I bow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. My name is Lori Sanaki, and I'm giving the talk this morning because I'm the shuso, or head student, for our six-week practice period. been given a little Zen story, actually I chose it, partly I had a choice, and I chose and felt that I had been given a little Zen story, a koan, case 21 in the Book of Serenity, yin-yang sweeps the ground. Oh. As Yunyan was sweeping the ground, Dawu said, too busy.

[01:35]

Yunyan said, you should know there's one who isn't busy. Dawu said, if so then there's a second moon. Yunyan held up the broom and said, which moon is this? So a lot of koans are stories, they're an interaction between a teacher and disciple and The feeling is that that was an interaction where the student woke up. And this is actually a story of two old pals. Yunyan and Dawu were peers, both students of the teacher Yaoshan. So the feeling is more kind of playing or kind of testing each other in a playful way. For me, that's the feeling. In the commentary it asks the question, is it yin-yan exposing Dao-wu or Dao-wu exposing yin-yan?

[02:45]

It's like, is it yin-yan testing Dao-wu or Dao-wu testing yin-yan? I just want to say a little bit about yin-yan. Yin-yan is the teacher of Tungshan who is the founder of the Soto school which is our school of Zen. And Tungshan, we recite his, he's a big mountain in our mountain range. We recite his poem, the Joolmeer Samadhi, on Saturday. He's an important person for us. So he's the father of Soto Zen, you could say. So Yun-Yun's kind of like the grandfather. And Tung-Shan's mound is so big, you can barely see Yun-Yun kind of peeking out from behind. And Tung-Shan said about his teacher, He was conducting a memorial service for yin-yang and he said, someone asked him, what teaching did you receive when you were at yin-yang's place?

[03:45]

And he said, although I was there, I didn't receive any teaching. And the person said, well then why are you conducting this memorial service? And he said, it's not my late master's virtues or his Buddhist understanding that I esteem, just that he didn't explain everything to me. Or just that he never pointed out anything directly. So Yun Yan was a teacher that taught by embodying the truth. And it comes out in this story. So Yunyun's sweeping the ground and Dawu comes by and says, too busy, or maybe just busy. And Dawu says, And he says, so the feeling is Da Wu is kind of poking at him but in the commentary it says, without upset there is no solution, without struggle there is no expression.

[04:58]

So it's really okay for Da Wu to come up and kind of pick this fight. It's kind of for our benefit. It's like we have this story now. And Yun Yan doesn't respond like someone who's been caught in the act of like, not paying attention or something. He's very cruel about the whole thing and he says, you should know there's one who's not busy. For me the feeling is kind of like, what are you doing seeing busyness? You're just going around seeing busyness, why are you doing that? So what does this mean, the one who is not busy? Where I went with it is the teaching that in our actual experience, what we actually experience is how everything is merged. So it's like if we see something, it's the I and the form and the consciousness coming together as one merged thing.

[06:09]

If we hear something, it's our ear and the sound and consciousness merged. If we think a thought, it's our mind, our brain and our thought and consciousness merged. Really, this is what we actually experience. We actually experience how it's merged. Even though we can't really ever get our mind around that, that's what's actually happening. It's sort of like, you know, in Legos there's like the tiniest little one-by-one Lego piece that everything else is made up from. And I was thinking about this and I remembered this poem by Kabir. I'm going to read you part of it. When you really look for me, you will see me instantly. You will find me in the tiniest house of time.

[07:11]

Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath. The tiniest house of time. Can we get a taste of that? I'm pretty sure we can because it's the only thing that's happening. It's what's happening. And the way that it's always merged, that the sense organ and object are merged is also why we can't really get at self and other or inside and outside. We can infer those things, we can infer that there's an I form, but really what we experience is only when they merge. We don't experience our eye unless we're seeing something. We don't experience our mind unless there's a thought there.

[08:14]

So really we can't actually get at the self and other thing. It's always really just merged. And also from the point of view of how it's merged you can't really get at how we're doing anything either. So we feel like we are doing things and we are doing things but you can't really get at that from the point of view of this tiniest house of time. So we can't be busy. We can't ever be busy. So It's like Da Wu says, hmm, busy? And Yun Yan's pointing to this. He's pointing to how you really can't be busy. And Da Wu says, okay, then there's a second moon. Da Wu is so feisty in this story. It's really okay though.

[09:18]

It's like he's wrapping up a little present for us, shooting it down through time. So his feistiness is good. Then there's a second moon. So how do we open our little present? And what I kind of came to when I was thinking about this koan is how there's like a short narrow path to here. It's, we have to take this short narrow path. It's really strange. We can't just, we're not just here. We have to take a short narrow path and it's short because we can never get that far away from here either. So it's short, but it's really narrow. It's like the tiniest house of time. It's the breath inside the breath.

[10:21]

It's the body in the body. It's the feelings in the feelings. We have to take this short narrow path to here, but then when we get here It's really big. It's huge. It's quiet. It's not busy. There's room for everything. There's time for everything. But still we have to take that short narrow path. And I don't know if this makes sense to you, but to me it really is kind of like there is a second moon. That's the really strange part about the way we are. It's just the way we are. There's a second moon. In fact, in the commentary it says, only two? There's hundreds, thousands, myriads. Our feelings also can be the

[11:25]

our feelings in our feelings can be the short, narrow path. Mel gave a talk last week about the gathas and he mentioned this one that A.K. Hiroshi had written about. Gathas are these little poems that you can say, they're kind of like another way to get here. if you say this little poem, it's a little mindfulness device. And anyway, he had read this one of A.K. Hiroshi's that was about when you feel disappointed and I flashed on this part in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Hiroshi's book, that always just seemed so amazing to me. He says, when we feel discouraged we should be glad because that discouragement points out where our gaining idea is. So it's like you take the short narrow path of your discouragement and then you suddenly see, oh, I thought I had control over the outcome here or I thought I knew what was going to happen or I thought I could make something happen.

[12:38]

How silly of me. So it's, you know, get away from, we need to get away from that sort of bad practice, discouragement, bad practice, gaining idea, you know, just that. It's not really, we need to go from what's happening to here and then it won't feel that way. So, then yin-yang, what can yin-yang say at this point really? It's all been said. still he finds something to do, which is, which moon is this? which moon is this is how we have to actually bring this to life.

[13:47]

We have to take the short narrow path. We have to be here and when we're here it's peaceful, it's big, it's a big round full moon shining on everything and then we have to somehow bring that into our life, express that in our life. So I was going to tell you about a little practice I've been doing since the beginning of practice period. It's a very well-known, well-established Soto Zen practice called doing one thing at a time. In a way it's sort of like simultaneously taking the short narrow path and expressing it both. We just, sort of like when we eat, just eat. When we bow, just bow. Very common practice, Zen practice.

[14:51]

And when we do this practice, we're just joining what's already happening. We're not trying to achieve anything, we're just joining the merging. It seems like in our culture this is really hard to do because it's almost like multitasking is, you almost have to do it. It's like a requirement of our life or something. And so there's a way I think that you can say, well, multitasking is the one thing you're doing. I'm doing, multitasking is my one thing. And that's okay. As long as you don't think you're going to save any time by multitasking. Because multitasking, and here's another example of how we think, if I multitask now, I will have more time later to do one thing at a time. But the way our minds work, it's like multitasking just sows seeds of multitasking.

[15:55]

The more you multitask, the more likely you are going to be to multitask. So it's good to remember this and remember once in a while to try to just do one thing at a time. And I'm an intense multitasker myself and I have to admit I'm not even like Alan multitasks because many people have asked him to do important things. So I mean to do, he says yes to too many things. So he has to do a lot of things at the same time to get them all done. And I do that too, but I also hate to wait. That's one reason why I multitask. I hate to wait. So I fill in the chunks of time that I'm waiting with other things that I can do. I think this could be part of why I ended up with this story as my koan. So, like, my computer is really slow, it turns out.

[17:02]

I didn't really know that. All I know is that I hate to wait for my computer. I didn't know objectively that it is slow, but I hate to wait, so what I like to do is I have my little PalmPilot, a little game on my PalmPilot, and I whip it out and play it for, like, 20 seconds while I'm waiting for something, my computer to do something. I've been, I decided for practice, maybe I wouldn't do that. And so I thought, we'll make up a little gata to pass the time. And I remembered this, I flashed on this thing that Mel once said, I have no memory of what we were talking about, but he said, we have to contain ourselves in alertness. And I think that's exactly what I can't do. I can't contain myself in alertness. So I've been saying this Gata.

[18:03]

While I'm waiting for the computer, I vow with all beings, and actually usually that's the time. It's so bad. But if it takes a little longer, I can say, I vow with all beings to contain myself in alertness. And... You know, when I leave the Zen Dojo, I go up and get my kids ready for school, and there's this period of time of tremendous activity, and I'm making breakfast, I'm making lunch, I'm talking to them, I'm getting my own breakfast, and so I tend to try to group things, multitask there, so I've been trying just for practice period, because I have that set amount of time. You know, if I do one thing at a time or if I group them, it's kind of going to be the same, I think. So I've been trying to just, instead of opening up the freezer and thinking, well, I'll take the stuff out for lunch, I'll take the bagel out for breakfast, and I just think, okay, I'm going to make the breakfast now, and I make the breakfast, and then I'm going to make the lunches now, and I'm going to make one lunch now, and then I'm going to make the other lunch, because my kids have completely different lunches.

[19:22]

And then I'm going to turn my attention to my children, make sure they have their things. It's really, it's not that different, but the feeling is actually pretty different, I have to admit. It's pretty different. Linda Huss was quoting some Zen masters saying, when we eat and read, just eat and read. That's good. That's good. You know, I think that for our time we need both sides. We need to do the one thing of the multitasking as the one thing. And then we need to say, okay, if I'm going to eat and read, I'm going to just eat and read. But do I need to read while I eat today? Not forever, you know, not for practice, but just today. Do I need to eat and read? Could I just eat? So that's what I've been trying to do is just usually I find out I can just eat. Not always, not always, especially if there's something laying on the kitchen table that I wasn't planning to read but my eyes just gravitate over there.

[20:34]

So I was going to propose that if anybody else wants to try this, any part of the practice period, I'd like to hear how it's going. You could tell me how it's going and we could talk about the kind of gray areas like listening to music while you're doing other things. It's kind of a gray area for me. But maybe musicians wouldn't feel that way. Maybe they wouldn't want us to be listening to their music while we're doing other things. I don't know. Anyway, do you have any thoughts about these matters? How do you prioritize? What is it within you that chooses what the one thing is going to be? It's, yeah, I think it's easier to do the one thing if it's a set thing that you have to do. I mean, I have to make my kids lunch.

[21:41]

But I guess the choosing is maybe the one thing then at that moment. The choosing, to realize you're choosing. Do you have much of a sense of criteria or a guiding, some guiding gossips? Yeah, in fact I was going to talk about that in my next talk. You have the important things, the things that are important to you in your life, right? There's not that much, there's not that much time. You can really only do the things that are important to you, I think. How do you know what they are? Well, sometimes other people tell you also. Sometimes people tell you what they are. Doug, then Paul, then Sue. Oh, sorry. Hi, Richard. Hi.

[22:43]

Oh, thank you. I have the habit of, when I take long walks, of taking a walk with me on tape. I listen to a book on tapes. I was doing that earlier this week. I was noticing a so beautiful green warm out, but I didn't notice any You mean either way you're kind of paying a price. Yeah. Right, so when I go to the gym, I sometimes go and work out in the gym and I know, I'm pretty sure that you can't read and exercise and that as one thing. I mean, you do it, so you can, but I mean, I don't think that's the practice. But what about listening to music? Because music can actually help, you know, the rhythm of music can actually, you can kind of merge with the music and your movement, so.

[23:53]

But yeah, I think that the story is right. Who was over here? Doug and then Paul? I know probably driving a car and talking on the cell phone is the most fantastic thing. Where does multitasking take over from, where does single tasking take over from multitasking? Like driving a car is a lot of stuff. Right. Especially if you have a gaining idea. Is it a matter of consciousness versus unconsciousness? Or where does something become one thing and not many things? Or are we fooling ourselves? That's my question. I think it's, again, sometimes you have to do it the narrow way. If you really want to realize the practice, you have to have some time where you say, okay, I'm going to do it as strict as I can.

[24:57]

I'm going to do one thing that I, as strictly as I can and then see what that feels like. And then kind of bring that feeling into the, I mean, I was just off the top of my head, but I think you actually, have to take the short, narrow path to get there before you can do the multitasking as one thing, I suspect. One feels like one. Yeah. What feels like one thing, right? Should we, what do we do? Do we, do we go through the revert? All at once. Multitask. Paul, are you still? Yeah, I was asking myself, I was going to ask you, I was thinking that of examples of doing one thing at a time, and all those things I can think of are actually combinations of, there's no one thing at a time.

[25:58]

Walking is an infinite number of things. And if you just try to do one thing at a time, it's more easy to see the depth of complexity of what you're doing, and it also spills over into what's happening around you anyway. Like Richard was saying, So that's, but that's the way things are. So doing one thing at a time helps you see the way things are, which is rewarding. As we know. Right. I think there was Sue, then there was Dean, then there was Paul Cotton. Sue? Everybody wants to respond to this wonderful talk. It's really helpful. I love this koan too, being a person tortured by busyness. And I've always thought that Yun Yan was also saying, and I guess you implied this too, that in the midst of the greatest amount of busyness or even multitasking or whatever, at that very moment, there is also one who is not busy.

[27:11]

And so sometimes I try to bring that awareness into my everyday life when I am multitasking. Those times when you kind of can't avoid it when you're in the middle of one thing and then the phone rings and you kind of have to answer it because you have left all these messages so you have to pick it up and then you have to tell the person well just a minute I'll go find out if I can do it then and then you were in the middle of sending an email but you know, those times just happen. Right. So what do you do? So you are multitasking. And then for me, I can, I have some place of faith, I guess, that even while I'm doing all of that and feeling incredibly scattered and confused and fragmented, there is one who is not busy somewhere. I might have kind of lost track of her but she's there helping me and taking care of me. Right, she can never be that far away from us. So I find that that helps too. And then I was thinking about your comments about getting the kids ready for school and that seems like a

[28:16]

You know, it's a very brave attempt to do one thing at a time in a situation like that because it really calls for, you know, motherhood of young children kind of calls for doing a lot of things at once. And, you know, if you're making, if you're defrosting two bagels for two different lunches, you're not going to first defrost one and then defrost the other. So there's ways in which you do have to combine things. I think what I'm hearing in what you're saying is that you get into the sort of play side of it. I mean, it's not like I'm going to feel like, will I go confess to Mel if I didn't do one thing at a time this morning? I mean, you know, there isn't this sort of like thing. There's like, well, it really doesn't matter whether I do them all at the same time or not. So I'm going to try doing them one at a time this morning. Dean, you guys, I need a facilitator. Thanks, Lori, that was just absolutely delightful.

[29:22]

It's a little startling to me that it made sense. I don't know, I don't know if we should get you a new computer now if I've heard this. You always have to think that. Is it going to improve things? Right. Everything you think is going to improve things. Well, I will find that time someplace else to do a little. So what I'm wondering, when you're talking about the short and narrow path, does that come, or is that the realization of the path being short and narrow come with the simplicity? Is that what the simplicity is? You know, you're talking about fixing breakfast and you think, okay, I'm just going to do this and all of a sudden the path is short and narrow and it's also pretty simple.

[30:25]

So, I mean, that's what it sounded like to me. Is that making sense at all? Yeah. It's always right there. So whatever's happening, but it's something about the way we think. We have to merge with what's happening. We don't just automatically merge. Linda? I'm sorry to... Oh, God. Was there somebody else? Yeah. Somebody you remember? Paul? I've really enjoyed this talk. And I wanted to say, I just learned Susan was here, Susan Lewin. Something she said in a talk a long time ago keeps coming back to me and she described herself going in a car and hurrying to get someplace because she felt she was late and that whole sense of being late and not being present and not fully being

[31:26]

on time, and when I feel like I am on time, or I can do whatever I want fully, it feels like if you're thinking ahead, if you're not fully in the present, no matter what you're doing, you're not doing it. So what do you do? I guess you just breathe, Something in the way that Susan described her moment, I don't know if you can remember that, but it was totally just a ridiculous situation. There's something humorous about it. It's a lot to do with how we think about it, isn't it? Pesky old brain that we have.

[32:46]

Ken? And Linda? I think maybe this one thing at a time, which is a really good practice, but it's sort of, it's just some words that we try to use to roughly get us to a certain point because often, if not always, we are doing lots of things at a time. And it's not, you know, like we're always juggling. And if you're a juggler, you just juggle. And it's, that can be a very frazzling kind of thing, like, and then you probably would fail. you know, what's happening or it can be something where with practice you're just very alert and it's just a nice flow there and you can even be talking with somebody while you're doing it and even holding several conversations at once and all sorts of things and that's not necessarily a problem.

[34:02]

The problem is sort of being torn, pulled from one to another so that We really don't know. I mean, you could just as easily make several lunches at once. You know, it all depends. That might be a better way or it might be one lunch at a time. It depends. But the point is that whichever thing you're doing, you have that one that, what was it, that isn't busy, that's kind of centered and all these things are going on. But I think that two moons thing is that you have to make sure that that one isn't being real egotistical and saying, oh, here I am in the center, just everything's under control. Or then you do have that separation again. So it's like. Right. Just now I was doing more than one thing at a time by thinking about what I was going to say instead of listening to what was even going on.

[35:20]

In response to the first question that came from Ko about prioritizing, I thought that it's really, you know, usually you just know. You don't have to figure out, oh well, which thing is really the most important. One thing that you're doing is... I mean, I know when I'm doing something to kill my consciousness. Like, I'm doing something, I turn on the radio. Turning on the radio is to kill my consciousness. Usually you know. That is one thing. Then about the narrow... And it's always coming back to your body that helps. If you just pause, if I just pause for like one second, and contact my body. That's it. Could I just quote Kabir one more time? On the narrow track. This is a little short peanut sized poem of Kabir.

[36:22]

He says, Kabir's house is at the top of a narrow slippery track. An ant's foot won't fit. You fool, you're loading your bullock. You fool, you're loading your bullock. Even an ant can't go on here. Is that the last word, Ross, or what time is it? It's a word. Nobody's going to go twice. I'm sorry. That's just not going to happen. That's not going to be one of the one thing. Ann and Moffat? Yeah, I want to thank you for a lovely talk. And I would second what Linda said. I'm worse. I will not only read and eat but watch TV.

[37:28]

I've started asking myself, you know, why am I doing all of these things? Which ones are just a distraction? Do I eat while I eat so I won't notice what I'm eating? Which is really silly, because if you really think about what you're eating, then less is more satisfying. And that idea that Linda mentioned about just getting in touch with your body for one second makes a lot of sense to me. I do have a lot of things to do, but I'm often in the position of they're not necessarily things I really have to do. And so I try to focus on what am I using as a distraction? What do I really need to do? Sometimes it's a blessing.

[38:34]

Where I went with what you said was I mean, I think the distraction, it's a little bit more complicated because how do you... If you're needing to distract yourself, I mean, partly we just sort of like to feel distracted, but how do we know that the one thing is the thing we're supposed to be doing? You know, I mean, we need to be quiet, we need to have some inner, we need to have our conscience, you know, we need to really have a settled place. If it's just, if you're just doing what everybody told you to do and they told you it was a good idea, are you just believing that or, you know?

[39:44]

It seems like this thing about when we distract ourselves, it opens up something. I can't quite put my finger on what it is exactly. Who was El Moffat? Well, it's really a very rich topic. I just want to say maybe there's some comfort in getting older to where I am now, where it's hard for me to think about more than one thing. I used to do all that with kids, too, and I think, gosh. So I try to take advantage of, you know, try to take a seeded advantage of what my brain or psyche does not want. really to do too many things at once, although I do really move again and again.

[40:52]

But the point of reducing this sense of being pulled in different directions, it's uncomfortable, as Kim said, but when one can, feel unified in one's conscious awareness with one's activity, it's that that allows the one moon to rise, to be felt. Right. So I think that this staff is, what's this? This is it. Ross, did you want to say something? Well, I'm just not reading too much into that commentary about there's hundreds of millions of moons, and if we take the moon as enlightenment, that our lives are just filled with so many things, and if we're really present with each moon, then we're really present in this body and in this enlightenment, and it doesn't really matter how much we do.

[42:10]

But as you said earlier, if you're beating yourself up, that I shouldn't be doing so many things, that's there. Marty? I guess that would be the last thing. I was thinking when you were reading the column about, I was listening to music yesterday, and it was jazz. this particular music was very frantic on the surface, but then if I was able to step back and think of the whole chord progression and listen to the franticness within the larger progression, then that was a kind of stillness behind it.

[43:12]

And I thought it was interesting that it's in a way the opposite of what you're saying. You're going to the smallest house of time, This is going to the biggest house of time, but is it different, or what do you think? I think they're both helpful. I mean, that's what I was saying about my, I was thinking from my other talk, there's a way to talk about it as from the bigger, from the biggest sense, yeah. So I don't think it's the same, but I think this is pointing to equally, to all the different ways, you're not busy. Okay. Thank you.

[43:58]

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