Okay, today I would like to talk about attention and attachment, really fundamentals of Zen practice and basically Buddhism too. As a matter of fact, number one is Buddhism and second is Zen. In some ways, Buddhism is so uh thorough and far-reaching that sometimes the simplicity of the message gets lost in all the details so always always keep coming back to no matter how um mysterious the the teaching is or how confusing or how elaborate or how difficult to grasp um that It always comes back to the Second Noble Truth, which is that the reason that we're having difficulties and that we're unhappy is because we hold on to everything.

[01:07]

We hold on to stuff. We don't want to let go. It always comes back to that, no matter how sophisticated we are and how long we practice, it always comes back to this really simple truth. So, that's where the attachment comes in. And attention is just common to all Buddhist practices. It's really paying attention. In Zen, we don't talk about attention per se so much, whereas in Vipassana practice or Theravadan practice, it's talked about more elaborately and in more detail. And so I want to talk about our Zen attention and Zen practice, but also looking through the lens of Vipassana practice, too. Because I think that when we look at what somebody else's emphasis is, it helps us to see our own emphasis.

[02:08]

I've been going to a Vipassana group in Benicia for maybe 15 or more years, twice a year, giving talks. And I usually give a talk on a Zen theme, which I really enjoy and they enjoy it because it's mixing, you know, I'm discussing Zen, their Vipassana, and we see the similarity and we see the differences, but the similarities and the congruencies are always more fundamental and strong than the differences. And it's just enjoyable to share that with a group that doesn't have our particular style and find out it's like, It's like meeting distant relatives that you haven't seen for a while, and yet you have the same common ancestors. And when you get together, you start realizing your commonality, and then also how you're different. And both are helpful to understanding what we're doing. The Benicia group, Megan Collins was the first one to go out there.

[03:18]

She lived out in Benicia for quite a while. Hozon's been out there for a couple of talks. Mary Mosine has as well for a number of talks. So we've had some interaction with that group, which is basically, they don't have a central teacher, and they've managed to exist for at least 20, 25 years, just cooperatively meeting in the downstairs of a church in Benicia. So I want to read you, you know, Kika and I have been helping Sojin edit a book of his memoirs and his lectures. And the lectures have been selected by a number of BDC students who looked at them and gave us their opinion about which ones were the best. And we selected about 35 of those, going back like, gee, 35, 40 years. And then I put that together with his memoir. So I looked over his previous talks and I went back to a talk in 1985 where he talked about the four foundations of mindfulness.

[04:28]

He doesn't talk about mindfulness per se very much. So this is a little unusual talk for him, but it's good. And I'll just read you about a long paragraph from that talk. Recently, people have become Zen people Recently people have become, at least Zen students have become, very interested in mindfulness practice. And sometimes there's a feeling that mindfulness practice is something different than Zazen practice. People say, well, there's Zazen practice and then there's mindfulness practice, as if they were two different things. So I want to talk today a little bit about mindfulness practice and Zazen. In the mindfulness sutra, the Satipatthana Sutra, Buddha mentions four ways to practice mindfulness through the body, the mindfulness of the body and actions of the body, mindfulness of feelings, mindfulness of consciousness or mental states,

[05:39]

uh consciousness of the dharmas which means consciousness or awareness of what is buddhism or what is the dharma or what are the various practices that lead to enlightenment or bring out our enlightened nature so these are four ways that we practice mindfulness and in zen practice we do them all constantly and in zazen we do them all everything is included just in sitting It's good and important to have knowledge or understand the four foundations. Sometimes feel that when we say just zazen, that we don't include intellectual understanding. But mindfulness of the dharmas means intellectual understanding. It includes intellectual understanding as mindfulness. You can practice zazen, just zazen, up to a certain point. But if you don't have some intellectual understanding, if you don't know what the dharmas are, then it's easy to get confused, mentally confused or lost.

[06:41]

So I agree with everything he said there. This is given, you know, this is like 35 years ago, so if he were to say the same thing today, he would probably word it differently. But that's what he said then, and it makes sense to me. To me, what's really interesting about attention, from a papasana point of view, is what they call bare attention. And bare attention is just paying attention to what's in front of us, but with no commentary going on. No evaluation, no judgment, and no commentary. Just simply paying attention just letting the attention take over rather than our self-reference or how it fits into something else or in the past or this or that. So without a thought process going on, how do we actually allow ourselves just to pay attention to something very simply?

[07:50]

I think actually in our society for sure, or at least in my perception of it for sure, the hardest thing is for us just to be simple. Our minds are so complex, and fantastically, I mean, we have this capability of just thoughts and emotions just being so variable and subtle and nuanced, and then it's stimulating, you know, we get the stimulation from all that, just to be simple. And just to allow our attention to be there without having to do anything with it is hard. It's almost like the simplest thing is the hardest thing. And that's always interested me, why that is. I'm even not even concerned why it is. I noticed that in my way of observing, that's what I observe. So, bear attention.

[08:55]

is actually like... I don't know what that is. So bear attention is like, in a way, it's like beginner's mind. You know, beginner's mind, send mind to beginner's mind, this is a phrase we all really know well. It's almost become, not really a cliche, But it's like part of our culture. Oh yeah, Zen mind, beginner's mind. But bare attention is like beginner's mind. That, you know, we don't have any expectation or assumptions. We're just open to whatever is happening. Again, it's really simple. It's not complicated. But it's complicated because we're so complicated. But if we can allow ourselves just to be open without any qualification, just paying attention.

[09:59]

That's my understanding of beginner's mind. It's an open mind which is available for whatever's appearing and happening. In Dogen's introduction to zazen, actually, fukan zazengi, The key phrase in that short fascicle is, let go of the workings of the conscious mind, the gauging of all thoughts and views. That's bear attention. Let go of the workings of the conscious mind, the gauging of all thoughts and views. And that's also what we mean when we talk about chikantaza, or just sitting. It's just sitting. It's not meditating so that we'll be enlightened, or meditating so that we'll improve ourselves, which we would all like.

[11:09]

Who wouldn't like to improve themselves? But Suzuki Roshi, in a number of the talks, points out that that desire for self-improvement is also a barrier to just paying attention to what's actually happening. And seeing things as they actually are, rather than trying to get things to be how we would like to be. So, shikantaza is just sitting. And I don't really think that's so different from bare attention in the vipassana world. It's just that that we actually made a practice out of it, and then we don't talk about it very much. We just do it. Because when you start talking about bare attention, then there's a whole, if you really go into it intricately, there's a whole chain of things that happen with our attention, our perception, our thoughts, process, one thing leads to another.

[12:14]

I just want to mention a... EQ... I want to mention something which kind of a... I don't know what the word is. EQ was a contrarian monk. back in, I believe it was the 15th century. And he kind of flaunted all of the orthodoxy of Zen practice in many ways. He didn't exactly follow the Buddhist precepts either, but he was a brilliant practitioner. And there's a little story about him with attention. So I'll read it to you. One day a man of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyu, Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?

[13:28]

We should say that to Sojin. You know, can you give us some maxims of the highest wisdom? And Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word, attention. Is that all? asked the man. Will you not add something more? In other words, that's not enough. Ikkyu then wrote twice, running, attention, attention. Well, remarked the man, rather irritably, I really don't see much depth or subtlety in what you've just written. So then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times, running, attention, attention, attention. Half-angered, the man demanded, what does that word attention mean, anyway? In other words, tell us something about it. And EQ answered, attention means attention. So he didn't want to elaborate with comparisons, perceptions, references, and all the rest.

[14:43]

He just wanted to get this person to just allow themselves to be. And we're not used to doing that. We're always used to interpreting and referencing and perceiving, and we need to. As humans, that's absolutely what we need to do. But we do it so much that we lose sight of the simplicity of just paying attention, which also involves listening to what people are saying. So much of the time when somebody is talking, we have a feeling. Oh, we like what they're saying. We don't like what they're saying, we're critical of what they're saying, or, boy, that's really good what they're saying. And rather than just listening to what they're saying, or if what they're saying is boring, we tune out. So we have our ways of avoiding paying attention when, let's see, when we don't just want to stay there as is.

[15:49]

I need to, I think I'm gonna I'm trying to think how to not run out of time and say what I want to say and allow time for questioning. I just first of all want to read something from Sojan, one more short paragraph, about attention.

[17:27]

He says, So each one of those little dips and rises is a separate mental state. In zazen you can watch the process very closely. If you're very attentive you can see how thoughts arise in your mind and how mental states come and go, modify and so forth. And in zazen, sometimes our thinking mind takes over, and so we lose our awareness. Oftentimes, I would say. And in our daily life, our thinking mind is going all the time. Usually, our thinking mind is going all the time. We're always creating something. In zazen, we stop the creative process of thinking mind, or we narrow it down. And incidentally, sometimes now in Vipassana groups, they prefer the word narrow attention to bare attention. There's also broad attention, which is more like mindfulness. But what we're talking about now is narrow attention.

[18:34]

But in our daily life, I think the hardest thing is to watch our states of mind or to be aware of our states of mind. And I would say, I would add to that non-judgmentally, not using it as a mirror of me, but just paying attention to that. Because they're changing so fast and we get into a situation where we have to move very quickly. But to be able to notice or have awareness of our changing states of mind means to step back a little bit, not watch, but have awareness. So I'd like to talk about an issue that, it's more than an issue, it's a fundamental reality of our life, that Sojin has scheduled two sessions on Thursday nights about birth and death.

[19:42]

And one's coming up, the second one is coming up this coming Thursday. So I just wanted to show you a kind of a contrast between the Zen way of understanding birth and death and a more maybe Theravadan or I don't know if I'd even say call it Vipassana, but a Theravadan way of understanding birth and death from the sutra. So let's just say a sutra way of talking about birth and death and a Zen way in a call-on of talking about birth and death from the point of view of attention. Where does our attention focus? How does our mind work and our emotions work as we try to cope with birth and death? So there's a...

[20:46]

A sutra, and I won't, a sutra is only several pages long, but these sutras are dense, and a lot of detail, so I'm not gonna read you the sutra. But it's called the Anathapindaka Sutra, and it's in the Middle Length Sayings. It's relatively short, and it's relatively simple. Anathapandika is a lay monk, not a monk, he's just a lay person. And on his property, Buddha and his retinue have come and are camped out there while they give talks in the nearby town. Anathapindaka is dying and he's in pain and he's in great discomfort. And so he goes and mentions, he has an audience with Buddha and says, This is what's happening to me." And just states that, but doesn't take more time to have a conversation.

[21:51]

And then he goes to Shariputra and says the same thing. And Shariputra says, okay, well, I'll come over to your house and we can discuss it. So Shariputra, with Ananda in attendance, comes over to Anathapindika's house and has a discussion with him about birth and death. And what he does is he goes through at least 11 different types of clinging that we all do. I don't know if I've written them down. Yeah, more or less. And each one of them is very simple. He says, okay, you have to not attach to this. and you have to not attach to this, and you have to not attach to this. So he just reads off a litany of the hardest things that are for us to let go of.

[22:54]

Our senses, our objects of our senses, our sense consciousness, let go of the skandhas, the jhana states, let go of the world, consciousness not depending on the world, and all the various elements that take like a page and a half to lay out what Anathapindika needs to let go of. And of course, because it's a sutra and everything works out, it works. Anathapindika says, oh, thank you so much. You know, I really feel so much better. And so I understand what you're saying. And Shariputra, and Ananda leave and then Anathapindika dies. And they give the sutra a happy ending because he goes to Sita heaven and comes back as a young prince and thanks Buddha and Shariputra and Ananda for all their help and then disappears.

[24:03]

So that's a sutra way of dealing with birth and death. It doesn't really get into the nature of it But it's like, all you have to do is just let go and it'll be alright. Just let go. That's the message. Very straightforward, very simple. A Zen version of this is a koan that... Let's see where this is... I think I'll just have to remember it.

[25:17]

So I see what happened. So I'm going to simplify it because from memory, I don't want to mess up the details too much. So I'll simplify it. There are two co-practitioners, These are all, these are ultimately students of Dizong. And their names are very similar to each other, but I'll just call one, they're Dharma brothers, but... Oh, actually I have it here. So they're Dharma brothers, and... Shin San Shu is the senior of the two.

[26:20]

And he's more mature and has a longer experience. And forget the experience, he just is more mature in his practice. And Shu San Shu is Dharma brother who is not quite up to speed. So Shin San, Shin Sanchu says, after one has clearly known the unborn nature of life, what is it that still makes one to stay in life? In other words, even though we have some really good understanding of birth and death, and we see that there's no birth, no death, we see that it's all one thing, However we want to conceive of it, we have a good understanding of it.

[27:21]

Even though that's so, still, after one has clearly known the unborn nature of life, what is it that still makes one to stay in life? In other words, even though we understand the unborn quality of our life, and I'll explain that in a minute, Why emotionally do we still hold on to our life? So that's the question he's posing to him. And when he says unborn, my understanding of what he means by unborn is that since there's no own being here, you all, And I am just a combination of things that are constantly changing. And there's no central owner. We think there is.

[28:22]

We imagine one, which is our ego. But really, there's no central owner. So, because there's no own being, you could say, in a sense, that we never even were born. There's no own being there to be born. So there's no own being to die, either. So if there's nothing to be born, there's nothing to die. So that's what they're basically conceptually talking about in terms of unborn. If you wanna learn more about the unborn, you can check in with Bankei, B-A-N-K-E-I, I think, a Japanese monk of, I forget what century he was in, probably the 19th, I'm not sure, maybe 18th century, 17th century. um and his whole thing was the unborn there's a whole book on unborn with banke and uh he's quite good and he just that's his it's a one note samba that's all he talks about is the unborn buddha nature so that's the question that's a that the older monk is um posing to the younger monk okay even though you you have all this down still what what do you do about being

[29:42]

emotionally attached to your life. And the monk says, the younger monk says, the bamboo shoot necessarily becomes a bamboo, but is it possible to make a bamboo rope out of a bamboo shoot? What he means is that he's like a bamboo shoot, He's not quite strong enough to be made into a rope yet. He has potential. He can get there later. But right now, it won't work to try to make him into a rope. He just has to do some more growing. And then the older monk says, well, later, you will come to realization by yourself. In other words, you don't quite get it. But later, by yourself, you'll get it. So then the younger monk says, well, that's my view, how do you see it?

[30:50]

And then the older monk says, my view is just as I said, Shin said, the older monk said, and they're standing in the temple, the older monk says, this is the steward's quarters and this is the cook's quarters. And that's the end of the conversation. So this is like a typical or enigmatic Zen koan where he's not really answering the question, it sounds like, but he's actually demoing the question. His demonstration is he's just paying attention to where he is right at that moment. That's the doorway, that's the window. It's... It's a little crazy because he's not responding directly to the question about how do you handle birth and death? How do you accept that, genuinely accept that, not just intellectually?

[32:02]

And he says, the doorway's right there, the window's right there. If you just see what's right in front of us, if we just see what's right in front of us and really see it, there's not a problem. It's because we want everything to be a little different, even if it's subtle. We want things to be different than they are. Which doesn't mean that you have to accept injustice or all the things that are going wrong in the world and just go along with everything. But in your own being, or my own being to accept where I'm at right now is important and not, I wish I were in some different place. So that's what he's demoing that quality. Here's the window, there's the door. It's right in front of us. And the younger student just bows to him.

[33:05]

So, In a sense, this is just bare attention, although there's much more substance to this than when we just talk from a Vipassana point of view about the dynamics of bare attention. And the Zen koans are all about, over and over and over again, the koans are really about, especially the Book of Serenity, are about breaking through our conceptual framework, not relying on our conceptual framework, and using more of our attentive and intuitive framework. And case after case is going in this direction. And they're all different, actually. It's brilliant in that they're all a little bit different, and they emphasize different aspects

[34:12]

But it always gets down to that one person in the case usually is trying to solve the problem by figuring it out or by using common sense. And they're not allowing themselves to be simple enough or vulnerable enough to just allow their own attention and their intuition to just work and follow that wherever that goes. So oftentimes the answer to the case seems a little disconnected or strange or weird. But the reason is because they're trying to express something which As long as, as soon as you make it conceptual like I'm doing, as soon as you make it conceptual, it's not what they're pointing at.

[35:19]

Let's see, we have a few more minutes here. There's another case, a Zen case that's Maybe the most well-known koan for Sojo Zen is, ordinary mind is the way. It's one I like a lot. And I think Susan Marvin, that was her, was that Susan's? Yeah, I think, no, that wasn't Susan's. It was Carol's, it was Carol's Shuso koan that she was working with. And I have a copy of it because I'm bad at remembering it in an accurate way. And most of you probably heard this before, but it's short.

[36:23]

Joshu earnestly asked Nansen, what is the way? Nansen said, the ordinary mind is the way. Joshu said, should I direct myself toward it or not? And Nansen said, if you try to turn Toward it, you go against it. I think about batteries. If you turn a positive terminal on a battery to another positive terminal on another battery, they keep pushing each other away. Joshu said, if I do not try to turn toward it, how can I know that that is the way? Nansen said, the way does not belong to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion. not knowing is a blank consciousness when you have really reached the true way beyond all doubt you will find it as vast and boundless as the great empty permanent that's an interesting translation um this is a koan yamada or yamada koan saying that okay how can it be talked about on a level of right or wrong

[37:37]

At these words, Joshu was suddenly enlightened. Again, most of you have heard this at least once. The thing that we usually talk about in this case is the non-duality of knowing and not knowing. That knowing is delusion, not knowing is a blank mind, or sometimes they say, indifference, or sometimes you say ignorance. But that duality of knowing and not knowing is what we often focus on. And also, going towards it, and if you go towards it, it goes away from you. So that also... those dualistic situations. And so, we try to get to the non-dualistic aspect in this case, When I asked Sojin in Shosan, Dhyanavasi Sheen, what is ordinary mind?

[38:43]

He said, holy. Which I thought was really irritating, actually. But really, what he's getting at is that the duality between ordinary and holy is questionable. You know, this is ordinary and that's holy. Well, yeah, for humans, we need to do that kind of discrimination, but there's nothing fundamental, holy, or ordinary about anything. They're just as they are. We give it those meanings. There's a verse that goes through this case that goes, which I've always really liked. The verse is by, this is a Mu'mun Khan case so the verses by muman uh the spring flowers the moon and autumn the cool breezes of summer the winter snow if idle concerns do not cloud the mind this is a person's happiest season i love the simplicity of this case which is basically if you know they're talking of idle concerns if we just let go of

[39:59]

that the elaborations that we do mentally, whatever we're doing is fine. We're just there. And in a sense you could say that's non-dual. But I've always felt that this is a kind of more... I don't know a good word for it. It's more about open mind. That with an open mind we can pay attention and just enjoy what we're doing. Rather than, you know, actually we kind of like to rain because we need it. But, it's raining, you know, I was going to go out for a walk today but I can't do it. You know, I wish it wasn't raining. So, excuse my rambling quality.

[41:03]

I'm aware of that. So if you have any thoughts or questions, challenges, or different ways of seeing than I've mentioned, please come forth. Peter Overton, I invite you to unmute yourself and ask a question. OK. Hi, Ron. Thanks very much for your talk. I really enjoy hearing you speak. Thank you. I wanted to ask a question that's come up for me in connection with the two sides of things you were talking about. Bare attention or just seeing clearly without distractions, so to speak. And that is a kind of quality or value or practice that we understand. And the question I have is moving forward from there into what we often refer to as an appropriate response. What is the connection between these things?

[42:04]

And leaving aside the question of, for now anyway, of whether not seeing clearly is in fact the appropriate response, but anyway. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. You know, that's another aspect of, I think if we are able to take some time and be attentive, how we respond next is going to be more in tune with what's actually happening. How do you recognize next? One thing follows another. Okay. An example might be... Say you're having a political argument, and boy, you really disagree with what somebody is saying. And... You have your point of view, they have their point of view. If you just pause and let it be open without, I gotta get my point of view across, then when you respond to that person and the differences between you, I think that you can be more in touch with what they're saying and what you're saying in a more in touch way.

[43:26]

And Also, by the way, what you're mentioning, that activity is really a part of mindfulness practice. They don't call it an appropriate response, but they have another kind of phrase for it. But that's a really important part of mindfulness practice is how you respond to situations mindfully. But I'm saying or suggesting that paying attention And just an open-minded attention to begin with, and hopefully sustaining, allows us to be more in touch with what people are saying and to listen to what they're saying. I really like the pause. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Judy Fleischman, I invite you to unmute yourself and ask a question. Thank you, Rod. I'm actually flowing from that interchange just now.

[44:28]

I had this image while you were speaking when you said the words, letting go, of letting go like this. Actually, the body continued to move to gather in. So something like the in-breath always flows with the out-breath and it's this birth, death, birth, death. letting go, what I'm experiencing in my arms as including everything. And so I was wondering, especially because of your life path including so much around the body, you know, from massage to all the wonderful yoga classes you've taught us and stretching, how do you see that including everything and letting go, and particularly how it relates to our buddhisatva vow? That's such a big question, I don't know how to answer it. Can you slice off a little chunk of that?

[45:31]

How do letting go and include everything meet? How to let go and include everything? Well, you can include everything that we're aware of. We can include everything we're aware of. So if that's what you mean by everything... Yeah, we can include everything that we're aware of. And the more open our awareness is, the more we can include. Heiko, I invite you to unmute yourself and ask a question. Thank you, Ron. What a wonderfully calming and simple talk. I really appreciate it.

[46:32]

Also, you may notice on my screen, your description of birth and death inspired me to change my pronouns to we and us. But that's not my question. When you talked about idle thoughts, It occurred to me, my experience sitting in Zazen, for example, worrying about how this piece of wood is going to be cut or that client is going to be dealt with. They're not in my immediate response field at that time. And I wonder, you know, they're like the window and the door are in your case. Is that what you mean by idle thoughts? Or could you address that a little bit more? Yeah, if you're just sitting, if you're just doing zazen, those are idle thoughts. If you're working on your project, then it's not an idle thought. It's a part of your project, but it depends what your intention is.

[47:38]

I mean, you could just sit on the couch. You know, if we just sat down on the couch, and I'm gonna sit down on the couch, and I'm gonna think about that project and how to do that project. That would be fine, no problem. That's not an idle thought. It's very deliberate. But if your objective is just to sit still and be aware without any agenda other than to be aware, then starting to think about are you going to cut the wood this way or that way, three days from now over in Walnut Creek, it is an idle thought. Thank you. So would you say that when we're in the face of others, anything but attending to them is idle? Or how would you address the moment of another? You mean when you're relating to somebody? I'm not quite sure what you're... When they're in your response field and you're talking, what are idle thoughts in those times?

[48:42]

Oh, I see what you're saying. I'd say if you separate out from listening or talking, if you're separating out and sort of watching and strategizing in some way, even if it's very subtle, that's what I would call an idle thought. When we kind of withdraw from what we're doing, and go off into our mental space is an idle thought. There's nothing wrong with mental space. It's fine. We're amazing what we can do with our minds. But if it's not necessary, then just give it a rest. That's the way I see it. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. OK. Looks like we're out of time. This is fun. We have to stop, so thank you very much for listening.

[49:46]

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