Good morning. The volume okay? Volume okay? No. It's on. And how about now? Or now? Now? Now. Good. So today is day four of our Rahatsu Sushin. And welcome to those of you who are just arriving today. Today is also the annual memorial for Suzuki Roshi.

[01:06]

He died on December 4th, 1971, which has been quite some time ago. And the memorial ceremony, the service, will be the last period of zazen today. And everyone will have an opportunity to speak some words to Suzuki Roshi during that ceremony. So December 4th in 1971 was the first day of Rahatsu. And he died, Suzuki Roshi died, shortly before Sushin actually started, right about that time. You know, what a time that was for a very young sangha. And... What I have heard about that day and that week is that there were a small group of people that took care of what needed to be taken care of, and everyone else went to the zendo and sat.

[02:19]

And the feeling was that Suzuki Roshi had given his whole life, really, to come to this country and to share Zen as he understood it in America. And everyone just wanted to uphold that and to honor him and his strong intention and will in that way. The gift that he had given them, that was how they could give it back was by just sitting together in the city center Zendo. The city center had only opened in 69. Everything was so fresh and new and there were lots of people there. What a time. And one year ago we were sitting Rahatsu here and many of us were sitting with Hozan Roshi right next door in the abbot's office.

[03:33]

So I wanted to bring Hosan into the room with us as well. I think many of us have been thinking about him during this week, remembering that time. So tender and so intimate. Hozan did not pass during Rahatsu. That wasn't until December 22nd. But we will have a memorial for Hozan next Saturday on the 13th. Because we're going into interim, that's the date closest before the day that he died that we could have a public ceremony. So it'll be next Saturday. And of course, Sojun Roshi died on January 7th.

[04:42]

It'll be five years ago in January, which is amazing. All these things that happen in the dark time of the year, and amazing also that Rohatsu itself is a celebration of Buddha's awakening. It's not his pari nirvana. It's not his death. It's his awakening. So, you know, and in January also is a time when it used to just seem so strange to me that it'd be January and you'd see blossoms on the trees. I hadn't grown up with blossoming trees. It's like, yeah, the light and the dark, always together. Birth and death, always together. This morning during morning service, we were chanting the names of the Buddhas and ancestors, maybe because I've been thinking about our most immediate ancestors so much lately, preparing for this talk, and also maybe because thinking about the Buddha so much, and the chanting was just so strong this morning.

[06:07]

It was just really... I felt like we really were invoking all the Buddhas and ancestors, just calling them in. They felt right here with us. Not their bodies so much, but their spirit and the transmission, mind to mind, body to body, for all these centuries. I felt each name like my mouth from years of chanting and having memorized them without trying to years ago from doing it every day. My mouth just knows exactly what to do. They were in my body. So this connection, this

[07:12]

lineage, this transmission is what has made it possible for us to be here today. So grateful. But of course we're also here today exactly because of all of us, all of you and all the teachers that you've had in your life and all the ways the Buddha Dharma has been supported in this country and other countries. It's amazing. Maybe because I've been talking about mindfulness of the body and seeing the impermanence I remembered that when I was a child, I had wondered something like, what made me me?

[08:21]

And I had this question that would come to me at different times of like, if I didn't have certain parts of my body, would I still be me? Some parts of my body have gone missing in the meantime, so... It obviously wasn't them. But it was like, well, what if it was a hand or an arm or a foot? And I thought, well, I'd be different, but I wouldn't... I would still be me. And I got about up to, you know, I sort of went from the foot up to here, and I got, okay, so it seems to be my mind or my brain... But that doesn't feel right either. There was really no one around to ask. I knew better than to ask about things like that. But reflecting on that now, it's like the self is so persistent.

[09:37]

You know, every morning we wake up as ourselves again and not as someone else. regardless of what happens to us, regardless of how much we feel we've changed or haven't changed, we're still recognizably this person. Even though we look back long ago and it's like, was I actually ever that young or soft or innocent or whatever it is? And the Buddha Dharma is also very persistent. And like us, it's also fragile. It can be cut off in different ways. It pretty much disappeared from India hundreds of years ago. So it rises and falls. So the heart of the teaching is always.

[10:44]

It has, because there are human beings, because there was Shakyamuni Buddha, it manifests in this form, has been passed down in this form. This form that is like our own bodies, deeply precious to us. But there are also the Buddhas before Buddha that we recite. buddhaness, this awakeness has always existed. In some way the universe seems to be awake, intelligent, however our limited human minds can imagine something so far beyond what we can imagine. And as the as a teacher, as having received Dharma transmission from my teacher, Sojin Roshi, I think about teaching and upholding the lineage and sharing it.

[11:58]

But it's also something that we all do together, whether we're aware of that or not. We're all doing it together, each in our own way, each coming into that. And because of our deep limbic resonance, but also something even beyond just limbic resonance, our practice speaks to each other, supports each other, and we're all held together. This container that we're creating during Sashin, holds each of us even as we hold it. So the theme for this week is the Satipatthana Sutta, the four foundations or four establishments of mindfulness or awareness.

[13:08]

And we went through the body and feelings and But before we get back into that, there were a couple of questions that I didn't get to yesterday that I want to talk about. One was, can mindfulness be defeated? Or worded another way, is there anything one cannot be mindful of? I really had to think about that. What a great question. And I thought, I don't know that there's anything that we... can't potentially be mindful of. The Buddha had so many objects of meditation, visualizations like the casinas, like these disks of different colors, or maybe that came later with all the commentaries. At any rate, there are many, many objects of meditation, wholesome qualities, hindrances,

[14:15]

compassion, loving kindness, bodhi beings like Avalokiteshvara, khanzeon. So there's form and there's formlessness. You can meditate on space or light. So I'm not sure that there's anything that we could try to be mindful of that we wouldn't have some kind of mindful awareness with even if that awareness is struggling to maintain the object of awareness or struggling to come back to it, there's some engagement there. But I did think that, well, maybe you could say that mindfulness would be at least temporarily defeated by our own distractible monkey minds. It's not happening. It's not arising at that moment. The meaning of mindfulness is to have focused awareness, and there are definitely times when we don't have that.

[15:21]

But that's only temporary, because as soon as we notice that and come back to the present moment, there we are, once again, being aware of what's actually happening in our own minds and bodies. And the other question was, How do you understand Suzuki Roshi's description of Zen as Hinayana practice with Mahayana mind? Boy, did I go down a rabbit hole with that one. It's really kind of great. If it had been just in the context of a talk, it would have been, you know, just whatever comes to mind and go on. But I started thinking about it all different ways. So walk with me through this. So the word Hinayana literally means lesser vehicle in contrast to the Mahayana, which is the greater vehicle.

[16:25]

Obviously, that's not how the practitioners of what Suzuki Roshi would be referring to as Hinayana practice would refer to themselves. And today that term is generally not used very much, but again, this was, you know, decades and decades, like 50 years ago, I guess, right? Yeah. So today that's called Theravadan, which means literally the way of the elders, the way of the original sangha. But I think also what both Suzuki Roshi and Dogen were pointing to was a way of approaching the Dharma that is literal, tight, limited, very linear.

[17:27]

But I was also reflecting that today we're able to say, yeah, don't call it Hinayana because it's derogatory. It was to differentiate Mahayana from others who weren't doing this. But, you know, of course, Suzuki Roshi and Dogen, as far as I know, had no contact with Theravadan practitioners. So they didn't have a chance to know, as I have, and many of you probably have, senior practitioners and teachers in that lineage who definitely do not have what I think Suzuki Roshi or Dogen were talking about is like a Hinayana mind, which is kind of a closed mind, I think, or a... Not just closed. Well, it's interesting because I was also thinking, because of this question, I was reflecting on, and because of the memorials,

[18:36]

etc., how hard it must have been for the early Sangha after the Buddha died. He was the teacher for 45 years. And it wasn't that there weren't other teachers at the time, but it was acknowledged that no one else had quite the breadth that the Buddha had, the depth of of insight and experience and capacity to teach. What they were teaching was what they had learned from the Buddha. And after he died, and they had these councils afterwards where everyone shared the teachings that they had heard and developed a system to remember all of it because they didn't want it to be lost. So the whole emphasis at that time was to preserve the teachings as they were. And of course the Buddha is teaching people who, you know, there was like his growing sangha, but it wasn't like today where there are whole Buddhist cultures and, you know, in Japan people grow up in a pretty Buddhist culture and other places as well.

[20:01]

So there's a whole way that you absorb things. So in order to communicate the teachings to people, he taught in a more linear style, because I think the times when he, not many people got it, like, holds up the flower, Maha Kashyapa only gets it, you know? It's like, okay. So to teach more widely, he's trying to make it accessible. But of course you can get caught in that. We have to keep it just exactly this way. But the people I know, Theravadan monks, mostly Western, almost all Western, or senior teachers in the Vipassana tradition, have wonderfully flexible and humorous, wide minds. When one

[21:03]

Monk was, he was meeting with someone here, a member of the sangha here, who was a woman. And because they can't, because of the vinya, the code of ethics, you couldn't sit, you couldn't be alone with a woman. So, Gimpo, Alexander, Laurie and Alan's son, at I think about the age of four, was their chaperone. So I think both traditions have this recognition of we have this ideal and how do we meet the real moment as it's actually arising. I also wanted to say that the practices themselves that we're familiar with, there are many, many different practices throughout Buddhism, but the ones that we're familiar with, especially Zazen, have a lot of similarities to what people would be familiar with in Theravadan traditions, especially breath practice, body practice.

[22:36]

Zazen, the word zazen literally means sitting zen, and zen is a transliteration of chan, which is a Chinese transliteration of jhana. The jhana states, all those lofty states that are very much the aim in Theravadan or Vipassana practice, you know, that's right there, zen. It's not something else. There's absolute continuity. But what I think Suzuki Roshi was pointing to was the form, the formal aspect of the practice you know, upholding the precepts, you know, doing the forms, which he didn't teach so much, but he brought Tatsugami Roshi to teach the students at Tassahara.

[23:57]

So he was consciously transmitting that because he knew that that was a container in which to transmit the teachings, even if he wasn't around. And I think the Mahayana mind or what we might think of as Mahayana mind is teaching from emptiness. Teaching not about Zen, but by Zen, manifesting, embodying, being unexpected, spontaneous, playful. Not just keeping, it's like you know exactly where the lines are so you have some sense of when it's appropriate to play with them, push them, surprise someone with them. Suzuki Roshi had one of the chapters in, I forget if it's in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind or the other one, called Letters from Emptiness.

[25:12]

You know, out of kind of calling in emptiness, seeing all these things that remind us. I had one more thing I wanted to, maybe one or two more things I wanted to say about feelings. Oh yeah, just one. It occurred to me that 12-step programs are quite a remarkable way of working with feelings to practice discernment around feelings and how we're relating to them. Because it's just, you know, the feelings are just very apparently simple. You know, there's pleasant and unpleasant and neutral. And you could kind of think of them as a continuum from pleasant to unpleasant with neutral somewhere in the middle, like you can't quite say what it is. But there's also a lot of complexity in there too, because when we're really attached to something, it can feel pleasant, but also unpleasant.

[26:32]

Can have a lot of... I'm seeing the heads popping. It looks like the little Fukudo player outside of Ross's. Yeah, so this... But the practice of is it pleasant or is it unpleasant is in itself very illuminating. You know, like, actually, I can't say. That doesn't mean it's neutral. It's kind of this both and... which as I'm sitting with that, as I say it in my own body, I'm like, well, that's unpleasant. It's kind of this, you know, it's like, yeah. Yeah, and I imagine that most of us have had one or more areas in their lives where that was awake for you, that pull in two directions. I want, I don't, you see. So...

[27:34]

I also wanted to say something about forms briefly, body practice. So, you know, we talk so regularly about zazen posture of sitting in a way that's upright and relaxed. And finding that balance point that requires the least amount of energy and effort possible to just be able to use the minimum amount of energy. You know, to pick up this book, I need a certain amount of energy, but to pick up this piece of paper, you know, if I did it with the same effort, it would go flying. So how do we meet our body in each moment as we're sitting? Cart open, shoulders down, first of all, rather than up, relaxed, and a little back, just all of this opening.

[29:04]

The chin tucks slightly as the crown of the head, not the top, but the crown of the head lifts. sitting on the forward edge of the sitting bones, not back onto the butt, but forward edge, leaning a little bit into your knees or your feet, depending on how you're sitting. And as much as possible, relaxing through the core of your body and having a little curve in the In your low back, like you do when you're standing, probably about the same amount as when you're standing, just a really neutral spine. And you might notice when you touch into that place, because the breath starts coming more easily, you're not holding your diaphragm so much anymore.

[30:09]

The back body, especially from below the shoulder blades down, is supporting you. And you can bring that same posture into standing and walking as well. So when you bow, you can bring your palms together. My elbows go up easily, I'm flexible. Give a little extra effort to whatever is usual for you. But if this is usual, no more effort. But you just end opening at the same time. And then with that open heart, you bow forward. But you don't maintain the curve in the low back.

[31:12]

You bow kind of from here, I think. So you're bowing kind of your upper body. and leaving your lower body basically where it is if you're doing a standing bow. And if you're standing in shashu, you can do the same thing. You know, holding the right hand over the left about your hara or navel level depending on, basically your elbows are straight across. And, you know, maybe part of why we gaze down is because this supports the posture. If you hold the head all the way up, you can kind of start. Your head weighs a lot, actually. So the more that your head is balanced, the lighter it feels because it's like trying to balance something.

[32:14]

When it's straight up, it's very light. When it's over here, you know, like you can... I used to watch people do tricks on the rings, the hanging rings, and you can be like this holding yourself up for a long time, but being in like iron cross is a whole different thing. So the uprightness really helps. Sojin said, we practice bowing like this when we're young so that we can practice like this when we're old. So we're going to go on to mind. Mindfully observing the mind. I need to read it first. I think before doing that I'm going to talk about the Heart Sutra.

[33:28]

Because we talked about the body, that would be form. And we talked about feelings, that would be feelings. And then we're going to get into perception, formations, and consciousness. That's mind. That's the contents of the mind. Like what is the mind? I think what the Buddha was pointing to, giving the image of the body as being like a whole collection of organs and body parts, just like you would look at a bag of beans open on both ends with all these different kinds of beans in it, that the mind has all these different aspects or parts. So jumping back to Hinayana mind and Mahayana practice, the Heart Sutra contains all these detailed things that the Buddha talked about and that people practiced as paths to awakening.

[34:57]

And the Heart Sutra starts out by saying, Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva, when practicing deeply the prajnaparamita, perfection of wisdom, perceived that all five skandhas, form, feeling, perceptions, formations, and consciousness, are empty and was freed from all suffering. So this is just a little manual for how to do that. Satipatthana sutra is actually how to see into emptiness. That's the whole point. I remember when I first got to that, to awaken, to see the true nature of things, the true nature of reality. But it starts from the point of view of, like, don't hold on to any of these things.

[36:05]

That's where the Heart Sutra starts from. On the other hand, like, I didn't know what most of the things in the Heart Sutra were. I didn't know what five skandhas were. You know, it's like all of this was very, very new to me. And I still remember the day in this sendo when I was, you know, chanting the Heart Sutra. And it says... No suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path. And went, wait a minute, that's the Four Noble Truths. What do you mean there's no? So you could say, you could think that it's just like... sweeping all of those things aside, like we don't need any of those things. No eyes, no ears. On the other hand, at the time the Heart Sutra was written, everybody was very thoroughly grounded in all of those things.

[37:15]

That was not novel language. Monastics, we're talking monastics here. They knew all that. So to have a teaching about don't cling to it, don't hold on to even the Buddha Dharma, that's Mahayana mind. That's my understanding of what Suzuki Roshi meant. I think that's maybe good for today.

[37:55]

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