This morning we're happy to have as our guest Paul Haller who has been here several times before. Paul is a priest at San Francisco Zen Center and he's presently the So this morning I thought I would talk, or use as a starting point, a Zen story from the Mumonkan, and it's a very short story, and then I'll explain what my own thinking, how I came to use Mumonkan, the English name for it, is the gateless gate.

[01:12]

Zen practice is thought of as passing through a gate that was never there in the first place. This is about a famous teacher called Young Men, who's quoted in many koans, many stories. A young man said, see how vast and wide the world is, why do you put on your robe at the sound of the bell? So, I would paraphrase it by saying, the world is so vast, Why do you limit yourself by doing something as particular as a Zen practice? And in many ways this is a question we keep coming back to.

[02:16]

What prompted me to think about this was a couple of weeks ago I got a letter from an organization that was called five and five, I think. Anyway, what they were promoting was a Sabbath weekend. And it made me think about, do we have a Sabbath? And what is a Sabbath? And so I looked it up in the dictionary. And a Sabbath is a day of rest and worship. And I thought, well, I guess we try to do that all the time. We're always trying to find some ease or stillness or something of that nature. And we're always coming to worship in our own particular way. So somehow that made me think of this coin.

[03:18]

Am I talking loud enough? So in our practice, I would say that we start with the rest part. And that really, when I thought of that, it really made me think quite hard because I think many people like myself who've been at this practice for many years would have a hard time defending that their life is restful. And that actually comes up later in the comment. It's wonderful how these stories that can be 500, 1,000 years old can be so appropriate to exactly how we're leading our lives. But it made me think about that. Is my life restful? Do I have a Sabbath? And to tell you the truth, to be quite honest, I think I have a long way to go in truly

[04:25]

appreciating that question and manifesting it in my life. I find my life quite relentless. By the time I've added what I need to do to what I feel I ought to do to what I want to do, I think I have about a 30-hour day. And I think I try to respond to it with the story I'm going to give you this morning. And I'm not sure it's true. I'm not sure. As I say, I feel like for myself, I have a way to go in terms of taking on a modern life, whatever that is, but taking on the life in the times we live in and the demands of it.

[05:26]

both to just function in the world and the demands of it to respond to the incredible injustice and suffering that surrounds us and that this wonderful modern age of media can present to us so accurately. And then to add that something about how do we express ourselves, you know, how do we make some statement about who we are and have something that feels nourishing or meaningful. So the response I came up with for myself had to do with looking at the heart of our process. And here's a description I'd like to give you. Please bear it in mind and reflect it in terms of how you would phrase it.

[06:31]

And, you know, I'm happy to be questioned on it. As I say, when I look at my own life, in some ways it's vast and wide, but it seems to have other qualities in there. like a certain busyness. I was thinking of our practice and a statement from Suzuki Roshi came to mind which had something to do with the quality of our activity, the quality with which we do something. And I was thinking about how we cultivate that. And what I would say, I would say that we cultivate through limiting our activity, to holding still, to discovering directly something about a quality of activity, to discovering something of entering the zendo.

[07:47]

and sliding the bolt, stepping in, and being in the zendo. Being, opening the door, being, entering, and being in the zendo. There's something, some way in which we can participate in activity that has quality to it. And traditionally, the gateless gate that we pass through to discover this has to do with holding still. It has to do with initially finding some space in the busyness of our life to investigate what it is to hold still. And in our tradition we rely heavily on on sitting still, on stilling our mind, on easing our breathing and holding our body still.

[08:59]

So this is very much something that we use to cultivate this quality. And as we look through the teachings, we find it all over the place. Katagiri Roshi, a teacher who's very influential in the Bay Area and in Minnesota, he described it as returning to silence. So when we sit, our intention, our aspiration is towards some stillness, some limitation. There's a saying in Zen that we enter Zen through a very small doorway. And what it means is that we let go of our arrogance, we let go of our busyness, and we enter in a very particular way.

[10:08]

So there's something about the practice of meditation that is both exacting and particular. And as I say, as we pass through this gate, this gate, we get an inkling of the quality of expression that it's trying to introduce us to. And sometimes, like walking, entering into the zendo, we just do it and we don't even notice. And sometimes we struggle like crazy and all we see is busyness. We just see the way we miss the mark. For those of us who practice regularly, we know pretty well that that's an ingredient of what we're doing, is noticing how we miss the mark.

[11:13]

So when we first start to sit, it's not uncommon for someone to come back and say, I'm not sure this is working for me. I'm not sure whether my mind, my mind doesn't seem to be getting calmer, it seems to be getting busier. And what it is, as we start to notice when we pay attention, just what's going on in the first place, how busy it is, how active it is, how much it's not holding still. And our effort to meet that is very much some kind of constant coming back. Your mind gets scattered. You come back. Your mudra slips. Your back slumps, you straighten it up. You follow your breathing, you forget your breathing. You go back to your breathing. And this is pretty much how it goes. It has this sort of quality of not quite hitting the mark.

[12:23]

The saying in Zen is one continuous mistake. But this is actually an accomplishment. Because we started to notice something. We started to come back. We started to notice where we are in relation to stillness. We started to notice where we are in relation to our breathing, our mudra, our posture. And maybe at this stage in our practice, which is also every stage in our practice, but when we first start to explore it, it has some quality of right and wrong. It's wrong to forget my breathing.

[13:26]

I'll try to do the right thing and follow my breathing or it's wrong to not sit up straight and I'll try to do the right thing or the virtuous thing or whatever. And then as we practice some more, usually we have a little glimpse, a little snippet of feeling connected. And sometimes we feel connected through our body, sometimes through our breathing, sometimes through our mental disposition. And each one of those little snippets of connection calls up its own quality of being. Sometimes when we feel connected to our body, our body feels light and pliable. Sitting becomes easeful. it can become a sensation of pleasure just to sit there sometimes when we connect to our breathing we can feel relief we can feel a certain flow a certain dropping away of busyness in our own

[14:54]

And sometimes when we connect to our mind, we feel connected. We feel the bolt slide in the door. We feel the light coming in the window, certain ambience in the Zen dharma, quiet. So these moments come up for us. And sometimes we notice and sometimes we don't. And when we notice, we feel reassured. We feel we're getting a payback. We feel that And sometimes they produce a very helpful perspective on our practice.

[16:06]

Like when we feel a sense of relief, when we let go of some of our busyness directly in our body, in our breath, it really teaches us something about our usual busyness. It teaches us something about It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this busy, this tense. However, impermanence being what it is, these feelings go along with all the other feelings, with all the other experiences and sensations. And we return to the more usual activity of our practice. However, we bring back to it some sensibility, some sensibility that it doesn't need to be a desperate struggle, a desperate activity.

[17:22]

And I think we discover this as we're willing to practice with unpleasant sensation. The adversity and anyone I think who sat a one day sitting or a seven days as she knows the adversity of sustaining your effort without any of those feel goods as this hand Dorsey would call them. A priest who's deceased now at Zinzentum, he described, he categorized these sensations of quality of being as feel-goods. So we come back to our more usual way of being. without holding on to a sense of this is wrong and I'm just sitting here waiting for when I really

[18:30]

In the Sutras, where everything is codified in the Vasudhi Magga, there are four layers or four aspects. And this roughly corresponds with them. When you go from the initial striving to a sense of ease and joy and rapture, to a sense of equanimity, when you just do it. You just sit. And this is very much what we try to cultivate in our practice. And this is why we keep beating to death the phrase, just sitting. Because we're trying to point towards not being contingent upon having to feel good. We're trying not to be contingent upon some triumph of right over wrong, or some some trance of virtue over whatever, evil, however we construe it, however we concoct the appropriate way to synthesize it versus the inappropriate way to synthesize it.

[19:47]

So we go through our practice and hopefully as we do it, this is what we're refining. So this is what Jungman is pointing at. He's pointing at... He's putting up a question to keep us refining our practice, to keep us looking at how we sit. Also the particularity, because this is the power of our practice, is its particularity. It's the effort. to sit up straight. It's the effort to hold up our mudra. It's the effort to let our breathing flow and let our thoughts come and go. It shows us where we are. It shows us the exactness of our state of being. It shows us our continuous mistake. And when we

[20:54]

engage in that exactness. We engage in it a particular way. We engage in it without assumptions, without assumptions that that there's a certain result, that that we know how to do it, that we know what it's going to produce. So it's this odd mixture of exactness based on a vast and wide world. So this is what young man is asking. He's saying, can you practice and appreciate what you're bringing to it, appreciate your disposition, appreciate how you sit, how both in the particular and how in the attitude and the effort to cultivate.

[22:10]

So with each of these stories there is a verse, many commentaries and then a small verse. So I'd like to read the commentary. And this is by Wu Men who put together the book. of these koans. And Wu Men says, all you Zen students training in the way, don't be victimized by sounds, don't follow up on forms. So our practice is exact. When we hit this bell, we respond a certain way. When we enter the Zen leave is in, but we do it a certain way. So it's both exacting in our sitting and it's exacting in what we surround this sitting with, how we bring it into being, literally.

[23:13]

And Wu Man says, don't be victimized by this. He's saying, these are not there to make your life more busy. These are not there to say, Now you know what right and wrong is. These are not there to alleviate careful examination. It's not a matter of mindless conformity. So don't be victimized by the signs and the forms of this practice. Then he says, you may have realization on hearing a sign or enlightenment on seeing a form. That's natural. So as we practice, we'll have our moments.

[24:19]

And As I say, we may not even notice them. We might not even notice the ease with which we entered the zen dome. The uncluttered way we just put ourselves across the threshold. That's how natural it is. And we may know this, and we may be greatly inspired, and it may be the turning point in our practice. From then on, we might practice twice as hard. We might cherish that moment and look to it as a guiding light, as a resource, as an affirmation. And that's natural too. But don't you know that true Zen students can ride sounds in real forms? They see all and sundry clearly and they handle each and everything deftly. So this gets us back to

[25:38]

woman's probing, I do we use the forms. And for not to be victimized by them, I do we use them. I should we use them. It's should even an acceptable word. True Zen students can ride signs and reveal forms. They see all and sundry clearly, and they handle each and everything deftly. So what is it to handle each and everything deftly? What is it to sit deftly? What is it to sit create a Sabbath in the midst of your city without denying one continuous mistake, without blocking it out.

[26:51]

Perhaps you're such a person. Tell me, does a sign come to the ear, or does the ear go to the sign? And if you transcended sound and silence, what do you say at such a point? If you listen with your ear, it's hard to understand. If you hear with your eye, you're intimate at last. So it's very interesting that his final instruction, the final point that he wants to give is back right into the exactness of our practice, the exactness of paying attention. And then he takes conventional paying attention and he turns it backwards. If you hear with your eyes, So what does it mean to ask the question, does the ear come to the sign or does the sign go to the ear?

[28:14]

What it means is can you notice exactly what's happening? Can you notice the difference between the ear going to the side and the side coming to the ear? Our practice is exacting, and that's what makes it hard. And in its own peculiar way, it is the same activity that same allegiance to that exactness that creates the power to be with that exactness. When we sit we have more capacity to confront who we are both physically and mentally.

[29:27]

And we are confronted more exactly with who we are physically and mentally. And it puts us deeper into ourselves. It helps us explore and create a sense of trust. A sense that in a primal way the solution is not outside of ourselves. You know, in many places in our culture, we're asked, we're given the image that the solution is somewhere else. Buy this and it will create satisfaction. Buy this and it will alleviate the pain. Do this and the general disposition of your life will be changed because of its power.

[30:38]

But our sitting draws us back to to a different sensibility. It draws us back to a sensibility that there is reason in trusting facing our life in the moment, that that creates a truthfulness and an empowerment. And most of the time, it's my own experiences, we don't notice this. Most of the time, it's not so evident and then occasionally we see the consequences of it and it's a little surprising and as you practice this is part of what we cultivate in a peculiar way we cultivate what we don't know what we can't quite get at

[31:56]

And I think this is how... This is why a woman says it's hard to understand. Because we're not reaching out and changing the world. You know, I remember when the Gulf War was on, someone said to me, When I see all this amazing array of armaments and almost a million men and women ready to battle each other, and I think of myself placing my allegiance with this practice, it seems so puny, it seems so insignificant in relation to the power of maybe a hundred billion dollars or fifty billion dollars worth of armaments and almost a million men and women.

[33:07]

And I'm not sure I can answer that directly, but I would say that our practice has a different kind of power. It has a power to create a Sabbath, to draw the individual, to discover who they are, and to foster a sense of confidence in the center of our being, and to break down barriers. between one being and another. And that's a natural consequence when we have the trust in our own being. So that's all I have to say.

[34:22]

So if you have any questions, was the concept of silence and the importance of it, and I seem to hear you saying that it's significant and should be made part of the practice. It seems to me that in my own personal experience, the more I look for silence, the more it seems to run away. I come here, for example, for some of that silence, and I hear, you know, air blowers The more I look for silence, the more it seems to, you know, flee from me. And it destroys my own ability to center myself and calm myself and develop that kind of sound.

[35:32]

I'd be grateful if you'd share some thoughts on that, please, and how you relate to it. Thank you. Well, what I was trying to also communicate was that You know, we could also say another thing. We could say there's no silence and there's no stillness. Because this is an act of existence. Because it has the vibration of life. If you're the only alive thing, in this planet then everything else would be silent. But you're not. So it brings us to this other activity where we look for silence and we look for stillness and we discover noise and we discover activity.

[36:38]

We look for We discover perfection and it challenges us to discover how do we relate to all that. And how we relate to it is by appreciating that that in itself is teaching us. very literally, the energy of life. Both in that term, in that sense, and also in the activity of our own human existence. When we try to sit still, we discover the ways we move. When we try to let our breathing breathe, we discover how we don't do that.

[37:43]

We discover the way we ways that we hold tension in our breathing, the way we influence it. So one way to describe it would be that our aspiration towards stillness and silence calls forth the vast wideness of the world. So it teaches us what existence is. And in Buddhism we say that the perfection of wisdom is the willingness and readiness to be. And this is a learning process. It's a peculiar one continuous mistake. Why do you put all your will to the devil?

[39:06]

Can you say something about Someone's saying to me yesterday that he's 41 and he may only live till he's 60. That's 19 years. And he meant it. And when I think about, sometimes when I think about how little I've accomplished, Um, when I have those moments you described, that's not a question. But, the rest of the 90% of the time, it's, uh, what am I doing here? How am I, how is it that I'm wasting this incredibly precious life by worrying about it?

[40:31]

So, definitely. Well, for a start, I'd say that's a precious question. I mean, all over the place we see these admonitions, don't waste time. And... Yeah, that's what we're juggling in our practice. On one hand, we're sort of providing ourselves not to be complacent. And then on the other hand, we're saying, take it easy. Nothing special. And I think it's... The art of our practice is the right mix, that we should leap into the middle of our lives and we shouldn't get lost in busyness, either leaping through And I think, as I was just saying, you know, when we discover there is no stillness and there is no silence, and we listen to what it teaches us.

[41:52]

And it teaches us a lot. It teaches us the fatality of life. It teaches us the cry of suffering, both our own and others. And it teaches us something about silence and stillness. It teaches us something around ease and peace. And the question then is, how do we sustain that sensibility. How do we sustain what our life is constantly teaching us? And I think our practice, you know, in bare bones way, doesn't offer us much more than inquiry.

[43:08]

to ask the question, to stimulate us to ask the question. And my own thinking on that is because in our practice there's a lot of trust, that if the person, if the being asks the question from a disposition of clarity and composure, it will find its his or her answer. In some of the sutras they talk about each person hears the Dharma according to their need. And I think there's something in our practice that says, discover the penetrating question. So sometimes we talk about question.

[44:17]

Sometimes we talk about trust or faith that this will call forth our life. So what I was trying to say was When we put ourselves into this activity, it draws us in into some sense of trust of the moment. It teaches us about it. And it teaches us to trust it. You know, maybe in common parlance we'd say, love yourself. But you know, in some ways that's a very dangerous expression because it has It sounds like you know what yourself is, and it sounds like it could be construed to have something to do with protect yourself, or pamper yourself, or prefer yourself.

[45:25]

I was at a poetry reading last night about Philip Wayland, and he had a beautiful expression, but I can't remember. And it caught that very thing where he was, he took it and he expressed it quite wonderfully. As he talked about, don't get caught in thinking that love yourself has something to do with protect yourself, pamper yourself, indulge yourself, or hold fast onto what you think yourself is. You see, with loving yourself, But I would say it has something to do with the continuance of our practice, the continuance of this sort of exactness, you know, where Wu Man comes back to just asking this tedious question, does the sign come to your ear, does your ear go to the sign, and you think,

[46:32]

What's the point? How can that help my life? How can that solve the Gulf War? How can that, you know, stop acid rain? How can that, you know, get me a good job? But, um... That's... That's why Zen's hard. Because people ask you things like that. Yeah I'd sort of like to share Because we thought that was the best place to meditate.

[47:40]

And we had rented some space in a college. So from the time he got up in the morning till the night time, we were playing James Brown. And I had to figure out a way to be able to do my practice while this was going on. I mean, we had gone a really long way only to, you know, to the mountains in order to find silence and it wasn't there. One of the things I noticed about it bothering me was the emotion was anger. You know, angry that there was something else going on that was intruding on what it was that I was trying to do.

[48:50]

And the way I made peace with it was, number one, see my connection with the sound, and then just to let it be there while I was doing what I was doing. And pretty soon I could just meditate on anything, you know. I just wanted to share that. I don't know if that helps you because I know like coming back to an urban environment, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on. And if you feel connected with it, also just letting it exist along with you, I just, I find it doesn't bother me very much. That's what it says. Yeah, I think that's a good piece of advice. I think what I was trying to do was just communicate a basic attitude, which was that indeed, even if you go to Ethiopia, there isn't a perfect environment. And what I was trying to link it to is that's a sort of a version of the powers out there.

[49:55]

Because the atmosphere is rarefied. Exactly. And at the heart of our practice is something different. finding a way to manipulate the world and making it to our wishes. The transformation happens when we meet the world, because everything exists in interaction. Kings are hamperless.

[51:01]

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