Good morning. Is this working okay? Thank you. Well if I seem a little nervous, it's because the last time that I was sitting here and I started to talk, I looked up and there was a meditation cushion, a zafu coming flying at my head. I thought that with increased security that there'd be no zafus in this room, but apparently some got in, so please hold on to your zafus. The theme for this practice period is the six paramitas,

[01:01]

and the six paramitas are generosity, morality, patience, energy, meditation, and wisdom, or understanding. And this word paramita literally means, it's translated as perfection, but it's also translated as crossing over, or practices that can be used to cross over from greed, hate, and delusion towards peace and well-being. And this morning I feel a little bit, a little bit like I was tricked into having to speak about wisdom. It's a little bit like musical chairs. It's a game that I played as a child where the music stops and there's one more person than there are chairs. And then in this case, the practice leaders talked about,

[02:04]

during this practice period, all the other paramitas except for wisdom. So I thought, well, I guess somehow I have to talk about that. And then I realized when I was thinking about this game, this musical chairs, I thought, yeah, that's a lot like how I feel about my life, that there was no comfortable chair growing up to sit in, and no chair seemed to work. And then I ended up here at Zen Center, where there was always a place to sit. The catch was that you had to face a wall, and you had to stay for many years. We're now more than halfway through this fall practice period here at the City Center. During practice period, there are some roles and routines that are unique to practice period.

[03:04]

For example, my role during this practice period is that of shuso. The word shuso is literally translated as head monk, and it's perhaps not the most accurate translation since I'm not head of anything and I'm not a monk. But it is an amazing role and opportunity. We started in early October. I've been living in the building, ringing the wake-up bell every morning, having tea with groups of students, giving some talks, and cleaning the toilets every morning. I haven't lived in the Zen Center community in nearly 20 years, and just being back here, living in this community, and following the schedule has been amazing. And then on top of that, getting the kind of attention and support that I feel is truly an amazing experience. You know, when I was a kid, I used to think, kind of a rule of thumb,

[04:07]

was that the best job in the world was being president of the United States. And I don't know where it came from in me. I was driving my car the other day, and I thought, wow, this shuso job is even better than being president of the United States. And I don't have to fly around in that jet and give vapid campaign talks. And then the next thought I had made me laugh, which was, I imagined George W. Bush doing, as shuso, doing full prostrations in the zendo at 4.50 a.m., and running around the halls in the morning with the wake-up bell, and cleaning the toilets. And I thought, how much safer the U.S. and the world would be. I was going to ask Paul if he could perhaps arrange that.

[05:08]

The word wisdom is translated from the word prajna. The challenge, as I try to research what to say, is that this prajna, this wisdom, is the highest form of understanding, free from concepts and ideas. It's thought of as the pinnacle of Zen practice. And Zen teachers throughout time have rarely spoken about it, often saying that the moment you try to speak about it, you miss it. There's the Ahart Sutra, which is actually the Prajnaparamita Sutra, which is the perfection of wisdom, which is chanted here every morning. And it says, through practicing Prajnaparamita, through this perfection of wisdom, the mind is no hindrance. Without any hindrance, no fears exist. Fortunately, Zen also states

[06:19]

that there's no difference between wisdom or Buddha or our ordinary minds. And in fact, there's a very famous dialogue between Zen master Matsu, who's asked by Tame, who says, what is the Buddha? Or, what is this wisdom mind? And Matsu responds and says, this very mind is Buddha. This ordinary mind is Buddha. This ordinary mind is the way. So it's easy just to dismiss this as some kind of a fancy Zen trick or word game. But I think what this means to me is that this ordinary mind is Buddha, is that we have no choice but to work with what we have, with our body and our minds just as they are.

[07:21]

We acknowledge our pain and suffering, our joy, aspirations. We commit ourselves to be aware of and understand and transform our patterns and habits through meditation practice and through extending meditation practice into our lives. And we don't get caught by this idea of ordinary mind or this idea of wisdom. Several months ago, when I first became aware that I have arthritis in one of my hips, I mentioned this to my friend and teacher, Norman Fisher, and he said in a very matter-of-fact way, he said, well, it's just something to adjust to. And after all, life is just a series of adjustments. And one way to approach this kind of lofty subject of wisdom or understanding is as a series of discoveries and adjustments,

[08:21]

adjustments that are the result of paying attention or mindfulness as well as investigating and trying to understand. My daughter, Carol, who is now a teenager, but when she was young, she used to actually let me read to her every night before she went to sleep. And she often asked some really terrific questions. And I remember one night, just as she was getting ready to go to bed, she said, Daddy, just before a person dies, do you suppose that all of life's secrets are revealed? She said, you know, like a board game or a puzzle where you turn over the box and look at the back and you see the answers. As you can imagine, this was a pretty difficult question to answer. And the truth is I don't remember what I said.

[09:22]

I said what I hope that I said. Laughter. This is full disclosure. I hope that I said something like that the secret is in us right now and that it's in us all the time and that we don't need to wait until we die to find it, to access it. And I think of Zen practice as a method and path to give us access to our own vital life energy and innate wisdom to find real freedom without having to wait until we die. Zen practice is a way to understand and transform our habits and conditioning and to develop a mind that is flexible. It's a way to find real freedom. So I want to talk about kind of wisdom

[10:26]

as this kind of making adjustments to things, looking at them deeply and then seeing what kind of adjustments we need to make. I realize in our culture we tend to think of freedom or power as being not to have to adjust to anything. But I think real freedom is having a flexible mind and being able to adjust to the circumstances and adjust to the circumstances that are in our lives and to our ordinary minds. I've been really enjoying getting up at 4 o'clock each morning so that I can read before ringing the wake-up bell. One of the things I've been reading this week is Buddha's talk on the seven factors of awakening. The first factor that the Buddha talks about is mindfulness and the second is an attitude and spirit of investigation.

[11:27]

Mindfulness is carefully noticing what we are doing. In Buddha's talk on mindfulness, he goes into great detail about paying attention to our body, especially paying attention to our breathing. When taking a short breath in, we notice that we're breathing in. When taking a long breath out, we notice that we're breathing out. We pay close attention in zazen and in our lives to our body, attention to our feelings, to our mind, and to objects of mind. We pay attention and investigate like a child or a baby, approaching everything we do as though it's new and fresh. And we constantly learn and adjust from what we notice. What are we doing out of habit and out of conditioning? What patterns have we learned from our parents that didn't even serve them very well? What extra effort do we make to look good or to be accepted?

[12:32]

What activities help us feel alive? What helps us feel ease and peace? By noticing these things, we can constantly learn from our everyday lives and especially learn from what's difficult and what's messy and things that happen that we're not expecting. The last time that I spoke here, I mentioned taking care of my mother when she was very ill and dying and that she stayed with us for her last few months of her life and that she died on our living room couch. My son Jason, at the time, was 12 years old and she died during the night and my wife and I woke Jason up the next morning and told him what happened. He got up, Jason got up to come be with her and he had never seen a dead person before, a dead body. And we told him that we spent the night with his grandmother, with Mama Bee

[13:37]

and that we cleaned her and dressed her, put her in her favorite clothes. We assumed that Jason would stay home that day but he was very clear that he wanted to go to school and have it be a day as usual. A few hours later, Jason's counselor from school called to say that Jason was crying a lot and wanted to come home. And a half hour later, he walked into the house and he threw his arms around me and we just stood and cried together. And then he looked at me and he said, You know, Dad, walking is really a good thing to do in times like these. You should try it. I think that my son, in my son's own way, he discovered the power of understanding and adjustment. First, he was avoiding what was painful.

[14:39]

He just wanted it to be a regular day. So he tried just going to school as usual. Didn't work. And he tried something. He tried just walking and it worked for him and he was not only able to articulate it for himself but he was able to teach it to others, in this case, me. And in a very short time, he went through what Buddha spoke about as the five stages of making an adjustment in our lives. And the first is recognition, just noticing what we're actually feeling. And in a way, especially in our busy, pressured lives, that's often the hardest. The second is accepting. After recognition, just accepting what we see. The third is embracing

[15:40]

and fully accepting our feelings and our situation. The fourth is looking deeply, looking closely at what is happening, moment after moment in our lives. And the fifth is insight, which is totally looking deeply with our bodies and minds and seeing what lesson there is to learn, what adjustment we need to make. The Sanskrit word, smrti, that's translated as mindfulness, literally means remembering, which I think is really interesting to think about mindfulness as remembering. And as I was writing this, I remembered a very powerful moment in my life. It was something that happened many years ago when I was director of Ta Sahara, and Thich Nhat Hanh was visiting for two weeks. And every morning he would give a talk over in the dining room,

[16:44]

and one of my roles as director then was to walk over to the pine rooms where Thich Nhat Hanh was staying and kind of knock on his door and get him, and then we would walk over from the pine rooms to the dining room, which was just a few hundred yards, but Thich Nhat Hanh walked very, very slowly, so it took about 10 or 15 minutes just to walk that time. And it was really wonderful to walk with him and to be at that pace, and we didn't say much. One day, what I recalled, and I hadn't thought of this in a long time, Thich Nhat Hanh, we were walking along and he turned to me and he looked at me in the eyes and he said, we've known each other from a previous lifetime. And then he just turned his gaze back to the path and we continued to walk together and he never said another word about it. And this has given me something to adjust to all these years.

[17:45]

The word mindfulness, or remembering, remembering and investigation, for me means not holding anything back. We practice meditation, and we do this practice, this not holding anything back, in our meditation and in our lives, with our family, friends, and at work. These are all opportunities. to be mindful, to remember. Each month, there's a full moon ceremony that is performed here in this room. And one of the lines is, All my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, I now fully avow. So just by avowing, just by acknowledging our ancient twisted karma, it's kind of the first step towards seeing our life more clearly

[18:53]

and making adjustments, making changes. In Buddha's discourse on mindfulness of the body, the most often repeated phrase that he makes says, The practitioner imagines that his body is a corpse, which he sees thrown into a charnel ground, lying there for one, two, or three days. And he goes into amazing detail about this and repeats it over and over again. As I said, it's the most often repeated statement in this talk. And obviously he's making the point that we all know that we will die, and none of us knows when. So imagine for a moment that you've died, that your life as you know it has come to an end. Buddha over and over again was being quite forceful about trying to have it be pictured. Imagine that everything that you know and think of as yours,

[19:56]

your body, your mind, everything, has disappeared. And then imagine that you have another chance, that you've been returned, and that somehow everything is a little bit different, that you have another chance, that maybe things are a little bit loosened, that you have permission to really feel your own truth, to make changes, to make adjustments. While we have the second chance, at the same time we have to deal with every issue that's right in front of us, every pain, every mess that there is. But we have, with the second chance, perhaps we can appreciate the mess and have a bit more spaciousness and kindness with ourselves to make adjustments, and adjustments towards awakening.

[20:57]

Our meditation practice is like this, breath after breath, not knowing what will happen, and appreciating each breath, and appreciating the not knowing, and appreciating the difficulty. I was thinking of another day in my life that I kind of think of as an amazing day of adjusting to circumstances. This was a day in which I was living at Green Gulch Farm, and I was in charge of the horses, the draft horses and the cows. There used to be horses and cows out at Green Gulch. It's truly spectacular that I'm still alive to talk about it. There were many near fatalities, but this particular day that I was thinking of,

[22:00]

it was the cow who I used to milk every morning, Daisy. That's her name. Her name was Daisy. Right after cows give birth, cows are susceptible to getting all kinds of diseases. I'd read a lot about it, but I had never experienced it. I remember going to milk Daisy and seeing that she was lying down on the ground, which is really a bad thing for cows. I had remembered reading that if a cow lies down, it will die within a few hours, and that you have to prop it up. Fortunately, she was right in a small building, so that I was able to kind of prop my body up against the wall, and with my feet kind of keep Daisy up a little bit, and at the same time yelled to get help. I was in that position for several hours.

[23:03]

Then the vet appeared and gave Daisy, I think it was insulin or something, or something that apparently is very, very common. He gave her the shot, and Daisy just popped up on her feet. I popped up on my feet, and I was quite exhausted and relieved that this event was over. As I was walking back to my room, someone came running down the Green Gulch Path, saying, one of the horses is stuck in the pond. I thought, horses don't get stuck in ponds. But they said, you better come take a look. I think there's a problem. So I went over to the pond on the other side of the Zengo, and there was Snip, this large, 2,000 pound draft horse,

[24:08]

had gone into the water, and I guess it was quite, to get a drink, and went in too far, so that she sunk into the mud. I could see her kind of slope. When I saw her, she was close up to her neck in mud. We were trying to figure out all kinds of ways of getting her out of there. What I remember, I have this picture of, it was nighttime, and the Muir Beach Fire Department had come. We had figured out that the only way to get her out of there was we wrapped fire hoses all around her, a few different fire hoses. Everyone at Green Gulch, and a lot of people from Muir Beach, pulled on these fire hoses, and pulled this horse out of the mud. This actually, again, reminds me a lot of my practice, I have to say. But it was an amazing day of dealing with adjustments,

[25:21]

adjusting to circumstances as they come up, which we're doing constantly. This morning, Vicky came over and said, we talked to the people who were working outside, about could they maybe take a break for an hour. We were having a special church service at 10 o'clock. She said it so that they would understand. They gave her a very quizzical look. They were sweet, but they said, no, we're sorry, we can't do that. I realized, and actually, I was feeling a little grumpy as I noticed, as I was thinking, oh God, there's all this noise outside. It's just my luck that I'm talking this morning when there's all this noise out. I'm grumpy next week. It'll be done by then, I'm sure. But it was interesting, by the time Vicky had come over, I said, well, we'll deal with it. It'll be noisy talk. I think of myself as having grown up at Zen Center.

[26:27]

I came to live here when I was in my early 20s. And then, in my early 30s, I left to go explore the world and find some other environment for my practice. But what I realized, and I realize this more and more, is that wherever we go, every experience, whether it's a pleasant one or an unpleasant one, whether we're playing or at work, is a possibility to compare or complain and, at the same time, that experience can be used as an opportunity to pay attention, to investigate, to move towards developing a peaceful, contented mind, a mind of awakening. When I left this formal temple, I spent a few years at a different kind of a temple. I'm down on Wall Street. I went to business school there.

[27:29]

But I had the aspiration of combining Zen practice and business practice. And about 13 years ago, I started a business called Brush Dance that makes greeting cards and journals and calendars with spiritual themes. I keep learning over and over that this practice of paying attention, investigating, and adjusting is equally useful and applicable in many parts of our life, even in the world of business. I was writing the other day, and I was writing this little essay on how it is that we are all Zen students, meaning everyone, that everyone is a Zen student, and that everyone is a business person, that, to me, I define a Zen student as someone who's concerned with consciousness, a person interested in transforming

[28:32]

pain into joy and desires into understanding. And we're all business people. We live in a culture that is affected by the world of money and commerce. Whether we are schoolteachers or Zen priests or doctors or researchers or work in non-profits, there's no escape. And business, in most ways, is fundamentally a way to help people. In business, there's an expression that says, let cash be your king, but let flexibility be your god, pointing to the importance of understanding the needs of cash, but ultimately the survival and well-being of any business is dependent on paying attention, investigating, and making adjustments, summed up in the word flexibility. And Brushdance, this business that I started

[29:33]

13 years ago, started out as an environmental products mail order catalog. I noticed at the time that no one was making greeting cards and wrapping paper from recycled paper, and it seemed like a worthy endeavor. And then we noticed, we learned that the catalog business didn't work so well, but stores kept buying our things, and we transformed into being an environmental products company that sold to stores. And then we learned that people weren't buying our things because they were on recycled paper, they were buying our products because of the themes, because of the spiritual themes and the artwork. And I sometimes wonder what Brushdance will be in two or three years from now, as we experiment and test with things like selling to schools and non-profits that do fundraising,

[30:35]

or doing online sales, and that kind of paying complete attention and not losing focus on what we're doing now, but investigating and being open to possibilities of what might be an expression of the truth and real intention of the business, but that is expressed in different ways. I find that as CEO of a company, as a husband married to the same partner for 21 years, and as a father to two teenagers, that my well-being, and sometimes I think my survival, are dependent on paying attention, investigating, and making adjustments. Through this process, I've come to intimately know that success is highly overrated, and that, you know, Dogen has this expression

[31:37]

that Dogen was a great Zen teacher many hundreds of years ago who said, hitting the mark is the result of 99 failures. And I hate to contradict Dogen, but I think he may have underestimated in my case. We often think of adjustments or flexibility as responding to pain or difficulty. But like in the case of me responding to my hip or to the day with the cows and horses, the other side of flexibility is creating an environment that moves us towards a state of mind that is conducive to practice, that is conducive to our own waking up. I mentioned earlier that the Buddha talked about these seven factors of awakening. And I've already mentioned the first two happen to be mindfulness and investigation. And the other five are

[32:39]

energy, joy, ease, concentration, and letting go, or equanimity. You know, energy is one of the paramitas. We've talked about the energy it takes to continue practicing day after day, continue sitting meditation and living together amidst the constant difficulties that we come across. Joy, I think, can best be expressed in a Rumi poem where he says, keep knocking and the joy inside will come to meet the one who's there. Ease is a state that we could all, including especially myself, use a lot more of. There's so much running around and so much effort that I think ease would be tremendously conducive to practice. Concentration is collecting and focusing our minds.

[33:42]

In a way it's kind of the basis of mindfulness practice. And I think of equanimity as both letting go and also letting go to the point where we see everyone as Buddha, to see everyone as enlightened, or at least as aspiring to be enlightened. A major adjustment of practice is shifting our energy and attention from how we get things for ourselves to how we can develop ourselves and how we can develop ourselves so that we can help other people. And Suzuki Roshi also talks about just practicing for the sake of practice, zazen for the sake of zazen. So I think all the time our practice is about simultaneously working on ourselves,

[34:44]

developing ourselves, trying to help others and practicing just for the sake of practice. I want to end this morning by reading something from a Suzuki Roshi lecture in which he was talking about a famous zen story about being at the top of a hundred foot pole. This student is in a bind, not knowing what to do. Does he jump off the pole or does he come back down? He's mindfully looking at all of his choices and examining what's his purpose, what does he do. In some way, the student feels like he's on the brink of something. I think many of us often feel that we're on the brink of something. Often when people ask me how

[35:48]

my business is doing, I often respond by saying I feel like we're right on the brink of either tremendous success or tremendous disaster. And I feel like that often feels like the most truthful answer to how I feel about trying to take care of my business. Well, the first thing that Suzuki Roshi explains is that actually there is no top to this pole, that the situation can be looked at differently, that the way it appears is different than how it actually is. And then he goes on to say, the secret is just to say yes and jump off from here. Then there is no problem. It means to be yourself in the present moment, always yourself, without sticking to an old self.

[36:48]

You forget all about yourself and are refreshed. You are a new self. And before that self becomes an old self, you say yes. And you walk to the kitchen for breakfast. You just go on with your ordinary life. And then this is my favorite line. So the point is to forget the point at each moment and extend your practice. So I'd like to encourage us all to realize that the point is to forget the point and for us all to continue practicing together. I also want to, I just want to mention how grateful I feel to be here. There's 55 of us doing this practice period

[37:52]

and it's just been, I feel so grateful and so well taken care of and challenged by living and practicing with all of you. And I also want to thank my family that has made this possible and has let me, supported me so wholeheartedly to be here and do this practice. Thank you very much.

[38:25]

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