So this morning I want to talk about what is the basis of our activity? What do we actually base our activity on? Why do we do what we're doing? And what is the core of our activity? Someone asked me recently, why do we chant? So I thought that was a good question. Why do we chant? So I had to think about it a little bit. I could come up with a lot of different responses to that. But the first thing we do in the morning is sit zazen. We get up. We do wash our face, brush our teeth, and go to zendo.

[01:10]

There are a few other little things, but you don't have to mention those. And then we sit zazen for an hour, and then we chant. We bow and we chant. So zazen is like The reason it's pure activity is because there's no purpose in it. That's what gives it its purity. It's not tainted by any kind of desire. It's simply pure activity, which is fundamental. And then we open our mouth. So when we open our mouth, out comes the Prajnaparamita Sutra, which is the Sutra of Wisdom. So the first thing we do, the first thing we say in the morning, the first thing that comes out of our zazen and out of our mouth is this wonderful exclamation of pure wisdom and compassion.

[02:31]

and we send this voice into the universe. Zazen is like the foundation and then the expression, the verbal expression is the sutra. Wonderful! What could be better than that? We're not criticizing anybody, we're not trying to get something, we're simply allowing this pure activity to flow into the universe. So it's like, I like to think of it that we're sending this voice into the universe, which is actually what we're doing. So we send a voice into the universe. Everybody's sending some kind of vocal something into the universe, you know. We either talk to each other or we talk at each other. Often we're talking at each other.

[03:38]

Everybody has got something to say. But here, it's just pure activity from one end to the other. So if we can maintain that kind of basic activity, this is called practice. So we maintain that basic activity throughout the 24 hours. And when we don't, We realize, oh, I'm not doing that. I'm doing something else. And then we remember. It's called the practice of recollection. We keep returning to pure activity, no matter what we're doing, all of our activity, whether you're working in the library, whether you're working as a mechanic, whether you're writing poetry or whatever you're doing, writing a thesis. working, you're always in that mode of, where is my basis now?

[04:44]

What do I keep returning to? When I get out there, what do I keep returning to? The Sixth Ancestor says, don't stray from your essence of mind. That's called practice. It's not straying from the essence of mind, but we stray all the time. When we sit Zazen, we settle in the essence of mind. But then our mind starts wandering, creating dreams and fantasy. And then we wake up. And then we start fantasizing again, and then, oh, and we return to essence of mind over and over again. So this is called practice.

[05:49]

Practice is returning or recollecting. Oh yeah, practice. Oh yeah, practice. Oh yeah. Come back to the fundamental. So never straying from the fundamental. But as long as we are continuously waking up, that's called practice. So waking up is remembering. Oh yeah, practice. I like to think of Zendo as It's actually a training place for behavior. It's a training place for human behavior. Because we learn the simplest things.

[06:49]

I like to think it's the Sesame Street of Zen. When I lived up here, where Ellen and Lori live now, about 25 years ago, My son was very small. I told you about this before when he was about four or five. He would be watching Sesame Street and we'd be having sashimi. And then during the break, I'd go up and start watching Sesame Street. And it was just wonderful because it was so simple. It was like, walk. Sit. And they were trying to teach the kids these words, right? And then they had the illustration. The words in the illustration. And, you know, we should really be watching this. Because it's training school, you know what I mean?

[07:56]

It's like debutante school. The debutante puts the book on her head and walks. Then practice. Keep your back straight. What's your posture like? How do you turn? In Zendo, we always turn to the right. Why do you do that? So that we don't bump into each other, of course. If you're turning right, and if I'm turning right and you're turning left, And we look into each other. So if we all turn in the same direction, we harmonize. So how do we create harmony in our life? And not just with each other, but with everything that we handle and all of our surroundings. How do we create a harmonious situation moment to moment?

[08:58]

Dogen Zenji, in his Ka'in Zamae, a fascicle, the Great Ocean Samadhi, Ocean Seal Samadhi, he talks about swimming on the surface of the ocean, but your feet are walking on the bottom. My dog used to do that. Some people remember him. He would go in the water and he'd look like he was swimming, but it's actually... That's just an aside. But walking on the bottom means that your feet are always planted. You're always settled. in your basic nature.

[10:07]

You're always settled in your essence of mind, no matter what kind of activity is going on on the surface. That's called practice. So, in Zendo, we're careful how we walk. When you get to the gate, you should take a deep breath. You know, I'm going to go to the zendo since I zen. So when you get, and then that's when you start practicing, that's when you start to relate to zendo practice. I'm going to sit, and then you get in your bike, or you get in your car, or you walk, or whatever, and that's where you start practicing. You start recollecting practice. You don't stop practicing ever, but you start recollecting practice. And then when you get to the gate, take a deep breath and then walk through the gate.

[11:14]

And open your eyes, open your ears, all your senses are open. And you become one with the atmosphere. Your whole body, mind, feelings are expanded. to the whole atmosphere. And then you become one with the atmosphere that's here. And then when you open the door, you open the door quietly. There's an interesting bolt on the door. Some people, new people, don't quite know what to do with it because we're used to turning the handle. But the wonderful guy who created that door, he made the door And then you close, you enter, and you turn around, and you close the bolt quietly.

[12:20]

And just that act itself settles your mind. Just one complete activity. Opening the door. Sliding the bolt. Opening the door. Entering the door. Entering the room. Closing the door. that act. And then you put your hands in Shashi like this, and you walk and you bow to the altar. Each one of those is a complete act. And then we walk to our seat. We don't rush to our seat. You walk carefully with restraint. Not real slow. Not real fast. but with mindfulness, with attention.

[13:25]

How the body, what is the posture? What kind of posture are you expressing when you walk? And then you bow to the cushion. You know, sometimes we're carrying a lot of things. Sometimes we have our coat, and our book, and our this or that, and then we come to the And we don't know what to do, because we're supposed to bow. We have all this junk in our head. And then we're juggling and we're trying to bow. How do I stop being awkward? How do I let go of being awkward in this situation? What do I do? Well, you put down your things. You arrange all your things first. And then you bow. You don't bow because bowing will forgive you for not bowing first.

[14:29]

You just put your things down, free yourself, and then bow. That's a whole other act. That's one complete action. And then you turn around and bow outward. When you bow to the cushion, you're bowing to all the people that came before you. to all the ancestors, who, you know, the reason that that cushion is there, and the reason you're there, bowing to that cushion, is because Shakyamuni Buddha lived on. Isn't that amazing? Because he did that, you're doing that. And then all the other ancestors from Shakyamuni Buddha have kept the tradition going. So we bow to Shakyamuni and all those people who actually are at the other end of the cushion. And then we turn around to the right and bow to the universe, basically.

[15:36]

This bow extends to everyone in the universe, to all beings, all beings in the universe. So it's a wonderful act. You say, why do we bow? Well, duh, you know, You can't say exactly why we bow. We just say it's a complete act, a complete action. When we say complete, it means total. It includes everything. It's a universal act. But then, it's just this simple thing. But then when I think about what I'm doing, I return to my basic practice.

[17:18]

What more wonderful thing can I be doing than bowing? So there are many things to do in this world, but then how do you bow without bowing? How do you bow, in other words, how do you give respect to things? without just doing that one particular act. Sometimes we bow with our hands. Sometimes we just simply bow this way. If you're holding something, you can't put it down, then you bow. You don't bow the thing. You hold the thing and then you find some way to be graceful. maintain a graceful attitude all the time when relating to whatever it is that you're engaging with.

[18:26]

So, you know, during Sashirin and during Saturday morning, we eat in Zendo, And we're sitting Zazen and the servers bless them, come and feed us, basically. It's a wonderful tradition that when we're sitting like this and we're accepting the meal, we're all monks. Whether you're a layperson or a priest or whatever, we're all monks. We're all left home at that moment, at that time. And there's an offering that's been given to us. And so, you know, we're grateful for this offering. And so when the server comes, and we bow to each other, we bow to each other to begin with, and then we bow at the end, and then at the end,

[19:36]

the server and the person is being served bow and then there's a moment when you stop if it's just like this it's not it's not meeting meeting is when where everything stops just for a mini second just so that meeting happens communication happens but if it's just sometimes the server goes Not in the next person. There is no next person. It's only this person. It's only this act. Only this is what's happening. Forget the next act, the next thing. When you're finished, this is complete. And then, oh, there's the next one. And then this is complete. There's no anxiety about getting finished. Sometimes I show you where we'll go. trying to get some food in the bowl and it gets all over the place, you know.

[20:41]

So, how to be in time, totally in time, without being ahead or without being behind. This is our basic activity, is to be in time, basically, frankly. Dogen talks about time as being our life, we live our life in time. So, he says, time is being and being is time. So, we don't separate time from activity, but time and activity are one. So to be in our body, to be in our activity, and to be in time. So to be in time is to be timeless.

[21:47]

If you're totally in time at this moment, that's a moment of timelessness. Because there's fundamental stillness, which is time. We think of time as always going someplace. The time, basic time is stillness. It doesn't come or go. And then we divide time into little pieces, call it 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 o'clock. And so our activity takes place in the realm of divided time. But the fundamental is stillness. So stillness is essence of mind. That's where we reside. That's our basic modus. And then out of that comes divided time, which is called running around.

[22:49]

So from undivided time, which is zazen, we chant. get up and we chant in divided time. And that's how we send our voice into the universe. But what we're actually expressing is the undivided time of divided time. The fundamental aspect of time being. So when we say returning to our fundamentals, it means returning to stillness, resuming our fundamental mind, our fundamental. So in this world it's hard to keep everything in order because nothing is stationary.

[24:18]

We try to make things stationary but it doesn't work. It only works for a little while. It's very interesting when we're living in a house, the house becomes alive. feel the liveness of the house. And then when the people leave, and leave for a long time, the house starts to decay. It starts to feel like it's dying. But then people start living in it again, and then it comes to life. then it starts to decay. So, how do we bring our life to life? That's Zen practice, actually, bringing our life to life through our activity, through our fundamental activity.

[25:27]

But it's very hard, because You know, there's a certain, in Soto Zen, there's a certain kind of carefulness, attention to detail, and attention to kind of neatness, and taking care of each thing as your own head. Dogen talks about the pots and pans in the kitchen. The large pots go on the bottom of the shelf and the smaller ones go on top and everything has a kind of place according to the order of gravity and various other forces. And then we appreciate all of the utensils that we use. I always think of working in a kitchen, you know, there's always during a mealtime for the Zindo, there's always food coming and you have your little space that you're working in and you finish what you're doing, chucking, and then you clean that all out and you have a brand new space to work with.

[27:09]

And then the next thing comes, and you work on that, and you clean up, it's done, and you have a brand new space to work in. So every time you're doing something, you're starting over again, rather than letting things pile up. I don't like to let the dishes and the pots and pans pile up. The cooks feel like, you know, we're doing the cooking, and then the dishwashers will take care of the pots and pans. But when I do the cooking, I like to wash the pots and pans myself because it feels, this feels complete. There's something complete about it. So I don't know why that's important, but I don't think we should do that. You know, give the server something and give the dishwasher something to do. That's good. I have done this part, they can do that part.

[28:15]

It's all one complete. To take care of one complete part of your work and to start with nothing and end with nothing is a really good practice. So that at the end, everything is complete. That's our training. So each moment is a new moment. We think of the past or the present as becoming the future. The past becomes the present, the present becomes the future. But each moment is new, just now. So that's how we bring life to life, is by this moment never happened before. What a great moment this is, because it's brand new, fresh, pure.

[29:20]

It's not tainted. What is a tainted moment? Tainted is when we bring all of our past into the present. And then, we're kind of bringing the future in too. You bring the future and the past into the present, and then the present disappears. So, you know, you say, well, good, you know, if you live a simple life, you can do that. And it's true that when you cut down on your various activities and really concentrate on something vital, you can keep it simple. But because our lives are not like that, our lives are very complex. We have to find the simplicity within the complexity. You can't just shut yourself off from your life.

[30:24]

You have certain responsibilities which fortunately or unfortunately you took on. And we have to live with the results of what we took on. Some things we can eliminate, but basically most people are stuck in the stuff that we accumulated. I don't mean just things, but what we're connected with. What we're connected with, who we are and what we're connected with is ourself. So we have to deal with that. So how do you find simplicity within the complexity? That's a great challenge, a great challenge of lay practice especially, how to find the simplicity within the complexity.

[31:32]

I'm not sure that you can do it by ordering things around. in whatever your activity is, then you can actually do one thing at a time. We have this word now that's called multitasking. That's the new paradigm, multitasking. So you can get caught up in that if you want to, but is that necessary? Maybe somewhat. You know, everybody's going around like this. Where are we? So, you know, and there's all this stuff going on around us, but we're doing this. like, which ordinary children would, ordinarily children would.

[32:57]

But then they say, oh, uh-huh. And then they pick up little children. Then they pick up their children. This is the interesting thing. It is. I mean, it's seductive. I mean, it's so seductive that we can't stop doing it. So how do you maintain your composure within that kind of activity? in the busy marketplace. It's easy to be calm and composed when there's nothing going on, right? In the middle of the forest, you can sit by the Zen very happily, maybe. But then the birds will bother you, the mice will bother you, and stuff like that. But the challenge of practice.

[34:02]

When we had our first Tendo in Berkeley on Dwight Way, Dwight Way was busy thoroughfare, still is. So you could listen to the rumble of the traffic going by and so forth. In San Francisco, Sin Center, it was people yelling and since I can because it really deepens your concentration and your ability to not be bothered, to not get upset. So that's great. So within the busyness of our busy life, where is our center? How do we stay centered and how do we keep from being overturned and carried away and lost. How do you stay with the fundamental? So in other words, when you're swimming in the whirl of busy life, where your feet

[35:20]

Do you have a question? Yeah. Could you say something about what's on the altar today? OK. You see the two pieces of white paper on the altar. Yesterday, we had a visit from Suzuki Roshi's grandson and his wife, and their two kids, and two of their friends. They've been visiting for about 10 days. And so they came here. Shingo is Suzuki Roshi's grandson, and he's Hoitsu's son. And he's a priest. He's about 35 or something like that. And I knew him when he was just a little baby. It was really interesting. He has a wonderful family. But I saw him periodically when he was growing up in Japan, at Rinso-in.

[36:57]

And he became, you know, quite often in Japan, the son of the priest of the temple, the older son will become a priest too, in order to carry on the temple. Of course, he's the only son. He had also two daughters, two sisters. So he became a monk. He went to Aheiji Monastery and did very well. He was, as a youth, he was a national champion of Kyudo, Japanese archery. It was either high school or college. Very humble, though. And so he came with his sisters about 20 years ago.

[38:01]

They were just little kids and they didn't know what to do, you know. So he took a bold step of coming here and visiting. And little by little, he's becoming more and more loosened up, so to speak, and able to communicate with us. His father, Hoitsu, became the godo, the head of practice at the Heiji Monastery, and he recently retired. And then Shungo had the temple in Yaizu, Suzuki Roshi's temple, He used to complain about his father falling asleep. He said, Dad, you're embarrassing me and my peers.

[39:03]

But anyway, so they came. And when you come to a temple in Japan, when you visit, you leave something. So the one on the right, the piece on the right is probably money. They always leave money. When they visit each other's temples, they leave money. And the money circulates. So nobody's really out of anything. But that's just one aspect. But I haven't opened it, but I assume that's what it is. That's like a character. There's like a gift. And then the one on the right is probably, oh, you're right. The one on the right is probably incense. I think it's incense. So when the priests come to a temple, they bring incense as a gift.

[40:06]

So that's nice. And then you put it on the altar and offer it. Going back to the beginning of your talk, when you were saying that we Why do we do what we do in the Zen Do and that it's pure activity? You're talking about bowing. And so I was wondering, just about anything could be pure activity. So what if I came and arrived in this Zen Do and instead of bowing to my seat, I went like... to my seat. Would that be okay? Why wouldn't I do that? Well, because you don't want to. No, I mean, is there any reason not to do that? No. See, here's the thing. We think that everything we do is rules. It's not rules. We bow because we want to. When what we want to do is what we should do, and what we should do is what we want to do, then we're perfectly content.

[41:16]

So if you want to go to Ezekiel, Why substitute one for the other? Just add it on. That's what I would do. But if you say, well, why can't I do this instead of that? You can do anything you want, you know. But we follow a customs. So if you don't want to follow a customs, then why not? They're not rules. So I made a distinction when I was at the San Francisco Zen Center. There's this terrible statue of Suzuki Roshi, which the guy who carved it never saw him. But it's the Kaisando, the Founder's Hall. And so when you pass the Founder's Hall, you bow and then go on.

[42:20]

People said to me, well, do I have to do that? And then I realized, you don't have to do anything. We don't have rules that you have to do. We have customs. And when we follow the customs, we feel like we're all doing something together. We're all participating in the same activity together. And that's how it's called egolessness. When we want to do our own individual It's different from everybody else. That's called ego. It's not that you can't do your own thing, but when everyone is doing the same activity, you participate in that activity. The problem is we don't understand our ego. That's the practice that's come to us.

[43:26]

I remember in the 70s when we, I happened to be in the San Francisco Zen Center living there and we did not bow, it was not the custom to bow passing the Kaisando. And while I was there, somebody decided that that should be a custom. So it was announced that we would be doing that. But it sounded like a new rule to me. So for a long time, I just wouldn't do it. So sometimes customs come to us like that with ancient weight on them when they were just made up by somebody in an office yesterday. Yes, but you have to remember that it was a new practice. Zen Center, you know, had not been around a long time. So Zen Center is kind of catching up with the practice. It's not like somebody decided, well, now we'll do this. It's just that, oh, we haven't been doing something that we should have been doing all along, according to custom.

[44:34]

But not all customs are good. That's true also. But what's the problem with respecting the founder? I'm not going to respect the founder. We don't put you in chains. As a matter of fact, you make your own chains. When we do stuff, when we follow the procedures that we all agree on, then we let go of our chains. And we put the freedom within that restriction. Not a restriction, but within that parameter. When we flow easily, then we find our freedom when we resist to something binding us. So, I'm not criticizing you. I enjoy your rebelliousness.

[45:36]

That's what makes us friends. Suzuki Roshi always liked mischievous people. He said, when you're mischievous, then I can tell who you are. If you're simply just following along and never reveal yourself, then it's hard to tell who you really are. So, you know, there's pros and cons in each side. It's really so. There are pros and cons either way. Everything has its opposite, which is equally true. That's why we try to put it all together. called oneness of the diversity. So you want to be careful, you know. I don't want to say, oh, you're not bowing when you walk past the, you know, you're a bad girl.

[46:41]

You should. We just, OK. You know, we're all working through something.

[46:53]

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