Good morning. Today I'm going to comment on a talk by Suzuki Roshi that was published in our new book, fairly new book, not always so old. This book, this particular talk was labeled True Concentration and what Suzuki Roshi talks about Well, we usually think of concentration as focusing on one particular thing and letting go of everything else.

[01:24]

But here he talks about concentration as not focusing on any particular thing. not being caught by some particular thing that we focus on a little bit different so he starts out saying true concentration does not mean to be concentrated on only one thing although we say do things one by one what that means is difficult to explain Without trying to concentrate our mind on anything in particular, we are ready to concentrate on something. For instance, if my eyes are on one person in the zendo, it will be impossible to give my attention to others. So when I practice zazen, I'm not watching anybody.

[02:26]

Then if anyone moves, I can spot them. He doesn't really mean to catch somebody moving. He simply means he can see that happening. So this is what we call mirror mind, the mirror which simply reflects everything as it is, without trying to see anything. As soon as we try to see something, then we have discrimination. So this is simply letting seeing see, letting hearing hear, letting smelling smell, leaving our senses open and operating, but with no judgment or discrimination as a reaction.

[03:35]

This is simply saying things, as he says, saying things as it is. So then he talks about Avalokiteshvara. You know the Avalokiteshvara with a thousand arms? Sometimes we see in pictures or a statue of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, hand is an eye or some implement with which to help human beings. So the Bodhisattva with a thousand arms and hands has a thousand means with which to help people. So Avalokitesvara is the Bodhisattva of compassion Sometimes portrayed as a man, Avalokiteśvara also appears in the form of a woman.

[04:42]

Sometimes she has 1,000 hands to help others, but if she concentrates on only one hand, then 999 hands will be of no use. From ancient times, the main point of practice has been to have a clear, calm mind. whatever you do. Even when you eat something good, your mind should be calm enough to appreciate the labor of preparing the food and the effort of making the dishes, chopsticks, bowls, and everything we use. With a serene mind, we can appreciate the flavor of each vegetable one by one. We don't add much seasoning so we can enjoy the virtue of each vegetable. That is how we cook and how we eat food. you know, without adding seasoning, without, when we relate to someone, without adding something, to simply see the person as who they are, and not adding something good about them, or not adding something bad about them.

[05:57]

This applies, you know, this is like non-judgmental mind, to simply appreciate things for what they are. When we, especially in an orioke meal, this morning we had a meal in the zendo, sitting zazen, and when we lay out the bowls and the cloths and then chant the sutra before we even serve the meal, And then all the time it takes to serve the meal and we bow to each other and all this. This is all non-judgmental, non-attachment eating. Simply appreciating every aspect of what comes to us.

[06:59]

appreciate if we do this correctly some people think it's too much trouble why do we go to all this trouble you know when we could just put something in our bowl and eat it but all this trouble is allows us to appreciate every aspect of what we're doing and it allows us to relate to the bowls, allows us to relate to the implements, allows us to relate to the simple food, which is not highly seasoned. We have a little gamasio, you know, and to appreciate the taste for itself. Tsukigoroshi, you know, didn't like, he was brought up on white rice, and when he came to America, we started serving him brown rice. But he ate it, you know.

[08:07]

And then he gave a nice talk, you know, on brown rice. When you chew brown rice, it takes a little while, but you have to start really chewing it, and then pretty soon the flavor starts to emerge. And when the flavor starts to emerge, you begin to appreciate the flavor and relate to the flavor. And the flavor and you become one thing. And he also talked about chewing the brown rice as the way you chew your practice. Your practice seems very plain, but when you chew it, after you chew it for a little while, then the flavor of practice starts to emerge. And then practice becomes very nourishing, even though it's just plain, simple food. for the spirit, for body and mind. So, then he says, to know someone is to sense that person's flavor, what you feel from that person.

[09:25]

Each one has his or her own flavor, a particular personality from which many feelings appear. To fully appreciate this personality or flavor is to have a good relationship. Then we can really be friendly. To be friendly does not mean to cling to someone or try to please them, but to fully appreciate them. Well, someone has a kind of sweet disposition, or sweet flavor, or a sour disposition, or a bitter disposition. different, you know, each one has a fundamentally characteristic flavor. And sometimes, you know, we say, well, someone's very grumpy, you know, or sour. But as we relate to that person, without judging, at some point, you know, we really begin to appreciate this person's personality.

[10:30]

And then when they're not there, we miss them. Tatsugami Roshi was the Ino, the head of practice at Eiheiji Monastery. He was one of my teachers at Tassahara. And he was very hard on the monks, really hard on them. And they all kind of hated him. But when he left, they all cried. They tasted that, you know, there was something about the flavor of that personality that was strong, but everyone appreciated it. So, we can be, you know, friendly, or we can, to have this kind of relationship of really blending or interacting without attachment.

[11:56]

We say, oh, someone is so beautiful, or we just love their personality, or the way they do this or that. And then it's very easy to become attached in that way. So to be able to let each one, to see everyone exactly who they are, let each one come and go, and welcome when they come, and let go when they leave. This is not always easy. But this is how we can actually appreciate each person. As soon as we overreach our bounds, then we have problems. So knowing what boundaries are, and what interaction is, and how to work within those limitations. So to appreciate things in people, our minds need to be calm and clear. So we practice Zazen, or just sitting without any gaining idea.

[13:04]

At this time, you are you, yourself. You settle yourself on yourself. With this practice, we have freedom. But it may be that the freedom you mean and the freedom Zen Buddhism means are not the same. To attain freedom, we cross our legs, keep our posture upright, and let our eyes and ears be open to everything. This readiness or openness is important because we are liable to go to extremes and stick to something. In this way, we may lose our calmness or mirror-like mind when we stick to something. Zazen practice is how we obtain calmness and clarity of mind. but we cannot do this by physically forcing something on ourselves or by creating some special state of mind. You may think that to have a mirror-like mind is Zen practice. That's so. But if you practice Zazen in order to attain that kind of mirror-like mind, that is not the practice we mean.

[14:14]

It has instead become the art of Zen. we don't practice to attain something, we simply practice and then the mirror-like mind appears or which actually the mirror mind is our fundamental mind but when we practice simply for the sake of practice there's no obstruction When we practice to obtain something, then that idea of obtaining is an obstruction. So if you practice to obtain enlightenment, enlightenment doesn't appear. But if you simply practice, enlightenment is there. So we can't chase enlightenment or we can't chase the mirror mind or try to create the mirror mind. It's not something that you can create or get.

[15:16]

It's simply your endowment. So just to let things be, you know, you say just relax. Just let go, you know, and there it is. But if you try to grasp it or hold on or create it, it doesn't work. What you try to create or the dragon that you try to invent is called the art of Zen. So the art of Zen, he says, the difference between the art of Zen and true Zen is that already you have true Zen without trying. When you try to do something, you lose it. You're concentrating on one hand out of 1,000 hands and you lose 999 hands.

[16:20]

That is why we say, just sit without any gaining mind, without trying to obtain something. This is one of the hardest things for people. No matter how long people have been practicing, they say, I've been practicing 10 years and I haven't got it yet. Well, if you find yourself in that position, you can say to yourself, I've been practicing 10 years and I haven't let go of it yet. That's more appropriate. It doesn't mean to stop your mind altogether or to concentrate or to be concentrated completely on your breathing, although these are a help. You may become bored when you practice counting the breath because it doesn't mean so much to you, but then you have lost your understanding of real practice because you're looking for meaning.

[17:25]

We practice concentration or to let our mind follow our breathing so that we are not involved in some complicated practice in which we lose ourselves attempting to accomplish something. In the art of Zen, you try to be like a skillful Zen master who has the great strength and good practice. Oh, I want to be like him. I must try very hard. The art of Zen is concerned with how to draw a straight line, or how to control your mind, or how to put a gleam in your eye. But Zen is for everyone, even if you can't draw a straight line. If you can draw a line, just draw a line. That is Zen. For a child this is natural. And even though the line is not straight, it's beautiful.

[18:37]

Last Saturday, I think it was last Saturday, we had the children's talk, and so I asked each one of the children to come up and ring the bell. I said, when you ring the bell, a Buddha appears, if you do it nicely. So without any instruction, I just said, don't hit it hard. Each one came up and made a beautiful sound on the bell with no knowledge, with no training, simply through their, because of children. Everyone drew this wonderful, made this wonderful sound. And yet when we train people, you know, The training is actually to let go. You can't train somebody to make a beautiful sound.

[19:43]

You can only train, you can only insist or keep trying to help people to be, just let go actually. So whether or not you like the cross-legged position or whether or not you think you can do it, if you know what Zazen really is, you can do it. So it's not that the person who sits in the full lotus with a straight back and looks like they have wonderful concentration is the perfect Zen student. That's not it at all. Sometimes that person doesn't understand what Zen is, sometimes. And we see somebody struggling and always, you know, can't keep their legs crossed and they're moving around and feeling terrible, but they stay in their cushion and they're really making an effort.

[20:48]

And it's a wonderful practice, which inspires everyone. Sometimes, you know, I like to think of the beginning Zen student as the one who inspires everyone because they don't know what they're doing. You know, they come for the first time and wonder what's going on around and they see all these people with funny faces, you know. But they're trying really hard and don't know anything. So this is inspiring because it's pure effort, just pure effort. Then we have to go through a stage where we go through all of our ideas about what Zen is until we come out the other side not knowing again and then we just have pure effort but that's pure effort with maturity called enlightenment the most important thing in our practice is just to follow our schedule and do things with people

[22:21]

In other words, you don't have to do anything special. When it's time for Zazen, you just come to Zazen. You don't come late. You don't come early. Simply be on time. There are people who have never once been on time in 20 years. And you'll probably see that person walk in the door pretty soon. But that's okay, you know. I used to worry about, I used to think, what will I do to get this person to come on time? And then I decided, it's not my problem. So you may think that this is group practice. But that's not so. Sometimes people think, well, I don't like to do things as a group, you know.

[23:24]

I don't like to join something. I'm not a joiner. I hear that all the time. I've never been a joiner, you know. And I don't like, you know, doing things with the groups and all that stuff. But this is not group practice. This is simply practicing together. Group practice is quite different. Another kind of art. During the war, some young people, encouraged by the militaristic mood of Japan, recited to me this line from the Shushogi. Shushogi is a compilation of some of Dogen's teaching, which was put together about a hundred years ago. in order to synthesize, make a little package for people to understand what Soto Zen was.

[24:27]

It doesn't include Zazen, though. To understand birth and death is the main point of practice, they said. Even though I don't know anything about this sutra, I can die easily at the front. This is group practice. I don't know anything about, and then he said, that is group practice encouraged by trumpets, guns and war cries. In that way it's quite easy to die. So this is group practice led by some kind of idealism. This is what he considers group practice. If we look at what's happening today, I didn't think I was going to be able to talk about this, but You know, now that there's this quasi-success in the war, people are becoming more...

[25:36]

more behind, getting behind the war effort. When there's a kind of success, then people like to kind of follow behind that success. When there's kind of a strong leadership, people like to get behind that strong leadership. So when they see strong leadership and success, in a certain way, even though it's not really right, not really moral, they get behind it. And this is kind of group practice, group mind that it's easy to fall in behind. When you look at the newspapers and you see Oh, all these wonderful, all these people in Iraq kissing American soldiers and liberation, you know, all the propaganda, you know, it makes you feel, well, geez, maybe they were right after all.

[27:11]

Maybe that was, maybe they were right. There's a little doubt and so it's so easy to get behind that because if you have to doubt, It's very troublesome, you know, when you, to stick to your, to stay with your original understanding and resistance in the face of all this seeming success, very difficult because it's more troublesome and you're on the when you're on the winning side you feel good so not easy for most people to resist that so when when there's a war with success people really get behind it even though it's harmful to everyone so

[28:17]

That's what he sees as group practice, just being led by some kind of idealism. So he says that this kind of practice is not our practice either. Although we practice with people, Our goal is to practice with mountains and rivers, with trees and stones, with everything in the world, everything in the universe, and to find ourselves in this big cosmos. So this is, you know, practice which is just the opposite, which is to identify with the universe and to not ignore the environment, to be one with the environment. Sasaki Roshi once said that in Japan what we used to teach children is very different than what we teach them today.

[29:27]

What we used to teach children in the temples was, do you see the moon up there in the sky? The moon is actually part of yourself. That moon is not some object in the sky, but that is actually you yourself. But he says that kind of teaching has been lost, partly due to wars and so forth, militaristic understanding. You know, in a desert like Iraq, where there's not a lot of big stretches of seeming empty space, the desert has a crust which takes 50 to 100 years to develop.

[30:39]

It's a very thin crust, and that crust keeps the dust from flying around. And it's very easy to crush the dust, I mean the crust. And when the crust is disturbed, then you have sandstorms, dust storms. So when you have thousands of tanks running over the desert, it looks like there's nothing there. But it's totally destroying that crust which will take another hundred years maybe to form again. And this is the source of all the dust storms and the havoc that's created by that which affects everything around it. The whole ecology is affected by, is kept in place in some way by that crust.

[31:42]

So not only are we destroying cities and people, but the environment as well. So how do we bring that to people's attention? Even if it's brought to people's attention, how can we do something about it I don't know very difficult so he says when we practice in this big world we know intuitively which way to go when you when your surroundings give you a sign showing which way to go even though you have no idea of following a sign you'll go in the right direction that's an interesting statement you know we have signs we nature is always giving us signals as to which way to go, but we don't always see them or hear them or pay attention to them.

[32:52]

But when we are still, really still, and without some idea, we know which way to go. sometimes when we're confused, or we're given a question which we can't answer. And if we just say, I don't know, by saying I don't know, to just let go of everything, then something will appear. But if we have something in our head, in our mind, then the response or the message can't come up because there's already something there. So Suzuki Roshi's whole message here is to let go of whatever is in your mind.

[34:04]

This is how we practice. moment by moment letting go of whatever is in your mind as being the way to really concentrate. True concentration, which is non-dualistic. Not concentrating on something special, but simply giving the space for something appropriate to appear. So he says, to practice our way is good, but you may be practicing with a mistaken idea. Still, if you know, I am making a mistake, but even so I can't help continuing with my practice, then there is no need to worry. You think, this practice is a big mistake, but I can't help doing it. I hear that a lot. I don't know why I'm doing this, but I have to do it somehow. People say that.

[35:06]

So if you open your true eyes and accept the you that is involved in a wrong idea of practice, that is real practice. So you may even feel that I'm practicing, but it's not really doing it so well. I know that I'm not doing it well, but still you practice. You accept your thinking because it is already there. You cannot do anything about it. There is no need to try to get rid of it. This is not a matter of right or wrong, but how to accept frankly with openness of mind what you are doing. That is the most important point. When you practice Zazen, you will accept the you who is thinking about something without trying to be free of the images you have. Now he's talking about Zazen. In Zazen, We're always so worried about the thinking mind. Oh, I always have all these images coming into my mind.

[36:10]

And no matter how long you've been practicing, 30 years, oh, I have all these images coming into my mind. I can't get rid of them. Well, of course not. How could you possibly get rid of them? They're yours. Even though they're simply fantasies, you can't get rid of your fantasies. But you can step back from your fantasy. So when you practice Zazen, you will accept the you who is thinking about something without trying to be free of the images you have. Oh, here they come. If someone is moving over there, oh, he is moving. And if he stops moving, your eyes remain the same. In other words, when the images come, they just come. Okay, I just noticed, you just noticed they come.

[37:13]

When someone moves, you just notice they move. That's all. You just, the mind is like a mirror and simply reflects what's there. If you start judging or trying to do something about it, then you're creating dust, you're creating a little storm in your mind. But if you simply let everything come and go, come as it comes and goes as it goes, then the mind is free of whatever it is that's appearing. This is how your eyes will see when you're not watching anything special. In that way, your practice includes everything, one thing after another, and you do not lose your calmness of mind. So, we tend to want to focus on something.

[38:13]

But this is the unfocused mind which sees everything. So, When we sit zazen, our mind wants to focus on something. That's because we're always doing that. To let go of that takes a little practice. So when we have a little discomfort somewhere, even though you may not like it, it's a kind of relief because you can focus on it. And you can say, oh, my leg hurts. You can focus on that. It gives your mind some peace. And so you just go to that. And that becomes the most important thing. So you give it a lot of importance. So we tend to give things importance that they don't warrant, that those things don't warrant.

[39:23]

And then we worry so much about it that we cause ourself a problem. So, this is a good lesson, you know, we can see how we create our own problems. We do create our own problems. We create problems out of ideas that come into our mind. We create problems about our bodily dispositions. when you start focusing on it too much and creating and isolating it and then creating a problem out of it. You know, if you're walking along and you stub your toe, you can acknowledge that and just keep going and forget about it. Or you can walk along and you can stub your toe and you can say, ouch, and then you look down at my toe and it hurts. And it's my toe! And oh, and oh.

[40:27]

And then pretty soon your toe really starts to hurt. And more and more and more. Pretty soon you have to sit down. You have to put a bandage on it. You have to... Mercurochrome. We used to use Mercurochrome in the old days. I don't know what they use nowadays. Mercurochrome was this colored water that we used to put on all of our owies. Anyway, just a little exaggeration. I just wanted to make my point. The extent of this practice is limitless. With this as our base, we have real freedom. When you evaluate yourself as being good or bad, right or wrong, that is comparative value and you lose your absolute sense. So we fall into the realm of comparative values. This is the problem. When you evaluate yourself by a limitless measure, each one of you will be settled on your real self.

[41:32]

That is enough, even though you think you need a better measurement. If you understand this point, you will know what real practice is for humans and for everything. How we settle ourself on ourself. without getting caught by anything. So people wonder, you know, what is the value of zazen? And because we are always operating in the realm of duality, good and bad, right and wrong, attachment, clinging, it just seems so different to let go of dualistic thinking

[42:50]

and comparative values. We live in the realm of comparative values. This is better than that, this is worth more than that. A very materialistic way of looking at life and we're really caught in it. And to be able to let go of that and see the quality of things And that there's really nothing special about anything. It's to be settled, have a settled mind. This is the power of Zazen. It's the opposite of comparative values and acquisitiveness.

[43:56]

As we said, the meaning of nirvana is cool, cooling off, not running after something. I talked about that recently that in ancient days nirvana was a term that meant just cool like the soup is too hot it should be a little more nirvana or simply a term meaning cool. So this is zazen, cooling off, so that we don't get caught by the desiring mind.

[45:14]

which is reaching out for something, isolating something, getting caught by something. Dogen says, hooks and snares can't reach it. When he talks about zazen, hooks and snares can't reach it. So there's nothing to grab onto. But what the heck? Without something to hook into, life is boring. But if you can get over your boredom, you've enjoyed Zazen. Actually, I don't think I've ever been bored in Zazen. I don't think so. Boredom is, in my definition, When you're disconnected, when there's a gap, then there's... when there's a gap, then... that's called boredom.

[46:33]

But when there's no gap, there's no space for the mind to fall into that gap. In Zazen, in true Zazen there is no gap. There's no space that allows you to fall into an empty feeling. We say, you know, emptiness, but emptiness means fullness, fully filled. Emptiness means to be fulfilled. To be truly empty is to be totally fulfilled. We're all looking for fulfillment in some way. So we grasp at things and we get attracted to things in order to find fulfillment. But fulfillment is to be totally empty.

[47:39]

So empty isn't the opposite of full, but it's simply, it's completion. Do you have any questions? As usual. As usual. I was going to say that myself. You said something about a compilation of Dogen's works and something that started with an asterisk. Oh, Shishogi. And you said that it sort of explains Zen, but it doesn't include Zazen. Well, it, yeah, it not explains Zen, but it gives an overview, like a taste of Dogen's Zen. It talks about renunciation and precepts and so forth.

[48:49]

Kind of an introduction to Dogon Zen. But it doesn't include Zazen. So it's interesting because this was done for laypeople. And they didn't expect laypeople to sit Zazen. And this shishogi was done in about 1898 or something like that. And no one expected that lay people would be sending zazen. So it wasn't included. Yeah, Russ? I instructed the children last week if they hit the bell What would appear if they didn't hit the bell? What would appear if they didn't hit the bell? No Buddha.

[49:50]

Well, um, um, some kind of sound. Would it be a Buddha? Well, it would be a distorted Buddha. It would be a Buddha who is out of tune. When you talked about somebody coming late for Sadhsatva, I come late all the time, but go ahead. You said that you kind of let go of this idea that you shouldn't do anything about it, and that you said it wasn't your problem. And I liked that.

[50:52]

And I thought, well, yeah, because you're here to give the lecture, so you don't have to worry about that. But so what if the person who was late, what if it did affect you? Like, what if you had to be somewhere? and you were depending on that person. Oh, that's different. So, talk about how does the calm mind or what does our practice help us to do in those situations? Well, if like the person was supposed to be there and it wasn't there. Is that kind of what you mean? Yeah. How would you deal with that so that you wouldn't get in a conflict with that person? Yeah. Well, I would try to understand why they're not there before I did something, before I made a judgment.

[52:00]

You know, this is a very interesting little story about somebody's out in the river with a boat. And there's another boat coming down the river the other way. And as this boat comes down the river the other way, it starts heading toward our boat. And then people say, that boat's coming close. It looks like it's heading right for us. Hey! Hey! Nobody's hearing. Nobody's listening. You're coming right at us! Get away! You know? And, all those stupid fools, those stupid fools, can't they see what they're doing? And then, as the boat goes by, it misses them, but they look and there's nobody on the boat. So they realized, they made this judgment about what they thought was happening on the boat. but there was nobody there.

[53:06]

So, best to hold your temper until you know exactly what the circumstances are. And then get mad. Yes? Is renunciation the same as letting go? Letting go. Yeah. Of self. Letting go of Actually, renunciation is not clinging to dualistic thinking. This is perhaps I should know the answer to that, but I don't see it very clearly. You talked about, well, we all know that duality is something that we should try to avoid, to have judgment based on duality. but to make a moral judgment that this particular Iraq war is morally wrong is a judgment already. So where do we stop these judgments?

[54:09]

How do we... Well, we have, yeah. So, you know, we live in the realm of, in the world of duality. So we have to include duality. Duality is included in non-duality. If we're only, you know, we can get stuck in non-duality as well as in duality. So there is duality which is beyond the opposites of duality and non-duality, and that is the non-duality which includes duality. So even though we step back from dualistic thinking, also have to include dualistic thinking. We recognize that there's hot and cold, good and bad, right and wrong, but to not be attached to those values.

[55:15]

So we base our judgment on non-duality rather than simply basing our judgment on dualistic thinking. It's called the duality of non-duality. I'm wondering about that, what you just said, because it reminds me, I don't think we base our decisions on we fall into the samurai problem, which is to execute purely. So I think we base our decisions on conscience. That's good. Yeah, we do base our decisions on conscience. And conscience is a non-duality beyond

[56:24]

duality and non-duality, which is to see everything correctly. In other words, not simply to take a side, not simply to be attached to anything in particular. So if we're not attached to anything in particular, in other words, we can make a decision based on the way things really are, even if it hurts ourself, rather than simply favoring one side or another. I can make a decision based on a correct understanding, even if I lose everything. But people aren't usually inclined to do that, because when it comes to making a decision, we usually favor ourselves.

[57:31]

That's quite usual. But conscience allows us to be free of self-interest. So when we make decisions not based on self-interest, then we can see things more clearly, which is the way we see things in a non-dualistic way. It's simply not favoring self. Paul? I was thinking about what you just said. I think the root of conscience is joint knowing and coming to know with. The idea that we all know the same thing at the same time is probably that miracle. that state of mind that we're trying to achieve. Well, it would be wonderful if we all knew the same thing at the same time, and acted in a conscientious way.

[58:45]

That would be quite wonderful. It's getting to be late, but that may be a good place to stop. Thank you. Beings are numberless.

[58:59]

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