Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words.

[01:29]

I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Today, I wanted to talk about sitting, satsang. Today, I wanted to talk about sitting, satsang.

[02:51]

Of course, mostly how we find out about sitting, satsang, is by sitting ourself. But, nevertheless, I will say a few things, trying to keep that point in mind. And, asking you to keep that point in mind, and not to think that you'll hear anything

[03:53]

in particular that will make any difference at all in your sitting. In the Yurikutsu Yoga Sutra, Dogen Zenji writes about a realization. And he says, when you realize Buddhadharma, you don't think, ah, this is realization, just as I expected. Even if you think so, a realization invariably differs from your expectation.

[05:03]

Realization is not like your conception of it. For this reason, realization cannot take place as you've conceived, as you've previously conceived of it, or as you presently conceive of it. When you realize Buddhadharma, you don't consider how it came about. So, Dogen says, you should reflect on this, that what you think, one way or another, before

[06:13]

realization, is not any help at all for realization. Just because these thoughts are not a help for realization, is not because such thoughts are actually bad and were not realization. Past thoughts are realization, but because you were seeking elsewhere, you thought and you said, such thoughts cannot be realization.

[07:15]

So it's worth noticing that what you think, one way or another, is not a help for realization. In this way, you'll be cautious not to be small-minded or rigid about what you think, what you should think. If realization depended on your thinking, it would not be trustworthy. Realization takes place far beyond your thinking, and realization is helped only by the power of realization. So you should know that then, there is no realization, there is no delusion, and there

[08:42]

is no realization. But to be unstained is like meeting a person and not considering what she or he thinks she looks like. It's like not wishing for more color or brightness when viewing the moon or flowers. Spring has the tone of spring. Autumn has the scene of autumn. There's no escaping it.

[09:45]

So when you would like spring or autumn to be different than they are, you should notice that they can only be as they are. And when you want spring or autumn to be as they are, reflect that spring and autumn have no unchanging nature. I left out a little bit of the connection between realization and being unstained.

[11:09]

That realization is to have a mind, a mind that is unstained. But Dogen mentions again that this being unstained is not something that can be intended or can be discriminated or can be established or set up in any way. It's like, and then he says, it's like meeting someone and not considering what he looks like or not wishing for more color and brightness when viewing the moon or flowers. I think we have that kind of problem oftentimes of experiencing spring or autumn.

[12:56]

Or whatever is happening. And we say, this can't be realization. Our realization must be much grander than this. So this is stepping outside. And this is creating a conception of realization, creating expectation of realization. And realization doesn't happen according to that. Perhaps we might even say, or we could even say, as Dogen said, there is no realization. Realization is not something which happens. So Zakya Rishi one time said, so you should follow your breath.

[14:19]

Until, so closely, until there is no breath. But it's not because you overlook or ignore your breathing. It's because you're so completely absorbed or immersed in your breathing. I'm going to let this subject go now for a while. And talk some about the posture of sitting. Okay.

[15:47]

Okay. Lately, well for now I've been doing yoga. Indian yoga for two or three years. And I wonder what happened to all the other kinds of, all the other postures. Because this posture of sitting is a yoga posture. And it didn't exist in isolation. And the Chinese seem to have, you know, maybe they practiced Tai Chi or something.

[16:53]

In Japanese it seems like, that we get our Zen tradition from, it seems like there's not any tradition in the Japanese pre-spring here about, you know, what kind of stretching or exercises to do or something to help your body be in good shape to sit. Which I wonder about. I don't know quite what to make of that. And this posture in fact goes back apparently to pre-Aryan times. To India before the yoga tradition predates the Aryan invasion of India, 4000 BC. They found little stone plaques or discs in the Indus Valley before 4000 BC. Showing pictures of people sitting cross-legged with their back straight.

[17:58]

So this tradition in India, the yoga tradition, goes back before, earlier than Hinduism even in India. And in some ways, you know, Buddhism could be seen as a kind of revival of the indigenous religious or mystic culture, whatever it's called. So, we all know about crossing our legs. And there are of course various ways to cross the legs.

[19:08]

And as we've heard many times, the best is to sit full lotus and then if you can't do that, you sit half lotus. And then if you can't do that, you figure out some other way to do it. But in any case, setting aside how your legs cross because it's something that you have to work on or work out for yourself. It's quite important in sitting to have your weight evenly balanced on this upward. Because if your hips are off at all, then the rest of your body can't help but lean out and you can't sit. You can't relax because if you really relax, you'll continue to fall over. So your hips need to be, regardless of how your legs end up, you want to try to adjust and get your hips as even as possible.

[20:22]

So one thing, just rocking back and forth, or when you sit down, you try to get even on your hips. For that reason, I didn't sit full lotus for many years because although I could get my legs into that position, I couldn't get my hips balanced. And then it's kind of a strain. It doesn't make any sense to have that kind of strain in sitting. You need to be able to settle yourself directly down and not be falling over in that case. So there's going from side to side. I find it also helps to lift myself off the zafu this way and settle back down evenly, hips evenly on the zafu, or to lean out over one leg and then over the other leg.

[21:34]

And you'll find this has a lot to do with how flexible your hip bone and pelvis is. Because sometimes when you try to lean like this, you want to try to get in your hip bone. It's like a girdle, like the band on a barrel. You want to get your hip bone so that it's upright. That's the foundation of your sitting, or just above the foundation perhaps. And it's very easy for it to be tipped a little bit towards one leg or towards the other leg and not be settled. So regardless of how you have your legs, you want to try to have your hip, pelvis vertical and not leaning from side to side, first of all.

[22:58]

And then you want to try to get your pelvis front to back. So in addition to your hip joint, this front to back has to do oftentimes with the flexibility of your hamstrings. The hamstrings are the big muscle in the back of your leg. So if you're sitting here, and anybody who has hamstrings that are a little bit tight, if this is the back of your pelvis, if your hamstrings are a little bit tight, the back of your pelvis is going to be pulled under like this. And try as you might to get your pelvis tipped up. You won't be able to do it because the hamstring, which is running along right where you're sitting, doesn't extend that far. I don't know if that makes sense.

[24:02]

So front to back, if your hamstrings are tight, it would be very hard to get your pelvis to an upright position. And to compensate for that, you have to arch the small of your back quite a ways in to be able to sit up straight. And that would tend to give you lower back pain, among other things. Equally to getting your pelvis forward. And you see what will help then if your hamstrings are tight, is if you sit up higher. Because if you sit up higher, your hamstrings don't have to stretch so much for your pelvis to be upright. The lower you sit, the more your hamstrings have to stretch around. Does that make sense?

[25:05]

Just stretch around this corner that I'm making with my two hands. So the higher you sit, the hamstrings don't have to stretch so much. You sit up higher. So if your hamstrings are tight, that's a good reason to sit up higher. And then you can have your pelvis vertical, front to back. If your hamstrings are looser, then you can sit lower, and your pelvis can easily be vertical. So, how I used to do is I try to get my hips level side to side. And then I check to see about my pelvis being front to back, being vertical. So if you pull in the small of your back, you can pull your pelvis forward.

[26:11]

If you relax the small of your back, you can slump your pelvis back. So again, you want to try to find front to back now, rather than side to side. Having your pelvis vertical, and not tip forward, and not leaning back. And as I said, partly that will have to do with the height of the socket you can help adjust. So, I think this is probably, the position of your pelvis is probably about as crucial as anything in sitting. And more important, I think then, whether your legs are in half lotus or full lotus, or tailored posture, or whatever. Because however your legs are, if your pelvis is straight, up and down, then the whole rest of your body can relax into that.

[27:23]

Or we can say relax into that, or extend out of that. There's a firm and solid foundation, either direction, for extending up, or for relaxing down. As I said, if your pelvis is not vertical, and you relax down, you have to hold on finally, or else you'll fall over. There's a holding on involved with having your pelvis tipped. And also, if your pelvis is not straight, you can't really extend your spine up, because you're putting so much energy into trying to hold your pelvis where it is. Now, there's one other thing about that, pelvis, which is that most of us, again, if this is your legs, and this is your spine,

[28:48]

most of us aren't so used to energizing the lowest part of the spine, the sacrum. And when we go to straighten our back, what we straighten is the small of our back, and what we energize is the small of our back, because that's flexible. But in sitting, you want to move that intention or attention of straightening your back as low to the base of your spine as you can. I don't know, again, if that makes sense. But, see, there's a difference between if you mostly, unless you work on it some, the tendency, the loosest part, and the most easy to energize or activate is the small of your back. So then you sit like this. You pull the small of your back forward and up, and then it feels like you can sit up pretty straight.

[29:54]

But what will happen again is that the small of your back will tend to get sore, and also, you know, the energy won't be able to flow properly, and at some point your back will resist. At least that's my experience. And your back will of itself decide that it wants to sit down like this instead of like this. So anyway, rather than pulling forward and up in the small of the back, you try to energize the base of the spine. So that's not, I can't do that in such a noticeable way as doing it with the small of my back, but your spine doesn't work. So there's actually a whole lot of, anyway, this is not exactly something you can just do right out. You have to, it takes maybe some time to work on that.

[31:06]

Then the next thing I want to talk about is the chest. And the posture of sitting is, this is a posture, you might say that, this is a very, this can be a very open posture. Open or, we could say open or opening. It's a posture to open you up, open us up to ourself. And mostly, again now with the chest, we'll have some tendency to lean forward. It's just a, it's a physical habit because we do a lot of things, work in front of us and we study.

[32:25]

So we spend a lot of years not doing very much to open up, to bend our back in the other direction. So over a period of years, the upper part of our back gets bent forward. And this also then closes the chest in. A lot of these habits, you know, also of course have to do with emotion. And that the posture we have is some way to carry our emotion, past emotion about with us without having to deal with it or look at it. And we can conceal it in or carry it in how we, in our posture, how we carry ourselves about.

[33:30]

You know, for instance, Gassho, kind of Gary Roach, he was always very, you know, very correct at Gassho. So he always said, your hands are one hand width from your nose, and the top of your fingers is at nose level, and your elbows are up. And if you actually try to do this, at least when I actually started doing this, I found that there was an awfully exposed feeling along my side. And I felt quite vulnerable. Just by having my arms up like this, something is going to get me in the side if I don't get my elbows down. So sometimes I was, I tended to be rather forceful, perverse kind of person.

[34:42]

And so I would insist to my elbows that they stay up. However, my elbows would have ideas of their own and they would go down. And I would try to get them to go back up. And I would get into then battles with my elbows, I guess, as to whether or not they were to be up or down. At some point, they gave up. I had to give up a little bit too, as it were. And generally, the chest... Generally, the chest has a certain amount of anger, some amount of anger. Which is involved in having it be closed rather than open.

[35:51]

And the stomach has a certain amount, has some fear. So if you're, you know, and then also the shoulders have a certain amount of fear. You know, the shoulders and the stomach are connected. This shoulder muscle that we hit with the stick is the first muscle that needs to move to activate all the muscles that are involved in breathing and to activate the diaphragm. So it's not surprising that that muscle will often be the muscle that becomes tight. And won't relax. And it has to do with holding our breath slightly. Because in this sitting posture, it's the breath that gets into these closed places and opens them up. And then one will find out what one has been carrying around, perhaps for many years.

[37:03]

And then one must, one will be, one will not know, be able to find some way to, what to do with that stuff right away. Because if one knew what to do with it right away, one wouldn't have abandoned it for so many years in the first place. So, anyway, we sit with various things that come up. As our breath and effort to sit up straight opens up the body and mind. So that's a little digression from when we started to talk about the chest. Anyway, the effort is to have, to lift, to lift the chest. And again, this is not as simple as it seems, because what most of us, again, when we go to lift the chest, we don't really lift the chest, we push the small of our back in.

[38:21]

So you see, without doing anything to the chest, if you move the small of your back in, it has the experience of lifting your chest. But you haven't done anything to your chest, you just moved the small of your back in. And so, lifting the chest, at the same time you're trying to lift the chest, you're still trying to keep your pelvis level, and settled down, and lifting your chest up. Now I'm talking about posture kind of mechanically, and I'll get to the dynamic part in a few minutes. And then your hands, as you know are in this posture, and you have your fingers over to your palm, and I've usually heard that these knuckles of the middle finger are above each other, and the other fingers go into place.

[39:35]

And you can rest your mudra where it comes to, on your leg, on your thigh, or lightly, but of course you don't want to be straightening up your chest by using your arms either. Your shoulders get quite tired if you prop yourself up with your arms. And again, there should be some feeling of, a little bit of feeling of the elbows away from your sides, rather than, I've also, I've spent two or three days at one sushinu in time, unable to get my elbows away from my sides. It was probably not three days, it was probably more like two. But I couldn't get them to move at all away from my sides, I did my orioke like this, and so on, you know, and I couldn't get my elbows away from my sides.

[40:41]

And then, I don't know, I forget, but I was walking to the zendura or something, on my way to the zendura, anyway at some point, they let go finally. And then, as they say, with your head, you lift up from the top of your, what would be the top of your spine. And you have your chin in, nose in line with your shoulders, you know, to have your, rather than your nose, the tendency of anything would be to have the nose out in front of the navel. Because, especially if you start to think, your chin goes, and it's like looking off into the distance, now what's happening over there, I wonder. Gee, that looks pretty good. And so, the chin goes out there, and the nose is kind of sniffing out what's out there.

[41:46]

And one is then advised to pull the chin in and get one's nose in line with the navel, rather than out there ahead of it. So, I find that if I think about posture this way, or talk about it this way, it sounds like, as I said, mechanical, and a little bit like building blocks. And you put the building block of your hips in place, and then the building block of your spine, and then you get the building block of your chest, and the building block of your neck, and put it on top of that. And then you stack your head on top of that, and you try to keep it all kind of stacked up, and not have it get knocked over. And that's all rather precarious. And if one has a stack of building blocks, as you know, some other kid can come along and knock it over, and it's really fun for that other kid.

[42:52]

And we've got lots of kids running around with us, and they're very likely to come by and knock it over, because they want to join the fun too, and it's such fun to knock over your building blocks. So chances are, if you conceive of your posture that way in sitting, you lose it a lot, and it gets knocked over a lot. And also, it's kind of tiring. There's a certain exhaustion and tension in stacking yourself up that way, as though there were these different pieces, as though there were actually these different blocks. So I don't really recommend that you think about your posture as this stack of building blocks. So one way we sometimes think about sitting is, we get ourselves into the posture of sitting, and then we see if we can't breathe there.

[43:54]

And usually, of course, we'll find that as soon as we start to breathe, we won't have the posture, because our breath isn't used to breathing in that posture, it's used to breathing in another posture. So naturally, as soon as you start to breathe, a few breaths, the habitual posture of your breathing will come back. And then you straighten yourself up again and try to breathe there, and naturally you go back to, and so on. So you have this little, sort of like taking a rubber band, and you stretch it out, and then you start to breathe, and the rubber band snaps back. So this is the kind of silly play that we are. And there again, if you're overly rigid about keeping the posture, you won't be able to breathe. And at the same time, if you're just breathing and not paying attention to the posture, you tend to be sinking, as it were, in your previous acquired and developed habits or tendencies.

[45:20]

So there's a posture for worrying, and there's a posture for being afraid, and there's a posture for anger, and there's a posture for sexual fantasies, and there's a posture for thinking, and so on. And the more you can actually take the posture of zazen, as it were, I'm not trying to suggest that there is such a posture, because to suggest that there is really a posture of zazen is to suggest that you should get it and keep it, and then you tend to be, again, overly rigid. But this posture in and of itself doesn't hold, won't hold anything. You won't be able to. You don't think so much, and you don't get angry, and you don't have fear, and you don't have sexual fantasies, and various things come up, but they don't stick.

[46:34]

Ah! And then sometimes they do stick, and then you have to practice with that, sit with that, be present with it. So one could also start with the breath rather than with the posture of sitting, and I think, in my experience at least, is that if I start out just with my breath, gradually my breath of itself will approach the posture of sitting. If I really relax and focus in on my breathing, and let go of it, let go of it but at the same time am aware of it, gradually the inhale expands and my chest starts to come up, and my stomach opens up, and my head starts to lift up,

[47:42]

and just by following the breath, you know, maybe this is some kind of, you know, having some subliminal idea of posture of sitting, but I don't know. But anyway, if I follow my breath, I find more and more I find myself in the posture of sitting. So that's probably about as good an approach as, or better, I don't know, as to try to take the posture of sitting and breathe in it. And to hold that posture and to breathe is, as I mentioned, a kind of impossibility. But again, anyway, my experience at least is that if I follow my breath, it will only go so far, and I need to, if I want to open up, I can, a little bit more, I can stretch just a little.

[48:48]

Past where my breathing has come to, and say, well, how about this, to my breathing, as it were. You want to try this? But again, I think one, in that case, should be cautious, and it's not to become rigid and insist that your breathing takes some posture that it's not about to. And yet, as I said, at the same time, if you don't do that at all, my experience at least is some sinking into the past body and mind, and just maintaining that. Let's have a play around. Okay. Now I want to talk a little bit more about alternatives to the building block conception of posture.

[50:02]

Another thing that happens, you see, if you take this posture and you breathe, I spent six or eight years conceptualizing the posture of sitting and keeping my back straight and breathing in the front of my body, in my stomach and chest, mostly in my stomach and not so much my chest. So that's like, do you understand the back of your body being like a board, and then the front is this flexible part that fills with air, but the back stays fixed? And after I've been sitting for about six or eight years, one day I thought, well, why don't I breathe in my back too? And then I found that instead of having to keep my back straight, my back was also going in and out. And it was really nice. A lot of heat came into my back that wasn't there before, and it was a lot easier to sit up straight. Now, you see, I came to that by, this again is an aside, in terms of my saying that mostly you find out about sitting by sitting, and I came to that not because somebody said anything about that, but because I was following my breath.

[51:35]

And just in the process of following my breath, I found that it stopped at my back. And then I wondered, well, why does my breath stop at my back? Why doesn't my breath also go into my back? Why does my back also breathe? Why do I limit breathing just to the front of my body? And the same is true, of course, with your whole body and mind, that the breath can extend everywhere and reach everywhere. And when you follow your breath in that way, you don't have to worry so much about your posture, you know, holding your body a certain way and trying to breathe around that.

[52:45]

Because the idea of sitting is not that you hold yourself a certain way, but that you let go. This is not a business of holding yourself a certain way. Or breathing a certain way. Or, you know, to go back to realization, to produce a certain realization. This is a posture of, this should be or can be, at least, a posture of letting go. And to breathe throughout your body is, the breath is the instrument we use to let go.

[53:55]

As the breath extends, each place the breath is, is a place that is let go. So, I did, you know, keeping my back straight and breathing in the front of my body for six or eight years. And then, it wasn't for another two or three years, I can't remember exactly. But I found out finally that I was doing the same thing with the base of my pelvis, that I was holding the base of my pelvis and the very base of my spine. And where I was sitting, I was holding that in place and breathing above that. I was establishing a solid part of my body to sit on and breathing above that.

[55:00]

And that, in my experience, is one of the causes of, most of you may not do that because most of you don't shake. And that, in my experience, was one of the main causes of shaking. But again, you may do that, and these kinds of things are hard to notice until you notice them. That's the way it goes. And I always had a great, there was a certain fear associated with that, and it had to do with exhalation. And I was afraid to exhale all the way down to the cushion. And it was as though, if I did that, you know, there wasn't any bottom to things anymore. And it was completely like falling through space and like falling into a great abyss, as it were.

[56:11]

And I wanted to keep something solid at the base of my sitting to sit on, or I was about to. I couldn't let myself exhale completely and let the base of the pelvis and the base of the body that is right on the cushion let go. But you find these things again by following your breath as intimately and warmly as you can. And it was sometime earlier than that, I, this is sort of out of order, but I also, you know, your legs, the legs are the same way too.

[57:19]

It's actually possible, you know, I don't know how to explain this, except to just to say it. But I found that when my knees hurt, they hurt more when I didn't breathe there. And that once my knees started hurting, my habit was to try to move my leg away from the pain as though the pain existed in a particular vicinity of space. You know, the pain was in this part of space and I could maybe move my leg away from it. And so there's a certain tension in my leg moving, you know, this way, trying to get away from that pain. And of course if you're sitting with that kind of tension in your leg trying to get away from the pain, that's creating more pain. And it also had to do with breathing, which is that, you know, I would breathe and then it was like the breath would only come halfway down to my knee. And then it would stop. Because you want to have the breath just in an area of comfort, a nice comfortable breath.

[58:27]

And then, you know, get rid of any of that other stuff that's unpleasant and have that outside of the breath. Anyway, again, if you create any kinds of boundaries like that in your breathing, you have suffering. And you have some hindrance to absorption. But to create a boundary like that or some fixed principle, your back straight, the base of your spine solid, sitting on something solid, not having your breath in your knees, wherever it is, that kind of boundary is a hindrance to absorption. And you find these by breathing and by following your breath. You'll come upon them. Ha!

[59:28]

So I don't really recommend, you know, I want to say a couple of things now about the spine. One way to do, rather than the building block, is to lift the top back of your head and get up as, you know, as rigidly and as tall as you can. And then, from there, keeping your head in place, relax your back. So that is like, instead of stacking yourself up, it's suspending yourself and relaxing down. Letting go of your back down. And if you've, you know, gotten yourself fairly much in line this way, I will let you come to some good place for your back.

[60:54]

And I find this very similar to something that Thich Nhat Hanh mentioned, as a kind of, you know, as something you can practice and try out. So as you inhale, let your chest fill with compassion. And then as you exhale, in Vietnam, he said it's very hot and they use a coconut shell on a handle to pour cool water over themselves when bathing. He said then you take this and pour it over your, the compassion on the exhale, and pour it over your head and it should be very refreshing. Now I think here in February, if you do something like this, you have to, you might want to imagine that it's very warm or hot water that you're showering yourself with, rather than the cool, refreshing water. This is the warm, soothing waters.

[62:00]

Anyway, if you do something like that, there'll be some tendency to lift your head and your spine just slightly. You find yourself, I find myself at least, if I do something like that, lifting up slightly to receive this wonderful.

[62:23]

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