Before I get into the substance of my talk, it's always good to begin with the practice of confession. And I confess that when I was up in my kitchen just now, There was a huge steaming pile of soybeans that just emerged from the pressure cooker. And I'm so weak. I took a couple spoonfuls of soybeans, and I put a little salt on them, and I ate them, and they were delicious. And you'll all get to have them for breakfast tomorrow, right? No? When? Lunch.

[01:01]

Lunch. OK, so you have to wait like 25 hours from now to eat these, but they're very good right now. Sojin Roshi is still feeling under the weather. I'll call him actually after lecture and see how he's doing. I don't think he's, he's not really that ill, but I think he's wisely protecting his energy and he really wants to be here. So for the moment I'm, filling in, and you'll see from my talk, I've stolen egregiously from him in the words that I'm gonna share with you. One bit of instruction, because I noticed that when you're sitting here, you can see everything.

[02:02]

If you have to cough or sneeze, It's really good to cover it with your sleeve, whether you have a robe or not. If you cover it with your hands, then you're actually transmitting if you have any germs to transmit, you're transmitting to your hands, which are going to transmit it to other things that you touch. Whereas if you do it to your sleeve, you're not so much, and you're preventing aerosol action. So I'm just encouraging you. number of people are coughing and sneezing, and I don't presume to know whether they're having a respiratory illness or allergy, but it's just, we're taking care of each other. And this is, yes?

[03:04]

It's working. I don't know if it's loud enough. Is it louder now? I am speaking now. Okay, so the deal is see if you can cough into your sleeve and just make that a way of doing it. We've been discussing illness and in particularly in these kind of close quarters. So I just wanted to share that with you. Okay. So here we are at the first day of our five day session. And I was, I just found out last night that I'd be offering a talk. And so I was looking through talks by Sojin Roshi, Suzuki Roshi, published and unpublished, and I'd like to offer a kind of melange of Sojin and Suzuki Roshi.

[04:21]

There's a talk which you can find, because nothing is hidden on the internet, from, it was actually posted by the Chapel Hill Zen Center, but it's a Rohatsu Sesshin lecture that Sojin Roshi gave on day six of the 1997 Rohatsu here. We've been doing this a long time. And there are people in this room who have been doing this a long time. There are people in this room who have been doing it longer than me. And so we have this great body of practice and also a body of words and encouragement. And that's what a talk should be. It should be an encouragement to practice.

[05:25]

So I'm going to read you parts of this and probably intersperse it. Sojin's talk is on kind of the really way that we look at our own functioning. How do we work in Sashim? So actually, the title of the talk is Continuous Practice, Why and How. That's the title of his talk. And then there are several talks in Not Always So from Suzuki Roshi, and one of them, the first one in the book is also from Sachine, and it's called Calmness of Mind. And I think that the, really, as I was looking through it today, The focus of Not Always So is how do we practice Shikantaza, which is how do we do what is the mark and the spirit of our family and our practice, of our Soto Zen tradition.

[06:48]

But let me begin with Sojan Roshi. He said, this is the sixth day of our Rohatsu Sashin. So this is the first day of our Jun Sashin, our practice period Sashin. And he says, we have been sitting Zazen. So I'd just like to reframe this. We are sitting Zazen, doing Kinhin, eating meals, cooking meals, and serving each other. moment by moment we are dealing with, so I've translated everything from the kind of near past to the present. So instead of saying moment by moment we've been dealing, moment by moment we are dealing with our silent dramas, dealing with our not so silent dramas, with all of our complaints and our doubts.

[07:54]

I would say also dealing with the challenges that we feel in our bodies and the challenges that we feel in our bodies in 2016 are probably greater than the challenges that we felt in our bodies in 1997. It's really amazing to contemplate that, you know. I was there, you know. Corey was there, Ross was there, probably many of you were there. And our bodies have moved on. And yet, here we are. This is really incredible. Here we are, still doing this completely nutty activity. You know? So he said, this is continuous practice, a very concentrated time of continuous practice.

[09:01]

During this time, two questions come up. One is, why? I don't know where he got that. And the other is, how? Sashin is pretty difficult. It's difficult to stay in our seat, dealing with our painful legs, our painful mind listening to the loop of our thoughts continuously going around and around. It's like, this is really getting down to the detail of what we experience. It's sometimes difficult accepting the various emotions that come up. Difficult just settling ourself on ourself. without getting caught by emotion, thought, painful legs, or without becoming attached to any of the nice states of mind, which might occasionally appear.

[10:08]

We wish that those would be less occasional. We wish that this would be, as Dogen described, our zazen in Fukunza Zengi, It's just the dharma, the zazen we practice is just the dharma gate of repose and bliss. So like, okay, let's bring it on, you know. But what is this settling the self on the self? I'm just gonna leave that, I'm not going to answer that, I'm gonna leave that as a question. Settling the self on the self, this is something Sojin is expressing, this was like a key point of Kategiri Roshi's teaching, and I think it's a principle of Soto Zen.

[11:14]

What does that mean? Even syntactically or literally, It always stops me to think. So Sojan writes, the state of mind one seeks in zazen is no special state of mind. When we first read about meditation, it's very intriguing. We are lured into this activity hoping to reach nirvana. We don't understand that nirvana is the pain in our legs. Too bad. That's his word, not mine. Although I might say, too bad. This is seven days, this is five days of letting go. Five days of dropping. Five days of non-clinging. Five days of not discriminating.

[12:17]

Five days of allowing whatever state of mind is present to be present. Five days of not chasing away evil thoughts, not coveting good thoughts, not grasping after wonderful states of mind, and not rejecting painful states of mind. Just being present with whatever is present. That's all. The most difficult thing of all is to stay in your seat. So what Suzuki Roshi spoke of, speaks of as his understanding of Shikantaza is cultivating a mind and body that includes everything. So it includes painful states of mind, it includes joyous states of mind.

[13:22]

It includes bliss and painful legs. It includes moving and not moving. And the way our usual discriminating minds work, works, discriminating mind works is to sort the good and the bad. To sort out, I will include this and I will exclude that. Here, we've created a context and a practice to include everything. And not only to include my everything, but each of us is including everyone else's everything because this is an activity that we are doing together.

[14:32]

I think the frame of mind that comes up for me is What Dogen speaks of in Bodhisattva Shishobo, it's the fourth method of guidance, which he talks about as identity action. In the early Theravada version of these teachings, it's cooperation, and I think I think Tamar once said that the Sankhya Nims was together action, is that right? So this is, they're the same thing. And our together action, I like that, because it's really pithy, is together not excluding or including everything that comes up within me.

[15:46]

but it also is including everything that comes up with each of us in the room. That's the practice of Sashin. We place ourselves here for this concentrated time and do this very physical practice. And we recognize that everyone, each of us in our own way, is having the same challenges, the same kinds of challenges. The particularities are different, but, you know, I found a quotation from another teacher of mine, Shoto Harada, who said, it's very hard to have it's hard to have very good posture when your mind is full of thoughts.

[16:56]

And it's also, you find that the inverse is true, that if you're really being able to focus on your posture, then your thoughts can fall away. So we're constantly in this dynamic activity. And this is where Sogen says, he said, the most difficult thing of all is just to stay in your seat. He says, we're always moving around. That's our life. Life doesn't stand still. We look for the next comfortable position, the next interesting thing. It's very hard to stay in one place. So we have these two questions. The first is, why do we do this? When we start to sit, even when we come to sashiin, there's always this question, why am I doing this?

[18:06]

And the older we get, the more insistent that question is, right? And it's interesting because I have that too. I have a slight anticipatory anxiety going into Sashin. And yet this morning I just woke up and set a foot down, got out of bed and came down. And that's very different than when I first sat Sashin. Not only did I want to know why, actually why was framed by, not how, but what am I doing? It's like I used to wonder for three days in advance, oh, what's my job going to be in Sishin? You know, and sort of like really wait until that job list was posted on the bulletin board and run down and see it.

[19:16]

And I find, and Sochin would always say, people would ask him about cecchini, you know, how do you prepare for cecchini? He said, I don't think about it. And there was one part of my brain would say, oh yeah, right. You know, and another part of my brain would say, How does that work? And really, I don't think about it much these days. And still, the question, more of the question is, how will I do this? So when we start to sit, we instinctively want to know why. Actually, he didn't say that. That's interesting. He says, when we start to sit, we instinctively know why. It's beyond our reasoning, but somewhere we know.

[20:21]

Knowing knows. When we start to reason, we don't know anymore. We try to match our reasoning with our knowing. And it brings up this question, particularly we get into a difficult spot. So it's true. We know on some level, even though we can't articulate it, we know. And if we didn't know, why on earth would we come and do this? I mean, it's really, it's a very unusual and not so easy activity. We know, he said, it's like taking a boat ride. We know we enjoy going out in the boat. But then a big storm comes up. Pretty soon, the boat's leaning over and the sails are starting to rip. The waves are coming over the gunwales. We say, why did we ever do this? But it doesn't help. The real question is, how do I deal with this?

[21:23]

How is the practice question. Why? is valid but it's secondary to how. Take your, I'm reading this, take your life for example. Why was I born? It doesn't matter, you were here. How do I live this, in this life? How do I deal with this situation? When we hold this question how, that's continuous practice. You can't deal with why until you get tired of it and turn to how. How do I do this? This is the koan of your life. Occasionally, someone will ask me, how can I be a good student, good Zen student? Invariably, I say, just keep that question. Keep that question in all of your activity.

[22:30]

So this is what we are doing here for the next five days. We are just doing this activity. And it seems to me that the essence of it is this cooperation and together action. It's very complex what we're doing, and yet virtually everyone in this room has done it a lot and knows how to do it. We know how to fall into and take care of the responsibilities that we have, and we can enter them very freely And so our practice is cooperating with each other to cook this whole community for these five days.

[23:46]

For us, it appears like very, a kind of intense practice-based activity, but it was occurring to me earlier today that actually, In a monastic context, what they do during Sashin is simplify things a little bit. For us, it appears there's more ritual because our whole life is ritualized in this context, which is not the way we usually see our life. But in a monastery, it's kind of like they strip things away. It's simpler than the usual repertoire of ritual activity. So we see it both ways. And this is the real gift and uniqueness of what's going on here at Berkeley Zen Center, that we are not a monastery.

[24:58]

We're a lay practice center where people have families and jobs. People are getting older. You won't go to a monastery and see an age demographic like this. It ain't happening there in the monastery very much like that. It's like young boys, you know, or young girls, never mixed in Asia anyway. But we have this monastic-based practice and yet that's not what we're doing. We're really doing some hybrid, and it's a very unique experiment. There are not very many places, and as you know, I have a lot of communication pretty widely within the Zen world, and just, there are very few places

[26:11]

that sustain a practice with the level of regularity and everydayness that we have. And we're very fortunate to have that. And also, it's not so easy. For some reason, Sochin goes into this whole thing about comic books. here. Has anyone ever seen him read a comic book? But obviously he read them when he was a kid and he remembers them. Comic books are archetypal stories which represent the real battles of our time. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man. In comic books there is always an evil one with a big head. He has all the technical control at his command.

[27:13]

The hero has spiritual strength. The battle between the head and the heart, this is, he had begun talking about the relation between head and heart. The battle between the head and the heart is actually the battle of our time, between the forces of technology, of expanding brain power and the spirit, struggling to bring these under control. The tensions of our time arise because technology and brain power are easily cut off from the heart, from the solar plexus. So there's, sounds like heart, there's the heart and there's the hara. So the solar plexus is, I don't know, maybe about 16 inches lower than the heart. or less. The tensions of our time arise from the vital center.

[28:15]

In comic books, the hero is always trying to keep it together. And this battle goes on in each one of us. How can we keep the heart, the mind, and other satellites in harmony? So this is also this function of cooperation or together action. When Dogen talks about this, the metaphor that he uses is the wise ruler and the people. And there is, I mean, it's a kind of brilliant social analysis But you can see it in a macrocosmic way, and you can also see it microcosmically, in the sense that if you look at yourself, if I look at the nation of Alan, maybe the ruler, wise or not, I think of as my brain.

[29:24]

And then you have the various people, the hand people, and the liver people, and the excretory people, and the stomach people, and all that. And in order for one to work, they all have to be cooperating. Co-operating. One doesn't say, when the liver says, I'm gonna check out for a little while, then it's like, next thing you know, we're headed for dialysis. No, that's kidneys, sorry. That's the kidney people. What? No, that's true. Anyway, you get the idea. And you could think of it like, now to think of your body as a comic book, that's interesting.

[30:33]

Actually, that's good, because it's pretty ridiculous. There actually is a comic dimension to it, except that it's a lot more gritty. Where Sojong goes is our Zen practice is to harmonize the mind and keep it under control so that it can work in harmony with the heart and the rest of the body. To harmonize the mind is one of the other pieces in Not Always So is an essay called You Be the Boss. where Suzuki Roshi says, you be the boss of you. And that's, it's interesting, that's what we're doing here for these five days. On the one hand, we have this framework of practice and of schedule and activities.

[31:40]

But in order to make it work, every one of us has to be to some degree, in control of ourselves, so we don't just go off. And, you know, believe me, I've led Cixin in a lot of places, and there are a lot of places where, mysteriously, people just walk off. You know, it's like, They go, you know, I got something to do. You know, I have to go to a class or, you know, various other activities. And they just, you know, it's the American way. It's really interesting, because when I've led in other places, it's like nobody goes anyplace. You know, if I do sashimi in India, People don't do that, but we do that.

[32:42]

And there's something really good about that, because that means the people who are here have really decided to be here. Each of us is really here. And we're having to work with these forces, with these forces of entropy that want to send us spinning off into random activity. But we decide I'm going to be here because I do want to harmonize my mind and body. And why do I want to do that? I want to do that because I'm rooted in the Bodhisattva vow to awaken with all beings. And Here, as Sojourn Roshi says, the mind should be working for humanity and not for just its own satisfaction.

[33:46]

We sit up straight harmonizing all of this in one act. The first order of practice is to be grounded. When you pick up a cup of tea, pick up the cup with both hands. Drink the tea with no separation between you and the cup and the tea. The cup is not an object. You are not an object. And the tea is not an object. There are no objects. It is just the reality is subjective, which means cooperative. When we let go of everything, no one thing stands out. The center of yourself is the center of everything in this moment.

[34:53]

That's what I would add. I would add in this moment. When we sit Zazen, we bring the whole world into harmony. This is called saving all beings. Even though people are still out there killing each other and running for president, the influence of your continuous practice has far-reaching effects which you can never know. As long as individuals are out of balance, the world will be out of balance. It's true the world is made up of individuals. Those individuals make up various social systems that we have, whether they're systems of community, systems of gender, systems of race, systems of business.

[35:55]

It's all composed of these, of individuals, of each one of us. So as long as individuals are out of balance, the world will be out of balance. In order to bring the world into balance, we start with ourselves. We start by bringing ourselves into balance, which is the whole point of Sesshin. It's a natural activity in recognition of the this kind of energy that wants to pull us apart and fractionalize us and have us spin out, spin off. We say, no, I'm going to sit here with my friends and I'm going to help them and I'm going to let them help me.

[36:58]

And in that one small place, we're going to be of benefit to each other and save each other just a little bit, even though the world is also aflame. But this is where I'm going to start. This is what Suzuki Roshi was talking about when he said, to shine one corner of the world. I'm going to shine my light, my energy, right here, right now, for these five days. And maybe it'll make a little difference. Maybe it'll make a big difference. Maybe I'll be able to see this difference in the world. Maybe I'll be able to see this difference in myself.

[38:00]

Maybe not. but I do this in faith, and that's faith as a practice, not faith as a belief in something, but as the enactment of wholesome and holistic activities that I've come to believe in. The world is still out there. The whole time that I've been giving this talk, there's been a helicopter circling overhead, which probably means that there's been some crime committed, because that's usually what that means. And yet, we're here. We do what we can to shine one corner of the world. And in the course of five days, even though some of our individual lights may flicker on and off, the collective light is very bright.

[39:19]

And we're very lucky to participate in that together. So I'm going to stop there. We have a couple of minutes for discussion or questions. Thank you. James. Good. Yeah. I think over time a lot of us have quit worrying about why. It might be a young person's question perhaps. Or it might be a young person's question, and it also might be a question that we face at the very end. But for now, if it falls away, it falls away. That's dropping away. So thank you. Good to see you here. John.

[40:25]

The faith in our practice and the faith, I'm glad to hear and to be sharing in it, the faith that whatever we let down in ourself, it's actually letting down, generally. And although there's no product or outcome specifically, I would say anyway, I don't know, it's wonderful to know. I mean, it's wonderful to keep in mind that as we become a little bit calmer, Well, I think there's a literal aspect to it in the sense that if one is truly calm, if one develops whatever degree of imperturbability that is a factor in how we relate to people, which is always there.

[41:40]

All of the Buddhist, all of the Bodhisattva, the vows, the precepts, they really are all instruction about how we are in relationship to each other. And the whole container of Seshin is so completely relational. We could have a different form that says, you know, and a different structure that said, you know, Buddhist retreat is each person goes off into their own cell and meditates. Actually, there are retreats like that, which are also very useful. It's an intense encounter with yourself. But that's not our style.

[42:43]

Our style is to do it together. Ken? bringing up the idea of cooperating selves. When I feel angst, it does not feel like cooperation at all. In fact, I feel like I'm not cooperating with myself. My body is not cooperating with my desire for comfort. But to feel the self, settle into the self, it does feel like collaboration, which makes me think of the Shenzhen Ming, that it's when our ego arises, that's where, that's the other voice that is in conflict with what is happening.

[43:45]

Yeah, it wants to go its own way. But really, I think the subtext of Ken's message is everybody should cooperate with him. Because he's a session director. But actually, secretly, we all think this would go a lot better if everybody would cooperate with me. But it's the great thing about cooperation is that we're constantly having to find this middle ground between what my thought, what my capacities may be, and what someone else's thoughts and capacities may be. And cooperation means there's a, there's this aspect of letting go, and there's this aspect of coming forward.

[44:57]

And it's a great, it's just like, it's dancing, you know? You can't dance without, having both of those aspects. And at the heart of it is responsiveness. It's responsiveness to each other. So this is the dance we're in. Yeah, Mary. Someone said to me recently, the most important thing is to regulate your life. And it seems to me that that's what you've been talking about. You could say harmonize your life, but I think that regulate your life gives you a more clue as to what to do. And if I could find my glasses, I was going to read from something by Suzuki Roshi.

[46:05]

if I can find it. I may not be able to find it, but I'm not going to linger on this too long. He's talking about Shikantaza. I can't find it right now, never mind. To regulate your life is also the act of mindfulness. We tend to think of mindfulness and the way it's being described these days is like being present in the here and now. But actually, that's just one aspect of it.

[47:15]

When you look at the four foundations of mindfulness, the fourth foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of the dharmas, which means the application of dharma teachings to the circumstance, the difficulty that you find yourself in. And this is a regulatory act. It's also translation, another word, way to translate mindfulness is recollection. So you use these Dharma tools to recollect yourself and reestablish yourself on yourself. So, That's a regulatory action. Regulatory just means regulation has a wonderful envelope of meaning coming from Latin.

[48:17]

It means proper order, it does mean harmony, but there's an active component in it. you know, if you regulate the temperature in your house, you're having to either create some fire and heat, which brings it up, or create some cool, which brings it down. It's like you're having to inject something into that system. And we can do that in a mindful, in a conscious way, and we can also do it in an intuitive way. One more and then we'll end. Judy. which I might sort of identify with the awareness in Zazen.

[49:32]

It's just one with sound, vibration, whatever that is. I'm not really attaching meaning to what that sound is. And yet somehow in terms of the Brahma Kaharas, there's something that I associate with that sound that might spontaneously give rise to Yeah, I don't think that's so mysterious in the sense You know, a good Zen student is just hearing without listening, without creating a narrative about what's going on out there with those helicopters.

[50:53]

In that sense, certainly I'm a failure as a good Zen student because one part of my brain is flipping to the creation of a story about what's happening out there. If that story is created, then I have to apply other practices to it. And that's what you're doing with the Brahmaviharas. It's like, okay, I've gone this far. I've created a story. I can't undo that. So then, how do I interact in a productive way with that story? I can interact by invoking a practice. That's what I'd say. Tamara, you're last. Just say last time there was a helicopter in the middle of the day, it was because one of the warriors was selling coffee at a Starbucks, and there was a big crowd down there.

[51:54]

You're kidding. Which one? That's cool. Yeah. There are many possibilities. Right. But there are many possibilities. That's the thing. So this is where my mind went. And to recognize it could be a good thing, it could not be a good thing, which is what everybody's been studying the Xinjian Ming for the last six weeks, which is a great place to stop.

[52:30]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ