And a thousand days of truth and love and spite I was thinking recently about devotion. People usually think of religion as devotional.

[01:05]

But people don't usually think about the Zen school as being devotional. When you think about the Zen school, we think more about wisdom and koan study and zazen. But is the active principle of faith. If one has faith, then it's characterized by devotion. Dogen Zenji says that for him, faith and enlightenment are the same thing.

[02:19]

Faith is enlightenment and enlightenment is faith. But faith in what? In a fundamental Buddhist understanding, Faith is faith in enlightenment, in Buddha's enlightenment, but Buddha's enlightenment means various things. And faith in Dharma and faith in Sangha. Since in Buddhism we don't have a deity, we don't have faith in something outside of ourself. In most religious practice, a deity is something separate and outside of ourselves.

[03:33]

And so we tend to objectify a deity. But in Buddhism, there is no inside and outside. And we see all beings as having one and the same nature, which we call Buddha nature. Everything has the nature of Buddha, and everything has the nature of enlightenment. For Dogen Zenji, He had faith in Original Enlightenment. Here we talk about Original Enlightenment and Acquired Enlightenment.

[04:40]

Original Enlightenment means that all sentient beings have Buddha nature. But unless there's some way to manifest it, or some way to bring it forth, it doesn't manifest. Which is the same as saying all beings are basically enlightened. But unless there's some process to stimulate it, it doesn't come forth. So, acquired enlightenment is the bringing forth aspect of original enlightenment. If we were not all originally enlightened, we couldn't become enlightened, because you can't gain something which you don't already have.

[05:49]

So our practice is called a non-gaining practice. We can't acquire something. There's nothing that you can get that you don't already have. This is a basic understanding. So faith is faith in the fact that we all have Buddha nature. faith in basic enlightenment and faith in basic Buddha nature. And Dogen says, and the practice is devotion to single-minded devotion to upright sitting. So I would say that Zen is a totally devotional practice.

[07:04]

Sometimes people say, but where is your devotional practice? What they mean by that is, where is your supplication? Zazen is not supplication. It's totally giving yourself to the universe. So Zazen is an offering. It's without excuses, without ideas. Leave all your ideas behind. Leave all your graven images behind. just simply enter and return to your true nature in total devotion and with total faith that you are Buddha.

[08:19]

It's very simple. Faith has to be supported. Faith and devotion can't act by themselves. The early Buddhists understood this very well. They categorized are the dharmas into various categories. They're very good at making categories. And they came up with the five controlling factors of mind, faith being one of them. And the five spiritual faculties, or five controlling factors, they're called indriyas.

[09:27]

Indriya means, is a Sanskrit word for Lord. And that's where controlling comes from. The five spiritual faculties are faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. Energy is a necessary factor for making something happen. You may have faith, but unless you have some way of sustaining practice, it doesn't mean anything.

[10:35]

Or it's become very weak. Or it easily gets out of control. The reason why they're called controlling factors is because they control their opposites. and because they also control each other. They level each other. They balance each other. They harmonize with each other. Mindfulness is the factor which is right in the middle and is present in any wholesome state of mind. And it keeps the mind When we keep coming back to mindfulness, mindfulness lets us know what we're doing. It keeps us from straying away from the path. Concentration keeps us fixed or attentive in a way that

[11:51]

It's like when you have a magnifying glass, and you hold it in the sun just right, and there's a little beam of light, and you can start a fire with it. That's concentration. Concentration enables you to start the fire, or to heat things up. And wisdom, in this case, not prajna, but panya, Panya is learning, study, development of the mind. Prajna is wisdom, which is on a different level. We usually talk about prajna when we talk about wisdom. rather than Panya. Zen school talks about Prajna all the time.

[13:01]

But Prajna is non-dualistic wisdom which is beyond learning. It's our innate wisdom which cannot be learned, but can only be brought forth. whereas pāññā is the wisdom of learning and education and development of the mind. So mindfulness is right in the center between these two pairs. But the pairs are like faith and wisdom. Faith and wisdom are a pair. And energy and concentration are a pair.

[14:07]

Faith is like are enthusiastic joy. When faith is established, it's like love. Love and enthusiasm and joy. And it's the heart. Faith is the heart. And wisdom is the mind. Just clean thinking without being swayed by anything. The heart is always swayed, you know, by things and it's easily lost. And faith can attach to any object. So wisdom is its controlling factor and keeps faith from wandering off into various byways.

[15:17]

And faith keeps wisdom from arrogance and cunning. The mind, without faith, or without the heart, is totally destructive. and easily becomes seduced by its own structures. So these two controlling factors are very important in keeping the balance of the mind and the heart. Compassion belongs to faith, and wisdom belongs to wisdom, or right thinking belongs to wisdom.

[16:33]

Energy, the Sanskrit word is virya, which means virility, which is a male concept, but basically it's thought of as just energy, both male and female energy, and its characteristic is effort to do something, effort to practice. And concentration keeps effort in balance. without concentration just goes all over the place and it's very overbearing and destructive and tends toward restlessness. Concentration left by itself leads to indolence.

[17:40]

If you've ever smoked marijuana You know that you get very concentrated, but you can't do much. It doesn't lead to action, but still kind of stay very concentrated on something. Viriya is the controlling factor or the support of concentration. And concentration is the activity of effort. And mindfulness is the balance point for these pairs of opposites.

[18:44]

And if you go into it more carefully, you'll find that there are many more, as you can see, relationships between these five factors. When they're very well established, they're the powers, the Balas, the five powers, because they can't be upset by their opposites. Faith will not be overturned by skepticism. And energy will not be overturned by laziness. And mindfulness will not be overturned by mindlessness or forgetfulness. And concentration will not be overturned by restlessness.

[19:59]

And wisdom will not be overturned by ignorance. So these factors are all present in zazen. If you think about zazen, one sits upright with total energy and concentration. Concentration in this case means samadhi, which is undivided attention. in selflessness. The difference between concentration and samadhi, normal concentration and samadhi, is that there is no self, no self-centeredness in samadhi.

[21:07]

And of course, ignorance is absent in zazen. And so, paññā and prajñā arise naturally. So in our daily life, the same thing, the same practice, should be our concentration. So people often talk about mindfulness practice. Mindfulness practice.

[22:26]

Mindfulness is present not only in every wholesome state of mind. Mindfulness keeps reminding us of what is a wholesome state of mind or a neutral state of mind. Sometimes called the practice of recollection, continually returning to faith, wisdom, energy, and concentration. This is the practice of recollection. It's like not forgetting what your practice is, not forgetting what you're doing all the time. your activities. So for a Buddhist student, it's important to keep these in mind as the basis of practice.

[23:47]

total devotion to sitting, total devotion to whatever you're doing. Total devotion to sitting also means total devotion to whatever you are doing. This is practice and This is how one fortifies or verifies faith. In Buddhist understanding, faith should be investigated by wisdom. It's not blind faith. It's actually faith with the eyes open. And one should investigate everything.

[25:07]

To have faith does not exclude either doubt or questioning. One should always question so that you know that what you're doing is supported by reason, even though it goes beyond reason. Ultimately, faith goes beyond reason, but it should be supported by reason, and reason can go far enough to realize that faith goes beyond reason. Maybe you have some questions? There's a lot of little things in there that I've talked about.

[26:10]

What is a virtue and the purpose of vowing? Did you say vowing or bowing? This way? Oh, bowing. Bowing. Well, I don't know about what the origin of bowing is, but I can tell you why we bow. Bowing is called a great activity. When we bow, since there is, well, let's say this, we bow to ourself. When you bow, you bow to yourself. What does that mean, that you bow to yourself? That sounds very egotistical.

[27:12]

But since we have no self, what is it that we bow to? The altar. What's the altar? To change. Change? To change ourselves into the good. To alter. But we also bow to dogs and cats. The altar is everywhere. But it's represented by this spot. But actually, there's no special place where the altar is. Well, I think we just bow.

[28:19]

When we bow, we just bow. And then if there's any alteration, it will happen by itself. I think this is important. We don't bow to change anything. We just bow to everything just the way it is. Just how it is. Bowing is just bowing. You can say we bow to Buddha. But what is Buddha? What is yourself? What is altering. We say the sage has no self, but there is nothing that is not the self of the sage.

[29:34]

That's why bowing is just a great act. With nothing in the mind, we just bow. We just offer this gesture. Just like zazen. Zazen is just an offering. And bowing is just an offering. And serving is just an offering. Everything we do is just an offering. This is why what we do in the zendo is how we should be acting outside of the zendo. When we walk out of the zendo, the zendo is just extended to as far as we're going. We don't try to get something. or change something.

[30:51]

You can change something, you know, this little radical. You know, things need to be changed. You should do social action. But basic understanding, basic practice is and to see Buddha nature wherever you are. Zazen is just to have faith in Buddha nature. Bowing is just to have faith in buddhanature.

[32:00]

It's motivated by buddhanature. And it's a kind of humility, realizing that your self is the self of the universe. I say universe because that's a convenient word. Don't try to visualize it. So when we have no self, in Buddhism, we have no self. According to Buddhadharma, we have no soul. Soul means singular. We have no singularity. But our singularity is the singularity of the totality.

[33:08]

You will never get lost because you are just a blip in the totality. But we hang on to our blip. We covet our blip. our blipness. But we don't have faith in the totality, which is our true self. So when we sit satsang, we let go of our blipness and we emerge with the totality. That's our practice. We still have a sense of self. We always have ego, some ego. But we offer the ego. Bowing is offering the ego to... just offering it up.

[34:12]

This is your offering. Here is my ego. I have a question about mindfulness and forgetting in zazen. It seems like our effort in zazen is to be mindful of our whole body and whole mind in zazen. But in the practice of it, I find that I will make an effort to be mindful of my mudra. I'll forget about it. And then I'll make an effort to be mindful of my breathing. And maybe I'll feel like I am. And then I'll realize that I've forgotten my mudra again. And then I'll return to my mudra. And then I'll realize that I've missed a couple counts. And then it can seem like a restlessness, my mindfulness. And I'll think, what is this?

[35:18]

It can get very mixed up. But your realizing is the important thing. I realize that I forgot. You keep saying, I realize, and then I realize. The realizing is the thread that runs through all that. So there's continual movement, continual forgetting, continual reinstating, you know, reminding, recollecting, and forgetting, and remembering, forgetting, and readjusting. That's life. It does not stay still. It's just the important thing is to realize how it's moving and how it's changing.

[36:51]

Not to try and keep something, you can't keep it. You know, there's no way to keep it. There's no way to grasp it. So there's no special state of mind to cultivate or to hang on to. And in Zazen we notice the changing states of mind. One changing state of mind is awareness. Another changing state of mind is forgetfulness. Another state is watching the mudra. Another is your mother. So, the noticing, the realizing, and the coming back, that's to allow all the states of mind to come up without judging them.

[37:55]

Just let them appear and disappear, let them come and go and keep the awareness of the totality of concentration, effort, mindfulness, devotion, in this case Prajna. I'd like to put in a good word for Remember that Shakyamuni's personality was his true personality. He offered up his ego personality to his truth personality and let that manifest.

[39:08]

So I support you in bringing that up. And Buddhist practice is our practice. So we can best honor that by making that effort ourselves. I was wondering if you had any suggestions about how to maintain energy? How to maintain energy? Well, through devotion. One of the empowering factors of devotion is joyfulness and inspiration. So through inspiration, we become energized.

[40:14]

And inspiration induces joy. So when we begin to practice, we usually do it through inspiration. We read something, or we hear something, and then we are inspired to do something. And then the energy channel opens. But inspiration is also fickle. So at some point we have to go on determination, just the determination to continue until the inspiration comes back around again. So sometimes it's just intention, you know, bare intention. even though there's no inspiration, you don't know why you're doing it, you just keep going, because of your intention, and your intention will carry you through all kinds of problems.

[41:29]

If you stop doing something because you don't have the intention, or your intention is not strong, then it's pretty hard. Intention and determination are really important factors and they will support energy. They will support energy. It's like just continuing to do something no matter how it's going. That's a vow.

[42:33]

I say intention, but a stronger term is a vow. I vow to do this no matter what. You say that through your inspiration. And then when the inspiration is gone, you still have it, and you say, I said I was going to do this, and I'm going to do it. And so that will also inspire you. If you continue, even though you don't have the inspiration, through your intention or your vow, then that will, again, inspire you, because you'll be inspired by yourself. Pretty good. Thank you very much.

[43:17]

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