Well, shall I just speak loudly? Talk some. Is this working yet? Not well. I think it's probably a double A. I can just project. Can you hear me in the back? Yes. Okay. But it won't record. I don't know if it will record. I think it is recording. Okay. All right. So this is the dharma of electronic amplification, I guess. This is the first time that I'm giving a Saturday morning talk.

[01:08]

It's a little intimidating. You know, we chant about an unsurpassed penetrating and perfect Dharma is rarely met with, And how can one give a Dharma talk after that intro? But everything's always preaching the Dharma. It's meeting it and recognizing it, which sometimes we forget to do. I was away last week on a trip with my wife, and we were in the Grand Tetons, and I was practicing Qigong, which is a bit like Tai Chi.

[02:15]

It's actually the ancestor of Tai Chi. And I thought to myself, oh, this is going to be a great place to practice, you know, the beautiful mountains and the lake. And I was practicing, and it was certainly very nice, but something didn't feel Quite right and then at a certain point as I was practicing I turned 90 degrees And there was a little piece of ordinary sagebrush Sitting right there, and it was wonderful it The chi from that sagebrush the feel from that sagebrush the Dharma Was as complete as as the Dharma from these fantastic beautiful mountains. And I think we spend a lot of our lives looking for beautiful mountains when much of our life is dusty sagebrush.

[03:15]

And that's actually largely why I wound up writing this book, which I'm supposed to give a talk about this morning. Zen practice is largely about discovering how the grandness of the Tetons and the ordinariness of the sage are both upheld by the earth and the sky and how the earth and the sky are both realized in the sagebrush and in the mountains. That's very nice and we all know that on some level but it gets hard when you walk out of the Zendo sometimes and someone's cutting you off on the freeway or your boss is pushing you to work harder, faster and maybe cut a few corners here and there.

[04:37]

It's been known to happen. And there you are trying to practice Zazen. And a few years ago, a lot of things were going on in my life where what was going on here in the zendo and what was going on outside in the rest of my life, it felt like there was a large gap. Let me read you just a little bit of the introduction. While I was working on this book over the past several years, my parents died. My sister went through a serious illness in which she nearly died, and my children were growing up. One of my daughters suffered her adolescence quite painfully, and we really felt heartbroken when she had to leave our household for a while. At the same time, the circumstances of my work as a psychotherapist were also changing. With the advent of managed care, the context in which I practice psychotherapy has altered from a profession centered on client needs

[05:41]

to a business oriented to the vagaries of profit and loss. In my clinic, we always had practiced brief therapy, but in the past it was governed largely by our need to serve our community and meet the large demand with a small staff. Now our clinic has a larger staff, but we practice brief therapy with one eye on economic indicators. Measurements of productivity and cost compete with and sometimes threatened to overshadow the experience of working intimately in the service of a human being in pain. In the midst of these events, I decided to receive lay ordination as a Buddhist practitioner and commit myself to following the Buddhist precepts. And so I was sewing a rakusu. And as you know, this is sewed out of a number of individual pieces, eight pieces of cloth. And when you sew the raksu from the different pieces of fabric, it becomes difficult to evade the question How do I make my life a whole cloth?

[06:43]

That's the question that we're always facing How do we take the bits and pieces of our lives and sew them together? And I didn't find it satisfying to just add some Buddhist techniques to my therapy work, you know to start teaching mindfulness meditation that that felt like It didn't feel integral and It didn't feel like applying psychological inquiry to my Buddhist meditation was going to be all that fruitful although sometimes that can be helpful too There's a lot of stuff comes up during meditation And since my family wasn't into Buddhism, it didn't really work for us as a family to work together meditating or chanting. So how could I do psychotherapy practice, family practice, and what at the time I saw as Zen practice, without adding to any of them or taking anything away?

[07:53]

So what I did was I took each of the texts that we chant in the morning, the Heart Sutra, the Sandokai, the Hokyo Zamai, and I tried to write something on them which would somehow give me an idea of what that meant for my life, the Metta Sutra. And for me, that was very helpful. You know, if you wind up reading this book, it will only, I hope you would find parts of it interesting, but you have to write your own book. Everyone has to do that. And it was helpful for me to write this, and maybe it can give you some hints along the way. But basically what we have to come up with is a way to deal with each moment of our lives.

[09:00]

It's not like we get to pick and choose. I have my aunt who took me to the circus when I was little. I was a travel agent and she was a travel agent in the days when you bought tour packages, you know, it would include a hotel and airfare and you'd have this meal in this place and that bus to that place and people were always calling her up and They'd say this is a great package, but can't we just stay in Hotel X instead of Hotel Y? You know, she said no. No, no, you have to stay in this, you know, it's all part of the package, etc And people really hassled her about it. So when she died, I In her will, she put down what she wanted to have put on her tombstone. And if you go to the cemetery, it says on her tombstone, life is a package deal. But, you know, when we're faced with difficulties in our lives, we don't like that piece of the package, you know, so we wind up trying to find out what we should do.

[10:19]

We want to be in some better, some more ideal state. We look for something to cling to, something to believe in. As we grow from children into mature adults, we want to make something of ourselves, but often we feel we lack something. In our insecurity, we think we must learn some special knowledge, attain some special accomplishments, create some stable, secure identity to be ourselves. We feel there's something we must do in order to realize our lives. But gradually, as we deal with one event after another, we realize our lives have been works in progress from the moment we were born, and that we're always being ourself. There's really no escape from it. Most Zen students feel that they meditate to become enlightened. So we start to practice, and every morning we wake up early, and we get dressed, and we go down to the Zendo to sit on our cushions, and gradually the truth begins to dawn on us.

[11:25]

We wake up before we meditate. We open our eyes before we become enlightened. We go down to the zendo not to run after and find a way to possess enlightenment, but rather as a way to express our true nature, to realize our true selves. And people come to psychotherapy, and most people think they do it in order to heal, to become more whole, but in every psychotherapy session, as we talk to another human being, we listen to and start to listen And gradually we begin to hear the music we're making of our lives, and the truth begins to dawn on us, on therapist and client alike. The impulse that brings us to therapy is the source of the healing. What's communicated is not so important as the communicating itself. We go to therapy not to become some ideal person, but to become who we are.

[12:29]

And in becoming who we are, we realize our true selves. A lot of my work as a therapist is helping clients recover their faith in themselves. It's easy to lose that. I must say the water tastes particularly good up here. It's easy to lose faith in ourselves because we have a lot of mistaken ideas about who we are. I think there's one thing you can be sure of is that you're not who you think you are. Once you take that as a starting point

[13:37]

lots of possibilities open up. But we get caught in our images of ourselves, in the images that other people project onto us and that we buy into, in the images we get attached to. Now, helping a client or a friend find faith in themselves doesn't mean thinking If I have faith in myself, it doesn't mean that I think I can personally handle anything that comes along. Because that's not true. A lot of people try and create a faith in themselves by mastery. Mastering everything which comes. It won't work. There's always going to be something that you can't master. And in fact, that's often the beginning of practice. It's very helpful. to learn what you can't master.

[14:42]

Rather, faith in ourselves involves a process of falling apart and discovering somehow we come back together again. Sojin Sensei is fond of often saying in the middle of a session, just when things are getting really hard, just let go. Just let go. A lot of times we're sitting there going, that sounds good, but I don't know how. To which he sometimes responded, well, just do it little by little then, which is fine. Or you can do it all at once, which is also fine. But we're scared to let go. We're scared we'll lose ourselves because we think we exist. a fundamental delusion or let me put it another way we think we exist as separate beings and that's sad actually it's very isolating now we do exist as separate beings but we also only exist by virtue of the way we're connected to each other I mean that's just a fact

[16:10]

And how we realize this play of connectedness and separateness is a lot of what our practice is about. So we learn that having faith in ourselves requires that we have faith in life. I might add now that we have faith in life and death. Having faith in life doesn't mean we'll get what we want, or that we'll avoid pain. Having faith in life involves having faith in something larger than ourselves, though it does include ourselves. You know, when I first got involved in Zen practice, I got involved because I was looking for something which didn't require any faith, I thought. I was very upset one day when Mel was talking about the importance of faith in Soto Zen. But virtually everything we do in life requires faith.

[17:17]

Getting married, having a child, doing meditation, coming to this talk is an act of faith in a certain sense. Who knows what you'll find? Who knows what will happen? You just kind of plunge in and you do it and take it from there. It's a big act of faith, a leap of faith. Every time you cross the threshold of the zendo into here, and every time you cross the threshold going out, big leap. But having faith isn't a question of clinging to a particular set of beliefs. And that includes a particular set of Buddhist practices or psychotherapeutic techniques. Having faith involves the opposite. It requires that we let go of what we're clinging to. And as we hold on to less and less, we're more and more open to what this particular moment of meditation of psychotherapy or family life requires of us.

[18:27]

How can I respond as a therapist to what this client says? How can I respond as an employee? to what my boss says or to what my client says? How can I respond as a parent to my daughter, to what she requires, to what my lover invites? How can we face our inner demons and the oppressive tyrants of the world without returning greed for greed, hate for hate? It's very easy to return hate for hate, anger for anger. During this vacation in the Tetons, we went with both of my daughters, one of whom is 19 and the other of whom is 14. Going on a vacation, a family vacation, with two teenagers is an interesting experience, especially when the 14-year-old is sick and decides, once she's gotten there, that she really doesn't want to be there.

[19:33]

So she was angry the whole time. miserable and you know we go into that going oh I've been working so hard gee I really want this vacation oh come on let's just all enjoy each other and have fun and relax and she just wasn't having any of it so how do I respond in that situation without going All right, if you don't like it here, just stay in bed. Don't go out to the Tetons. Don't do anything. See if I care. Very tempting. And not to say that I didn't do that once or twice. But it doesn't work. It just doesn't work. It's not a question of moralistic.

[20:35]

Oh, I shouldn't do that, you know If I respond that way, what do you think happens to in my daughter's response? Does she go? Oh, okay dad No The only thing which works is to find a way of Finding compassion and finding a way of enjoying That set of circumstances Appreciating it perhaps is a better word at enjoying it. So, raising the question of how I can respond is an essential part of our practice, and it's this questioning which is our faith. It's our mode of renewing ourselves. It's our way of reminding ourselves to appreciate our lives. If we hold to our beliefs, we oppose our beliefs to others. If we do not cling to any particular thing, we have pure faith and perfect freedom.

[21:39]

Life is full of dilemmas and snarls in which we may easily lose sight of this. When we're stuck in our personal despair, it helps to remind ourselves of the larger picture, and practice is therefore about how, in the midst of the difficulties of our lives, we keep faith in mind. I like that phrase. I think Sheng Chen wrote a book called Faith in Mind. We remind ourselves again and again. We try and keep in mind faith while we keep faith in mind. But it's not faith in anything in particular. Or maybe another way of saying it is it's faith in each thing in particular. Some of this book, a lot of this book is addressed to psychotherapists and it's about how to practice as a psychotherapist while trying to maintain the nature of our practice.

[22:57]

While some of you might be psychotherapists, and probably a good number of you aren't, I don't think I'll go into that part of the book here. But one of the reasons I wrote the book was because I fell in love with the Genjo Koan. I don't remember when it was that we had a session, maybe 10 years ago, where we read the Genjo Koan. And it's wonderful. And something about it hooked me and I said, you know, I just really want to make sense of that. The Genjo Koan is sometimes translated as actualizing the fundamental point. It's a good question. What's the fundamental point of my life, of my practice? I found I had to kind of work backwards.

[24:05]

I couldn't start with the Genjo Koan. I started there, but then I had to go through all the other sutras to make sense of it. And I wanted to share just a little bit of the Genjo Koan with you and a few, let me call it riffs on it. It's the study of a life. But maybe if I just read the words of it, of the opening to you, you'll get some flavor of it. It starts off, As all things are buddhadharma, there is delusion and realization, practice and birth and death, and there are buddhas and sentient beings. As myriad things are without an abiding self, There's no delusion, no realization, no Buddha, no sentient beings, no birth and death.

[25:11]

The Buddha way is basically leaping clear of the many and the one. Thus, there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and Buddhas. Yet an attachment blossoms, fall, and in aversion weeds spread. Dogen, the author of the Genjo Koan and the founder of our school of Zen, is wonderful in the way that he brings all sides of things out. And his writing actually is a good expression of the Dharma that way. It doesn't explain it so much as kind of embody it.

[26:16]

Not necessarily easy to understand if you think about it too much. But thinking will only take you so far, whether it be in Zen practice or in psychotherapy. Very useful to think, very useful to drop thinking. If you do just one of those, you'll have problems. So long as you can do both of them, sometimes at the same time, it's kind of interesting. When I first read this, I made a mistake. I thought it said, as all things have Buddha Dharma. And that's not what it says. And it's a fundamental difference. If everything has Buddha Dharma, then you have to look for it.

[27:19]

It's hidden somehow. And when we meditate, Thinking to find the Buddha inside us when we go to psychotherapy thinking we'll find the healthy self within us It's like the old story about the drunk looking for the key under the light post you all know that one where he looks and looks looks can't find it and someone comes up to him and tries to look with him and and finally they can't find it and They say, are you sure you dropped it here? He says, no, I dropped it in the dark alley. They say, well, why are you looking here? Well, the light's much better here. It's not where you can look for the key. I have a little section that I wanted to read about that. We actualize the fundamental point swimming at the meeting of wave and water, breathing at the intersection of wind and air, living in the service of the larger firmament of love.

[28:46]

We do this by studying ourselves, asking, who am I? And we all want to discover who am I. We want to discover our true nature. But we run into problems because we think our true nature is like some elemental ore, buried deep and out of sight. Prospecting for who I am, I hope to make some discovery that will enrich me personally and allow me to stake a valuable claim. Although I may fear that my inner core consists of some base substance as dull and heavy as lead, that's what we all fear, right? That really we're just this yucky thing inside. Still, I hope to find gold deep within the mind of myself. But as I continue my search, I begin to discover that this who I am is like the wind. It reaches everywhere I see, everything I touch. In some kind of simple alchemy, it turns out that wherever I go, there I am.

[29:47]

As this becomes clearer my search for my true self stops digging for a fabulous one-time find and becomes instead the pleasures of continual finding. I become less anxious about defining once and for all who I am and more curious about how I am. Because the wind reaches everywhere the question who or what am I transmutes into how shall I live my life at this place and moment swimming on this wave in this ocean. When I make my answer and plunge into this particular moment with full sincerity, I forget myself and find realization in myriad things. This is actualizing the fundamental point. There's a Zen koan which goes, We Chow asks the teacher, what is Buddha? And the teacher responds, you are We Chow. There's a Jewish version to this Reb Zusha said when I die and go before the heavenly tribunal They are not going to say to me Zusha Why weren't you Moses?

[31:15]

They will say to me Zusha Why weren't you Zusha? That's a harder one to answer The end of the Genjo Koan gives a little story. Zen master Baochei of Mount Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there's no place it does not reach. Why then do you fan yourself? So this monk is kind of stuck in the, you know, oneness of it all. Nature of wind is permanent. Bauchi replies, although you understand the nature of the wind is permanent, you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere. What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere, asked the monk again, and the master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.

[32:18]

In response to this, I wrote, love is neither tainted nor pure. We all have our personal selfish agendas. We all want to get something out of what we're doing. I had a lot of problems when I was writing this book about the ego aspects of it. I was worried that somehow it would serve as a way of self-inflation rather than as a service to the Dharma. And so I tried to find ways of making it pure. I thought very seriously about publishing it under a different name. so that I wouldn't have that piece to deal with. And at a certain point I realized you have to deal with it. You have to deal with being out there in the world. There's always this ego and there's always big self. They're two sides of the same coin.

[33:30]

And that's what the nature of wind is about. In addition to our personal selfish agendas, we all have our generous intentions that sincerely aim beyond ourselves to a larger wholeness. We all have ways of putting forth effort without desire for personal reward, of putting forth effort for the thing itself for no particular reason or sense of gain. We all are continuously self-centered, and at the same time continuously self with a large S centered. And the question for our practice is how we go about uniting the two. Because there's a difference between small self and large self, winds rise up. That's the nature of life. Okay? Whenever there's a difference in temperature or pressure between two places, it generates a wind. that seeks to connect the differing areas and reach a greater sense of equilibrium.

[34:34]

Everything in nature, including ourselves, is always looking to find its balance. Each being, each physical object, absorbs heat and radiates heat. We're constantly exchanging energy with each other. The nature of wind is permanent. Although the nature of wind is permanent, we need to fan ourselves if we want to be able to cool off in the heat of the moment. That's what the precepts are for. They're basically instructions on how to fan ourselves. They're not rules saying, do this and you'll be a good person. They're hints. If you fan yourself this way, you'll cool down. They're helpful hints in that regard. though sometimes it's hard to figure out how to apply them. I want to leave time for some questions, so I want to just read one or two brief little sections and then stop.

[35:48]

If the bottom line question in therapy is, who am I? Ultimately, the answer has to be, here I am. If this leads us to ask, what or where is here, we have to answer, now. We're the expression of here and now. As a koan in the Book of Serenity, as the World Honored One was walking with the congregation He pointed to the ground with his finger and said, this spot is a good place to build a sanctuary. Indra, emperor of the gods, plucked a blade of grass, stuck it in the ground and said, the sanctuary is built. And Buddha smiled. There's no need to wait. We don't need to go anyplace else but where we are. We don't need to look to anyone else but to ourselves.

[36:56]

We and all we encounter are complete in our incompleteness. We need not search for something special. This is the time and place to realize our true selves. Each session of psychotherapy, every moment of Zazen, each moment of our lives, provides the opportunity to make each spot a sanctuary. We need only pluck and replant our impermanent existence as it is, where we are, and consecrated with a smile. I think I'll stop there and would enjoy having a little discussion. I wanted to comment on your Oh, that's what it means.

[37:58]

Right. But the totality of everything can't exist without the interplay of its parts. No wave without water, no water without waves. I don't know if that answers your question. Yes? You spoke to the similarities of death and psychotherapy. I wonder if you could possibly, in some practical way, suggest the differences. Sure. Psychotherapy is basically directed towards healing glitches in the ego, in behavior.

[39:41]

Zen practice doesn't heal anything because there's no thing to heal. It helps us see that. There's a koan, which actually I think is a good guide for psychotherapists, but I don't think it's how most psychotherapists think of things. I I don't remember if it was Master Ma or Fa Yen. Maybe one of you could help me. But the teacher was unwell. Do you remember who the teacher was? It was Master Ma. Thank you. So Master Ma was unwell. And so a monk came to him and said, Master, you've been sick. And Master Ma says, yes. And this student says, is there anybody who doesn't get sick? And Master Ma replied, yep.

[40:54]

Which is not the standard reply. So the monk said, oh, well, does the one who doesn't get sick take care of you? And that's what we all hope for. We want to find someone or something which will take care of us, whether it be our therapist or our teacher or our quote, or our wires, or our true self, you know, in the reified form that we think of it. If I just realize my true self, it'll take care of everything. That's what the monk's looking for. He says, does the one who doesn't get sick take care of you? And Master Ma replies, I have the Now this is where, sort of, Zen and psychotherapy, I think, part places a little bit.

[42:00]

Now the monk's very confused about this. So he says, I mean, the one who doesn't get sick, you take care of the one who doesn't get sick. What happens when you take care of the one who doesn't get sick? And Master Ma replies, then I don't see that there's any illness. Illness and health are just words. They're real experiences, and when we approach them from the world of discrimination, which is certainly the world of psychotherapy, we say, that's good, that's bad, that's pleasant, that's unpleasant. But Zen is leaping clear of the many and the one. It's being able to say, yes, that's pleasant, that's unpleasant. On another level, pleasant and unpleasant are fictions.

[43:08]

There's just the whole universe being realized this moment. That happens whether we want it to, or think about it, or try and make it happen, or not. Which is nice. I was struck by something you said about mastery. I know I can't remember exactly what it was. What it reminded me of was, at a machine, I was assigned to make cookies. And I was trying to get out of it. Because I felt like I didn't have the time. I'm sorry.

[44:27]

So, but what that was about, I didn't mean that in any way to embarrass you, because it somehow, not in the, for complicated reasons, it drove me to not be a kind of a victim here, you know. But the issue of mastery coming from a purer place, I give that example. And whatever you said about mastery, you were sort of underrating it. I feel like mastery is very close to effort. It may have a goal in mind, which makes it sort of contaminated. But really, in a sense, when you think about all the things that as an infant grows, and it masters speech and walking, So I'm just wanting to think more about the math degree.

[45:32]

To me, it's a very positive thing and it doesn't kind of have to go into the realm of that you think that you're supposed to do it a certain way or that you're attached to it. Well, if mastery, if you see mastery as just complete sincere effort, without worrying about how it turns out, I agree with you. I guess I was thinking of it more in terms of, I can do this, you know, give me positive strokes for this and oh my gosh it turned out bad. You know all of the ego stuff which can get tied up with it. I think in Zen practice we talk about effortless effort and you know Zen can get kind of cute sometimes with its way of saying you know true mastery is no mastery and all that kind of stuff.

[46:45]

But in order to get to that point of True mastery is no mastery. You just work at it again and [...] again. And at a certain point, doing that, your ego just sort of gives up. And what you want from it becomes unimportant. And you just give yourself to it and then it gives something back to you. I'm studying Qigong right now.

[47:33]

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