I've been thinking a lot about how to practice, what is it that I'm trying to do in devoting my life to practice, and how to communicate it. And the question of how to communicate something always intimately bound up with, well, what is it that you're trying to communicate? What is it we're trying to do here? My oldest child will be 21 tomorrow, and so I wanted to give him something that would express my understanding of life that would be useful for him in his adult life.

[01:33]

I've spent most of my adult life trying not to perpetuate the mistakes of my predecessors in parenting, my parents and my ancestors. And sometimes when I think about giving a lecture or starting, I have a very kind of fledgling little practice place in Orinda, that meets in my house a couple of Sundays a month, and in an Aikido studio in Concord once a week. So I'm thinking a lot about, you know, how to start from scratch, how to work with people that have never practiced, and what to communicate, and how to help, what is going to be useful to people.

[02:38]

So, I don't... have any answers here. I'm going to try and lecture a little bit about practice from the point of view of practice as staying in the process and being one with the process of whatever we're doing or feeling or thinking in each moment. So I include you in the process here, and you get to see the raggedy and unformed nature of my thinking in this, as judged by the stack of books I bring in. Whenever somebody brings in a large stack of books, you know they have no clue. Those of you who, many of you know my dog, he's very hungry for the Dharma.

[04:00]

He tried to get the whole thing, but luckily he only got the references. I can't read them all. Kadagiri Roshi says that we practice to know our unconditioned nature. This is Dogen's teaching, the basic teaching of Soto Zen. To know our unconditioned nature is to thoroughly learn the naked nature of a human being by taking off all our cultural clothes. It's a nice phrase. And if we take off all our cultural clothes, we can just be in the process.

[05:06]

The process of walking is exactly what our body and mind are, nothing but the process. There is no gap between us and the process. We are peaceful. We are harmonious from the very beginning. Take off all conceptual clothes, and then what is left? Finally, there is nothing to think about. All we have to do is just plunge in." And this is walking, or what he's really talking about in this chapter is sitting, or shikantaza, which is just sitting. Shikan is translated as wholeheartedness, which seems to be a sort of psychological state or pattern. But shikan is not a psychological pattern. Shikan is exactly becoming one with the process itself. Literally za of taza is zazen, and ta means to hit.

[06:13]

So from moment to moment, we have to hit the bullseye of zazen itself. And when we hit the bullseye of zazen itself, he says, this is not a technique, this is not something I can teach you. Just plunge in, just be right here. And then what? And then just keep doing it, moment after moment. So the whole teaching is, just live your life. So what kind of person can do this? What kind of mind can just be completely naked in the present moment, completely open to not just what is happening externally, what is going on, what is coming at your senses from the outside,

[07:30]

what being completely open and completely naked to yourself, to be completely naked with one's own inner stuff. Can we even contemplate what it means to attempt to be so totally present. Do we even want to do it? And if we say that that is our practice, and we are practicing to be completely present, to be in the process of our life, moment after moment, who is it? Who are we? What are we doing here?

[08:32]

Who is this person who has this aspiration? This aspiration to unity with the present moment, to just be who we are. The psychoanalysts say that we have this kind of urge, this drive to union as a sort of residue of our original, initial, infant experience of union with our mother. And that from the moment we develop the neurological wherewithal to think about things and to know that we're in some physical sense separate, that we long to go back to this primordial union, this original state of bliss, and that we spend

[09:59]

the rest of our lives in looking for someone who will do that for us, someone with whom we can unite and feel that comfortable, or some way to convince ourself that actually we're self-sufficient, and that that split in our consciousness between the sense of being self-sufficient and the sense of being incomplete and needing another to complete us is what adult psychology is about. There's a wonderful new book out which you may have seen. It's called Thoughts Without a Thinker. And it's an attempt at looking at Buddhist practice from the point of view of psychotherapy, or psychotherapy from the point of view of Buddhist practice.

[11:10]

And it's... Actually, it's the best thing I've read so far on the subject. And what I like about it the most is that it's so clear It's explanation of Buddhism is so clear. He's a Freudian psychoanalyst, which is not my favorite school of psychology, and so I get a little tense reading that part of it, but he's very, very clear. One of the other things that I like about it so much is that his point of view is that unraveling what we in the West think of as our personality and our personal psychology and all our sort of ancient twisted psychological karma is not different from plunging right in.

[12:25]

when we plunge in to practice, this is what we are plunging into. And while in zazen maybe the content of our consciousness is not so important, the process is all-important and it's what is so hard often about staying with the process is that the content of our consciousness is so painful or embarrassing or difficult to stay with. We don't like it a lot. His view of what happens when we practice is that by staying with the process of finding, of realizing that we are, and experiencing really, that we alternate, our state of mind tends to alternate between feeling self-sufficient

[13:56]

and looking for somebody or something that will, some experience that will complete us and make us feel okay that these are the roots of wisdom and compassion that when we can transform what he calls the investment in ourself When we can turn that inside out then we see the true nature of ourself. And when we see through our desire and our rage at not getting satisfied and not getting what we want we see everybody else caught in the same process we begin to see that there really is no magical other, that all this is in our own mind.

[15:05]

And so what gets extinguished, what gets totally burned up, and enables us to be just this pure flame of attention, and in the process, all the false views of ourself. He recounts a wonderful story about a meeting with Acharn Chah, who was a forest teacher in Thailand, one of Jack Kornfield's teachers. And they trudged out into the forest to meet him, And after much sort of fumbling around, asked him basically the question that I'm asking today, you know, what's all this about?

[16:09]

What are we, what are you talking about? What are we trying to do here? And he held up a glass of water and said, this glass, is already broken. Look how it's a nice glass and it holds my water quite admirably and sometimes the sunlight looks beautiful reflected in the water. And it makes a nice sound if I tap it. But if I drop it or I brush against it and it falls on the floor, I'm not surprised. Of course, if I drop it, it'll shatter in a zillion pieces. So Ajahn Chah says, so when I look at this glass, I see that it's already broken.

[17:11]

And what practice points us towards is seeing that this self that we're so busy protecting is already broken. It's a little bit like, you know, we built this house. You know the famous story about Milarepa building this house and the teacher said, take it down, move it somewhere else, and he kept doing this over and over again, that the process of really examining our life is like building something and then taking it and putting all the bricks in a pile, and putting all the lumber in a pile, and putting all the electrical stuff in a pile,

[18:21]

And that's our personality. I feel a great deal of compassion for my 21-year-old son who has finally put his personality together and spent the last 21 years trying to raise him and help him feel like a person. The next step is for him to let go of it. Poor kid. It's been such a struggle. And actually, he has a glimmer of it already. And it's very wonderful and very sad. So how do we help people?

[19:28]

How do we train? How do we practice to promote this self-understanding or letting go that enables us to be one with our life which is being free of suffering? Because when we're one with our life, we're not reaching for the future or stuck in the past, holding back in fear, lashing out against something. Kadagiri talks very movingly about his own training And he went to study with an old teacher in a mountain temple when he was 19.

[20:37]

And he describes this really kind of awful experience of being, you know, one of, I guess, just a few students or maybe the only student of this old man who didn't teach him anything. And the temple was apparently kind of a spooky place where there was a graveyard nearby and often when the breeze was right, they could smell the funeral pyres. Katagiri tells this great story of saying to his master, there's this funny smell in the air. Is somebody cooking fish nearby? And the master says, no, they're cooking dead bodies. And Katagiri says, they're cooking dead bodies where? And the teacher says, in our backyard.

[21:39]

And every night, Katagiri Roshi had to return alone on a long path late at night to the temple. And it was very spooky and very scary. And he was only 19, he was just a kid. And his master, you know, didn't think anything of it. But, and so he didn't get any, you know, he didn't get any validation, what we would call validation. Nobody acknowledged his fear. And he ended up leaving to go to university at some point because he felt his teacher wasn't teaching him anything. You know, he was here to learn something. He was there to penetrate the great matter, to free himself from suffering. And he was certainly suffering a whole lot.

[22:42]

There was often not enough food. He was a growing boy. The teacher was completely unconcerned about there not being enough food. If there was no food at all, he'd say, well, you know, some will come, don't worry. Maybe somebody will bring something. And we've all had this experience, you know, particularly during Sashin or some difficult time. Why aren't they? Why don't they teach us anything? Tell us to sit here, you know. So he thought it was pretty weird the teacher didn't teach anything and went to university and read lots of stuff and learned lots of stuff and ended up going back into a life of practice and being just that kind of teacher who says, really there's nothing I can teach you, please just sit. And I'm sort of coming full circle.

[23:43]

And I find myself kind of coming full circle over and over again with this practice of being frustrated with its very complex form of simplicity, which on the one hand says, there's nothing to do, just live your life, just be in the moment, gives us a tantalizing little bit of instruction and then sort of throws us out in the deep end without a life preserver. And appreciating that and being frustrated with it, maybe both at the same time. there must be lots of ways to learn this basic lesson of being present for our life and the value, not the value, but to have the experience of

[25:14]

taking off our cultural clothing the clothing of our concepts and our conditioning and experiencing life as it is in an unfiltered way. So there's that and then there's having some undeniable experience of this and having it over and over again, moment after moment, integrating it completely in our life. So I'd like to read you an example, and this is, it's long, but I'd like to read it because it gives you a feeling of the emotional experience of letting go, and it's quite, the setting is about as far from the Zendo as you can get.

[26:22]

This is from The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. And it's about a saga of a black family. And this young man has gone on a journey to retrieve a treasure, some bags of gold which one of his aunt had left somewhere a generation earlier. And he gets involved in quite a series of adventures that he wasn't planning on and getting to know himself and the background of his family and his personal karma. So he's in a forest on a coon hunt, and he's lived his entire life in a city.

[27:27]

He's never been in a forest before, and somehow he gets on this nighttime coon hunt in the forest. He's never held a gun. He's never seen a coon. He's never been in a forest. He doesn't know what to do without street lights. And he has no kind of physical stamina, so they're all running ahead and he's lost in the dark. At last he surrendered to his fatigue and made the mistake of sitting down instead of slowing down. For when he got up again, the rest had given his feet an opportunity to hurt him. And the pain in his short leg was so great he began to limp and hobble. Soon it wasn't possible for him to walk longer than five minutes at a time without pausing to lean against a sweet gum tree His friends were pinpoints of light bobbing ahead in and out of the trees. Finally, he could take it no more. He had to rest. At the next tree, he sank down to the ground and put his head back on his bark.

[28:33]

Let them laugh if they wanted to. He would not move until his heart left from under his chin and went back down into his chest where it belonged. He spread his legs, pulled the flashlight out of his hip pocket, and put his Winchester down near his right leg. At rest now, he could feel the blood pulsing in his temple and the cut on his face stinging in the night wind from the leaf juice and tree sap the branches had smeared on it. When he was breathing almost normally, he began to wonder what he was doing sitting in the middle of a woods in Blue Ridge country. He had come here to find traces of his aunt's journey, to find relatives she might have visited, to find anything he could that would either lead him to the gold or convince him that it no longer existed. How had he gotten himself involved in a hunt, involved in a knife and broken bottle fight in the first place? Ignorance, he thought, and vanity. He hadn't been alert early enough, hadn't seen the signs jutting out everywhere around him.

[29:38]

Maybe this was a mean bunch of black folk, but he should have guessed it, sensed it. And part of the reason he hadn't was the easy good treatment he had received elsewhere. He had done nothing to deserve these people's contempt, nothing to deserve the explosive hostility that engulfed him when he said he might have to buy a car. Why didn't they respond the way he wanted them to? He didn't deserve this. He didn't deserve to be in this situation. It sounded old, deserve, old and tired and beaten to death. Now it seemed to him that he was always saying or thinking that he didn't deserve something or other, some bad luck or bad treatment from others. Didn't deserve his family's dependence or hatred or whatever. Didn't deserve to hear all the misery and mutual accusations his parents unloaded on him. Nor did he deserve his girlfriend's vengeance.

[30:42]

Apparently, he thought he deserved only to be loved. From a distance, though, and given what he wanted. And in return, he would be what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was, I'm not responsible for your pain. Share your happiness with me, but not your unhappiness. They were troublesome thoughts, but they wouldn't go away. Under the moon, on the ground, alone, with not even the sound of baying dogs to remind him that he was with other people. His self, the cocoon that was personality, gave way. He could barely see his own hand and couldn't see his feet. He was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him had disappeared. So the thoughts came, unobstructed by other people, by things, even by the sight of himself.

[31:47]

There was nothing here to help him. Not his money, his car, his father's reputation, his suit or his shoes. In fact, they hampered him. Except for his broken watch and his wallet, All he had started out with on his journey was gone. His watch and his $200 would be of no help out here, where all a man had was what he was born with or had learned to use. And endurance. Eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch. And some other sense that he knew he didn't have. An ability to separate out of all the things there were to sense the one that life itself might depend on. Kadagiri says we usually have to be in that kind of situation right at the edge of life and death in order to really get it, in order to really have

[33:08]

some experience of our unconditioned self climbing a mountain being in some life or death situation that we cannot get out of. And so, in Soto Zen we construct this kind of situation where we sit for a long time. So Sashin is kind of like that. I thought of Sashin when, in the description of the pain, how he slowed down, how he stopped instead of slowing down, then it hurt more, how he struggled to decide whether to move or not. What do we do about this pain?

[34:12]

And then, you know, what is this young man going to do with this experience? How is he going to integrate it into the rest of his life? How is he going to use it to help himself, to help other people? And that's really the big point of our practice. We don't talk about enlightenment so much. We talk about it as everyday life and we tend to put a lot of emphasis on doing things in particular ways as a way of helping us focus on the present moment and sometimes as a sort of landmark so that we can tell if we're focusing on the present moment.

[35:23]

But somehow if our practice is to be alive and a living thing that is not just something that happens in the zendo, or that our understanding is not just something that is some dramatic experience we have on a mountaintop or in a scary situation. If our understanding is to permeate our life so that we really live as if it mattered, as if we were always right at the edge of life and death, then we have to have this understanding over and over again

[36:39]

if he's going to learn anything from this experience, our young hero has to find a way to use this dark moment to light up the rest of his life. He gets back to his friends and They didn't know what happened to him. And he says he got lost and they said, was he scared? Scared to death, he said, scared to death. They hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing him, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them, laughing too, hard and loud and long, really laughing. And he found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth, walking it like he belonged on it, like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down, down into the rock and soil and were comfortable there on the earth and on the place where he walked.

[37:59]

And he didn't limp. So that's where we started, where Kadagiri says to practice Shikantaza is just to walk like that, stably on the earth, completely just walking. We have a few minutes if you'd like to say something, talk about something. Yeah?

[39:09]

Could you say a little more why it is that he has to experience this again and again? Well, I don't think he has to experience this again and again. you know, going, getting so scared, hopefully he'll figure out how to keep out of that kind of danger. It's really easy to forget the lessons that we learn in extremis. Once we're safe again, and life goes back to being regular, whatever that was for us. We're so relieved. We want to forget about that. It's like if you have, you know, a serious, a life-threatening illness, or a bad injury, you know, you really, your life is just totally turned upside down, and you have to, you can't go with any of

[40:22]

any of your assumptions, none of your conditioning helps you get through that kind of an experience. But if you've learned something about who you really are, underneath your habits, that's something very important, because you could be in that situation at any moment. In a way, it seems that we have to learn to not trust our instincts then. Our instincts for safety. In what sense? Well, it feels so good to be safe. Why on earth would someone want to be living on the edge? You know, there's something about it that's very vital, but also just... I'm just wondering about how one knows whether to trust one's instincts on anything in the natural world.

[41:36]

The fellow that they picked up in Bosnia told a story in that they wanted to turn into this big hero. Told a story about he had one gun with him and he really thought he heard a noise and he was sure someone kill him and he pulled the gun out and was ready to blast, basically what turned out to be a rabbit. A very similar story to the Kenny Garris story, a little rabbit that looked at him like, you know, and he saw himself in the rabbit. He described it, said, I realized that was the rabbit, just trying to survive, just like that rabbit. When they picked him up, nobody wanted to hear that story. He wanted to tell another story about a brave man who survived and wasn't afraid. So it was his fear that got him through in its own way. He pretty much kept saying, I was just a frightened person eating bugs and trying to survive.

[42:41]

When he saw that rabbit, it was almost like he described it as no separation. But that continual message was, no, you're a hero, because we need a hero, and we need a concept, and the world is falling apart, so we need to have a concept. We need to know that there is order in the universe. But he was in that extreme situation where he knew better. Now, whether he still does, I don't know. But he knew better at the moment because he was there, you know, almost time. But it's interesting how we don't want to hear the experience of what somebody in total fear is going through and what our instincts do tell us in those moments. I can't help but notice I'm wearing some kind of odd cultural clothes.

[44:13]

And so are you, and so are different people in here. And I wonder what you make of that. It's kind of a conundrum. It is a conundrum. And it was actually one of my first questions. My first practice period at Tassajara, the question I asked Rev at his Juzo ceremony was, essentially that, why, you know, given the point of this practice, why do you wear this outfit? And I didn't get a satisfactory answer to it. And so one answer I could give now, the reason I wear this outfit is to find out something about, you know, what is This isn't even our culture. Yeah, it isn't even our culture. And so you put on the suit of another culture, and you learn something more about what all this culture business is about.

[45:15]

And somebody once said, well, you know, I put them on so that I could take them off. You know, this doesn't quite answer it for me either. And I think that if I'm really brutally honest with myself, I think one of the reasons that I wear this outfit has to do with the need to be identified with the the establishment in the right way and that it's both tainted and pure. It's an identification with the practice and also a need to belong that is very much part of not only my cultural conditioning but my personal karma, the leftovers

[46:27]

from my family. And the more I practice in this outfit and in this form of being a priest and all that, the more I can see the ways in which my motivation to wear these particular clothes comes both from my tremendous desire to know my unconditioned mind and my just blindly acting out my conditioning. need to identify with and be a part of something.

[47:34]

And it's very odd, man. I was interested in Joyce's question and I think it's an interesting one because I don't think And some things, things just come that just will scare you. And probably more than once. And I do think, though, that in practice situations, in intense practice situations, they are risky. and discern, you know, openly what's happening.

[49:00]

But, I don't know, my personal experience with these situations is that, oh, if you survive, they're very beneficial. You have to then survive to be conscious of where you are. Buddhist studies. It just doesn't help. And in a way, I will say that because And I don't know, that seems to help.

[50:09]

That is, if you then get out of it, then there's been a deep experience and you realize what that place is. And then as soon as you start to reconstruct, I mean, then the reconstruction begins. And you kind of begin to well, entertain yourself with the same thoughts and the same concepts, which is why it's so dangerous to talk about any of this. But I do think that one needs, then, the reminders somehow or other to remind oneself But it is really easy to forget, and to forget that one does it more.

[51:27]

I think most people need repetition. It may be too much of a question to answer now if this is a great hour, but maybe just a brief comment about how it's affected. Because you said, and it was very poignant to me, that here you spent 21 years trying to help It is, and it is a big question also, but maybe I can just say that how I've practiced with raising my children is really to try to just be with literally the process of

[52:46]

that they were going through, to join with them, and to over and over again try to let go of my conditioned ideas about how it ought to be, how they ought to be, how things ought to be going, and to really let go of my preconceptions enough so that I could learn from my own experience and my own mistakes with my kids. rather than just kind of doing the same thing that my parents did and their parents did, whether it worked or not. And to help my kids be good observers of themselves and their own internal dialogue. But that's another talk. I'd love to talk about it sometime. But what did you get your son for his birthday? What I did was, I wrote him, I gave him a collection of things that I've written over the last many years including some stuff that I wrote for some family therapy courses in graduate school about our family and part of the reason I did that particular thing was that

[54:02]

My mother recently wrote a book that was really quite a scathing attack on me and my values and essentially was dedicated to my children because she felt that she needed to get her point of view across to future generations and her grandchildren were not going to get it from their parents. And my son, just about a month ago, was on a trip and visited her briefly and got quite a long negative message about his own upbringing. I gave him this collection of family stories and some poetry that I'd written and some stuff. And a note just saying that I give you this so that you can hopefully make some use of it and move on to territory that nobody in the family has gotten to yet because

[55:14]

you only, you leave home with the amount of emotional maturity your parents were able to achieve themselves and this is the story of, you know, our struggle and we haven't gotten very far and I'm really sorry and I've tried to protect you from the worst of it and I'm, you know, able to move on. It's kind of an emotional legacy.

[55:52]

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