Good morning. So, this is a time for the big mistake. You know, our practice is very deep and it's not so easy to open our mouth about it without having feelings, strong feelings, that you're making a very serious mistake. So, let me go on with my mistake then. And today we're sitting Sachine one day, one day sitting, so I would like to talk about sitting practice, actually. And kind of keep it within the bounds of that and hopefully say something that might be helpful and encouraging for you in your sitting today.

[01:15]

And if you have any questions about this, please feel free to ask them at any point. I want to start talking about effort. And for that, I would like to quote Suzuki Hiroshi, what he has to say about effort. And he says, strictly speaking, any effort we make is not good for our practice. because it creates waves in our mind. So these are the waves, mind waves, that interfere with our original nature. Or you could say these are the words that interfere from expressing our real being.

[02:23]

It is impossible, however, to attain absolute calmness of our mind without any effort. So, we make an effort to realize this calm mind that underneath these waves is a deeper ocean of experience that actually is what the waves are about anyway. In this realm, there's no subjectivity or objectivity. Our mind is just calm, without even any awareness. This is an interesting point. because we usually think that sitting is about awareness, but here it says, without even any awareness, just calm mind.

[03:41]

In this unawareness, every effort and every... So it is necessary for us to encourage ourselves and to make an effort up to the last moment when all effort disappears. You should keep your mind on your breathing until you're not aware of your breathing. So, in Sashin, we drop our usual activities and come and sit here together for a whole day. And it takes some effort to just get up and get out of bed and come and sit. So the effort kind of begins right there. But there's some resistance that has to be overcome in order to find our calm mind.

[04:55]

And although we speak about calm mind, really what we're doing mostly in Sachine is sitting with our body. So usually we think just of our mind as our mind, which is what gives us trouble in our everyday life. Anxiety, the worry, lack of energy, anger and so on, all the hindrances that arise in our everyday life and that we can notice or not notice. Sometimes we're so immersed in these hindrances that we don't even notice them as such. But if we start practicing, then we start noticing these hindrances as they go in and out of our mind in our daily life. So it seems like in our everyday life what bothers us most is our mind.

[06:14]

Unless you have some physical problem that brings your body to your awareness. Because it seems that the body is kind of natural, spontaneous. The blood is circulating, we're breathing, and so on. It's this wonderful organism. And when there's some misalignment, then there's a symptom that appears, and then it comes to our consciousness. Otherwise, it's just unconscious in the sense of natural, spontaneous, without self-consciousness. So unless there's a sign in our body that tells us about the body, then we don't, we take it for granted.

[07:18]

And then we're dealing with our mind. But in Sashina and Zazen, in order to get through the fetters of our mind, our conditioned mind, our conditioned awareness that we're always relating to objects or internal objects that worry us, people that worry us or make us anxious, angry and so on and so forth. In order to be able to break through this hindrance of our small mind, we come here and we focus on our body. And in this body, through this body, we realize that, we realize our big mind, our calm mind, which is our whole body, is our mind, and our mind is our whole body.

[08:28]

It's us in. So we keep coming back to our breath and to our breathing. And actually that's something that's continuous between, we're always breathing, we're alive. So Zen is just kind of bottom line, just being alive and breathing. That's one of the ways we can tell if something is alive or not, is whether it has breath. Breath of life. So, whether we are sitting or we are walking, we are always breathing. So this is a fundamental connection between Zazen practice and our everyday life.

[09:31]

we can take this awareness of breath with us. And so we make this effort to concentrate on our breath and take it to the point where the effort itself disappears. and then you're not so conscious of the breath and we're back in this natural spontaneous unconscious state where we're just breathing. So Zazen brings up this fundamental question of our body, mind, unity.

[10:39]

What is it? Is it our body or is it our mind? Are we sitting with our body or are we sitting with our mind? It's kind of an irrelevant question. or perhaps a koan, a very relevant koan. And so, Suzuki Roshi answers it as, not one, not two. If you say they're two, that's wrong. If you say they're one, that's wrong too. Because the mind is the mind and the body is the body. and yet the body is the mind and the mind is the body. So when we cross our legs in this posture then also do we have one leg or do we have two legs?

[11:46]

Do we have one arm, do we have two arms, and so on. So, this posture then brings up a lot of difficulty for us. And then becomes kind of the laboratory for understanding our mind or what binds us. And usually what binds us is the ideas or expectations or desires that we have for anything that we may do, including taking this posture.

[13:06]

So we have some pain or difficulty and we usually think, well, okay, there's pain. If we can get beyond the fact that there's pain, because we may also leave at that moment when you realize that What you encounter is, yes, joy, but there's also pain. Pleasure and pain, two sides of the same coin. And that's our small mind. It's what Freud called the pleasure principle. It's seek pleasure and avoid displeasure. Seek pleasure and avoid pain.

[14:20]

So that's our spore mind that's usually giving us a lot of trouble. So we have to get beyond this pleasure brain principle. And so if we encounter Usually, I think, at first, when we first sit, we encounter calmness or samadhi. And we realize our calm mind. We say, oh yeah, this is it. Even if we haven't sat before, we often have had experiences of calm mind or joyful mind, since it's just one of the wholesome dharmas, right?

[15:23]

And the wholesome dharmas may arise by conditions and they are also impermanent. So we've often experienced zazen before we actually did zazen. Then we realize, oh yes, this is it. But then we start sitting and then we realize that it's not so easy or that there's some difficulty actually in assuming this position. And then we may leave at that point and say, well, this is not for me. It's practice. It's not for me. We'll find some other practice maybe that doesn't have this difficulty. But old practices have some difficulty or something that we may find lacking that's not quite right.

[16:26]

So at some point we have to make a choice and take a decision and realize that this sense of lack is in our own mind, or there's something that's not so good about it. our own mind and it's not intrinsic to what we see. So and actually Suzuki Roshi also used to say that it's best if you actually have some difficulty in sitting practice. That if you can sit very easily, right away, it takes longer to actualize the bone of Zen, the marrow of Zen.

[17:39]

and he quotes in Zen beginner's mind the Surangama Sutra where there is given the parable of the four horses and the first horse you've all heard this but for those of you perhaps who haven't heard it I'll mention it the first horse ruts very quickly, even before seeing the shadow of the whip. So that's supposedly, everybody would want to be that, right? That would be equivalent to being able to sit very easily, comfortably, right away. And then the second horse, He runs at seeing the shadow of the whip.

[18:47]

The third horse at feeling the pain of the whip on the skin. And the fourth horse is the horse that runs only when the pain is in the bone, in the marrow. And he says that this fourth horse is actually the most helpful for practice. So, no matter which position we take, there will be some difficulty there that we'll encounter. And being able to find our freedom in that difficulty, in that situation, that's Azen. So, we have some restriction, but

[19:52]

Within that restriction, there is a big sense of freedom. And this is not unrelated to our everyday life, of course, because we're always encountering some obstacle, some problem, minus one problem after the other, after the other, after the other, and so on. So you say, oh, life is terrible. Life is suffering. When is it going to end? Maybe I should commit suicide. Maybe that's the way out. But that's just the way it is. So if we can find our freedom within the limitation of this posture and the restriction in it, especially in Sachine, then the actual problems of everyday life acquire a different perspective.

[21:07]

So, you know, if somebody asks you to do something in a work setting or at home, and then there's kind of this response that you feel, this reaction, it evokes a feeling evokes a thought, fantasy and you have the potential therefore harmony or disharmony in that situation to get into some kind of problem, argument and so on or to find the way to create harmony in that situation so that's kind of a problem or restriction So how we find the freedom in that situation is the same thing as how we find the freedom in sitting Sasa in the posture. So actually that's how this practice in Zendo, which is a moment of sort of dropping everything

[22:25]

and just doing this, it's our kind of monastic moment, finds its natural expression or extension in how we negotiate the daily situations of everyday life with the people close to us, people we work with, people in the street, people on the bus, people on the freeway, Somebody cuts in front of you or you cut in front of somebody. So sometimes you may need to cut in front of somebody, but then do you mind when somebody has to cut in front of you? Because usually it's, we want to be able to go first, but then when somebody wants to go first, we don't want to yield.

[23:27]

So, and then we think, well, see, we have, part of the problem is, which is related to the same thing that I was saying before about small mind, is that we also have this notion of development. And even, we all talk about it as if, you know, perhaps even psychological understanding, and this notion of development, that we're going from stage to stage, and that there's progress, it's getting better somehow. And somehow this Zen practice doesn't seem to go by those rules, it doesn't really actually work that way. So we would think, well, okay, all right, there's pain, okay, there's joy, there's pain,

[24:50]

I can deal with it. But eventually, there will be only joy and no pain. So that's the kind of, that's the developmental trap. And then you think, well, now I can sit pretty comfortably, you know, doing daily zazen. But the sheen is a problem. So maybe I'll just sit daily Zazen and won't sit Sashim. Or a Hirohatsu is a pretty difficult but one day sitting is a piece of cake. So I think then we go through that kind of phase once we've entered the path of practice.

[25:52]

But then, and actually to be able to get through Sashin, we have to give that up because we think, well, we also, what gives us a lot of pain is we think, well, okay, the first two periods, first, I can handle first period, second period, third period, you know, but then, oy baboy, you know, then, It's going to get so much harder, you know, as it goes on, and we'll wait until those last two periods at night, you know. That's... I'm not looking forward to that. Or in Rahatsu, it's okay, the first day is fine, second day okay, and then third, fourth, and fifth, oh yeah, yeah, and sixth and seventh, forget it. But... Actually, then we realize it doesn't really work that way. Just one day sitting is one day sitting.

[27:00]

One period of zazen is just one period of zazen. And you may have as much fate as you're going to have in the first day of rahatsu than you're going to have in the seventh day. Or you can have as much difficulty in the first or second period than in the last period. So I think what that's pointing to is that we have to give up our idea of progress, of first and last, and just fully assume our difficulty. And actually, It's helpful if you can meet this barrier, not only at the end, but actually every day.

[28:10]

So we always have some difficulty, no matter which stage of practice we are. We always have some difficulty, but through practice we also learn to just appreciate that difficulty that we have. And instead of seeing it as a hindrance or a problem that we'd rather not have, then we just include it. in this big, big mind. Recently I've been noticing that my left leg goes completely to sleep in zazen. So Before it was just, there were some, would just go to sleep sometimes.

[29:44]

And now it's going to sleep completely. So, I thought it was a problem. And at first, you know, I started getting worried. Is this something that I should be concerned about? Is it going to get better? And so on. So I went to Mel and I asked him, you know, what about it? Because somebody had told me, oh, you know what Rev says about your legs going to sleep in Zazen. I don't know if Rev really says that or not, but that's what I heard. I said, well, your leg should not go to sleep.

[30:47]

If it goes to sleep, then it's a problem. And I thought I knew better than to worry about something like that. But I still got worried. So I had to kind of catch myself with that. And Milt said, well, you know, his left leg always went to sleep in Zazen. And he's 65 or 60-something, and it's not a problem. And he's in good health, so not to worry. So I think we're all dealing with some part of the body that's kind of giving some problem at a certain point. And that may cause us to worry and create some waves in our mind.

[31:50]

But it's always changing. So it may go to sleep for a while and then it won't. Or maybe it will just continue going to sleep. So we just have to become big enough to include all these changing problems. And actually these problems are ancient twisted karma. So in Zazen we're also working with our karma. And actually Zazen provides a kind of opening for our storehouse consciousness

[33:04]

which is in Buddhism there are all these levels of consciousness and the storehouse consciousness is the mind where all the things that we've done, thought and done, felt. Everything that we think or sense or perceive or experience. It's all being registered in the storehouse consciousness. So everything that we're experiencing is a product of our ancient karma. And zazen provides a kind of an opening for this karma to kind of come out of an unconscious state where it is. We call it consciousness, but it's actually unconscious because we're not really aware of it.

[34:10]

We just live our karma, but are not necessarily aware what has cost it, or how this that we may be experiencing is a karmic effect. So maybe I'll stop there. I think I've said enough. And if you have some questions or comments you'd like to make about what I said, we could try to keep it within the Sheen experience.

[35:21]

I think that may be helpful. Yes, sir. Well, I don't know if this is within this issue, but it's sort of within this issue. When you were talking about the parable of the four horses, which I used to think I understood, all of a sudden when you were explaining it, I realized I don't understand it. Why shouldn't the... Why... Is it better to be a slow horse than a fast horse?

[36:26]

It seems like the faster horses are responsive. They understand, they're aware of what their circumstances are and responding to them quickly. Well, I think, you know, I didn't say better. Maybe that's the key. It's not better or worse. And that's our problem because we usually think that the to be the fast horse is better than to be the slow horse. But it's not the opposite either, that to be the slow horse is better than to be the fast horse. Yeah, I thought that was the implication. No. I think it's just a counter or dualistic way of thinking about to be the fast horse is better than to be the slow horse. So he's saying, well, actually, to be the slow horse is very helpful. And these are not two. Because it's not like the fast horse is not the slow horse. We're all going to be fast and slow at different times.

[37:27]

And embody those archetypes for each other and for ourselves at different times. I think we're actually, when you say It's helpful. That's helpful. Because we tend to... It's easier to identify with a slower horse than a faster horse. Yeah. As an example. Right. That's why he's saying it, you know. Oh, it's... Zen practice is so difficult. How can I ever do this? I'm the slow horse. You know, I can barely sit this way or that way. So... I think he's trying to encourage us to practice and to get us to be able to see things not dualistically. Yes? Is the slow horse better because you suffer more? No. See, that's the dualistic way of looking at it.

[38:36]

Is it better to be, it's like saying, it's better to be poor than to be rich. It's a question of whether you're rich or poor is how you practice with it. Whether you're fast or whether you're slow. How do you actualize practice in that condition of being fast or slow? and that actually that practice is neither fast nor slow. Does it increase or decrease? No, so it's not like if you're wise you have more of it than if you're ignorant. Take their sense. nearly two years, and it's basically day in and day out of pack booking.

[39:43]

what came to mind a few moments ago, talking about the horses. With some people, perhaps, it can be very easy. I find this natural. I'll do this. Of course, on the other hand, it can be, oh, wow, I'll do this. Then I'll do something else. Then I'll do something else. Right. So that's just... Right. That's effort. That's the point of effort. And then we have to let go of effort as well. And think, well, what does it mean that I must do this? Or that I will do this? Think... You had your hand up.

[41:19]

Well, I think this gentleman really spoke to what I was thinking about after a calm mind. I think that if we look at the slow course not being better, or the fast course not being better, it's sort of the leave some pressure and somehow perhaps there's more access to calmness. And you said that the calmness is always there. Did you say something about that? I'm not quite sure I understand that. About calm water. Yeah. Well, I think that the more we

[42:23]

practice and we actualize this calm mind or realize a deeper mind which is like the ocean and then there are these waves on the surface so these waves on the surface is just the turbulence that there is at this moment you know, the anxiety or the anger that maybe come up at certain situation. But deeper than that is this unperturbable calmness that's not disturbed by the turbulence. Well, when my hip hurts, I don't have any sense that there's a calm line anywhere, you know? My efforts or whatever, yeah.

[43:28]

That's gone. It's just like, not even an idea that exists. All I want to do is get away from it. Right. So if you don't get away from it, that's the effort. Just to stay with it, then you find color in life. And then this calm mind helps you to stay with it, instead of running away from it. Yes? To leave horses and move to football. I heard some sports commentators remarking that one of the, or maybe the key attribute of Joe Montana as being a superlative player of football is that it doesn't matter what happened a moment ago.

[44:46]

He got knocked down, an elbow in his ear, or somebody batted down his pass. He's able to focus entirely on right now, this play. It's a new play, it's a new, that's a great gift. You commented, you know, we come to Sashin and we sit down and the first period, the second period, and then your mind moves ahead and your knees begin to hurt and, oh, what am I going to do by 3 p.m. and how about at 7? Oy, you know, and it makes this moment fraught with pain that is entirely produced by your imagination. So this is rather a commonplace that is not a surprise or a great insight, but I was really struck to learn that someone who is admired by many people, those who know his work, how is it that he is able to

[45:46]

do his job so superlatively? Well, that's an answer. And it's a lesson we could all profit by, to make an effort to just stay right here, right in this moment, and don't think about the third hour of Sachine, or the fourth day of Sachine, or et cetera. Right. Make a joke that has its thoughts Well, that's kind of a dharma of agility. So, the dharmas that arise in zazen also arise spontaneously for people. And depending on their karma, some people may have more of one or more of the other. So, I think montana is very agile. And that's that quality of being able to respond at the moment very quickly without being hindered by what happened two minutes ago or three minutes ago or how you were struck by something that may have been said and so on and yet not be hindered by that and just be able to respond freshly to the moment.

[47:08]

But some people may have more of that because of their particular karma than others. But in Sazen we can cultivate those dharmas even if we don't have them for karmic reasons. Yes? I got a little confused earlier. You were talking about calm mind and I think you said to be a calm mind doesn't involve awareness. And I thought this practice was about awareness. Could you explain it? Well, often, you know, there's a section here of Suzuki Roshi where he talks about consciousness beyond consciousness, or we say wisdom beyond wisdom, where he says that Buddhism is really a religion of the unconscious. Is this kind of just being it beyond consciousness?

[48:22]

Because usually consciousness is self-consciousness or is conditioned by an object. So this kind of awareness or effortless effort is unconditioned. So if you call it conscious, it's not quite right. If you call it unconscious, it's not quite right either. So there you have another koan. Okay.

[48:58]

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