I vow to chase the truth that best hides us first. Good morning. We're having our Beginner's Sashim this morning. I think this is the second almost annual Beginner's Sashim. I'd like to welcome everybody who's here for that and everybody else too. I'd like to talk a little bit about beginner's mind and a little bit about zazen this morning, and I'm not going to talk very long because I'd like to leave a lot of time for questions and discussion, since we're... During sesshin, usually, not always during a one-day sesshin, but during longer sittings, one usually has a chance to talk to the priest or whoever's running the sasheen, leading the sasheen, to have a private interview and ask questions about your practice.

[01:06]

And we won't have time to do that today, so I'd like to leave a lot of time for everyone to ask questions, and you can ask questions about anything. Beginner's sittings and zazen instruction are often my favorite, I think my favorite part of our practice because people coming in are so open and so eager and practice is very fresh at the beginning. You may not know quite what we're doing and that's just wonderful. It's often very uncomfortable when you feel like you don't know what you're doing, especially when you come into a formal practice place like this, and it looks like there's the right way to do everything.

[02:09]

And we spend a lot of time and energy trying to help you learn what the right way to do everything is, but actually not knowing anything is the ideal state of mind for a Zen student. When we sit down to do zazen, when we sit down in this posture, we're expressing ourselves just as we are. And sometimes we say that when you cross your legs and you put your right leg, your right foot on your left thigh and your left foot on your right thigh, which hardly any of us can actually do.

[03:14]

When we cross the legs, plant our lower body firmly on our seat, firmly on the ground, and put our hands like this, that we're joining the opposites, all the opposites, of our body, right and left, and up and down, male and female, active and passive. And in Chinese culture, the right hand is thought of as being the active side, and the left is thought of as being the passive side. And that's one of the explanations for our mudra, is that the The active helps the passive and the passive side quiets the active side. I think the point is that one hand helps the other and we are expressing a natural harmony, being in harmony, sitting in harmony with each other and in harmony with ourselves.

[04:37]

the inside and the outside in harmony. So this is our original state which includes everything. Here we are doing nothing, no props, having nothing, expressing everything. I'd like to share with you Part of a lecture that Maizumi Roshi of Zen Center of Los Angeles gave, I think at a sitting like this, not too long ago. He talked about how posture is very important because the posture of our body and the posture of our mind reflect each other.

[05:38]

And I've talked about this before also. So the mudra reflects the unity and the attitude of harmony. And he says we should hold our hands like the surface of still water, calm and without tension. and that our lower body should root us to the ground. Sitting on the ground is very stable. And if you're sitting in a chair, to let the soles of your feet be your roots, really joined firmly with the ground. And sitting in stillness with straight spine, but not stiff, with eyes open and senses open, receptive, is the posture of zazen, and also the posture for everyday life in which we can

[07:09]

be open to whatever is coming in and ready to respond in whatever way is appropriate. If we have some idea about how we should be or if we're protecting our calm and steady posture with some physical tension or some mental rigidity, That's not a natural posture. That's something added. Or we're trying to separate ourself from something that might come up or something we feel we might not be ready for. So beginner's mind and relaxed, energetic posture go together. The Chinese ideograph for zazen, za is translated as sitting, and zen is translated as meditation.

[08:27]

But Maezumi Roshi points out that the characters, one is hito, which means person, and the other is tsuchi, which means ground or earth. And there are actually two persons in the character. And another meaning for that character is scale or balance. And so he said, if you look at that character, which you probably can't see it, but it's this one here with one vertical line and two horizontal lines across it, like a scale, that his interpretation of that is in order to have perfect balance. one person is not sufficient. There needs to be harmony between oneself and others, or between one's true self and one's apparent self. And I think that that's the deep reason why we practice, to bring into harmony our deepest self and our apparent self, so that our apparent self reflects

[09:43]

our deepest nature, rather than just our conditioning or habits. The characters that compose Zen are shimesu, meaning to show or reveal, and tan, meaning one or single. So the fundamental implication of Zen, he says, is to show the oneness, to reveal ourselves as the unity of everything. And that's what we are. unity of everything. So through zazen we're not getting anything, we're not achieving anything, we're just revealing our natural state of true balance. Maybe at the end I'll review his points of Zazen instruction, which are remarkably similar to the ones that we teach every Saturday.

[10:55]

But I'd like to invite people to ask questions about Cixin, about Zazen, about your own practice, really anything at all. This is a chance to ask all those questions that You never get a chance to ask, and it doesn't matter how small they seem. There are no stupid questions. Probably any question you have, several other people have it. physically, but it doesn't seem to go beyond into my other life, which I think of as my

[12:04]

Anybody else experience that? Anybody not experience that at some time? Yeah. It's ... Part of what you're experiencing is that the surroundings and the exterior, the forms of our practice help bring the inside and the outside into harmony, and there's nothing much going on here. There's no distractions. But if you can even notice your distraction or your mind starting to raise, you haven't lost your attention. And I think that that's important to remember because I think it's a mistake to feel like you have to be calm and still all the time.

[13:42]

This practice is really about being awake. It's not necessarily and noticing, being aware of our state of mind, moment after moment. But it's not about staticness. Stillness and staticness are a little different. So it's that observing mind that follows the monkey mind and the activity. That's your anchor. Yeah, that's the not gaining. And I think that's hard because we... I think we all come wanting something, you know, feeling some... most people, most of us come feeling some lack or some discomfort, some pain that we want some help with.

[15:07]

How do you experience it? What's going on with you? Just the kind of space and peace having the right way, wanting to tell people, why don't you just be quiet and sit down? We could all be having a better time here. It's like George Bush said, sit down and shut up. Is that what he meant? Suzuki Roshi used to say that.

[16:35]

Yeah, I think, one, I was thinking about that this morning when we were having orioke instruction and everybody was helping and, you know, we had about 20 people or more who were learning and about half of them had never done our meal service before and it's pretty complicated and then we had a bunch of people who had done it quite a bit, and some people who had been doing it for years and years. And I was giving the instruction because I was asked to lead this particular sitting, and I always feel a bit inadequate when I do it. I love orioke practice, and I really like doing it right, and it's one of those things, rituals we have in which there's a prescribed motion for every moment.

[17:44]

And there's a, you know, really a thousand places to make a mistake. And everybody helped. Everybody, everybody extended themselves. to each other. The people who were brand new opened their minds and extended themselves to those of us who were instructing, and everybody who knew something about it contributed to the process. People stopped me when I forgot something, and did it with a very generous kind of a spirit, people corrected me when I made a mistake in a way that was very kind and didn't have an attitude of, well, you know, here's this priest who's been doing this for 25 years and why can't she get it in the right order?

[18:55]

Everybody just sort of kind of pitched in. And I think that's the attitude of practice is, and what generosity and compassion means, is just to be there with people and try to extend your calm spirit, meeting them where they are. Which is hard to do when people are in a place you find unpleasant. pulled by what they're doing. But I think that's really the meaning of sitting still. You know, when somebody's hassling you, having a tangle with somebody who's in a bad state of mind, to have a still place inside you that helps you, they may not even notice.

[20:00]

But there's something in you that doesn't move, It may sway like a tree in the wind. It doesn't go pfft when confronted with somebody who's pissed off at you. What's the difference between a person or someone being a stoic and detached? I mean, when you just don't care and you just And they have a sense of stoicism, which goes on to arrogance. What is calmness and what is stoicism? That's a really important question, and I think we have to keep asking ourselves that all the time, especially in, you know, I sit a lot as Azen.

[21:07]

From Buddha's point of view, Buddha did a lot of ascetic and very stoical practices and eventually abandoned them for this, which he called the Middle Way. But for us undisciplined Americans, this looks pretty stoical. You get up pretty early in the morning, it's pretty cold in here, we're supposed to sit up straight. seems, you know, a little stoical. But that's not the attitude. The attitude, the stoical attitude and the arrogant attitude and the attitude that you're talking about, that a lot of people have that's kind of, they say they're not attached, but one has the feeling they just don't care. They're not connected. That's discriminating mind, that's a mind that doesn't include everything but only includes what it's comfortable with.

[22:15]

And the mind of zazen is the mind that includes everything, including the things we don't like, including the things that make us real uncomfortable. And so non-attachment or a non-dualistic attitude it doesn't reject anything and doesn't cut you off from anybody it connects you to everybody and it particularly connects you to people who are difficult because people who are really difficult for us are the people that you know, manifest something that we don't like about ourselves. And so, that's really what this is about, including everything.

[23:18]

They can get confused. They can be confused. They're associated. The main difference is equanimity. That's maybe one-dimensional. Or maybe that's not what people are saying. It's not true equanimity. It's a kind of I don't know what it is, but those two qualities can be side by side. Yeah, indifference is like the near enemy of equanimity, and so if equanimity is something we're cultivating, the opposite of equanimity, we all know about the opposite of equanimity, that's easy to spot, but the near enemy or the counterfeit is indifference. It's important to be able to spot the counterfeit. There are some real good fakes around.

[24:41]

Before each sashin or most of them, we all promise each other we're not going to talk. We promise ourselves we're not going to talk. Then we come to sashin and talk, talk, talk. So I was wondering if you could say something about the importance of not talking. During the work period, I was sitting in the hut, and I was amazed, actually, at how much quieter this work period was, at least in the compound, than it usually is during Sashin. And I thought, it must be because it's the beginning of Sashin, and the people that have the most trouble with talking here, us older folks. You know, in Zazen, we try to let go of the thoughts and the conversation, inner conversation.

[25:57]

And as you sit, and there's nothing else happening, you pay attention to your breathing and pretty soon find that your mind has engaged itself in conversation. And when you notice that, you interrupt the conversation and come back to your breath. So we're always sort of in conversation with ourself. There's always running commentary going in our mind. And there really isn't And he's stopping it completely. It's the mind's function to generate thoughts and stuff. But we try not to entertain them. We try to let them go as we let each breath go. We let them come as we let the breath come. We let them go as we let the breath go. And we're all here together, but we're joined by the silence.

[27:04]

So the silence is kind of the glue that holds the sheen together. And we always give the instruction, no unnecessary conversation, no talking, no reading or writing, and no looking around, because looking around is a form of conversation. But particularly during work, We always have these great excuses for striking up a conversation. We may have some legitimate need to get some instruction, and it may be awkward or impossible to write a note. We try to write notes if we can. But there's a tendency to carry it a few sentences farther than is actually necessary. And I think sometimes we do it because we talk during work or even during breaks at the coffee area because it's so socially uncomfortable and unusual to be silent with people.

[28:28]

There's a kind of, particularly when there are new people around. I always have the feeling I want to make people comfortable. And it's hard to find a way to make people actually feel comfortable if you can't talk to them. And when there are people I know, I want to say hello to them. I haven't seen them for a long time. So there's that reason. So the challenge of Sashin is to encourage each other with our silence and to cultivate a warm and friendly feeling, but not to have conversations. Yeah, it is important, and we don't put a lot of emphasis on it, and so we really have to take our opportunities where they come.

[30:04]

What's always amazed me is that there's always a very, particularly during long sessions, you know, sit silently with people for four or five days or a week, there's a very close feeling. Over a long period of time, silence is a very important part of what makes this community special. But it is important to get to know people. It's especially nice to be able to talk to people during the informal teas that we usually have after Saturday. lecture, which we won't be having today because we're having a session. And actually after the session is over, I'm going to hang around for an hour or so if people want to talk informally. And that's an experiment to do, kind of what you're talking about.

[31:07]

The other kind of talking that's real important that I'd like to make a pitch for here is talking to teachers. And I'd like to encourage everybody who comes with any regularity to make a relationship with one or more of the people who teach. There's about half a dozen older students who give private interviews and We'll talk to you about your practice by appointment. And the abbot, when he's here, talks to people and his calendar is just to the left of the front door there. You can sign up to talk to him about your practice. And so by forming a relationship with people that

[32:12]

are more experienced, and that's certainly not the only kind of relationship to form, but kind of making some practice friends, some Dharma friends, is a nice way to get, feel closer to the community and also to get some help so that you don't need to feel so alone in your effort. because of my schedule. At what point do you have a teacher that you align yourself with? And how do you go about doing that? Well, how you go about doing it is, all you have to do is ask. And on the bulletin board, there's a list of the names and phone numbers of the senior students who give practice instruction and then the Abbott's calendar is by the door, as I said, and you can sign up on an empty line and you don't have to be anybody special, you don't have to be a member, you don't have to know anything to make an appointment to talk to somebody about your practice.

[33:29]

And the time to do it is when you feel the need to do it, or when you want to feel more connected to the community, or when you have a question. And I think the sooner the better. I think it's wonderful to practice alone, and it's very hard to know what, it's much easier to find out what's happening if you can express your experience to somebody, and just the experience of hearing yourself say what's happening with your practice is often very enlightening, whether or not the person you're talking to has anything in particular to say about it. Just having that opportunity to sit with somebody who's also practicing share your practice and your experience.

[34:34]

I think it's very supportive. So there's no special time. Any time is OK. I have an enormously curious mind. And one of the rules says, no looking around. And during the break, and I still can't help doing it. When I'm deprived of reading materials or conversation, is that still should be discouraged? Well, we discourage looking around. You know, there's looking around and there's looking around. There's being tuned in to your environment.

[35:38]

And if you walk out of the Zendo, and there's a perfectly gorgeous sunrise happening right in front of you, to pointedly stare at the ground, seems odd to me. But if your mind is just wandering and restless, kind of like a puppy, or a toddler that kind of just follows its nose from one thing to another, then, you know, maybe you want to gently, you know, kind of put on a leash or gently take its hand and, you know, kind of bring it back into your body to right where you are. Yeah, I think that's a real important point.

[37:20]

Most teachers recommend settling with one tradition and really exploring it in depth. Sometimes you have to kind of shop around a little until you find the one that's right for you. And so I think that there's a sort of appropriate shopping stage and we're really fortunate in this area that, I mean, there's so many good teachers and so many traditions represented right here. But then once you kind of know what's out there and you've sort of tasted it There's one tradition or practice place or teacher that you feel particularly connected to or maybe that's just closest to your home and it's most practical for you to train at.

[38:25]

But it's usually good at some point to settle down and thoroughly immerse yourself in one tradition. Traditionally, one also makes a commitment to a teacher, a particular teacher, and a relationship over time with a particular teacher. And I think that that's probably ideal. And then there's a point, I think, after one has been practicing for a long time, and studying just Zen or just Tibetan or whatever it is, when one needs to take another kind of look around, make sure one isn't getting too rigid or something. But that's how the Dharma has always been transmitted, is from teacher to disciple, and from teacher to disciple.

[39:30]

And really the essence of all these ways is the same. And what makes us usually want to keep shopping is that there's some things we don't like about each one. And so we want to take what we like and we want to leave the rest. And that's called discrimination and setting up your own standards. And there's a point at which that becomes a form of kind of gaining idea. You know, I want to be comfortable. I want to like all this stuff. Some of the rituals in this temple really are aggravating and stupid. So I think I'll go do the Vipassana for a while because they just sit and they don't have so many aggravating rituals. It's that kind of thinking that tends to lead us away from

[40:34]

our actual experience. Someone said you can't reach water by digging a hundred holes. You have to dig one hole a hundred times. That's great. I like that. And we always want to know, you know, where's this bus going? And do I want to go there? And if it looks like the scenery is getting dreary, then we think, oh God, I took the wrong bus. So we have to have some confidence that we're practicing to express all that we are.

[41:41]

And not because there's something we need to get here and something else we need to get there. We already have it. Let me just end by just reviewing the main points of Zazen as we're going to be sitting for the rest of the day, and we'll have a chance to ask a few more questions later on. So you sit on the forward third of your chair or your cushion. And this is important if you're sitting in a chair that you sit forward on it if you can so that there's a curve in your lower spine and your belly is loose and round.

[42:51]

And you arrange your legs in a position that you can maintain reasonably comfortably. And however you're set up, You want your weight distributed on three points, your bottom and your knees or your feet, so that you're like a tripod, nice and steady. You straighten and extend your spine, keeping it naturally upright, centering yourself in your lower abdomen. And when we first sit down, if you're sitting on the floor particularly, stretching out all the way to one side and all the way to the other in decreasing arcs to find your center from left to right.

[43:57]

And you keep your eyes open, cast down about a 45 degree angle. If your eyes are wide open, that's not so comfortable. If they close, you may tend to fall asleep or daydream. Your lips and teeth gently together, tongue resting behind your front teeth. putting your left hand in your right palm so the thumb tips just touch. And if you can sit in the lotus position, your mudra will rest on your feet. And if you're sitting in some other position, you need to find a comfortable place at your abdomen to rest your mudra. It should have some energy in it, not tense.

[45:09]

And take a deep breath, exhaling fully. And let your breath settle into a natural rhythm. And breathe naturally without trying to influence the rhythm of the breath. And Maizumi Roshi says, be fully and vitally present with yourself. Simply do your very best to stay, to keep your mind with your breath, whether you're following the breath or counting it. And at the end of the sitting, be sure to gently swing your body from right to left and not to get up before your feet wake up. And he suggests we practice this every day for at least 10 or 15 minutes to discover for yourself the treasure house of the timeless life of Zazen, your very life itself.

[46:24]

So please continue sitting with us and sharing this practice.

[46:42]

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