Good morning everyone. It's Labor Day weekend and I want to talk about work practice. So I'm going to go right back and start with the transition of Buddhism from India to China. In India, monks, Buddhist monks, were not allowed to or forbidden to work in the fields. They were supposed to concentrate on meditation and to some extent study. But in China, well there were many differences between Indian culture and Chinese culture. There was the largest cultural transition in Buddhism until the transition to the West that we're involved

[01:02]

with now. In China, there was much more of a work ethic and as part of the survival of Buddhism, especially with Chan, which became Zen, Zen is the Japanese word, there was this sense of the monks providing for themselves. And that's been somewhat exaggerated in terms of the historical context, but at any rate, there was this sense of Chan or Zen monks working in the fields and that became part of the practice. And there's a famous story about this from the great master Baizhang in Japanese, who sort of established the Zen work ethic. When he got old, you know, his monks all worked in the fields and he did too. And when he got old and he was not in such good shape physically, his monks, out

[02:07]

of concern for his health, hid his tools. And he refused to go out of his little hermitage, his quarters, and he refused to eat. And they didn't know what to do. And finally he said, a day of no work is a day of no eating. A day of no work is a day of no food. So this is kind of the legendary beginning of this, or establishment of this great Zen work ethic. And the earliest Zen monastic codes are attributed to Baizhang also. And I would say, so in terms of the transition of Buddhism and Zen to the West, even, you know, after much more radical cultural transition from all the Asian cultures to Western culture,

[03:09]

I think there's a greater, or another shift in terms of how we see work practice. It's there actually, you know, in Asian practice too. And I think we emphasize it particularly in the Soto Zen tradition that we're part of, and maybe especially in the Suzuki Ueshi lineage that we're part of here, from San Francisco Zen Center. But the idea that, you know, there's the awareness that comes to us from our meditation practice. So what we've just been doing, sitting and settling and facing the wall, facing ourselves, being present and upright, paying attention and being mindful and seeing what it's like to be this person this morning on our cushion and chair, or chair, apart from our ideas and our stories

[04:14]

about who we are, just to be present and aware, whatever arises. And, you know, the various techniques that we can use to help settle, but the basic point is just to be present, pay attention to what's going on. And as we settle into this meditative awareness, and for the people who are here for the first time this morning, I recommend very much doing this regularly. It's okay to do this at home in your spare time. And to regularly, you know, several times a week, have some space in your life where you just stop and sit, face the wall or face yourself, and have some space of being present. And the kind of awareness that arises from this regular meditative practice, well, in some sense it's nothing special.

[05:15]

And yet it's transformative, and it seeps into our awareness, and it seeps into our everyday activity. And so work practice is about a kind of more specific way of how we take on allowing our meditative awareness to express itself in the world. So in some ways we, you know, to come on a Sunday morning or whenever and sit and do this meditation, we're turning away from the world, in a sense. We're intentionally looking within, paying attention to the quality of our experience, our awareness. But in the Bodhisattva way that we're part of, you know, we're not, this practice isn't just about our own personal

[06:17]

state of mind or personal calmness. It includes that, of course, but also we realize more and more as we do this practice that we are connected to all beings, that the point of this practice isn't to transcend the world into some special nirvanic state of, you know, some super realm outside of our everyday activity. So how do we extend this awareness into our everyday activity when we get up off the cushion? So we have various specific practices for doing that. So we just did walking meditation, a very slightly more active mode of meditative awareness from our sitting. So we walk very slowly, small steps, focused on our breathing.

[07:19]

So that's one mode of bringing this meditative awareness to a slightly more active mode. But work practice is very important. And again, I would suggest that there's a different way of understanding that in our context of lay practice. So Buddhism in Asia, Buddhist practice in Asia was not exclusively, but was focused on, was based on monastic practice. And we have that available in the West too, but most of American Zen practice is lay practice like this. People who do serious meditation on some regular basis, but also we all have lives in the world, communities, other communities in the world, working and families and so forth. How do we bring this awareness into, again on Labor Day weekend, into our everyday

[08:25]

life, into the world of work? So another practice we have is temple cleaning. So in bigger residential practice places, this is a daily part of practice, but here we do this Sunday morning. So after this talk, we will have a period of temple cleaning. And it's practice, it's mindful practice, quiet. So we have a work leader, one of the very important positions in a temple, so Roy is our work leader now. And after this talk, those who can stay will meet in the kitchen and there'll be a work meeting and assignments for a brief period of mindful temple cleaning. This is another way, like walking meditation, of extending meditative awareness from our sitting practice into a more active mode. But given this lay practice, we have to be living in the world, with jobs and families and so forth, relationships, work practice

[09:34]

extends beyond our formal meditative practice. And how do we do that and how does that become part of our practice? So I think, you know, originally in China, the monks worked in the fields as part of supporting the monasteries and being kind of responsible to the Chinese culture and social norms to support themselves. But I think there's a shift that in Western practice we have, where actually we see that family practice, relationships, and so on, parenting, and also work practice, is actually a kind of practice. It is a way of expressing and attentively, mindfully taking care of the quality of our life, the quality of our awareness,

[10:36]

and how we express that in the world, according to principles of, well, Buddha's precepts. So we talk about the precepts here, the bodhisattva qualities of non-harming and positive expressions. And this goes all the way back to early Buddhist ethics and one of the Buddha's earliest teachings, Four Noble Truths, which include, well, Four Noble Truths were first that there is, sometimes it's translated as suffering, but just that there is difficulty, that this is a difficult world to live in, that things aren't the way we'd like them to be. And second, that there's a cause of that, which is based on, well, it's just that there is a cause, that there's cause and effect. It's not random and the cause of most of our suffering is in one form

[11:37]

or another, grasping after things, trying to manipulate things. And the third truth is that there's an end to that kind of affliction. Not an end to old age, sickness and death, but an end to suffering based on it. And then the fourth is the Eightfold Path, how to live so that we end this suffering. That's the point of this practice we're doing. And one of those eightfold expressions is right livelihood. So that's particularly relevant on Labor Day weekend. So I was thinking about how on Labor Day and Labor Day weekend, in our culture, we don't work. So, but maybe we can take this as a vacation from working as a way to reflect on the joys of working and the importance of working and how to make labor an intentional

[12:47]

practice and a joyful practice. So what does right livelihood mean for us? What is labor or work as practice, as meditative practice, as bodhisattva practice, as practice that is helpful to ourselves and to all beings? This is a great challenge. It's kind of a calamity for our society now, but it's also a challenge for each of us, a huge challenge for each of us. So in the early, you know, in Buddhist time, right livelihood was, well, based on principles of non-harming, which is what Buddhist ethics comes down to, and most basically,

[13:47]

ahimsa, non-harming, to support life, to heal. I would say maybe two aspects of, it's much more complicated than this in terms of talking about all the precepts, but maybe two fundamental principles of bodhisattva ethics are just not to harm, but to be helpful, and also to inclusiveness, to benefit all beings, not just to take care of one's own family or oneself, but to see our interconnectedness and to see benefit for all beings. So what does right livelihood mean? Again, in Buddhist time, they emphasized not taking on occupations that cause great harm, not being a butcher, for example, and that was the basis for Indian monks not doing agriculture, because they knew that if you plow a field, you're cutting, you're harming lots of little creatures. If you're plowing a field, there are worms and

[14:47]

other little creatures who are going to be killed, so they saw that very strictly. But again, constructive activity. How do we see that in terms of our context? Well, I think having occupations which are helpful and beneficial would be part of that. Finding some work that is constructive, is helpful to beings, to people, and to oneself. Now we have many people in our sangha who have very overtly or obviously helpful kinds of jobs, caring for old people, we have many therapists and counselors in our sangha, we have artists and creative people

[15:56]

in our sangha, we have many teachers in our sangha of various kinds, but I don't think it means just having one of those, I don't think right livelihood means just having one of those explicitly helpful jobs. I think any job that you find yourself in can, I mean there may be some that are pretty difficult, but I think there are jobs that aren't obviously helpful in which one can be doing things that are very constructive, so being a cashier in a grocery store or a bus driver, one can, for example, in those kinds of jobs, be expressing goodwill and kindness and make a big difference to many people's lives. I've heard many stories about bus drivers who are very helpful and cheerful and really express something that

[16:58]

made a difference to people on a daily basis, or workers and cashiers in stores the same way. So it's not about having some explicitly beneficial occupation, although that also is right livelihood. I think if you're working for a corporation that makes weapons of mass destruction, it's pretty difficult, and that's one of the main things our economy does now, so it's difficult, it's challenging in our time. Right livelihood is extremely challenging, but how do we find a way to work that is constructive? How do we find, in whatever job we're doing, even if it's not some helping profession, explicitly, how do we bring our best intention?

[18:06]

How do we express kindness to the people around us? That makes a difference in terms of how our world is. How do we do our work in a way that's not helpful, that's cheerful? How do we see our work as kind of play? Even if you have a co-worker or a supervisor who is difficult, who you don't get along with, or who is more actively difficult for you, how do you pay attention to that situation so that you can, and express patience in that situation, so that maybe you can help them to see some other way that they might be, or appreciate what the pain or fear or difficulty that that, appreciating

[19:20]

that that person, who you're having trouble with, maybe they have some difficulty in their life. Probably they do. How can you be patient and watchful and maybe make a difference so that they can, so that you can be helpful to them? That's very advanced practice, of course, and involves a lot of patience. But there's so many different realms in which you can see the realm of work, the realm of labor as constructive play. And I mean that word play in all the ways. How can you be playful in a way that is appropriate to your situation in your particular workplace? Some workplaces may be very stern and expect you to be very serious. That can happen. But how can you bring some play to that? Play has some flexibility to that situation. So work practice, all of these kinds of considerations

[20:26]

are part of what I mean by work practice. How do we see our work situation in a way that we can bring some intention, some awareness to it, and make it a situation in which we are helping to relieve suffering, helping to support awareness and awakeness? So that's one piece of it. Also, of course, we work to support ourselves and our family. And that's an important part of work practice. How do we do our work in a way that is supportive to pay the rent or pay the mortgage or take care of just our basic living needs? That's also part of work practice. And I think that's a measure of any decent society. So the whole

[21:29]

idea of a living wage. Right now we have people who are working at two jobs who can't afford their families. People who are working at much more than 40 hours a week who can't support their families. So I appreciate the fast food workers who are organizing and trying to go on strike. I think it's shameful that our society allows people to work and doesn't provide enough so that they can have basic living needs, even when they're working. And then speaks of them harshly as not wanting to work or not being able to take care of themselves. That's disgraceful. So in many ways we're living in a very primitive society.

[22:33]

That we don't allow right livelihood. So part of right livelihood might be for us to support people to have right livelihood. So all of this comes out of thinking about work practice on this Labor Day. What kinds of jobs are available? What kinds of jobs are available? How do we support people? And then of course problems of, this gets into all of the issues of how our economy is working and how people who want to get a college education are forced into huge debt. Anyway, and is it right livelihood for us? Is it, what is the work practice of people who are in charge of things in the large banks who make, who get huge incomes many, many hundreds of times more than the people who clean up after them, janitors in the same places.

[24:00]

Anyway, so I think we can't think about work practice without considering the situation of people working around us. But in terms of work practice, there's also how do we, there are also kinds of ways of bringing awareness and mindfulness into our work situation, whatever our work situation is. So I wanted to talk about that aspect of work practice a little bit too and then have some discussion, comments, responses. So part of what, part of how work practice, again, is shifting in terms of the importance of work practice in our Americans

[25:05]

and American Buddhism in terms of thinking consciously about work as practice, and also thinking consciously about relationships and families and parenting and so forth and taking care of a family and taking care of parents also as they get older, as part of our practice, all as expressions of the awareness that maybe starts with our meditative practice. There are various specific kinds of things that we can do in the context of whatever job or work you're doing to remind ourselves of our importance in our work. Our intention to bring awareness into our work situation. So part of our work in our culture in this time, for many of us, by definition, involves a great deal of busyness. So practically

[26:09]

speaking I think to remember, to remind ourselves, oh yeah, I want to try and remember to be aware, to be practicing in this context. And of course, in the age of multitasking and computers and all this information, in some jobs it's very difficult. Many things you have to keep in mind, keep track of in the middle of many of our work situations. How do we be mindful? How do we remind ourselves? So in some sense our practice is just about remembering Buddha. Our practice of taking precepts is to take refuge in Buddha, to return to Buddha. One of the main practices in Asian Buddhism is Nengbutsu, reciting the name of Buddha, but literally that means reminding ourselves of Buddha. So we sit, our sitting

[27:13]

practice too, is to sit like Buddha. And whether we sit cross-legged or kneeling or in a chair, we're taking the upright position of Buddha, sitting relaxed but upright, breathing calmly, sitting like Buddha, letting our body remember, remind itself of this possibility of Buddha that's here right now. So to remember Buddha, to remind ourselves of Buddha. This is basic Buddhist practice in a deep sense, and we can do that in our work practice too. So how do we do that? And there are various, you could say little techniques or tricks to do that. So I just want to mention a few of those. The first one is to remember Buddha. Remember Buddha. One of them, the one that I find most helpful, develops naturally from just in your

[28:21]

Zazen, in your sitting practice, developing a relationship to your breathing. So I always say that breathing is part of your upright posture. So just to be aware of inhale and exhale as part of your posture. Inhale with our whole body, without breathing, and exhale with our whole body. So sometimes when you're in the middle of trying to keep track of five things and you're very busy at your work, in whatever work situation you're in, just to pause, hit the pause button, just take a breath, two or three, maybe even just one breath sometimes. Just remember, oh yeah, okay, here I am. And then go back to whatever you need to take care of. This can be very nourishing and helpful. But there are many other techniques to remind yourselves of Buddha. Right in the middle

[29:26]

of work practice, in your workplace. So the various gathas, so during a practice period Paul wrote a whole series of gathas for different situations. This is an old tradition in Buddhism just various verses to remind yourself, oh yeah, this is my intention, is to be aware, be mindful, and pay attention to what you're doing, and try and be helpful in that. So that's related to remembering phrases from the teachings. So we do various chants here and you can just take a line from a chant. One of the chants we do, the Song of the Grass Hut says, let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. So sometimes as you're sitting for a period, for those of you doing that for the first time this morning, or if

[30:27]

you're sitting, sometimes you sit all day or for a few days, we'll do that in October, it may not seem like the point of this is to relax completely, but actually that's what we're here for. So just to recite that line, let go of hundreds of years and relax completely, in the middle of a work situation, just silently. You may not want your co-worker next to you to hear you say it, but just remember. Or just any line from a chant or Sutra or any mantra or a purusha, it could be something that, it could be, you know, there's lots of good dharma in our culture, just let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. Just take a line that helps you to remember Buddha, and just say it to yourself. That's kind of like Dharma practice, or a mantra. So we chant the Heart Sutra here sometimes, and there's

[31:31]

a mantra at the end of that. So at work, silently, or in satsang too, you're welcome to just say that to yourself over and over once or whatever, just as a way of stopping and calming. If you say it too much, and forget about what you're supposed to be working at, your boss might get upset. How do you just remind yourself to just, okay, I'm here to do my job and do it well, and do it helpfully, and do it constructively, and enjoy it, so you should enjoy your work. Even if there are parts of it, in any job, there are parts of it that are burdensome. But how can you enjoy giving yourself to your work? So those are some techniques. There's

[32:35]

others, when the phone rings, you may have a tendency to pick up the phone right away. But you can let it ring a couple times, or even three times. If the person really wants to talk to you, they don't need to talk to you, they'll still be there the third ring. And you can let the phone ring and stop, and let that be a reminder to take a breath, or two. Or my first teacher used to say, whenever you walk through a doorway, just see that as a chance to take a breath and see you're entering a new space. So you can do that at a workplace, too. So here, when we walk through the doorway, we take a step or two, and we bow to the space. So you don't have to go around in your workplace bowing. They might think you're strange, but I don't know, some workplaces you might be able to get away with that. But

[33:37]

you can just have that feeling, you know, entering another room in your workplace, and just, oh yeah, it's a new space here. Anyway, these are some little techniques to help you remember, oh yeah, here I am. So all of this is another way of thinking about work practice, and how is it that we extend this awareness for meditation into our everyday activity, and to enjoy your work. So this is something to consider on Labor Day. So, comments, questions, responses, anyone, please feel free. Has anyone had stories about enjoying your work?

[34:38]

I don't know if anyone else gets this when they go to work, but often times on Monday when I walk in, when I used to walk in before I quit my job, the, like the, I guess the impact of the eight hours was felt immediately when I entered the door, and the dread would come over me of like, oh my God, I've got to be here for eight hours and, you know, do monotonous tasks and deal with people that I don't want to deal with. And I felt like that dread was so heavy that it reminded me that I had to turn it around, or else I would just be stuck in this rut, you know. So I feel like Zazen practice has helped me with that, because when I'm sitting, you have to sit for 30 minutes, and you try not to get up. But it's how the practice has manifested for me, to remind myself to try to stick with the dread, and see if I can lighten up, and lighten myself up, or try to lighten other

[35:48]

people up. Okay. Other comments? Yes, Terry. You know, I work in the publishing industry on the print side. I'm a manager for print buyers. The whole industry is going through a huge change from print to digital and books to online. I was talking to somebody the other day, and I said, well, I've talked to a bunch of people, and the first thing they say to you is how many years they've got left before they can retire. And I thought, I realized today it was true, and that's pretty interesting. And it's partly because the whole industry is going through such a transformation that people's individual response to their own situation comes out in the way they do their work, and how they do their work, and how

[36:49]

cooperative they are in just getting the work done, just in the focus on the work. It gets, it just has a huge impact on the everyday process of just getting something printed, which is amazing. Right. I have a couple of thoughts. One is, we have this sense when we go to work, like, our time is being taken from us. And that there's this sort of mythical time that we're going to enter into as we go home that's going to be all wonderful and perfect, and they're taking us from this, you know, idyllic place where, you know, for a lot of people it's just staring at a screen for three hours before you go to bed. So I think that, you know, we put this discrimination in our mind that work is awful,

[37:49]

and if you actually go back and think about it, there's a lot of work that isn't so bad. And we're the ones who are seeing it as the time being taken from us. But in a sense, if that's what we're doing, we're actually giving away that time to somebody else, to our company, to our employer, to whomever, rather than really owning the time when we're at work and fully living it, and not having that big distinction of, okay, this is when you're stealing my time, this is when I get to have my, you know, time. And my other thought is that, you know, how we think of work in this culture, and I think in most cultures, it's so much based on our sense of value as an individual. You know, that, you know, how I see myself, if I see myself as a hard worker versus not a hard worker, constantly thinking, you know, how does my employer value me? Do they see me as a valuable employee? Do I bring value to it? And it gets caught up in our sense of our

[38:54]

own identity and our own sense of self-worth, which I think is a very dangerous sort of way, but unavoidable. And I think at root, it sort of keys into that very evolutionary thing of the time where if you were sort of excluded from the plan, you die. And there's that sort of thing where, you know, if my employers value me and I get fired, I'm going to die. Consciously, we don't believe that, but in our very DNA, I think we feel that way. And so employers and employment take that and use it against us to bring that sort of intensity. But I think it's really short-sighted that if we can let go of that sort of, okay, I have to prove my value, and if we can simply just live our role at work and see it as just part of life or part of practice, and take some of that value base and that fear out of it, I think it can work and be a very liberating thing. I agree, and I think part of that idea of value is that we're trained in our society

[40:00]

to limit that idea of value to money. So how much you get paid determines how valuable you are. The value in our materialist consumer society is whoever dies with the most toys wins. So if that's your measure of your own value, I think it's really an impoverished idea that there's lots of other measures of value, and that's part of what we can learn through this practice. So part of what I'm suggesting in talking about this is whatever your work situation, whatever kind of job you have, to enjoy your work. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be parts of it that are, parts of it are going to be, of any job, are going to be burdensome. But whatever you're doing, how do you enjoy,

[41:01]

how do you bring joy to, how do you enjoy your work? How do you bring some interest to your work? So it's not just something you have to do for eight hours until you get to go home and watch television, or whatever. What can you do to make it interesting? What can you do, so like the bus driver who actually actively greets the people who get on the bus and does something positive with that job. You were reminding me, Jerry, of one of my early, one of my first early cool jobs, which was working for a major news network in New York when I was at that point assistant film editor, and I started to realize that, and it, you know, it was a union job, it was interesting, and there were all these, you know, celebrities, or they thought of themselves as whatever people, people knew them. Anyway,

[42:10]

but I started to realize that a lot of the people there, their main concern was not getting fired. They were so afraid of losing their jobs, and I just, you know, and so I, and at some point, because of that, I quit. I just didn't, you know, I didn't want to feel that way. I didn't want to live that way. Anyway. Yeah. I don't work anymore, so you probably all hate me, but... Well, yeah, we have a few retired people here, too. It's been about ten years since I've worked full-time. But it's interesting to hear the comments, and people have asked me, well, how do you like your job? And I said, oh, I've never had a job, because I guess I've been very lucky. My father was a writer, a sports writer, and since I was seven, I wanted to be a writer and an editor, and for the most part, that's what I ended up doing for a long time.

[43:15]

So one of the observations that comes to mind is that I found that, and I've worked a lot of places in New York, in some high-powered situations, there are so many people that who are in jobs they shouldn't be in, and out of necessity, as you mentioned, you know, people who don't really think that's the only job they can get. But I've counseled many people, as a teacher, to leave the job market and go somewhere where you're really happy, so that they can say they don't have a job. There's a spectrum, I think, and probably for those who aren't that happy with their job, you need to figure out where you are. I was a golf writer my many lives, and we should be, I hope you've heard of him, he's about my age. My last interview was with him,

[44:16]

and he said, Michael, you know, I said, every morning when I got out of bed, the first thing I'd do is go like this. And here's a guy in a poor circumstance who became wealthy, but he gets up in the middle of the day, and the whole driving idea was just to hit a golf ball, that's his passion, his love. And I know that there's only a small group in that spectrum that get to do what they love, and all that good stuff. But that's probably the tragedy of work, that trying to make it meaningful and trying to find a thing that you really love. And my last thought is that I find it fascinating that my contemporaries, as they approach retirement, they all talk about the thing they really wanted to do for 30 years, whether it's being a chef or opening a hotel, it doesn't matter. They've been hiding this thing inside themselves. That was their true love. And the way they would have orchestrated their work life in terms of making a buck and doing all those things

[45:16]

that we have to do to support families and all that stuff. So, it's interesting sometimes. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, I agree with you. Circumstances are such that it's not always possible. But to the extent that it's possible to find something, so I've counseled people also who are searching for work or trying to find different kinds of work, to find something that you like doing and seeing where you can fit that into what's available. But whatever you're doing, again, to try and find some way to make it work so that you can enjoy what you're doing. So, what I'm talking about in terms of work practice, to think of it in terms of an extension of meditative practice is to think about how to bring it alive. And I think what you're talking about is related to that. Yes, Deborah.

[46:22]

One aspect I think that's difficult in our culture also is the danger of overwork. We're not speaking to people who don't make a living wage who have to work constantly. Before I retired, I was still working as a psychologist. One of the primary issues with people was that overwork and the ways in which it depleted them and left very little time for anything else and had the fears about not doing that. The rewards that come from our culture from overwork are pretty significant. So I think that the idea of a middle way is to be able to work for a world in which workplaces are humane and reasonable for everyone to make a living wage for those who don't. Yes, and maybe I'll close with one of my favorite Zen stories about one of our, actually the teacher of Dongshan who wrote the Jomar Samadhi, the founder of Soto in China. We're

[47:24]

just about to do temple cleaning and he was once sweeping the ground, the path in the monastery and his brother monk said, too busy. And he said, you should know this one was not busy. And how do we, even in the middle of when we do feel too busy, how do we remember that side of not being busy, of being able to, so in a sense our practice is about, even if you feel like you're trying to avoid dread for 30 or 40 minutes, just sitting is about not being busy, about just taking another breath. How do we remember that, how do we know that that person, even in the middle of multitasking and feeling like we're having to rush around. So part of it is that, so in response to what you were saying to everyone,

[48:28]

where many people do feel overworked, how do we bring that awareness into that, at the same time that sometimes we do have to find ways to physically, so all of this is part of considering how to celebrate Labor Day weekend.

[48:47]

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