Good morning, everyone. I want to talk this morning about Suzuki Roshi and discuss a couple of excerpts from his writings. Shinri Suzuki Roshi was the teacher who came from Japan to San Francisco in the beginning of the 60s and founded San Francisco Zen Center, what's now San Francisco Zen Center, which includes also Tassahara Monastery and now Green Gulch Farm. We're affiliated with them, and that's where I trained, and a number of people here have gone and done intensive practice there. And now, Thursday evenings, we're doing, after the meditation at 7.15, we're doing readings and discussion. Paula and Jeremy are a couple of the people who are leading that. But I wanted to talk this morning also about Suzuki Roshi. His book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, is kind of a Zen classic that all American Buddhists read, and if I had to recommend just one book to read, it would be that.

[01:11]

But I want to read this morning a couple of excerpts and comments from a more recent book, Not Always So, that's Suzuki Roshi. So, these are the Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind work, teachings he gave to a lay group down in the peninsula. These are more teachings that he gave to his students, including at Krasnodar Monastery. But it's all good stuff. So, I want to start with an excerpt from, there's many different little selections, not always so just like in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I want to start with an excerpt from the section called Not Always So. The secret of Soto Zen is just two words. Not always so. In books, three words in English. In Japanese, two words. Not always so. This is the secret of the teaching. It may be so, but it is not always so.

[02:16]

Without being caught by words or robes, or rules without too many preconceived ideas, we actually do something, and do something we apply our teaching. So this idea of not always so, that things are practices just to sit in the middle of reality, in the middle of, sometimes we call it suchness, just this. And yet, how we see things and how reality is, and how our life is, isn't always the way we think it is. In fact, it's usually not. Not that we, you know, many very bright people in this room, and so you're thinking maybe very fine, and thinking it's not that you should get rid of that, but whatever you think it is, it's not always so. To stick to something rigid, he continues, to stick to something rigidly is laziness.

[03:17]

Before you do something difficult, you want to understand it, so you are caught by words. When you are brave enough to accept your surroundings without saying what is right and what is wrong, then the teaching that was told to you will help. If you are caught by the teaching, you will have a double problem, whether you should follow the teaching or go your own way. This problem is created by grasping the teaching. So practice first and then apply the teaching. So this sense of grasping is very deep. We all have so many things that we hold on to very tightly. Our sense of the world, our sense of our identity. And in some ways, he says the secret is us, and Zen practice does not always say. So I would say sometimes the secret is letting go. So as we sit, many thoughts and feelings arise, and as we continue to sit over time, we start to develop a faculty for becoming intimate with the stuff in our hearts and minds, with our thoughts and feelings and ideas.

[04:34]

And so part of sitting, an important part of sitting, is settling, developing calm. And this happens over time. And again, to do this practice regularly, several times a week or more, really helps in this practice of settling. But also there's another side, one other side of it, is that we develop a sense of flexibility, of a wider capacity, of a spaciousness, so we can as we become more familiar with our own patterns of grasping, and aversion, and fear, and anger, and frustration, and all that stuff, and are willing to just sit in the middle of it, and be present, and be upright, and pay attention, we develop this wider capacity, this ability to let go.

[05:36]

So he's talking about that here. Not sticking to something rigidly. He calls that laziness, which is really interesting. Because if we think we have, you know, this is where fundamentalism and religious wars start, because we have some idea about what's so, and we're going to go out and fight for it. Well, to actually pay attention to what is happening in the next breath, it takes some attention. It requires whatever is the opposite of laziness. It requires attention and vigilance. And we try and do that in a relaxed way. We sit upright, we sit, shoulders relaxed, continuing to breathe, and so forth. He also says, we practice zazen like someone close to dying. There is nothing to rely on, nothing to depend on. Because you are dying, you don't want anything. So you cannot be fooled by anything. So we've been talking about that in recent weeks.

[06:40]

life and death, and how death is a great, and being aware of death, and being willing to face grief and sadness and so forth that comes with death of loved ones, and being willing to face that our own impermanence. Actually, it's a support for living fully, for enjoying our life, for appreciating what we have today and in the next breath this week. So he says we practice sadhana like someone close to dying. There's nothing to hold on to. We're just here. So can we just appreciate what is this? And of course, that doesn't mean shutting out all of the situations of the world, but how do we appreciate our life? He says, most people are not only fooled by something, they are also fooled by themselves, by their abilities, their beauty, their confidence, or their outlook.

[07:44]

We should know whether or not we are fooling ourselves. This is difficult. If we're really fooling ourselves, we're fooled. And yet, one of the things that Zazen does, just the challenge of sitting and being present and upright, and we sometimes do this for a day or more at a time, a couple of periods at a time, is that it kind of shows us something about how we're fooling ourselves. And it shows us how we're connected to everything actually, to each other, to the world, to our environment. But it's easy to be fooled by ourselves. we should know whether or not we're fooling ourselves. When you are fooled by something else, the damage will not be so big, but when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal. That's the way she says it. So, our practice is to sit and be present in the middle of whatever's going on and whatever problems we have, and just to be present in the middle of it. It's not to reach some ultimate higher state of no mind or no thoughts or some altered state.

[08:52]

It's not about getting high. It's about actually being present in our lives. And that's, of course, what's very wonderful. You may feel some resistance to this Zen way of life, or to your life in the world, but don't be lost in resistance. Do you understand? If you are deeply involved in resistance or fight, you will lose yourself. So this is very easy, and some of us have more of a kind of tendency towards resistance than others, but we all have some of it. We all have this, you know, our own ideas about things and our own way of doing things, and so we resist hearing something new. We resist seeing some new part of reality of ourselves. This resistance is really important, but don't be lost in resistance. How do you stay present? How do you, with Chandra, she says, open the hand of thought.

[09:57]

How do you allow yourself to, you know, if we think we know everything, we can't learn anything. So we have to be open to something we don't know. So he says, if you are deeply involved in resistance, you will lose your strength, lose your friends and your parents, you will lose everything, your confidence, the brightness of your eyes. You become a dead body. And no one will say, oh, I'm sorry. No one will say so. Look at your face in the mirror to see if you are still alive or not. So maybe we should have, besides each seat in the Zen, a little mirror to see if we're really there. Or actually, the wall is a mirror. We sit facing the wall. And that means we sit facing our lives. And this practice itself is a mirror. We see. My shoulders are tense this morning. Oh, I'm frustrated about this or that or some problem.

[10:59]

How do we sit in the middle of that? Relax into it. So he says, look at your face in the mirror to see if you are still alive or not. Even though you practice Zazen, if you don't stop being fooled, it won't help at all. Let's practice hard while we are still a little bit alive. So this, not always so, is really important. We have these... Well, in the Four Noble Truths, one of the most basic Buddhist teachings, ends with the Eightfold Path, the way to live and suffer, to open up ourselves to something deeper. And one of the Eightfold Paths, there's things like right meditation and right action and right speech and right livelihood, which is really important. There's also right view. And right view in Buddhism is not that you have some particular understanding or doctrine or philosophy.

[12:07]

Right view is to be open to other views, to be open to many views, to not hold on or try and impose one's own view on anybody else, but to actually listen to others. Now, we can use our own discernment. It's not that all views are equally helpful. But how can we, by listening, we can actually communicate and discuss. And if we listen to somebody else's view fully, wholeheartedly, then maybe they'll listen to ours. And then maybe we'll both change. So this is not always so. is something that happens internally also, that we are willing to not stick to our idea of things. And sometimes it's useful to know what our idea of things is. So, Dogen, the 13th century founder of Soto Zen and Genjo Koan, one of his basic texts, says that

[13:18]

Deluded people are deluded about enlightenment. Enlightened people are enlightened about their delusions. So our practice is to study our delusions, to be aware of how we think this is and this isn't. And so this, you know, this is the Hiroshi's way of saying this, not always so, to be open to the reality of the next breath. to be willing to be present, fully present. And when something shows up in the mirror in front of us that is new or different, not to resist that, but to say, oh, what's going on here? So this attitude of paying attention or questioning or looking at our experience or reality is where something grows. I want to leave time for discussion and comments and questions, but I thought I'd read another section, a little part of another section.

[14:29]

This is a section called Just Enough Problems. So he's talking to people in a sasheen, an intensive sitting, and this is a seven-day sitting. We do three-day or five-day sittings here, and we have monthly, all-day sittings. Some of you may have started the sasheen because you have many problems. You thought if you sat here for seven days, your problems would be solved. But whatever problems you may have, they can be solved anyway. Buddha will not give you more problems than you can solve, or more than you need. So, you know, another time, the story is, so I never met Suzuki Roshi, he was my teacher's teacher, but he once said, the problem you have right now, you'll always have.

[15:37]

Sorry. That'd be bad news. I would say it a little bit differently, maybe. Sometimes, you know, problems dissolve. There's also problem solving, and our culture teaches us that. If you can fix something through problem solving and calculations and deliberations, great, that's fine. But there's some problems that you will always have. Or maybe they, sometimes they drop away. Sometimes they, you know, some habits, they're not there anymore. And, you know, if you get rid of all of your problems, if all of your problems drop away, somebody else will come and give you their problems. So, you know, we don't have to worry about lack of problems. But he says here, Buddha will not give you more problems than you can solve, or more than you need. Whatever the problems are, they are just enough. If these are not enough problems, Buddha is ready to give you more, just so you can appreciate your problems.

[16:43]

Buddha is always giving you something. If you have nothing to cope with, your life feels empty. So I think you should trust Buddha. A life without problems is like sitting in the zendo for seven days without doing anything. So here in the zendo meditation hall, meditating for seven days, you have had many problems. You might think you have more problems while sitting than you have in your daily life. Get out of here. I don't want this problem. But actually, you are finding the problems you have had all along but didn't notice because you were fooled by something. When you are not aware of your problems, they will appear unexpectedly. No problem will appear that you did not originally have, but because you overlook it, you do not expect it. So it is better to see your problems as soon as possible. Sometimes, you know, there are various different possibilities and cases.

[17:50]

Sometimes people come to Zazen. We have several people here who had their first Zazen instruction this morning, which is wonderful and auspicious for all of us. And sometimes people come... I've talked about this because I was talking a couple of weeks ago about my 40th anniversary of my first meditation instruction. And for me it was just like, this is it. And I've been sitting here every day since then, most every day. And I just knew it. And other people here I know started, came to Zazen and just, oh, this is wonderful. And there is this aspect of our sitting that we sit and we're present and we're upright. We connect with this... There's no way of talking about it that actually gets it, but this sense of wholeness, this sense of, it's okay to be the person on my Kushner chair with my problems, with this body and mind. It's okay. We're connected with everything. We actually are.

[18:50]

So everybody in your whole life is here with you on your Kushner chair right now. Maybe every book you've ever read, every teacher you've ever had, your pet says you were a child. Many, many things are present on your cushion or chair right now. Can we be present with all of them? Can we just give ourselves to this situation here, now? And as we sit, we become more able to face these problems. So, Srigi Roshi says, No problem will appear that you did not originally have, but we overlook our problems. We don't expect it. Other people come to Zazen because they're having some very serious problems, some situation of grief or loss, and feel the need for calm and for settling and for some way to be able to be present in the middle of that problem.

[19:59]

But whichever, what's difficult about this practice isn't getting your knees into some funny position or whatever, but just staying with it and settling into all the stuff that comes up, all the thoughts and feelings, the stuff that is not pleasant. So you don't have to force yourself to look into that or to be... to see the problems, they'll show up. You don't have to try and be unhappy, you know. But in the middle of paying attention and being upright, we see the range of our life. So, here, Sridhira, she's talking about how we face problems. So he says, certain students sit facing the wall, There's other schools where they sit facing the center all the time.

[21:01]

But he says, Buddha is there behind you, and you are trusting him. If you trust completely, there's no need to face Buddha. So Buddha sits in the center of our meditation hall. This is an attitude of complete trust. Your enemies or problems will come from the back, not from the front. So to expose your back to Buddha means to express complete trust in Buddha. Buddha just means the awakened ones. So actually, this is about trusting reality, trusting ourselves and the world and everything in it and everything we know. Not trusting it to be... This is not Pollyannish. It's not about trusting everything to be perfectly wonderful. Of course, we come to practice through awareness of suffering. through awareness of all of the things that are not going well in our lives or in the world. This is the First Noble Truth, that that's part of reality.

[22:04]

So it's not trusting people to be perfect, wonderful Buddhists, although they are in some ways. But it's trusting reality to be itself. It's trusting our life to be itself. It's trusting just that we can sit in the middle of that. So he says to expose your back to Buddha means to express complete trust in Buddha, in reality. Even though you feel you have too many problems, when you trust in Buddha, you sit with your problems. At the same time, you should be ready to refuse a problem if it is too much. So my practice recently has been to say no as much as I can, and it's really difficult, and I end up saying yes to way too many things. Yeah, sometimes we should say, no, I can't do that. Sorry. I'd like to, but... Sometimes the problems that come to us are too much. Buddha may say, if you really don't need it, I will accept it at any time.

[23:09]

Give it back to me. So Buddha is there to appreciate your problems. And sometimes, you know, we have to find a balance. not to push ourselves too hard, to take on too much, to appreciate rest and realization. This is a practice for human beings, not for super-beings. How do you find in your life a way to sustain a practice of paying attention, of taking time to stop and put things aside for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever, or Sunday morning, and just be present with yourself and reality? If you refuse the problem, though, Suzuki Roshi says, more and more the problem will change into something you need. You will think, if I refuse this problem, I may regret it, since I am not so sure whether this is a real problem or Buddha's help.

[24:10]

Maybe it is better to keep it. If you sit in this way, you will find that your problems are valuable treasures that are indispensable for you. So the more we're open to taking on things, the more we develop our capacity to be present with more aspects of reality and the problems that we are. So we're each in some ways a walking problem. Some of us are more obviously a walking problem than others. You know, when I first, after I'd been at the San Francisco Zen Center for a little while, I started to appreciate that the The older students, the students who had been disciples of Suzuki Roshi and had been around a long time and had been doing this practice a long time, they didn't fit some mold of perfect Zen students. They were actually, each of them in many different ways, really peculiar in their own way. they were really themselves in their own way, and yet there was something about them that was also just there.

[25:13]

So, the practice isn't to kind of fit some idea of, you know, good Zen students. The idea is, the practice is to really study ourselves, as Dogen says, to get to know what this is, and to be willing to face all of it, and respond as we can. and sustain that attention in a balanced way, to be kind to ourselves. So we try and practice compassion for all suffering beings, but we have to start with ourselves. So, I want to leave some time for discussion, but I'll read a little more. Before you accept the problems you have in your position, in your situation, You cannot accept yourself as you are. You cannot sit in a true way. When you steady your mind, trust Buddha, and just sit, there's no confusion or problems anymore. When you are patient enough and wait until the problem makes some sense to you, you can appreciate your being here and your position, whatever it may be.

[26:23]

That is how we practice. So, yeah, this practice of patience, of paying attention, not passively, attentively. but not have feeling like we have to go run around and fix things, or problem-solver, you know. Don't just do something, sit down. Be present in your life. When you practice Dazen, there's no need to expect Buddha to help you solve your problems. Buddha is already helping you. Usually we refuse Buddha's offer. It's very interesting, can you see? There is some way to take care of the situation at hand. And it may be just paying attention to it and leaving it alone, but always Buddha is awakening. Reality itself is there offering some assistance. When you ask for help, you are asking for something that has not yet arrived. You are refusing to accept the treasure you already have. Instead of working with the problems you have, you cause yourself more problems by seeking for something else.

[27:31]

There's no need to seek for anything. You have plenty of problems, just enough. This is mysterious, the mystery of life. We have just enough problems, not too many, not too few. If you are patient enough, if you are strong enough to accept your problems, to just be there in the middle of them, Then you can sit calmly and peacefully, trusting Buddha, trusting your own being. Because you are helped, and the way you are helped is perfect, you exist right here. If it is too much, you will die. If it is too little, you will die. You are receiving just what you need. So the whole universe is actually allowing each one of us to be here this morning. Everything in the universe has collaborated. Our whole environment allows each of us to be on our cushion and chair right now, and all of us together, and doing this together.

[28:37]

So to accept our problems without trying to squirm or run away from them, to just be there and allow ourselves to see through the problems without trying to push them away. You know, in the first part that I read, not always so, he was talking about how we are all dying in some ways, or we know of death or we know of loss. So part of what this is pointing to, both of these, in different ways, are a kind of radical acceptance of reality. A kind of patience with things as it is. There's this Sanskrit word I love to say, anapadika dharmakshanti. It's a kind of patience. Kshanti is one of the practices we do, the practice of patience, and the padika dharma could be translated as the ungraspability of anything. So being patient with the fact of our problems, being patient with the fact of death as a nourishment for our life, is considered actually equivalent of full enlightenment.

[30:03]

just to be ready and present and willing to be the person on a cushion or chair, to see that. And also then to respond. So when we can help with something, we should. We can. We have guidelines of ethical presets, how to respond helpfully, and with the situations in our own life and with our friends and family, and the situations of our troubled world. We sit ready to respond and help. But whatever we think it is, it's not always so. So, I can keep babbling, but I won't. Any comments, questions, responses to any of this? It made me think about a recent conversation I had with someone who's about my age, and we were talking about retirement, but then they made a comment that somebody that they knew had retired early, you know, like in their around 50 or something,

[31:25]

And the people that witnessed it did that kind of stuff for me. You know, it made me think, okay, there's something about, you know, when you talked about just having problems, there's something about having things in our lives that we are striving around, and that part of the work of development or whatever is happening, that it has to do with the striving process and encountering the things our lives and to stay in life. You know, I'm sure there are productive things you can do if you're retired. But to stay engaged is part of the process. And problem solving seems to be, you know, it can be a positive or negative problem, but that seems to be the way we engage. Yeah, I think that's a good comment on this. Thank you. Yeah. Dogen talks about Buddha going beyond Buddha. So Buddha didn't have this great awakening in India 2,500 years ago and then stop practicing, or stop awakening.

[32:43]

So we emphasize here, sustained practice. How do we sustain our energy? How do we sustain, in many ways, how do we sustain attention. So that's like ongoing education or adult education. We're always open to learning more, to realizing more, to finding new ways to be helpful. So thank you. Are there new people too? Any comments or questions? And during her way-seeking mind talk, which was like an introductory talk, she was a new arrival, I think, she talked about Suzuki Roshi and the impact that he had on her.

[33:48]

And she admitted to being a very active warrior and stressed out, and like, could you hold I had a picture sitting by her bed. She said whenever she would wake up and look at that picture in a very thick German accent, she would say, don't take things so seriously. And if you're really serious about your life, you have to have a sense of humor because it's a riot. All the things we think we can take care of, anyway. Other comments or responses or questions? Libby. I'm thinking about what Kathy says. It's interesting, and, you know, bouncing off what you said about problems, and when you read that, it felt like, right, it's a certain way of engaging with problems.

[35:02]

It's like learning how to practice with problems, because if you just you know, like the German woman you're talking about, or any of us, if we, you know, I know for myself, if I just get completely lost in the problem and I just get sucked on a drain of worry or whatever, you know, I don't know what's coming from that except just straight up suffering, you know, but then, you know, there is the effort to kind of wake up that, you know, in some, even minuscule way out of that kind of dream, you know, that's practice. And so, but I know, you know, as I've gone through, when I've gone through darker times or more difficult times, and then it's going to be very difficult to practice, but there's a little, you know, even again, it's just a that over time, then I look back and there is something powerful that's come from the whole process, you know, from just deepening and finding a way to sort of live through, you know, and accommodate and sort of open up to it.

[36:25]

And then you become wider and understand But I really want to remember that idea of, I forget how he put it, but it's something about not wishing for it to go away, that maybe this is, maybe it's better that it doesn't. Buddha gives you just enough problems. But there was something about, that line actually, wasn't as crazy about because it reminds me there's a saying that goes around it's like a meme it's like a you know God only gives you enough you know what you can handle but then you know there was there was One where they had a picture of a starving child. Yeah, there's something about that that's... Yeah, I mean, there is real misery and suffering in our world.

[37:29]

Right, so there's some humility of, like, who knows how problems are distributed and what... I mean, it's... You have to just accept the reality of horrible suffering. But, no, it was a line about... Don't try to let go. Don't be so... either to get rid of it or let go of it, maybe hold on to your problem or something like that. Yeah, yeah. So trying to get rid of it is a way, you know, just that kind of resistance just increases the tension of the problem. Can you actually just breathe into it? And sometimes there's nothing to be done. But to be able to sit upright and breathe into whatever's going on helps. Actually, I assume that these two reminded me of this line from the Diamond Sutra about biting nowhere, but original mind can fork.

[38:37]

Because it seems like to say, not always so, would also apply to itself. Not always so is also not always so. The way he articulates this, he makes it impossible to just And that means you have to take each situation as it arises completely freshly, which may mean simply, at one time, letting go of whatever is troubling you, letting go of your problems. At other times, it may mean 100% committing to that problem and trying to find your way through it or to dissolve it. There's this line, emptiness itself is empty isn't it? It's kind of like that. There's always this quality to these teachings about, they've got this reflexive quality that always sort of bounces back on itself in this really fascinating way.

[39:46]

Yeah, so maybe not always so is also not always so. So yeah, as you said, to set up some policy, I think that's going to take care of it. We have to actually pay attention to, oh, what's coming up now? It's challenging, but this is reality. This is how to wholeheartedly engage reality. Other questions or comments or responses? Please feel free. So this, it's all made me think of one other thing that, you know, I've been reading a little bit in the book about mindfulness, which I've read about some before, and that we were talking about the impact on the brain of meditation over time, and we know that people are having an easier time at self-regulation when they meditate, maybe?

[40:53]

Yes. not good to deal with problems in a way that you're highly stressed and your cortisol levels are high and it can be very unhealthy. And that there's healthier ways to kind of not let the stress level get that high. And I think that's where the Zazen supports this, that you can sit with it, stay with it without Yeah, when there's some situation that's difficult. I mean, we could just run screaming from the room, but that's not really going to help so much. So how can we find a way to just be present and breathe and allow things to shift, because they always do.

[41:52]

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