Last night, Les talked about our zazen posture and our preparation for zazen, getting ready for zazen, beginning zazen even before we reach the zendo. He talked about practice with many interesting observations from his own practice. And I want to continue talking about preparation. Some schools of Buddhism, you don't start doing zazen until you've gone through many stages of preparation. In Zen, we start zazen right away, but still the stages of preparation have to be gone

[01:07]

through. Maybe most fundamentally, the six paramitas have a particular order, which are giving and morality and energy, giving morality, patience and energy, and jhana or samadhi or zazen, and prajna or wisdom. And first, you practice giving and treating everyone as if they were yourself. And if you can do that, then you can practice morality,

[02:12]

contracting your entangling desires, and you can practice patience. And from this, you'll get the kind of energy, not the usual energy you need, but the kind of energy we need for Zen practice, an energy that has to be accessible to us and useful when we want it, as Mumon Roshi could be here and be quite awake until he left and he was able to sleep. You should be able to sleep when you want to sleep and be awake when you want to be awake. That kind of energy is necessary for samadhi or jhana, real zazen practice.

[03:19]

And the fruit of that is wisdom, and altogether, all of those are compassion. When we speak about preparation in Buddhism, often included are, you have to have fresh air. I think when they wrote that years ago, they didn't know how true it would be today. So I think to establish our practice, we maybe need to have fresh air. Actually, you should be willing to breathe the air everyone else breathes, but it's nice

[04:23]

to have fresh air and clean water. And you are supposed to have an auspicious place to practice, a recognized good place for practice, and the Tassajara is quite well and often recognized as an auspicious place to practice. And it's good to have a good example of preparation, a good example of practice. And we had Mumon Yamada Roshi come here as a good example of practice. We've been extremely lucky this practice period, because we had both Dr. Abe and Mumon Roshi

[05:33]

come and practice with us. We weren't together as consistently as I would have liked to have been, but having Mumon Roshi and Dr. Abe here more than makes up for that. Dr. Abe is probably the best Zen scholar who also practices completely, that exists. And Mumon Roshi, as you know, is a wonderful teacher. It's wonderful they think our practice is worth coming to join, and both of them wanting to come back to practice with us. I hope when they come back, we're ready for them.

[06:42]

So, you can divide practice, you know, you're trying to develop the ability to practice. And at first you don't know how to practice, or what practice is. So naturally enough, you can only start with what you know. It's important to know, you know. We know certain things, you know, for sure. One is, we should know our own death will find us, and we have this lifetime. And you should know your own nature, and you should try to balance your nature.

[08:02]

So if you're an angry person, you should try to find some way to counteract your anger. If you tend to be lonely or separatist, you should try to move with other people more. And if you can't seem to stop your tongue and lips from moving, you should try to talk, be silent more, try to talk less. If you're caught by every small desire, you should practice detachment. Anyway, it's essential to balance your nature.

[09:07]

And balancing your nature, it's then necessary to establish some habits or continuity in your life. The ability to stay with things. Even if you don't know what practice is, you can establish some good habits of staying with one place, staying with one group of people, staying with one situation in your life, staying with one practice, and mining that situation. We don't get anywhere by sightseeing. Sightseeing practice is useless. And although we should develop continuity, we shouldn't linger with things.

[10:18]

We should be able to make decisions. We should be able to know this is enough, just enough. So although you should be able to stay with things, it means also you should be able to let go of what's not necessary. Drop useless conversations or arguments. Eat, you know, not too much. It comes to mind, my daughter, when she was quite young, would discover something was funny that she'd say.

[11:31]

It took her a long time to realize that it wouldn't be funny the second time. And she'd repeat some situation. She'd set up a situation, try to say the same thing again. It was interesting how long it took her to realize that once is enough. She didn't have to linger on it, forcing her into something new. It's so easy to stay with what we know. And we should not practice in some topsy-turvy way, practice our own views, too dependent on our own experience as the source of the teaching. There should be more doubt than that.

[12:33]

And so it means you should practice according to sutras and according to a teacher. So in these stages, when you don't know how to practice, you develop habits and the ability to let go. Small and small things, the ability to let go, will develop finally, the ability to let go of everything. But if you don't develop it at the stages of preparation, it's silly. There's no big miracle going to happen. Once you have a teacher and have some habits, and can let go of things,

[13:37]

and can take care of yourself. Treating everything as yourself is really important. At Green Gults we're making the new zendo as if it were our own body. And that's the meaning of the Sampachi ceremony. Not just to make things clean, but to treat everything as if it were our own body. And we should take care of our own body. So, after you know more what to do in your practice, you should know when the time is right to do something. Not too late or too soon, but you should develop the ability to just write, as we say, write on.

[14:44]

You should begin to be sensitive to situations you're in, so you know how to be right on them. Your pace, your own existence should be moved completely with the pace of situations. Without much effort, not thinking afterwards, I should have done that. Right at the time, doing it. And you should also be able to recognize what to do. In this way you'll begin to make some progress in your practice, but at the same time it's important, as part of your preparation, not to be satisfied with progress. Okay, but is maybe the best way. Okay, but.

[15:52]

And we shouldn't be too quick to cast off the yoke of our practice and wander about in the sense world, deluding ourselves that this is practice. When everything is, when you can practice real equanimity, then it doesn't make any difference. All this leads up, you know, to one thing, which is to make the real resolve to practice. Everything turns around your resolve to practice. Mooman Roshi gave me a fan the other day, and he had written on it,

[17:29]

the clear wind is in your own hand. Now, if you're not aware of that, then you have to make up your own resolve to practice. Out of this resolve your meditation practice comes, most deeply. So we try to sit in zazen posture, as the most comfortable, stable posture. And it's less said, some kinds of exercises are useful.

[18:38]

I think, without having some idea of specific yoga exercises, it's important just to move all your parts. You have fingers and arms and legs, and if you just shake them, move them in ways they don't usually move. You get in the habit of moving certain ways throughout the day. You should move in ways that counteract your habits. It helps your energy flow in your practice. Anyway, you should be able to sit with some fresh, clear feeling, even though we do the same thing over and over again, bowing or zazen. You shouldn't be bowing or practicing through a kind of haze of mild resistance, going along with it. It should be, each time, completely fresh and easy,

[19:47]

as if you had nothing else in the whole world to do. Anyway, beginning to practice zazen, you turn your thoughts inward. And you begin to be able to hold your thoughts inward. And finally, you experience outward phenomena as inward. What you see is in your own mind. What you hear is in your own mind. What you feel is in your own mind, body.

[20:51]

Subjectivity and objectivity are not experienced in the same way. Then you begin to practice what seems the only way to translate it, is silence, but some big silence. Your experience rests in silence, not in forms. And that silence becomes deeper and deeper and very clear. At first, that silence is maybe sleepy. Without form to distract us, we tend to fall asleep. Finally, there is some clearness or consciousness, even when we're sleeping.

[22:13]

And out of this comes equanimity. The ability to be responsive, and yet the same in every situation. Not exactly the same, I don't know. Not exactly different. You've all noticed, that the word spiritual means breathing, I think, right?

[23:35]

Inspiration and expiration. Anyway, spirit and breath are the same. And in this session, I mean, what I'd like us to do, is to notice carefully how our consciousness arises. When you have that new consciousness that remembers, just what you just did. And when you have that, some thinking activities going on in your mind, but you don't remember when it started. How do you get caught in that?

[24:38]

I'd like you to become more able to see it when it arises. Go back over it. How did that come about? So that you can be there when your mind gets involved. And just notice when your breathing is fuel, and when it's consciousness itself. You know, as he said last night, a monk who practices zazen for a long time, maybe breathes only a few breaths per minute, but most of you, I think, will find that your breathing is probably slower when you do kinhin. So when you're walking, your breathing may be quite slow,

[25:41]

paced with your... stepping. And when you're running, of course, your breathing is immediately connected with your running. But when you sit down to do zazen, what is your breathing connected with? Your breathing is your getting fuel, you know. You get oxygen from this clean, fresh air, and you turn it into... you turn it into all kinds of thoughts. So when you sit down, you can see as your breathing becomes more rapid, even than when you're walking, that your thinking and your emotions take so much more energy than walking. So you should be able to notice just when this thing which needs all that energy arises,

[26:46]

various emotions and thinking, which you then breathe back out that air, all with clouds of these thoughts on them, for the next person to use. So spiritual means that your breathing is your breath of life, or is your consciousness, and it's not fuel for thoughts and emotions. So when you sit back down, you're actually doing much less than walking, so your breathing should slow way down. And you can tell something about your practice if instead of your breathing slowing way down, it goes faster than when you were doing qing-ying.

[27:47]

And, of course, sitting still and your breathing are one. If your mental and emotional activity is also accompanied or causes physical activity, your heart must keep going and your breathing must keep going to supply the fuel for all that. I guess your brain actually, I don't know exactly, but it consumes some enormous percentage of your actual energy, food. I think if you diet, for instance, your brain is a tyrant and it will take all of the energy for itself and deplete the rest of the body before it will start giving up its own energy supply.

[29:10]

So in this session, you know, it's possible to be like Mumon Roshi. It's possible in this session to deepen your practice immensely at each moment. Thank you. Maybe I should give you the next to last report on Mumon Roshi's progress through Zen Center. I think I left off with his arrival at the city.

[30:37]

Isn't that right? Anyway, he didn't go to first period of Zazen, but they went to get him for second period of Zazen, which he said he wanted to go to. And he was waiting at the door. They went out to get him at the end of the first period. He sat in the zendo and then he ate in the zendo. He ate in the zendo. Today is Sunday. I can't remember where I left off. I don't know. Anyway, he gave the Saturday lecture

[31:45]

and there were about 200 or 250 people came. It was quite diffuse. It's obviously not as concentrated as here and everyone just stood around not knowing what to say. And in the Buddha hall, everyone had to sit in seiza, as small a position as possible. He talked for an hour and then he answered questions for 45 minutes or an hour, about two hours' talk. And all the questions except for the first one were asked by people who just came. No one knows who they were. They asked lots of questions. Then he spent a lot of time with Oksan and Nakamura-san. He kept coming back to talking with them and he did tea ceremony with Nakamura-san

[32:54]

and I guess Berkeley and Yvonne made tea for him. Then he ate lunch with the students in the dining room. Then he went out to Green Gulch. Oh, they wanted to go down the curvy Lombard Road, or Shunan-san did. That's well known in Japan. Whenever they have little booklets on San Francisco, they show that road. They wanted to go down. So they went down that road and then they went across the Golden Gate Bridge to Green Gulch. And then they went into the zendo and he was, as he was in the city, he was very moved by the Gandharan Buddha in the city and he spent a long time looking at it. At Green Gulch, he was very moved by the zendo. He spent a long time in the space of it, liking it very much. And then he spent a long time in front of the Manjushri,

[33:55]

bowing over and over again to it. He likes Buddhas and things like that. He took a walk with us with some reluctance, actually. He just wants to do calligraphy and stand in front of Buddhas and talk to people, I guess. Tsukiyoshi was rather like that. We couldn't get him, really, usually, to go anywhere. He just stayed in that little tower. Once or twice we got him to go to the movies. We got him to go to the top of Mount Tamalpais once, but he scared the daylights out of everybody because he got up on the tippiest rocks in his little shoes, you know, with a little strap. And then he began jumping from rock to rock with his feet. Everybody was laughing. He said, Stop! Stop! He didn't even jump. So, no one brought him there again. Anyway, then he went and saw the chickens in the garden.

[35:02]

And then he, again, spent a lot of time, went to my house there, my room there, and he spent quite a bit of time there, again, talking to Nakamura-san a lot. And Nakamura-san did a whole trip on us, you know, full of superlatives about how wonderful we were. But probably he can see through that. He knows her from Kyoto, so he probably got the score on us pretty thoroughly. And then he gave the teisho at five o'clock. And the last question was, Peter asked, a little bird came in, was flying about in the barn, Peter said, What does the bird say? And Momonoshi said, It said I just gave a wonderful teisho. And then he cracked up.

[36:07]

And then he went back to the city. Oh, no, then they went and had dinner with the students. They had orioke meals sitting at tables, stretched out, you know, at the low tables that Neil's home made. And then they put the tables together, and they had tea together. Then he went back to my room, and he sat there a long time. When he first went to my room in the building in the city, he and Yvonne did zazen for about 15 minutes. He just decided to do it. And I guess I told you he spent a long time with Mike Dixon's painting, didn't I? Anyway, in Green Gulch, he again went to my room, and he spent quite a lot of time again with Nakamura-san and Oksan. Then he went back to the city, and people felt like some relief, you know, the trip was almost over. So I guess the students decided

[37:17]

that it would be nice to have a cup of sake together. And they asked him if he would like a cup of warm sake, and Shunan-san said he would, it would be all right. And he said, I'll take a little glass of brandy. So before he went to bed, they brought him a little glass of brandy, which he had, and he went to bed. And I don't know what happened since then. They were going to get up at 5 o'clock and start preparing to go to the airport this morning. Any questions? What was it? Flipping away?

[38:17]

Do you know anything? Do you know anything to say about that? I don't think real resolve can dissolve. It stays. But what we base it on dissolves. And what we base it on is often not adequate. We have some resolve that's formless. And we say we should practice for this or this is, etc. But as your practice matures, those reasons or your ability to sustain it in those terms gets weaker. But it's the terms themselves, not the resolve, I think, anyway. And so when that happens, you should be confident that some new way the resolve will express itself in your practice will come. So your resolve should take the form of confidence at that time,

[39:39]

even though you don't know how to express it. You know, Nanaku, I guess you all know who Nanaku was. He was a man who made fun of Baso by polishing a tile. Taught Baso by polishing a tile. When Nanaku was very young, he went to see the sixth patriarch. And the sixth patriarch said to him, Who is it that comes? And Nanaku was too young to know how to answer. And he stayed with the sixth patriarch for a long time. I don't know how long altogether,

[40:42]

but after eight years, when the question was asked again, he was able to respond. Nanaku, the sixth patriarch, said again in some way, What is it that comes? Who is it that comes? Who is it that comes? And at this time, eight years later, Nanaku said, Even if I put it into words, it will not be right. Even if I put it into words, it will not be enough. That also means, even if I put it into words, it is right, too. Anyway, he said, even if I put it into words, it is not right. And the sixth patriarch said,

[41:44]

It is that which cannot be put into words which wants to practice. It is that which cannot be put into words which is enlightenment. And Nanaku said, But that practice or enlightenment must not be relative or absolute, must not be dualistic, must be beyond relative and absolute. That which, It is that which cannot be put into words which practices Buddhism.

[42:52]

If you think you understand what I mean, you're probably not right. But if you think, if you don't know what I mean exactly, you may be quite right. Do you understand? We have to practice in this way. It's the only way our resolve can be deep enough. Any questions? Who had a question? A little louder, please. And

[44:12]

Please, speak louder. During the night they did what? They did what? Hmm. Hmm. It's no point to practice in the realm of comparison, comparing this and that.

[45:15]

Anyway, that excuse is used by Soto monks even more than Rinzai monks because there are more Soto monks than Rinzai monks. It's a very common excuse for doing what you want. As I said, you know, the eighth thing I... Yeah, eighth thing, eighth preparation I mentioned was don't throw off the yoke too quickly. Maybe that Rinzai monk threw off the yoke of practice too quickly. It's very clear. You don't, when a person is doing this and that, which maybe doesn't look like practice, if he's actually practicing, he doesn't have to explain it by saying, oh, I'm quite free. Mumon Roshi did an interesting thing in that talk.

[46:21]

You know. He took all the popular versions of what people say about Soto and Rinzai and he took them all and he balanced them back and forth against each other contradicting himself about Rinzai and then Soto and etc. And then he said, if you want to really practice, your Blue Cliff records can't be either Rinzai or Soto but must be your own foreground, not the background of your practice. Must be your own situation now. And maybe you should have Shinryu Suzuki records. So he didn't actually compare Soto and Rinzai. He just mixed them up. Yeah.

[47:24]

The issue that we're not quite, not quite understanding, we're not exactly understanding. Is that true? Does he just speak some words also? Or will he speak some words? What you do or whoever is speaking to you. Yeah. I think you know what I mean. Anyway, I don't have any doubt about what I said.

[48:53]

Even though I don't understand it at all. Not much anymore. I'm worried about you. I'm keeping you sitting so long. Two questions. I don't think they're related. There is not any relationship I can say. Can you say something about any relationship that may exist between having some small good feeling about your effort and not attaining it. And the other one is, what's the relationship between sitting alone, sitting entirely alone, and yet counteracting a tendency towards separation. Hmm.

[49:54]

Well, the first is, is it okay to have some small good feeling about your practice? Yeah, that's all right. But then I start thinking I have a tendency, even if I don't know what it is. That's, the next step is where you get in trouble. If you have some small good feelings, oh, okay, let it go. If you then you think, whoa, and that means then you're, then you'll cause yourself some trouble. You can find that out by experience. But if some small good feeling arises, it's all right. If you sit on that egg, trying to hatch it, it won't be so good. Actually, we don't get so much out of our practice. So if you had some small good feeling, it's all right. I hope you had quite a few small good feelings. And the second one, as long as they're small.

[51:04]

The second one, what was the second one? Sitting alone. What do you mean sitting alone? You should sit entirely alone. That doesn't have anything to do with people. No. It doesn't mean going off in the woods or something. No. Anyway, balancing your nature is an entirely different level than that. Balancing your nature is so that you can sit alone. Just like in order to sit still, you have to balance your body. It can't be this way or that way. So you want to balance your

[52:07]

social and life activities and your tendencies. If you want to get free of your tendencies. Thank you very much.

[52:22]

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