Good morning. It's a pleasure to introduce Richard Hapley as our speaker this morning. Richard's water name is Chin-Chi Tetsunen, Steadfast, Resolve, Penetrate, Now Mind. Richard began his practice at Berkeley Zen Center in 1973, and received lay ordination in 1990. He was our Shuso in the year 2000, and received lay recognition, the Green Rokusu. in 2005. He's held many positions here, including, for seven years or so, he led the Wednesday night group welcoming many of us into practice at Berkeley's Zen Center. He's been married to Joan for 44 years and has two grown daughters. We look forward to hearing what he has to say to us this morning. Thank you. Thank you, and good morning. Good morning. Well, the Bodhisattva ceremony we just had in this humid climate is

[01:00]

It causes a lot of moisture. I have indelible feelings about the Bodhisattva Ceremony because it's so much bowing that I sweat. I really need to wear my gym clothes to the Bodhisattva Ceremony. But my favorite parts are the first part, Oh My Tangled Karma. goes back a long way. It does, too. Longer than I know. And that whole part, you know, I talked to Sojin many years ago, sort of saying, well, Buddhism doesn't have confession. And he said, oh yes, it does. There it is. And of course, when you go to Dogasan, you also have an opportunity for some confession as well, if you want. But I think my very favorite part is in the pre-pure precepts, the last one, which says, I vow to live and be lived for all beings. That be lived, the first time I heard it, it just really caught me.

[02:04]

And I've been thinking about it ever since. What does it mean to be lived? And it's really an interesting idea. And a very, very relaxing, I don't know if that's the right word, relaxing and calming come to mind. But also, I don't have to fight the world. I can just let the world and me beat and react in a positive way. That's kind of getting ahead of my talk. I didn't know we were going to have a Bodhisattva ceremony, so I just had to say that. Those are the parts that I love about it. Let's see. My practice is what I want to talk about today, and a sort of summary of practice, if you will, or a quick outline of practice. And I'm doing that because I think I'm giving a lecture that I need to hear, for me.

[03:12]

And the reason I need to hear that is my practice has its ups and downs. And right now I feel like I'm in kind of a down period, and what I'm looking for is some anyway. Some of you have had a lot of practice experience, and all more than I have, and some of you have come for the first time. And for those of you who have come for the first time, or maybe the second or third, welcome. You're starting what I consider the great voyage of discovery, greater than Columbus and Magellan. voyaging to find your true self, which is much more important than finding America, or circumnavigating the world, or finding the Northwest Passage.

[04:18]

Finding your true self is where it's at. So it's really great that you've come, and I hope that you continue that voyage, that great voyage of discovery. My practice history, as Andrea was saying, I'm not really sure it's 1973 when I started. It's somewhere around in there. I was working as a computer programmer at Chevron, and this really cool guy with blonde curly hair came as a programmer. And I started meeting with him at lunch. We both brought in bag lunches. And it turned out that he was a Zen student at the San Francisco many lunches where he would talk about Zen and I would listen. Previous to that, I'd been reading Krishnamurti. Some of you may be familiar with him. He's more of an Indian slant on spirituality and practice.

[05:20]

I remember, after reading Krishnamurti, trying to meditate on the bus going over to San Francisco, where I worked, and the heated bus. And ten seconds later, I said, was that it? Was that it? Was that it? That was pretty low on the learning curve there. But he talked about Zen and I thought, well, that's really great. But I study Krishnamurti, you know, so I had this sort of like I was listening to him, but I wasn't really hadn't really decided that Zen was going to be my practice. Turned out his name was Rev. Anderson, who since became, as you know, or many of you know, one of the very early abbots of the San Francisco Zen Center and is still This is before he had his head shaved. But he was very articulate with Zen, even then. So in a sense, I kind of figure he's my first teacher. So he left to go to Tassajara.

[06:23]

And I stayed there programming computers and went on vacation. My wife and I went backpacking. And I took You know, as a backpacker, when you take something heavy like that, maybe it means you're kind of committed. So I read it on the trip, and decided, OK, I'm going to go try this. And wound up at the Berkley Center, because I lived here in Berkley. And Wednesday afternoon, took Zaza instruction, had a really hard time sitting cross-legged. But eventually started sitting there at the morning in those days, and I get in the evening. I would go both morning and evening. That's my enthusiasm, if you will. And I attended a few Sashins, and that's where I learned that Sashins were really hard, and it was really important for me not to move.

[07:31]

And the fact that I wouldn't move while I was sitting, and the pain was there, and the difficulty was there, helped me let go of my ego. I've lived such a comfortable life my whole life. There really isn't any other place in my life where I really have experienced discomfort in such a way that I can't move or get away from it. All the other places in my life, I can always go somewhere else. But sitting sasheen, sitting cross-legged with the rest of the community, respecting them, part of this is not moving, it's respecting your neighbors, because if you move, then they feel like they that's really important. So I learned that. And then at work I got promoted and sort of dropped off of coming to the Sin Center.

[08:32]

This was when it was over in Dwight Way. But I continued to sit at home. Two periods. I'd get up in the morning and sit two periods. I got promoted, promoted, promoted. And then I got demoted. Which was a shock. I decided that I was going to go back to the Berkley Zen Center. I'd also been paying my dues as a member of the Berkley Zen Center for years, so I was still a member in good standing. Andrea was asking me earlier why it took so long for me to get my original Rokkasu, my blue Rokkasu, which was 1990, 1989, somewhere there, and I think that's the reason, because I had sort of a 10-year vacation, or 15-year vacation, where I had bought a house, got promoted, to sit in the mornings. I still continued to occasionally read a book on Zen, and I always considered myself a Zen student, and I always knew I was going to come back here to the Rigpa Zen Center.

[09:37]

So I had that kind of down period, and then the up period. Okay, so, and then I've had, as Indra said, lots of practice opportunities here. When I came back nice. I enjoy that. So recently, like in the last eight months to a year, I found myself sort of slacking off my practice and not getting up to come here and really in a sense not sitting at home as often as I used to and as I'd like to. And so I said, what's going on? What's happening? and how to practice it.

[10:49]

Sometimes I'm afraid I'm a Zen tourist, although it's kind of hard to imagine I am, but sometimes I think that that's the case. You know, a Zen tourist is someone who sort of comes in and looks at Zen and sort of plays it for a while and then goes off. Which is okay. Many times people come and they leave and then they come back, as I did. I think I'm always going to be sitting and I'm always going to be practicing Okay, so what is practice? Think of two ways of defining it, narrowly and broadly. Narrowly, think of Zen practice as being sitting meditation, most often here in the Zen Dojo, sitting sushis, In the wider picture practice, I can't believe I wrote this, I want to say, is meeting each moment of life with fresh response, not using habitual thoughts and feelings.

[12:07]

I wrote that yesterday. This is 24-7 activity. Each day, each hour, each minute, being mindful and aware of internal and external activity, and then responding to that activity in a direct way that does not depend on I don't know if you understand what I said or not. We need Harry Potter in here to sort of handle this velvety book. He can translate it for us. Now, this is the why definition. This is where we're meeting our life. It's one thing to sit here in the Zen Center, which is really important. I sort of see this as the cradle of our practice. And we learn, basically, to meet ourselves, to meet our true self, and also to meet our ego.

[13:09]

We learn that here, and then we take that out into the world, and because we've met it here, it's easier to see the responses in ourselves when we're out there, what we call outside the gate, outside our own gate there. I go on to say, this is not easy. We don't often live up to this. and this idea of 24-7 activity, and oftentimes we don't act correctly, as I can testify to many times each day. But then the practice continues to recover quickly and to return to mindfulness. Sojin has an example of a weighted clown, a little toy, When I understand him talking about it, that's basically what a Zen student is. A Zen student is knocked over with a problem, and they recover from that, and they come back to the center, to their mindfulness, to their practice.

[14:20]

And even though we meet situations incorrectly, we probably oftentimes chastise ourselves or somehow wobble because of that, but then that wobble comes back. And just the speed of that wobble coming back is our mindfulness practice, if you will. It's recognizing that we need to put that away. OK. So, how to practice. So those of you who have just taken Zazen instruction can already know this. I find that it's always good to review Zazen instruction. because I need to be reminded of that a lot. So we can sit cross-legged, we can sit in a chair, we can sit in a kneeling position. When I first started practicing, I sat on a stool at home, a kitchen stool, put a pillow on it and it was just the right height for me. I could sit up straight and put my hands in the mudra position and sit.

[15:25]

And then I would sit there for a while and then I would go down and I would kneel and put a kneeling position. First I started with five minutes, and then I built that up. And when I'd get to 40 minutes sitting that way, that's when I went back to the Zen Center and started sitting there, after having taken Zazen instruction to realize that I couldn't possibly sit in a cross-legged position. I don't know if that's the right way to do it, but that's the way I did it. Because I didn't want to be embarrassing. Chairs back in the 70s were not as plentiful as we are, as we have them today. Today, I don't know, maybe I never would have gotten to the cross-legged or the kneeling position if I'd had so many chairs as an opportunity, because I never would have had the motivation. The thing that moved me from sitting in the kneeling position to doing the work to be able to sit cross-legged was that my back started hurting me so much in the kneeling position that I found if I sat cross-legged, my back didn't hurt. So that sort of moved me into the cross-legged position. Cross-legged position is great because you've got the three-point triangle, right?

[16:29]

You've got the one knee, and the knee, and the fanny, and you're really stable. So, I like it. Okay, so we count our breaths, or we follow our breath, we put our attention down on the hara, and then we try to let our minds relax. I find that by counting my breaths, especially in the evening or in the afternoon, And I would come in here to sit, or at home I'd sit, and my mind would still be programming computers. So I saw the counting of breaths as kind of like a backfire, if you will. Sort of a way of telling my mind, OK, you don't have to program anymore. You can do something else, like just follow your breathing, just counting your breaths, and that sort of thing. And it's worse most of the time. So when I was sitting in the, very early on, when I was sitting in the

[17:32]

One time I had just had a little discussion with my sister. My sister and I have strained relations, which we've had for, well, she's 69 and I'm 67, so it's been a long time. She lives a mile away from me now, so we have an opportunity to see each other frequently. So I had to strain, this is back in 1970, call it 73, so I started sitting. in a sense, on the stool. In my mind, it's just talking about my sister. And as I calmed my breath, suddenly I discovered that the whole issue with my sister had just fallen away. It was just gone. And it was amazing to me that that had happened. This was really early in my practice. And that, I think, plus the reading and the talking with Rev Henderson, gave me the faith that this was something that was really going to work for me.

[18:42]

The Zen practice was something that was really going to work. And I think that it's that faith that we have that what we're going to be doing and what we're doing is really a true practice. It's also very beneficial. So those of you who have been sitting for years probably already have got that. Those of you who are starting out as much as possible and count the rest. Sometimes when my mind is really occupied with something else, I visualize the numbers down there on my belly, kind of like they were tattoos, sort of putting a visual component in my attention. We have to visualize that too, I don't know. On your belly? Red, white and blue. I have down here on my desk, effort and energy.

[19:53]

I always found doing sit-ups very good too, because it helps strengthen your back. So if you're able to get some strength in the trunk of your body, that helps as well. Effort and energy probably come from the faith and the understanding that, hey, this is something that really can work for me. This is something that I want to do. Okay, then I went to the website and I found a bunch of hindrances to Self-delusion? No. Yeah, self-delusion. We kid ourselves in thinking what the world really is, rather than understanding what reality really is. Skeptical doubt. Sloth and torpor. Clinging to ritual. There's a puzzle over that one. Clinging to ritual. And I think that goes a long way, because our brains are very habitual. They can create habits almost instantaneously.

[20:55]

And so we get used to doing things a certain way. When I was visiting Japan a couple of years ago, there was a McDonald's restaurant that I used to go to for breakfast. I didn't go to any other place. Probably because McDonald's opened early. Most other places didn't. But I kept going there because I felt comfortable there. Basically, I kind of created a habit of going there. So it's very quick and very easy to create that ritual. And sometimes these rituals will take you away from the practice. Sensuous lust, which would be greed, among other things. Ill will and anger. Greed for fine material existence. Greed for immaterial existence. When we're setting jobs in, one of the things that we give up our ego mind, a mind that's telling us that we're such a good person, and all the rest of that, and just let that drop away for us.

[22:07]

So if we have this greed for this existence, and it's kind of the ego saying, I want to be here, I want to be alive, I want to exist, and the ego wants to do it in this very special way, which I'll read about here in a minute. Maybe I should read about it right now. Let's see if I can find it. Ego in its worst state Ego wants to live forever. It wants to be the center of the world, and it wants to put everything under his control. That was a wonderful way to talk about the ego. So we have this greed for existence. We have this greed basically for this ego to do that stuff. Conceit. I can do it my way. I don't need to do that. Restlessness and worry. Ignorance. OK, so those are some of the things which can keep us from practice. In my case, over the last few months, I would say sloth and torpor is probably the thing that's been getting me the most.

[23:15]

Maybe a little bit of conceit. I don't really know what's going on. And ignorance. Ignorance is this idea that I'm going to live forever. And I'm the only one. I'm the guy. I'm permanent. And when we think that, it's really easy to slip into that mood. That's that ego coming after us. Ego deluding us into thinking we're it and we're the only it. So where to practice? It's amazing how when you come here and other people are sitting, it really energizes your sitting.

[24:20]

It makes a big difference. So some people find that they can't really sit at home or other places, but they can sit here. So this is the place. And I work down here at home because I do sit at home. And I have two places to sit, where I have Zafu set up. One in my bedroom. I'll just sit in bed. I'll wake up in the middle of the night, I'll sit up, I'll put the pillow under my panty, and I'll just sit there for a while. And then I wrote down here, all places, Zazen being a 24-7 activity. So, this idea of mindfulness, where we are constantly meeting the world, and we are meeting that world in a mindful in his big picture.

[25:22]

That's practice in his big picture. And I wrote down here, camping in Tuolumne Meadows. I have this little story I wanted to tell. Many years ago when my kids were young, my wife and my we would go over and watch the bears go over and paw through the garbage bin. So we trained them and we enjoyed training them. It was a great event. And now, of course, we say, these bears are a real problem for us. So the bears come around the campsites, and I was meditating on the picnic table, bench, sitting out. It was about 11 o'clock at night, and then So I was sitting, my kids and my wife had gone to bed, and suddenly I saw this shadow about two feet away from me.

[26:33]

It was a bear, snuffling up. And I saw it. It didn't know I was there until I moved. Because I saw this sort of shadow at a quarter of my height. And I saw it, and I just jumped out. And the funny thing is, the bear jumped the other way. In the mountains and rivers, everyone sits on whatever they have. I think this last time they were out on the beach, facing the ocean as it was coming in, people were saying it was really neat. They liked that a lot. Okay, when to practice? Well, there's a schedule here in the Zendo. We have the morning and afternoon practice. And as I said, when I first started practicing, I came both in the morning and in the afternoon. And that was great.

[27:36]

And when I was Shuso back in 2000, and Shuso was sitting over in that seat there, I came every period for the five weeks that the practice period was then. Both morning and evening. That was really nice. But if you said both morning and evening, maybe someone can do that. Really, your ego manages to sort of find its own place, if you will, not taking the ascendancy. It sort of finds its own place and doesn't become quite as bothersome. It's very comfortable. Also, in the Zen Center here, we have a periodic one-day seven days, and you sit every period, or almost every period, your legs start hurting, your body, you get tired because you're getting up early and going to bed late.

[28:41]

But if you stick with that and put that energy and effort into it, you really begin to understand what it means when I talk about body and mind falling away. Because you start putting away the things, I want this, I want that, and you just let yourself be there. That's very nice. And then that experience you can then carry forward into places like when you're in traffic and you're trying to wait and your patience is getting dried, you can just be there. Put your attention down here. So Juna always says, when you're out in the world or here as well, always keep a little bit of your attention on your breathing and your attention down here in your heart. So you learn how to do that. And I found this coming to the Zen Center easier for me when I was working full-time. I hadn't had to be there at work around 8 o'clock in the morning, so I had to get up.

[29:45]

So I had to go to bed. So I just got up a little bit earlier and came to the Zen Dojo. I got up a little bit earlier and sat in my own house. And now that I'm semi-retired, and I work at home, I work at home. I don't really have a set schedule. I don't have a boss telling me to get up. As a matter of fact, the guy that I work for waits and calls me up and says, are you awake? So he waits for me to wake up, if you will, before he puts me to work. And I'm only working maybe 10 to 20 hours a week, so it's not a big deal for me. But the fact that I don't have this schedule means I have to find that formal schedule from the inside. And that is not easy for me. That's an area where I need work. I need energy. And I know the key is going to bed early.

[30:49]

And so I say, OK, 9 o'clock, I'm going to take my shower and go to bed. You know, when I finally do get to bed, it takes me a while to get to sleep. I have a... I'm a night person anyway. So for me, I'm just as happy not going to bed until 2 o'clock in the morning. That would be great for my viewpoint. So we've been talking about that, and he said, yeah, he's not a morning person either. Although it's hard to believe, because he's here all the time. But this is where I need some discipline. And I know it. And somewhere, I hope I will find it. and get here more. Monday mornings are especially nice to be here at the Zen Center because we have a student talk three days, three Mondays a month, and then on the other Monday we have a discussion. So it's really a way to get to know the Sangha and get to know the people in it and what the issues and ideas are that are floating through the Sangha.

[31:53]

So it's really a nice time to come. Okay, and a lot of people come on Monday that don't come other days. We have a big turnout on Monday mornings. So now we come to the hard part, or maybe not the hard part, but why practice? Why do we practice? For the new people, why did they come here to the Zen Center today to Gansazen? continue practicing and even practice more than I'm doing? That's a good question. So, I wrote down here, health. Some of us come to the Zen Center for health reasons, whether it's stress reduction, heart attack recovery, lower the blood pressure, or maybe cancer control.

[32:58]

And she realized that there was more to Zen than just that, more to meditation than just health reduction or health improvement. Which is good. But you know, if you just got here for health, that's good too. That's great. And then I wrote down here, enlightenment. So, when I was, you know, when I first started out I kind of thought that, and this is a really good Kensho experience, when you read the books about Kensho experiences, it's like really a cool high. So I sort of thought, it's sort of like a legal high, you get high and you don't have to worry about being arrested. And I understand that the ancients tried drugs. and it doesn't work.

[34:16]

It's totally different. You know, you take drugs or alcohol and your brain just isn't clear. One time I was sitting, we were starting a session, I think it was the second day, and this guy said, well, here, take some aspirin, or I think it was ibuprofen, to help the pain. I said, oh, okay, I'll do that. So I took some that medicine affected my brain and I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't really get into it. It was kind of like there was a screen between me and the rest of the world and my zazen. So I didn't do that after that anymore. And I think that's the way drugs are. They may feel good, but there's also a screen between you and the rest of the world, which I don't like. But an ointment is something we'll talk about some more. Then there's the Bodhisattva's Four Great Truths, talking about suffering and the elimination of suffering.

[35:19]

Agitation, dissatisfaction, that's the first truth. Basically we have agitation, we have dissatisfaction. We know it's this. long as we're alive. And so if we don't get food, there's going to be some suffering, some pain, some agitation with that. But I don't want to say life itself is suffering. I don't think that's true. I think life is a lot of fun. Okay, so the second truth is desire is the cause of the suffering. And if we want If we want a girlfriend, and we see someone who might be a candidate to be a girlfriend, and we don't make it, then we're really unhappy.

[36:27]

Back years ago, when my girlfriend was in high school, just out of high school, my girlfriend broke up with me. That was really, you know, ruined my whole summer. I'm not a happy camper. Because I really wanted her to be my girlfriend. I really liked her. So that's just a couple of examples. These examples were rampant. And you all, probably all of you, are familiar with them. Desire can see such a third truth through the ability to realize, you know, we can end this desire. We can end this suffering by ending our desire. And then the fourth truth, of course, is the Eightfold Path, how we live our lives in a way that minimizes our desire and minimizes our suffering. One of the things that we learn in Sashim, when our legs are hurting, is that we don't

[37:32]

We have a battle with ourselves. We have a war that says, I don't like this. I can't move. I don't like this. I can't move. And so there's this constant crashing between these rules you set for yourself, not moving, and not liking the desire. This creates a tremendous amount of suffering. And this is kind of where the breakthrough is, because then you say, OK, I'm just going to put that all away. because it comes and goes. So sometimes it's not there and then it comes back and it kind of goes and what not. So that's one of the great things that I learned in Sashim is just that, how to look at that pain not in a way that says, I don't like this, I want to move, I want to get away from it.

[38:39]

No, there's that pain. Oh, there it is. Okay. So how much time do I have? Six after, so a few minutes. So I talked about practicing to give up the self-centeredness of ego. And I tell you about what the ego was. Live forever, center of the world, put everything under its control. But we can't live without the ego. We're stuck with it. It's there for us, for our lives. And we're still going to have these bodily needs, food, sleep, sex, so on and so forth. So, what we learn in Satsang is where the ego fits in the natural order of ourselves. In Zazen we also meet our true selves and we learn that the true self is possible without ego activity. The true self is a life lived with the true self active and the ego subservient to it.

[39:43]

For a long time I thought that Zen practice was just sitting Zazen and usually in the I did. That's sort of like, there's this discontinuity between practice and the rest of my life. But as I matured, I learned that my practice, really, the most important part of my practice is how I'm meeting the world every day, in every moment. So, I guess I'll Well, since you've covered everything, I won't ask anything. But I did want to say, I think that this might be the first time I've heard you talk. Or maybe I've heard you talk sometime in the first couple of years when I didn't hear anything anyway. But I just really appreciated the way you talked. It was very just regular language.

[40:47]

There wasn't a lot of Zen speak that I get lost. And I just really appreciated I just really appreciated the way you talk. It brought it made me start thinking about a whole lot of things that I hadn't thought about. Maybe help me understand things that, you know, for the past eight years I haven't really understand. Oh, that's what that means. Thanks, Richard. I really appreciate that. Thank you. that you hear sometimes that you don't get something when one doesn't get something for any reason. You don't get something to get something. I struggle with that idea. And you've given us, you gave us in your why section, you gave some wonderful reasons and your whole talk was about desire and love and practice and what it does for you.

[41:55]

And you spoke about whether it works or not. So how do you get something? Yeah. Yeah. You know, sometimes I don't listen to them. He's right. And I think that when you read That's what practice really is, is just this following away of body and mind. But again, we live with our egos, and so our egos are going to come, and they're going to say, Boy, I really want to go to Zazen today, because I'm going to feel good afterward. Sometimes they don't feel good afterward, and say, Oh, I'm disappointed. And sometimes people, I think newer people, don't get what they think they're going to get. start getting it, if you will.

[42:58]

In the Sixth Patriarch, there was this war theory. Supposedly there was this war between the Sixth Patriarch, who was a young man, and another Zen student about who had the right understanding. And the Zen student said something like, your mind is like a mirror, you have to keep it clean. You mirror reflecting reality. You have to keep it clean from delusion. And the sixth patriarch said, well, really, from the very beginning there's no mirror, so what is there to claim? And, you know, both of those are true. That's my understanding. It's true that there's nothing to gain, there's nothing to get from Zazen, because there was nothing from the beginning to get. But on the other hand, We do have, my mind still wants to program computers, or my mind still, when somebody cuts me off in traffic, still gets angry at that person.

[44:02]

And that, my brain rings with that delusion, that ego stuff. And I sit in part to dampen that ringing. Yeah? started to talk on you said you up and down and you're in a down period and I'm thinking that there's no gaining life this period where you feel sort of uninspired all the things that were getting you all charged up to practice seem a little bit weak and there's no reason to practice or maybe that's a really good time English to practice. Yeah. Right. Right. There's a that's a that's a trouble before with one with having any idea. We think we gained it.

[45:04]

I don't need to do this anymore. I've been there. They don't work anymore. I think we're out of time. We are. And with being that, thank you very much for your thought. I think this is related to Susan's question, which I was struck by the tension between the image at the very beginning that you had of resting or relief, and almost melting with the moment, and the energy of effort about meeting every moment in, you know, The tension between the effort and the... You said I think he didn't relax, right? I don't know where to go with that. Well, I'm still... I still don't consider myself a finished Zen student.

[46:05]

So, we'll work on that together. Thank you.

[46:12]

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