I vow to take security of the Tathagatagarbha Buddha. Good evening. Good evening. It seems to be two groups of people. I'll try to address... I hope you can hear me over here. This evening, I want to take this opportunity, since we're in the Zindo, to talk about what is Zazen and why we sit Zazen and how we sit Zazen. And I would like you to ask questions. So I'll give a little talk about Zazen, and then you can ask questions if you feel like it.

[01:07]

Zazen, or sitting meditation, for us is, we say, returning to our original nature. What we mean by original nature is originally undivided nature. Before separation, in our usual daily life, all people and objects, we feel, are separate from us. But in our original nature, we're all one. And Zazen is a way to realize our oneness, or to resume that oneness, which is our original nature. So we call it unconditioned nature.

[02:26]

Nature which is not influenced by conditions. So when we sit, the posture we take is a posture that's not influenced by the conditions of our usual life. When we sit Zazen, we cross our legs, or sit in some way that not everyone can cross their legs, actually. But we sit with a very straight posture. We sit with a posture that is not ordinary. Our ordinary postures are usually conditioned by the events in our life, and by the way we approach life.

[03:33]

And it's very rare to assume a posture in our ordinary life that's like Zazen posture. So in our Zazen posture, we sit with a very straight back, and a completely open front. So it's a kind of defenseless posture. Completely open and defenseless. So that's why we say it's not conditioned by fear or by events. So when we walk into the Zendo, we leave our conditioning behind. Of course you can't completely leave your conditioning behind. But the atmosphere of the Zendo gives us the opportunity to drop our usual posture.

[04:42]

And assume a completely open, non-conditioned attitude. Which is more original. More innocent, actually. And we can experience ourselves in a very deep, true way. Original way. And when we sit in Zazen, our breathing resumes a very fundamental working. So our breathing is very deep. Not forced or controlled. But when we allow our breathing to go below our chest, when we have anxiety or fear, our breathing is very shallow.

[05:55]

In Zazen, our breath is allowed to fall down where it feels like it's in our lower abdomen. So our breathing is not conditioned by fear or anxiety. And it allows our mind to be free. And allows our body to be free. So the purpose of Zen practice, you might say, is to find true freedom. Not being bound by anything in this world. And Zazen is to find perfect freedom.

[07:02]

Within this very confined posture. Although the posture is very confined, it's maybe the most extreme posture that you can think of. Because you sit and cross your legs and assume a position, a formal position, and you don't move. So it looks like you're very confined. But within that confined posture, you can find perfect freedom. So what we, in Zen, or in Buddha Dharma, we find our freedom from the inside. If you've had an experience of sitting cross-legged, you find that your legs become painful, and maybe your back becomes painful.

[08:17]

And it's not so easy to sit in this position, but yet it's called the comfortable way. Zen Master Dogen calls sitting in Zazen the comfortable way. But if you've ever made an effort to sit, it doesn't seem so comfortable, at least not at first. Because when you have painful legs, you don't change to make yourself comfortable from the outside. So you have to find what makes you comfortable from the inside. So Zazen is a kind of way of finding ourself in a very deep sense, to reveal our true nature.

[09:18]

Zazen is a great teacher for us. If we want to know something about fundamental reality in this life, Zazen is a wonderful teacher. So how to, without finding comfort from the inside, how to find comfort from within? So Zazen is a kind of great problem for Zen students. Everyone who sits has a lot of difficulty with it. And the way that we deal with our difficulty is to face it without retreating or running away from the difficulty.

[10:44]

Just to completely accept whatever difficulty we have. And there's no trick to it. It's not a kind of trick or a technique. Zazen may look like a technique, but the way to accept the difficulty that we have is to become one with the difficulty. So that there's nothing outside the difficulty. If you call your difficulty good or bad and make a judgment, then you contrast it with its opposite. And as long as you're contrasting it, you create something called suffering. If you have some pain, difficulty, you've got it.

[11:51]

If you don't like it, or if you do like it, you immediately create a difficulty for yourself. So just to be able to see reality as it is, without making a judgment, or from a partial point of view, is a necessary attitude in Zazen. So Zen students, when they see Zazen, and the Zen students' daily life, which is Zazen and working together and study,

[13:00]

is a way of refining our life in a very fundamental way. Zen students sit Zazen every day, over and over again, deepening their practice and understanding. So Zazen is not a way of eliminating difficulties in our life, or escaping from the difficulties of life, but rather dealing with them directly. And dealing with reality directly, without making judgments about what it is or what it isn't.

[14:24]

But directly experiencing, and getting rid of partiality and self-centeredness. If you have partiality and self-centeredness in your life, it's very difficult to sit Zazen. So Zazen lets you know exactly who you are and what your nature is. And gives you a way to deepen your understanding of who you are. If I've stimulated any questions, please feel free to ask.

[15:33]

I still fall asleep quite a bit. I don't know if I'm too comfortable. Could you say something about that? It's a little discouraging. One of the characteristics of Zen students when they sit Zazen is sleepiness, or falling asleep. In Zazen we offer our whole body and mind to this one act. And the necessary ingredient is staying awake. And it's very hard to stay awake. I don't mean just falling asleep. In Buddhism, the word Buddha means to be awake.

[16:46]

So Buddha is an awakened one, one who is awake to reality. And in Zazen, the purpose of Zazen is to be awake, actually. To be completely, totally awake. But unfortunately, when you sit and you don't have a special object in your mind, it's very easy to fall asleep. So Zen students are always nodding off. In the olden days, which was not too long ago, we used to carry a stick called a kiyosaku. And when students would fall asleep, we'd hit them with the stick. So we'd come out and hug them. It was a service. But in recent years, people have not wanted to be hit with a stick.

[17:50]

So it's easier to stay asleep when you fall asleep. Sometimes I think we carry the stick, but not so often. But that was one way. A stick is not brutal or anything. It's just a way of helping us to stay awake or encouraging our practice. And you hit the student on each shoulder. And when you hit the student, it makes a loud noise. Whack! And everybody wakes up. So that's one way. The other way, if you don't have a stick, then you have to wake yourself up. So that's always a challenge. And sleepiness is one of the things that we always have to deal with in Zazen.

[18:58]

And Zen students will go through periods of sleepiness. Long periods where they always fall asleep every time they sit. And then, miraculously, for long periods of time, they'll always be awake. And it's pretty hard to account for it. You can't always account for why that happens. But if you make a total effort with your whole body and mind every time you sit, you don't fall asleep so easily. Or if you do, you have a way of waking yourself up by exerting a lot of effort. So ideally, when you assume Zazen posture, you really put all of your effort, complete effort of body and mind, into this one act.

[20:12]

And you can stretch your waist to keep your back straight. And in Zazen, we make an effort to harmonize our mind with our body, so that the mind is not thinking about some object outside of Zazen, but is focused very strictly on the posture of Zazen. So you're not thinking about something. The thought that you have is the thought of sitting. So Master Dogen says, Think not thinking. This is the art of Zazen. Think not thinking. What is not thinking?

[21:16]

It's non-thinking. But even though we have some thought, the thought is the act itself. So there's nothing outside. You're not thinking in an objective way about what you're doing. But a total immersion in this one act. I'm being completely awake. So in Zazen, we always keep our eyes open. But you know, we have a tendency to close our eyes. So when you close your eyes, then it's easy to fall asleep. But strictly speaking, when we sit, we always keep our eyes open. We should always keep our eyes open, so that we don't fall asleep or fantasize about something.

[22:23]

And when we fantasize about something or fall asleep, then we make an effort to wake ourselves up. So Zazen is actually constantly awakening ourselves, because we're always falling asleep. But in our daily life, we're also falling asleep. And we fall asleep in various ways, even though we feel that we're awake. We're always dreaming about something. And when you sit in Zazen, your dreaming becomes more recognizable. In our daily life, our mind is always going somewhere, always fantasizing or making up new stories. And we call that dreaming. And in Zazen, when we start to dream,

[23:27]

then we forget what we're doing. And so we make an effort to stop dreaming and come back. That's called waking up to the present. So over and over, we're waking up to the reality of the present moment. So Zazen is just to be awake in the present moment, completely, totally awake in the present moment, without dreaming, without thinking about something. It's an object. When you are sitting in Zazen, and you look at who you are and what your basic nature is, and say it comes out that you're always a pretty difficult person, or you're full of anger or resentment, then what do you do?

[24:28]

But like I said, that's one thing that you do in Zazen, when you sit to find out who you are and what your basic nature is. There's no confusion in basic nature. You just allow basic nature to reveal itself. If you start to explain it to yourself, that's objectifying and discriminating. Without making any discrimination, Zazen is without discriminating. Consciousness, which is discrimination, means to break up the world in little pieces. It's to discriminate. And the purpose of Zazen is to stop or suspend discrimination,

[25:38]

or making the world into pieces. When you stop discriminating, the world resumes, or your consciousness resumes its original oneness. Not that there's something wrong with discrimination. It has its place, but not in Zazen. So when we find that our mind is discriminating, we let go of that discrimination. And it can be telling itself something. So the word for this kind of practice is called Japanese Shikan Taza.

[26:50]

Shikan Taza means just doing. It means when sitting, just sitting, without any other motive. Not sitting to do something, to get somewhere, or to have some other purpose, but sitting to just be. So Zazen is just being alive. Sitting is just sitting. Walking is just walking. If you do walking meditation, it's just walking. If you work in the kitchen, cutting vegetables, it's just cutting. And when eating, in a practice situation, of course you can't do it when you're with friends, talking,

[27:56]

but it's just eating. So the whole practice, our practice, comes out of Zazen. As our life unfolds from Zazen, each act, each activity is totally experienced as itself. So we don't miss something in our life. Our whole life is experienced as life itself. So even though in our activity, one activity leads into another, underneath that activity, where one activity leads into another,

[29:04]

we experience each activity for its own sake. Each moment's activity for its own sake. In that way we settle on ourself. We're always settled on ourself. So a mature Zen student is always settled in each moment, no matter what's happening. I remember our teacher Suzuki Roshi, our original Japanese teacher, whatever he did, he never seemed like he was in a hurry. He always had a lot to do, but I had never seen him be in a hurry. Wherever he moved, whatever he did, he was always completely there.

[30:13]

We learned from him. He was a very simple man. He didn't move slowly, particularly, and he didn't move particularly fast. But there was something about the way he moved, which everyone... He was just himself, but the way he moved was very subtle. I don't know if I can explain it, but there was something very wonderful about the way he moved. It was very ordinary, but very profound. Each moment was a moment of perfect attention and settledness.

[31:22]

And when he talked to you, even though it was very ordinary, he always felt some wonderful presence. And he was never in a hurry to get to the next moment. Yes? How do you understand the urge to move and physical pain in Zazen? How do you deal with physical pain and the urge to move in Zazen? Well, it's natural to feel the urge to move. And our reaction, when we become uncomfortable, is to try and find some comfort. In Zazen, you sit for a period of time, and you make a decision not to move.

[32:25]

You say to yourself, Well, I'm going to sit here for 40 minutes in this position, I'm not going to move. And then some uncomfortable thing comes, like, say, pain in the legs. And you just accept the pain in your legs. And it's something that you have to experience yourself. Like, how can I do this? And so, this sets up a problem for you. How can I do this? And you have to work through the problem. That's your work, is to find out, how is that possible? I can say something about how it's possible. But I can't make it possible for you. How it's possible is to expand your mind, to include it. Just allow it to be, without discriminating it.

[33:35]

If you say, I don't like this, then you set up a duality. Which means that you like something else better. And as soon as you like something else better, what you're experiencing becomes worse. So, that's becoming attached to the pain in the legs. You become attached to the pain. And you can't free yourself. But actually, there's no reason to be bound. But because you reject it, you become bound by it. So, we lose our freedom. So, how to gain our freedom, or keep our freedom, is to accept it and allow it to be there. And to grow bigger and bigger inside, so that you can accept everything.

[34:42]

And the only way you can do that is to not fight, not contend. And to give up your sinful self. And to just merge. As long as there's an opposite, then you have a problem. So, when a pain is, when you merge with it, it's not such a problem. Even though there's something there, some pain, it's not necessarily a problem. But it takes some experience to be able to open yourself. It's one way that you might... Something similar, if you go to a birth class these days.

[35:47]

I'll tell you the same thing. To go with it, not to resist it. Or a death class. Birth classes or death classes, go with it. Thank you. Yes, hi. Hi. I was going to say, I'm a little troubled by the response to the thing that Del brought up. Meaning, your basic nature. My only experience has been that at times I've run into psychological or emotional things that surface. When sitting.

[36:48]

That we're not just going to go away. And after a time, I started developing ways to quickly process them. Which is working through, in some sense, in my head, while sitting. I can understand that that's not Zazen, exactly. But I'm wondering if I'm doing some sort of violence to the process of Zazen by doing that. I wouldn't call it violence. Can you give me an example? Yeah. Well, a couple. One set of examples would just be coming to some really fundamental realization about just having a sudden insight of something that you might consider unpleasant in your own nature.

[38:02]

Another is having some unpleasant daydream or fantasy, I guess is the best way to describe it. A scene where you see yourself in some sort of interaction that's troubling. And what I've found is that if I stop and identify what the emotional content is there, if I see myself in the scene and ask myself what I'm feeling in the scene, then I understand what the scene is about and I can just let it go. But if I just sit with it, then it keeps playing over and over. And so that seems to me to be more, to take me further away from Zazen than to stop and think. Well, that kind of thing is coming up all the time.

[39:06]

We always have something from our psyche, which is in our subconscious or unconscious, which is coming into consciousness. When you don't think about something, then it leaves your mind wide open. And that stuff is constantly coming up. Thoughts are constantly coming up. Most thoughts we don't pay much attention to. Or we let them come up when we see them, and then let them go without picking them up or using them as a foundation for building further thought. But sometimes something comes up which seems rather significant. And you don't want to let it go. And so you work it out while you're sitting Zazen, in one way or another. To say not to think doesn't mean that you can't think sometimes. Sometimes you have to allow yourself to think something through.

[40:07]

I think that's different from what Bill was saying. I mean, I see it as different from what Bill was saying. Sometimes thoughts come up and we work it through and let it go. But you have to judge that for yourself. There's nobody standing over you saying, bad boy. It's up to you what you think is necessary. I think what Bill was saying, my understanding of what he was saying is, should you try to make some kind of judgment on your thoughts? Whether or not you're on your nature, true nature.

[41:15]

Some kind of statement to yourself about it. Is that what you're... I think I misunderstood what you were saying. I was thinking in terms of when I sit and I get some insight into who I am and what my nature is. If it comes out that it's not creative or how we want to put it, I would say a negative profile. Then what do you do? You were saying you just don't think about it. You never do nothing. I think our thought process works by itself. My experience is that when I think of something, if I think of some negative part of my nature, my thought process just thinks itself out.

[42:19]

I don't have so much to do with it. My mind is working by itself. And I can watch that happen. And if it's really interesting, I'll probably let it go on. But at some point I'll say to myself, let's get back to waking up to Zazen. Let's wake up to this moment. There's a teacher who used to say, you should keep a pad of paper and a pencil next to you when you sit Zazen. And when you have a really, what you feel is a really important thought, write it down. And then after Zazen, you look at it and you can think about it. You don't lose it. And it kind of frees your mind. I don't know. Well, my mind is such a blank.

[43:22]

I understand what you're... The question, when things like that come up for me, I think, isn't that interesting what my mind is thinking about me? There goes my mind. It's bullying me again. My mind is abusing me again. It's thinking all these ugly things about me again. Isn't that interesting that I have that kind of mind? You know, that's really important information. But I don't do anything with it. I just notice that my mind is beating me up again. And I don't want to beat up my mind again. So you just notice it. And sometimes you notice your mind is, you know, deifying you. What's the word you were saying? My mind is saying a lot of interesting things about me. So just notice it. Go ahead. Yes, and also I'm curious about identifying some part of your nature that comes up as negative.

[44:22]

That sounds like discrimination. Yeah, it's a kind of discrimination. You know, again, the mind is making an effort to discriminate. That's why, you know, no matter what it's doing, it's going to do it. In zazen, you don't really pay so much attention to your discriminating mind. All the rest of our day, you can pay attention to your discriminating mind. In zazen, you give yourself a little peace. We really don't like to give ourselves peace. It's hard. It's hard to allow ourselves to give ourselves some real peace from our discriminating mind. But we think it's very important. And we think our thoughts are very important. Because they're telling us something about ourselves. And we need to know something about ourselves. Maybe we'll get the real answer about ourselves.

[45:25]

If we let our mind discriminate enough. We're always trying to figure out the answer through our mind. And no matter how much we try to figure out the answer through our mind, it's never the answer. It's always a partial distinction. So, in zazen, we allow ourselves to stop thinking about it. And just be. Without judging. There's no good and bad in zazen. No right and wrong. Things are just the way they are. This is our zazen. Zazen. Pain is just pain.

[46:28]

Thoughts are just thoughts. Good feelings are just good feelings. Euphoria is just euphoria. Peace is just peace. There's no special state of mind. In zazen, we don't look for some special state of mind. States of mind are going by like this. One state of mind follows another. Faster than we can count them. But we don't take them up. We just let them go by. And each state of mind is our life at that moment. But we don't try to create some special state of mind. Or figure out a great answer. Try to find a great answer. Life is just presenting itself in its purity. That's the end of it.

[47:51]

That's the end of it? If a child is crying, you find out why the child is crying. But where is your equilibrium when the child is crying? When the child is crying, what are you doing? It's your response. Where is your equanimity? That's the point. What do you make of it? Do you get upset? When the child is crying, and you can't stop the child from crying. Where are you? You're compassionate. But maybe you lose your compassion. Maybe you lose your patience at some point. And you start screaming back at the child. Or do you let the child scream and

[48:56]

fill your whole body and mind? And you're still able to be compassionate to the child? My child, they're testing me out all the time. And I have to know what my response is all the time. Where am I settled in myself when I'm interacting with my child? That's the important point. Not what's going on out there. What's going on in here? What kind of response do I have to that situation? That will make my calmness will help his calmness. My reaction will make him more anxious.

[50:02]

How do I calm down the world around me? How do I make some peace in the world around me? We make peace with ourselves. Moment after moment. We make peace with our children. We make peace with our friends. But we only do it by being that ourself. I have to deal with it every day. So, should your child test you out all the time? Your spouse is testing you out all the time.

[51:21]

Your friends, your neighbors, the world. It's all a test for you. Where do you settle? Where do you find a place inside of yourself that you can deal with without discriminating? Without losing your temper? Without getting angry at the pain that's being caused that you think someone else is causing you? It's really hard for us to see the source of our problem in ourselves. It's really hard. It's really hard when a kid is screaming and acting

[52:22]

completely contrary to everything you wanted to do to not lose your temper. Temper means evenness, you know. The ability just to be calm and not reactive. And that's really hard. Hard place. So, hopefully, Zazen is to find us real settledness in ourselves. And when we relate to circumstances to keep that settledness to always come back to that

[53:24]

as a way to respond to life. Without blaming life for our problems. It's so easy for me to blame. It would be so easy for me to blame my kid for giving me a bad time, for making me angry. Anger is something I can and I can I can't blame it on somebody else. The way I respond is my problem, not somebody else's. So, in Zazen, the problem we have is our own problem. We can't blame it on anybody else or anything else. I must admit that I've lost my temper

[54:38]

with my child. But it's my own fault. So, for Zen students, everybody is your teacher. Everybody and everything you encounter is our teacher. We have to be able to see that. If we don't see it, then we're not such a good student. So, our whole teaching comes out of sitting in Zazen. Our own pain is our teacher.

[55:46]

Our own difficulty is our teacher. And then, we have difficulty from outside instead of trying to make, to settle the world around us down, we work from the inside. I know Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, was talking about the boat people coming from Vietnam and the boats being very full and people being very anxious and the boats rocking. If one person with a calm mind gets on the boat, that person has tremendous influence on the stability of the boat. One person who is settled and doesn't have anxiety and is well balanced can

[56:48]

equalize the whole boat. That's part of his experience, just by being himself. I don't know if that answers your question. Thank you.

[57:30]

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