Good morning, it's December 1st, this could come down maybe a little, and for some reason during the last period of Zazen, all I could think of was, I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas. But December 1st is, so we have 24 more shopping days till Christmas, we have 30 more days till the new year, and 31 days until we go headlong off the fiscal cliff, whatever that means, and also, this is the month that I officially join Romney's elite 47%.

[01:02]

It's actually the month of my 65th birthday, which is mind boggling. I never thought I would get that far, but not yet. And it's also the day before we begin our Rohatsu Sesshin, the Sesshin that marks the Buddha's enlightenment, the culmination of his years of practice, that we commemorate by throwing ourselves into this practice as we, in the spirit, I think, that he entered it with great determination and energy, and that's really the gist of what I want to talk about today. But first, I want to acknowledge a piece of news that really shocked me yesterday, a friend

[02:23]

in the world of engaged spirituality died yesterday, a man by the name of Bo Lazov, do people know of him? He wrote a very important book, he worked with prisoners for 40 years, and he was really a pioneer in working with people behind bars, and in holding them in a loving and very firm way. So he wrote a book that you find everywhere in the prisons, and translated into a variety of languages called We're All Doing Time, and it's quite an important book, an important collection of ways that we need to view our own lives in the larger, what you might call

[03:34]

the minimum security existence that we live, we don't have a lot of security, but there's also walls all around us, some of which are material walls, some of which are walls that we create for ourselves, that others create for us, and how do we live free within whatever space we exist, whatever security we're in. So Bo was an avid motorcyclist, and I guess he was killed in a traffic accident on the Big Island of Hawaii on Thursday afternoon, and he was also a musician, he played country

[04:39]

music, he was really good, he had the best, he could just sort of slip into this Johnny Cash voice, kind of really bass voice, hello I'm Johnny Cash, and I can't do it, but Bo could really do it, plus his songs were really good. So I miss him, he was a complicated guy, I interacted with him a lot over the years and then not so much over the last few years, and I just always remember a key expression of his that has been really meaningful to me in an ongoing way, it's these four words of, let's see, 12 letters,

[05:39]

four words, you can do this. This was sort of the core of his teaching, you can do this. He would say that to men facing execution, people coming to terms with their really awful crimes, people experiencing chronic illness, just you can do this in a kind way that was an expression of what he knew from the inside out. It wasn't just an adage or an aphorism, but something that he knew because he had to live with all that he was, and he found this strength that he could do it,

[06:45]

and he was willing to share that teaching with those around him. So I just want to remember Bo Lozoff, and you can find his work, look at it. How do you spell Lozoff? L-O-Z-O-F-F. He was the New Jersey boy. So what I'd like to talk about for a time anyway is, it came about in a conversation with a woman named Miki Kashkan, I guess she's the coordinator for the Bay Nonviolent Communication, is that correct? Yes. She's quite wonderful, and we had lunch a month or two ago because she had been to India

[07:47]

and worked with some of the same people that I work with, the ex-Untouchables in India. And we got into a conversation about power. Power is not a word that we're so comfortable with, but depending on how we look at it, it's an essential element of all that we do, just the power to live, the power to sit down and practice, the power to get up and move into the world. So I looked in the online Webster Dictionary, which has three definitions. The first one is, the first definition of power is the ability to act or produce an effect.

[08:52]

And the second one is kind of interesting, and we won't talk about it much today, but the second definition is the ability to get extra base hits. That's how high baseball is in our consciousness, and I think that's a good thing. The way Mickey put it in something that she wrote is, power is the capacity to mobilize resources to meet needs. The power to mobilize resources to meet needs. And that's a wonderful way of putting it. And she says, from this standpoint, we could be referring to either external or internal resources. External resources include food and shelter, relationships, family and otherwise, education, money, inherited status, and other factors resulting in our place in the socially constructed world.

[10:05]

Internal resources might include education and training, health and well-being, cognitive ability, capacity for self-empathy, physical energy. So that brought me in mind of internal resources or internal powers and spiritual powers. Now Buddhism has a way of talking about spiritual powers from the early times, and I think it was incorporating some of the powers that were cultivated in the various pre-Buddhist traditions that the Buddha practiced

[11:06]

before he sat down under the Bodhi tree. These are referred to as supernormal powers, which supposedly are also a fruit of your meditation. For example, vanishing and appearing at will, walking on the water as if on land, traveling to other worlds with or without the body. So if some of you are experiencing this as a fruit of your practice, great. Keep it kind of quiet. I like to think that I was only given one admonition in this respect when I was ordained, and I've kept to it pretty much, pretty religiously.

[12:09]

I think that Sojourn said, don't use your special powers for parking. What? You do. But that's because you're the Zen master and reserve that power for yourself. You didn't want your novice disciples to inflate themselves. What? Yes, to out-park them, especially in his parking place. Anyway, that's not the power I'm talking about, but it's good for a laugh. In Buddhism, in the Japanese Buddhism, there's also a discussion of power, which again is different from what I want to point to today. There's a kind of general division of the schools of Buddhism in Japan into what are called self-power or Jigmeki schools,

[13:15]

of which Zen falls into that category. We're very self-empowering. We just sit and we're doing it all ourselves, theoretically. And then there's the Tariki, other power school, which the other largest group of Buddhists in Japan, say Shin Buddhists, tend to fall into that school. To my mind, this is a pretty useless distinction, which you can deconstruct simply by figuring out, simply by looking at how did any of us in this room get here? I'm not sure. Was there anyone who was born into a Buddhist tradition in this room?

[14:22]

No one. So we all had to get here somehow. Now the self-power dimension is we actually had to walk through the gate, but how we got to that gate is beyond our understanding. So to me, there's always this merging of self-power and other power, and I think that's a much more productive way. When we're sitting, we're sitting with our body. We actually have to do this and sit down cross-legged or sit in the chair and maintain our posture. But how it is that we're able to do that is in every moment beyond our understanding. So it's this self and other is a false distinction anyway.

[15:26]

But I just wanted to lay that out. So I have thought about, I've looked around and I've thought about and I've come up with what I feel are five powers of Zen. They're not goals. They're kind of what arises as we dedicate ourselves to practice and we come day after day, and particularly it arises when we do this kind of intensive sitting that we're about to embark on for the next week. But it's here every time we sit down. We're cultivating, allowing these powers to arise without necessarily thinking of them. But I just wanted to break them down. So what I thought of as this kind of list is the power of renunciation,

[16:32]

which is just letting go of views, desires, regrets, attachment, wishing things could be different from how they are. It's renunciation not in the sense of wearing a hair shirt, but just of letting things go away. The second power that I've been thinking about is mindfulness or single-mindedness, which is a kind of pervasive energy of awareness. I'm just going to give you the list and then we can talk about them in a little more depth. The third power is, speaking of depth, is concentration, which is also what we call samadhi.

[17:37]

It's the element of depth, of going deeply. The fourth power is the power of non-reactivity. The power not to be pushed around by one's feelings or emotions or perceptions, but to come to terms with whatever is arising. And the fifth is another way of framing the Buddhist discovery of dependent origination. It's just the joy of connection. So once these are all working together is one integral dynamic.

[18:44]

And when they're all working together, sometimes there's an actual joy and you can feel some blissful state or just some deep, deep happiness. And sometimes it's just subtleness. It's not the idea of connection. It's the actual experience beyond any conceptualization of being, just being connected, not thinking of being connected, but just being that way. So my thought is that these are powers that arise. And in Sikhin, what we do is we step back a little bit, not entirely.

[19:55]

We step back partly from the world of those kind of material resources or powers. And yet we're never really separate from them, because in the way we practice, which I love deeply, we are also cooking our food for each other. We're serving it to each other. We sit body by body next to each other. And so we're physically supporting each other in this practice. That's material. And it also allows the internal resources and the internal power to flower in a really precious way.

[21:00]

And when that flowers, it's not just an upward reaching and blossoming. It's also a downward extending and sinking of roots, so that those powers, whatever is planted, has really deep roots in our life. And underneath the soil, it's like, what was that? Is it bamboo? Some plant is really like one plant. Is that bamboo? That underneath the soil, even though you see the individual stalks, it's one root that is intertwined.

[22:05]

Crabgrass? What? Crabgrass is one thing. Bamboo is grass. Bamboo is grass, right? So, one organism. This is like, you didn't do kin-hin today, right? We did. You did? We did not. Did not. You know, when we do kin-hin in our tradition, we walk as one organism, kind of like a canteen or something. We do everything as one organism, and yet we have our individuality, you know, individually poking up through the soil. I won't have time to talk about this in depth, but there'll be other times for that.

[23:09]

I just want to start with, I think this question of renunciation is the point of departure. Other, I'm thinking of Zen teacher Bernie Glassman has three tenets in his formulation of Buddhism. Not knowing, bearing witness, healing the world. Renunciation is not knowing. Not knowing is really hard for some of us who like to know, and like to think that we know, and want to get points for knowing.

[24:12]

Not knowing is, I should say though, it's really important, not knowing is not know nothing. It's letting go of what you know. It's another way of manifesting what Suzuki Roshi said. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few. So it's like renunciation is letting go of being an expert, and realizing that one is even a beginner at one's own life. And that each time you sit down, each time I sit down, I really don't know what's going to happen. And then, I must say, when I get up, I really couldn't tell you what did happen.

[25:24]

But something happened. Some constant process of settling, and the process itself of Zazen is a process of renunciation. So, emotional storms rise as we're sitting. It could be anger. It could be lust. It could be despair. It could be joy. They arise, and we let them just blow through like the storm. It's moved through now. It was pouring an hour ago. It will come back. Or the day could brighten, and the sun could come out. We don't know what's going to happen. So when we're sitting down,

[26:28]

we're letting go of renouncing this idea that we know, and also we're letting go of our fear. This is really important. We can fear what's going to happen in the world. We can fear what's happening in our bodies. We can fear getting older and dying. These are all reasonable, materially rooted fears. But just as we're sitting, can we let go of them? And recognize that as we let go of them, that's a really powerful manifestation of our practice. To have that power to let go.

[27:33]

And to let go of the way we often think of power is power over. This is what constitutes... It can constitute a kind of mastery, but it also can constitute force. I was talking about this a little a few weeks ago, because I've been thinking about this for a few weeks. Annette pointed me towards a quite incredible work by the French philosopher, activist, mystic Simone Weil. I don't know if you know of her. She wrote this piece called... It's an interpretation of the Iliad. It's called The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.

[28:44]

Her reading of it is how the entire poem, which is a foundational text of Western civilization, is about the manifestation of force that is kind of playing back and forth between the Greeks and the Trojans, to where everyone is essentially destroyed. And she talks about force as... Let me see if I can find this quotation. It is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most liberal sense. It makes a corpse out of him. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects, is the force it does not kill.

[29:47]

In whatever aspect its effect is the same, it turns a person into a stone. This is exactly what we are letting go of. We are practicing power with, not power over. In this definition of force, it resonates with something that I've heard Sojourn say a number of times. Don't treat anything like an object. That everything that we see, everything that we encounter, should be respectfully met, as if it were part of ourselves. And this is what we do, as we're sitting, as we're practicing here.

[30:53]

This is really what's cultivated in Seshin. So when we pick up a cup, we pick up a cup with two hands. We support it in the bottom, we hold it in the side. And when I drink this water, which merges with me, and then in an hour or two will emerge someplace. It's very refreshing. And I can enjoy it and be grateful for it. I don't have power over this cup. This cup and I are practicing power together.

[31:55]

It's actually refreshing me. It's containing the water that's refreshing me. And now I'm going to renounce it. But just for a moment. So we're playing with, dancing with, the objects, the people, our own minds and energies. We take up the dance, the music ends, we say goodbye to that partner, and there's another partner. So along with renouncing is taking up. In a parallel sense, the next element of these powers that I listed

[32:59]

is mindfulness, which is also known as right recollection or right remembering. In the sense that we are then taking up a perception or a thought. We're forgetting or turning our attention away from another. So we're always in this motion. And for the next week, we're going to get to examine this very up close and personal. And we will do it together. But there will be times when it's really hard and I'll want to really want to get out of here. But I will do my best to sit with that

[34:02]

because I'm encouraged by all my sisters and brothers who are doing the same thing, and each in their own energy, each in their own power, each in their own dedication to the Dharma. So I think that's all I'd like to say today. If you have some thoughts or some questions, we have some time and I think I'm doing a Q&A at around 1130 or something like that. So any questions or thoughts? Sue? The term renunciation seems like a word that is so opposite of what you're talking about, of letting go. Renunciation is such a forceful not that. Is there another term that would be better there

[35:05]

or am I missing something? What I like about it is it has an edge to it. I like that. It pushes me a little farther into seeing what's going on. Of course, a lot of our language is freighted with other cultural and religious nuance or suggestions. So renunciation is one of those. And I think what I'm... I'm sort of trying to reclaim it and also seeing it is an element of... There's an element of energy that has to go into it, which is mostly about the power of our self-concern.

[36:14]

At least me, I can't speak for you. And it takes some energy to set it aside in ordinary activities. And then what I find is it doesn't necessarily take that much energy in other circumstances. It doesn't take that much energy necessarily when I'm sitting. But in other circumstances, it does. So I like the edge of that word. But you don't have to use it. You can just say letting go. Ross. Thank you, Osama. I'm curious about the convergence and divergence of the teaching. You can do this as it relates to sitting a period of Sazen in pain till the bell rings in contrast to walking down the aisle to an execution room.

[37:19]

And what do you know of your friend's teaching to support the victim in that circumstance? That might be helpful to someone sitting Sazen. I think there's a sense in which... There's one sense in which what Bo tried to offer and what he was encouraging people to offer was unconditional love. That even as you're walking down that hallway, there's love available to you, including self-love, perhaps. The other side is this really tough-minded, strict side,

[38:27]

which is saying sort of ipso facto, you can do this because actually everybody does. Everybody dies. And so you are capable of dying as a kind of stark expression of accepting things as it is. So he was really offering this with both hands. And I think that we have this admonition in the Zen tradition to die on the cushion. It's particularly Zen. I don't find the Buddha talking about it very much, I don't think. But that's not a bad idea.

[39:32]

In the way that he's talking, there's no good or bad place to let go of your life. Thank you. Anyone more? Yeah. Oh, subject. Well, I'm reminded of the Balas and the Indriyas. The Indriyas are the qualities, faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom. And the powers are the powers of those qualities. So that Bala is the power. Yeah, the Balas are the powers. Yeah, faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, wisdom. There you go. So the qualities are compound. Right, and it's an interesting... One commentary is faith controls doubt,

[40:42]

energy and persistence control laziness, mindfulness controls heedlessness and distraction, concentration controls distraction, and wisdom controls ignorance. These are all... But those factors that they control, you could also see are coverings for our true nature, which is also expressed in the positive sides of those Balas. It's not really who we are. We're really not distracted and heedless and lazy and full of doubt, even though our parents may have told us we were. That's not really who we are. And it's the contrast.

[41:45]

One of the things I love about Buddhism is the notion, if you will, of original enlightenment rather than original sinner imperfection. Right? There was one more and then we'll go ahead. Thanks, Shantanu. You talked about letting go of fear. I fear loss of control or the unknown. And therefore, I spend a lot of time planning or planning my way as a way to manage the fear. So how do we simultaneously let go or renounce the fear of loss of control as well as the ways that we manage that? On the cushion or outside of it? Well, how does that work for you? I don't know. I think of it as kind of like a scale. And how can I let go of one and simultaneously let go of the other? What I'm asking is that if you want to, if you're willing to reduce things to the model on a bumper sticker or a T-shirt,

[42:55]

I've got a good one that I saw some years ago. Worry is not preparation. So the fear or anxiety that I have, what I've learned is it actually has very little to do, if anything, it's a barrier. It has very little to do with what happens in the moment that I'm actually encountering the difficulty. So I know that. And still, characterologically, I'm a warrior. But that's part of what I have to do is I accept that. I accept, OK, I'm going to worry, but I don't have to take it so seriously. So it has less and less hold over me. And you can cultivate that attitude towards yourself. This is difficult.

[43:55]

This is why, even though we practice in the sudden enlightenment school, we have to look at our notion of time. Sudden could be 40 years, which is very sudden in geological terms if you're a rock. So just keep looking at that, which means accepting yourself, but don't expect to be able to control things because it cannot be done. From moment to moment, there are things that we can have some mastery over, some power with. In the larger sense, we don't know. And we don't have that control. And that's fine. That's the three marks or four marks of Buddhism.

[45:04]

There's impermanence, non-self, and dukkha. Dukkha as suffering. But in certain approaches to Mahayana Buddhism, it's impermanence, non-self, and nirvana. It all hinges on your attitude towards impermanence. Really, it all hinges on your attitude towards impermanence. It's impermanent, and that's okay. That's a good place to stop. So we'll have fun together. By the way, the lectures, which will be Sojourn Roshi lecturing this week, are all open at the usual time, I think at 10, 15. And also all the normal open periods of Zazen,

[46:09]

the 5.40 in the morning, 5.40 in the afternoon. Or is it 5.50? 5.50 in the morning during Sesshin, and 5.40 in the afternoon. Those are also open. Please, let's come sit together, whether you're in Sesshin or not. I have an announcement. Yes. Today is 20s and 30s, I believe. Oh, that's right. The 20s and 30s sitting group, so that will be... I would like to enfold that into your question and answer. Oh, okay, thank you. That'll be fine. So will you be there? Yeah. Okay. So I think in about 15, 20 minutes.

[46:49]

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