Well, I'll just go along until something else happens here. We're in the second week of our practice period. The practice period in Japanese is ango, which means peaceful abiding. So, there's about 22 people here who are practicing in peaceful abiding. And thank you, those of you who've come from other places today, thank you for joining the One Day Sitting. I know that it takes a big effort to carve out the time and space to do a One Day Sitting, even though we plan for it way ahead, when the time actually gets closer and closer, we think, can I really do it, and it's raining, but anyway, you all got here, just about, so thank you.

[01:04]

And it's a good day for sitting. I always feel when it's raining outside, it's just right. Of course, any day is a good day for sitting. I wanted to talk about everyday mind, everyday mind, and there's a koan that is pretty well known, you probably have heard it, it's about Zhaozhou and his teacher, and I'll just read one sort of rendition of it. The great master Zhaozhou asked his teacher Nanchuan, what is the way? Nanchuan said, everyday mind is the way. Zhaozhou asked, should one aim for it or not? Nanchuan said, if you try to turn towards it, you turn away from it.

[02:07]

Zhaozhou asked, if we don't try, how can we know it is the way? Nanchuan replied, the way is neither knowing nor not knowing. So we have this teaching that everyday mind is the way, and yet we may feel like our everyday mind is, our quotidian mind is scattered and annoyed and irritated and foggy, and so how could that be the way, the Buddha Dharma, how could that mind possibly be the way, what are they talking about? And shouldn't we try and kind of aim towards it and do something and practice hard and polish it up and get our act together? But then Nanchuan says, if you aim for it, you're going the opposite way.

[03:10]

So I just wanted to talk a little bit about everyday mind. I was given this wonderful book, I've never heard of it before, it's called The Quotidian Mysteries. Are you familiar with this book, anybody? Has anybody ever heard of it? It's called The Quotidian Mysteries, Laundry, Liturgy, and Women's Work. Anyway, it's a great book, I'm enjoying it. It's a Catholic, a woman who converted to Catholicism, and what converted her was, she was raised Protestant but not religious at all and had not gone to church in years, and she was invited to go to a wedding, a Catholic wedding with, you know, lots and lots of people and laughing and this wonderful feeling at the wedding parties, and then in the Mass itself, after this very elaborate thing went on, she noticed that the priest did the washing up, he kind of washed up. I'm not actually familiar with that particular ceremony, but she said he washed up the chalice,

[04:18]

kind of like doing the dishes, and that was what did it for her, to have such an elaborate, fancy ceremony, and then she said he looked like a kind of overdressed housewife doing up the dishes. So this is kind of the quotidian mystery. Quotidian means daily or every day, the things that we repeat every day, and when you, the root of it, the first part, quot, that part means how many, and the quotidian, that refers to, the root of it refers to day, but there's many words that are, in all these different languages, where that is the root, there is a feeling of divine, like the divine bright sky, it's day, but it has this other part to it, divine bright sky, and deity, so this

[05:33]

day and divine is combined, like everyday mind is the way, so you have this everyday mind, but somehow it's completely fused with the way of the Buddhas and ancestors, or the divine bright skies in this other tradition. So, so how can we, how is it that we can realize this and practice with this without kind of falling into one or the other, meaning mundane, no I'm not Buddha, and this is just a regular old, daily old life, or some other thing like I'm really doing Buddha's way, different from, separate from my everyday life, both of those are off in some way, both of those are not

[06:34]

pointing directly. So, one of the problems with, she talks about something that, this is another new word for me, quotidian has not been a real regular word in my vocabulary, but vocabulary was really fun to say, the way it, the didian part really is fun to say, but anyway, she had another word in here, which I wasn't familiar with called ascidia, are you familiar with that word, ascidia? What? Say that again, Daya? Well, in this pronunciation it was ascidia, so maybe there's A-C-E-D-I-A, which is defined as spiritual torpor or ennui, and in our daily lives, it's referred to as a demon, actually, for the monks, this is Catholic monks again, this ascidia was thought of as a demon, the

[07:40]

way it entered in, sort of like Mara, the evil one in our, in Buddhist cosmology, that comes in and kind of undermines your, one's practice, or you feel like you're being undermined. So, the description is, to me, very much like what happens sometimes in a practice period where you're, the beginning of the practice period is kind of exotic and, you know, you're doing this really special thing and getting up early and it's all, an orioke practice and it's all very new and exciting, and then you kind of settle into it and, as my friend said, the pyrotechnics are over and it's just this practice, day in and day out, and you can't really get excited about it anymore, and this is where this demon ascidia comes in, and this 4th century monk, Evagoras, writes about it, and this is how he describes ascidia, this spiritual torpor, which is not just for a monk's life, I think it's for people who

[08:46]

are not living in a practice place and have jobs and families and relationships, and, I mean, people inside a monastery have that as well, but not, I don't think this is necessarily confined to spiritual endeavors in a monastery, it's our contemporary life too, the demon of our contemporary life, so this monk, 4th century monk Evagoras says, the demon of ascidia, quote, makes it seem that the sun hardly moves, if at all, and that the day is 50 hours long, then it constrains the monk to look constantly out the window, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun, to determine how far it stands from the 9th hour, meaning lunchtime, so you get this feeling of, you know, the day, the morning is just dragging on, when is lunch coming, when is that work bell going to ring, or when can I get out

[09:50]

of here, that kind of feeling, this is, rather than everyday mind is the way, you know, it's when will this day get over with already, you know, and then it moves inward, this kind of demon of ascidia, and it instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his or her very life itself, and the monk begins to think less of the other monks, and we can also say, you can begin to think less of, you know, your family members, or your co-workers, or the people you come in contact with, and you brood, the monk broods on the ways that they have angered, or offended, or merely failed to encourage him, so rather than appreciating each person in all their thusness, in just

[10:54]

how they are, you brood on how it is that they're failing you, and annoying you, and offending you, and angering you, then the demon drives the monk to desire other sites where the monk can more easily find work and make a real success of himself. I thought that was really great, you know, so it moves into, you know, this, I want to go somewhere else where I can really, you know, make a go of it, and people will really appreciate me somewhere else, and this place is the pits. Having rejected the present moment and the present company, the monk begins to dwell in self-pitying, and various memories of dear ones and former ways of life come up, and then Asidiya, this demon, or Mara, you might say, moves in for the kill, this is what she

[11:57]

says, depicting life stretching out for a long period of time, and it brings before the monk in the mind's eye the toil of the ascetic struggle, or you could say the, you know, practice life, lots of formal practice maybe, and as the saying has it, leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell or her cell and drop out of the fight. So that's how this demon kind of gets in there and gets a hold. And I think this description, I found it very accurate for, I remember being at Tassajara morning work and just really, when is that bell going to ring, you know, I can't stand this, whatever it is that I was doing, and people have told me, you know, in the middle

[12:57]

of it, even though they made such an effort to get to a place where they could practice, feeling like, I'm out of here, I can't do this. So I wonder how much this Asidiya gets in, this kind of spiritual torpor, and how do we encourage ourselves when that arises, and if we can acknowledge what it is rather than believing in it. And same with our family and work and, you know, we tend to want to change the environment, get a new husband or wife and a new job and change cities and then there it's going to be better, you know, there I'll make a success of myself or something. So our tendency is to want to shift and move the environment around rather than looking at what's going on inside of us. On Wednesday I spoke about, I mentioned someone who had written me asking how, is there any

[14:05]

way to live in the world without hurting another? And I've been thinking a lot about this person who wrote me, and also about the movie The Cup, in combination. How many people have seen The Cup? It's this wonderful movie about monks in a Tibetan monastery in India, young monks who are very interested in soccer and they want to see the World Cup on TV, and they figure out a way to get enough money to rent this TV and ask the abbot actually if they have permission to do it. They've sneaked out in the night to go and watch it, and they got caught. But anyway, the life of monastic life is depicted in various, very humorous ways. For example, there's one monk who's always sleeping, very drowsy. The monks are doing all these elaborate chanting, you know, that Tibetan chanting, and mudras

[15:06]

and bells, and he's back in the corner kind of nodding out totally. Then you see him and they're eating the meal, and he's completely sleeping. They have to elbow him to kind of wake up there. And then in this other scene, he's falling asleep during this chanting, and his buddies, his dharma buddies, sew his robe to the zabutan, you know. They're busy doing that while he's nodding out during the chanting service. And then the end of that goes, they're supposed to go to the next event, and he gets up dragging his cushions with them, which reminded me of this fellow who wrote to me about, is there any way we can live without hurting people, David Schneider. I'll just tell you this story about him, because he is a very sincere person still, although I haven't seen him for a while. But when he was at Tassar, he was, as I said, very young. I think he was in his early 20s, and during a break before work started, after lunch, before work, he was out in the sun sewing patches on his robe,

[16:08]

which is a very, what shall I say, it's wonderful work, you know, to keep your robes in good order, keep them mended, and it's very monkish kind of work. You know, it has, in the kind of hierarchy of work, you know, mending is really right up there. So he's mending and talking about practice and his sincere efforts, and he's talking with Darlene, those of you who know Darlene, and they're busy talking about practice, and he's sewing away. And then the bell rings, and he gets up, and he'd sewn his robe to his pants. So that, I was just thinking about David. And another thing about David, oh, David, excuse me for telling you, but talking about you, but I was talking about serving the other night, and I remember David serving in the Zen Do, the old Zen Do at Tassar, where there was a very slick linoleum, red linoleum floor, that was polished endlessly as part of your daily,

[17:10]

if you were assigned to the Zen Do for the day, you ran up and down with wet cloths polishing it, and it was very nice. But during this meal, he was carrying this big pot of beans, chili beans, and he came in, we used to, you know, there was a kind of premium put on, you know, swift and silent serving, you know, get in there, moving very quickly. And he came in there and slipped, and came down on his bottom, holding the pot like this, and it slopped over the top, all over, and I just remember his face, you know, so sincerely trying to do his formal practice, and it was just, anyway, so David, please forgive me for telling you. But those are encouraging stories, aren't they, you know? We get so, we are concerned about doing the forms properly and not making a fool of ourselves and, you know, blending in, not sticking out,

[18:13]

and so forth, that's one of the concerns that we all have. So there's so many stories like that of, with full, sincere, wholeheartedness, you know, something like this happens. So, where was I? So asidya, asidya, spiritual torpor, and where the everyday doesn't have, we don't feel like it's a direct line to the Buddha way. It feels like something that's bringing us down. So how do we practice that way when this is coming up? And how do we practice everyday mind is the way? So this points back to something that is in Soto Zen in particular,

[19:20]

which is this school, where great attention is placed on carefully doing things and the details of your life, the details of your everyday life. There's great attention of time and energy and teaching about how to do very small things, quotidian, everyday things, as the understood as not just for form's sake, not just to be neat and tidy as the reason, but as a way of expressing the truth that practice and realization are one thing, practice realization, which is another way of saying everyday mind is the way. Practice and realization are not two. So how do we express that?

[20:20]

We express that by practicing carefully, thoroughly in all aspects of our life, because there's no part of our life that's somehow outside of realization or outside of the Buddha's way. Now this point, practice realization are inseparable or not two, is, you know, we can say it or I can say it very easily and we get a sense of it, and yet as soon as we begin to look at, we say, but you mean just chopping vegetables carefully is the Buddha way or is realization? Well, I don't feel that way. I mean, I hear what you're saying and that's great, but I personally do not feel like I have realized Buddha's way and I am chopping with great care. So what's going on there, you know?

[21:20]

And this is a kind of koan, and this is a koan that comes up in our everyday life as we're encouraged and admonished about and pointed towards this careful, thorough, complete, wholehearted doing that which is before you. And for no other reason than there is no other end besides doing that which is before you. How come? Because that which is before you is realization, right under your feet, Dogen says, right under your heel, which always reminds me of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz clacking those heels together. It's, I want to go home, right? Well, you had the power to go home all the time, just right under your heel. So practice realization is not to...

[22:29]

How do we... That's a quotidian mystery. There's a mystery there, and I think we respond to it. It's like when we thoroughly do completely that which is in front of us, there is something that is met in a way that is... beyond words, maybe. We actually feel met in some deep way which we can't even describe. So, but I'm going to try to use some words, just for the fun of it, just to give me a chance to try and say something about it, because... because what I'm talking about, actually, is form is emptiness, and emptiness is form, which is the Heart Sutra, the kind of core wording in the Heart Sutra. Well, that's one of the core things.

[23:29]

And the other is that Avalokiteshvara clearly saw that all five skandhas in their own being are empty and was... What do we say now? And thus removed all suffering. So those are the core parts of the Heart Sutra. And in practice realization, when we look at what practice is, practice is all these myriad things that we do all day long. This is our everyday life, from getting up in the morning and having our morning, whatever it is, if we sit in the morning, have our tea, go off to work, do the dishes, all throughout the day. This is practice. This is everyday mind. And those very practices, those very regular old everyday events in their own being are empty,

[24:34]

meaning they are selfless. They have no separate existence by themselves that is not thoroughly connected with the entire universe. Now, you may not feel that drinking your tea in the morning, but there's a kind of analyzation of that that intellectually gives you a sense of it. You know, drinking your tea, where did the tea come from, and how did it get here, and the sun, and the air, and the tea pickers, who are these young girls with slender fingers who can get in there and get the green tea anyway, maybe all tea, and their parents and grandparents, and the food they eat, and on and on and on until your morning tea is not just a cup of tea, it's the cosmos, a cup of cosmos, you might say.

[25:36]

You can't separate out tea as some separate thing that's not connected with the entire world. Literally. And yet, we can't. If we talk that way, everything is the same in that way. The teacup too, the clay, and the glazes, and the potter, and his grandparents, or her grandparents, and the earth, and how that clay was formed, and pretty soon you've got the entire cosmos again. And the morning paper. It's just every single quotidian event is not just the newspaper, or the dog, or the tea. You can't pick up one of those things separate and have it separate in your pocket. You pick up one thing and everything comes. So, in this way,

[26:39]

each of those things is selfless, meaning it doesn't have its own separate self. And these are what we call the practices, or the myriad things, or the ten thousand things, or conventional reality, or there's lots of words for that. And the realization part, or the ultimate, or the truth, or Buddha, the realization part is that is the selflessness of all the things, of all the quotidian things. Their selflessness is realization. The fact that they are selfless and are everything all at once is the realization. So practice and realization are inseparable. Now, there's this wonderful analogy

[27:44]

from the Samadhi-Nirmochana Sutra, which I've just started to study, which is talking about this inseparability, but still you're able to separate out, aren't you, a cup of tea from a newspaper? I mean, if you drank your newspaper and let the cup of tea out for a walk in the morning, there would be big confusion, right? So everything has its own place, completely itself, completely, as I was talking about, the pots that carry the food. They're completely sitting there being pots and nothing else but pots, and then we can use them for serving food. And same with every one of those individual quotidian things, but they're the quotidian mysteries because that very newspaper or pot is selfless, is not just newspaper or pot, is the whole, is truth or is realization. So in the Samadhi-Nirmochana Sutra,

[28:47]

it talks about, there's a number of analogies that point to this, about being not two and not one or not completely the same but not completely different, being both the same and different, not two, not one. For example, they say the gold, the luster of gold, the bright luster of gold, is that different from gold or the same as gold? Gold, the metal gold. If you take away its bright luster, is that gold? Well, no. But is that bright luster just gold? Well, no. Other things have bright luster too. Or the hotness of pepper. Can you separate out the hotness as a separate thing? Well, no, then it wouldn't be pepper, but is the hotness, is that pepper? All hotness is pepper?

[29:48]

No. So the hotness of pepper and pepper is both the same and different. So that kind of analogy, it's for me, being not a thinking kind of person, I have to sit with that for a long time about the hotness of pepper and how that relates to practice realization. So this selflessness of the quotidian, the selflessness of everyday is its realization or is its Buddha way. And we might then think, well, fine. So everything I do all day long is Buddha Dharma and is realization. Whatever I'm doing already is realization. So therefore one might think,

[30:50]

I don't need to practice, right? Because it's already going along. Everything's fine. And realization is there before I realize it. And what I just said is, I could say I have faith that that's true. And yet I'm unhappy. I have asidya. I'm annoyed with my fellow monks and think I could go somewhere else and make a success of myself because they're really ruining my practice here. Why am I thinking like that? Is that Buddha Dharma to be plagued in that way? I thought realization was everyday mind. So you see how that, we come back to what's this kind of separation of the two. How can we express and realize practice realization? How can we accomplish it, maybe we could say. So Dogen, I think the whole Shobo Genzo,

[31:52]

the whole life work of Dogen is pointing to this practice realization and our expressing it and thoroughly realizing it. There's a modern-day koan, this is two people who are living, I won't use their names, but an exchange between a teacher and student where the teacher came to the student and said, excuse me, the student came to the teacher and said, it's a terrible thing to have heard the teaching and to wear the robe, the Raksu or the Okesa, to have heard the teaching and to not understand Buddha Dharma. It's a terrible thing. Dung Shan also said this, one of our ancestors said, what is the worst thing for a person is to wear Buddha's robe and not thoroughly understand. So in modern day this person said that. It's a terrible thing.

[32:54]

And the teacher said, what is the practice for someone who doesn't thoroughly understand? And the student said, upright sitting, Zazen. And the teacher said, what is the practice for a person who does thoroughly understand? And the student said, upright sitting, Zazen. So we have this practice of upright sitting and Zazen practice that is the practice for whether one has accomplished the Buddha way or whether one feels they do not have thorough understanding. It's the same practice. There's something for me very releasing about that. Because we often think, I have to accomplish this, I have to get this understanding and I will work and improve and try harder

[33:55]

and harder and harder until I finally understand. And that way of thinking is, I think when Nan Chuan said, Zazen said, shall we aim for it? Should we aim for it or not? This everyday mind is the way. Can I aim for it by practicing harder and harder to get this understanding? That's a kind of, through time and space, you're going to acquire more and more understanding as you go along. But Nan Chuan says, if you try to turn towards it, you turn away from it. So thinking in that way, if we think in that way, it actually leads us further and further from practice realization right now, practice realization. And yet, we have to start somewhere. So we all do this. We all have this way of starting

[34:55]

and entering our practice thinking. I will practice very hard and then I will understand. But the practice realization is that at each moment, at each moment of our practice, practice and realization are inseparable. So it's not something you accomplish way at the end. It's right there. At each moment of your practice, there's equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of understanding, right at each point. So this thorough realization of the inseparability of practice realization, or sometimes we say attainment of this understanding. Dogen says... I memorized this, so let's see if I can say it.

[35:57]

He said, you should know that in order not to defile realization, you should know that in order to not defile realization, that the Buddha ancestors always caution not to be slack in your practice. You should know that in order not to defile realization, which is inseparable from practice, Buddha ancestors always caution not to be slack in your practice. So this... So we have to practice hard. We have to thoroughly take up our practice and asidiya, to see it as Mara

[36:58]

that's come to push us off our seat, just like Mara did to the Buddha who was sitting there under the Bodhi tree, and Mara came in these different ways to kind of get him to move, to leave and go, leave the cell as Vagra says. So the admonition is to not be slack. How come? Because your practice is inseparable from realization. So you can't just rest on your laurels or on this kind of conception really, this idea, this sort of an intellectual idea that, well, practice and realization are the same and realization's always going along, so everything's groovy. That's going too far to have great confidence in our practice that practice and realization are inseparable. But then this cautionary thing, not to be slack, is how it's expressed.

[37:58]

So Buddha ancestors always cautioned not to be slack. So we put great attention into mending our robes and serving with great, wholehearted attention and all the things of the day, walking, sitting, just like we chanted this morning, the four postures, sitting, walking, lying down, sitting, walking, lying down, standing, the four postures. So how do we encourage each other? Because asidiya arises and we are plagued by it and we do have difficulties. And this repetition, the daily round, it's hard sometimes to find joy there.

[39:07]

And one way of encouraging ourselves is to encourage others. We find when we encourage others, somehow we're encouraged along with it. I've always found that to be true. There's a word in Japanese which is translated as love, or Suzuki Roshi translated it as love, Ji-hi, and the two parts of it, it means to give joy and to lessen suffering. The two parts of it are to give joy and lessen suffering. And the way you lessen suffering for people is to suffer with them. You actually, we can't take away suffering for the most part. We can suffer with others. I mean, we can give morphine and certain things to relieve painful feelings, but the way that we actually relieve suffering for each other

[40:08]

is to suffer with, to share with others in their suffering, to be willing to share with others in their suffering. So what happens between two people who share suffering and what happens, this is from Suzuki Roshi, the interrelationship between someone who helps and someone who is helped, whatever happens in there is this Ji-hi or love. So it's not necessarily romantic love, but it's what happens between two people who share their lives together, share sufferings, encourage each other, help each other, are willing to be helped. What happens there is what you could call love. And there was this study done

[41:09]

about married couples, what makes a marriage last. And the study was, could only find one thing that really determined and made a difference with this wide group of people, and that was that these couples in the morning and after work in the evening kissed each other. And it wasn't like a great big deal. It was just, you know, peck on the cheek, good morning, and when you see each other after the day's end, this kiss. And in fact they said it wasn't even particularly sincere. This is what I found really interesting. It was just this quotidian mystery, you know, where just this thing, this little kiss, but that seemed to make a difference for these couples feeling, you know, encouraged,

[42:11]

this kind of acknowledgement, and this kind of repetition, daily repetition, which we know from our practice has great power to change us and to shape us and to transform us. Being aware of these little things, these little daily things over and over and over and over like, you know, a water drop on rock or something. It has great power. So, you should know that in order not to defile realization, which is inseparable from practice, Buddha ancestors caution us to not be slack in our practice.

[43:14]

So we have a whole day in front of us, a whole mysterious day to sit and encourage each other through our attention to details and awareness to listen to the sounds of the wind and the rain and settle. Everyday mind is the way. Thank you very much.

[43:46]

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