I bow to taste the truth of the Tadakata's words. Good morning. Good morning. I'd like to introduce our speaker today, who's Ross Blom, known to many of us, but perhaps not everyone here. Ross is a longtime resident here at BCC and has held a number of practice positions. He was also the head student some years ago. Ross began his practice in New York. and came to Berkeley, I think about 15 years ago, maybe it's been a little longer now. Anyway, we're glad to have him here today. Thank you, Leslie. It's nice to see a lot of familiar faces and new ones. The first time people come to practice reminds me of my first visit to a Zen center. So I do have a sort of sentimental, nostalgic streak that courses through me that opens up from time to time.

[01:09]

The good side of that is that there's a feeling of support, of being around people that are known and that one has practiced beside. And the downside, of course, is that it can get a little sort of saccharine, sweet and soft, and one can get a little lazy and not persevere in practice because of well, various things that come up. So there are certain plateaus that we hit in our practice where we might feel a little sort of flat or stale. But initially, at the beginning, it's a very exciting time. at least it was for me, there was a lot of inquiry and sincerity and inquisitiveness and settling down while sitting and feeling things bigger than myself, the workings of the universe and all that. And I started getting experiences of, or validation if you will, of things that I was reading and then things I was experiencing.

[02:17]

So that's a little bit what I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to talk about enlightenment as a touchstone in practice, but not for practice. We don't talk about enlightenment so much here. We can read about it. Certain books talk about it quite a lot. It comes up from time to time, either through innuendo or reading the other side of the page, as Mel likes to say, when reading Dharma. I was having tea with a friend a few weeks ago who was feeling that she wasn't getting any more training here at Zen Center.

[03:21]

Traditionally speaking, Zen practice years ago was reserved for monks and nuns and they were training temples and the students practiced and got trained. They learned something. They learned about maybe things that they had learned were a little erroneous and so there was an opening up. a deepening of awareness and practice. And many of these monks and nuns, after their training was so-called done at that point, they would go off and establish other practice places, other temples. Well, here in this country, that still carries on, but not quite to the same degree. There's training going on, and temples are being established. In the 50s and 60s, there were a few practice places and some gracious teachers coming over from Asia to establish them.

[04:23]

And they had students, and then these students matured and went out and formed other practice places, just like here. So the question that came up for me with my friend was, well, what about people who are not in training in that formal sense? They're not going to be professionals, if you will. They're not going to be a priest or a nun. They're not going to start a temple. or a sitting group, they're just practicing to, well, for a number of reasons. Quite often, they want sort of physical or mental well-being, and through meditation, that sort of stuff begins to happen. One starts feeling a little better, a little more subtle, or maybe a little more clear, a little less foggy. And then there are times when it doesn't feel that way, and then it does feel that way. And if you persevere long in practice, you actually get to see the changing in life, and that there's clarity and fuzziness.

[05:25]

But at the same time, with perseverance and practice, you get to touch the ground. and stay connected in the midst of all of that, all those ups and downs in one's life. I think that if we don't have a deep enough experience of touching the ground that things in fact are okay, then when things get a little rough, we will run away or get shy and not come forward as much as we once did. So those are some of the things that come up when we sit and stare at a wall. For me, when I first came to practice, one of the more exciting things about it was this idea of enlightenment. And at the practice place where I started in New York, there was a lot of emphasis on that. We worked on koans, and we heard about enlightenment experiences, and we could sort of taste that carrot, or have a sense of what that carrot must taste like.

[06:35]

And that for me, in my particular personality, that was a really great encouragement. It didn't really get in the way too much, but it was an encouragement that there was something more going on in this life than what I was experiencing. And I wanted that. So I felt that I was in training to get that. So, The very first Sashin I set, which was about a little over 20 years ago now, I didn't have an experience like one reads in these books of great openings and interrelatedness of all things and kind of burying the bucket of problems and not having to worry anymore. But there was a sense of settling out and feeling okay and really grounded in my physical being. And I didn't want to get up off the cushion. And I remember the Sashin had ended and I heard the head monk who was leading the Sashin and one of the other students talking at the doorway saying, go get Ross and wake him up.

[07:47]

Tell him Sashin's over. But I was quite awake and just greatly attached to the feeling that I was experiencing, which was just, and we've all had these experiences of just feeling very settled and very okay and not wanting to leave. There's a new book out of Dogen Zenji's teachings called Beyond Thinking. It's a, Dan Leighton, who gave the talk last week, read a little bit from it. And I just wanted to read the first sentence of the back cover, which really struck me. Dogen says, Spiritual practice is not some kind of striving to produce enlightenment, but an expression of the enlightenment already inherent in all things. When I read that, and when I've heard that rendering, it's been difficult for me to fully appreciate that teaching, that really revolutionary way of looking at enlightenment, because when I came to practice, and I still fall and feel in this way, that I'm in training for some kind of enlightenment experience.

[09:17]

trying to get something, acquisitions. And we've heard numerous teachers from time immemorial saying that there's nothing really to get. I can't give you anything. Quite often people want to give our abbot some kind of present of thanks for having this temple. And he says, well, the best present that you can offer is your ego. And that's too precious a gift for us to really give up. So we hold on to that and we give him a teapot or a book or something else. But I had an experience that was a little bit closer to what I had in mind of these experiences that the teachers of old have talked about, and it happened a couple of months ago during service. We sit each morning for about an hour, and then we offer incense at the altar and bow and chant some Buddhist liturgy.

[10:33]

And I didn't have a particularly calm period of sitting beforehand. It was just kind of the run-of-the-mill period as I was in before. And then we'd get up for service and we'd put our bowing mats down and we started bowing just as we do for a bodhisattva ceremony. And on one of the prostrations, when I was pretty much horizontal and down and there, there was a feeling that came over me of that things were okay. And specifically with a particular person that I have difficulty with. And I like that session that I had a long time ago. I wanted to hold on to that, um, that feeling of okayedness with, uh, this person in my relationship to this person. But I think perhaps because I've been sitting for a little bit longer now, there wasn't as great a need for the attachment to that feeling as I had early on.

[11:41]

But the feeling was really in my body and in my bones of feeling okay with my relationship with this person. And it lasted for a few bowels. I mean, as far as the vision or the energy around it lasted for a few moments during a couple of bowels, and then it dissipated. And I didn't try to sort of hold onto it or try to bring it back. But it was a clear enough confirmation that things were OK. And then I started having sort of residual thoughts come up from my memory that things weren't okay with this particular person. But they didn't have the same kind of hold on me as they did before.

[12:43]

And I began thinking about this training that we're all doing and this effort that we make and the sense of striving even though we are taught not to strive or not to be too attached to this effort that we're making and just let go and let things come to us. And one of my favorite teachings of Dogen was when he returned from China after meeting an authentic Zen teacher, which was one of his biggest desires that he had in his life, that when someone said, what did you learn when you went to China? And he said, nose vertical, eyes horizontal. And that's the sense that when things are vertical, there's a hierarchy that things kind of assume, or we place things in positions of here, here, here, here. And on the horizontal plane, there's a sense of sameness or oneness, that all things are just what they are.

[13:55]

And our life is a continual meeting of the matrix of horizontal and vertical. So when we lie down, we let go of the universe. And when we stand up, we take up the universe. Now, it's not to say that we give up in either of those positions. It's all that. It's all letting go, or it's all taking up. But generally speaking, when we lay down, especially in the evening to go to bed, we let go of the things of the world. And when we get up in the morning, we resume our relationship. I like to think of it in a more dualistic sense. We take up the universe in a more dualistic sense. So in that prostration of just laying down and letting go, there was a feeling of oneness, specifically me and my relationship with this person.

[15:15]

And it's easy to have that go out to all beings, all people, all things, all ideas. And I think that's one of the reasons why we bow so much here. Not as much as some places actually, but we do bow a lot. And I wanted to read a little bit from Suzuki Roshi about bowing. From his book, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. After Zazen, we bow to the floor nine times. By bowing, we are giving up ourselves. To give up ourselves means to give up our dualistic ideas. So there is no difference between Zazen practice and bowing. Usually to bow means to pay our respects to something which is more worthy of respect than ourselves. But when you bow to Buddha, you should have no idea of Buddha.

[16:17]

You just become one with Buddha. You are already Buddha themself. Bowing helps to eliminate our self-centered ideas. This is not so easy. It is difficult to get rid of these ideas, and bowing is a very valuable practice. The result is not the point. It is the effort to improve ourselves that is valuable. There is no end to this practice. So when I thought further about my connection to this person and then having a turning in that relationship, I began thinking about training and am I training to let go of my dualistic thinking?

[17:32]

And I had a really nice discussion with Eric yesterday about the idea or practice of striving and making effort. And we do make an effort to try to get something, and yet we are encouraged to be careful about that effort that we're making, and just to sit, just to continue sitting. And what seems to happen is that we wear down And the effort becomes more of just an expression of what we're doing versus the actual doing something. And when I began to think about that, I started thinking about our universe and what we see here. There are trees. And I started thinking about the trees being an expression of the seed that's planted, and that we could think, well, there's a seed, now we put it in the ground, it'll grow up into a tree.

[18:43]

There'll be a seedling in all these various stages. And Dogen in Genjo Koan talks about things having a time of themselves, that firewood doesn't become ash. Firewood is firewood and ash is ash. And yet in conventional thinking, we think you have a piece of firewood, you light it and it burns and it turns into ash. Well, similarly, there's this seed that turns into a tree, so-called. And that's an expression of that seed. And then I began thinking about, well, where did this seed come from? And the seed was from, presumably, another tree. And then I began thinking about this term, beginningless beginning, and the Buddhas before Buddha. And it becomes incomprehensible about where things begin. In psychotherapy, there's an effort to find out the source of suffering and where did this anger begin or when did this disillusionment begin.

[19:54]

And there are proximates that are reached in therapy that are very beneficial about the cause and conditions that bring on a person's suffering. And I think it's a little easier to see some progress in therapy. In practice, it's a little bit more difficult. It's a little bit more slippery. And the sense of training or stages and all, it's hard to keep it up. And this was what my friend was experiencing. So I thought about her question for a while and I said, well, I think what it was was you used to be in a sense more involved here. There was a context for your practice. You held practice positions, you know, cooking meals or cleaning the zendo or holding incense during service or some such thing, and there was a context for what so-called progress was.

[20:58]

Was there mindfulness and awareness in the handling of a position or was there busyness of mind and not so much subtleness? Well, it doesn't really matter whether it's the awareness of the state of mind that one was in in doing the various practices and being in a context with other people to kind of get a sense of, well, how am I doing, which is good. To have that context to compare one with, of course, the downside is if we compare too much, we can potentially become judgmental and then not really let go so much. We actually start holding on more and building up sort of scaffolding about how good I'm doing or how bad I'm doing. And we have both those types of people here. But having an awakening or enlightening experience about something is confirming that something is working and something is working me.

[22:17]

And it's difficult to continue practicing without having little insights or big insights about how things are going. And we just continue to kind of run the various tapes in our mind that keep us from really seeing what our teachers have told us. That it's all, you know, of a piece. You're not separate from me. I was talking to a friend about the horizontal and the vertical. And he was telling me about a relationship that he has with his lover. And when they were lying down, everything was okay. There was a connection and a sense of okayness. And it wasn't even just the physical act of making love. There was something about each person's bearing, lying down and letting go and just being present that was very nourishing and affirming, confirming their life together.

[23:35]

And then when they would get up vertically, they would get into various things that caused dissension and difference and it was very painful. And so he did an experiment where they were lying down and having this sort of harmony between themselves and then they would look at each other and they would go up very slowly because he was really curious when, at what point, there was a disconnect. And they weren't able to determine that, but it's somewhere between here and here, between horizontal and vertical. But I really appreciated that inquiry that he made because he was making a sincere effort to see where is this source of suffering that we're experiencing continually. I got into a little difference of opinion with someone talking a few days ago, and I felt my body shift from a fairly open, prostrated, kind of open, horizontal feeling to needing to make a point and kind of

[24:59]

getting up to make that point. And I think for myself, a practice of just continuing lying down to make that point, if that would have been more successful in conveying these points of view that we were discussing. So there's a term, lay down the burden, and I think it could be extended to just lay down. And we also have to get up. You know, the bell rings, the sheen is over, we have to get up and relate to people. So that training, I think that we all... participate in, whether we're career Buddhists as professionals setting up temples or we're lay Buddhists where we work in the world and we have this as a spiritual practice to help us make sense of the world and help others make sense of the world, that if we can taste the that horizontalness of life, that sameness of life, that when we become vertical at some point on the scale there, we can remember and meet the next moment a little bit more openly.

[26:19]

Some people say having an enlightenment experience is like an accident. It's not what we normally have. We normally have our life and then occasionally we make a bump and there's an accident and then we wake up to something in our life. And that practice makes us accident-prone. And there's no doubt in my mind that having a practice place helps us to be more accident prone and to have accidents where we wake up. And still we have 23 or so hours a day where we're not here. So how do we bring that zendo support to our life? And everybody does that a little differently. But the touchstones of that are in breath and posture, in being upright and following our breath, as we do in Zazen.

[27:48]

If we continue to do that, we actually feel the connection to the zendo when we're out in the so-called world doing so-called things, moving around, interacting with people, and just living. When I came in and offered incense at the altar, I was looking at all the images and I thought of them as my friends, but I'd never had that feeling before, that here are my friends on the altar. And when I thought about it a little bit more, I realized, well, and these are not, I wish these were original thoughts, I'd feel really good about myself, but I'm just copying our abbot. These, these images represent aspects of ourself. That there is Buddha, there is Abhilokiteshvara, there is Samantabhadra, there's various aspects of practice, of manifested practice, but they're not outside.

[29:02]

They are outside. I mean, there's this beautiful image here that... Manjushri? No, it's Samantabhadra, I think. No, Manjushri, I think, is on the left there. But, anyway, he knows. He knows who he is. She knows who she is. They're beautiful representations of aspects of ourself. And Buddhism, the most important thing is to sit. and to wake up. And in the 2,500 years since the Buddha said that, there's been a plethora of teachings, written and sculptural, esoteric and exoteric. And one of the teachings that has been helpful for me are the three bodies of Buddha.

[30:04]

And when I first started studying that, I thought these were like three separate sort of people. There's the Dharmakaya, the Sambhogakaya, and the Nirmanakaya. The Dharmakaya is the essence, the essence Buddha. The Nirmanakaya is the manifestation, the actual person, if you will. And then there's the Sambhogakaya, which is the expression. So we have the essence, which is always around us and through us. There's the ever-changing Nirmanakaya Buddha, which is the ever-changing us or this body, this being. And then there's the expression. And the expression is one could say is kind of in the middle. It's kind of a, uh, you can't see the essence.

[31:09]

You can only see the, um, the expression. And there's always something being expressed in just this body or this, this, this being. And when we first come to practice, it feels like there's just Nirmanakaya Buddha, there's just me, and what else is there? And then as we begin practicing and we start getting a sense of the interrelatedness of beings and we get a little taste of waking up and subtleness, we see that things are actually bigger than us. And while there's still an effort to strive to wake up, things sort of happen on their own with our relationship to them. And that things happening on their own is the expression and

[32:12]

through ourselves as nirmanakaya buddha and the expression of that we get to taste or sense or get a little insight to what is the essence or the ground of this life that supports all of us. So when I was prostrating and then having this insight there was a sense of all were in that moment coursing through me. And we can reflect on our life and see times when it's happened to each and every one of us. And as Suzukiyoshi says, you know, getting an enlightenment, enlightenment experiences and all that, it's not so difficult. It's the practice that makes it difficult or is difficult just to continue on because we can't just sit back and just say, well, I had this experience of waking up and feeling connected to someone I felt disconnected to.

[33:16]

It's more of like, what's going on now? And that's where this practice place can help us. And where Dogen's teaching of we don't practice in order to get enlightened, we're enlightened already and practice is the expression of that. And as we offer incense and wash dishes and pull weeds and all that, we actually get to taste the expression and see that connectedness of all phenomena. We have a little time for any questions or comments that people may have.

[34:24]

Thank you. Charlie. Well, we co-create the universe. we co-create the universe. With whom? All being. Thank you.

[35:31]

Yes? On the subject of enlightenment experiences, Dogen says, practice reaches everywhere. And he also says, practice is enlightenment. So, maybe even it's not so good to use the expression, enlightenment experience, as though it were a separate thing, and encourages this thinking of because practice is enlightenment. Yeah, that's a good point. Eric, what was the literal translation of that term that you were, it was confirmation, enlightenment? Verification.

[36:38]

Verification, yeah. Yeah, yet again one of those terms that has all sorts of meanings and conjures up all sorts of ideas. Yeah, Dogen says in Genjo Koan to advance forward is delusion and to sit and receive the world is enlightenment. And yet we still advance forward with that desire to want to receive. It's a funny paradox, isn't it? Hosan. It's not the end.

[38:26]

And his answer was interesting. It was that, and these were. way, nose vertical, eyes horizontal, and Dogen's notion of practice where our view is we're supposed to concentrate on everything, not on one thing. So we have to be constantly doing this work of opening up and widening the view. That is Dogen's expression of enlightenment.

[40:14]

Yeah, it's more like a, is that book enlightenment as a verb or something? It's like it's an ongoing unfolding. the cushion or the seat. I wonder how, and I've experienced that, how does one not be attached to that and yet remember it?

[41:39]

I mean, it's a standing position. Remember where you come from. Beginning, it's beginning. I get attached to pretty flowers and they fade and fall. And each moment is enlightenment of that flower. And I can see my attachment to a particular point in that flower's life. Well, more on the horizontal-vertical, which is so interesting. It occurred to me as you were saying that the importance in Zazen posture of being upright, that actually Zazen includes the vertical and the horizontal both, and it's kind of like there's the vertical spine and the horizontal base of our legs, and there's the

[42:55]

It combines the revolutionary aspect of it though is that here we are in a particular position that we associate with discursive thinking and all the activities of the mind and yet the training is to let go of that kind of thinking. So for me this is how this training goes on continuously that the vehicle that we have is this body and the habitual training that we have in this mind of thinking is suspended, if you will. And then we get to associate the so-called waking life or upright life with non-attachment. And then we go through life a little bit more freely. But it takes a long time because it's not just a physical sort of scaffolding that's up, there's this, the mind that can, because it knows this is what it does, continues to do that. It's much easier, I think.

[44:11]

For me, it's much easier when I get horizontal to let go of thinking and just rest, but a lot of people don't have that opportunity, and their mind continues to think. Maybe they're actually more asleep when they're upright, and they're less asleep when they lie down. But the posture that the Buddha took on that predated him certainly was a mix of those two points. And Dogen really brought it home when he came back from China. Thank you very much for your attention and questions. I appreciate everybody being here, sitting together and supporting this practice place. And I'd just like to confess something for myself.

[45:13]

Well, I've been practicing here a long time and I'm a resident here. Um, that is often seen as someone on the inside, someone like on a career track of, of sorts, and they'd be closer to, uh, to something. But, uh, I struggle just as much as the next person. And, um, when my friend told me that she felt that she wasn't training as much and all of that, I think there was a feeling that because I so-called do more while I'm here than her, that I'm more in training. But, you know, showing up is 90% of it. It's really what one does when they're here. And I mentioned to her that There's some people that aren't here very much, but when they're here, they're really here, and I can feel that. And there's some people that are here a lot, and I, for myself, I don't feel their presence so much.

[46:15]

And I think this gets back to Dogen's teaching of action and that through our expression, enlightenment unfolds. And so when we're here, we express ourselves, and when we're out in the world, so-called world, we express ourselves. So the encouragement is, no matter where you are, wake up, be present, and just keep on, keep on. So, thank you.

[46:47]

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