Can you hear me in the back? Hi, kids. Hi. How are you? Good. Good. And children of all ages? My lovely and talented Jisha, Veronica, will now pass among you and distribute these very small objects. Maybe you can start with the kids. Take two, just two. I want to make sure I have enough. And just keep them in your hand. Don't taste them yet, okay? Don't mush them all up yet. So this morning I want to talk about mindfulness and start with a mindfulness exercise while the kids are here. And then we'll go a little farther afield.

[01:08]

Mindfulness is an important part of the Buddhist path and Buddhist practice. His Holiness the Dalai Lama puts it, whatever you are doing, you should ask yourself, what's my state of mind? But that's one part. My teacher, Sojanoshi, he's been known to ask, where are your feet? Do you know where your feet are right now? Were you thinking about your feet before I said the word feet? No. So that's mindfulness, knowing where you're sitting, where you're standing, how you're moving, and to keep paying attention to what it is that you're doing.

[02:13]

So, while Veronica is passing this out, so all the kids have these small things? Yes? Imagine that you are a being from another planet. From planet Mars, if there were small beings like you on Mars. Do you think there are? No, I don't think so either. They actually have bug eyes and antennae. That's what they look like there. And they walk around, they ride their bikes in the canals. So, somebody, you come to planet Earth and somebody puts these two small things in your hand. Just right now, carefully, without squashing them, just feel those things. Just very delicately in your hand.

[03:19]

You don't know what they are. I know you know what it is. But pretend you don't know what they are. And so you pay attention to it. This is mindfulness. You pay attention. Oh, how does it feel? Does it feel smooth or does it feel kind of wrinkly? Wrinkly, right? Pretty small. Now look at it. Take a look at it very carefully. I forgot to take one myself. Do you have an extra? No. What is this thing? It's the wrinkly and what color do you think it is? Blackish red. That's pretty good. And can you feel the wrinkles?

[04:21]

And let your eyes explore it as if you've never seen anything like this before. I bet you've seen something like this before, but I bet you've never really looked at it very closely. Look at it closely. And while you're doing this, you may be thinking, what is the point of this? Why are we doing this? It's kind of dumb. But just know that you're having this thought and come back to looking at it. Oh, his mind has got a little thing sticking out of it. Okay, now smell it. Can you smell anything? How does it smell? Raisin. It smells a little bit like a raisin. Well, we don't know yet whether it's a raisin or not.

[05:33]

There's all kinds of things it could be. Especially, remember, you come from Mars. Coming from Mars, they don't have any raisins on Mars. All they have are stones. But maybe they have raisin smelling stones on Mars. And they look like raisins. That's right, and they look like raisins. And they what? And they call them raisins. They may call them raisins or they may call them blazons. On Mars, raisins are blazons. Right. So, okay. Notice the smell of it. Now, put one of them carefully on your tongue. Your tongue is incredibly smart. Pay attention to your tongue. How does your tongue know what to do? It kind of rolls it around in your mouth, right?

[06:37]

Or does the Martian have a tongue? That is a really good question. I think you should mindfully consider that for the next five years. And when you have an answer, come and tell us all. And you can give the talk. What does a Martian have instead of a tongue? So you're rolling it around. Can you feel the wrinkles? Yeah. You haven't chewed it yet, right? Yeah. You have or you haven't? No. Good. Don't chew it yet. And it's getting a little warmer and softer in your mouth, right? Well, mine isn't. Yeah, mine isn't either. OK. But, as you're doing this, you taste, there's more saliva coming into your mouth, right? Your mouth is becoming moister.

[07:39]

That's amazing. Your body is just doing this and you're paying attention to how your body is doing this. OK. Chew down very lightly on this raisin. Oh! Oh, guess I just gave it away. I just blew the whole thing. Chew down on this thing. Very carefully. What happens? You get more taste. Does it get, all of a sudden, is there like a sweetness that explodes? More taste. And you can taste the skin. You can see it has a little skin, it has the soft part inside and a kind of harder part on the outside. And then your tongue is kind of wisely moving it about in your mouth, right?

[08:50]

Without you having to think about it, but you can pay attention to it mindfully. He makes noise too, when you chew on it. That's right. And the taste changes. OK. Now, when you're ready to swallow... Has anyone swallowed yet? No. You guys are really good. You have. OK. You have to leave the room. Just get out of here. I have another one. You have another one. OK. When you're ready to swallow, See if you can just find the first moment that you're intending, that you're meaning to swallow it. I put the word swallow in your head. Now you're thinking swallow. And then, swallow it. And as you're swallowing it, feel it moving down through your mouth,

[09:54]

your muscles of your throat contract, it's moving down into the great, mysterious interior of your body, where it becomes just food. Okay. And now, in mindfulness, have you had your second one yet? No. Go ahead, eat your second one. And now, mindfully consider that your body is now exactly two raisins heavier than it was a minute ago. Can you tell the difference? Do you feel heavier? No? I do. I can hardly move. Those raisins just went right down to my stomach.

[11:00]

So that's our exercise for today. You will never, every time you eat a raisin, you'll probably remember something like this. And if you want to be really mischievous, you can try the same exercise with a potato chip. And you get a very different feeling. It crackles. You can notice how it coats your mouth with grease. So that's our exercise for today. Do you have any thoughts or anything you want to ask? Did you enjoy your raisin? Yeah. Good. Now, go enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. Have you all eaten your second mason?

[12:14]

Good. Thank you. So, good morning again. Happy to be back here with you. Some of you know that I've been in Asia for the last three or four weeks in India, working at a school with ex-untouchable Buddhist youth, maybe about 19 to 22, 23 in age.

[13:21]

which is really enjoyable. I just love being at this school and to work with young people of that age who are completely alive. And then I had an opportunity to go and offer some training in Burma, which is really in a process of change after years when it looked like nothing would ever change. I'm not going to talk about those places or those activities today. But I will say I'll put up a poster. I'm going to do a report back on Sunday the 4th of March, I believe. That's a week from this Sunday. I think it's 7 15 or 7 7 7. Yeah. Anyway, I'm happy to talk to you about that. But while I was there, I gave a talk about mindfulness and I've been thinking about it so just in Buddhist terms to give you some background mindfulness is really a core practice it really is the practice of awareness you find it in it's the seventh

[14:48]

element of the Eightfold Path, which is the way the Buddha describes the path of life and practice. So that element is usually called Right Mindfulness. It's not just mindfulness as a technique, but it's Right Mindfulness means applied in a useful and beneficial way for oneself and all beings and it actually has an interesting it's translated differently the word in Pali is called Sati and in Sanskrit it's called Smrti and sometimes that's translated usually as mindfulness or right mindfulness but you could translate that as also simply awareness and you can translate it as right remembering which is an interesting word to remember it's like taking all of the elements of a body and putting it back together putting the members back in the right place so that your fingers are on your hands not growing out of your stomach or whatever

[16:19]

and also sometimes it's translated as right recollection which is another interesting word in English to recollect to bring together what was together and perhaps is scattered and just to bring it back together it's also the second factor Just before I went away, Sojin Roshi gave a really good talk on the seven factors of enlightenment and mindfulness is the second of those factors. And it's the subject of a very well-known practice and there's a sutta connected with it, an early teaching the Sakhipatthana Sutta, which is the mindfulness, the foundations of mindfulness.

[17:25]

And there are four of them. It's mindful, being mindful of the body, which really focuses, first it focuses on breath, and then it focuses on posture. We put a great emphasis on posture in our asana practice. The Satipatthana Sutta begins talking about the four basic postures and then elaborates from there basic postures of lying, standing, walking, sitting. And this is mindfulness of the body. The second of the foundations is mindfulness of the feelings. And there, in Buddhist terms, is using feelings in a quite technical and precise way.

[18:30]

Not feelings as emotions, the way we generally refer to them, but just the sensation as your body makes contact. We could have done that with the kids and with you, It would have been interesting to have done that actually, to look at in the realm of feeling, am I experiencing something pleasant or unpleasant or neutral? It would have been interesting to do that with the raisin, to see is this pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. and then the third foundation of mindfulness is contents of the mind or mind states this is where our emotions are registered mindfully the stories that we then create from just the barest contact and feeling and then the final

[19:42]

The final foundation of mindfulness is being mindful of what is called the dharmas. And in many ways these are the kinds of systems that we use, systems of Buddhist analysis. So the Eightfold Path is one of those, the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, the Paramitas, all of these ways that we have of looking at the system of our existence through these dharmas. So those are the four foundations and they kind of increase in complexity. There you can see them as circular, but they also exist both independently and interdependently. But I think that... Let me read you something from how the Buddha described it.

[20:58]

He asks, how is a monk possessed of mindfulness and alertness? When going forward and returning, he acts with alertness. When looking toward and looking away, he acts with alertness. when bending and extending her limbs, when carrying his outer robe, his upper robe, his bowl, when eating, drinking, chewing and tasting, monk acts with alertness, when urinating and defecating, when walking, standing, sitting, falling asleep, waking up, talking and remaining silent The monk acts with alertness. So really what you're doing in each of these cases is using this mental quality of mindfulness like a flashlight or like the sun that shines on a person in the dark.

[22:14]

That shines on each of us. our minds and our activity in the dark. And you want to be careful. You're not necessarily looking at the light, but when the light is turned on, that person comes into view. And another thing to keep in mind is that Things grow in the light. Everything that grows needs light. It's true of a flower. It's true of a tree. And it's true of our awareness and practice. We depend on the light of mindfulness. We depend on the light of Zazen. Just to sit

[23:15]

to come in the morning when the light is very low, to sit and cross your legs. When I do that, I can feel myself subtly growing, grounding myself in place, knowing where my feet are, where my body is, and shining that light gently around my body and around the room. So it means to me, mindfulness as well, it means being engaged, being in relationship. This is one of the things that I thought about a lot in India and Burma.

[24:16]

I think I've probably said this before, but when I started working at Buddhist Peace Fellowship in 1991, somebody gave me this poster which I hung over my desk, and it was an excerpt from something written by Thich Nhat Hanh, where he It was given a title. Mindfulness must be engaged. And I often think about that. Is mindfulness engaged? Is it anything different than normal awareness? And what does engaged mean? Is this something that's extra in our practice? In a very direct way, Thich Nhat Hanh described his dilemma at the time.

[25:22]

He says, When I was in Vietnam, so many of our villages were being bombed. Along with my monastic brothers and sisters, I had to decide what to do. Should we continue to practice in our monasteries, or should we leave the meditation halls in order to help people who were suffering under the bombs? After careful reflection, we decided to do both, to go out and help people and to do so in mindfulness. So there's not necessarily a separation. We can cultivate this in our meditation halls, but the cultivation is not for the sake of having some pure or holy feeling here. but to cultivate it so that we can go into the world and bring that awareness, bring that sense of harmonization to people that we encounter, to situations that we encounter.

[26:36]

This is what I saw in Burma. It was really interesting. I visited, my last day there I visited a monastery that had been blocked by the government during the Saffron Revolution in 2007. And the monks who had been there, the abbot and the chief monks had all been arrested and sent to prison. And they had been in prison from late September 2007 until mid-January of this year. And I can't vouch for their ultimate peace of mind, but when I went to that monastery, they were there, sitting about, talking with people, and it was remarkably peaceful.

[27:43]

They had points of view, but they were not lost in rancor or bitterness. And they had wasted no time beginning to rebuild their monastery. Just to begin again and again, which is actually the mark of our practice. It's not that we don't get pulled away, It's that the essential act is to return to begin again with each breath. And that is what we are recollecting. That's what we're pulling together. That's remembering. In terms of Magian Monastery, there were workmen who were running in those blue plastic lines, pipes.

[28:46]

So they were running electricity and they were running plumbing. They were remembering the place where they lived and establishing it so that it could be used by people again in a comfortable way. So this is something else that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about, which I find quite wonderful. He talks about, he says, mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what is the use of seeing? We must be aware of the real problems of the world, then with mindfulness we will know what to do and what not to do to be of help. He says, are you planting seeds of joy and peace?

[29:47]

He said, peace is every step. Shall we continue the journey? So, there is this active component that follows on the practice of mindfulness. It's not just to turn ourselves into radiant lumps of humanity sitting on our cushions here, but actually to take what talents and strengths we are aware of, to take that into the world. So, I often think of this, there's a very famous story that was written in the early 40s by the poet Delmore Schwartz and it was titled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and I think in this setting, in awareness awareness comes with responsibility

[31:02]

That's what Thich Nhat Hanh is saying when he says, once there is seeing, there must be acting. Sometimes our responsibility is just to show up here. And we have a responsibility to support the practice. And to recognize that by doing this practice, we are setting the world in motion. at the same time. In a few minutes my talk will be over and we will move out into the crisp brightness of this day and we'll move on to our activities and lives. How will we carry our mindfulness forth in that way? And that brings me to the last thing that comes to mind that I've been thinking about, is that the whole shape of our practice, particularly the practice that Suzuki Roshi brought us, our ancestors brought us, Sogen has been carrying on,

[32:30]

we have it deeply in mind is that we don't do this practice alone. We do this practice with each other. Now the wonderful form that we have is we come and we sit next to each other and we face the wall. So facing the wall we have our independence and our some sense of our solitary responsibility responsibility we have for ourselves in the same time as we're sitting right next to each other just maybe 18 inches apart and supporting each other with our practice, with our mindfulness so mindfulness is not a solitary activity It's a relational activity. It begins with being in relation to myself, and then it broadens into an awareness of the relationship that we have with each other.

[33:46]

There's a wonderful quotation, and I think I will end with this. One of our teachers who came to help Suzuki Roshi was Kobinchino Roshi. He was a very inspiring teacher. I know that Sojin was very close to me. I think he performed one of his weddings. One of Geno Roshi's students quoted something to me that I hadn't heard before. This is something to the effect that Colvin said, compassion is the activity of walking with another person side by side, not too fast,

[34:54]

Not too slow. Same speed. Walking, compassion is walking with another person side by side. One is mindful of one's pace. To walk side by side, you know where your feet are. And you're just matching the pace of someone. as you're moving through the world. So this is mindfulness in action and in relationship. And I think that it's extremely important to remember that our practice is rooted in relationship, in connection, in connection to the Raisin which then becomes incorporated into your body, in connection to our children, in connection to each other as friends and practitioners, to our teachers, to our families and work, and when we are cultivating mindfulness and practicing mindfulness, we're cultivating connection.

[36:21]

this ultimate connection to everyone and everything. So I think that I'll stop there. If you have any thoughts or questions, we can take them for a few minutes. Yes, Helen, is that right? I think of mindfulness as an intellectual exercise. Can you talk about how to reconcile that with this other principle of losing yourself and being the action? Right. Well, I think that one of the things that's happening I think in this culture is that mindfulness is a force that's kind of co-opting it to some degree. and making it a technique.

[37:24]

That's just my own opinion. But mindfulness is inseparable from the other factors of enlightenment, say. Inseparable from the other steps on the Eightfold Path. So it has an intellectual, a mental quality to it. But that quality is always tempered and connected to all of the other aspects of it. If you separate it off, this is the problem that I have, if you separate it off as a kind of technology, like a meditational technology, then you've actually taken it out of its context. And you could, that's a dualistic way of looking at it. So, How do you see it in connection with your actual life?

[38:28]

Not just as an intellectual ability. And what I see, and I've talked to various people, is that it shifts very subtly and quickly. You know, it's not like you're observing yourself, but you step back for a moment and you step forward. That's the sense I have. Actually, do you have a comment on that? My comment would be, what are the other factors of enlightenment that mindfulness is encompassing? I'm trying to remember the entire list, which you probably do. I do. You do? But there's effort, there's joy, There's meditation, energy, effort, meditation. Joy is one of the factors of enlightenment.

[39:33]

There's others. Wisdom. Wisdom, right. Donna. What? Jimmy. Donna. I don't think Donna is... No. Different system, that's in the Paramitas. But anyway, these are all, they're integral. It's one integral system. So, uh... What? Tranquility, yes. Equanimity, also. I think we've just about covered them. Yeah, follow up, yeah. So, in the idea to be conscious about water, and feeling it up that to me seems the opposite of just washing the dishes that's right so there's a this is what's amazing about the mind that you can you can focus in very narrowly for an instant and then broaden so we're talking about

[40:48]

When the commentators talk about mindfulness they actually distinguish a kind of this technical looking at these four foundations of mindfulness that's a meditation practice in action there's a fluidity and that's also mindfulness just washing the dishes as one activity so you can look at it in a in a micro-level, say, oh, Washington is lifting the sponge, placing the sponge, holding the dish, wiping it, you know, you can do this in micro-level, or you can do it just as one fluid activity, complete in itself. This is what's amazing about the capacity of the mind. A few more, and we'll stop in a couple minutes. I saw some hands. I just want to say that I think, to me, mindfulness, maybe the word is unfortunate because it has mind in it, and we're used to thinking a certain way about that, but I don't think it's an intellectual activity at all, actually.

[42:00]

And this is an intellectual speaking, but... And I don't know if you're referring to John Kabat-Zinn and his mindfulness, you know, how much it spread, but I also don't find him to making a technology out of it. Bare awareness? seems like one of the happier translations of what we're calling mindfulness and observing consciously even though it's not the same as just doing is the way we learn how to just do or the way we learn that if we're not just doing the mystery in it is who is observing yeah you know what comes to mind is how I work on, say, a musical passage, if I'm playing something on the guitar, and I kind of can't quite execute it, I zero in very closely and really focus in on the few notes and exactly

[43:14]

exactly what I'm doing with my left hand, exactly what I'm doing with my right hand, and break it down very small, go over it again and again, until it becomes fluid, and then, mysteriously, I don't have to think about it anymore, I can just play it. I think that applies to other aspects of life. hand, that's just a way of describing, like, if you're actually being mindful, you would just feel that your hand is warm. You wouldn't be articulating that way, but to talk about it, you have to say that, and that makes it sound weirdly analytical, where maybe the actual being aware of it might be instantaneous. Right, and there's different practices, like, there are practices

[44:18]

in sort of modern Theravada practice where you actually name and note everything that arises and that has its own qualities to it. That's actually not what we do. You may have just a very quick perception of something, but you don't necessarily have to put it into language. As soon as you put it into language, there's another... If you're just noting the sensation, if you're just feeling the sensation, then that's mindfulness of feelings. As soon as you're putting it into language, then you're moving to another level of mental complexity. Don't get too caught on this. One more question, if there is one more. Yes. I'm interested in the relationship of seeing, doing, and not doing.

[45:23]

And how our zazen and mindfulness practices can be influenced by and influence what we do. Especially in the way that concerted attention to zazen can change the way we see so that it's no longer, as some of you have pointed out, a seer and an object being seen. I wonder if I'm quite ready to speak. But that the eye or the lens through which we experience the world to encompass the body and beyond the body through this concerted work of Zazen, enables a kind of action that doesn't depend on the usual feedback or causal feedback, and can take action that is not based on what is physically present or knowable in the immediate future.

[46:39]

In other words, we begin to act from a aura instead of an eye that encompasses more than we can speak of or see. And then our actions can be fundamentally huge, huge, and hugely different from what we expect in normal and yet it takes place in normal daily life. I wonder if that has any resonance here. Well, what comes to mind, this might be a good place to end, to paraphrase Meister Eckhart, the horror The hara through which you are experiencing Buddha is the same hara through which the Buddha is experiencing you.

[47:52]

One big belly. I think I'll stop there.

[48:00]

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