Well good morning everyone. We have a wonderful turnout for Sashin and also wonderful turnout for the practice period. I think that some of you are new to certainly new to a practice period. We haven't had the last practice period we had was in the I guess it was in the fall of 2019. It was a shorter practice period aspect of practice. That was a year and a half ago and now we're trying carefully and thoughtfully to renew and reinvigorate the traditional practices that we are used to having.

[01:07]

So I thought that the theme for this practice period is I'm going to begin by speaking about Zazen because that's really our north star and then I'll be the classes and the lectures most of which but not all of which I'll be doing will be on basic principles basic teachings of the Buddha. I think that it's really important to be grounded in this. These to me are continuously or continually inspiring. When I came here in the 80s Sogen Roshi was doing a lot of teaching on basic buddhism and so we would

[02:12]

learn about the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the factors of enlightenment, the hindrances, the paramitas, all of these systems, the precepts that are ways of their ways of looking at ourselves. There are ways that help us in our relationship to ourself and also in relationship to those around us and ultimately they help us wake up. They help us on our path as bodhisattvas and on our path to buddhahood. So that's what our subject matter will be for the for the next six weeks. This week's lecture and next week's lecture I want to focus on Zazen

[03:13]

because that as I said that's the north star of our practice and it's pivotal in certainly in my training in Sogen's teaching, Suzuki Roshi's and our lineage as it descends from from Dogen's entry. So I'm going to begin speaking of Dogen's Zazen instruction. I'd like to say something first about very briefly about Sashin in practice period. So Sashin is a way to step back from the ordinary activities of our life. It means literally to touch the heart or touch the mind. So we step back from these ordinary activities we set them aside and

[04:20]

just focus on our practice. Our practice including Zazen, walking, eating, working, resting and so forth. Usually this is something we would do all together but we're doing it together in cyberspace where we have actually I feel that we've learned really well how to use this territory over the last year and a half and I will admit I was not a big fan of of the idea of it before it became a necessity. When it became a necessity after the pandemic it's like oh okay in order to stay together this is what we will have to do. And I think what's inspiring is that in the course of

[05:29]

the pandemic our membership has grown, attendance is very good, our finances haven't slipped and we I feel that we've with the pandemic and also with the loss of Sojin Roshi's death we have really pulled together as a community. So I greatly really appreciate that. I'm really inspired by it and this also shows in our opportunity to do a practice period. Our practice usually traditionally a practice period there would be in the early Buddhism the practice period would take place during rains retreats during the rainy season when it was really not so practical for the monks and nuns to be wandering about from village to village because it was pouring rain if any of you have ever seen

[06:37]

it. It's like you know like find me a tree to or a cave to hide in but what the Buddha inaugurated was okay during these this three months period let's come together and practice together and so that was the beginning of what we what our Japanese ancestors called Ongo. Ongo was a 90-day period it usually happened twice a year it happened in in the really hot season and happened in the really cold season and that would be an opportunity for intensification of practice. So the interesting thing here is that we're doing practice period in the world that our practice and our training is not strictly monastic although it has monastic aspects

[07:43]

but we need as well to look at how are we being trained by the conditions of our life by our family by our work and what are the resources both in terms of Zazen and in terms of Buddha's teachings that we that really inform our lives inform our lives as social beings inform our lives as family members as workers as as social activists whatever uh these principles that we're studying are not somehow apart from that they inform everything that we do. So this is the beginning of our spring practice period and I hope that we will have another practice period in the fall and have the opportunity

[08:48]

uh once again to have a shuso I had student and uh also you know there's a long discussion but we're exploring how to come back together you know how to open again for activities in person and we're going to do that very carefully but we're going to do it. So take a breath so I want to start with two two points about our practice both our practice in general and our Shikantaza, our Just See. They're both these are both drawn from uh our ancestors Dogen Zenji and I'll

[09:51]

give you a little biographical background on him. So in one of his important uh fascicles uh Bendowa which translates as wholehearted practice Dogen wrote in the buddhadharma practice and enlightenment are one and the same because it is the practice of enlightenment a beginner's wholehearted practice of the way is exactly the totality of original enlightenment. So what he's saying is in another way of putting it uh as we've heard many times uh unlike the usual proposition that we practice in order to become enlightened

[10:54]

Dogen turns that on his head and says we practice because we are enlightened because we are already enlightened we express that enlightenment by our practice and that is what he called practice enlightenment or practice realization and that's at the heart of uh of Dogen's teaching and that is what he meant by zazen. And it's interesting because if you look at the period in which Dogen studied and taught he he was actually presenting a radical perspective that

[12:01]

that uh that first of all most of the buddhist schools in China and Japan for most of them meditation was an aspect of their practice. It went along with preset practice and devotional practice and and a whole range of other practices that and you'll still find that if you went to uh if you went up uh to city of 10,000 buddhas in northern california which is a quite a traditional chan uh chinese zen monastery uh meditation is one part of what they do but it's not necessarily the pivotal part there's all there's study there's translating there's devotion and so forth uh what Dogen did was he put he put zazen at the middle of his practice which

[13:05]

was and of the middle of what he he offered to everybody and that was a radical perspective and he also emphasized by emphasizing practice realization he was de-emphasizing certain kinds of concentration practices that were very commonly part of the meditation instruction so uh in a sense he was he was quite a radical and this is the tradition that we've that we've uh we've inherited we think of it as traditional and i suppose maybe after 800 years it's fair to call it traditional but at the same time it's true that we're just one school of buddhism and we're here because it works for us

[14:09]

I mean Dogen took to it because it changed his life. I'm sure that many of the people who are on screen now i mean i'm just looking that the people that i see right in front of me in the top row all of them have been practicing for 20 years and um you wouldn't be doing it we wouldn't be doing it if somehow if it didn't feel alive if it didn't feel like a vital practice so the other thing i want to read from Dogen before telling you about his life is at the heart of the fascicle uh fukon zo zenki that we're going to that we're going to examine is a dialogue that takes place between a monk and zen master yakusan kodo

[15:14]

so yakusan was sitting zazen and the monk asked him what are you thinking in your state of stillness the master said think about not thinking the monk says how can you think about not thinking and yakusan says non-thinking so i just wanted to drop that into the pond there this is not new for many of you but it's it's the question that we'll have to that we really work with and we have to find the meaning of that for ourselves as we're sitting here today you know as we've been sitting all morning and we're going to sit all afternoon

[16:19]

so a little background about Dogen's life if you don't know and he was born into an aristocratic japanese family uh in the year 1200 and when he was two years old his father died and then when he was seven his mother died and so he was orphaned and as he sat with his mother's body he noticed the rising incense smoke and he watched it curl and disappear into the air and it brought forth for him a perception of the impermanence of life and as the narrative goes at that point he decided uh even though he was only seven years old he wanted to become a buddhist monk when he was 13 he had the opportunity to do that and joined a tendai monastery

[17:32]

perhaps the main sect at the time uh and where his uncle was a priest he practiced there for a while and then he came up with a question and that question was if as all of the buddhist texts say all people are endowed with buddha nature why is it that we have to train so strenuously to realize that buddha nature in other words if we're already enlightened why do we have to work so hard at the monastery and uh his uncle couldn't really answer that question he said i think i think that's a question for a

[18:36]

for a zen practitioner and so he sent him to to see a rinzai master who had recently returned from china and this was uh master eisai who was usually credited with bringing rinzai zen to japan and uh dogen asked master isai and he said all the buddhas in the three times of past present and future are unaware that they are endowed with buddha nature but cats and oxen are well aware of it indeed uh so what this is interpreted to mean is that because buddhas are buddhas

[19:40]

they don't think about having or not having buddha nature it's just the natural expression of who they are whereas uh cats and oxen that's us uh cats and oxen are in our delusion we think about buddha nature as something we have to acquire so when he heard this dogen decided okay i'm going to stay here and study with with eisai but it turns out that eisai died the following year and dogen became very close with a size main disciple myosin uh and he studied with myosin for about nine years and then they both decided

[20:45]

they would make the long trip to china and look for an authentic teacher because they weren't finding they both felt like they needed to go another step and they weren't finding that in him so to make a long story short dogen uh practiced in several monasteries and uh with several teachers and finally came across his teacher rujing or uh tendo nyojo uh that he that was his central teacher i think some of you've been to rujing's monastery uh yeah stan was and i think ross and i'm not sure who else uh i wish i've never been there so um so the story is that one day rujing was doing his morning greeting circumambulating the uh

[21:48]

zendel and he came across one of the monks sleeping uh not so unusual and uh uh he he hit him with his slipper uh and said uh the practice of zazen is dropping body and mind uh what do you expect to achieve by this single minded sleeping uh now dogen who was sitting next to him heard this and that woke him up i don't know if it woke up the monk you know you know we don't hear any we don't hear a follow-up about about the monk himself but it woke up dogen and he went to rujing and he said body and mind and he offered bowed he offered incense he said body and mind were dropped away

[22:52]

and rujing approved and they continued to practice with him for two more years and then he returned to japan so this dropping of body and mind is a also an important principle in our in our practice it means in a sense settling it to zazen from the and being freed from our limited thoughts our slippery minds the the difficulties of our bodies and just being freed from these things that we usually we hold on to and touching the oneness of our existence

[23:56]

and they were studying together dogen asked rujing what is the mind of a bodhisattva and rujing replied it is a soft flexible mind dogan asked what is soft flexible mind rujing said it's the willingness to let go of your body and mind so soft flexible mind is the mark of our school uh that doesn't mean mushy it means responsive it means being aware and being able to respond to whatever it to to to bring forth an appropriate response moment by moment

[25:01]

so when dogan returned to japan in 1227 he wanted to teach what he saw as true buddhism which he understood as zazen and so he wrote the fukan zazengi uh when he began composing it he worked on it actually in many ways through his whole life so there's several versions um it's interesting that he wrote he wrote it off of an earlier zazen instruction uh which i can send to you if you want it is these chinese zazen instructions called zazengi in uh in japanese very common but one in particular was the was the model it's a the so chan yi by uh master tsung se and what you can see and i'll read you some sections uh

[26:15]

dogan really appropriated sections of the text whole uh but he also elaborated and personalized it uh to express his his own deep philosophy so the fukan zazengi begins with three questions first is the way is originally perfect and all pervading how could it be contingent on practice and realization so that right there is the question that he presented to his tendai teacher

[27:17]

if the way is perfect and all-pervading what's the need for practice and realization because it's already here then he asks this is sort of a this is a an extension of the same question the dharma vehicle is utterly free and untrammeled what need is there for our concentrated effort indeed the whole body is far beyond the world's dust who could believe in a means to brush it clean so for those of you of us who have studied this is a uh this is a reference to poetry contest that takes place in the platform sutra

[28:24]

between uh uh winning who was uh sort of a country bumpkin working at the monastery but an enlightened one and shen shu who was the primary disciple of the of the fifth ancestor of zen and you probably know this story but uh the fifth ancestor wanted to transmit his robin ball to pick a successor and shen shu even though he had doubts about his his accomplishments wrote a poem uh basically uh the world is a mirror stand and the mind is a is a mirror and our practice is to to be wiping it clean of dust

[29:28]

on and on and uh somebody read this poem to winning and he had someone come with him because he was nominally illiterate and he wrote an answering poem saying there is no mirror stand there is no mirror where could dust delight so it's this is really the perspective that we might see in the heart sutra the perspective of the via negativa uh and according to this narrative he won the contest that's that's another whole discussion but this what dogen's referring to uh who could believe since the whole body is far beyond the world's dust who could believe in a means to brush it clean uh how can you brush the body clean

[30:34]

when there's no dust and finally he says it is never apart from from you right where you are what is the use of going off here and there to practice which is which is kind of interesting because he went to china to that's where his awakening happened uh uh but i think that what he's saying here is that our awakening is not contingent on place our awakening is contingent on our practice wherever it is and wherever it is it can be realized and wherever it is we are never apart from it

[31:35]

so he asked these questions as sort of framing questions at the beginning of the text and then he says and yet if there's the slightest discrim discrepancy the way is as distant from as heaven from earth if the least like or dislike arises the mind is lost in confusion so these this is a to uh famous poem by the uh it's the third third ancestor i think is that right uh the xin xin ming xin xin ming says if there's the slightest discrepancy the ways is distant from heaven to realize its manifestation be neither for or against the conflict of likes and dislikes is in itself the disease of the mind do not dwell in dualities and scrupulously avoid pursuing

[32:43]

and scrupulously avoid pursuing the way if there is a slight least like or dislike the mind is lost in confusion this is i think every line that we read here opens up a big question this opens up a big question and one thing i would say uh this is really the dharma from the standpoint of non-discrimination and in order to be able to come to terms with our discriminating mind which is also a part of our buddha nature we have to be able to encounter and embrace the non-discriminating mind at the same time

[33:46]

and in the case to me in the case of these these all teachings or songs are every sutra every buddha teaching is medicine the idea of medicine whether it's allopathic or homeopathic it's about bringing us back into balance it's about it's a it's a teaching it's a substance that helps us harmonize our being and harmonize our life so this very strong statement uh if the least like or dislike arises the mind is lost in confusion is a way of correcting the kind of dominating power that our likes and dislikes have for us

[34:57]

and of bringing us back into balance i think it's important to recognize and as i've said this i've said this many times that to understand that medicine is not food we take certain dosage of medicine to bring us back into balance uh but we don't eat it we don't sit down to eat it like a meal if we if we take all the medicine at once then we get very sick so what is our place of balance so the next line says suppose you gain the pride of understanding and inflate your own

[35:59]

achievement uh glimpsing the wisdom that runs through all things attain the way and clarify your mind raising an aspiration to escalate the very very sky so you know we don't encounter so many people like that in our zen practice but some of us who have practiced elsewhere and other traditions uh have some of that experience and meet people who are very very proud of their attainments uh and they think they've got it and maybe they do. Dogen says if you gain these things say you are making an initial partial excursion through the frontiers

[37:03]

of the dharma but you are still deficient in the vital way of emancipation and they said then look at the buddha himself who was possessed of great inborn knowledge the influence of his six years of upright sitting is noticeable still or bodhidharma who transmitted the buddha's mind seal the fame of his nine years of wall sitting is celebrated to this day since this was the case with saints of old how can people today dispose with negotiation of the way so in other words so here he's coming to that first question

[38:06]

right uh he's he's saying although the way is perfect and all-pervading it is still contingent on practice and realization the buddha had to do this in order to bring forth what was what was already in him what had been testified to uh by all the wise people and gods and figures at his birth but he still had to do this he had to bring it forth the same thing with bodhidharma so this is if this is what these figures did how should we or why should we do something different than them

[39:07]

then so this is all this is sort of the preamble and there's one sort of transitional paragraph here he said that you should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding pursuing words and following after speech and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate yourself this is what the buddha said in his last teaching he said be a lamp unto yourself so the whole of the practice is watching the way our mind works and how that becomes

[40:12]

our active self in the world and the answer you know the the response that is like is not oh i should go in a cave and cease to interact with somebody but in the context of practices you should cease you should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding pursuing words and following after speech in the context of your practice what we understand is beyond words but it is within us it is our fundamental nature so learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate yourself that's like a dance step right the backward step actually one of my favorite uh bluegrass tunes is called

[41:19]

the clinch mountain back step i never thought of that before it's the clinch mountain back step so that's a that's very zen body and mind will drop away of themselves and your original face will manifest itself so it'll drop away by itself you cannot make that happen uh ikon roshi used to say uh enlightenment is an accident and zazen makes us accident prone so yeah i feel accident prone it's like uh after years of doing zazen i'm i can trip all over myself

[42:19]

very accident prone not that that's enlightenment you know uh and then he says if you wish to attain suchness you should practice suchness without delay what he means by practicing suchness is what he's going to get to right now which is practicing suchness is zazen taigan layton uh who some of you know from ancient dragon uh in chicago says that the practice of zazen is buddha mudra i really like that a lot so when we think about you know the emphasis sojourn really and suzuki roshi school really emphasize posture

[43:21]

that the posture is putting our body in the form of a buddha that doesn't necessarily mean i mean the model is cross-legged sitting but really it can be manifest in every in any form you know i'm thinking of this little the statue that i have on my on my altar here um which is about 10 inches high it's a model of this 40 foot golden buddha at nagaloka in india uh the school that i teach at and uh that buddha is in the posture of striding not just peacefully walking but but kind of with a little forward lean

[44:32]

you know really moving through the world that's also buddha mudra so to practice suchness without delay is to take up this position of buddha mudra to when you put your body in this position then you allow your buddha nature to express itself and there follows now a a oh another couple hundred words which are the formal zazen instruction itself i'll read one more paragraph and then we'll take some questions so this is where he begins to

[45:35]

um draw from the traditional text as well he draws for that as well chonji chonji chonji uh says for the practice of zen the quiet room is suitable eat and drink moderately cast aside all involvements and cease all affairs it's a quiet room our zendo is quiet room right now hopefully the rooms that we're sitting in are quiet that's not an absolute quiet it's a general quiet uh quiet room is suitable eat and drink moderately cast aside all involvements and see soul affairs

[46:39]

in other words when you walk into the zendo try to put aside all of that we brought with us that's hard you know i mean my experience uh at the start of my practice was that uh in a 40 minute period of zazen it would take 35 minutes before those kinds of busy thoughts and urgencies would start ebbing you know and then i had like five minutes of sort of cruising and then the bell would ring but what i do see now is and i'll say more about this next week as i sit down often those involvements and affairs fall away by themselves which is a great relief

[47:48]

so do not administer pros and cons in other words don't say oh my zazen zazen is good zazen is bad i can't do this you know uh why am i here forget about all that just place your body and mind in this posture cease all movements of the conscious mind which doesn't mean that's that's the sense cease all movements of the conscious mind gauging of thoughts and views what that allows is for the unconscious mind to flourish to allow the flow of just thoughts that are secreted by mind and yet and not to evaluate them not to measure or compare allow them to rise and allow them to fall away

[48:54]

and finally he says have no designs on becoming a buddha don't think about becoming a buddha just be a buddha it takes it's really hard for us to own the fact that we are buddha but it's kind of the that's the message that's the message of all the teachings so it's not like you can't try to be a buddha uh it's like the zen student who is piling a who is polishing a stone to make a mirror it's not going to happen

[49:56]

then he says the practice of zen has nothing to do with the four bodily attitudes that's moving standing sitting or lying down that's what i was just saying this buddha mudra is not about some particular posture that is conducive to concentration uh the zen the the the practice of zen is beyond that it's really about settling yourself on yourself in a harmonious peaceful way in that in that soft flexible mind we spoke of earlier so i think that's where i want to stop for today and then next week we'll go into the kind of nuts and bolts of of his zazen instruction i think sometime during the

[51:05]

practice period also we'll do a a friday afternoon zazen instruction but we have some time for questions and comments and so uh i'll i'll turn that over to marybeth and to into you thank you okay so if you would if you have a question that you would like to address to hosan please raise your digital hand um you'll find that um on the bottom line or in your chat participants box i'm not sure it depends on what program you have or you can send me a message through the chat you can go ahead and unmute yourself is the question

[52:28]

yeah um thank you for uh that um you mentioned that uh we don't take medicine something to the fact we don't take medicine to get uh cured we take medicine to find balance and i was wondering um you know what you meant by that because i i look at it like uh you know medicine is kind of like it's like a cast the cast isn't going to cure us or get it but it's going to hold us in place so the rest of us get in balance and in terms of zen how do how do you see that well it's okay one of the the uh

[53:32]

texts that i read read from one of the texts that i read read from in the beginning uh is called zazen shin which is uh translated as the acupuncture needle of zen uh so zen is i mean i guess that my my notion of i didn't say it's not about curing or uh it is about harmony harmony i mean i'm thinking holistically and so that if your body is functioning in a harmonious way then you are you're healed you're cured so um i don't want to get too literal in this uh but one of the things that's interesting in the commentary to zazen shin is that uh

[54:37]

so not only is does acupuncture needle is acupuncture a you know a medical healing approach and this is healing it's the buddha is often known as the great physician uh we have all these metaphors of uh of our suffering as our sickness but in part also there's the implication here that uh that zazen as an acupuncture needle of zazen heals us from some of the potential sicknesses of zen uh and there's there's a lot of talk about that in the traditional literature which which usually has to do with overdoing it you know with with pressing too hard so you know if a little medicine

[55:44]

is a good thing then a lot of medicine's got to be better but that's not the case thank you thanks heather please unmute yourself and ask a question good morning hazan so if our practice is about settling the body mind i've been struggling i've been having a particularly painful meditation sort of uncharacteristically painful and my brain was very agitated for the first few sessions and then i switched to a bench which alleviated my pain and allowed me to think profound much more profoundly into the practice and i have never fully developed a relationship between how much pain is

[56:52]

helpful and how much does it hinder and when is it time to interfere yeah well that's a really good question i mean assuming when that you're the pain you're talking about is physical pain is that correct yes yes but but the physical pain made my brain agitated yeah i mean it's interesting because sometimes for for some people the physical pain is uh allows one to focus and if it's not physical pain then your mind is all over the place but uh i think you have to be the judge of how much is enough and you know this is something i mean i i had to i had to figure it out uh sojourn struggled with it certainly early on he had he had a lot of fame uh and i think

[58:01]

the point of view at that point was just tough it out you know it was more macho uh what i what i came to for myself was that i would not go further than uh than i felt i was likely to be injuring myself and i don't think i ever i mean i have injuries and various artifacts of old age and arthritis but uh i don't think i ever injured myself doing that but uh yeah you don't have to push that hard and at the same time it's really helpful to try to extend ourselves so that our body can open so that our our hips and our knees can open

[59:06]

further instead of just finding that balance and that's the thing it's your balance it's not you know you know it's not like in japan where they would come around and they would shove a uh you know a stick under your robes and if you weren't sitting full lotus you can imagine where that would go you know uh we don't do that you're really it's you really are you have to figure it out yourself okay thank you thank you kelsey please unmute yourself and ask your question hi how's on hi can you see me yet i can't okay um i'm wondering why you continue to practice

[60:08]

maybe maybe i'm very maybe i have a limited imagination and i can't think any further than that no that's not true was that so is that a real question that's a real question um almost everything good that's happened to me in my life has happened within the environment of practice how could i how could i do anything else i don't feel myself to be virtuosic um certainly have have faults and uh human flaws but

[61:17]

well actually this is going to be the class i'm teaching on thursday i believe in the three treasures in buddha dharma and sangha all of those to me they're all they they are pretty much intertwined and uh i love living in sangha and to be accountable to a community it's like i always wanted that so i could wax rhapsodic but i won't and it's also not a day at the beach but i don't know maybe it's like a day at a northern california beach it's not a day in the bahamas or in hawaii

[62:30]

thank you thank you gary did you have your hand up okay well maybe we have time for one or two more anything in the chat no or perhaps we're done going oh hey go thank you hosanna and uh i really you answered a lot of my question but if we're already enlightened the first 35 minutes of your early practice brought you to five minutes of of what when you say you got there and what i'm really asking is already enlightened

[63:36]

why do you continue practice already enlightened what do you get by practice i mean you know these are all been answered but could you answer directly about what uh why practice if you're already enlightened um my when i first came here there were people that i looked up to uh there not so many of them are around ron is around uh uh and what i felt was there was a way that they moved in the world

[64:37]

and sojourn also and mailey and a number of people that i considered and consider my elders i could not define how it is that they move in the world but i felt that i wanted to be more like that and as i practiced i came to really believe that they they weren't necessary that necessarily that way because they were born that way but because there's something in them in the manifestation of the three treasures that that brought that out and even though character logically i'm a doubt type

[65:46]

uh i also had faith and my faith i must say my faith was has been encouraged by all my teachers often in moments when i might really doubt it myself but um i don't know what the practice does i mean in certain moments i i i could say i feel that it it sort of rewires one's brain but i don't know how that happens actually and i'm not particularly not all that interested in neuroscience i mean i like it okay but i don't i don't study it but i know something's happening in here you know um so i don't know if that's an answer to you

[66:55]

so yes thank you and and you would say that it uh is embodied in the what you see without knowing what it is you want to see if you can embody that is that's yeah as clear as it gets i guess yeah and sometimes we really embody it like sometimes you know in my mind or my body i feel different people's bow b-o-w you know i can see uh sojourn bowing or i can see a rata roshi bowing i can and i can feel that in my own way in my body that that's you know in certain respects that's just like that's beautiful also how you learn to play music you know you you learn the way a person phrases something and you really go deeply into that until you come out the other side in your own

[67:59]

in your own expression because if it's imitation that's not alive but imitation may be the path by which we reach what is original in us thank you very much thank you thank you so i think we will end there there is a question in the chat box i don't know if you want to take it why not okay it says uchiyama said something to the effect of zazen is i think calming the body and opening the hand of thought how do you understand this especially the latter and then is opening the hand the backwards step that is not a rational act um i'm not sure if it's a rational act but i think it can it's a conscious act you you have to direct um you have to you may have to give your mind some direction in the sense of

[69:03]

for me opening the hand of thought it's is something that i try to do in in terms of my own way of thinking about it of just as i'm sitting each morning can i open my mind so one way that that dogan talks to me dogan talks about ggu zamai uh which often translated is self-fulfilling samadhi self-fulfilling concentration um another way to hear it is receptive concentration and i like that that's more useful to me uh and so i i literally as i'm sitting i try to open briefly my ears and allow whatever sensations are coming to come and see if i can become aware of them before i name them that's opening the hand of thought

[70:11]

closing the hand of thought is putting a name and a story on it so so that that's the way i understand that and let's just say uchiyama's uchiyama's approach just to say there's other approaches to meditation this is our approach our approach is this soft flexible receptive mind um um the uh that's one major type of meditation the other major type of meditation is uh very tightly focused concentration with a word or a visualization or the light from a candle something where you focus really intensely uh and that's a different that that's a different different kind of meditation i'm not sure in

[71:13]

essence they're they're different or they they do different things to you but i think what i've seen is they they have they may have different effects on us uh in a broad sense but that's getting into fine points and i think we should probably end thank you thanks for the question

[71:35]

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