Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Good. Good. I had some audio difficulty with my different devices. So it seems like it's okay. So we're having a one day sitting a zoom session this morning, this afternoon. I really hope that soon we can return to the Zendo for these sittings or for hybrid sittings, whichever, however we decide to design them. But for now, this is our practice. And I think that many of us have learned how to make the best of it. How to appreciate the fact that we can be very widely connected.

[01:06]

And, you know, in a certain way, this is, it's kind of like an extended version of our lay practice. We're sitting as I look around. And each of us is in our home. Very nice to see you, to see you in your sitting. And it's funny, I mean, I'm looking the first person that I see on my screen is Ross, who's probably about 20 feet away from me in his own, in his own environment here. And, and I can see if I put you on gallery view, which I prefer, rather than looking at myself, I see all of us here. And I see, you know, there's some people in Southern California, there are some people in

[02:13]

India. I don't know, we have to see here. Often there. Well, there's somebody in Bozeman, Montana. So we're all over the place. And yet we're trying to make Oh, yeah. And there's three of you up in probably in Northern California. Hi guys. And yet we are today we're coming together as one mind. So Sashin, as you know, means something like to touch the heart, or to touch the mind. And while large tracts of the, of the West are burning, while there are floods in

[03:15]

Louisiana and in New York City, while the COVID virus is a continuing danger, we rely on Zazen. To use Katagiri Roshi's expression, to settle the self on the self. That was a kind of obscure statement to me for quite a long time. And what I've come to understand it to mean is that we use the mind to observe the mind. And when we use the mind to observe the mind, then we are not caught by the wiles of our monkey mind.

[04:19]

And last night, my son Gimpo gave a way seeking mind talk. And he referred to something that he had heard Sojin Roshi say in one of his lectures that basically he lived in the context of raging emotions. And I think Gimpo, like many of us, somehow we wouldn't have pegged Sojin Roshi as a creature of raging emotions. Which is not to say that he wasn't, or wasn't fully prone to his emotions, but I think that through his long training, he was able to use his mind to watch his mind.

[05:27]

He was able to settle the self on the self. And so he was able to, by the very act of observing those emotions, to be free in the middle of them. And I think in the long run, this is what we are attempting to do. This self of raging emotions is the unsettled self, the habitual self. And if we can find a way to settle it, even noting that what we take to be our self may have a very good reason, a very good case to make for being unsettled, then what we can come to is just

[06:34]

simply to be grateful for being alive. This is what we're bringing forth in Sojin. I felt very, just seeing that the gratitude wells up in me quite emotionally. You might say this is a raging emotion that I'm having at the moment. Just be grateful to be alive. And this is something we structure our Seishinde to allow this gratitude to flow forth. So what does a Seishinde look like? We've tried to make it, on Zoom, we've tried to make it as as close to a

[07:47]

Seishinde in the zendo as it might be. But obviously we're missing the the body to body component. But this is pretty good. It's pretty good to see you all, to see all of your faces, and to see all of your places. So Seishinde is, in a sense, a really highly compressed version of an ordinary day. And ordinary, you know, ordinary is an interesting word. Its Latin root means really things in the proper order. And so we have ordinary, we also have recognition that

[08:53]

our religious institutions or religious denominations are often orders. We have the Soto order, or we have the, you know, a monastic order. And that order also means to set things in the proper sequence, to set everything in a way that's in an appropriate relationship to each other. And that's what, to me, that's what ordinary means. It's not a, it's not something plain in the sense of, uh, what can I say? It's not something plain in the sense that it's not important or important. It's just, it's actually really important. It's really important that things be in their proper order. This is how we try to organize our life.

[10:00]

I've said it, I've talked about this many times. It was an encounter. This is a long time ago. It was probably, it had to be at least 30 years ago, because I was already together with Laurie. And, uh, the, uh, Chan Master Sheng En came and gave a talk in the Zen Do one evening. And in the Q&A, Laurie asked him, I think something like, what's the most important practice or what's the most important thing for a lay practitioner to to do or to pay attention to? And his answer very quickly was, regulate your life. Regulate your life means to put things in the proper order. And that's what we do.

[11:08]

In the broad sense, in the course of a session day, the elements that we cook together into this tasty stew, we have zazen, we have kin-hin or walking meditation. Usually we have eating and cooking. We have a Dharma talk, opportunity to meet with a teacher, work and rest. This is a full day. These are all the things that we need to do. And we cook them together into a schedule that is pretty balanced. And we go through that day. And particularly when we do a long session, when we do one day, one day is hard sometimes because one day is like uprooting

[12:16]

our usual weekly schedule that we, the schedule that we have in our daily lives. And reframing it this way. But when we do a multi-day session, then after, usually like after day two, we fall into this rhythm and then it's just, it all makes sense and it just all unfolds. And when it unfolds, then we have an opportunity to settle the self on the self. We just fall into this, as it unfolds, we fall into this rhythm and the schedule sustains us, structure of our activities sustain us, and we create an ordinary day. Everything in its proper relationship to each other.

[13:20]

And then if we focus in, every activity has its ordinary dimension. And that particularly goes for Zazen. Just as we put the events of a day in the proper sequence, in Zazen, we put our body and mind in the proper order. And we're constantly having to readjust and reset and realign ourselves with what we have come to feel is the ordinary way, which is to sit upright, to breathe freely, to allow our senses to be operating and receptive,

[14:24]

and not to get caught on any particular idea or feeling. And we are constantly getting caught and we are constantly sort of falling out of balance. And of course, there's some part of our mind that wants to ask, why are we doing this? What good is it? So the other day, at resident dinners, we've been at the end of resident dinners here, we've been reading brief excerpts from this new collection of Suzuki Roshi's lectures that Sojin was working on with Jiryu at Green Gulch. And Jiryu is continuing to work on it. It'll be like a third volume of Suzuki Roshi lectures,

[15:34]

sort of a successor to Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, and not always so. And Lori was helping Jiryu, and so she has this manuscript and we're reading very short excerpts at the end of our meetings. So I want to read you the excerpt that we were looking at this week. It's from a Sishin lecture. And it was given, I found it, it was given on March 1, 1970. So a student asks, do you get anywhere if you keep sitting every day and count your breaths? Of course, this is a question that we all have. Even though we know, we're not supposed to think about getting somewhere. We all secretly or not so secretly

[16:39]

still have this question. It's a human question, it's understandable. So do you get anywhere if you just keep sitting every day and do your breath counting? Will there be progress? Or can you just get stuck? This is a really good Zen question. And Suzuki Roshi says, yesterday, which was also a Sishin day for them, I said many people changed into stones after sitting for six days. But why we practice is not to change into a stone. In other words, we don't want to change, we're not, we don't practice in order to get rid of our human aspect of feelings to be to be as supposedly feelingless as a stone. Although, of course, we have no idea what stones are feeling. The stones themselves may be full of raging

[17:47]

emotions. We'd have to ask a stone. But then in order to ask a stone, we'd have to know stone language. Maybe some of you know that. Anyway, why we practice Zazen is not to change into a stone. That is something that will happen in our practice. I don't say that is bad. That may be good. But that's not why we practice Zazen. You will have various experiences in Zazen. And then more and more, you will experience less the sense of duality. In other words, as we practice, we just fall into that, that rhythm of ordinary. And we see that everything is like, not so much,

[18:50]

this is good, this is bad. But really, this is just the flow of my life. And in Zazen, you get to experience the flow itself. Not necessarily the various elements that are part of it, but just the feeling of that flow. So you experience less the sense of duality. Good or bad, good experience or bad experience. You will always feel a sort of composure, the same feeling wherever you go. With that foundation or same feeling of composure, you will see things as it is. So composure, that's also an interesting word to me. Ah, because it seems to imply an act of composition. An act of pulling ourself,

[20:04]

putting all the elements of our life together. And again, in a way that is ordinary, in proper order. And then you will see things as it is. This is, of course, a famous expression of Suzuki Roshi's that he used a lot. And it has a, it has a tension in it. I don't know if that was intentional, the contradiction or the tension between things, the plural, and as it is the singular. But what it implies to me is a way of seeing what we ordinarily think of as the separate things of our life as one reality. In other words, to compose just the way a musician

[21:18]

or a painter takes different colors or different sounds, limitless, and places them together and creates one thing that we perceive, that one perceives as whole. And that actually each of us perceives, hears, sees in a way that is unique to us. A painting doesn't say one thing. It says something to each person, and that thing is not necessarily the same. So with that foundation or same feeling of closure, you will see things as it is. When we're sitting in Seijin, after we really settle into it, then we're just living all of the things as one reality, the reality of Seijin. So that constant feeling will be like

[22:30]

emptiness, or Buddha-I, or Buddha-mind. We call it by various names, a kind of fundamental openness of mind. This openness is what I often talk about as, to me, the act of Zazen is the act of a complete receptivity. What Sojin Roshits encouraged us to do was to include everything in Zazen. So this calls for an openness of mind, which is another form of meditation. It takes some concentration to be able to have this openness of mind, but it's not fundamentally an act of concentration. It's an act of openness. It's an act as if somebody

[23:36]

lifted the top of your skull off, and so everything could be poured in. So you will not feel that you are here or you are there. Here or there is just a dualistic mental understanding of things. Before we develop that dualistic understanding of things, we have a more pure experience of things. In other words, before we identify as being here or being there, before we invoke the story that we have about any particular thing that we experience or perceive, there is a quicker and very subtle moment when we don't know. Whatever it is that we are

[24:51]

perceiving, taking in through our senses or through our mind, there's a moment before we identify it, and then very quickly once we identify it, we invoke our past experience and begin to create a story about it. Can we get to that moment before that? This is what I believe he's talking about. Before we develop that dualistic understanding of things, we have a more pure experience of things. If you are able to maintain such a state of mind or state of yourself, then you will not be bothered by the idea of here or there. Maintaining that is challenging for us. The first thing we have to do is to,

[25:51]

and we have this opportunity in Seijin because Seijin allows us to go very deep into our state of mind. Still, we may just have glimpses of this state of mind. The more glimpses we have, it's just like building a circuit. Once you've created this route for your mind to follow, then more frequently you know how you can do that. More frequently you know how you can allow your mind to settle into this place. I think that many of us, and one of the great things about

[26:51]

this sangha, I mean as I look around, there are many of us who have been sitting for a very long time. Each in our own way has found that route. We may not be able to live there every moment, but one of the things we can do is we have greater flexibility, greater ability to reach that ordinary mind. We know what it's like and when it arises it's not unfamiliar to us. Uh-huh. And in time it becomes very supple. Working with our mind this way means that we know what to do when feelings or ideas are raging. We can work our, you know,

[28:03]

as you work a piece of clay in your hands and it gets warmer, it gets softer and more malleable. That's the way our minds can be. So then he finally in this paragraph he says, well then you will not be bothered by the idea of here or there. You don't seek for anything because you have a contented feeling. Uh-huh. I'm thinking about there was an exchange and some listserv I was on a few weeks ago about zazen and boredom. Uh-huh. And some person was writing and a few people chimed in in agreement that zazen was boring.

[29:10]

When I reflected on it, uh, yeah, sometimes it's hard. But what I reflected that again to return to this, this position of being grateful for being alive, I used to be bored a lot. Maybe that was my raging emotion. Uh-huh. It was a constant companion and I also, I feel that since I started practicing, I've never been bored. I can honestly say that, you know, it's like things that we might see as tremendously boring, like sitting in a, uh, sitting at an airport gate, waiting for an airplane that's been delayed. You know, it's okay.

[30:19]

You don't feel bored. I have, I can always do zazen. Uh-huh. But it's also, it's, it's not just that I have zazen to rely on. It's that I think that one of the things I've learned in the culture of this receptivity of receptive mind is, uh, I'm generally very interested in what's going on around me and it doesn't have to be anything special. I'm quite content to sit on the front steps of my house and just watch people walk by. So, uh, that's a, you know, I do have that contented feeling and I'm so grateful for that because I think before that, an activity of that sort or a non-activity of that sort, uh,

[31:27]

would have, I would have wanted to jump out of my skin. Anyway, the student, last part of this, uh, excerpt is, uh, a student asks, and this happens by simply sitting there and doing that for a long time, over a period of time. Uh, and Suzuki Roshi says, first of all, you should get accustomed to the right posture and the right breathing, natural breathing. So put things in the proper order, put your body and mind in order. Then you will have this kind of, should I say feeling? Uh, because it's not exactly even a feeling. It's just, that's how you'll be. Then you will have this kind of, should I say, feeling. For us,

[32:34]

it takes time, quite a long time to have this kind of feeling. So either at home or with a group, it is good to sit because it will help your posture and breathing. Breathing is an important thing. If your mind is disturbed, your breathing will be disturbed too. Breathing is both mental and physical activity. So to take care of breathing is how you take care of yourself. To take care of breathing is how we can settle ourself on ourself. And everything occurs within the space of a breath. Anyone who counts their breath,

[33:40]

you know, we think, Oh, counting your breath, one, two, and so forth. But we all know that between one and two, all of a sudden you can take a trip to Florida. You know, you can be thousands of miles away and have quite an elaborate story about what's going on and then come back to two. That's fine. That's just being human. And one can be grateful for that creative, imaginative power. Even though it might be a distraction, even though you might chide yourself, this is not what I intended to do. It's okay. It's really, it's being alive.

[34:49]

Now, if you can hold your awareness on breath, good, but that's not the goal. The goal is really to accept whatever comes up to us. And we create, we create this, this light lattice work of counting in order to give ourselves a little structure, in order to get something to, to return to. So we returned to that. We returned to it so that we have the opportunity to drift away again and to return. Returning is the essential act of Zazen. And so the reason that we take care of our breath is because, uh-huh, breath just naturally returns.

[35:58]

So long as we're alive, we don't have to do anything particular to get to the next breath. The body takes care of that. So that's the way we sit Zazen. Gimpo was talking last night about, uh, forget quite how he put it, but he was talking about the impossible things that we have to do. And Zazen is maybe one of those impossible things. Not in the sense that it's so hard or excruciating, although sometimes it can be, but it's impossible because we can't get our mind around what it is.

[37:03]

And yet, we set that for ourselves as a wonderful effort. And over time, we find our freedom right there in the middle of that impossibility. So even if it's impossible, it's not just that we have to do it. We recognize in time that we can do it. We can do impossible things. We can do that over and over again. And we have, then we have this settledness. And we have confidence. And we have, we are grateful for our life.

[38:06]

So I think that I will stop there and leave time for, uh, some questions and discussion. And, uh, I'm not sure whether it's Karen or, uh, Mary Beth, who's going to call on you. It's me. Okay. Hi. So if you have a question or a comment that you would like to make, please raise your digital hand from the reactions box. Or you can send a message to me in the chat box and I will relay your question. Okay. Hey, Ko, I see that you have a question.

[39:12]

Please unmute yourself, but also please show us your video so that we can spotlight you. Good morning. Thank you. I think you have two devices on, Heiko. Yeah, you'll have to turn one off in the room. Okay. Thank you for your talk and, and, uh, questions and things that are just kind of wedging out, uh, concerns of my own. One of the concerns that I have is that, uh, no, no question about the ongoing raging emotions. No question at all. I'm full of it. But, uh, when I find a story going on in my mind, I'm thinking about, oh, Florida or, you know, a river trip or different things. It's sometimes a signal that I want to think about.

[40:14]

I feel like sometimes it's a signal that I want to think about that. And sometimes I think that my trip to Florida is really dodging the current raging emotion and allowing me to escape from the current, uh, experience. Can you distinguish between those stories that come up that are just distractions from things as it is, and those that are actually part of things as it is? They're both part of things as it is. I'm sorry. Uh, we've got ourselves muted from you now. They are both part of things as it is. They're just different things. One is not real and the other is unreal. They're both real. And each of us has to decide where to put our attention. Would, would I say automatically that my story that's coming up is something I should attend

[41:24]

to or how would I decide, as you say, which, which one, whether to suppress that story and listen to the birds and the sounds around me or whether to, you know, how to manage my mind, not allowing it to just be monkey mind. I think the question is, how does one manage one's mind? And one doesn't manage one's mind by suppressing any experience. One meets it. Uh, whatever that means, you have to figure out what that means and how to do it. Uh, but it doesn't mean just picking one distraction over another. I, the, actually the, the classical way in the context of Buddhism

[42:25]

would be the fourth foundation of mindfulness. Uh, so in the first three foundations of mindfulness, you're looking at your feelings. You're looking at what's coming up in your body. You're looking at what's coming up in your mind. You're just meeting them moment by moment, right? Uh, the fourth foundation of mindfulness is called mindfulness of the dharmas. And that actually is how we change our mind. We don't, we basically, we remember the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the factors of enlightenment, the hindrances. We remember those as fundamental dharma teachings and we, we wear them like lenses that we look at our experience through.

[43:33]

So in a sense, you really are invoking, you're not distracting yourself. You're, you're invoking or you're bringing to life a lens through which you can look at that experience in a more focused way. But, but that's not necessarily Zazen. You know, sometimes what I would say, what I do is when these kinds of emotions arise, I, I noticed them, I returned to my breathing and I allow them to live whatever lifespan they, they will. Uh, and if that is not sufficient, then I, then I will actually try to apply a dharma teaching.

[44:39]

Uh, but it's not, it's not a first resort in the context of our Zen practice, but it's always there. We question Ellen Levin in the chat box. If a person is anxious at certain times and cannot sit, what then? Hi Ellen. It's a long time. Um, take a walk. Uh, especially take a walk with a friend. Uh, that way you have someone to accompany you to, to travel side by side. And also that way you are accompanying them. And so there's a, you allow for a kind of

[45:47]

mitigating resonance to take place. Between you, uh, one of the things, a whole part of this talk that I, uh, that I ditched, uh, was about Zazen and alchemy. Uh, there's a concept in alchemy. I'm not going to go into all this. I'm not going to give you the, I'm not going to give you the second talk. Fear not. Uh, there's a concept called the Alkahest. Alkahest was seen in medieval alchemy as a kind of universal solvent. But the interesting thing was that it was capable of dissolving any substance without altering or destroying its fundamental components. Whether these are physical or, or philosophical or psychological.

[46:56]

So in other words, breaking things down into their basics. And, uh, sometimes we need something. We can't always do that by ourselves. Uh, so yeah, take a walk. Thank you. You all are very quiet today. And there is Ross. Ross, please unmute yourself and ask your question.

[47:59]

Thank you. I'll do that. Uh, good morning. Um, at the beginning of your talk, you spoke about, uh, selling the self on the self and that it's kind of hard on, at a one day machine. Uh, but as, uh, the days roll along, multi-day machines, we can maybe have more access to that settled self. And I'm wondering about the so-called unsettled self that becomes settled. And in that point between say a one day or a multi-day where many people get more settled, the place where that unsettled is. And it's like Ellen just asked about, uh, not being able to sit. It reminds me of an exchange I read in, um, Umbrella Man between Steve Weintraub and Sojin where, um, Steve asked, I mean, Mel asked Steve how he was doing and he felt wobbly.

[49:08]

And Sojin responded, wobbly Buddha. So could you say a little bit about, you know, our wobbliness and how that is, in a sense, if we can settle on wobbliness, that would be. Well, one way that I, that I think about it is, um, to find the middle way between the middle way of looking at these wobbly emotions that, uh, sometimes they're just painful and I accept the pain. Um, and sometimes I know I can see I'm trying to get out, out of it or away from it.

[50:13]

Right. Uh, and sometimes I think the acceptance actually can manifest as just amusement. And I, I think about this, uh, just, just, it just occurred to me that this is one of the great human gifts, uh, the gift of comedy, if you will, uh, that we take what is quite painful and there's some transformation that we make that turns it into humor. And usually I think that humor is a kind of recognition of, uh, the fullness of our human emotions or the say fullness where you could say foolishness,

[51:21]

but they're not foolish. Like you can, you know, it's like, this is the way it is. So nobody wishes to be wobbly generally, but we are. And to me, seeing that is to recognize, uh, my humanness. And also I think then the challenge is to make an effort not to harm other people because of my wobbling. Does that, does that make sense to you? It's like, so part of the wobbling, for example, I had a conversation with somebody this week about anger and I can think of instances where I have been

[52:25]

quite angry and I, and I've done something perhaps that I've done something reactive. Uh, I really regret that. I regret the reactivity. I regret it. The effect of my anger of allowing my anger to impose on others, but I don't really regret getting angry. So one's wobbliness may be okay if one can really settle oneself on it. Anyhow, that's a start. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Alex, please unmute yourself and ask your question.

[53:34]

Thank you, Hazan. Um, I feel sometimes that much is made about, uh, staying in the moment or being in the present. But one of the things you said in your talk is that the essence of our practice is returning. And I'm curious, uh, why you think that's so, and how we can best make that return. What, what do we do when we return? Yeah, well, let me say something first. I wrote something in a column quite a few years ago when I was working at Buddhist Peace Fellowship at, uh, staying in the present and the magazine was Turning Wheel magazine, uh, our magazine. And, uh, when the magazine was published one night, I got a call pretty shortly after it was published from, uh, Nelson Foster, a teacher that I respect a lot, uh, ring a bone. And he was, he's,

[54:43]

he got on the phone. He said, you can't stay anywhere. He got my attention. You know, he was right. You can't stay in the present because the present is always moving. So my idea, it's not a fixed idea. Also, it's really important to recognize in the spirit of not getting stuck on anything, uh, not to have a fixed idea about even how your perception should be. So perhaps a model that I think of often when I think of, uh, this kind of open, this kind of receptive zazen is like sitting. One way of looking is by sitting by the side of the stream

[55:47]

and you're watching the water flow over a stone and it calls, it causes lots of eddies and ripples and so forth. And a leaf or a twig is drifting down the stream and it gets your attention. And before you know it, you're following it with your eye down the stream. That's just inevitable. That's not a problem, but then you recognize it and, and you say, oh yeah, I was, but I was really trying to, uh, keep my attention to watch that water flowing over that stone. So that's, that's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it, uh, I think is not just watching the water flow over the stone, but jumping in.

[56:53]

So you're not sitting by the side of the stream. You're actually jumping into the water and then you're, that's a, that's another, that's another aspect of meditation. But the returning, if what you're doing, I think, you know, we return, maybe we return until the pull is just impossible and we take off all our clothes and we jump in. Maybe that's a way of looking at it. I don't know. Thank you. Carol, Paul, would you unmute yourself and ask your question? Thank you for your talk, Hozon. My question is, let's say you do all the things that a Zen student is the thing to do, and yet you still have this feeling that something is missing.

[58:00]

I'm sorry, say it again. I'm having, my audio is having trouble. Okay, maybe I'll turn it on a little bit too. So let's say you're doing all the things that a good student will do, including Zazen, etc, etc. And yet there's still this feeling that something is missing. Something's just not quite right. What do you do with that? Well, Dogen's verse, which you know, is that when Dharma fills your body and mind, you realize that something is missing. My completion of that line is, when Dharma fills your body and mind, you realize that something is missing. And that's just fine. Things are incomplete.

[59:07]

They are, on one level, complete. This is what Suzuki Roshi, I think I talked about this last week or something, I don't know. All of the so-called things of our life, or Dharmas, if you will, is another translation for things, are constantly changing because they're impermanent. And what Suzuki Roshi says is they're constantly changing against a background of stillness. Ah, that background of stillness is like the screen that the movie is projected on, a very common analogy. Ah, so we are, the only, the permanence

[60:13]

that we might yearn for is the reality of impermanence. That's the best we can do, you know, because we can't make things permanent. And we feel, you know, we do have this existential feeling that something is missing. And we have an existential inkling or doubt or concern. Another way of looking is that we worry that we're not exactly real. But we're as real, we're as real as we can be. And that our doubts and questions are precisely what testifies to that reality. We will never, you know, we may never get rid of that sensation

[61:23]

until our last breath has left our body. The thing to do is to come to terms with that, to be okay, to feel that's just fine. Thank you very much. And I have maybe a closing comment from Cricket. She says, there's a line I love from a Stephen Dunn poem that, to me, fits so well with Carol's question and Hozon's response. To be without some of the things one wants, a wise man said, is an indispensable part of happiness. Read it again, please. To be without some of the things one wants, a wise man said, is an indispensable part of happiness. Yeah, I'll leave that there. I don't think I need to comment on that.

[62:37]

So thank you all. And it looks like now the winter has come. It has changed to summer in the course of the last hour. And so please, those of you who are not in Seychilles, enjoy the day and the weekend.

[62:53]

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