I want to taste the truth of the Buddha's words. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. We're very close to the autumnal equinox, which is the 22nd, just in a couple days. And the equinox is the evening out of the light.

[01:00]

There's a balance of dark and light. And on the equinox, there's exactly the same amount. And then at that point, we begin to turn towards the dark, and the days get shorter, the nights get longer, and at least in this hemisphere, it gets colder. So the equinox is a very, it's this time where things are in balance. And the harvest is coming home, being gathered in, and there's also a sense of some kind of sorrow or leave-taking. The high summer is over.

[02:06]

And in the wheel of the year of the Zen Center calendar year, this time of year, in the fall especially, is a big time of transitioning and change. There's a lot of movement. People are moving, large groups of people are moving from one practice place to another. And people we've grown very fond of and close to and Dharma buddies and good friends that we depend on are leaving or going off or somehow. There's this shifting, and it can be very hard for people. Transitions are always hard for people, pretty much. In childbirth, there's a time during the labor that's called transition,

[03:14]

and they warn you about this in your childbirth class to be very attentive to this time that's called transition. Before transition, labor is going along, the contractions are getting closer together and stronger, and one knows where to put one's effort. Is this a little high, do you think? I hear like there's a slight, it's going to do that whistle. It's a brand new amplifier, so we're getting used to it. Okay, is that still, is that okay? Too low? Let me know if you can't hear me. So before transition, you're laboring along, feeling the contractions, breathing with them, there's a kind of rhythm and regularity and getting stronger and so forth, but you know where to put your effort.

[04:16]

And then after transition, it's also very clear, it's very clear that you want to just push. But during, now it's gone. During transition, it's chaotic. You don't know where to put your effort. The contractions are coming not regularly, and that's when you kind of lose it. That's when they warn you, that in transition is when you're going to lose it, and if your intention is to have natural childbirth, you might at that point say, you know, I want, give me some drugs, you know, to block the pain. That's when it happens in transition. So this, I feel, is kind of going on right now in this community, and we're just about to settle in.

[05:19]

We will be settling in when practice period starts and all the shifts have happened. So for each one of us, whether you're living in a practice community or not, the transition times of your life are the times when one loses one's balance and falls back on maybe old patterns or trying to grab for something or to make it all right, and one can make trouble for oneself and others. So it's just something to be really, really attentive to transitions. Today we have another workshop going on at Green Culture. I'm not sure if it's a workshop or not, but there's about 50 children and their families here

[06:22]

out in the yurt doing council work, learning about speaking and listening to each other. They're doing a whole day of this. And I was thinking about how great it would have been as a kid to have gone through something like that, where you actually, with your parents, sit in a circle and talk to each other and have them listen. I don't know exactly what they're going to be doing over there in the yurt, but I have some sort of imagination of it. And how my childhood was totally devoid of such interactions with my parents, where you hold the talking stick and it's your turn to speak and then you pass it to the next person. So sometimes I feel like there needs to be a lot of remedial work done,

[07:24]

never having had a chance to listen to someone or be heard. We need to have practice in that, some kind of remedial work. And I looked up the word remedial because it actually has a kind of, you know, like a bad connotation, like the kids who had to have remedial reading, you know, they were taken out and went to some other place in grade school to learn how to spell or read. But the word remedial means it comes from to heal or a remedy, remedial medicine or therapy or a cure to remove dis-ease or correct something that needs correcting and healing. So our practice in some ways is remedial,

[08:34]

is to again cure or heal ourselves again in ways that we weren't able to do before. So it's good medicine. You know, this one day sitting in the calendar of events, it says led by Linda Cutts. And I thought, now what does it mean to lead a one-day sitting? What does it actually mean to lead a one-day sitting? And, you know, I have some impulse to, you know, do a lot of posture correcting, like go around and sort of move people's backs or, you know, see how everybody's holding their shashu and kind of adjusting. And also what arises is just telling you

[09:39]

all the mistakes I ever made in practice so that you can learn from those. But I don't know if it works exactly that way because when I see you all sitting, like this morning when I walked through the Zen Do, everyone was making such a strong effort. I know what kind of effort it takes to get here for a one-day sitting, to carve this time out in your life, make all the arrangements, you know, make sure that your loved ones who actually want you there that Saturday are okay and to bring yourself here, unless you bring your loved ones with you. So in some ways, the fact that you're here sitting, it's five in the morning, that in itself is, it doesn't need any adjustment. It's really, there's nothing really to add to that.

[10:44]

And at the same time, our Zen, the formless quality of just bringing yourself here and that intention that you're meeting by bringing yourself here, that has a kind of, it's formless. But sometimes, or in Zen particularly, we meet that with our forms. So, and we want to be trained in the forms. Actually, many of us are drawn to Zen practice because of the forms and the aesthetic quality of the forms, what that awakens in us to see the forms. So I wanted to read a poem that I wrote. This was after reading a fascicle of Dogen

[11:54]

called Jukai, which is Receiving the Precepts. Fifty years, over half lived within the sound of the Han. The same things the Tathagata used now have come into my mind. My life. Don't take this for granted. Ask permission to be granted. Receiving, observing the precepts. Correctly transmitted, life after life. So I just celebrated my 50th birthday a couple weeks ago at the end of August. And I realized that I just turned 50 and over half my life I've lived within the sound of the Han, either at Tassar or at Green Gulch or close enough to San Francisco Zen Center to actually hear the Han in the morning.

[12:55]

And this feeling of gratitude that the same things the Tathagata used now have come into my life. So in terms of the forms of the One Day Sitting, the same forms that have been transmitted through 2,500 years have now come into our lives, have now come into your life for you to practice with. And how do you practice with that? For example, for our formal meals, we do orioke practice, and those of you on trays are doing a modified orioke practice with the three bowls and the utensils and so forth. So those things used by the Tathagata, meaning having a bowl that is held out to receive food

[14:04]

and receiving that food with mindfulness, taking care of the sounds of the utensils, as I mentioned, how you handle these things, how you... Are you present when you place the bowl down or move the bowls from one place to another? These... Now you have a chance. Now those things of the Tathagata's life have now come into your life to practice with. So I find this very... encouraging. So we have this formless practice of zazen, and we meet it because we are these beings that have arms and legs and mouths and we have to... and minds. We have to meet our life

[15:08]

through the forms. We can't get out of that the fact that we're beings that exist in form. So how do we connect with the forms in such a way that... that wakes up the formless side? I guess I would put it that way. So the one day sitting, we have this day set aside to take this zazen posture over and over again, to take a posture as we walk in kinhin, walking in shashu, mindful of our footsteps. That's all. The day is set aside completely to do that. Now, Suzuki Roshi,

[16:12]

right at the beginning of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, actually in the prologue, talks about the difficulty in zen is not taking the cross-legged position. You may have all read this many times. It's not sitting still in cross-legged position. The difficulty in zen is to keep your mind pure, keep your practice pure. So I think we have difficulty with the word pure because it immediately brings up puritanism and cleanliness is next to godliness and what else comes up, you know? That somebody's pure and I'm defiled or they're defiled and I'm pure. It brings up right and wrong very quickly and these kinds of discriminations which are very painful. But the pure,

[17:13]

this kind of pure, keeping your practice pure, I don't feel is necessarily this kind of pure that we fall into of right and wrong, but some of us have a really strong background in right and wrong, like really strong, like it has a grip on us that is very hard to loosen and I think others have a little looser, came to zen center with a little looser feeling around that. But pure, the word pure has to do with unmixed, something that's unmixed and thorough, unmixed. It also has the connotation of clean I just want to look at all the different meanings.

[18:30]

Complete, thorough, utter, containing nothing inappropriate or extraneous, free from foreign elements, this is all pure, having a homogenous or uniform composition, not mixed, full strength, pure, and then free from dirt, defilement or pollution and clean. So in Suzuki-ro she talks about beginner's mind, the character he uses is sho-jin, excuse me, sho-shin, beginner's mind, and the character for meticulous effort or continuous effort is sho-jin, and the sho is pure, it's translated as pure, or this kind of pure effort or meticulous effort

[19:31]

or unmixed effort, complete or thorough, continuing. So in Dogen's words, being pure is not mixed or meticulous effort. So when I think of not mixed, to me it doesn't mean that we push out all the stuff we don't like about our mind or stuff that we feel is, if anybody knew about that they'd throw me out of here, kind of thinking, it's including all that, including everything in a round and whole way, that's pure, including everything meticulously and thoroughly is pure. So the difficulty according to Suzuki-ro she

[20:35]

in Zen practice is not, you know, sitting or doing the forms even, but it's keeping our mind pure. And I think, you know, he goes on to say in other places, and I think what sometimes happens is what comes in to our original beginner's mind, which is this kind of pure, unselfconscious, almost being drawn to practice, that kind of beginner's mind, that show, or pure, or beginner's, eventually gets kind of mixed with ideals, actually. I was recently talking with somebody whose identity will not be revealed, but this person was finding it very difficult

[21:36]

to come to the Zen Do anymore. They had been very assiduous and practicing very faithfully with the schedule and so forth, but at a certain point they were finding that they just somehow couldn't get into the Zen Do anymore to practice. And this reminded me of someone when I first started practicing. I had been at Zen Center maybe a couple weeks and there was an older student who had been at Tassajar for a year and she had come back and she had decided to stop sitting and I was very, I just couldn't understand it, you know, because I was so enthusiastic about sitting, that's all I wanted to do, and here was this person deciding not to, and what she said was, I am not going to go into that Zen Do ever again, I can't do that to myself anymore. So I remember being quite confused

[22:40]

about what it was she had been doing to herself in the Zen Do. I mean, she looked like anybody else just sitting there, but internally, or what her mind was doing while she was sitting there was, well, I'm, today I'm going to say that her mind wasn't pure, meaning she had gotten a lot of stuff mixed up in her, in what Zazen was or what her practice was, such that, and often what gets mixed up in there is an ideal, some ideal that we have of what practice is, some perfection soldier, which is not my image, it's something someone once said that they had to be a perfection soldier, some perfection soldier

[23:42]

becomes lodged in our thinking about what we have to do to practice, what it means to sit, what it means to do the forms, what it means to continue our practice, and it gets very mixed up with this ideal. Now, ideal comes from the word idea, and, so interesting to me, an ideal, the first meaning of ideal is the concept of something in its absolute perfection, one regarded as a standard or model of perfection, an ultimate object of endeavor, and then the last part is that which exists only in the mind. So we set up these ideals, and they're based on ideas, and we set it out as something that's perfect, that we're going towards and we're striving for,

[24:46]

and it becomes a goal that we set out for ourselves, and we're heading towards it, but intrinsic to it is that it's perfection that exists only in the mind. So we set this thing for ourselves that is unobtainable, and not only that, but that it has this perfection soldier side to it. I mean, an ideal can also be, in terms of a pattern or an archetype, can be something that's very inspiring, like the Bodhisattva ideal that we study and that can inspire us, and that we... that we take on

[25:47]

and relate to, actually. Like these Bodhisattvas in the Zen Do, the Jizo behind me, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, are practice figures that we can be inspired by and practice with and be in relationship with. But the ideal that sets a goal for ourselves that is unobtainable, exists only in our mind, and anything that falls short of that, we end up beating ourselves up about so much so that we decide, you know, I'm not going in the Zen Do ever again. That, to me, is very unfortunate, and... but it's something that we fall into. It's not so uncommon to actually sit in this way. So this person more recently was describing, actually, this ideal of practice and how much he or she was not able to get close to it, and if he wasn't,

[26:48]

he or she wasn't able to get close to it, then what was the use of going to sit at all? Because if I'm just going to sit there and fall asleep or, you know, waste my time because I'm not getting to this ideal, then forget it. So I'm not going to come anymore. And so the other day, Steve Weintraub, my husband, gave a lecture a couple Sundays ago, and someone saw my son on the way to lecture, and they said, aren't you going to go hear your dad at lecture? And he said, I don't want to hear that foolishness. I don't like that foolishness or something like that. So this thing that I just described

[27:48]

of having this ideal that exists in the mind that one sets up for ourselves has a foolishness to it because it actually keeps you from your practice. It keeps you from continuing your practice. It keeps you out of... So Suzuki Roshi calls this gaining idea. In my beginner's mind, in lots of his lectures, he brings up over and over again gaining idea. And there is some... I just had a kind of glimpse of the foolish side of it, of setting this up, even though we often can't help setting it up. We get caught in it even before we know that we've set up this kind of an ideal. So this shojin

[28:49]

or meticulous effort or continuous effort is pure, meaning unmixed, and it just continues on. It doesn't fall back. It just continues. So as long as you're continuing to sit, as long as you're trying over and over and continuing, there's not so much of a problem. It's when the ideal kind of cuts you off or gets in the way so that you feel like this too I can't do, just like all the other things I can't do, so forget it. It's making zazen into this small thing, mixing it up with all sorts of other things. So this is one of the main difficulties of practice, is keeping our practice pure or beginner's mind.

[29:50]

So this morning when we chanted during the meal chant, we'll do it at lunch too, the first portion is to avoid all evil, and then we bow right there. The second is to do all good, and the third is to save all beings. Those three are a particular translation of the three pure precepts. And the first one, to avoid all evil, another way of looking at that, another way of translating that is to do the forms of zan, or to do, in terms of the zan understanding of the precepts, one way of looking at to avoid all evil is to do the ceremonies and rituals and forms, to do those completely. So in zan, there's an emphasis on the forms as a way of transmitting how to, well in this case,

[31:05]

how to avoid all evil or how to, you know, not make your practice impure, how to continue your meticulous effort. And so as I was talking about the formless side and the forms, to completely do the forms is a way of avoiding all evil. Doesn't that seem odd? I mean, to think that, you know, taking care of your orioke bowls carefully, you know, how does this have anything to do with avoiding all evil in the world and so forth? So I want to kind of, what do they say, unpack that. So when we completely

[32:12]

do the forms with full attention and full body and mind, what arises for us, that mind that's completely with that which is in front of us, there's no room in that mind for breaking the precepts or it's an unmixed mind. It's a mind that's pure, meaning thorough and complete. So when we take our posture, for starters, you know, this is what I feel like the one-day sitting is all about. It gives us this chance to really practice carefully with these kinds of things, like our posture and attention to the details, attention to what's in front of us. I speak about this a lot

[33:14]

and I realize, you know, when I said I want to tell, what arises in me is to tell you everything that ever worked for me or all the mistakes I ever made. What always arises for me is taking up the forms with love, actually diligence actually means love, taking up the forms with love and throwing yourself into the forms without holding back, without mixing it up with Jesus is really, I can't do it perfectly, so I'm not going to do it at all or to just throw yourself in. Like when I do bows, the full bows, there's a phrase you can say, which is plunging into the bow. So I always take refuge and plunge into the bow. So that kind of feeling of just no holds barred and just plunging into the forms,

[34:16]

plunging into, that's an attitude of mine. I don't expect to see you necessarily plunging. It's the attitude of thorough, pure, unmixed living your life. And we start with something as simple as our posture, taking our posture carefully, thoroughly, finding it. And for whatever reason, I find this unutterably fascinating. It never loses. Each time I sit down, there's this body which is changing and will change. I think that's partially it. It's the unchangingness of the change.

[35:19]

There's always change and always something to work with and pay attention to. So for me, it just never gets boring because there's so much going on there. And as I get older, Suzuki Roshi was 53 when he came to America to go to the Japanese community. And when I bow at the Kaisandu in the morning, you know, Suzuki Roshi keeps looking younger and younger and younger, that picture up there. But pretty soon, he's going to look like a kid, you know, I don't know. And when I look in the mirror, I keep getting sort of, you know, who is that looking back at me, you know, in the mirror? So to take our posture very carefully, you know, find our backbone. Where is our backbone? And there's an admonition,

[36:20]

a yoga admonition of moving your backbone into the center of your body. You know, it's not like where you kind of open up your chest cavity and kind of like that and kind of curve your back. That's not exactly, but it's a kind of moving it in deeper, moving your spine in deeper. And you know, you can feel what happens to your heart and lungs actually, diaphragm. So the forms, I feel like I'm just going on and on about this. The forms are your body and mind and what happens to your body and mind as you do them, as you put this kind of meticulous effort into this, that's when it all comes alive. And of course it's really boring and why do I want to do this? If the perfection soldier

[37:22]

is kind of the dominant paradigm or something, or the kind of dominant way that one is approaching these or engaging, it's like you just get angry, walking around like this with my elbows such and such and my arms parallel to the ground. Give me a break. Let me out of here. So there's, and that to me, I feel like in terms of remedial, what is the adjustment or the medicine to kind of turn that, to cure, or to kind of heal that way of thinking so that the way we interact with the forms awakens us in an unending flow of, unending flow.

[38:28]

So that's kind of what I'm putting forth for you all today. Can you enliven all these things, do the rituals and ceremonies, do the forms of Zen in such a way, when I say do, I mean study yourself as you do them, as you go through the day and there's, it's just, from the time, the whole day is just given over to that. Even your break time, we ask you to remain silent and not read and to take a careful posture, not lie down in central area, or if you're going to rest, do it in a careful, not just a casual old manner, to actually bring all your attention to even your break time and see what happens. So,

[39:39]

so as long as you continue in this way, you have pure practice. I think that's, I think that's, as Suzuki Goshi says, that's the secret of Zen. And when we find that we are discouraged and we are conjuring up the perfection soldier and thinking, gee, maybe I should try something else because it looks like this isn't working either, thinking like that is a very sad thought, a very painful thought, and it's unnecessary, you know, I feel like it's unnecessary. There is, it's just like shifting, shifting the way we, shifting our attitude. So,

[40:46]

you know, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Green Gulch a couple weeks ago, and some of you came to the storytelling in the evening, and one of my, I think my favorite story of the evening was about Steve Stuckey, who heads the Azendo in San Rafael, and many of you know him, and he was the director at Green Gulch, and he's a very interesting person. Anyway, he, during Zazen, one day in this Zendo, a spider was on him and ended up making a whole web during the, during Zazen from his ear to his shoulder, and he sat, and he said it was so amazing, you know, and someone told that story because they remembered him sitting there while the spider formed its web. So somehow I felt like

[41:51]

that story should be, it should not be forgotten. I don't know. And it has this quality of, you know, how do you study yourself? How do you study what happens when the spider comes and starts working away? You kind of do that, which I've done. Those who sit next to me can attest, because I always think it's a tick actually. But what would it be like to just let that spider have its own Zazen, you know, and see what it creates? So I wanted to read, I don't have my watch, but I feel like it's getting near the end, but I wanted to read, this is the last fascicle of the Shobogenzo, the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye by Dogen, and it's called

[42:52]

The Eight Awarenesses of Great People, and he says at the end of this, it's not too long, I'm not going to read the whole thing, I'm just going to read you what the Eight Awarenesses of Great People are, but he says that this true teaching, this was what the Buddha taught right before he died, and that very few people have heard this. There are hardly one or two among a thousand monks who know the Eight Awarenesses of Great People. Do any of you know the Eight Awarenesses of Great People? So Dogen asks that these be explained to people, so I thought I'd take this opportunity since I just finished studying this, and I think a one-day sitting is a perfect time to cultivate these or to practice with these Eight Awarenesses. The first is having few desires, and this has to do with

[43:53]

not seeking objects of desire, things that you don't have now, not going after and seeking those and trying to attain them. And what happens for those who have few desires is there's very little seeking or craving. And also people who have few desires are free from the dangers of flattery and these kinds of things that happen. If you have desires, you're subject to things of the world that can entice you because you might want to curry people's favor in order to get your desires met. So those with few desires are calm and without worry or fear. So that's the first awareness. And the second is similar. It's called being content. And it means that

[44:58]

what you already have to just be content with what you have. So the first one is not seeking for things you don't have already and wanting those. And the second is being content with what you have. And this state of contentment is the abode of prosperity, happiness, peace, and tranquility. And I think this is interesting that those who are content may sleep on the ground and consider it comfortable and those who aren't content can be in heaven or in some, you know, very comfortable situation and still not be content. The third is enjoying quiet and to actually, and I feel like everybody here today, this is something that we do enjoy. We look forward to it, a day of sitting quietly in the Zen dome, not talking, being outside of the clamor and noisiness. And just in the commentary,

[46:03]

those who like crowds suffer the vexations of crowds just as a big tree will suffer withering and breakage when flocks of birds gather on it. The fourth awareness is diligence and this has to do with cultivating virtues without interruption, pure and unalloyed, alloyed, unalloyed, advancing without regression. And that's, I think, what I've been talking about, this meticulous effort that's out of love and the description of, there's lots of traditional descriptions of, you know, putting a pot on the fire and then keep taking it off and putting it back on and keep taking it off. The food never gets cooked. So diligence is putting the pot on the fire and letting it sit and cook and bubble. And also the image of a tiny stream just flowing, flowing, flowing that will eventually cut through. And also called

[47:06]

unfailing recollection. So this has a lot to do with, you know, hearing the teaching and remembering it, being able to recall it, bring it to mind when you need it. And it includes concentration and mindfulness. So if you're able to recall, have unfailing recollection, this will protect you in times that are very difficult. They liken it to putting on armor, or going in, if you're in a battle, wearing armor, or being protected in the midst of thieves, being protected from them and not being harmed. So unfailing recollection. The sixth is cultivating meditation concentration or practicing samadhi or concentration stabilization practice,

[48:09]

which is very beneficial, wholesome practice. And to do this energetically. The seventh awareness is cultivating wisdom or practicing wisdom. And they talk about the three wisdoms of hearing, reflecting, and learning. So, srutamaya prajna, I think ears, sruta, hearing, hearing the teaching, cintamaya prajna, I always think of a, like a cinch, a belt, which means, it means reflecting inside and turning it around. And then the last one is bhavanamaya prajna or making it your own through your own practice. This kind of practicing of wisdom.

[49:09]

And then the last one is not engaging in vain talk. And this points to, you know, the precepts around speech and the eightfold path of right speech and the precepts of not lying, not slander, not praising self at the expense of others. So the commentary for this is realizing detachment from arbitrary discrimination is called not engaging in vain talk. When one has fully comprehended the character of reality, one will not engage in vain talk. So, the main reason is that this kind of vain talk disturbs your mind and disturbs others. So they call it an affliction. Vain talk is an affliction. So during a one-day sitting where we have the wonderful practice

[50:14]

of not talking, you know, neither, when we do talk, it's not vain, it's, you know, it's to get some kind of instruction or give instruction or ask for instruction. And here goes the kitchen. Thank you. So, those of you who are on serving crews and are working in the kitchen or working to help the session by doing dishes and all, to really hold this eighth awareness of not indulging in vain talk. And this will help you help your mind awaken because vain talk will disturb your mind. So, so now you've heard the eight awarenesses of great people. So,

[51:23]

so for the rest of the day we'll be sitting together, walking together, eating together. Please be aware of the space around you, your neighbors, not disturbing others by being too noisy, muffle coughs and sneezes and other noises. And together, with all of us doing this together, this wonderful practice is awakened. Thank you very much.

[52:15]

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