Today I want to talk about right effort and right thought. Right effort and right thought go together. So when you talk about one, you're also talking about the other. They're very close. If we don't have right thought, we don't know. Even though we have good effort, we don't know what to direct our effort toward. So right thought is knowing what to direct our effort to. And right effort is focusing our energy so that things will work. So right thought

[01:01]

really refers to keeping our attention on dharma, keeping our attention focused on practice. In a very narrow sense, it means to know what Buddhism is about, And so that whatever you're doing, you don't forget that what you're doing is practicing. For us, this can be a very hazy place. the place of keeping our attention on practice all the time.

[02:08]

The central point, you know, of our practice is zazen. And Dogen Zenji's attitude toward practice was that Zazen includes everything. So, if Zazen includes everything, if Zazen includes all of practice, all of Buddhadharma, then Zazen cannot be just confined to sitting. but must go out into activity as well. So to come to sitting and go out to activity and back to sitting and out to activity in a kind of never-ending cycle is what he means by zazen.

[03:27]

and ultimately in a kind of eternal life. So to be able to have a kind of focus which enables us to always see our life as a state of practice, always within practice, is most necessary. Someone said to me, you know what I feel about this dental is that it's like country practice as opposed to say, or compared with city practice or monastic practice or something.

[04:47]

Country practice, I don't know exactly what that is, but the sense I have is not so strenuous, more What I mean by strenuous is not so focused in one place, but focus is more spread, more diffuse and spread out. And I feel that our practice is like that. The focus is more diffuse and spread out. But in a realistic sense, no matter where our activity is. It's always, if we're really focused on practice, it's always focused in the same place.

[05:52]

So whether it's country practice or city practice or monastic practice or whatever our activity is, is not so much the point. Our activity will always be changing. The things we do will never be the same in any one place. Our particular activities are always changing. This 20th century is not the 7th century. But surprisingly enough, our activities are not so different. So, the point is, in any activity, how do we focus on practice? How do we keep our attention focused on right, how do we keep right thought in every single situation of our life, no matter what that situation is involved in?

[07:09]

I think that When we first begin to practice, some of us come from having studied something about Buddhism or Zen, having read some books. And some of us come just because some friends tell us about it, or we hear about Zen in some way. Maybe our Zen center is becoming popular. One time, when we were on Dwight Way, somebody was driving his car down the street and just stopped. Parked the car and knocked on the door and came up and sat and talked to him, but didn't really know what was going on at all. It's a very strange thing. I don't know why that happened. It's a very interesting story. So there are various reasons for coming to practice.

[08:23]

But once we engage ourselves, once we start to practice, we find some reason for doing it. Our reasons are not all the same. And the reason we come to practice is not at all the same for everybody. It can't be. And our understanding can't be correct, completely correct. Maybe subconsciously our reasons are correct, more correct, or unknown reasons. But our conscious reasons are usually almost never completely correct. for why we practice. So as we engage in practice and become more and more confident, and more and more our realization becomes greater, then we need some kind of guidance, some

[09:45]

way to keep ourselves focused. At first, everything is new to us. The whole situation of practice is new, and we start discovering things that we didn't know before, and we start discovering our body, and how to relate to the world in a more clean kind of way, empty way. And our practice has some kind of joy in it, even though there may be difficulty and pain and various other things. Still, we have some joy of engaging in something in a new way. But as our practice becomes deeper and as we become pretty good at sitting and get some handle on what we're doing, then It's kind of like a marriage, you know.

[10:48]

At first, you have this great, wonderful kind of joy of things being new. And then after a while, you settle down to everyday existence. Practice is kind of like that, has that quality. So how to keep that everyday existence relationship going is the real test in the real guts of practice in both marriage and Zen practice. How to keep our practice fresh. And, you know, at some point And we may say, well, I'm stuck with this. So being stuck with this is actually where this second stage of practice really begins.

[12:02]

You can leave. But if you don't leave, then you accept the challenge of deepening practice, deepening marriage. I'll leave marriage alone. So at that point we need to expand our understanding. Usually we don't ask people to study for the first year or so of practice. Study can be a kind of hindrance to practice if you don't have some... some confidence in what you're doing.

[13:13]

But at some point, you know, we should know what our predecessors found out, and what their way was. Because our way, actually, of practice is based on the whole history of Buddhism. Our practice looks very simple, but it's like an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is like our practice. It's showing above the sea. But underneath the sea is this huge thing which supports the tip. And at some point, you know, we should investigate what this huge iceberg is. We should investigate and try to understand

[14:18]

what this mountain is. We can know the mountain just from the tip. It's true. We should know the mountain just from where we are. This is Zazen. Zazen is becoming one with the whole mountain just from the point where we are. So that no matter which point we're at, whether at the bottom of the mountain or the top or the side. Every place we stand includes the whole mountain and is supported by the whole mountain. But we know that it's supported by the whole mountain, but at some point we should investigate what is this support. If we want to understand what the old Zen masters were talking about in their dialogues.

[15:23]

We can understand something from just what they say, just what we read. But when we understand the background or the bottom of this mountain, then what they say becomes richer and richer, much more profound and deeper. Because what they're saying is a comment on the whole mountain of Buddhism. The interesting thing is that in a way, you know, even though you don't know anything about Buddhism, you can understand, it's possible to know what they're talking about. But if you have some understanding of this mountain, what they're talking about becomes much clearer, much clearer. When Bodhidharma came to China, he brought the Lankavatara Sutra with him.

[16:36]

That's what they say. And Huineng, the sixth patriarch, preached on the diamond sutra. And then the Chinese took the Sixth Patriarch's biography and made a sutra out of that. It's not a real sutra in a sense, in a legitimate sense, but it's definitely a sutra. sometime we should study the Platform Sutra, the Sixth Patronage, again. Not so much because it's written in an authoritative way,

[17:46]

not to follow something dogmatically, but to understand what our predecessors, where they were coming from. So in one sense, keeping right thought is much easier when you're studying. the background of our practice. When you study the background of our practice, it helps us to focus on, what am I doing? I'm studying Buddhism, I'm studying Zen. So, one side is just to do what we do, and the other side is to find the support of this big mountain, to learn how to appreciate it, and learn from it, and you find that you yourself are in the same place that these patriarchs were in.

[18:53]

And in a sense, no different from them. So in Soto Zen, or our particular the way that we've inherited. We don't study koans as a practice. But we should all be familiar with those koans. We should all be familiar with those stories. And they're very meaningful. Our study is our practice, which we call shitan taza, or just sitting, is more our focus. Soto Zen is a much more vague way.

[20:11]

It's a difficult way to practice because it's not so... there's nothing to hold on to. Very little to hold on to. And everything is up to you. It's not like we have some regimentation by beating you over the head, telling you what to do. Get in line. That's good, actually. Get in line. Don't go this way. Don't go that way. Get in there. That kind of practice. very good, but it's not so much a practice. Everything is really up to you. So, that's just the style that we've inherited. And a relationship with a teacher is more like when you meet a teacher, then you go away from the teacher.

[21:19]

But you have a relationship. And you look at the teacher and the teacher looks at you. And it's like you live your life and the teacher lives his life. But you live your lives independently, together. And you have some idea of what the teacher is thinking. And the teacher gives you lots of space. But if you take too much space, then you get lost. So some people need to be very close because of who they are. Some people can be more at a distance.

[22:34]

This is what enables us to have a practice where we have different people in different places of practice, different positions. Some people can practice very close, other people way out there. This country then, so-called, would call it allows us to have relationships where we carry on our individual affairs and yet in some way we're all connected and doing the same thing that each one of us has to find our own way. But finding our own way can be confusing.

[23:42]

It doesn't mean that you just do your own thing the way you want to do it. That's not what that means. When we are living in the woods by ourselves, we can do whatever we want, except that we have to pay attention to the creatures and the plants and so forth, and we have to be in harmony with that. But when we get together with people more, the more we get together with people, the more we have to conform to the way people do things. And when we get into a situation that has a kind of narrow way or a narrow practice, then we have to, in order to practice with them, we have to give up more and more of our own way of doing things.

[24:47]

In a monastic situation, we give up our way of doing everything completely. We just toss aside our way of doing things. The only way you can do it, the only way you can be in a monastic situation is to just give up your own way of doing things. And that's why there are so few people that can practice that way. It means to give yourself over. Hand yourself over. Not everyone can do it. But in city Zen, you have to do the same thing. But there's more space, more latitude because of the nature of being in the city. In country Zen, country practice, we think that we don't have to do that.

[25:58]

We can practice thinking that we don't have to do that. And that's a kind of problem. How to give ourself over to a situation. How to give ourself up to a situation and let practice direct our life, how to direct our life in cooperation with it. We have a lot of latitude. We talk about how to be in cooperation with our lives in practice within a certain kind of limitation. To draw an analogy, it's like a nuclear family and a community.

[27:11]

A nuclear family, which is mother, father, and child, have a certain kind of unity. And when a nuclear family becomes part of a community, in order to exist within a community nuclear family has to have more space or be more open to becoming each member, part of the community so that there can be harmony and interaction so that becomes a very difficult kind of balance Because a community has to be able to also participate in that way. For single people, you know, it's easier in a different way.

[28:26]

So, in a sense, the question is, what is the right attitude? What is the right way of directing our attention in this kind of situation? Someone, nowadays, as the world becomes more and more a community. The whole world is becoming more and more of a community. And in this country and in other countries, housing is becoming scarcer and scarcer. Berkeley is a prime example of a city that has no place to go. There's no place for Berkeley to expand to.

[29:38]

It can go up a ways. It can't go out. And nobody's thought about it going down. But it can only go up so far. And there's so many people. It means that people more and more have to learn how to live together as a total community. as they learn to live together as a total community in houses that are getting smaller and smaller, and rooms that are getting smaller and smaller, and population which is getting bigger and bigger. People have to live, open up their houses. More and more people will live in a house as time goes on, until maybe there won't be any single family dwelling. At some point, there may not be any single family going. So, whether we want to or not, we're forced to live in a community.

[30:47]

And the nuclear family is becoming less and less tight, and more and more open, and community itself is taking the place of nuclear families. And as that happens, it keeps coming up. We have to know how to include that and deal with it. In Japan, for years, they have this kind of problem. But I think they have a tremendous sense of community. And also they have a tremendous sense of privacy. How to keep our privacy? So Japanese people were forced to become very careful about everything.

[31:59]

We've inherited in our practice a kind of Japanese style of being very careful about everything. How not to bother people, even though you're this close to them. How to maintain your privacy in a very crowded space. When Suzuki Roshi came to America, he lived with a friend, someone I knew, and his mother. And he and his mother had this huge apartment in one of the San Francisco, Victorian apartments that has three bedrooms and a dining room and a living room. And he said, do you live here with your mother? No one else lives here? He said, in Japan, a house that big that has maybe 15 people living in it. And they would all just live there.

[33:02]

Everyone would have privacy. everyone would cooperate with everyone else in making the thing work. We haven't gotten to that point yet. We're still the Wild West. America is still has the feel, we feel that we're still pushing towards the West, but actually we've come to the end of the trail. And we're all kind of Momentum is piling us up all against each other. The movement is stopped, but the momentum is piling into each other. And we're trying to sort it out. So this community here is a kind of experiment. It's our real life, so we can't exactly treat it as an experiment.

[34:03]

It's an experiment in that there's lots of room to figure out how things should be. And people that live here and also people in the wider community influence each other. And we're all learning how to do it, how to live together. So, in some sense, this is where our effort is going. how to live together, and how to keep our practice going in a strong way. This is one side. The other side is to study how things were done in the past, and what is that big mountain of past experience, the result of which has put us on top of this I'd like to ask how you yourself study.

[35:15]

Do you underline things or do you take notes? So much of the material is so very dense, how is one to absorb it? Yeah, how do you open it up? One way is to study with other people. Another way is to study by yourself. When I studied by myself, I learned something in a certain way. But when I had a class and I teach what I studied, then the whole thing becomes much more opened up. As soon as you start to read out loud what you read silently, it's a whole different thing.

[36:19]

Not only what you read, but what somebody else reads with you and studies with you just opens up the subject. So it's studying with other people is the best way. And also studying by yourself. Both. So I'm always studying something because I'm always interested in something. There's so much to study. Buddhism is like... Buddhist study is so huge and vast that you can never do it in a lifetime. You can never study, unless you're a completely brilliant person who remembered every single thing you ever read. Some people can do that. I keep reading over and over the same things that I read 10-15 years ago, but every time I study something it brings me back to the thing I read 10-15 years ago and I see it in a completely different light because it reaches out and touches other things that you don't know what those things are until your study becomes broader.

[37:28]

So when we study some small thing or some focus on one thing, we can understand that one thing, maybe, in a certain way. But when we begin to study other aspects, then what we read before, we can see how it is influenced by and touches those other aspects. And those other things have influenced this. And study becomes more and more interesting and more and more deep. So we have to have a balance of study and activity. If we study too much and start to get too involved in that, then we become scholars. And for that person, someone whose intention is really to practice, you can't really be a scholar as well. Some people can, but very few.

[38:29]

So study mainly is to support our practice. and allow us to identify with this great mountain of practice that's going on before us. After you practice, and then you study, you say, oh yeah, that's familiar, this is familiar. You're just really studying your own practice. Mother, even though we don't use koans, isn't it possible to use study as a kind of directory in our development practice? When we're reading about certain problems, we can design anything, too. Well, I mean, just the reading that we've been doing, just very basic problems come up about the

[39:33]

universal in particular and where we are in that. Yeah. Yes. Whatever we read actually becomes a koan for us when we study. Someone said that when you read Dogon, every sentence in Dogon is a koan. That's why, you know, you don't read Dogon's writing like you read a book. in that sense. It goes on somewhat logically, and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But each sentence is a koan. Because it's not writing about something, it's writing which is expressing something. Study also can be very soothing. At least I find that I can sit and have some vision or ideal of how things should be and maybe an interaction that doesn't quite come together the way that a vision of life you would want it to be.

[40:53]

But study can, it's a little bit abstract, but it can, for me at least, give me that feeling. quiet feeling, soothing kind of feeling from which to study. Anyway, I want us to at least have some background, to know something about the background we've practiced. In that way, it may confuse us, which is okay, but we don't think it's something that it's not.

[41:55]

And it really helps us to think about So, these are, this is kind of how we, the effort we use to keep our attention focused. To use our situation and to use our study. And of course in our daily life, you know, we always come back to just what we're doing right now.

[43:01]

No separation of body or mind or things. Even though we talk about things, you know, we talk about absolute and military and so forth, when we're actually engaged in doing something, we're just doing something. And that's where our life resides. But how to not get lost? to keep from getting lost in that simple situation. And to just go on, day after day, when you practice. Thank you. Singing beings are

[44:05]

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