers or maple leaves or trees. Maybe you can see a few roofs or something. Just some big, gray, even sky.

[21:43]

So in that, during the sasheen, in that sky, many things will happen. The question will be, how well can you stay there for what happens? And even if you sit completely through the sasheen without moving, Still, how well are you staying there for what happens? When you sit, you should notice your breathing. Of course, you should try to keep your posture straight or clear or something like that. And you should notice your breathing, how it goes when your legs hurt and when they don't hurt, when you're anxious for the period to be over and when you're bored with the food, etc.

[23:18]

I don't know, I don't know exactly why it is, but after a while, if you practice zazen, you know, long enough, you can be in a French restaurant, you know, and you can want your food prepared just perfectly, you know, and you want all the right seasonings, et cetera, and if it's not just right, You know, you maybe feel some criticism of the restaurant or the food, if it's supposed to be that way, you know. But if you're somewhere else, like here, where we're given rather bland rice or gruel or grain or something, it tastes almost exactly the same as the French food. In this situation, you just, you don't need seasoning or anything. It's almost exactly the same, but it doesn't mean that when you're in a good restaurant you don't expect seasoning. Anyway, your breathing

[25:02]

the steadiness of your breathing has a great deal to do with the steadiness of your mind and I wouldn't try to slow down your breathing or steady it or I wouldn't try to steady your mind either but notice how your mind is and how your breathing is. If you get involved in Whether your breathing is this way or that way or no movement or a lot of movement, it's really the same as whether there's seasoning on the food or not, you know, or whether it's good or bad. Actually, just what your breathing is, is okay. But if you're sitting with some steadiness and you can retain that presence in your posture and in your feeling, during this whole sashin, then your breathing will be very, like some kind of, like light, some very steady, clear thing, sometimes almost not there. Sometimes you may count your breathing, sometimes you may count the exhales,

[26:34]

And sometimes you may just follow your breathing throughout your body from your tips of your toes. In fact, sometimes we are inhaling from our knees or our toes or our stomach way down below, kind of feeling as if we're inhaling in that way. Yeah. So during this sasheen, please try to have that presence that absorbs everything, that is unshaken by whether you are agitated or painful or discomforted or feeling very good or sleepy.

[28:00]

Thank you.

[28:13]

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