Well, while our practice, as you all know, starts with the thought of enlightenment, whether you actually recognize it as the thought of enlightenment, actually you won't practice unless you have some feeling which we describe as the thought of enlightenment. And the longer you practice, the clearer that feeling becomes as the blood of your practice. Maybe the second step is the seeking for spiritual friends, which you've all done by ending up here.

[01:03]

Without spiritual friends, it's impossible to find out what our karma is and how to get rid of conflicting emotions. Spiritual friends means anybody, you know. It means the people you practice with. It means your teacher. It also means Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, or Nirmanakaya Buddha, Sambhogakaya Buddha, and Dharmakaya Buddha. But practically, it means in the beginning, finding someone you can share a certain kind of space with.

[02:24]

First, it's important just to be able to have a friend, and then we realize the necessity to have spiritual friends. And then a third stage, maybe, any friend you have can be a spiritual friend. Any person can be your spiritual friend, but for a while, preparation for practice means that you choose your friends. We say you stay away from famous people and people with habits, bad habits, which influence you. And especially, you choose people who are practicing also. we do zazen, this may seem rather strange, but actually we do zazen so we can have spiritual

[04:05]

friends. You have to center your space before people can enter your space. As you know, our effect on people is not limited to just touching or talking with them, but your presence affects everyone. So, right actions also means calm action or action which is considerate of other people's space. But we lose a feeling for that. I mean, if you're holding a baby,

[05:08]

you treat the baby very carefully. But if the baby's across the room, you don't worry so much about whether you move your arm roughly or smoothly or whatever. But actually, you influence the baby almost as much, whether you're holding it here or whether it's over there. I mean, if it's across the city, it's not so noticeable. But anyway, one can make a case for that too, though. I won't today. Okay. So, how you speak, act, and move, you know, establishes the way everyone will relate to you before

[06:18]

they begin, you know. You can tell a person who's angry, of course, immediately, whether they're speaking or acting angry, you can feel it. Some people walk around always as if they're ready to bite your head off, you know. And some people are always seducing you into their anger or into their craziness or into their weakness or reassurance or something. As we do not give much instruction in Zen practice,

[07:23]

we especially emphasize sitting straight. I said at the beginning of this session about abandoning your posture, you know, and then some of you have abandoned it too much, you know, sitting like this in various ways, you know. I can't explain how both must exist at the same time, effort and no effort, but as long as you don't have any choice, just concentrate on making an effort, but don't be caught by it. When I talk about presence, I'm not trying to say that it's different from that there's

[08:36]

you and then there's some aura, your body and some aura or something like that, though actually at first in Zazen we experience it that way because we separate our ... in order to experience things our mind at first wants to separate them into parts to notice them, otherwise we think nothing happened, so we separate our experience into parts and you'll find in Zazen practice eventually you feel some field of awareness which sometimes is tipped or straight. You may be sitting straight but the field is cock-eyed, you know. We notice something at first in practice, something separate like that, and many people who look straight that presence is all twisted and after a while your presence and the other

[09:41]

person's presence can be simultaneous, you know, and yours gets all twisted up if theirs is twisted or if they're tipped you have to keep pulling yourself back because they're tipped, you know, and there's a tendency of people to move either toward the left or right and for each person it has a little different kind of meaning, but left side if you notice has a different meaning for you than right side. So some people will have one side of their body, one shoulder or the other shoulder knotted and not the other one, or one person will always try to lean, tend to lean toward one side, or one side will seem more secure in time and sort of a sense in the time of some conflict they'll move like this way and if in a time when they feel they've got to do something bravely they'll move this way. There's that tendency in people if you look carefully at the way you are you'll

[10:46]

notice that kind of thing. So our physical presence, mental and physical presence, if you try to analyze it is very complicated. So we don't try to analyze it, we just say sit straight until you are physically and mentally and in every way centered. So as long as you don't have much control over anything but your physical body, so you must work with your physical body trying to sit as straight as you can, lifting up maybe a little off your cushion and till you're quite comfortable and straight. If you keep doing this you'll

[12:00]

eventually have some whole feeling which allows you to be friends with other people, allows you to actually have spiritual friends so that you don't need to talk much but there's or at all or even be together because there's some, you can almost say memory, or it doesn't exist, that feeling doesn't exist in the realm of space and time. Once you have that kind of

[13:11]

contact it's always there but as long as you're at some conflict with yourself, body against body or body against something more subtle, you're always isolated and there's no way you can know how isolated you are. You always only experience what gets through, you know. And as long, maybe most important, are your own conflicting emotions first of all and second your conflicting emotions with others. So as long as you have anger and hatred or dislike some people you can't get to the first step in practice really. So the first thing you must do is to work with your hatred and

[14:18]

anger. Your way you avert from yourself and you avert from others or avert others from you. And even, anyway there's no reason to be suspicious of other people or mistrust them or feel like you've been burned, you know, or somebody out there is burning us all the time. You know that kind of feeling on one level may be quite accurate but it prevents you from knowing what's really going on and it prevents you from doing anything about it except complaining. If you can enter another

[15:30]

person's presence then you can do something about this world, you know, save all sentient beings because this presence is continuous with everyone, even the baby across the city, actually. So after you get rid of anger and hatred then you concentrate, the stages that you concentrate on are friendliness and compassion and even-mindedness, sympathetic joy, you know, the way it's technically

[16:31]

described, those names. And roughly that's just as your experience occurs and each of those is a kind of practice which intuitively you may practice finding out on your own because practice is a organic whole and once you've started it, it unfolds or you may actually receive some specific instruction on one or the other, particularly if you get knotted up at one or another point, you be asked to practice in this way or have this kind of responsibility because actually it makes you work with one or other of these ways of relating to people. In the ten bhumis, the ten levels of spirituality or omniscience or

[17:42]

the ten hmm, I don't know how to say it, anyway, track, you know, maybe we can call a person who practices ideally a trackless one, you know, a cloud, and though all ten of these are the same, at any particular time in your practice, one of them is your responsibility or your way to, way the world

[18:50]

is presented to you at that time, and the first one is joy, joyfulness, and the others follow from it, you know, and joyfulness is related to spiritual friends. You can't be, as long as you, anyway, there's, and as long as you are afraid, you know, have some anxiety or you're afraid your actions will hurt people, or you're scared that you won't be able to earn a living, or you're afraid of death, you know, or you're concerned about what people think about you. As long as you have those kinds of fears, you're cut off from yourself and others, and you can't get rid of those, or anger or hatred.

[20:03]

Or as long as you have those, you know, you can't feel any joy. Maybe you may feel good sometimes, but real joy, you can't feel, you know, because you can't feel that until you feel comfortable about how other people feel. As long as, until the welfare of other people is assured, you have a sense, you know, one of the great things about taking the Bodhisattva vow to save all sentient beings, you know, that without this vow you can't feel comfortable in some deep way. And you can't take the vow to save all sentient beings, as long as you're disliking this one, or hating that one, or afraid, or worried about your reputation, etc.

[21:12]

So this first stage, this first bhumi of joyfulness grows out of your beginning to be able to have friends, and spiritual friends, and finally an ability to feel comfortable with anyone, with everyone. Then you begin to actually see how we can save all sentient beings. And some joy arises from that. You've given up any deceitful intentions. You've given up any equivocal actions. You've given up, you've stopped habit-forming ways of doing and thinking. And your sole concern at this stage, you know, is how to satisfy others. You know, maybe the idea of a friend is much more important than the idea of who you are.

[22:47]

All you are concerned about is how to satisfy others. And the only way you know how to do it at the beginning is to practice Buddhism, is to join others who practice in the Sangha, and trust that the practice and the Sangha will satisfy others. So that desire to satisfy others, which is predominant at this stage of practice, doesn't mean just the people you live with. It means everyone in all worlds, all ages. Especially it means your teacher, and the patriarchs, and the Buddhas, and your own deepest sense.

[23:52]

So, from one point of view, this is Buddhism as morality, you know. Right actions, etc. Right speech. From another point of view, you know, it's the only way we free ourselves from conflicting emotions and our karma, and begin to enter into that subtle being which we all are, is. Suzuki Roshi always would say, is. We all is. R doesn't work quite right. First I thought it was this Japanese, and I'd change it to R. No, is. Okay, we all is.

[25:08]

And this begins by centering yourself in Zazen, putting your strength here, you know. If we put our strength here, actually, your energy is free to flow everywhere in your body. If you put your strength somewhere else, there's some constraint. This is the most satisfactory place to put your strength. And sit straight, you know. And sit still, no matter what. And if your mind is full of activity, you know, count your breath.

[26:52]

And if your mind is not, just be alert, without any ideas about anything. Some palpable, calm presence is there. That is completely sensitive to everyone else's, and which comes to flower by its sensitivity, by its relationships to everyone else. This presence knows everything, and is the actual continuer of Buddhism.

[28:09]

And it comes to most actualization in the relationship between teacher and disciple. And that relationship, as I always say, is the actual teacher, not teacher or disciple, you know. And that relationship, you know, exists forever. Most of you, when you eat, and I don't think we've given you much instruction about how to eat.

[29:34]

I haven't, but most of you eat pretty, without explanation, pretty well. But some of you bend down to your bowl. We lift our bowl up, and you sit, just as you were sitting Zazen, and you eat, you know. Pretty, you hold the bowl up pretty close. But you don't bend down to your bowl. You don't, you know, if you pick something up, you get back into your centered feeling, and then eat. Everything in the Zen Do and Zazen, or in meals, is like that. The sense I'm talking about is easiest to find with spiritual friends, you know.

[30:39]

And so, here in the city, you know, there's a special need to find some way to practice together. You may enjoy spending time with one person or another more, but like and dislike don't enter into it. Do you have any questions, anything you'd like to talk about?

[31:44]

I didn't believe you left your last book, but I'd like to talk about how to get a kind of balance. I don't see one. Perhaps an anger, or something like that. Yeah, one way you get rid of anger, or dislike of someone or something, is you cultivate the opposite feeling, rather in the manner of the power of positive thinking, you know. It's sort of similar, actually. You think good thoughts about somebody, you know, that kind of thing. But all of Buddhist psychology is based on this way of, but neither is real, neither the liking or the disliking. It's just that you find something as unreal as disliking, so you balance it with something you create, you know. But what you create that from, or the space, begins to give you some freedom from it.

[33:21]

But that way of cultivating friendliness, or compassion, or etc., friendliness mostly, or the opposite emotion, isn't the same as friendliness. It's a kind of friendliness maybe, but when you, what I meant was, when you don't have that kind of conflicting emotion anymore, then you can have a practice of friendliness, where you don't have any conflicting emotions there. For most of us, I think, though, we are always working with conflicting emotions. And you, of course, can't reject them, you know. That's another whole thing, you know. Any...

[34:29]

All so-called stages of Buddhism exist simultaneously. There is actually no advanced and beginner, you know. You notice, when you're practicing, your practice looks like beginner's practice, because that's the only part you can notice, or describe. Do you understand? Later, your practice may be no different, but you notice it as something different, as maybe your field of application becomes more subtle. Yes. On other people? You can project your feelings on other people? Of course. Hmm.

[35:37]

You can try to get into some very minute analysis. This is myself, but that much isn't. But actually, from the point of view of practice, just assume everything that happens to you is the result of your own wishes or desires or something. Otherwise, there's no other way to practice with your life situation. If you... Well, sometimes the question arises because we really want to avoid it being our anger. So we say, oh, that's our anger.

[36:44]

If someone's angry at you, you know, or angry around you... ... It's a rather complicated answer, but... If you're interacting with a person, yes. If you're not interacting with a person, right? Then you can assume that, if you want to, that your practice, if it was better, could stop that person's anger. So, the fact that the anger is there means your practice is narrow. Right? But what you can do, if you're not interacting with a person and the person is angry,

[37:52]

you shouldn't be drawn into the anger. Answer the anger with anger. Unless, sometimes, you should answer the anger with anger, though. If someone's angry, you get angry back. But you shouldn't be caught by it. Anyway, I don't think it's so fruitful to talk about this because as long as we're thinking about it, we're looking for some excuse. We don't have to think about it, just in each situation you find out something. But anyway, you must assume, practicing, that what happens to you, that your basic life situation, that the quality of your friends, the quality of how people treat you, is your own doing, your own mind, you know, your own responsibility, your own karma.

[38:56]

There's another side to it, which is, if you're like Suzuki Roshi, everyone treats you so well, and everyone's so kind to you, you begin to think the world is paradise, that there's no problems out there. You get isolated in a certain way. But, actually, that isolation is easy to see through. Because even though people treat you very well, you can see they don't treat themselves very well. We talk about psychosomatic, you know, some illness or something we have is psychosomatic. This cold comes from anger or sadness or something, you know. But, actually, we're all psychosomatic. It's one great big psychosomatic.

[39:59]

So, your psychosomatic cold I catch. You understand what I mean? We can't, if we're angry, we're angry together, you know. If one person is angry, we're all angry, you know. That's why your responsibility is so great to practice, you know. If you have a cold, you'll give it to other people. If you have anger, you'll give it to other people. You know. So, you won't know anything because your world is always reinforced. The only way such a snowballing occurrence does not happen is when there are people whose presence is free of contamination

[41:06]

or pure or unable to be affected by that kind of feeling. Such a person can change, you know, reverse that snowballing effect, you know. So, the whole aim of Buddhism is to produce people who can do that. Who can reverse the snowballing. Because, you know, as we say, the Bodhisattva sits in the midst of myriad circumstances but is not affected, you know, by anything. But not separate from anything either. So, your practice of sesshin, zazen, is how to learn, first of all, just physically to do that, you know. But first of all, you have to deal with your own history

[42:11]

which is coming in all the time like a crowd of angry, you know, landlords. Get out of my house. Pay the rent. So, you know, maybe that's the meaning of the person who practices is no longer a householder. You know, we say you can't really experience even-mindedness or joy until you have given up being a householder. It doesn't mean, you know, you can't be married or have some job. But practically speaking for many people it means that, you know.

[43:13]

But it means you have to have no distractions outside this household. You have to be your own landlord, maybe. How do you become your own landlord? How do you become your own landlord? Just do zazen. That's how to be kind. I didn't say anything. I didn't say aura. I said the word, but I don't mean some aura. If you get interested in auras, it'll hurt your practice of zazen.

[44:21]

Maybe presence is a more common word. So, how do you be kind to your presence is to do zazen. No, you've already asked the question. No. No. Okay.

[44:52]

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