Tomorrow is the 1st of October. And on the 28th, excuse me, on the 28th of October, our practice period begins with one day sitting and entering the shuso, the head student. And it goes through November. And on the 4th of December, we start our rohatsu, seven-day sashin, which ends on the 10th, 11th, something like that, huh? The 10th. And then on the 11th, we have the shuso ceremony, dharma combat. David is going to be the shuso. And the lady sitting next to him, Susan, is going to be his assistant, called the benji.

[01:29]

And she'll be making his appointments for having tea with everyone. So I want to talk about practice period today, even though it's a month away. I won't be able to talk about it next week, because I won't be here. and I think it's good to start preparing for it now. Practice period is an opportunity, of course the older students have heard this many times, but nevertheless, practice period is an opportunity to renew our practice and to intensify our practice and to bring the Sangha together in a strong way, and to work on something that we want to work on but never get around to. So I want to talk a little bit about requirements.

[02:40]

You know, since this is a a lay Sangha, and everyone has a different approach to practice because of your responsibilities and your time and inclinations. And you have to tailor the practice period to each person, or we have to tailor the practice period to each person's ability. But I would like to suggest that, you know, we have a sheet, you know, which we put down all of the things that we're going to do during practice period, you know, how much zazen, a kind of recipe for practice, how much zazen, how much are we going to attend the sasheen and so forth, all these questions.

[03:43]

What I would like to suggest as a requirement for the practice period is to sit at least three days a week at the zendo and to come to the opening seshin where we have the entering ceremony for the shuso. I have a little list here. to sit on Saturday morning, to attend the class, to attend the shuso ceremony at the end, to come to the practice period dinner, and to sit the Saturday sashin on the 12th, to have tea with the shuso one time, to have dokasan or practice instruction from either me or one of the practice leaders, and to choose something to work on or to let go of in a personal way.

[04:56]

So my suggestion would be, if you really want to do the practice period, to extend yourself And if you sit in the afternoon, if you can sit, if there's nothing hindering you from sitting every day in the afternoon, to sit every day. If you sit in the mornings, and there's nothing hindering you from sitting every morning, to sit every morning. If you don't have some responsibility, if your wife or husband isn't tugging at your nightgown, We don't want to upset family relations, you know, so you have to take this into consideration. And if you come on Saturday morning, to come at 6 instead of at 11, 10, 10.

[06:00]

So to put a little more effort into your practice, that's why we have practice period. Oftentimes people sign up for practice period, but they never come to anything. It's not necessary to attend the practice period. You will not be any less of a student if you don't attend the practice period. No one will think ill of you. if you don't attend the practice period, you will not be a second-class citizen. But if you make a commitment, you keep the commitment. This is how you put a boundary on your practice. So in order to do practice period, often we have to let go of something else. less TV, go to bed early, maybe not go out to dinner so many times a week, to cut back on your leisurely pursuits and put your effort into the practice for this period of time.

[07:27]

And so when you do sign up for the practice period, to consider, you know, can I do this? or how much of this can I really do? I'm not saying you should do five days of zazen. I'm saying if you can, consider doing it. You know, often people's practice is stretched to the limit as it is, because we have so many obligations in our life, and our time is very precious. But we have to consider, well, what am I spending my time doing? What's the most important thing for me? What can I let go of in order to do this? And if I let go of something, will it make a big difference?

[08:36]

Sometimes yes and sometimes no. You know, we really like to keep ourself occupied. And there's so many things to do in this world, in this society, that we can't do, you know, very much. There's a bumper sticker that says, you've probably seen this, so much to read and so little time to read it. That's the story of our lives. So much to do and so impossible it is to do all these things. So what's the most important or valuable thing for us? So practice period includes not just sitting at the zendo,

[09:41]

But how you balance your Zendo practice with your family life, with your work life, with your varied interests life, so that your life becomes integral with your practice, and your practice permeates the activities of your life. in practice period, how does your practice integrate with your family life? How does it integrate with your work life? What does that mean, practice at work or practice at home? The zendo, you know, although there's a door there, And when you come this way, you enter the zendo, and when you go that way, you leave the zendo.

[10:50]

But actually, that's not the real door, because when you leave, you extend the zendo to wherever you are. So every place you are, there's an opportunity to practice. every moment there's an opportunity to practice. So how we integrate all this is the emphasis of our practice and the emphasis of our practice period. So a practice period gives us the opportunity to regroup, so to speak, to come back to ourselves, to redefine what we're doing, and to energize our practice. It's not necessary to sit the whole seven days of Sheen in December.

[11:58]

You can sit a minimum of three days, but I suggest you do as much as you possibly can. people work during the week, you know, hard to get time off. But, you know, to sit the last three days or something like that is okay. And then having a tea with the shuso is a way to get to know the shuso in a more intimate way, and also to discuss your practice. David's been practicing for a long, long time. And I first encountered him practicing at San Francisco Zen Center.

[13:00]

And I can't remember when exactly he started practicing. When did you start practicing? He didn't know. Late 70s, yeah. Then he was the treasurer of San Francisco Zen Center, and helped get some of the businesses started. And he's been a very dedicated student, and he's very mature right now. And he does... We'll see. He leads us stress reduction classes which are based on this practice actually. A lot of his students come here to sit zazen. So his whole life is very involved in practice.

[14:05]

So there's some practices, some personal practices, which I can suggest for us to take up. One thing you could do is pick out one precept, you know. and to follow one precept and just see how that precept keeps coming up in your life day after day. But there are various dharmas that we can take into consideration. Like if we look at what gives us difficulty, Like opinionatedness, if I happen to be an opinionated person, people may say, you know, you're really an opinionated person, but you don't believe it, or you ignore what they say, to actually think, I might be an opinionated person after all, so let me see if opinionatedness comes up in my life.

[15:50]

And then just keep an eye out for looking for whenever opinionatedness comes up in your life and examine that. Another aspect could be you may be the person that's always taking over, always asserting yourself and jumping in before everyone else. to answer a question or to push everybody out of the way and be there first. So that would be something that you could look at. Do I do that? And then there's the person who's always retreating, in the corner, don't talk to me. It's the shy one to look at how is it possible to come out and relate then there's the person who's always criticizing your critical mode.

[17:03]

This is very prominent. Most everyone has a critical side, putting others down or thinking that someone is like this and that one is like that. So to look at that quality in yourself and notice when it comes up, And which, we may always be making value judgments. This is good, this is not so good. Making value judgments based on our opinion of what's good and bad. And then there's someone who never can say yes. And then there's someone who never can say no. And so just to have some awareness of our kind of habitual way of doing things.

[18:14]

which cause us some problem, and causes other people some problem, and which keeps us tied down, which limits our freedom. All of these unwholesome qualities limit our freedom. So the theme of this practice period, I've been talking with David about it, and it's kind of a little bit hazy, but more or less it's like on one side is birth and on the other side is death and in the middle is self. So self has these two qualities of birth on one side and death on the other and it's like the two sides of myself, right? Everything has two sides. Two cheeks, two eyes, two nose holes, two gluteus maximuses, maximi, two feet, two hands, and birth and death.

[19:41]

And then there's this, which is our self. Birth, death, and self. So how do we understand it? I haven't decided exactly what we will study in order to ... I have some ideas to deal with this. phenomena, phenomena. But this will be the subject of our practice period. How do we live our life given these two sides? And what is, how do these two sides come together in us? and what is the duality of this person, which is called birth and death, and what is the oneness of these two qualities.

[20:52]

So the class will be on that subject, Also, during practice period, I want to put some emphasis on how we sit zazen, and I will have some afternoon teas, and one of those, at least, will be devoted to, it'll be Friday afternoon talk during zazen, a kind of Zazen refresher. And I also want to work on our chanting and work with the Kokyos and the Doans in helping to improve our chanting and our bells and so forth.

[22:08]

So it'll be a very nice intensifying form of practice and a very good opportunity and a way of really helping us harmonize our personal practice, and our Sangha practice, and our daily life practice altogether. Do you have any questions about it? Yeah. I don't know if people could observe how they're illuminated, or will, or things like that, and you use the pronoun, we, of knowing what you're going to work on.

[23:17]

Oh, well let me see. Well, you know, we call this secret practice. Yeah. It's okay, I think, to tell people what you're working on, but I think it's also good to work on something that you don't reveal. If you really are working on something, people notice it right away because of the intimacy of our practice. I can tell when a person's changed the slightest bit just by looking at them, or the way they walk, or the way they hold their head, or the look in their eye.

[24:23]

You can too. But because of the intimacy of our practice and the relationship that we have, it doesn't take much to see a shift, you know? So, when I see somebody, one of our members, I can tell when things have shifted or what they're working on, you know? So, and respond to that. And I think we all feel that, you know, because our practice is such a gut practice that we feel intuitively when something is shifted or when somebody is, you know, something is changing. But to work, you know, like in the Hokyo Zamae, the end of the Hokyo Zamae,

[25:30]

Just do your work like a fool or an idiot, secretly, and continuously. I mean, it's okay if you come to me and you say, I would really like to work on this. And I'll say, good, I support you to do that. That's okay. I mean, I think I could work on all these myself, but I might pick one out. I don't know which one I would pick out exactly, because I have so many of these problems. The biggest difficulty we have, you know, is the problem of choice, because we have so much to choose from.

[26:46]

And to be able to limit our life is very difficult to find our limitation. And that's what practice period is. It's like limiting your activity to something that you can do really well for a period of time. Ross? really early on, these personalities tend to stay pretty much the same as child growth. And say if a person is somewhat reticent, they can work on maybe coming forward, but also not be so self-critical that they feel kind of out of sorts when they don't have anything to say. Well, it's critical, like me, for instance, to say, well, it's OK to be critical and look at that, where it's coming from, and also not

[27:52]

with regard to direction or criticism? That's kind of coming full circle. When we, you know, as I brought up in our family life as a child, you know, we received criticism from our parents and so forth. And so often we grew up somewhat intimidated and formed by our family's view of us. And then when we join the Sangha, that's another family. But this is a family that's helping to free us. The Sangha should be a family that's helping to free us from the bonds that were imposed on us in our life growing up. So I think for the Sangha we have to be very accepting of the way everybody is, which is not easy to do, always.

[29:04]

Accepting doesn't mean that we're not critical. There's critical and critical. We have to admonish someone, but at the same time, we're not just being critical. Because at the same time that we may be critical, we're still open. And we have to be critical with goodwill if we are critical. But at the same time, we really have to accept everyone the way they are. And that way we can accept ourselves the way we are. And when we accept ourselves the way we are, then we can accept that other people's view of us. And when someone says, you know, you're like this, we have to be able to accept that, which is very hard.

[30:08]

Criticism is the hardest thing to accept. And when criticism comes our way, then immediately ego rises up. puts up a defense. So what we need to look at is ego. What am I defending? You know, sometimes we say, if I'm just accepting, people will run over me. You know, if I just accept everything, people will run over me. But then the question is, who is there to run over? That's the big question. Who is there to run over?

[31:10]

So who is self? how to treat everyone compassionately, which doesn't necessarily mean in a way they like. So compassion has various aspects, and one aspect of compassion is helping somebody in a way that they don't like. So criticism may be compassionate, How do you criticize someone in a compassionate way? Or how do you let them know something in a compassionate way? At the same time that you're letting them know something, you also are doing it in a way that the person feels accepted and not defensive.

[32:16]

So how can you do something and how do you disarm someone and at the same time give them something that may not be easy to swallow. Because as soon as someone is pushed against, as soon as someone is criticized, they become defensive and then their back is against the wall and there's no way to relate. I read in the paper, I think it was yesterday, you know, there's this Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Arabs and the Jews, you know, both claim this as their holiest place, you know, so the Arabs are there stoning the Jews, you know, who are saying, this is our place, you know, and we're going to pray at the wall, blah, blah, blah. there's no way to do anything except throw stones.

[33:25]

This is the most critical part of that whole process in the Middle East, is the dome of the rock and the place that both, it's narrowed down to this one spot where the Jews and the Arabs have to do something. They have to let go and accept each other. Otherwise, they have to destroy each other. It's one or the other. And it's come down to that, just that one little spot. Who's going to live in Jerusalem? Totally stupid. but they can't let go of the, it's my place. It's my place. That's a big go on. And until they learn how to treat each other with respect and accept each other and each other's differences and share this one spot,

[34:43]

it's just going to be mayhem. But they have to do it. They have to drop the ego, drop their religious ego, drop their national ego, let go of self. It's a great lesson for everybody. I think it's a great lesson for the world, because the world is becoming one place, and the sangha is becoming international. So, eventually, no one will own anything. And yet, wherever we are, that's our place.

[35:53]

But it's not just our place. So it's an interesting kind of evolution, if it works. The ultimate evolution is that everything will be integrated. Everybody will be integrated. So we see these really tough situations. And actually we have a very easy situation here. How do we integrate ourself with each other and how do we let go of ego and self in order to harmonize? So we can't criticize unless we do something ourselves.

[36:57]

The answer to our critical mind is to work on harmonizing and letting go of self-centeredness. Also, I think that our practice, even though it's just our practice, has sent a message to our surroundings. There was a Thai monk I read in the paper, in his 80s, and he's a forest monk. You know, he does Zazen all day long, I guess. But he's very highly revered in Thailand, which is a Buddhist country, and monks still have some respect there.

[38:00]

And, of course, the government has been very corrupt and the economy went plummeting. And so he said, I want all of the people in Thailand to contribute some money to the economy or else if they don't do that, I'll leave this body. And so 100,000 people lined up to give him money day after day. And it's not that the economy rose up, but it lifted their spirits. And the economy did rise up. And he challenged the government And the government officials bowed down, even though he was criticizing them. And he demanded their ouster. I can't remember whether they left or not.

[39:03]

But he changed the whole economy of the country just by saying that everybody should contribute something, some money, the jewelry, rings, money. hundred thousand people lined up outside his ashram contributing. So if there is integrity someplace, it has far-reaching effects everywhere. So if you ask me what I'd be working on, I think I'd be working on integrity.

[39:59]

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