From Dharmaweb

A Zen Retreat

By Nomon Tim Burnett

A Zen Practice Group Sunday Retreat At Bellingham Dharma Hall

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I think we all come to practice with some lofty ideas. Maybe we're drawn to stories about spontaneous wonderful Zen masters. Maybe enlightenment sounds like a good plan. Or maybe we just want a little more peace and ease in our lives. And such ideas are really wonderful. These ideas helped bring us to practice. Having such ideas is the emergence of bodhicitta - the wholesome desire for awakening, and the arising of such an idea is seen as the first step on the path of the bodhisattva.

And as we all know from our zazen practice, ideas are also just ideas. Inherently flimsy, without substance or abiding reality. They come and they go. They are like the weather of our mind. One day it's sunny, one day it's rainy. As we North westerners know, there's no point complaining about the weather. As they say around here, "if you don't like the weather, just wait 15 minutes." And it's the same with our mind. If you don't like your mind right now just wait 15 minutes. It will all change by then.

And so in a way our idea about practice, our idea about Zen, really doesn't matter. It changes all the time anyway, there's nothing to grab onto.

This all just sounds like another lofty idea though, doesn't it? Oh, yeah, that's right mmm... Zen so mysterious, ideas don't matter, everything changes. Yes, grasshopper. Very lofty and esoteric. And not terribly useful!

Zen is lofty and mysterious, no doubt, but Zen is also practical. Down to earth. A simple path that we can do. No problem. "Just do it," as Katagiri roshi used to say. So how on a practical level do we engage our life though the vehicle of Zen practice?

I want to suggest today that the primary activity of practice is studying our suffering. Studying the patterns in our life that lead to discontent, to separation, to feeling less than completely satisfied with our circumstances. And not the kind of studying where I'm over here and I have this magnifying glass called Zen practice so I can scrutinize and dissect my life. More like full immersion language school where you are just show up in a new country and they refuse to speak English to you. Studying our suffering means really being our suffering. Living our suffering. Embracing and loving our suffering. Completely putting down our shielding and resistance to our suffering.

As I've mentioned before, suffering is the most usual translation for the old Buddhist term dukkha. And suffering is a maybe a little to loaded as an English word. It sounds a bit extreme. What does he mean study our suffering? I'm not suffering at the moment. Do I need to wait until I have a horrible crisis before I can practice Zen? Do I need more suffering in my life? Other possible translations of dukkha are stress, discontent, a sense of dis-ease, a feel of disconnectedness with our life, that vague quivery feeling that even in the midst of happy times something isn't quite right. This isn't quite it. How are you? Oh, nothing to complain about really. The excellent Access To Insight website (See the BIONA "Links" Page to visit this wonderful Dharma library) comments on this translation problem this way: "One helpful rule of thumb: as soon as you think you've found the best translation for dukkha, think again: for no matter how you describe dukkha, it's always larger, subtler, and more unsatisfactory than that."

I don't know if Shakyamuni Buddha coined the term dukkha or if it was a regular word that he recast with a different shade of meaning. Usually he used everyday language, which was part of what made his teachings so revolutionary at the time. The situation in Buddha's day was that the mainstream orthodox religion was an esoteric form of Hinduism that was controlled by a priestly class called the Brahmins. It was full of elaborate rituals and secret teachings known only by the Brahmins. And to be a good religious person you needed to always consult with the Brahmins and bring them in to perform rituals and tell whether this or that is in accord with the proper religious teachings. I'm sure it was a very beautiful and elaborate spirituality, but it was also very lofty, full of special terminology and language, and generally beyond the ken of regular people. A specialist's religion.

This was a time of social change and relative wealth in Northern India. There was a growing merchant class, the beginnings of a middle class and people probably had a little more free time and a little more resources to invest in exploring their own spirituality and philosophy and for supporting others. A time not unlike our own.

Out of this social milieu there was arising a movement in contrast to the mainstream religion run by the Brahmins. This was an anarchistic counter movement of groups of ascetics, mystics, and yogis. These guys (and I think they were almost all men) were interested in direct spiritual experience. There were many different groups and different teachers, and I don't know if we can call what they were doing a religion, it was too diverse. And these holy men, yogis and ascetics were supported by their society. I imagine a good middle class merchant family of the time probably gave handouts to wandering holy men and also supported their local Brahmin. They would maybe have felt deeply moved by the seriousness and devotion of these ascetic practitioners, and probably they found them a little odd too. You certainly didn't want your own son or daughter to live that way.

This was the situation the young Siddhartha Gautama, who was later to be the Buddha, grew up in. You all know the story I'm sure of how at birth his father, who was in the noble class and very wealthy, learned from a respected prophet that there were clear signs of prophesy around the birth of his son. Either he would grow up to be a great political leader or a great holy man. Preferring the former, his father tried to shelter his son from all hardships and educate him as an up and coming noble leader. But sooner or later the cat always gets out of the bag. And the story goes that Siddhartha talked his charioteer into taking him out into the town unsupervised and there he was deeply shocked to see a sick person, and then an old person, and then the body of someone who has just died. It sounds simplistic, but it's a compelling story if you think about it. His father had great resources and had completely devoted himself to hiding his son from these realities.

One account of Siddhartha’s sheltered life is that not only did he stay in his palaces all the time; he didn't even go to the ground floor. Ashvaghosha wrote: "Thus he passed his time in the upper part of the palace, which was as brilliantly white as rain clouds in autumn, and which looked like a mansion of the Gods shifted to the earth. It contained rooms suited to each season, and the melodious music of the female attendants could be heard in them--soft music from the gold-edged tambourines which the women tapped with their finger-tips as they danced as beautifully as the choicest heavenly nymphs" and so on. His life had been one endless party and then suddenly he goes out for a little exploring and: bammo he finds out the truth that every one us will inevitably get sick, get old, and die.

And then in the midst of this incredible despair and shock he also sees a wandering monk. A disciple of one of the local ascetic yogis. And this monk was walking through the suffering world Siddhartha suddenly found himself with a deeply focused feeling of contentment and equanimity. You can imagine a monk really focused on his meditation practice, walking mindfully down a dirty back street in ancient India. Maybe he's walking by when they are loading the body of someone who just died into a cart to take to the cremation grounds. And his eyes are cast down, just following his breath, smiling slightly. Mindful of each step.

I'm going about this because I'm leading up to Shakyamuni Buddha's use of this term dukkha. I think it's helpful to remember the context of his practice.

Anyway, Siddhartha realizes that his life has just shifted too radically to allow him to go on as before. It's hard to understand a future teacher of ethics leaving his family to practice, but that's what he does, he leaves behind his wife and his young son and slips off into the woods to find a teacher. This feeling of bodhicitta was stronger than we can imagine. He really had no choice but to take up practice and devote every ounce of his being to trying to understand the truth about suffering. How can we every find peace in the midst of sickness, old age, and death. In the midst of inevitable decay and loss. They say that one of the stages in becoming a Buddha is when you mind reaches a state when it can no longer turn back on enlightenment. It just can't return to self-identification and thirsting after sense pleasures. Sometimes when we experience a big, surprising shift in our lives we maybe have a glimmer of what he must have felt.

We all know that the Buddha sat down under a tree, devoted himself wholeheartedly to sitting meditation and experiences a great enlightenment, but keep in mind that he didn't do that right away. First he practiced intensively with every meditation and yoga teacher around. He was a student of practice before he was a teacher. And he didn't just dabble. He mastered many meditation techniques, became adept at many yogic practices. He kept at it, working hard, learning, but still his question burned in his heart. Still he didn't understand how we can live with any real peace. And as often happens during intensive practice finally he hit bottom. Do you know what I mean? It was when we was doing a severe ascetic practice where he and 5 others students were only eating one jujube fruit, a one sesame seed and one grain of rice a day, not bathing, not sleeping particularly and working very intensely on their practice. He must have been in a wild kind of starved, spiritual daze. Really out of his mind, and yet deeply present. They say he had really awe inspiring spiritual and psychic energy. There's a famous Ghandaran statue of what he looked like then and it's really creepy looking. Ribs showing, wild hair, sunken, intense eyes. Anyway finally something snapped and he realized "this just isn't it." He stumbled across a girl from the nearby village, the story goes, and accepted an offering of rice and milk from her and then finally he began what was to become known as Buddhist practice. The middle way.

Well his five practice buddies were shocked. What a sell out! Eating rice and milk. And then he even made a cushy seat out of kusha grass instead of sitting on hard rocks like he was supposed to. So they left in utter disgust.

After his enlightenment, it was to these five men the Buddha gave his first formal teaching after his awakening. It was to these five friends from his years of hard practice that he first tried to formulate what he'd learned from his awakening as the Buddha. He must have loved them very dearly. And they were a little skeptical as you can imagine. Oh, now you say you have all the answers 'eh softy? Listen to what the sutra says they muttered to each other as he walked up: "There is our pleasure-loving friend, the mendicant Gautama, who gave up his austerities! When he comes to us, we must certainly not get up to meet him, and he is certainly not worth saluting. People who have broken their vows do not deserve any respect. Of course, if he should wish to talk to us, let us by all means converse with him. For it is unworthy of saintly people to act otherwise towards visitors, whoever they may be." But his argument was deeply convincing and they became his first students on the spot. One of them had a big enlightenment experience just listening to his lecture.

That talk, which we now call the Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta, The sutra on Setting the Wheel of Dharma in Motion, was on the teaching of the four noble truths. And that's where this term dukkha comes in. See, I got back here eventually!

There is a wonderful part of Buddha's enlightenment story that explains exactly when during his final night of sitting he realized each of these four truths, but I will spare you that level of detail. Anyway the first noble truth as that all life that's conditioned by our regular way of thinking is absolutely always characterized by dukkha. By suffering, by a feel of discontent. You can experience this even when things are going really well. And it's more obvious when things aren't going so well. Somehow we just aren't quite satisfied really no matter what. That is dukkha.

The second noble truth is when Buddha realized why this is. The second noble truth is the cause of dukkha. That as you all know is attachment. Or craving. Or aversion. Many names for the same deep impulse. Attachment and aversion happen at a few low level in our consciousness. And they happen constantly. The Buddha's mind was so clear he could see the functioning of attachment and aversion just like we can see our own hand opening and closing. And further he could see that engine of suffering operating in everyone throughout the world. It must have been a pretty awesome and creepy thing to see!

The third noble truth is that Buddha realized from his own personal experience that we can transform our life so that it isn't dukkha. That's important. The first noble truth gets shortened to "life is suffering" and Buddhism has a bad reputation because of that. That is not the first noble truth. The first noble truth, is "all conditioned existence is suffering." The second truth is the origin of the condition. And the third noble truth is there is a cure for this condition.

The forth noble truth is the practical way to solve the problem. The forth noble truth is the eightfold path leading to liberation. You've heard of this for sure: right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

So this is wonderful and pivotal teaching of Buddhism. Maybe the number one teaching and good to hear and know about. But of course hearing and knowing something in our mind doesn't change much. The important thing is that we need to practice with a teaching, be with a teaching, study a teaching with our breath, with our body. Enter into it completely and check it out. See what are the noble truths really? How to they feel? What are their dimensions? We have to explore the territory, step by step, even though it may take quite a while and quite a bit of persistent effort.

Our tendency, I think, is that we really like cures. So on truth #1 to #3 we nod our head and say yeah, yeah, okay, and then #4 comes along and we say - great that's what I was waiting for. I want the cure right away. What do I have to do?

But the example of Buddha's practice doesn't suggest that course of action. Buddha studied hard with his whole body and mind for year and had to completely realize the first noble truth before he could awaken.

So my suggestion to you today, which sounds a little grim, and it can be horrible and it can be really wonderful, is that we embark on the project of studying and realizing this first noble truth in our lives. What is suffering for me? What are the dimensions and varieties of dukkha? What is stress? What is that feeling of dissatisfaction? To really be with so-called negative emotions and mind states. Gently, but firmly to check out our condition as human beings.

We have many tools available to us in this exploration. The most obvious is our regular discriminating mind. And we can use that skillfully in dharma for sure. We can pay attention with our minds to when we're suffering. What do the causes seem to be if we can discern any? Does this action lead to more suffering? Basically I'm happy right now, but is there a deeper feeling of dis-ease included in that? Not that we are seeking out misery, but while learning about the first noble truth we commit ourselves to being open to misery, open to suffering, if it's there we aren't going to hide from it. We're exploring a new territory with dispassionate interest - we want to see what's really there not just what we hope will be there. So the use of discriminating consciousness to explore dukkha is very common sense and we already do this all the time. But maybe we refine our efforts a little in light of this teaching of the four noble truths.

The second tool available to us is our body. This is easily neglected. We can be much more sensitive to feelings in the body and how they connect to mind states and emotions. If there is a strong feeling of stress where does that manifest in the body. And what, in particular, does that feel like. Is it a warm feeling? A cold feeling? Does the feeling move around? When we experience stress does it always manifest in that same place?

There are many practices to help us employ the body as a tool for awareness. We can do a "body scan" during sitting or anytime when we are able - examining the feeling in each part of the body. We can practice relaxing the face - I almost always have tension in my face. It's really surprising to check. We can take on other practices like yoga, tai chi, chi gung to help us be more aware of what's happening in the body. We can also pay attention to our posture. In sitting and in every activity how do we hold the body? What impact does our posture have on our life? How is posture itself bound up in the noble truth of dukkha.

The tool emphasized in Suzuki roshi's way is the breath. I'm almost out of time, so I won't say too much about the breath. But the breath is incredible. It is always available to us, and entering deeply into the breath is really beyond all conceptions of space and time. The breath is a very powerful tool for understanding and liberation. I think we really need to have a lot of respect and veneration for the breath. Which we usually take for granted thousands of times a day.

And there are many particular meditation practices and things we can emphasize in our life to help us realize this noble truth of our life conditioned by attachment and aversion. I would like to touch briefly on one and then we'll close.

You've probably heard of "mettá" practice - or loving kindness practice - it's a common practice in Vipassana. It involves raising the spirit of love and kindness in your self and extending it to encompass your whole self with all of your perceived failings, to people you love, to people you're neutral about, and finally to people you really can't stand.

Metta is one of a set of four practices called the Brahma Viharas, for the divine abodes. These practices embody and create the place where the Brahma gods love to hang out.

The other three are karuna or compassion, mudita or sympathetic joy, and upekkha, or equanimity.

Lately I've been trying to practice with mudita, sympathetic joy, because I noticed a strong pattern of suffering in my life. I noticed that whenever I encounter someone who has accomplished something that is the kind of thing I want to do, or the kind of thing I once wished I had done, or even something I've failed to do, I really suffer. Instead of being happy that someone else is doing something I value I get pissed. I feel jealous. I feel regretful.

On the basic level just having this term "mudita" in mind, having a category in my thinking for this particular brand of suffering helps me be more aware of it. The teachings on mudita also suggest specific meditation practices, such as visualizing people we feel jealous of and wishing "May she continue to have material gains and may she gain even more. May he continue to have spiritual happiness and gain even more." and so on. And that's wonderful to take up for a while.

Mostly for me studying mudita has been really paying attention, with discriminating awareness, to what actually arises when I feel this way. For example, I care a lot about the natural world and I used teach kids about nature but I haven't for several years. The other day I received the catalog from an environmental education institute that I respect and leaving through the pages I felt such strong emotion! These guys are doing what I'm supposed to be doing! Where did I go wrong? And look at the way they're doing it! I would have done this program another way! And so on.

Examining those feelings I noticed that there was a combination of jealousy, anger, real joy and appreciation. Both sides were in there I just didn't notice at first. So my suffering contains my joy. And when that feeling of jealousy and upset arises I can practice turning towards it. Appreciating the complexity of it and appreciating the joy and gratitude that is part of being human even in the middle of being upset.

And that's the note I'd like to close on. Studying dukkha, studying our suffering, is not a grim chore to take on because as good Zen students that's what we are supposed to do. Studying our suffering is embracing fully our actual life, and within every moment of that life is deep gratitude and infinite joy. This doesn't fit our usual idea of how things are, so we have to study to loosen up on our misunderstanding. Turning towards anguish, turning towards discomfort, turning towards upset, entering into it. Just being it. Appreciating our life.

I'd like to close with a quote from a great American Bodhisattva, Woody Guthrie. There is wonderful exhibit on his life at the State history museum in Tacoma. And learning more about Woody Guthrie's life I can tell you he went through some incredible suffering and could still somehow express great joy in being alive.

He wrote one time:
Whoever has traveled a similar road
can tell of the rocks and weight of the load . . .
take it easy, but take it.
-Woody Guthrie

Contents 1 Our Idea Collections 2 = 2.1 What Kind of Effort? 3 =

Our Idea Collections

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A Sangha-led Sunday Retreat At Bellingham Dharma Hall

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Good morning, it's wonderful to be gathered here together today supporting each other in our practice. This is just the second time we've done one of these short retreats without a major Zen teacher here. It's like we're just old enough, 14 or 15 years old, to be home alone and our parents have left for the day leaving us to enjoy the responsibility and freedom of trying this on our own. And in a very real way that's not far off the mark. If you think about it, even though we are all perfectly competent adults, we are also in some fundamental way immature. Maybe after sitting quietly with your mind for a few hours you know what I am talking about!

But even though we aren't really mature, our responsibility is to act like adults, so we do our best, and I think we're doing very well. It really feels like a settled formal Zen meditation hall in here. You are all making such a strong and beautiful effort - sitting, standing and walking with dignity and mindfulness. Everyone pitching in and doing their best. And oddly even if you don't feel like your practice is so beautiful - what is he talking about? I can barely get through this! Zazen is killing me! - and yet it's actually true. Everyone of us is practicing very beautifully with all of our heart.

And it is helping us to grow up not having a big teacher here. Just like you have to give children the space to learn things on their own. Norman Fischer is our guiding teacher and was just here a few weeks ago and we had a wonderful retreat. But we didn't just wait another 6 months for him to come back to Bellingham we are here now. This helps us learn that, even though we do need our teachers to help us, we also need to be able to stand up on our own. The dharma is not like a milkshake that we only suck up from our dharma teachers. It is the unfolding of our own hearts through steady, strong, effort. The kind of effort we are making here today.

So I have the lucky job of being able to say on the behalf of everyone: thank so much for being a part of this, it really is a rare and wonderful thing that it's even possible for us to do this. And it's also just so ordinary too. Very simple and plain. Just human life. Just people trying to grow up and inhabit our regular lives with dignity.

I know most of you, but for those of your who are new here's a little background on how I came to be sitting here. And it really surprises me that I am sitting here by the way. I have been practicing for about 15 years. Most of those years with support from my teacher, Zoketsu Norman Fischer. I did residential training periods fairly early on at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center and Tassajara Zen Monastery in California. Both of those places are a part of the San Francisco Zen Center. Norman himself was an abbot of Zen Center for several years, but has recently left there to step out as an independent dharma teacher and start a foundation, the Everyday Zen Foundation. And last year, Norman agreed to be the guiding teacher of our group here in Bellingham.

I was ordained as a Zen priest by Norman just this last June, so I'm very new to giving talks and running around trying to figure out how to practice as a priest. Our little group here has been practicing regularly together for ten years now, and most of my practice and training has been in this context. Trying to practice together with each other here in Bellingham, rubbing shoulders and helping each other, supporting each other in our practice and working with whatever comes up in our lives, our zazen and in our relationships with each other. Very little external structure or support to guide us. Week after week after week. Doing our best to work it out. This is actually the group's ten year anniversary right around now. I think the very first sittings we a little earlier in 1991, maybe February or March, but in April or May there started being a few more people and it started feeling like "wow this might actually work." So we're have a little anniversary party in a way today. Celebrating in good Zen style: very quietly trying to express our gratitude by sitting, standing, and walking together.

I used to collect stamps when I was a kid. I don't remember very well the stamps themselves. I liked the foreign ones I had. Especially there were triangular ones, I think from Africa somewhere that were very colorful. What I remember more was the actual act of collecting. Ordering stamps from a catalog. Organizing them just so on a page and pasting them into my book. That feeling of gathering, pulling things in that I liked, and then organizing and presenting them to myself. It was quite solitary too. I don't remember showing my collection to anyone, or trading stamps or anything like that. It was my own thing.

The thing that's surprising is that I have no idea what happened to my collection. Once I lost interest in collecting, I had absolutely no use for the collection itself. I don't remember what I did with it. Maybe I threw it away or something.

Maybe some of you have collections or used to collect something. There's something to that desire to gather things together and organize them. We're pulling in the world and making it our own. A very strong tendency.

Practicing meditation allows us to study the self. To sit still and make an effort to pay attention to what's actually happening in our body and mind. To notice the waves of thought and emotion as they rise up, sweep through us, and recede into the distance.

What I want to suggest today that as we settle in zazen we start to notice that the sum of who we think we are is actually itself a collection. It's a collection of ideas, a collection of concepts, a collection of "truths." And we are all very serious collectors.

Like all collectors we want our idea collections to be as organized and tidy as possible. So if someone says something that doesn't fit into our collection we either ignore it or try to somehow get rid of it. We might trivialize the non-conforming idea, or trivialize the person it comes from. Or we can fight back with strong ideas and use them sort of like weapons. "I don't agree with that" is one of my favorites. Someone says such and such is this way and we can just say "I don't agree with that" - what does that mean anyway? Are you saying the other person is just completely nuts? Or we might feel very threatened: are you saying my collection is no good? Whenever something appears in our life that doesn't fit easily into our collection we are take one of several paths leading to some kind of suffering. Do you know what I'm talking about?

In order to be collectable, experience has to be first converted into ideas. And this is a full time job! Our minds our very busy trying to match up words and concepts to experiences. To make them collectable. Maybe you've noticed that happening this morning. A feeling in the belly can be converted to "oh I'm doing good zazen following my breath right now" A sensation in the knees can become "oh Zen practice is painful" A sound can end up as "hey he's so noisy I bet he's not really serious about zazen. Why's he here anyway?" And this conversion process is reductive, right? It's taking a step away from our experience and diluting it down, converting it into terms that fit our particular idea collection.

Our ability to actually not notice experience that can't be made to fit into our collection is pretty amazing! Have you ever had the experience of learning about something new, like a new flower, or a new kind of car or something and suddenly you see them everywhere? Before you had the idea in your collection, it was just too much effort to actually notice things that were right in front you. Suddenly when you have it your collection you can start experiencing it's existence and reinforce the validity of your collection.

Often we experience things that simply remind us of ideas in our collection. And then instead of experiencing what's right in front of us, we experience our idea collection instead. The last time you walked by someone panhandling for example, do you think you actually saw that person? Or did you instead experience your idea collection - panhandling is good or bad, or how sad it is the people do it, or that these people are probably just going to use the money for alcohol anyway, and how your uncle Joe had such trouble with alcohol, and you're off. Way off. Far away from the actual experience of encountering another human being at a street corner.

Our constant preoccupation with our collection can prevent us in this way from having space in our life for others. From having room for compassion to arise and manifest. In Buddhism we always say that wisdom and compassion work together. If you can start to recognize your idea collection as what it is, just a bunch of idea strung together which may or may not have any connection to what's happening right now. If we can do that there is some softness, some open space in our life. Within that open space compassion and love for others can manifest.

But our work with our collection is happening so constantly that mostly we don't realize that we are living that way. It is such a constant background noise in our lives that we actually think that our idea collection is who we are. Depending on our particular history, our karma, we might love or hate this idea of who we are. Or a little of both! Either of these choices, as you know, is a bit of a problem.

We might treasure our beautiful collection and even though we might suspect that it isn't absolutely a perfect model of the universe, it's pretty close and we're just working on the fine tuning now after all of these years. And we are certain that even though other people's collections are valid and important, ours is definitely better and more true.

Or we might feel very uneasy about our collection. We might be filled with regret that we didn't collect certain experiences. That we still are stuck in this job, or this relationship, or that we never finished college, or that we have such bad habits.

Or maybe we have some pages in our idea collection that we love and do our best to show everyone, and we have some pages crammed into the back that we do our best to hide away - our so-called dark sides.

Eventually in big ways or tiny gradual ways we begin to see that regardless of how we feel about our particular collection, spending so much time and energy obsessing over our collections is not such a good idea. It is a habit of separation. A habit of suffering. But the very odd thing is that whether or not we like our collection, we actually really love our collection. We are deeply afraid of being parted from it. In some sense it's all we have. Our idea collection is who we think we are.

Once in a while we have a powerful experience in which reality strongly contradicts the truth of our idea collection. And this causes us very deep suffering. Why did I do that? It doesn't make sense! Why did the happen? That wasn't supposed to happen!

My mother is having one of these experiences right now. Her mother, my grandmother, is 83 and has been feeling very poorly for a year or so. After a recent bought with phenomena it became clear that she would never be able to live on her own again. And also, she will have to work pretty hard to regain her strength if she wants to be able to walk and do anything for herself. My mom's idea about this is something like "my mom loves me and will always be with us as long as she possibly can, this is just a minor setback, she can go live in an assisted care facility and we'll help take care of her too." But my grandmother's idea don't mesh with this at all, her idea is something like "I've had enough. I've done everything I have to do. I'm really miserable. I don't want to be a burden on my kids." And she has decided to stop eating and drinking. To let go of life. Probably in a week or so she will be gone. Very, very hard on my mom. How can she process this? Could it be that her mom doesn't love her? It doesn't make sense. And she is really suffering.

During these moments of shock and anguish we are faced by an opportunity. Are we going to convert this new experience into a new revised idea and add it to our collection? Or are we going to begin to see the frailty and unreality of our collection. Are we going to start seeing our ideas as excretions of the mind with no inherent external truth or reality?

I think usually we do a little of both. We revise our collection to protect ourselves from the next shocker and we have, at the same time, a glimmer, a vague shaky feeling in our gut, that the idea collection is just a house of cards just waiting for a blow large enough to knock it down. And out of this glimmer, bodhicitta, the dream of awakening, the desire for awakening can arise. We realize that our collection isn't really causing us any real happiness. We want to find a way out of our collecting habit, a path to a life beyond idea collecting.

These kinds of shocks can also be quite destabilizing, so we need to gentle with ourselves. Pay attention to our mental health. We aren't trying to wipe out our personalities with some kind of dharma shock therapy or something!

And sometimes we see beyond our idea collection in quieter, less dramatic ways. The other day during a three-day retreat we had in Bellingham, I for the first time noticed the lovely new leaves growing on the blackberry bushes near our Dharma Hall. I was just walking along after a few days of sitting and suddenly I noticed, wow, the beautiful alive green colors and intricate shapes of the new leaves coming out. Just for an instant I saw the blackberry plants instead of seeing my ideas about blackberry plants. Usually when I see blackberries along the path, I think about how they are invading too much and displacing native plants. I delight in my ability to think of phrases like "non-native invasive species" and that I know they are in the genus "Rubus." Or I think of the many hours I've spent digging up blackberries trying to get rid of them. Or I think about their sharp thorns, and how they are just basically bad plants. That they are a problem.

And they are a problem of course, but they are also beautiful. And they produce such wonderful fruit. And it's amazing how fast they grow. They are vital and strong. So they don't really fit into our idea collections at all if you think about it. How can something be good and bad? Beautiful and a problem? Problems aren't beautiful. I can't process this. I can't file this in my collection. So usually I just see blackberry-problem-thorny and keep going, completely ignoring, just not seeing the lovely spring growth coming in.

The nature of our collecting habit is that our problems are stripped of their beauty and their complexity. Our problems are stripped down so that they will fit into our collection. We already have a very strong idea that problems are bad. Problems are what we avoid and try not to deal with. So when a problem arises in our life quite naturally we think "uh oh, problem, that's bad, how do I get rid of it?" without really seeing the nature of the problem itself.

The practice of zazen gives us many opportunities to study our idea collecting ways. By letting go of thoughts as they arise in the mind. By just returning to awareness of breath and posture, we can experience a softening of our impulse to collect, organize, and categorize ideas. An idea can arise and once in a while, just by cultivating this spirit of letting go, we for once don't try to collect it. We don't try to attach it to other thoughts and concepts. We don't evaluate it. We just notice "ah a thought arising" and return to our breathing.

Practicing this way, we can start to see experience as just experience. Thoughts as just thoughts. If the thought "When's the bell going to ring?" arises in the mind rather than collecting it: "oh what a bad Zen student I am I can't sit patiently" or "this was a bad idea coming here" or "they should have shorter periods, it's really not appropriate having periods this long." Instead of converting the experience of an impatient thought arising in the mind into one of these categories and collecting it, in zazen we just notice. "Ahh... impatience arising" and return to our breath "1... 2.... 3..." Just an impatient thought, just a tightening sensation in the forehead, just the sound of the wind, just our breathing. Just our experience, moment after moment. Nothing extra from our collection needs to be added to our experience, and our experience doesn't have to converted into ideas and added to our collection.

So some kind of regular quiet practice is essential. It doesn't have to be formal mediation practice it could be quiet walks in the woods, or making art, or having intimate conversations with trusted friends. Some kind of regular practice that helps us to move beyond our idea of who we think we are. Engaging in some practice activity regularly, whether we want to or not. Being quiet, letting go, paying attention, allowing our impulse to make all experience into a collection of ideas to release a little.

It is not just for our own happiness that we take this on. Our idea collection not only generates difficulty for our "self" - it also generates difficulty for everyone around us. Have you noticed the strong impulse in the mind to judge others? I don't know about you, but I find this happens almost constantly. I see someone and instantly I have 17 things I dislike about them. "Boy look at the way she dresses or drives or talks or stands or whatever." And why do we do this to people all the time in our mind? You guessed it, we want to collect an idea of who that person is. And because the central idea in our idea collection that we call me is that I am separate from you, and my collection is much better than yours, so an idea of someone else just doesn't fit in unless they are somehow inferior.

Or if the nature of your idea collection is that you are inferior to others,, then when you encounter others maybe you project positive and lofty ideas onto others. "oh she's so wise, I'll never be that wise" "he sits like a rock, I'm a lousy sitter" "she's so much smarter/prettier/better than I am, there's no hope for me" As you can see this is just more idea collecting. Trying to make our world sensible and ordered, even if the nature of that order is that we are miserable half the time, that's the way of our mind.

This is why Sangha, the group of people we practice with, is important. When practicing with others who are also working on letting go of their collecting ways you get both support and camaraderie, but also people who will call you on your mixed up views. This can be pleasant or unpleasant, but it is necessary, believe me. There is actually no way we can transform our lives all by ourselves. Why? Because all we would do if we practiced by ourselves is redesign our idea collection and think, "I was so mixed up before I thought this way and that way, but now I see the truth" We would just have a new collection. More refined. Maybe a closer approximation of the way things really are in our life, or maybe not, but still just a collection of ideas that limits our ability to see what's right in front of us, limits our ability to interact with others and our world with clarity and understanding. We need our dharma brothers and sisters reminding us "hey that's just your idea, that's not how it is" Which they might do with grace and kindness or they might get mad at your and knock you over the head. Either way is incredible kindness and compassion.

And we also need our teachers. This may be a little abstract if you haven't had the opportunity yet to practice Zen closely with a teacher, so you have my permissions to just add this to your idea collection about Zen! In meeting with our teacher within the intimacy and protection of the formal Zen interview called dokusan, we are meeting ourselves beyond ourselves. We go in there with brilliant ideas from our collection and we look into our teacher's eyes and start to open our mouth and whamo we see that our ideas are just ideas. We are humbled and encouraged to look more deeply into our hearts. Sometimes that happens anyway. Or if we are really caught in our ideas at the moment our teacher will kindly remind us to look more closely at our actual experience moment to moment and see if our idea really adds up or not. And if your practice isn't formal Zen, I'm sure there are similar ways of meeting your teacher that takes you beyond this small self.

I remember our first five-day retreat the church camp we use was starting. It was a big event for us, a whole new level or practice and a whole new level or event to organize so we were very excited. I, in particular, was running around like crazy making sure everything was taken care of, greeting people, solving little problems. I was very keyed up. The retreat started and I went to dokusan, to meet with Norman, and started telling him how wonderful and exciting I thought this was, what a great opportunity for practice, rattling on and on. Finally he interrupts me: "what you want to do is follow your breaths" and gives me basic zazen instruction. The exact instruction I've told new comers many times! And instantly I knew I could let go of that mind. Return to awareness of breath and posture. Practice much more deeply.

I'm more and more clear on these last two points. How deeply we need our Sangha and our teacher. If we think I don't need a teacher, I just want to sit here and practice zazen, or make art, or whatever, and be happier or calmer or better in some way, that's just a strong idea from our collection. And it may actually be true, we may well get calmer, or we might not, but the important point is we will never be able to move beyond this endless cycle of collecting ideas about who we are that way. And maybe that's okay! Nobody's telling you you have to transform your life. If you want to stay the way you are that's really completely fine. We have to choose what we're up for. But I'm here to report that I have a growing sense from my own experience that this practice can completely liberate you from the suffering and confusion bound up in our collecting habit.

By practicing with sincerity over time, in the company of others, and with the support of a teacher or teachers, we can soften up on our idea collecting habit. We can catch glimpses, in between the cracks of the wall of ideas that we build between us and the world, we can catch glimpses of the actual beauty and dignity of our life. Our heart begins to open. And quite naturally we do our best to help each other forward along the path. And that's it. There's nothing more than this moment. There's nothing more than this breath. This body. And this moment, and this moment.

All of this discussion of the collections of ideas we create and take for reality is, of course, itself just another idea collection. All teachings are like this. All teachings are provisional. We embrace them and explore their implications for the basis of our own experience in practice. We treasure them, and yet we hold them lightly with warmth and respect, but lightly. We see through them and are aware that even this, Buddha's teaching, is just a thin wash over the canvas of this moment as it is.

One time the Buddha taught his student the monk Bahiya that just paying attention to actual experience moment to moment is all we need to concern ourselves with:

"In the seen there should be for you only the seen. In the heard there should be for you only the heard. In the sensed there should be for you only the sensed. In the cognized there should be for you only the cognized."

We can't out-think ourselves. We can't trick ourselves out of our mental habits. Replacing our current idea collection with a better Zen idea collection is not our way. Our way is to penetrate this moment. To pay attention. In the cognized there should be for you only the cognized. Thoughts arising in the mind are only thoughts. Even to say that they are your thoughts or my thoughts is saying too much. Just thought, just posture, just sounds, just breath. Just this. Just this.

Thank you.

Post-script: Tim's grandmother changed her mind a few days after this talk was given and has decided to live longer. Her health is gradually improving.

What Kind of Effort?

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A Sangha-led Sunday Retreat At Bellingham Dharma Hall

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Good morning. Thank you all so much for coming today. It really is an amazing and precious thing when a group of people gets together like this. Supporting ourselves and each other to settle more deeply into our lives - our joys, our suffering, our funny lives. Somehow so complicated. Somehow so simple. There are a few people who can do this kind of practice on their own - but for most of us we need the support of a schedule and a group of people like this. We can all thank each other for having the courage and conviction to do this today.

As most of you know this is the first time I've done the practice of giving a talk. In one sense it's pretty surprising that I'm doing this - you can imagine the insecure thoughts that arise! I'm not good enough or deep enough or spiritual enough or smart enough or whatever enough to do this, surely. In another sense it feels perfectly natural.

I used to think that there was a clear dichotomy between Zen students and Zen teachers. We're the confused students here and over there is the wise, enlightened teacher. But know I see more and more we are all just confused human beings doing our best practicing together. We are all teachers and we are all students. It's like the famous saying of the T'ang dynasty Zen teacher Zhaozhou when he set off on his long pilgrimage when he was already an established teacher. "If I meet an elderly person who can benefit from my instruction I will teach him. If I meet a young girl with something to teach me I will learn from her." It also makes me think of when I was leaving Green Gulch after my longest stint there and Norman said something like "it's been nice practicing with you." I was so flattered. I was the one who should be thanking him for teaching me and here he is thanking me for something. I thought he was just being nice at the time, but now I see. Even someone who feels like they are a totally newcomer is contributing so much to our practice. Just showing up is a very deep teaching for all of us. So thank you for teaching me today. Just sitting, just bowing, just walking around, each practice a deep way to interact, a deep way to learn and to teach each other about this ancient deep way of life. About this natural way to just be a human being.

Anyway, Norman did give me the green light to engage in the practice of giving the dharma talk today. He suggested that I warn you that I'm a "baby priest" - just ordained last June. I don't have anything that brilliant to say to you. But maybe I can at least provide a little break from sitting.

In Zen we talk about each activity as a practice. It's a really good word to remind us what the nature of doing any activity is. We're just practicing. Giving it a try. Doing our best. We don't expect to do it "right" and we're not worried about doing it "wrong." We're just doing whatever it is. Just talking care of what needs to be done. Part of our tradition on a day of retreat is that someone gives a talk so today I'll do the practice of talking about the Dharma.

Keep in mind that it's just a new practice like any other. The first time one does a new practice, like ringing the bells for service or being the work leader, it's often a strong and instructive experience. We can feel very vulnerable. Fear of failure usually arises. And then once we've muddled through, what a relief! And even if we make the big mistake we're worried about - it's okay somehow. Often there's a big release of energy. You can learn a lot going through this process over and over - I recommend it.

The process of doing a new Zen practice is really the same as living every new moment in our lives. It's just that the structure of Zen, the simplified life we live for a few hours or a day in the Zendo, helps to clarify our experience. The way our mind works is often more obvious in the context of practice: all of the silly, amazing, boring, repetitive, surprising thought patterns that coalesce around us and form who we think we are rise into the quiet of our practice and we can catch a glimpse of them as they arise and recombine with the next thought that arises. Just a quick glimpse before we get swept away again by our belief in the reality of our thoughts and ideas.

Actually every new moment in our lives is really like doing a new practice in Zen. Every moment is brand new. Totally fresh. And in each moment we try to respond to this new set of circumstances. It's just that we rarely notice the freshness of each new moment. The complete newness of every experience. No two days are the same. The world is different. We are different. Constantly changing. And yet the momentum of the ball of thoughts and habits that we construct our self with usually just carries us right past this freshness.

But occasionally we glimpse something from between little gaps in this hazy ball of thoughts and emotions. We see a flower with fresh and open eyes - startling beauty jumps out at us and all thought stops for a microsecond. Or we hear a few notes of music - totally clear so beautiful, rising out of the background noise for an instant. Or a jolt of clear pure love arises out of nowhere when we're holding a loved one's hand. Sometimes we don't even notice these experiences with our cognizant mind, but we have a ghost of a feeling, a hazy glimpse out of the corner of our eye, that they are happening. I actually don't know why these experiences often happen after doing a bunch of zazen. It's a complete mystery what sitting still and following your breath has to do with it. Maybe that's just it. It has nothing to do with anything. That's it's magic.

But these experiences are just our life as-it-is. They are just our self-getting out of the way of our life for an instant. They are enlightenment. There's a lot of fuss and bother in Zen about the world "enlightenment" - it's a concept that we hear about or read about and it sounds like the ultimate candy. A total instant out from all of our suffering and problems. We don't in our insecurity really think that we could ever get that, but still we want it. Can you hear how crazy that is? We all know that our desires and attachments and aversions are the engine driving our confusion and suffering. We can't just take that desire engine and knock it onto a new track called "enlightenment" and expect anything other than a new flavor of suffering. Enlightenment is not some big thing that's outside of us that we just have to work hard in meditation in order to grab onto. There is nothing outside of us.

Maybe that particular delusion is why Eihei Dogen, 12th century founder of Soto Zen in Japan, invented a compound word (look up in Japanese) that's translated practice-enlightenment. Dogen wants us to understand that "this is place, here the way unfolds" - enlightenment is right now. This moment. Experienced with this body. This mind. We don't get a new mind. And we can't even expect the small-minded satisfaction of walking around telling ourselves "ooh that was cool, that's enlightenment, ooh good job sitting all of these years" - Dogen says "don't think that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is grasped by your consciousness."

We are working with habits of mind that are so deep. They are unbelievably deep. We really believe with incredible conviction in the story of who we are. The story of our life. We are constantly generating and revising this story. Our Zen teachers tell us, and I am deeply convinced that they are right, that this story is just a story. And it's the story of dukkha. Dukkha as most of you know is the Pali word from the Buddha's first noble truth.

After his realization deepened enough, the Buddha looked at the world with the unimaginable eyes of pure practice-enlightenment. Usually in the tradition he's portrayed as suddenly gaining all sorts of super powers like clairvoyance and the ability to look through his past lives. I think for our purposes today we shouldn't worry about whether he had such magical powers or not, but think about it in a way that makes sense for our scientific minds. He had simply stopped manufacturing his story. Completely. He was just present. Just there, breathing and alive. He still had all of his senses and his intelligence. And thoughts still arose and disappeared in his mind. But he didn't grab onto any thoughts. He'd stopped plunging into that whirling ball of thought-emotion and stopped thinking "this is me, this is me, this is me" And from this completely still and clear place he examined the way life works and he realized, wow, "the way people usually live is permeated with dukkha" - and later when he needed to formulate this into a teaching for others he called it the "first noble truth"

What is dukkha? What did he see so clearly as a deeply ingrained part of all life? Usually, as you know, it's translated as "suffering", but like many others I think that word isn't really right for us. Out of self-defense we can't really believe the idea that our life is characterized by suffering. I mean, hey, I'm feeling all right. I'm not totally happy every minute maybe, but I'm not suffering all the time. Boy you Zen guys are so gloomy!

Another translation, one that Thanissaro Bhikkhu who was here in the fall likes, is "stress." Everyone can relate to that - we all feel plenty of stress in our lives. We all have some sense that that this stress is really completely unnecessary - that it's something we are somehow adding to each situation.

But if we use stress to translate dukkha it makes sound like Buddhism is just a big stress reduction plan. That's okay I guess, stress reduction is a great thing to do. We should all pay attention to stress and take care of ourselves. But I think what we're doing here is much deeper, more transformational, more complete, than just lowering the stress meter a little. Even deeper than lowering the stress meter to zero.

My current favorite translation of dukkha - and I don't know if I heard this somewhere or made it up, so take it with a grain of salt - is "dissatisfaction" or "dis-ease." That feeling that permeates even our happiest moments, that vague feeling of "this is isn't quite it" or "this isn't exactly what I wanted" or "yeah and how long is this going to last?" - that dark background music of fear and "this isn't right" that we notice sometimes - playing quietly in the background. That feeling of things being not quite right, slightly out of phase, unsatisfactory, not quite it. And it's a feeling that's completely imbedded in our life. A feeling we can't shake going on a cool vacation, moving to a better town, buying a great new toy, by finding a better job, by having a wonderful relationship.

Maybe the definition of dukkha includes all three of these word-concepts. Dukkha manifests in different ways at different times for different people. Sometimes as totally misery and depression and real suffering, sometimes as stress, sometimes as just the faintest hint of dissatisfaction even when things are going really great for us.

The Dalai Lama reportedly said that the purpose of Buddhist practice is to be happy. Dukkha life is not sounding very happy. How does practice make us happy? How do we heal from this dukkha-flavored way of living? How do we do Dogen's practice-enlightenment? All of these ideas and analysis of our life really aren't good for much unless we can do something about it.

Zazen, sitting meditation, is the core of the answer to dukkha. For some mysterious reason that I don't begin to understand, just sitting down and settling the mind allows our life to transform. It's not something we can do in our usual way. Usually we think "I am Tim, I want to learn how to ski, okay I am trying to make a parallel turn, okay I did it, okay I can ski better now" - can you hear how self-focused that way of thinking is? I am me and I need to know this or do that, and now I have. I got something. It's mine. Me, me, me! And it does work after a fashion. I did get a little better at skiing when I went with my family for Christmas vacation. But this approach is also very limiting. It's the dukkha way of doing things. Athletes talk about entering non-thinking mental states when they are doing their best work. When people are really doing something well and naturally, they aren't constantly thinking "I do this, now do that, me, me, me" they are just doing it. And just letting it do them. It's actually impossible to really be experiencing or doing anything completely while thinking about doing it.

Zazen is remarkably intolerant of our usual self-conscious approach. Or maybe zazen just makes it more obvious that to think that there is an "I" that does things is a self-limiting and foolish fantasy. Zazen is something we can't do in our usual way. We can try. And all of us will try - it's the way we're used to doing things and it's so deeply ingrained that we don't even know we're doing it half the time. But we don't have to worry, zazen will teach us the error of our ways sooner or later.

This is a point I'm constantly learning and re-learning. I think I've told the story of my first 7-day sesshin to some people. Sesshin is our intensive meditation retreat - zazen, kinhin, zazen for most of the day. It's very wonderful and sometimes very difficult. An important and deep practice.

I was 21 years old and it was the end of a 6-week practice period at Green Gulch Farm in California. We'd been sitting 4 or 5 periods of zazen every day for those weeks and I thought I was getting the hang of it. So once sesshin came - 11 or 12 periods every day - I figured I just needed to work out a survival strategy to get through it.

I can't remember everything I did, but I do remember calculating how many periods there were in the whole 7 days and counting down. -ding- end of period, okay 57 periods left to go. Pretty horrifying if it had been a difficult period. Naturally I would project into the next 57 - 57 more period of that misery! At one point I seriously considered leaving, but the sesshin was at their Zendo in San Francisco and I didn't have a car there. Plus the embarrassment of showing up at Green Gulch early to get my stuff. So I kept at it.

I would try so hard in each period. Clamping down on my breath. Counting with fierce determination. Scrunching up my face so bad that I started seeing spots most of the time. So determined. Thinking, "I can do it, I can do it." At one point my head just couldn't take it anymore and there was some kind of release of energy that made me start laughing. "ah ha" maybe I'm getting somewhere - just try harder, harder, harder. I was so miserable! So agitated! So determined!

And the emotions were wild too. I completely fell in love with a woman sitting opposite me and made up all kinds of stories about who she was and what I would say to her and her to me once we could start talking at the end. I think I hated one of my neighbors. And not just like I thought she was cute and he was annoying. Full blown love and full blown hate. Very intense. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4. Harder-harder. I was my own worst enemy. I was totally obsessed with posture too, trying so hard to sit up straighter and making my back and shoulders into a complete agony of tension and stress.

But somehow I got through it and I started the process that sesshin of studying this question of effort. If we can't force zazen to work, how do we do it? We are taught techniques like counting or following the breath. We are taught to let go of our thoughts. But how? How do we do that with out causing the suffering I caused myself that sesshin?

One of my teachers, Blanche Hartman, went to see Suzuki roshi once after she's been practicing a few years. She was finally feeling some comfort and ease in her zazen and she wanted to tell Suzuki roshi how great it was that she finally could do zazen better. It was the only time he got mad at her she said. He was completely furious. He jumped up and yelled "you don't do zazen! Zazen does zazen!" We wanted to jolt her a little I guess, help her move deeper, beyond the self-centered idea of "I" can learn how to zazen.

And yet this "I" is what we start with. It's our tool. We can't just get rid of it. And even if we did learn how to rid ourselves of "I" - that's no good you can't do much in the world without your "I" - you end up a kind of blissful vegetable. Sometimes in the context of sitting "I" drops away for a little bit and that's wonderful. But we just allow it to come right back. That's it's nature.

So what I'm trying to get at is the question: what kind of effort do we make in practice? what does it feel like to make a skillful effort in zazen? How to do we use our upside down way of thinking and being to merge with the infinite no-self of zazen? How do we let zazen do zazen? How do we let zazen do us?

Eido-san in Olympia says that the only mistake you can possibly make in practice is to not make effort. There are no other mistakes. Everything you do it completely fine. You can't screw it up. What a relief! You just show up. Just make effort. Just effort.

But what kind of effort should we make in practice? In zazen? Try really hard and push-push-push? Relax and just hang out? Somewhere in between?

I did a little poking around in the stories our Zen ancestors. This isn't a new question. Here a few things I found:

Here's a famous dialog between Master Zhaozhou when he was a student of Nanquan:

One day, Zhaozhou asked Nanquan, "What is the Way?"
Nanquan said, "Everyday mind is the Way."
Zhaozhou said, "Does it have a disposition?"
Nanquan said, "If it has the slightest intention, then it is crooked."
Zhaozhou said, "When a person has no disposition, then how does he know that this is the Way?"
Nanquan said, "The Way is not subject to knowledge, nor is it subject to no-knowledge. Knowledge is delusive. No-knowledge is nihilistic. What the uncontrived way is truly attained, it is like great emptiness, vast and expansive. So how could there be right or wrong?"
At these word Zhaozhou was awakened.

(Repeat story)

Zhaozhou's asking "what is the way?" is the same as our question today. What is this we're trying to do? How do we do it? What kind of effort do we make?

Nanquan's answer is very famous. "Everyday mind is the way." There's nothing special that we're trying to grasp. We're not trying to attain some new improved mind. Just this mind. Everyday mind.

Zhaozhou's response to this is the same as what we would say I think. Okay then, if it's just everyday mind how will we know? If we are okay just the way we are why practice? How do we even know if we are practicing? Zhaozhou says is "Does it have a disposition?" How will I recognize this everyday mind?

Nanquan's answer is "If it has the slightest intention, then it is crooked" reminds me of my first sesshin again. Very crooked practice! But again, how can we function without any intention. Why would we ever sit down for zazen? Zhaozhou is still unclear on this too, so he asks, "When a person has no disposition, how does he know that this is the Way?"

I'll read you Nanquan's answer again. It answered Zhaozhou's question, but I don't think we can understood it with our intellectual minds so well. Nevertheless with these good stories it's good to just hear them and let them sink in.

Nanquan said, "The Way is not subject to knowledge, nor is it subject to no-knowledge. Knowledge is delusive. No-knowledge is nihilistic. What the uncontrived way is truly attained, it is like great emptiness, vast and expansive. So how could there be right or wrong?"

(Pause)

When Dogen was a young man in China studying with his teacher Rujing, he asked Rujing the same question. Rujing brings up another way of approaching our question of how to practice.

Dogen asked: "When we students practice the way, how should we cultivate the mind in the midst of ordinary activity, while walking, sitting, standing or lying down?"

Rujing replied, "When Bodhidharma came from India, the body and mind of Buddha-dharma truly entered China. Here are some things to pay attention to when you first undertake dharma study: don't spend a long time sick in bed; don't travel far away; don't read or chant too much; don't argue too much; don't overwork; don't eat leeks and onions; don't eat meat; don't eat impure food; don't listing to singing or music; don't watch dancing women; don't look at mutilated bodies; don't look at pornography or talk about sex; don't be intimate with kings or ministers; don't eat raw or unripe foods; don't wear filthy clothes; don't visit slaughterhouses; don't drink aged tea or take medicines for mental diseases like those they sell at Mt. Tiantai; don't eat fungi; don't pay any attention to matters of fame or fortune; don't eat too much cream... don't wear quilted clothes but wear only plain cotton clothes; don't pay attention to shouting and load noises, or watch herds of pigs and sheep; don't stare at big fish, the ocean, bad pictures, hunchbacks or puppets; instead look at mountains and streams.

"Illuminate the mind with ancient teachings and read sutras that contain complete meanings. Monks who practice zazen should always have clean feet. When the body and mind are confused chant the beginning of the text called "The Bodhisattva Precepts." And don't associate with small-minded people."

No subtle instructions about the mind here! Very simple, practical advice for his student on how to live. I think we can take some of the details with a smile as we are in a different cultural milieu from 12th century rural China, but the point of paying attention to how we live our whole lives is well taken, don't you think? If we choose to live crazy mixed up lives all day associating with people and things that cause stress and confusion and then plunk down on the cushion expecting clarity... But as bodhisattvas we are also committed to engaging with suffering, so we don't go hide in a cave either. We need to be skillful about what we expose ourselves to is the message. Perhaps for us the way to follow Rujing's advice to Dogen is to practice with the precepts.

And there are many other wonderful stories and sayings we can study and contemplate. And all of the exchanges between master and student are essentially this same question.

Zen people are famous for saying, with deep and complete conviction, "I don't know." And that's probably the answer to our question. We don't really know how to do zazen. We practice with this spirit of questioning, this spirit of not knowing. We breathe in I don't know. We breathe out I don't know. We live I don't know. I don't know is open to anything. I don't know allows zazen to get through.

But again, how on the practical level to do we do it? How should we count our breath? How should we sit? Why do we keep showing up? What are we doing here?

Well like I say I don't really know, but I do have a few practices to suggest. Maybe they can help you to explore this question. If none of these ideas grab you, please don't worry about them and continue practicing in whatever way makes sense to you.

The first is to practice relaxing the face. You can establish this practice during zazen and then try it throughout the day. Since we tend to live in the front of our heads, we store tons of anxiety and stress in our faces. That energy can really block us. Start with the forehead. Feel your forehead, let the skin and muscle drop and let go. Breath into it... Feel the eyes, let them relax down and back, let them sink into the eye sockets. Breath into your eyes... Feel the cheeks. Let them sag, let them drop; there's nothing you need to hold onto with your cheeks. Breath into your cheeks... Feel the jaw. Feel the front of the jaw, feel the middle of each side of the jaw, feel the very back of the jaw where the joints are with the skull, let the jaw slide back into the head, let the tongue relax into the jaw. Let the jaw drop and relax. Breath into the jaw.... Then do a brief scan of each area of the face: where does the tension return first? That might be an area to concentrate on relaxing during zazen. You can visualize the breath moving through that area as you follow the inhalation. Breathing in through the forehead, or the eye, wherever it is for you, and down into the abdomen and up and out. Letting the breath carry the tension away.

(Pause)

The second practice idea is to practice loving your distracting and difficult thoughts. I'm just starting to experiment with this. I'm starting to see that in my letting go of my thoughts there's been an element of repression of pushing them away, of trying to disconnect my idea of myself from those thoughts. Instead when a thought arises during zazen, try this. "hello thought of jealousy you are a part of me and I treasure and love you" and then let that thought fade happily away. Take care of the thought. Give it love and a moment of attention. Appreciate that each thought is a natural part of the working of the mind. Don't push it away. Often when we think we are just letting of a thought, our effort is more like "ick - go away I don't like you" and that creates discord and dis-ease, dukkha, in our sitting and our life. It can initially be a silent verbal thing as I describe it here, but then let that fall away into a feeling. And you can include the breath, the exhalation is a powerful cleansing wind that naturally carries all difficulties back into the void of emptiness. Give the thought the gift of the healing wind of that exhalation.

(Pause)

And a third general thing I want to suggest is to give your exhalation more space. We tend to be very inhalation-focused. We want to suck in oxygen as fast as possible so we can zoom around and get everything done. The exhalation is sort of a necessary inconvenience to get out of the way before the next inhalation. Without trying to control the breath, just give the exhalation more attention. Let it happen fully. Express the joy of letting the stale air out. Give the gift of carbon dioxide to the world's plants who need it to live. Don't rush it. The exhalation is giving yourself back to the whole world. It's letting go our greedy idea of separation. It's allowing ourselves to flow out into the whole universe. Letting go completely. Let's try that for a minute. Let the inhalation take care of itself and give the exhalation the love and respect it deserves.

(Pause)

Well I hope that by making all this noise there has been some benefit. My hope is that by doing the talk I could just take the role of reminding us all what we already know. In our heart of hearts we know that practicing the way is the only way for us. We know that we have to give ourselves to this practice and get out of the way. But we really don't want to! So we have to remind ourselves and sometimes we delegate someone to give a dharma talk to help us remind ourselves of our true intention.

It's like the practice of the 10th century Chinese Zen master Ruiyan Shiyan (rway-yahn shi-yahn) who made it a daily practice to talk to himself:

Ruiyan went to live at Ruiyan Monastery in Taizhou where he sat on a large rock.
Each day he would call out, "Master!"
Then he would answer, "What?"
"Stay alert!"
"Yes!"
"And in future don't be deceived by anyone!"
"Yes, yes!"

The effort we make in zazen is like this. There's really nothing we have to do. Just sit down. Settle down. Just sit. But we forget. We have to remind ourselves. "Tim!" "Yes?" "Pay attention!" "Yes, yes!"

Thank you.

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About Nomon Tim Burnett:==

Tim Burnett has been a student of Zoketsu Norman Fischer since 1987 when he was a resident at San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm. After sitting practice periods at Green Gulch and Tassajara Zen Monastery, Tim helped found the Bellingham Zen Practice Group in 1991. Tim was ordained as a Zen Priest by Norman in June, 2000. Like his teacher, Tim is interested in the possibility of deep and complete practice by lay people.
A person of wide-ranging professional interests, Tim has been a botanist, elementary school teacher, writer, and computer programmer. Currently Tim runs a computer consulting business with his wife, Janet Martinson, from their home office in Bellingham. They specialize in website programming.