I have a little bit of a cold, but I guess it's not going to matter because the microphone is going to make up for it. I haven't been here on a Sunday in quite a while. I think September sometime was the last time I was here on a Sunday. So, it seems like there's even more people here now. Which is rather nice. I mean, it's a wonderful opportunity for us to get together and to be in the company of other people in a setting like this. With some degree of quiet and composure and stillness.

[01:03]

And in that kind of setting it has a tremendous power to help each one of us to settle into the depths of our own life. And to resolve the conflicts in our life. Today I want to talk about work from various points of view. Basically, finally, in the end, I guess it's a kind of question of what is spiritual work. Which each of us has to do for ourself. Sometimes we think that the work we have to do is rather difficult and maybe too hard.

[02:11]

My work includes giving talks. Which is sometimes a bit of a burden, especially if you have to give talks over and over again to the same people. Then you feel like you have to come up with, I feel I have to come up with new things to say. You know, the adage is either change your act or change your audience. So, I don't know how many of you are the same audience or not anymore. But sometimes I felt that giving talks is a burden. Once, a number of years ago when I was at Tassajara, I complained to Kadagiri Roshi about having to give talks and how difficult it was. And he listened to think of things to say and how to talk to people over and over again. And he listened to me for a while, patiently.

[03:15]

And then he said, well at least you know the language. And at least you know the language too. So, I don't know, that's just one sort of simple example. There's a little shift in context there, you know, of how I'm thinking about something. In some ways, the most obvious or well-known story in Zen about work is the story about the Zen teacher, Hyakujo, who in his old age still used to work in the fields with his monks.

[04:17]

You know, the abbot of the monastery still went down to the garden with the others to work. But his monks were rather concerned and they felt that his health was declining and they were worried about him. So one day they took it upon, but nobody really wanted to say anything. So they just, they did it by other means, they decided to lock his tools up. So when he went to go to work, his tools weren't there anymore. So he turned around and he went back to his cabin or room and locked himself in. And then when the monks brought him food, he wouldn't let them in to give it to him. And finally, after not very long I guess, they said, why are you, why won't you accept food?

[05:21]

We want you to be healthy and well and eat. And he said, a day of no work is a day of no eating. After this, the monks unlocked his tools and gave them back. And he continued then to work with them in the fields. So this is a rather well-known saying in Zen, a day of no work is a day of no eating. And it's interesting because this is different than India. In Buddha's time, in the Buddhist tradition up until, in India was that the monks weren't allowed to work in that way at least. They weren't allowed to, especially to cultivate or till or grow things.

[06:22]

And they were admonished and the rule was to live by begging and by the offerings of others. And in receiving offerings then you can't, you're not really allowed though to say thank you very much for giving me what you, it's not part of the ritual of offering and exchange. So it's interesting in that context though the monks then, the only way to thank people for their kindness and generosity is to do your meditation practice. With more effort and more vigor, out of gratitude for the support you've received. So this is a little different notion, you know, of work in that sense of, you know, it's not working for a living. It's having a living and being grateful for life and for the sustenance in life.

[07:26]

And out of that gratitude comes work or effort. In a kind of, as a kind of thanks. And I think the, in the context of, you know, Zen and a day of no work is a day of no eating. I don't think it's, it's just a matter of, I mean it's a nice, you know, kind of graphic example there of a Zen teacher who's continuing to work in his way with his monks and joining with them. It inspired me when I first came to Zen Center to see Kadagiri, he was Kadagiri Sensei then, to see him working. When we cleaned the meditation hall, he would be down on his hands and knees, scrubbing the floor, putting the wax on the floor. And then after we had the wax on the floor, he would, he would run,

[08:27]

completely bent over with a towel in his hands, the length of the meditation hall. It's hard to do, especially if you have on anything resembling robes, to run all bent over with your hands on the floor. So it's kind of inspiring. As a, you know, teacher, for a teacher to be doing that and working in that way. That's interesting. We're receiving secret messages over here. But the, you know, what it, what work actually is, is rather,

[09:31]

in the context of a meditation practice or in the context of Zen, work is not just work. You know, it's not, and, you know, for me this came up because, you know, I thought when I was the cook at Tassara, I thought my job was to make good food. When I first became a cook. So that's my work, right, to make good food. So this is, if I have this as the definition of what my work is, then anything that gets in the way of that is not my work. You know, and I have to try to get it out of the way. So this includes other people. If they're getting in the way of my work, or if they're not, you know, helping me enough in my work, then, you know, I'm obliged to, you know, correct them or in some way, or, you know, point out to them how they could help me in my work more. So the way I went about my work was to tell everybody what to do.

[10:35]

So that we could together make good food. And then I would get the credit for it. So, you know, on one hand this worked out pretty well for a while. But as time went on, you know, it becomes harder and harder to get people to go along with this. You know, so finally there was a kitchen rebellion one day. It kind of, you know, gradually, I mean, you know, this kind of thing doesn't happen, you know, overnight, right? I mean, rebellions don't just happen, you know, like all of a sudden. I mean, people had been trying to tell me. I mean, you know, it's always interesting when you tell somebody what to do and then they kind of start crying. And it's like, well, what did I say? I just told you what to do, you know.

[11:38]

But it turns out that people have feelings. I started out, I mean, you know, I'm not very far along now, but I started out really kind of not knowing much at all. Amazing. But, you know, I got, they made me the head cook anyway. They didn't, you know, have anybody better, you know. So, you know, in the meantime, I had gone to Suzuki Rush and they said, you know, these people, they come to work late and then they take long breaks. And they disappear to the bathroom for half an hour at a time sometimes. And they're not always so careful about the way they work. And I show them something to do and then they do something else. And they're not very, you know, kind of helpful about cleaning up. I have to, you know, tell them and they leave little messes after themselves.

[12:42]

They don't clean up after themselves. How come I have to work with all these people? What can I do to get them to shape up? You know, this kind of thing. Because after all, you remember what my work is, right? I'm trying to make good food. These people aren't helping me enough. Well, his response was, cooking is not just cooking. You're also working on yourself. You're also working on other people. So that's, you know, kind of started me thinking. But, you know, not that much. I mean, it didn't. There was still a rebellion, you know, revolution coming. You know, when finally people kind of found out that everybody else felt the same way and they kind of started talking to each other. And then they went to the, you know, the officers of the monastery and they said,

[13:46]

we've got this problem with this person who always wants to tell us what to do. And as though, you know, one woman said, you know, you treat the bread very, you don't, you treat us just like bread. And then later on she apologized. She said, well, I think you treat the bread very nicely. But what she meant to say was like what somebody else finally said was, you treat us as though we're just another tool in your hand. You expect us, you know, to be just like the knife in your hand. You don't seem to realize or acknowledge that we have, that we can think, we have feelings, we have thoughts, we have taste, we can taste things. And you don't let us do any of that stuff. You just tell us what to do and then you have, you make all the aesthetic decisions. It's very burdensome to do that, I'll tell you. But every people tend to go along with it when you put yourself in that kind of position.

[14:48]

People tend to go along with it. Because it's hard to have a rebellion, you know, to have a revolution. And to challenge somebody, you tend to just say, well, if you want to make all the aesthetic decisions, okay, I'm not going to make any aesthetic decisions. I did that one time at Green's, you know. There was a new cook there from the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York, and she was doing her externship at Green's. So one day, I was just the, I was working there as various things, but I wasn't cooking. So one day they asked me to help her cook, she was doing prep. So I cut up a bunch of leeks and three gallons of onions, and after a while she kind of looked at me and said, you're pretty good at this, and I kind of shrugged my shoulders. And then after a while, later on, she said, would you make the vinaigrette? I said, no, I'm not going to make the vinaigrette. She said, well, why not? I said, well, I'd have to make some aesthetic decisions. Why don't you, you know, it's your job to make aesthetic decisions.

[15:49]

She said, oh no, you can trust yourself, it's okay. So I went ahead and made the vinaigrette, and she said, it's pretty good, see, you can do it. And then about two weeks later, she came up to me and she said, Ed, I am so embarrassed, you wrote all those books about trusting yourself when you're cooking. And then you wouldn't do it. And you made me tell you what to do. But that's what we tend to do, you know. That's what I tend to do. But anyway, finally everybody got together and said, you know, you don't treat us very well. You don't treat us like we're actually people. You just treat us like another tool. And so basically, you know, the officers of the monastery said, are you going to change, or should we get another cook? So I had to, you know, so I had to change.

[16:52]

I mean, or else, you know, I decided to go on being the cook, but it's pretty hard to change. That's the only way I knew how to do things. Then you kind of have to go like, well, now what do I do if I'm not going to do it the way I already know? Well, it's possible. So pretty soon, you know, instead of, you know, so I just asked somebody, I would ask somebody just to make the soup. Instead of just saying, you know, cut up this and cut up that, you know, and I'll put it together. Or I'll do the seasoning. Would you just make the soup? So it's actually giving somebody, you know, some responsibility. And after a while, my conclusion finally was, my job wasn't so much to make good food. I mean, I couldn't neglect that, but my job was training other people to cook. You know, and then, in a certain sense,

[17:55]

training them to train others to cook. My job is to create cooks, not just to make good food. And to create cooks that we have to practice, we practice becoming cooks by making food. Right? But the practice of making food means sometimes it's pretty good and sometimes it's not. But I'm not going to be able to save these people who are just starting to cook from the mistakes that they might make. I can't save them every time. You know, they have to make their own mistakes. This is a different kind of work, you know, than the kind of work I started out with. And so, you know, in this sense we say, we can say cooking is not just cooking, it's also working on yourself. It's working on other people. But if we define, you know, our work too narrowly,

[18:56]

like my work is to make good food, then I have a really hard time. And difficulties I have with other people, I think of as, that's not part of my work. You know, this is getting in the way of my work. And I think about all these, you know, opportunities to work on myself and work on other people, I call them hindrances. That's hindering my work. It's getting in the way of my work. So we say, hindrances become the opportunity for practice. Hindrances become the opportunity for a new kind of work. So it's quite important for us to begin to see hindrances in this kind of light, and be able to redefine what our work is in some bigger context.

[19:56]

What is the work of, you know, being alive? What is our real work? Because it's pretty easy to get caught up in some, you know, too narrowly defined kind of work, and forget about what is our real work. The Sufi poet Rumi has a line, he says, you miss the garden because you want a stray fig from a random tree. Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really want. You know, that's a kind of work to do that, isn't it? It's a kind of work to like, you know, you start going for that fig, as though that was like what was so important, the most important thing in the world, and you forget it's not what you wanted. So it's some work to remember what you actually want, to remind yourself of what you really want,

[21:01]

or let yourself be drawn towards that. You know, it comes up in simple ways, like, you know, if you have a cigarette, is it what you really want? Well, it's nice, and it may be, you know, enjoyable or a relief, but, you know, at some level, what we really want is to be calm and tranquil without the cigarette. I noticed one day I'm puffing on a cigarette, you know, and I'm going, I thought, why don't I just sigh without having to ingest all this hot smoke? There's another level of our being where what we want is to, you know, is to in some way meet and resolve the underlying tension and anxiety in our lives that we don't need to have a cigarette, that we don't use the cigarette

[22:04]

to do that and to get in the way of our real work. And we have many things like that, you know, eating and, you know, we can use food in the same way and we can use work in that way. We're so busy working, we forget about what we really want. So it's a work to remind, it's a different kind of work to, you know, remind yourself or bring up for yourself the question, what is it I really want? If you're careful about it, you know, you might notice, you know, I mean, what I want is to be happy. And then it's, you know, sometimes I can think, well, falling in love, this would make me happy. Maybe. But then there's lots of relationships that you can get into that don't make you happy. They give you a lot of,

[23:05]

kind of, you know, energy and drama and excitement and passion and maybe even romance and then tension and conflict and you're not doing this for me the way you used to. But happiness? I don't know that you can rely on that, you know, relationship for happiness. It doesn't mean not to have a relationship. But if you're not looking at a relationship, when you're not looking, when we're not looking at the relationship to make us happy and we understand this is my work to be happy, then we have a different kind of relationship with people and even in our, you know, intimate relationships with people are a different relationship and we pick different people to have the relationship with than we would otherwise. And it's important, then,

[24:09]

to remind ourself, what I want, or, you know, the larger context, then, is that my work is to find out how to work or my work is to find out what I really want. And we go and then if you're doing each thing you do with this kind of in the background, what is it I really want? As you go through the work day, as you go through your relationship and in walking and eating, it helps to clarify things. I'm going to read you a, I brought up not my Buddhist sutra book today, but my Wendell Berry book. This is a book called What Are People For? Which is a collection of essays.

[25:09]

Wendell Berry is another one of those farmers like Hyakujo, who's still working in his fields, but then he also writes these essays and poems and things. Probably he couldn't afford to be a farmer anymore if it wasn't for writing these things. You know, a small farmer. It's hard to make a living as a small farmer. But one of his essays in here is about work and about the pleasures and joys of work, which I think is another aspect to this question about what is work I want to bring up for you. One of the things he points out that generally in our society we think of work the way that most of our work is so hard and so demeaning that then we have to go and have some pleasure afterwards to make up for it. So you work hard and the pleasures in fact

[26:13]

nowadays in our society, the pleasures all cost money. There's a whole economy of pleasure or there's a whole industry, the pleasure industry. So then to have fun you go skiing and you buy all those lift tickets or you rent movies or you go out to eat or you go to Disneyland, you go here, you fly there. So we take these vacations so in order to be able to afford to have fun we have to do some kind of work that is really hard and tedious and is not very rewarding. Then we say, well I have to do this work so I can have the pleasures. I have to work hard and I don't have time to cook so then I can buy prepared foods, which cost five times as much as the raw ingredients. So he's trying to suggest

[27:13]

in this essay that we have the wrong idea about work. The work we do can also be a great pleasure. We should find some work and some way to work where it can be a great pleasure in and of itself. And this is the story that he ends his essay with which is an example of this kind of work. Last December when my granddaughter Katie had just turned five, she stayed with me one day while the rest of the family was away from home. In the afternoon we hitched a team of horses to the wagon and we hauled a load of dirt for the barn floor. It was a cold day but the sun was shining. We hauled our load of dirt over the tree-lined gravel lane beside the creek, a road well-known to her grandmother and to my mother when they were little.

[28:14]

As we went along, Katie drove the team for the first time in her life. She did very well and she was proud of herself. She said that her mother would be proud of her and I said that I was proud of her too. We completed our trip to the barn, unloaded our load of dirt, smoothed it over the barn floor and wetted it down. By the time we started back up the creek road the sun had gone down over the hill and the air had turned bitterly cold. Katie sat close to me in the wagon and we didn't say anything for a long time. I didn't say anything because I was afraid I didn't know what to say to comfort her. It was impossible to hurry very much and I was unsure how I would comfort her.

[29:17]

At last though, Katie turned to me and she said, Wendell, isn't it fun? Laughter I think it's a good example as a teacher child, because it's something like we might call beginner's mind or something. But aside from that, it's just how to work in a way that's pleasurable, that's rewarding in and of itself, whatever we're doing. So we're not, we find our, if you want to be happy, we have to practice, we say, practice being happy each moment, where it's not the happiness isn't dependent on getting this

[30:22]

or not losing that. What about having just a little happiness right now, if that's what you want? Or to have, to be generous or kind, we can practice in our own awkward way, being generous or kind to ourself, to people we meet in our work. So each of us may have, you know, we'll have different work that we want to do, you know, this week and next week, this year. But as much as anything, our work will be finding out how to work, finding out what our real work is, as we do each thing.

[31:28]

Even in spiritual practice, you know, it's easy to get caught up in the superficial aspects of the work, forget about what the real work is. Katagiri Roshi used to say, settle the self on the self, let the flower of your life force bloom. That's a different kind of work, isn't it? You know, we usually, if you practice meditation, then you think, then you can think about, you think the work is to sit really still and not to move. This becomes very important. Then if you move, you go, oh darn, you know, I had to move, I must be disturbing other people. Oh, I'm the worst Zen student. What does that have to do with your real work? You know, it's just the superficial aspect of thinking your work is to sit still. What does that have to do with settling the self on the self or letting the flower of

[32:34]

your life force bloom? It doesn't have anything to do with it. You know, who can sit the stillest or how long you sit still or how many periods or what position your legs are in or, you know, all of that stuff or how much you think or don't think, you know, how well you do at your meditation. Meditation should be a time, you know, immediately to begin practicing this way, settle the self on the self. Don't worry about success and failure, gain and loss. Practice immediately. You want to be happy, practice being happy in the simple work of breathing, of sitting. So, I think of, you know, everything after a while becomes work and it certainly is work to remind yourself or question yourself about what you really want and to begin to be,

[33:43]

you know, present in the moment. That's a kind of work too, isn't it? Rather than dreaming up other moments that would be, you know, you know, you know, you more suitable kinds of moments to be involved in. If I could have this other one or if I could get rid of this one, so it's a kind of work just to be present and work with that moment. Do work in that moment, the moment that we're actually in. That's how we become, you know, more and more at home in our own body, at home in our own mind, in our being. I think that's about all I want to say.

[35:06]

I'd like to just take a few minutes to sit quietly with you and since it's the, especially since it's the beginning of the year to, you know, take a few minutes just to sit quietly together and we can settle ourselves and consider what is our, the work, what is our work for, you know, today and for tomorrow and this year, the year ahead, the time ahead. You know, what is our work for this moment? The work of our, of being alive, the work of finding out what is our work or finding out what we really want. So, this work that we each have to do, our own work, our deep work, our work that we

[38:55]

work, finding out what our work is, finding out how to work, finding out what we really want, please don't neglect this work in the time ahead. And I wish you the best with your work in the coming year, okay? Thank you.

[39:18]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ