Good morning. Can you hear me okay? Yes, but it's maybe a little far away. Can you hear me? Maybe turn it up a little bit. Can you hear me now? Okay. Well, welcome to Aspects of Practice for 08. You know, for Aspects is our one month practice period, which is run by the seniors, and we don't have a head student. It's more of a cooperative feeling than the spring practice period, although it's all cooperative. And I think that there's like three aspects to aspects. One is that we review the different forms depending on who the members are of this particular aspects.

[01:10]

We can review the way we do things here. And this is a formal Japanese-type monastic practice which is being practiced by laypeople, for the most part. So it can seem kind of daunting or... little off-putting or intimidating first to be here and not know what to do. And sometimes I worry that people that come here once or twice and see the formality or that there's a certain way of doing things and you turn this way and you put your thumb here and you put your other finger here, that some people just are scared away by that. because they don't see through that. They don't see that that's just a kind of that's actually very friendly, but it only seems austere and rigid. And the people who like this practice I think feel more comfortable or relatively comfortable without this level of detail.

[02:19]

But I think it's really important that everybody be able to see through the detail, that the spirit underneath the detail is really very warm and supportive and not, you know, like militaristic. It's not a militaristic kind of practice. So anyway, we can review some of the details during this period, just so we know what to do with our bodies. But we shouldn't be too obsessive about it. The other aspect is that we can be here more than we usually are. So if we're only here twice a week, maybe we can be here three times a week during this month. But I hope that people don't strain themselves to do that, so that you're rushing around in order that you can come sit here. That the rest of our life should be in balance in order to support us if we're going to do more here to arrange our life in such a way that it's not a strain, doesn't feel onerous to get up an extra morning or to come over longer on Saturday than we might usually.

[03:32]

So if we can do it, if it's possible within our life to do more, that's great. But if not, just to do what we can do, the best we can do it. It shouldn't be a matter of straining. And the third aspect is that we focus on one topic, one theme for the whole month. And I really like this the best, this aspect the best, because I think that we're, in this culture, we're just inundated with information now. And it used to be for Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, you'd have to go to City Lights in San Francisco if you wanted any information. Now, you just turn on the internet and everything is available. Every book you can imagine, every esoteric division of Buddhism and Zen is all available. So, you know, if you're really interested in it, you tend to get scattered and go from one thing to the next, and this looks interesting and that's interesting, and somebody tells you about this book and that book.

[04:38]

But for this month, we just all share one focus, which is, for this month, the Zen Mind Beginner's Mind by Suzuki Roshi. So I really like the fact that as a whole Sangha that we can just zero in on this one teaching and we all focus on it together for just this one month period. And the senior students are presenting, generally will be presenting like a chapter from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, but not, don't have to do that, but generally that's what we'll be doing. And each of these presentations will come out, come at Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind from a different angle, because everybody sees it a little bit differently. So I think that's also interesting, that although we're all looking at the same thing, we all see it from a slightly different angle and a different emphasis. And the classes, the four classes on Thursday night, will do the same thing.

[05:42]

Alan, what's the first chapter for the first class? No dualism. So this coming Thursday, those of you who are coming to the class, the chapter is No Dualism. And if you can read that before the class, that would be good. So you know, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, is there anybody here who hasn't read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind? I'm just curious. Okay, so there's maybe five people. I may be wrong, but I think it's probably the most, over the last 30 years, the most popular book of Buddhism in America. That's my guess. It's been continuously in print since 1970. That's a long time for a Buddhist book to be in print. And it just has a unique place in the Buddhist literature in America.

[06:48]

There's something about his way of talking. These are, as you know, these are lectures that he gave at Los Altos back in the probably late 60s. It's a small group of lay people. And his way of speaking and expressing himself is so, he takes Buddhism but it comes out in a non-academic but very serious and right exactly to the point way, in a way that I've never heard anybody else's voice quite do. And so I think for that reason people really value this book. It really conveys the spirit and essence of Zen and Buddhism in an almost poetic way, but not in a romantic way at all, not at all romantic.

[07:51]

And full of information, actually. It looks very simple, as Alan was saying yesterday. It appears to be very simple, And it flows, like I was thinking, it flows like a stream, you know, it just sort of flows along. And because of that, you can read it and it all makes, even if you don't quite understand what he's saying, it flows so well and it seems to hold together so well that you just keep right on going with it. In a way, it's deceptive because He's actually, as Alan mentioned yesterday, he's actually saying quite a lot, but it doesn't appear that he's saying quite a lot. And I think what's also interesting is that you talk to people who have read this book over a long period of time, is that you read it at one point and you get something out of it, or you understand something, or it has a certain flavor, and then you read it a year later, or two years later, or ten years later, and you see it in a whole different way.

[09:02]

So obviously we're the ones that are changing. The book's not changing. We're the ones that are changing. And as we change or as we become more experienced in practicing and sitting, and as we just grow older and gain life experience, we start to see, you know, understand what he's talking about in a more experiential way and things become more clear that weren't so clear or didn't stand out before. I've talked to a number of people who feel this way about Zen mind, beginner's mind. And there are all kinds of references in Zen Mahamudra's mind to aspects of Buddhism and stories in Buddhism that he doesn't identify, but they're there. So it's intriguing when you know those stories to get too carried away with all the references, but they are there. And also if you have a chance to listen to his talks, I don't know if these talks are included, maybe a few of them are, in the library.

[10:14]

We have a whole CD collection now. A really big project was done to create CDs of Suzuki Goshi's talks. And Richard had a lot to do with transferring the cassettes into CDs and duplicates so that we could actually listen to them. And when you listen to a CD of Suzuki Roshi's talk, you'll find that it's quite different, the voice has a different feeling than when you read the book. And they actually mention this in the prologue to the book. And the book has been very carefully and tightly and skillfully, in my opinion, edited so that it looks very coherent and tight, but actually his way of talking is very loose and kind of feeling his way along, just taking his time. And so if you have his voice in your mind from listening to one of these tapes or a number of them, and then you read Zen Mind and Beginner's Mind, you can kind of put the two together.

[11:21]

So what I wanted to talk about today was the chapter Right Effort. And I like dealing with Right Effort from a Suzuki Roshi's point of view or from a Zen point of view because Suzuki Roshi's whole emphasis in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, the primary emphasis is no gaining idea. As humans we intrinsically want to gain something by our experience or get something and of course in practicing Buddhism, practicing Zen, practicing meditation, practicing Zazen, we have a desire to get something out of it. This is pretty natural. So he's always warning us to be careful about this gaining mind that we have, because basically it's based on our self-aggrandizement of wanting to hang on to ourself, to cling to ourself and to make ourself bigger, better, happier, more comfortable, all of that.

[12:46]

So the fundamental teaching of Buddhism is non-attachment. So if we're attaching to attain something in Buddhism, we're going across purposes. And yet, how do we make an effort? What kind of effort do we make if we're not trying to gain something? If you think about all the different kinds of efforts that you make every day, we're trying to gain something. Even when you brush your teeth, you're trying to gain, not getting cavities. And he particularly talks about gaining mind in terms of zazen, in terms of when we're actually sitting, to not be trying to get something, but just to actually experience being itself without projecting some goal onto the being, just be.

[14:05]

And if there's any, it doesn't mean that there's no effort, but that the effort isn't a gaining, it's not an effort to gain something. It's an effort to wake up, to be alert, and to have an open mind, and effort to let go of habitual kind of thinking patterns, but not an effort to gain, we don't know. How would you know what to gain anyway? You could just make something up. You'd project something about wisdom or enlightenment or peacefulness or calmness or serenity or compassion. You could project all of that in terms of what we might like to gain, but we really don't know what there is to gain anyway. It's just something we would make up that would be in our mental process, or somebody might tell us something that we should gain, but that would just be something that somebody was saying.

[15:17]

So really, it's a matter of just being, but being awake and not taking anything for granted. So if we want to gain something, that's what we would want to gain, to be able to sit upright and to stay awake, be alert, and have an open mind. In traditional Buddhism, or what I call traditional Buddhism, maybe Sutra Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, right effort is a dualistic, very set effort. prescription, you refrain from unwholesome acts which are unwholesome behavior which has not yet arisen, we refrain from unwholesome behavior which has arisen, and we encourage wholesome behavior which has not yet arisen, and we encourage wholesome behavior and sustain it which has arisen.

[16:29]

So that's the kind of standard classical definition in the Eightfold Path of effort. And, you know, it's very straightforward, very dualistic. You should, you know, not say get rid of, but actually I think refrain is a good description rather than not repress, but refrain from bad and do good. And I think we should be careful not to be too snobby and think, well, this is a very dualistic way of looking at effort. And we're more sophisticated. We're going to transcend this good and bad division and be something which is beyond good and bad. So I would ... this very straightforward conventional way of Buddhist eightfold path of understanding effort, to make an effort to be wholesome and effort to let go of what's unwholesome, I think is valid and we shouldn't dismiss it.

[17:48]

However, Suzuki Roshi's teaching doesn't emphasize that aspect of it, and Zen does not emphasize that aspect, but it also doesn't discard it. So let me read you just the beginning of this chapter. The most important point in our practice is to have right or perfect effort. Right effort directed in the right direction is necessary. If your effort is headed in the wrong direction, especially if you are not aware of this, it is diluted effort. Our effort in our practice should be directed from achievement to non-achievement. So rather than trying to achieve a wholesome state of mind, he's going in the other direction. Usually when you do something, you want to achieve something, you attach to some result.

[18:53]

From achievement to non-achievement means to be rid of the unnecessary and bad results of effort. If you do something in the spirit of non-achievement, there is a good quality in it. So just to do something without any particular effort is enough. When you make some special effort to achieve something, some excessive quality, some extra element is involved in it. You should get rid of excessive things." And then later he says, people ask what it means to practice zazen with no gaining idea. What kind of effort is necessary for that kind of practice? The answer is, effort to get rid of something extra from our practice. If some extra idea comes, you should try to stop it. You should remain in pure practice. That is the point towards which our effort is directed.

[19:56]

So his emphasis is, he says, get rid of. I don't know if he actually said get rid of, he might've. I would say let go of, to get rid of what's extra. And this is like, sounds so simple, but if you think about it and you really carry it through to the most profound level, it's huge. Think about what that means, what does it really mean to let go of what's extra in our life and what's extra in our mind and what's extra in our attitude. What does that really mean and how far do we take that? So I think this is not just Suzuki Roshi, but this is a real aspect of Zen. that the emphasis on Zen is letting go of something rather than trying to attain something.

[21:09]

Fundamentally it's not a different understanding, it's a different method. So you know traditional Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, could have an entirely different cast to how it's carried out, but with the same fundamental understanding. It's just that our emphasis is on letting go rather than gathering in. I was thinking... that Western explorers in the 15th century or so set out to gain treasure, to gather treasure from this hemisphere, to rip off the Aztecs and the Incas and bring their treasure back home to Spain. And the Chinese explorer, a famous Chinese explorer who sailed around in Asia, what he did was he brought treasure

[22:13]

to the countries that they were exploring and gave them stuff so that they would be impressed with China and realize how powerful China was. So his approach was to give something away to convince people that they were powerful and the Western approach was to take something from them and just run away with it. So we're letting go, we're not trying to enrich ourselves is to let go of what's not necessary and find out what's not necessary. And really, you know, this is just fundamental Buddhism. The second noble truth is non-attachment, is that the cause of our suffering is that we attach to, well, as Alan was saying yesterday, fundamentally we attach to wanting things to, we don't like things to be changing.

[23:15]

We want things to be the same. And all kinds of things that we attach to, and because we can't get what we want, then we're unhappy. So given that as humans we have this tendency to attach, our practice in Buddhism and in Zen is to let go of that quality. And really, there's so much written and there's just innumerable ways of practicing and wisdom in all kinds of levels and interesting levels of consciousness and practices, but I keep coming back to that what it all gets down to is just dropping or letting go of how we cling to things. It's that simple. So we have a very short time, you know, I can't, I don't want to go on too long.

[24:31]

So just in my own practice, in terms of that letting go quality, I was just thinking, well, how do I do that already in terms of practicing? How do I do that? I'm pretty self-centered and like my comforts. And I don't like shoulds. You should be like this, you should be like that, you should be generous, you should be kind, you should be this, you should be that. I resist the shoulds and my style is more to investigate, to find out what's true without a preconceived idea about what it should be. At the same time, I really appreciate the shoulds as a reference, as a background. That's what teaching is all about. It's a reference point for us to relate to, but also we have to find out for ourselves.

[25:35]

We don't just adapt somebody else's point of view. We have to find out ourselves. So, I'm very aware of how ... I have a mindfulness practice about how my ego works. That kind of feeling of self-centeredness, of being uncomfortable if I'm going to be uncomfortable, of not wanting to be uncomfortable, of wanting to be comfortable. wanting to have a good self-image, the whole, you know, all the different versions of ego that there are, and noticing how they come up daily, consistently, 24 hours a day, to be, when that happens, it's like a voice.

[26:37]

I'd call it maybe the voice of ego. And so for me, it's like being aware of this ego voice and being willing to relax it a little bit, just a little bit. The main thing is just to be aware of it, just for its own sake, to be aware of it. And I wish I could say, oh, and then I just let go when that happens, but no, that's not true. You just be aware of it and it's still there. But there's some little, the awareness of it creates a little space and learn something about how it works and how it changes. And also that there always seems to be a kind of a tension that rather than being relaxed, usually there's a kind of a tension or a tightness there.

[27:44]

And I feel, have a strong feeling this is all extra, this is not necessary. So I actually have a real love for letting go of what's not necessary. I like simplicity and just zeroing in on what's really important and not getting carried away with all the peripheral stuff because our life is so short. Our life is incredibly short. And to spend all our time with distraction and entertainment and all the stuff that we get, the pettiness that we can get involved in, And then we die. It doesn't make sense to me. So it seems like we should really live our life fully and not be caught up in pettiness. And to me, ego very much has a petty quality to it. So I'm always listening to that voice in my mind and it's so pervasive and so intrinsic that I can't just discard it, let go of it, get rid of it.

[28:55]

And to be judgmental about it, to say I'm, to feel I'm really bad because of that would be miserable. So how can, to be aware of the voice of ego without, with some, actually some humor, that this is an old friend that's gonna be around forever, likely, and has been around forever, and how to make friends with this tendency, and how to, you know, how to change, how to adapt, how to grow, and not just be stuck in exactly the same pattern over and over, which is a matter of relaxing or letting go, even just a tiny bit, and then comes back, and then relaxing a little tiny bit, and then it comes back.

[29:59]

So for me, that's what I relate to when Suzuki Roshi talks about letting go of what's extra. To me, that's how I notice it in my own practice, what I call mindfulness of ego, is letting go of what's extra. So I just want to cut the talk off, so there's a little time for you to say something. So please comment, Ross. Certainly, yeah, I've often thought, I wish I would love to be the kind of person who's not attached to my life, who doesn't, you know, Suzuki Roshi says, it doesn't matter if your life is one day or a hundred years, I think it's in Sun Face, Moon Face, it doesn't matter if your life is one day, and I thought, well, that just sounds right, but boy, I'm far away from that, but yeah,

[31:23]

Well, what are we letting go of? What we're usually letting go of is feeling like we don't have enough. Somehow we don't like what we have. That's what we're letting go of. We don't like the situation we're in and we want something different. And so it's letting go of that. Letting go, and that situation is a fundamentally dualistic situation. Here's what I have, but I want something over here. This is what I am, but it's not adequate. So the letting go is the letting go of constantly wanting something to be different than it actually is. And that behind that effort is some kind of faith.

[33:37]

So it's not so much, there is some faith in something. Yes. Yeah, I think that's really true. I wonder how you, did you get that from what he was saying, in that you do make a tremendous amount of effort in your practice. some preconceived outcome yet. He doesn't really, in this particular chapter, he doesn't really stress that. I think it's true. I think that any, but this is true for all kinds of effort, not just the effort that we make. I think, I can't imagine anybody who really wants to make a strong effort not having faith. I mean, if they, if you do make a strong effort and you don't have faith, you go crazy, you know, because you're, you're at cross purposes.

[34:40]

So I think any effort, any really sincere and deep effort that's sustained, you have some real faith in what it is you're doing. I suppose that can change. There are people that join religious cults and they have great faith and they put tremendous amount of effort and then they see something that, oh, geez, this is not what I thought it was. And the faith goes away and so does the effort. So it's possible to change, but yeah, I think that faith is consistent with effort, definitely. Yes? Yeah, I think you have to find your own balance.

[35:47]

That's really true. Very much so. He also, Suzuki Roshi uses an analogy of baking bread that it's like, you know, you're the loaf of bread and you're the baker. So you have to, you know, you have to have some feeling for how long to leave the bread in the oven and then when to take it out. So you have to be, I think you have to be true to your own personality and own nature. And if we're too idealistic or we're too cynical, it's too extreme. But it's a finding out process. So you tried it one way, and it was, go ahead. No, I'm not saying you weren't cynical. I'm just saying that's the other side of what you were doing, and it's cynical, but you were being the more idealistic side.

[36:52]

Yeah. So then you do that, and then you learn something from that, and then you keep on going. But you also have that desire in the background or that awareness in the background that there's something to that. It's just that you're finding out how to actually make it work in your life. See? Thank you. Thought provoking. Awakening.

[37:53]

Do you have a recommendation for our effort for the next half hour? A recommendation for your effort for the next half an hour. What are we going to do the next half an hour? We're going to sit, right? We're going to go out into the community and sit? Yeah. Yes, when you notice yourself thinking, lots of thoughts coming up in zazen, make an effort to relax your mind, and turn all that thinking effort into effort of just paying attention to breathing and your body. That all that energy is going into thinking, tremendous amount of energy and alertness and awareness and intelligence going into all this thinking energy, which is totally unnecessary during zazen.

[39:06]

You have plenty of time to think. elsewhere. So in the next half hour, you just take this thinking energy and turn it into just awareness energy of whatever is arising. You hear that before? Okay, it's time to stop. Thank you.

[39:35]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ