Good evening. I don't know if everybody can hear me or not. You can because you're in the front row. But you can't see me because of this. Well, first I want to extend my gratitude to the practice leaders and the staff, the regular staff, for setting the tone for this summer practice period and for really making it work well. That's due to their long, refined practice. Except for some.

[01:04]

This is the middle, a little past the midpoint, I think, of the summer practice period. And it's been a very hot summer. And when we get to this point in the summer, Sometimes we wonder, if you've been here all summer and doing this practice period, at some point the work and the heat kind of gets you down. And I know how that is. There's a koan that most Zen students know, very familiar with, Master Tozan, one day was asked by a monk. The monk said something like, how can we deal with the heat and the cold?

[02:18]

And Tozan said, well, why don't you go someplace where there is no heat or cold? And the monk said, well, where is that? Tozan said, When it's cold, let the cold kill you. And when it's hot, let the heat kill you. Another way of saying it is, when it's cold, just be thoroughly cold all the way through. And when it's hot, just be thoroughly hot all the way through. In other words, just be one with where you are with what's happening and be thorough about your practice. So we need to be constantly reminded about being thorough with our practice and about being where we are.

[03:26]

Zen students' life is characterized by a certain amount of difficulty. I'm sorry to say so, but it is. In the winter, it gets very cold. And in the summer, it gets really hot. And we have to deal with these things. In Zazen, in Sishin, it gets very painful. Because a Zen student doesn't have so many sensory dependencies, it gets kind of lonely, and sometimes very lonely. And sometimes you wonder what you're doing. So in the middle of seven days of sitting Zazen, day and night, the third day

[04:31]

you wonder, what am I doing? What am I doing here? How did I get into this? This comes up for everyone. And this is a very, very critical point. And so you look at this kind of state of mind and you just keep going. And the summer is a little bit like that too. At some point, you say, is this practice? I thought practice was sitting zazen all day. Our practice is based on zazen. Zazen is at the center of our activity. And zazen is our teacher, and it's the basis of touching reality.

[05:33]

So this practice of the Zen student is the extension of Zazen into daily life. So really, all day long, we're practicing Zazen. Some of us have been doing it for 20 or 30 years, and some of us have been doing it for a week or a month. But it's all the same. Same practice for everyone. And we touch this reality of no-self and non-duality in Zazen. And then we extend that practice into our daily life. And the way we extend that into our daily life is by being aware of the body, being aware of physical things, being aware of the body in the body.

[06:46]

Whatever we do with this body, we're completely aware of what it is that's being done. So always aware of our physical activity, not dreaming about something, not speculating about something, but thoroughly aware of walking, sitting, lying down, and working, whatever activity that we're engaged in. So this kind of awareness, it should be absorbing. This, we say, the harmony of body, mind, and breath. But there's also the field of feelings, to be aware of whatever feeling is arising, and to notice, not in an objective way, but to be one with the feeling that's arising.

[08:05]

So, drinking a glass of water is the glass and the water and the drinker. But the glass and the water and the drinker are one thing. Even though there's a glass, there's water, and then there's the one who drinks. But all of these are involved in one act. So there's really no separation between the glass, the water, and the one who drinks, and the act of drinking. This is called non-duality. And it's also called selflessness, because each part is equal, and each part is part of the self. So non-duality and selflessness are just two ways of talking about the same thing.

[09:17]

And that's what our practice is, to be always aware of this. So we handle things very carefully, as our self. We don't say, this is just an object, although it does have some objective validity. Things are not just objects. They are all extensions of my self. Or they are all extensions of self, which is the universe. So this is how we practice. This is what we keep in mind. If, when we work, we're just working as if it was a job, we lose our way.

[10:20]

We have this opportunity in this practice place to practice in this way. So we become aware of how our how we use the body, or how the body is moving. And then we are aware of whatever feelings come up. Feelings can be feelings either in the body or the mind, or the emotions. And then we're also be aware of states of mind. Whatever state of mind happens to be present on each moment, we're aware of that state of mind.

[11:25]

Without judgment and without trying to change it or hide it, Something pleasant may come up, something unpleasant, something we don't like to see may come up, but we just let it come up and just let it be there. So it's important not to hide from our mental states and our thoughts and also not to be carried away by them. So in zazen, as well as in our daily activity, to cultivate an imperturbable mind. Imperturbable means not moved by judgments, and not moved by whatever feelings, thoughts, or states of mind appear.

[12:36]

but just to be able to let everything come up very freely so that we can really appreciate our life thoroughly. So if we're too busy, we can't do this. So a Zen student's life is usually narrowed down to a very simple kind of way so that, which allows us to have this kind of observation and to sit right in the midst of reality without being carried away by fantasy or dreams too much. So we call this kind of life continually waking up, moment after moment to wake up.

[13:39]

In Zazen, you know, we keep our back straight, take this posture, and harmonize the mind, thinking mind, with the body and the breath. But the mind starts thinking about something, gets carried away, and then we bring the mind back to the present, or we wake up the mind to right now. And we do this over and over and over again, a thousand times. And it's called waking up to the present, or waking up to the reality of this moment. But it's not always interesting. The reality is not always interesting.

[14:42]

So, it's often not as interesting as our dreams and fantasies. That's why there are more, maybe more, mystery stories in books than there are in those things. practice and it's easy to feel sometimes deprived because it is a little bit of a deprivation practice. When students come to Tosa Hara to practice, especially during practice period, summer is a little looser, but no musical instruments or radios or no toys, just nothing, nothing to amuse yourself with.

[15:51]

And so that's a little bit of a deprivation. And sometimes in the summer we feel that too, you know. And so it's difficult to be consistent all the way through this long summer period. I really want, I really appreciate the practice of the students and knowing how every day is a different kind of, a little different, different feeling. Things come up for us which certain kind of cravings and certain doubts, it's easy to to have a lot of doubt come up. And when the doubt comes up, to be able to just let the doubt come up and practice with it.

[16:59]

The doubt becomes your koan. Or the craving that you have becomes your koan. We don't try to avoid it. And we don't try to grasp it. But just to let it come up and be there. So sometimes it's very painful. But painfulness is just another place for us to practice. So a well-seasoned Zen student knows that when difficult states arise, that that particular state is the zazen of the moment, and not to be thrown by it, not to be perturbed by it to the point where you are thrown by it.

[18:08]

So one is always master of the situation. This is what the term means, Zen Master. To always be the master or the mister of the situation. So that no matter what kind of difficulty comes up, one still has their way. And when you practice in this way, your practice becomes stronger and stronger. So adversity is actually a kind of blessing for a Zen student. And when we try to escape adversity, then we start to lose our way.

[19:09]

I don't say we should always cultivate adversity, but it comes to us. And when it comes to us, we should know how to use it rather than be turned around by it. That's our practice. There's an old saying, hell is just another place to practice. So I want to purpose of my lecture is to encourage you at this particular time and to remind all of us about what it is that we're really doing.

[20:12]

During the practice period, there are no guests, so our practice is to support each other's practice, and to support our own practice, and to let go of self-centeredness in that way. And during the summer, our effort is to support each other's practice and to serve the guests, serve the public. Kind of a way of offering something, opening our house to the world. and letting go of self-centeredness in that way.

[21:31]

So having people coming and going all the time sometimes can get people down, students sometimes, seeing so many people coming and going. It's just the other side of practice period. Practice period, nobody comes and nobody goes. Everyone is there. At this time, it's just the opposite. So we have to be able to have the fluidity in our practice to allow that to happen and to go with it. and enjoy it, and completely open ourselves in that way, then we don't get so tired. So one of the things that tires us a lot is resistance. Resistance is maybe one of the most tiring practices

[22:46]

But when we just let ourselves go with something, we gain energy. Energy comes through being open and flowing with the situation. So, summer practice period is an expression of what our winter and fall practice periods are, to the world. So, I would say that one of the ultimate practices for a Zen student after training for a long time is to just go out in the world and be an ordinary person.

[23:55]

Not let anyone know that you're a Zen student and just practice in the world. But practice as a Zen student. getting a job, doing what most people do. It's very easy to leave the world. Once you become a Zen student, it's pretty easy to leave the world because you realize that you don't need all the stuff that people think they need. You become more self-reliant and less needy. But we have some obligation to the world.

[25:04]

So we put ourselves back into the world and take on the burdens of the world. So we haven't gotten so much to that point as a group because we've only been around about 35 years. But as our practice develops, that will be an aspect of practice. A lot of people have already done that. So when we work, when we do our practice here, it does a horror, paying attention to how we use our body, paying attention to our feelings and our thoughts, and to the objects around us, mind objects.

[26:20]

All the objects around us are actually objects of mind, the things that we all the phenomena that we use in our life. The knives and forks and carrots, chairs and tables, houses, everything becomes an object of mind and is not separate from us. So, kitchen practice is dealing with the vegetable and with the other people that are working with you and all of the paraphernalia that goes with that and learning how to harmonize with a whole bunch of people working together in a small space. Knowing how to be turned by that space

[27:28]

And being able to turn things. And knowing when to back off and when to go forward. And how to harmonize with your surroundings as yourself. So one way to always realize how your practices are then is to pay attention to your breath. A Zen student always breathes in the lower abdomen, not up in the chest. When you find yourself breathing in your chest, you should allow the breath to go down, so that you're always breathing deeply. So this awareness is very important, both in Zazen and in our daily activity.

[28:31]

When you take a breath, your lower abdomen expands, and when you exhale, it contracts. That's normal breathing. But often we have abnormal breathing, which we consider normal breathing, because we've done it so long. But you should check your breath. Where is it? If I was to come up to you and say, where is your breath right now? You should be able to say, right here. Because you know where it is. You're aware. So we should be aware of our breath all the time. When you sit zazen a lot, just paying attention to one breath after the next, then it's very easy to have that awareness of where your breath is. So walking with awareness of breath, working with awareness of breath, with each activity, to do that activity with awareness of breath is how you stay in zazen during your daily activity.

[29:49]

So this is what we should be practicing with every day, all day long. If you know this, you don't get lost, and you don't wonder what it is that you're doing. You know. If your mind is wandering, or if you have some doubt, or if you have some lack of understanding, just come back to your breath. That's the touchstone for your practice. As long as you stay continually with your breath, and keep coming back to it, you won't get lost, and you won't get discouraged. This area here under your navel is called the Key Breath, but it has many different names, but... Hara, it's called, but it's also called the Great Ocean

[31:01]

the great ocean of calmness. And if you know how to stay with your breath in this sea of ki, this ocean of ki, you'll never get lost, no matter what's happening. This is kind of like your gyroscope. No matter how heavy the seas are, It always stays calm and level. And this is how you find yourself over and over again. So I can't emphasize this enough. When you sit down sometimes, just let go of thinking and pay attention to breath.

[32:05]

And the mind will calm down, the body will calm down, and you feel some calmness. And out of that calmness, you feel some fundamental joy of pure existence. And then when you return to your work or your activity, you do it with a calm mind and empty mind and joyful mind. So, during the day, sit down at some point and just allow yourself to breathe. And if you really make this effort to be aware You can do it all the time when you're walking and when you're working. Especially when you're working.

[33:08]

When you breathe into your activity, it takes on a different tone. Completely different tone. You notice sometimes when you do something, you hold your breath. No. with your activity. You'd be surprised how much it will do for your body and your mind. How much it will help you to free a lot of the energy that is locked within your body. So you might ask yourself, am I breathing freely? How often are you aware of the fact that you're breathing freely? And we can appreciate this when we get into a very difficult situation, which normally would choke us up, and we find that we're breathing freely and easily instead.

[34:32]

and the mind is calm and the body is calm and we can deal with the situation from that place. So sometimes we spend a few years practicing and we think we've done it and we should go do something else. But I think that sometimes when we feel that way, we should maybe investigate a little further to see if we really penetrated deeply enough. So let this be our fundamental practice.

[35:45]

It's just plain Buddhism. Fundamental Buddhism. Do you have a question? Anybody have a question or something to discuss? Yes. that Zen Center has become for me for the past two years.

[36:51]

When I first came here, I basically just stumbled onto Zen Center. And if I had heard this lecture when I first came, I probably wouldn't have heard it at all. I would have gone in one ear and come out the other. The question I have is, how is it that doing what you do, somehow all the stuff that you've said automatically happens. Nobody says it, nobody, you know, the manual follows it. You're pretty much left on your own to Well... It's something that everyone should learn.

[38:20]

I don't think everyone... I don't think it comes automatically. Our practice... We learn our practice through doing. The two aspects, you know. One is studying something and learning about it. And then the other side is doing something. And both sides are important. Some people have a propensity for learning. Some people have a propensity for doing. And both sides are important. But Zen practice is actualized through doing. And we absorb it through our pores. through doing something over and over again. Seems very repetitious. Every day, you know, as I was saying, every day, same, you know.

[39:20]

And if you're in the kitchen, you stay in the kitchen all summer. If you're in the dining room, you stay in the dining room all summer. It would be kind of neat, you know, if we changed jobs around so we wouldn't get bored with them, right? But we don't do that. We stay in the same place all summer. so that you can get bored with it. You can go through all kinds of feelings, all kinds of experience with that position. So sometimes I'm looking at people going through a lot of difficulty with their position and I think it'd be nice if they did something else for a while. But no, it's good for them. to go through the difficulty that comes with doing something for a long period of time and seeing the various difficulties through. So this becomes kind of repetitious.

[40:30]

Also doing zazen every day over and over again, you know, at some point you feel you're doing the same thing and that's problem, we also have to deal with that and come to the other side of that. What it means is that we have to eventually be able to see each moment and each activity as unique. Even though we did something yesterday, that was yesterday's activity. Today's activity looks like yesterday's activity, but it's today's activity, and it's completely different and has never happened before. So to be able to be that present, that every day's activity is completely unique and new, and has never happened before, is very liberating. But you can't do that if you're always changing around in order to create variety. So we learn through doing something over and over.

[41:48]

We learn liberation, actually, freedom, how to find our freedom through doing something over and over again. And we learn it through our pores. And so sometimes we don't teach certain things. And we expect that people will get this, but they don't. There are certain things that we have to explain. So we explain them. But we don't explain them enough, sometimes. And even though we explain them a lot, someone will say, I never heard that before. This is the most startling thing to me. When I will teach something over and over and over, And some of you say, I never heard that before. So, one reason I give this talk is because there's a great mixture of people, and a lot of the new students may not have heard this.

[43:09]

And a lot of the old students thought they didn't hear this. And it's just a reminder. Sometimes during Zazen, I'll talk about Zazen. I say, keep your back straight, keep your mudra like this. And people come up and say, Geez, you know, I'm glad you said that because I forgot all about it. We think that people know how to sit on them because they've been doing it a long time. But people forget. They forget the details, even though they do it every day. And also, there's a lot to Buddhism, you know.

[44:14]

There's a lot of... Zen and Buddhism is actually very intellectual and has a lot of territory to cover. So you don't talk about the fundamental things all the time. You tend to go through, when you're speaking about the Dharma, you tend to speak about things that people haven't heard so much about. And after a period of time, we no longer talk about the fundamental things. And people have been practicing for two or three years and they never heard about the fundamental things. So we're talking about, you know, higher states of being. So I always like to talk about ordinary practice because it's so extraordinary if you really do it.

[45:22]

If you can do the most ordinary practice, it's quite extraordinary. And then people say, well, what's next? it means they haven't got it. Because if you really get the most fundamental, ordinary thing, you won't ask what's next. Because it's so awesome. So I just want to encourage you to continue the way you're doing.

[46:32]

And when you find that you are getting discouraged, to remember the fundamental practice and just return to it over and over.

[46:49]

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