Good morning everyone. Good morning. This morning I'd like to speak about Zazen, this meditation we've just been doing, as a creative activity. So this practice, Zazen just means sitting meditation in Japanese, but this Zazen meditation in this tradition of Soto Zen that we do, going back to Dogen in 13th century Japan, actually going back to China before that, and then from Suzuki Roshi who brought this to the United States into California in the 60s. It is very, very simple. It's basically just sitting, but also, There's a lot to it. It involves paying attention. And in some sense, it involves continuously throughout the period of zazen, giving yourself zazen instruction.

[01:12]

It's, in some sense, molding your own zazen. So we have, you know, I'm available as the teacher here for doksan, for practice discussion, and at times it's very helpful to consult with a teacher or to have practice discussion with someone who's experienced in this practice in terms of finding how to work with your zazen. And it's because it's very individual. Again, it's very simple. It's just sitting, being upright, being present. And this applies whether you're kneeling or cross-legged or sitting in a chair. All of these practices are zazen that we do here. But there's a range of how we do that, and there are aspects of different aspects of how we do it.

[02:20]

And throughout the course of the meditation period, paying attention Paying attention is the key, no matter what else is going on. Paying attention to what's going on on your Krishna chair. So we can talk about various modes of what's going on in zazen. And maybe the first thing to talk about is focusing or settling. So just returning to Buddha. we take this position as a way of being, well, of honoring Buddha. By Buddha we mean the historical Buddha 2,500 years ago, more or less, in northeastern India, but also this Buddha nature, this quality of awakeness. Buddha just means the awakened one, this quality of awakening in all of us and in everything.

[03:24]

So we remind ourselves, we remember this Buddha body. And it's a physical practice. We take this upright practice with body and mind to settle into Buddha, to return to Buddha, to take refuge in Buddha. And so a big part of Zazen is settling and focusing And there are various ways, we could almost say techniques of doing that, various specific practices. So one of the first things to focus on is, well, and throughout our practices, Zazen, and I recommend doing this regularly, at least several times a week at home in your spare time, when you're not here or at some other meditation center, to stop and... Just this practice of being present and aware, and paying attention to what's going on, and seeing this body and mind as it is, apart from our stories about who we are.

[04:45]

So there's this settling, and there are various particular ways of doing that. Focusing on breath, focusing on posture, are always central, but there are very specific ways of doing that. Well, this isn't exactly Zen, but counting breaths is one technique you can use. So at the end of each exhale, silently, one, two, and so forth, up to ten, and then starting over again. Or just to pay attention to the space at the end of the exhale, breathing naturally. And there are various concentration objects, libraries full of them in various aspects of Buddhist meditation. But breath is a very helpful thing to focus on. Just breathing naturally. Through your nose, tongue against the front roof of the mouth. Settling, calming. This is a necessary part of the Sazen.

[05:50]

And there are various other ways to help settle as well. Being aware of sound. And it's pretty quiet in here. Maybe a stomach gurgling somewhere in the room. Occasionally some traffic. Although we don't hear the traffic so much. even though it's very close by. The air conditioner going on and off. Whatever. That's another helpful way. Or to focus on a line from the teaching, like the song of the grasshopper I'm going to talk about tomorrow night. Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. The point of this practice is to relax completely. The point of this practice is not to get rid of thoughts, not to get high and reach some special exalted state of mind or being, just to be present and settle into that.

[06:55]

So this is one side, and this involves focus and attention and concentration. Various other tools, mantras, you can repeat a phrase over and over again. So, you can do that in zazen. We chant the heart sutra, which has a mantra instruction at the end. Sometimes we chant that. So you can silently chant to yourself, during zazen, gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhisvaha, the end of the heart sutra. There are many, many other possible mantras. The point, again, is to settle, to focus, concentration. That's an important part of zazen. That's not all of zazen. The other side of Zazen, or one other side of Zazen, there's always more than two sides of everything actually, but the other side is kind of open awareness, spaciousness. Suzuki Roshi says, give your cow a wide pasture.

[07:58]

So just to sit and be present with whatever's going on. And thoughts come and allow them to come. Don't try and stop thoughts. The point again is not to get rid of thoughts and feelings. But don't try and do anything with them either. So this sense of spaciousness, this sense of openness, to feel the space of the room. So Zen meditation halls, in Japanese we say zendo, this zendo is constructed in a particular way to help foster a kind of energy. So you can feel the space of this room, or the space of your cushion or chair and the space around it, or the space of your body, from the base of your spine to the top of your head, or just the space of this sitting posture and this mudra where we hold our hands and hold the whole world in our hands in this cosmic mudra, or... Anyway.

[09:02]

and allow the thoughts to come and go. Don't try to do anything with them. Allow feelings to come and go. And sometimes we get involved in some thought or feeling. Sometimes whatever the problem is that has been on your mind or in the back of your mind or bothering you this week, or this month, or this lifetime, is there with you on your cushion? Okay, pay attention. How is it? This doesn't mean thinking about it. So I'll come back to this. How do you sit with the reality of your life? Keep the cow wide past you. Allow this openness and just be present with that. So again, the point is to pay attention. And then the other, so the other word besides attention is balance.

[10:09]

So all of this is part of the creativity of Zazen. Each period of Zazen is an expression of your whole life. Right now, this morning. How do you want to make the most beautiful zazen you can? And it's not that you control your zazen. Your zazen is a gift to Buddha or a gift from Buddha that is allowing you to express yourself right now. So this balance, you know, sometimes you need to come back and focus and pay attention to your posture. Pay attention to the details of your posture. So some of us have a tendency to slump in our lower back. I'm doing it now, I'm exaggerating. So one thing that you can do that's very helpful is to put some energy in your lower back.

[11:15]

A little bit of lift forward. Tilt on your pelvis forward a little bit. A little bit of lift. Helps energize. So in other words, energy. How do you find, how do you work creatively with the energy of your zazen right now? How do you adjust the energy? How do you adjust your posture? Pay attention to the details of your posture. Pay attention to your, this mudra. Right hand, left hand on top, thumb tips lightly touching, held against your abdomen. Little fingers against your abdomen. You know, if you notice your thumb tips coming apart, bring it back together. If it's pressing together, bring it back to an oval. Pay attention to the details of your posture. Are you tilting left to right? Are you leaning forward? Are you holding back? Finding balance. This is physical and mental. They're not separate.

[12:16]

This is a body-mind practice. So how do you create the most Buddhaful Buddha on your cushion or chair right now? Again, this is a kind of expression of Buddha that you are making with your body-mind right now. And it's not somebody else's Buddha, it's your Buddha. So, it requires paying attention. And, you know, So I said not to try and stop thoughts from coming. Thoughts is just scenery, like the sounds of the air conditioning. But then you get, it's possible to get caught up in some stream of thought, and at some point after a couple minutes or 15 minutes or whatever, if you realize, oh, I've been thinking about something I have to do tonight, whatever, or some difficulty I'm having with some person, or whatever it is, come back, feel your breathing, So, again, coming back to focus, coming back to settling is very important.

[13:22]

So, the focusing is the starting point in a way, and the settling is the starting point in a way. Posture is very important for that. Breath is very important for that. But then also, this other side, one of the other sides of openness and spaciousness. There's a huge field, a huge canvas on which to paint your zazen. this body and mind right now. And it requires, again, paying attention. So whatever's going on, sometimes we feel sleepy or exhausted. That's okay. Pay attention to that. What is it like when you're feeling sleepy? It's hard to keep your eyelids open. Maybe it's okay to rest your eyelids briefly, but then are you going to sink into grogginess? How do you take care of that energy?

[14:24]

Again, I'm, you know, I'm the teacher here, but I'm not, you know, and I can see what people are, I can tell often when people are thinking a lot or very, or sleepy. I'm not going to go yelling and wake up. It's up to you. I'm not sitting up here monitoring, you know, I may be aware of the energy in the room and the energy on all the cushions, but that's, you know, it's your zazen. It's not somebody else's zazen. The same thing with physical pain. Don't keep sitting in some excruciating pain. If you need to, it's okay. Some zen centers you may go to, if you change your sitting posture in the middle of the period, they may yell at you. This happens actually. It's OK if you need to, to put your knee up or to switch positions.

[15:32]

Do it quietly. Try not to disturb others. But don't do it just as a reaction. Don't squirm. Just, oh, do I need to do that? So part of the creativity of Zazen, and this takes a while, is to really find your seat. So people in this room right now are sitting in a whole range of different ways. There are people sitting cross-legged in a range of different ways. There are people kneeling. There are people in chairs. that we have different cushions in the back. Some are harder or softer. There's also support cushions. It takes some creativity and trial and error to find what is comfortable for you. What is the combination of cushions that, you know, you can sit upright and relax? And it changes. And if you come to some of our longer sittings, we have monthly, day-long sittings or longer, That's a way of getting further into Zazen.

[16:34]

I think that regularity over the week is more important, but from period to period, it helps sometimes to change positions or to sit in a chair. If you sit on a cushion, sit in a chair sometimes. However you sit, there's a creativity to that. It's not about submitting to some terrible pain. That's not helpful. That's not what this is about. It is sometimes about getting beyond your comfort zone. So it may be a little uncomfortable to just sit still. We're not used to that in our culture. And that's very helpful to see that you can do that. But again, Whatever's going on, pay attention. And pay attention to the aspect of settling and focusing.

[17:41]

And pay attention to this aspect of openness and spaciousness, and just allowing what is happening to happen with your attention, and finding some balance. So there's more to this creative aspect of Zaza, quite a bit more. There's also the way in which when we are willing to pay attention to what's going on on our cushion, and this doesn't mean that you have to be, again, it's not about obsessively trying to control Every second of awareness is about gentle awareness and a gentle attention, a sustained attention. Okay, what's going on? Can I settle and be present? Feeling the thoughts and feelings as they're drifting by.

[18:47]

As we do that, something that happens, and it may happen, sometimes it happens the first time someone does asana, And sometimes it happens after you've done a number of longer sittings. And sometimes it happens if you sit regularly. Gradually it happens. You may not even realize that it's happening. But we start to connect to this, you know, any way I talk about it isn't going to be it. So I can only talk about it in terms of metaphors or I don't know. But this deep, kind of pool, this deep wellspring, this deep source of creative energy. It is a kind of energy. In the Harmony of Difference and Samyukta Uposatha, the spiritual source, there is this

[19:58]

a source of spiritual energy, of creative energy, that has to do with interconnectedness and realizing our connectedness with each other and with everything. And when we're willing to just, again, as Sukhiroji said, give the cow a wide pasture, we're willing to just be present and allow zazen to be zazen. express Buddha on our cushion in the form of this body-mind. We do connect with this creative energy. And then beyond that, there's a way in which this creative energy of zazen is interactive with the creative energy of our everyday life and everyday activities.

[21:01]

So all of you have creative activities that you're involved with in your everyday life and activity. Some of you do explicitly creative, so-called creative things like make music or do healing or, I don't know, Anyway, there are various things that we, in our culture, think of as creative, but there are other things, like cooking, or gardening, or parenting, or relationships that are also creative. All the things that you do in your work life, in your family life, all of the creative things that are part of your life, connect up with Sazen, and vice versa. So as you're sitting, again, this is not something that you need to think about.

[22:05]

I mean, it might happen that thoughts about something that you're doing that is creative or challenging might come up in Zazen. and vice versa, but your willingness to just be present and open and settle and focus, and take another breath, and find your way of paying attention in this body-mind, it resonates in some way with your creative activities during the week. And vice versa. Your creative activities in your everyday life support this creative activity of zazen. Again, this is not something that you need to think about in zazen or any other time.

[23:06]

Because thinking about... We have this limited idea about thinking about. We think that thinking about means that we kind of... you know, A, B, C, we have this linear idea and we figure something out. But in Zazen, one of the things about the creativity of Zazen is we start to, again, it's hard to talk about this in language because our language is linear with subject or object, but our body starts to think about things. Our body has its own intelligence. So a lot of what I'm talking about, about Zazen as a creative activity, is not something that we think about, but it's something that we feel physically, somatically, in our body as we're sitting, or as we get up and do walking meditation, or as we get up and go out and do our life in the world.

[24:16]

This practice of just sitting, of being present and upright, and expressing buddhaness in this body-mind in our own way, each of us, and paying attention, and finding our balance in our posture, and finding our balance, each of us finding our own appropriate balance. this period of Sāsana in terms of focusing and settling and a lot of times we just need to spend, depending on what's going on in our life, we just maybe need to spend a whole period just really settling and really focusing and really trying to find that inner calm. Sometimes we may just let go and feel that openness or spaciousness or void pasture. And sometimes there's some balance between them and other aspects. How do we paint Buddha with this body line on a cushion this morning?

[25:31]

So again, this is an interactive practice. this body-mind, and Buddha. So it is a creative activity. And part of the creativity is being open to, you know, it's not just something we control, but there is a, but it's also being open to, you know, the sounds around us, the, you know, sensations, physical sensations, mental sensations. How do we appreciate? what is happening. So what I'm talking about, again, it's not just about becoming some yogic virtuoso. It's not about becoming some master yogi. That's not the point. It's about each of us, for ourself, in our own way, enjoying this creative art of just sitting, expressing Buddha.

[26:40]

And it's not exactly that we make progress and get to some higher state of being or something like that in zazen, but there is a kind of craft or knack to this practice. And with more experience, we start to feel how to express this on our cushion, but also in our everyday activity, how to have access to the quality of breathing that's in our zazen that we also can access when we're feeling rushed or frustrated or flustered in our work life or in some situation with relationships or family, just a way to find some Either that focus that helps us to settle and be calmer, or that kind of openness that helps us to see more options within which to respond to some difficult situation, challenging situation. So what happens, I think, with experience of Zazen is a kind of, again, this kind of craft.

[27:47]

Fellows are enacting all this stuff. Or maybe it's a kind of confidence, just that you know that if you've sat a number of day-long sittings or longer sittings, you know that you can get through it again, if it's feeling really challenging. But also we start to learn how to do the Buddha work. So this isn't just, again, this isn't, again, just about becoming this wonderful yogic virtue so that we can do this exotic practice of zazen sitting on a cushion without moving beautifully and wonderfully and so forth. The Buddha work is about how we extend this awareness to all beings. We're not doing this just for ourselves. Of course, we do this for each other.

[28:50]

So here we are, you know, we said Sazen just now and, you know, each of us was doing this alone, but also we were supporting each other. And many people notice that, you know, I encourage you to go do this alone at home or, you know, if you have others you can practice with at home, that's great. But also then to come together and sit with others because there's a kind of support. without saying anything, without knowing anybody's name, even just, oh, okay, there's other people in the room doing this too, and you feel that. And you're helping them. So we support each other. So that's part of the creative aspect of Zazen. But it's not just that either. It's also that when you have access to this kind of awareness, this creative activity of Zazen, there's a kind of flexibility, there's a kind of awareness, there's a kind of looseness, there's a kind of calmness.

[29:54]

Even when you're feeling rushed, even when you're feeling the difficulties of the world, there's some access to that in your everyday activities. And so we actually do this for all beings. This as an awareness helps many people in the world. And so we're always practicing for not just for particular beings even, but for all beings. This is the wider dimension of this practice. So we'll chant at the end of this the Four Bodhisattva Vows, to vow to free all beings, which is kind of Some people get freaked out by chanting these things. What does that mean? I can't do that. But the point is to express the creative, express the art as Azen with this totally wide open context. And then also to come back and focus on seeing, part of the focusing is to see your own

[31:02]

frustration and greed and anger and befriend that. So that's, you know, maybe I need to go back to the very beginning of what I was saying and include that in terms of the focusing and settling is that you have to settle on, you know, your own limitations as well. That's part of this creative practice. That the settling and focusing is, you know, that part of what comes up when you're willing to sit still and be present for 30 or 40 minutes is your own You know, we say greed, hate and delusion and part of what Buddha does is to accept whatever's going on and to be, to forgive yourself for being a human being. You have to do that before you can forgive others. And to pay attention, again, always paying attention to your own habits and patterns of grasping and anger and frustration and so forth and confusion.

[32:07]

And the more you do that and befriend yourself in the middle of that, the more you can stop causing harm to yourself or others in the middle of that. So that's part of the focus on unsettling. And then allow that to open up. So each of us in our own way is in the middle of this process. It's not like, you know, some Like you do this eventually at some point, whoopee, Buddha, and then everything is fixed. This is an endless process of opening and settling, focusing and balancing, and paying attention, and realizing that you haven't been paying attention. So that's how to pay attention, is to realize that you haven't been paying attention. How to practice patience is to see, oh, I've been really impatient. So it's a wide, wide practice. And yet, this is what Buddha is.

[33:09]

Buddha is open to all beings. Buddha is aware and awake. So this is all the creative, the terrain of the creative practice of Buddha's zazen, which you are all doing right now.

[33:28]

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