Today's Since we're sitting all day, I want to talk about zazen and about our attitude and about beginner's mind. and about way-seeking mind, and about how we practice.

[01:12]

And all of these subjects are really one subject concentrated in zazen. I haven't talked about zazen for a while exactly, but zazen is our touchstone for practice and we have to think about it, talk about it sometimes. And especially since there are a lot of people here who are sitting, haven't been sitting so long, and some people who are sitting along all day for the first time.

[02:15]

Zazen is, strictly speaking, is concerned with our body, speech, and mind. Speech is taken care of since we don't have to talk. But there's a lot of chatter inside our head. So even though it doesn't come out of our mouth, it still bangs around inside of our head. So it's not that it's not there. And so we're really concerned with our body. From morning to night, there's just this body and just this mind.

[03:31]

And we can't forget it, and we have to be attentive to it. We have to be its attendant. We have to take care of it. So the point is, if we're going to take care of it in this way, we have to harmonize our body and our mind. There's no other way. And so sitting like this is constantly harmonizing body and mind, moment after moment after moment. and harmonizing body and mind with our surroundings. Sometimes it looks like we may get the impression that our body and mind are isolated when we sit.

[04:41]

But there's no isolation. Even though we feel independent, This body and mind sits on the zafu. The zafu sits on the zavatam. The zavatam sits on the tatami. The tatami sits on the floor. The floor sits on the foundation, which sits on the earth, which includes the whole world. And around our body is space, which contains everything. So every time we move, every time we make a movement, we change the space around everything, change the shape of the space around everything.

[05:56]

So we sit very still in Zazen, very, very still, and bring the whole world to peace, harmony. And when we move, we bring the whole world to harmony. through our harmonious movement. So when we sit, zazen, It looks like maybe after two or three years, we know how to sit. You'd think so.

[07:00]

You'd think that after two or three years of doing something day after day, you'd know how to do it. Or maybe after ten years, you'd know how to do it. Or at least after twenty years, you should know something. In our, in zazen, the case is that we never are perfect. Zazen is never perfect. And at the same time, it's never imperfect. So we're always looking for, always looking for right posture. constantly looking for right posture. The essence of zazen is that moment after moment we're looking, seeking right posture.

[08:06]

So no matter how long you've been sitting, one day or twenty years, our practice is exactly the same. just moment after moment, seeking right posture, you can get better at it the longer you sit. But if you don't keep seeking it, you don't find it. So it's not as if you have accumulated something. and graduated to some step, some stage, where you know how to sit. You have to establish your posture on each moment. You have to establish the harmony of body and mind on each moment.

[09:11]

And when you're doing it, you're doing it. And when you're not doing it, you're not doing it. It's that simple. Sometimes we feel that we can just come in and sit down and relax, kind of take a rest. In a sense that's so. In a sense, satsang is taking a rest. One side of zazen is that it's taking a rest. The other side is that our whole body and mind is absorbed in effort. So first of all comes effort.

[10:18]

First is effort, and then through our effort we can feel some restful quality. But then if we attach to the restful quality, our posture changes. And we just want to stay there. We want to stay in some restful place, but our posture changes. And we have to establish ourself again. So, quality of zazen is that there's no real rest. There's no settling place. The settling place is in the effort.

[11:22]

We must settle into our effort. So, moment after moment, posture is changing. We call it—Suzugi Ueshii used to say, moment after moment, everything is losing its balance, falling out of balance. So if you think you've got it, the next moment you don't have it, because the next moment takes an entirely new effort. So you can't rest on your laurels and you can't rest on your former achievements. And you have to establish yourself over and over again.

[12:31]

So main thing is posture. What we have to work with in our body, with our body, is posture. lining our vertebrae, one on top of the other, in a straight line. This is the main thing. Without posture, without a straight back, you can't sit. And you can't sit well. And it's always a struggle. So primary consideration is posture of our back and the vertebrae lined up, one on top of the other. And at the top is your head. And this head weighs 15 or 16 pounds, something like that.

[13:38]

Did you ever weigh your head? Put your head on a scale or something. Anyway, you know, it's independent. The head is... You should try weighing your head sometime and see how independent your head is from the rest of your body. We think that it's stuck up there. But it's quite indefendant. So we have the ability to move it around. If we let it hang forward, then it pulls all the muscles of our back, and our back gets very tired. So if you keep your head up on top of your spine, the pinnacle of your spine, the top of the tree, you can balance yourself very well. So this is the balancing object.

[14:42]

Tip it this way, tip it this way, tip it this way, this way, and your body feels strain or composure depending on how you move your head. where your head is on top of your spine. So vertebrae, backbone is straight, and head sits right on top, not this way or this way or this way, this way. So while you're sitting there, you should be balancing your head on top of your spine. Just balancing your head on top of your spine. It takes a lot of attention to do that. And when you're balancing your head on top of your spine, you don't need to have tension in your shoulders, because your shoulders don't hold you up.

[15:51]

Your spine holds you up. Your sternum helps. Opening up your chest helps. So you don't need tension in your elbows or your arms or your back. You can just let go of those things. So zazen is a balance between tension that is going against gravity and letting go, which means letting things fall. Holding up and letting fall. The balance between those two forces. So we're always working with gravity.

[16:54]

While we sit here, we're working with trying to figure out the law of gravity. Working with gravity. If you don't do it right, gravity will win. Gravity always wins in the end. So the thing that helps us to work with gravity is called spirit. So the more concentrated our effort, is, the greater our spirit will be. So in Zen practice we always talk about spirit.

[18:01]

Zen spirit means, in this case, concentrated effort which opens you up and allows spirit to rise. It's called life force. And it holds you up. Life force holds you up. But you have to initiate it. If you don't initiate it, it won't open up. So, most important thing is your effort. If you have good, strong effort, then your body and mind will open up and spirit will take over. Spirit will hold you up. Not by spirit, I don't mean some ghost, but human spirit.

[19:15]

And when your legs hurt, you shouldn't ignore the pain. And at the same time, you shouldn't be attached to the pain. This is our lesson in Zazen. You can't ignore it, but you shouldn't be attached to it. And it will give you a big problem. But through your effort and spirit, you will learn how to become one with it. It's interesting about the pain in our legs.

[20:44]

We say that we just let our mind follow the pain in our legs. In other words, to harmonize your mind with the pain in your legs, if you set up an opposition or a complaint think in terms of good and bad, then you're out of harmony. So harmony here means complete harmony. It doesn't mean partial harmony or harmony based on our like and dislike. It means vital harmony. our necessary harmony, our harmony of reality.

[21:51]

It's like harmony of life and death. If it's just harmony of what you like or harmony of preference, that's not a total harmony. So in zazen we drop our personality. What I mean by personality is personal feelings. if you still have personal feelings, which means preferences, you can't sit zazen for very long. So, in zazen, you know, we enter the realm of not knowing.

[23:09]

Someone says, who are you? When you're sitting zazen, you can only say, I don't know. But I don't know doesn't mean you don't know. This I don't know is real knowing. Real knowing is just sitting zose, completely. Nothing partial about it. I'm not partial to pain, and I'm not partial to pleasure.

[24:18]

There's nothing to argue with. There's nothing to complain about. Dogen Zenji says, this is just the gate to peacefulness. The gate of real comfort. Not the comfort of picking and choosing, but the comfort of being one with reality. So just to sit up straight seems simple, but it takes all of our energy, our whole body and mind, concentrating.

[25:44]

The most difficult is when we're sleeping. If we're sleepy, it's hard to concentrate. So we just have to go along the best we can until we wake up. But a wakeful state is very nice. When we're awake, we can concentrate. Also our attention tends to be carried off by our thoughts. There's nothing wrong with thinking, but in zazen we're just supposed to be concentrating on our body and breath, mostly body, body and breath.

[26:56]

thoughts keep arising and interfering with our single thought. So my suggestion is when we sit and you have posture, first of all we should establish our posture. Then we should watch our breathing. But first is posture. So when you establish your posture and feel fairly concentrated, then you can watch your breath, follow your breathing in your lower abdomen. As your abdomen rises and falls, you can watch the rise and fall of your abdomen as breathing. but it doesn't make sense to watch your breathing before you've established your posture.

[28:09]

Posture is the structure, and then breathing is the movement. But in order to watch our stillness of posture and breathing and not have so many thoughts interfering. Try to catch yourself at the moment you start to have a stray thought. In other words, wait for a thought wait to catch yourself starting to think about something. Usually, when we start to think about something, we don't realize that we're doing that until we're into the thought.

[29:25]

You suddenly wake up and say, gee, I've been thinking about top dogs for twenty minutes now. I didn't realize it. So what I want you to try to do is to say, oh, I'm starting to think about top dogs. And as soon as you catch yourself doing that, then you're no longer thinking about top dogs. And you can resume more clear mind. It's easier to know when you stop thinking. It's easier to have that awareness. But it's difficult to have the awareness of when you start to think about something. So what I would like us to do is to be aware of when we start to think about something.

[30:30]

when our mind starts to wander. And when it does start to wander, when it does start to wander and we stop it, we just find ourself sitting here, concentrating on our body and harmonizing our mind with that body. It's true that we don't try to cut off thinking. You know, like with that hatchet. We don't do that. It's okay to let your thoughts, to have thoughts. But... I think the quality of our zazen is better if we're only concentrated on sitting, not concentrated on thinking about something.

[31:42]

Don't blame yourself for having thoughts, and don't mistreat yourself because you're having thoughts, but just try to catch yourself thinking. so that you can let go of the thought before you get involved with it. And if you find yourself thinking about something, just let go of the thought in the middle, if that's where you find yourself. Just let it go. Just bring yourself back. So constantly reminding ourself is what we're doing. Practice of zazen is to constantly bring our mind back to our posture.

[32:51]

That's you know, re-minding and finding our self over again. So moment after moment, we're recollecting. Do you have any questions?

[33:59]

One thing you brought up, a comment about it, that denying pain, what we said, Instead of working with it in our posture, he said, give me to an unhealthy habit of what deny, what work. You know, right at the end of it. Did you not wait on that? Yeah. That's why I said you don't deny, but you don't ignore any of it. But you harmonize with it. Harmonize with it means that it's not outside of what you're doing.

[35:14]

You can sit here and say, everything's fine except for this. Everything's fine except that my legs hurt. We don't say that consciously, but it's there. It would be great if only... So that's putting it outside of your situation. Trying to separate yourself from yourself. So harmonizing means this is pain, but pain is not good or bad. We call it something. We call this pain. But I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. When you stop calling it pain, when you stop calling it anything, it's just something, some feeling you have.

[36:21]

This is some feeling I have and this is some other feeling I have. That way you harmonize whatever feeling you have with the wholeness of yourself. Then it's not a problem, even though it's something there. It's no longer a problem. So problem, you know, it's not easy. It's not difficult because it's pain. It's difficult because it's hard to harmonize everything into ourself. Can you say something about working with resistance?

[37:48]

I think that, I mean, I have this wonderful idea, but sometimes it's hard to get there. That's right. Well, you'll find, if you sit out there, you'll find that you are some resistance. Yeah. It's bound to be, you know, uh-oh, there's resistance. This was going fine, and now it's changing. As soon as you want something, then it changes into its opposite. This is the law. As soon as you want something, its opposite appears. It's called desire. Desire is the cause of duality, dualistic problems. Dualistic problem means as soon as you want something, then its opposite appears, because something doesn't exist without its opposite.

[38:54]

Try and find something that exists without its opposite. So when you call something forth, you also call forth its opposite. If you call forth pleasure, you also call forth pain. If you call forth pain, you also call forth pleasure. We don't call forth anything. Zazen, we don't call forth anything. We just accept everything as it is. This is the solution. It means everything is soluble. There's no resistance. If you call it pain, then it means you want pleasure. You can't want anything. You can only want to be here. And of course wanting to be here is a problem because then you call for drifting.

[40:03]

So it's, you know, elusive, but simple. Last time, last period was wonderful, and this period is terrible. That kind of thing, it's just karma. just creating karma. Whatever you're experiencing is just what you're experiencing. Your effort is there. That's all there is. It's just your effort. And all these things are going on within this effort. So the main thing is to just have this effort. And if you just have this effort which releases your spirit, then without complaining, without sticking your personality in, without creating a problem, you can sit comfortably all day.

[41:28]

But the comfort I mean and the comfort we usually mean are two different things. Comfort here doesn't mean without some feelings. To sit comfortably, even though there's some unusual feeling in your legs. It's true comfort, not by taking away all the feelings. I've never done this, but there's a kind of box you can push yourself in and take away all the feelings. takes away, and you just kind of float in space. This zazen is maybe the opposite of that.

[42:35]

But it's necessary to not have any preference, not name anything. Zazen is the realm where You don't know anything. What is that stuff going on in your legs? I don't know. I don't know what it is. Something there. As soon as you start to know what it is, to know something about it. Watch out. The more you know about it, the less you can do about it.

[43:41]

So a Zen student is kind of like an idiot. kind of idiot. In order to be a good Zen student you have to be a kind of idiot. I don't know. I'm sorry, but it's that way. but if we have that mind not knowing mind we can enjoy our whole day

[44:39]

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