I vow to chase the truth of love, to tell it as it works. This morning, since our study period is beginning on the 10th of April, I want to talk about study period and what it means and see if you have any questions. We've been having study periods for several years now, and we've been experimenting to see how we can do it the best way for us, given our situation.

[01:24]

Usually, in a monastic situation, they have training period, three months training period, twice a year, as usual for a monastic situation. But for a lay situation, we have to have some kind of training that fits our situation. So we don't call it training period. That doesn't really fit. We call it study period. But study, what we usually associate with study is reading books. That's our usual way. When we think of study, we think, well, what book will we read? But that's not exactly that. When we say study, it covers more than just reading books.

[02:32]

We know the famous line from Dogen's famous line. He says, to study Buddhism is to study the self. And to study the self is to forget self. And to forget self is to be enlightened by all things. So this is what we mean by study and what we mean by study period. And study for us is Genjo Koan. So, study period is a time where we intensify our practice to a certain extent and focus on, put a kind of dimension on our practice and focus within that dimension.

[03:37]

In our normal everyday life, even though we practice with some kind of regularity or schedule, our life is very diffuse. And our study period is to delineate our life, to put a kind of border around it so that we can really penetrate it and so we have some limitation within which we can study. If you study a book, you know, you have this limitation of a one-foot square or something, and your attention goes right into there. Pretty interesting. So when we study, within our practice, our study focuses on something.

[04:49]

Every moment we're focusing on something and studying it. That's what we mean by study, is whatever we're doing, we study it in some way. It doesn't mean to objectify it, not study by objectification, not to look at it under a microscope, exactly. But you look at it under a microscope in the sense of focusing, not so much to dissect. about to focus. It's interesting, you know, when you have a camera, if you look at something through a camera, you can look at a landscape through a camera, and the camera focuses on each individual thing.

[05:53]

And so it's so wonderful to look at a landscape through a camera lens, a good camera lens, because you see every bit encapsulated or within a framework. And so everything you see becomes a picture. And it has its own, every picture has its own totality. And that's how we study our life, through each individual action, thing we do has its own framework and is related to all the other pieces within their own framework. And then we begin to see very clearly what we're doing. So the question, what am I doing, becomes our koan.

[06:55]

So our study period is... The limitations of our study period are that we don't... we have a diffuse practice. Each person who participates in our practice has a life completely... life activities that are different from everyone else. So we can't all do the same thing. If you were living in a monastery, everybody would be not doing the same thing, but practicing within the same framework. But our lives are not all within the same framework, exactly. So we have to have practice and a study that takes into account the fact that we don't all live within the same framework. Some people think that's a limitation.

[08:04]

You might think of that as a limitation. But it's a limitation, but it's also an advantage. Just like monastic practice is a limitation and also an advantage. Both are correct ways of practice and both are good ways of practice. What is not a good way of practice is to practice in a monastery and then come out into the world and not know what to do. So... All of our study and our practice is based on the fact that our field of subject, our field of study, our area of study is our daily life.

[09:11]

And in order to have a study period, our study has to take into account our daily life. So study period for us is our daily life activity, our sitting at the zendo, or our sitting at the zendo and at home, and our sitting sashim, and studying in an academic way, somewhat. And all of these factors constitute our study during that time. So, zendo practice, work practice, home practice, play practice, interrelationships, emotional problems,

[10:21]

and so forth. Everything is included in that study period. So, in order to bring that diffuse kind of activity into focus, we make some kind of commitment to how we're going to study, how we're going to participate. In the past, you know, we tried to think about, well, the various ways we could do a study period. And should we just have it limited to those people who can sit four periods of Zazen every day? Or should we open it up so that everybody participates? And we've done it various ways. And my feeling is that when we have study period, everybody, the whole Sangha, is included in study period.

[11:37]

We all do study period together. Some people more and some people less. But it's a whole Sangha effort And, but some, we have various degrees of participation. We usually have a minimal degree of participation. We say one period of Zazen at least every day, either at the Zendo or at home, and to come to Saturday morning and to We have a one-day session in the beginning and a five-day session at the end. And to come to the Monday morning talks, which are given by the members, which the talks are on whatever subject we're studying.

[12:40]

That's a kind of minimal requirement. But since everyone can't do that, we all have a... everyone has to have some kind of variance of that schedule. So even if the variance is tremendous, still everyone is participating Even if you don't feel you're participating, you're still participating. And we always encourage those people who can sit more, do more zazen, to commit themselves to that. So we have a core of people who commit themselves to sit as much as possible and then it goes, modifies from there.

[13:57]

So study periods are usually pretty successful and everybody participates according to the way they can. But we try to have everybody make some kind of commitment even if it's a very minimal commitment to the study period, so that we all feel connected. And it doesn't necessarily mean that the person who is participating the most is practicing the hardest. Sometimes someone who isn't participating so much in Zendo activities is working very hard in their daily life. And you don't see that, but you can feel the quality of their life.

[14:58]

But they're practicing just as hard, but in a different way. So the point is how we actually take care of everything. And Zazen is part of that. So we look at our life and we decide, well, how much can I really sit Zazen to where it doesn't really interfere with things so that my life will come crashing down? And what kind of commitment can I really make That's how we should approach study period. And then we just commit ourself to that what is reasonable. So this is also what we mean when we say arrange our life so we can practice.

[16:04]

Study period helps us to arrange our life to be able to practice. It doesn't mean that we have to sit every day at the Zen Dojo. but it means that we take our practice seriously, and all of our activity is included as our practice. This time, we're going to study the six paramitas as an academic subject. But it's not really academic, you know. Six paramitas. When we have a study period, the subject of academic study is usually something very basic.

[17:08]

We don't usually study philosophy or something abstract or difficult. We always study something very basic, the Eightfold Path or something that applies very directly to our life. And so we try to see our activity through those basic Buddhist applications. So this time we'll study six paramitas, six prajnaparamitas, actually. If we say six paramitas, it's not really complete. In order for six paramitas to be subject of study, we have to call them six prajnaparamitas. Prajna is the sixth. First one is generosity. And the second one is how you do something, or rules, or morality, or ethics, precepts.

[18:23]

And the third one is patience. And fourth is energy, or virya, virility, effort, and the fifth one is meditation, and the sixth is prajna, wisdom. And each one of the six includes the others. And if you just see them in the usual way, it doesn't mean so much, you know. If you look at them all as aspects of prajna, then you take them to their root. And that's how we should study them. So on each Monday morning, someone will give a talk on each one of those six paramitas.

[19:31]

And one way of studying is, each week, to focus on that particular paramita in your life. How is generosity, how do you focus on the meaning of generosity in your life during that week? You just focus on that one paramita in all of your activity. And next week, you focus on precepts or morality. or rules of living for that week in all of your activity. And then the next week, you focus on patience, the real meaning of patience throughout all of your activities, and with prajna as its base. So, Mrs.

[21:24]

the structure of our study period so far. And our study period is always something that we're always developing. We don't have some set way that it goes, but we do have some kind of guideline, and it's based on orthodox practice, but it's suited to our own situation. And part of the interest or exciting thing about it is that we're developing it. You know, it's not something that's set that someone's giving you. We're developing our own way of practice. And we should, you know, think about and put some effort into its development.

[22:39]

So little by little we work out a way for us to practice in this situation, in our situation. Sometimes, you know, as I said before, people feel, well, there are better situations for practice. If I go to a monastery, maybe I'll get enlightened. We have that kind of feeling. But if you get enlightened, you'll understand that wherever you are, you have to set up your practice. And whatever you're doing, you have to practice through that situation. And whatever activity you're involved in, You have to bring the enlightenment to it. So we actually have quite a good situation here for our practice.

[23:47]

Every opportunity. Good opportunity for practice right where we are. We don't have to wait for anything. We don't have to wait until we get better or smarter. We don't have to wait until we give up all our bad habits. You can practice right now, right here. So all it takes is just a desire. Most people who go from this practice to monastic practice usually do very well.

[24:54]

They usually find that they fit in very well in a monastic practice and can do it with very little problem. I hope that someday, what I would hope is that someday people can go back and forth to spend time in a secluded situation and come back to practice and then go back again and come back and have a kind of flow of monastic practice and lay practice back and forth. I hope that sometime in the future that we can have that kind of freedom. Do you have any question about study period or any kind of question?

[26:27]

This is very helpful for me to hear. I've been having a real hard time accepting that, looking at my practices as valid, and I sit mostly at home, and I don't feel that I sit enough, and on and on and on. And I really appreciate how you say that sincerity is important, and how you make room for, here for everybody to be in the Sangha. which is not to say that we don't have to pay attention and be committed in some way. And I was reading some stuff this week about spiritual materialism again and I just see how easy it is to make this picture of practicing well that looks, I don't know how to explain it exactly, but it's like, for me it's like this saint picture.

[28:07]

Whereas the thing about practice is to be with your life in a way that's, you know, awake and paying attention and not, it's not as if you sat twice a day, that would be an answer, do you know what I mean? It's not, it's like a band-aid, that if I could just get the band-aid to fit right, I could take it away. And, you know, I don't remember that. I can be upset. I've been upset for a month because my practice hasn't been right, and it's more about paying attention to my life than it is about making the band-aids work. Well, yeah. You know, there's the form and then there's the content. And the content, if you have the form, then the content should fill the form. But there are many forms for the content.

[29:13]

It's important to sit, you know, and it's important to sit with each other. But, you know, there are two ways two kind of extreme ways of looking at practice. One is that you give up everything and you turn your whole life into being, say, a monk. And you practice real hard, like they say in the book, you know, like your head was on fire. You try to become as good a student as you can, as good a monk, and you practice with the other monks, and you have a group of people who are doing that, and they become very refined, and their practice becomes very refined, and their whole life becomes austere and refined and very beautiful.

[30:23]

And then there's the other side where you just introduce people to practice. And because people respond, even in a very slight way, it means that they've made this connection with the Dharma. And even if they're not practicing real hard and completely dedicated and committed. Still, that fact that they are connected with the Dharma, you know, and feel that sincerely, has some influence in the world. If all the influence is in one package over here, they have this, you know, It's over here.

[31:30]

It helps. But what about the diffuseness of the Dharma? People, in sympathy with the Dharma, and little by little, you know, people come to appreciate it, and little by little come to practice, and little by little it becomes more evident or a part of their life. So someone may start practicing, you know, sitting zazen once every month, once a month, but they want to do it, but they can't do it, you know, but they want to do it somewhere. And then when an opportunity comes, they start practicing a little more, a little more, and pretty soon, maybe after five years or something, you know, they decide, well, I want to practice, begin to understand it more. You don't necessarily understand it, you know, You may have some contact with it and some real desire for it, and you do understand it.

[32:36]

You know, you do understand it, even though you can't analyze your understanding. The reason people are attracted to Zen or Buddhism or practice is because they do understand it, just through the minimal kind of contact, even if they never practice. But the understanding is like closed up, you know, it's like a flower that's closed up. And when they begin to practice and understand, then the flower starts opening up. So practice, you know, is like to open up the flower. And as your flower opens up, it influences other flowers to open up. So it's very important, you know, to have a Sangha, a very diverse Sangha, and very open Sangha. It's just two extremes, you know, both are right.

[33:38]

The monks over here are absolutely necessary for Buddhism to keep going and be understood and for someone to really perfect their life, work on perfecting their life. And on the other hand, all these other people who have a very minimal kind of practice and contact is just as necessary. So then you have all the gradations in between. And actually everyone should be practicing together. The monks should all be coming out practicing with all these people, and all these people becoming monks, not all of them, but some of them, so that you have everybody mixed up in some way.

[34:45]

So practice takes place every place, everywhere, anywhere, in any situation. So if you really feel sincere and pay attention, even if you have very minimal chance to sit Zazen and so forth, it helps people's lives. It doesn't just help your life. The point when you can really know that your practice is real is when your practice helps other people's lives. If you're just doing it for yourself, that means that you're just getting to the point of practice. That's pre-practice. Pre-practice is when you're practicing just to help yourself.

[35:52]

When practice really starts helping other people, then you're in the gate. So if we study six paramitas, when we study six paramitas, that will become clear. There'll be a lecture Monday morning at 6?

[37:04]

I think it's 5, 6, yeah. 5, 6, yeah. 5, 6, yeah. 5, [...] Six Paramitas is a lot, and it's really the basis of Mahayana, one of the basis of Mahayana understanding. But if you look for material, it's very little material published, you know, commentary. Not so much. But we'll have some Xerox material that people can have, and you can study that. But getting back to the point of study, you know, and studying our activity and studying our life like a camera lens, like looking through a camera lens, this kind of study, you know, it's not necessarily intellectual study and it's not necessarily analytical study.

[38:35]

It can be. It means it's more like when just focusing, you know, the focusing itself and the seeing the picture so that you always see what am I doing? What am I thinking? What's being thought now? What's being done now? What feeling is here now? and awareness of yourself and your situation. And finely tuning our life. And if there's some, usually when we have study period, we try to look at

[39:38]

look at our life, what are we doing? That's the first thing. Right now, what are all the things that are happening in my life? And what can I do without? What's necessary and what's just kind of, am I carrying along with me? So, what we do is try to unhook some of the superfluous things. or something that you know is not going to come to anything, something that we take on that isn't working so well anyway, or that we just took on for fun. So we have to look at our activities and make our life clean enough so that we can take care of everything that we are involved with. It's almost impossible, you know, because our lives are so integral with so many things.

[40:40]

Modern life is so complicated that it's very hard to do that, hard to know what to eliminate, how to keep our life simple. Simple doesn't mean that you only have this to do and that to do. It means that you, within reason, you try to do the things that are possible and let go of the things that are not. And even so, we always have something left over. But we should make that effort to do that. That way, it's called arranging our life. You know, we have to constantly arrange it. When I go into my where my desk is, my table, I see all these papers and objects and things which reflect the various things that are going on in my life.

[41:48]

And every day I have to go in there and rearrange it, you know, throw things away and put these things, some things I don't know what to do with. I just leave them there, you know, and I'll write something in my book. I always write down everything that I have to do because otherwise I forget it immediately. So, I write it down. I didn't do that this day, so the next day I write it down again. And after about five days I look back and I can see that it's been written down five times and I haven't done it. And then I have to look at it. Well, shall I write it down again or shall I just not write it down again? So I have to make that kind of decision. Otherwise my life would just be completely so full of things that I couldn't do anything. And sometimes I have to stop and think. I have five decisions. I have to make a decision among five things. Which one shall I do? And there has to be some basis for making the decision.

[42:53]

Otherwise, you kind of go into a slump. So to keep it, if you continually keep that going, what to accept and what to eliminate, what to accept and what not to accept, then you can pretty much keep your life going, but if you accumulate too many things, too much, you get stopped at some point. So keeping things simple is more the sense of keeping it flowing, keeping your life flowing and trying to take care of everything. If you can do that, then you can make room for practice. And that actually becomes practice. How am I practicing now means I'm taking care of that situation. That is zazen at that point. This is along the lines of Therese's question.

[44:05]

What if you have a sense, if not an exact, you haven't worked it out exactly, but you have some sense of how much you can formally practice without everything crashing down. And yet the fact that there are, that there's a possibility of sitting three periods a day here during the week and a whole Saturday schedule, as some kind of an absolute standard, So that there's always some level of feeling of failure if you're doing anything less than the whole thing. How can you work with that? Because guilt seems to be one of those superfluous things. What would make you feel a failure? What would make it a failure? What kind of thing would make it a failure? The only thing I could see that would make it a failure would be if you decided to go to the baseball game instead. But if your grandmother was dying and you had to go fix, help her.

[45:10]

I wouldn't see that as failure. Right, but those are two extremes. Most things take place in between those two and they're not so easy. I mean, you can always rationalize. We can always rationalize. And you don't always know when it's just a good job of snowing yourself or when it's a real valid... Right at that point is your training. Okay? Right there is the crux of the whole thing. What am I doing here? Am I kidding myself?

[45:47]

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