A few minutes ago I was just next door changing into my robes and at Lewin Blanches they have a little on one of the doors there's a few sort of sayings from various Zen teachers including one by Suzuki Roshi which I didn't hear him say but here it is it says he said it and there's a picture of him and it says life is like getting onto a boat that's about to sail out on the sea and sink maybe he was talking about you know maybe he was about to give a lecture it reminded me of a story about Kadagiri Roshi when a number of his students in Minneapolis had gotten together they wanted to do a fundraiser so they invited

[01:24]

many of those there's several wealthy families in Minneapolis you know IBM is headquartered there and other General Mills and so they arranged to have this tea and invited many of the wealthier families in Minneapolis and many of them came and they had tea and nice cakes and everything and then Kadagiri Roshi came to do a little Dharma talk and he started out by saying you know you're all going to die and the woman who had organized the tea was standing in the back through him going don't tell them that I appreciate coming here on these occasions when I do it feels very good to me to be in a group

[02:53]

like this and to you know share the quiet and a few words with you sometimes I kind of in a certain way I wonder why I'm giving the talk but you know on the other hand it just seems to be my I mean I say that only because I feel like when I see all of you I feel like any one of you could be giving the talk or thinking these thoughts or feeling these things you know that I might talk about and it seems in some way then it seems strange you know that why why am I doing the talk and yet I seem to be you know have this sort of history of it or something but when I talk I do try to talk

[03:54]

as talk in that way that it could be anybody anybody talking and it's not as though I'm trying to say something that you don't already know or that you don't already feel or think or understand partly it's just some way for us to be together and for each of us to recognize in our own life our our own understanding and our compassion and our kindness and gratitude and so on being together with a group of like-minded people can help remind us of that those kinds of feelings or understandings in our own heart. One of the important sayings for me many years ago when I

[04:56]

was first starting to practice Zen in the mid-60s I came across this saying of Dogen's which is from his guidelines for study of the way and he says when you study Buddhism the first thing you should the first thing to do is that you should believe or trust in Buddhism and to believe or trust in Buddhism he goes on he says that to believe or trust in Buddhism is to trust or believe that you're already inherently within the way it's a very powerful statement it's very simple but very powerful you're already inherently within the way I had thought I was lost or I needed to find the way and this says you're already inherently within the way where there's no

[06:00]

mistake there's no delusion no false thinking no upside down this is the path this is the way each of us is embodies that and I think so over the years you know every so often I come back to this because it's been very important to me and I think it's important for each of us to arouse or feel some trust or confidence like that about our own life you know sometimes we think well I get angry or I have these kind of problems or I'm not I'm lazy or you know various kinds of difficulties I'm not doing enough to help other people or whatever it is and there must be some other way

[07:03]

and yet those very things Dogen is saying are the way it's not as though our life is about creating you know just having the good experiences or being comfortable and then you know and not having the unpleasant ones if we follow that kind of approach of thinking that you know our life will get better and better and we can have fewer difficulties and problems and we'll improve etc and we'll you know we'll be progressing then we have some idea of progress and then but then we'll never arrive you know this is the definition of samsara the Buddhist understanding of suffering is this never arriving there's always one more thing to complain about isn't there you know that every so often I think of that poem by Kabir where he says I gave up some clothes and wore a robe but one day I

[08:12]

noticed the cloth was well woven and so I I threw it away and wore burlap but you know I still toss it elegantly over my shoulder and then he says well I worked hard at dissolving my greed and then I found I was angry a lot and I I let go of my anger and I was full of sexual desire I got rid of that and now I'm proud of myself and then Kabir says friends if you know when the mind tries to let go or you know in this sense find the you know be on the path get on the path it will always hold on to one last thing there are very few who find the way so anyway if we try to if we try to have

[09:14]

some kind of perfection or create some kind of perfection in our life or some kind of world to live in where we don't have these kind of problems it's not real and we'll be perpetually chasing after something you know it would be this kind of wild goose chase and it's a kind of idealism which means that we can never be where we are we're always trying to get to somewhere else and our mind will be agitated and it will be so frustrating to once again fail to measure up or to create the kind of situation that we thought we could so it's interesting you know last week I went on a meditation retreat to Mount Madonna Center it was a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh and today I wanted I thought I'd share with you some of his

[10:20]

teaching but you know one of the interesting things actually about the retreat we had small group meetings and also I saw someone here from there from Green Gulch and one day and she said you know last night we were staying at a place a few miles away from Mount Madonna Center because they didn't have room to accommodate all of us and she said when she was driving down the hill this one man in the car who was from New York with a very strong accent he wouldn't stop talking the whole way down the hill and we had been asked to be silent you know after meditation in the evening until after breakfast the next day right and she thought well I'm on a meditation retreat can't this person shut up this is the way that meditation retreats are you know it's interesting they're kind of like real life and you go to meditation retreat at first you think that it's going to be different at the meditation retreat

[11:28]

and then in our small groups you know it turned out that it rained which was kind of unusual for me and many people were camping in tents so their tents got wet and then the ground some of the ground had just been bulldozed where the tents were so it turned into mud and then their clothes got all wet and then their shoes got all muddy and so they had this kind of problem and then the Mount Madonna Center said no we don't actually have a dryer that you can use and then later on they said well we do and and then there was another woman who complained that where she was staying the toilet was backed up and it smelled terrible and she didn't understand what was spiritual about this and why couldn't she just you know made more sense to her to just be home with her husband

[12:42]

it reminded me the last time I was well I went back a few weeks ago I was at the New York Zen Mountain Monastery and I was leading a workshop for a couple days and one of the women there at that place everybody has to get up at 4 30 and go to meditation at 5 you know everybody who comes joins this right into the monastic routine and here at Zen Center we sometimes say to the guests well maybe you get up a little later and just come to the second period or you know various things we kind of make we're a little accommodating there they don't make any accommodations like that and the first day I was talking to people and they seemed to be so kind of you know how you are when you're really tired non-responsive they're kind of sitting there like no matter what I said and after about half an hour I realized like they must not have gotten very much sleep last night

[13:46]

and then later I was talking with one of the women and they said well someone in our room it's a sort of a dormitory room there was six or something women staying in a room or and she said somebody was snoring a good deal of the night so many of us didn't sleep very well and they didn't know what to do about it you know and then later I was talking to another woman and she said I'm so tired and you know the ironic thing is that I just came from Germany and I got back here and I found out about your retreat and I signed up and I came and I asked her what she'd been doing in Germany and it turned out she'd gotten engaged to a German and moved in with him she'd gone back she'd met him here and then gone back to Germany with him and then at some point she found out he snored well you can see to make a long story short you know she they were sleeping at separate ends of the apartment finally and then she decided like she couldn't take it

[14:49]

anymore second night back in America and she goes to this meditation retreat somebody snores so this is the spiritual life you see what makes it the why does Dogen say you're already inherently within the way see and you don't need in a certain sense you don't need to go to a spiritual retreat to find this out but on the other hand you might you might have to go to some spirit to do some spiritual practice to find out that it's not so different than your life already and all the things that you might like to change about your life are just going to be there when you arrive or if they're not there when you arrive you know your baggage eventually catches up with you and even if you try to leave it behind you know the somebody comes up to you and say excuse me but you left this

[15:53]

so even though what struck me at this retreat was even though I for years I have this kind of I keep reminding myself in a certain way you're already within the path I'm already within the way inherently within the way that we all have however you want to say it you know the buddha nature we're already you know if we are quiet enough we can see we already have something of the nature of what is worthy of respect or gratitude or appreciation and we already have in the depth of our being we don't have to manufacture love or understanding you know we it's there we don't have to you know the way we think oftentimes like when when we're brought up you know there was a whole there's a whole understanding of bringing up children that that and it's whether it's freudian or german or whatever it is that

[17:14]

that children are inherently bad our people are inherently bad and we have to tame them you know we have to get them to behave properly so in this idea you know we always have to tell ourselves the right thing to do what to do not because it's in our heart to do it but because it's the right thing or the good thing or the buddhist thing or something like that but actually we want to know how to find our own heart and act from our own heart and out of our own being it's not just doing the right thing it's what it's our deep wish how can we live that so even though i remind myself of this saying at this retreat i was struck how much more there is that i might do or that we might do to help us realize we're within the way

[18:21]

that this is the path and to practice it or acknowledge it in some more complete way and in my life and perhaps in all of our lives and the other striking thing for me was how important it is to that we have a group of friends or what do we call ourselves here sangha we have a sangha or friends or companions who will support us who are a support for us i was at a couple weeks ago i went to an event where dean ornish was talking about heart disease dean ornish is the the doctor who has done for many years now studies of heart patients

[19:24]

and he's developed a program of non-surgical intervention which involves changing diet a moderate amount of exercise some meditation and yoga and then also at least a couple nights a week a kind of support group where you can go and they provide food and then also you can talk about what's going on in your life not just you know how difficult it is to follow the diet but it's some place where you actually can be recognized or heard or understood and you have some friends and i had heard all of this before but it was interesting because the part i hadn't heard before in his presentation was that there are actually now studies that show that other things being equal or even not other things being equal but people who live isolated lives have much more heart disease than the people who don't like twice as much or something like that it's not like

[20:27]

if you don't have an isolated life you avoid heart disease but people who don't have intimate relationships you know who feel and this is largely by their own testimony you know i don't feel like i have particularly any particularly close relationships in my life those people have more heart disease it's so it's literally true you know that being you know hard-hearted or cold-hearted or you know isolated will do that to our heart you know and the arteries will clog up and people who have relationships that they feel supported by or nourished by will have less heart disease and so that means that for all the you know the heartache there is in relationships of the heart it's still more nourishing for the heart than not to have those relationships isn't that interesting see

[21:29]

anyway if this is the path and i would say it must be this must be the path we must be inherently within the way i think sometimes what is it that makes it path or will make it more real to us as path and i think this the difference as Thich Nhat Hanh mentioned in his in this retreat is this kind of quality and the quality of samsara we aim for some future and some kind of life where we don't have certain kinds of problems anyway the basically the idea is we haven't yet arrived we're trying to get to some place in the future we're not there yet okay so we have the constant always the feeling of we've net we haven't arrived we're not there there's something wrong there's some problem and the idea of of it being path is we arrive moment after moment every moment we should arrive we should be where we are you know and this is in some ways the

[22:40]

simplest you know most basic teaching in buddhism just to be present and there's lots of explanation about what's involved in being present you know what what are the factors of the mental factors of being present mindfulness and concentration and trust and tranquility and energy and you know you could list many many qualities that have something to do with being present but in a very simple way it's just to be present to arrive this moment to be with yourself to be with others um and we think no there's no but i have this place i want to get to because you know a lot of what it's like is to be here is it's painful uh and this is one of the things then that uh thai talked about

[23:42]

um which i know i've thought about these things before but somehow it made a lot more sense to me and so this is partly because it made so much sense to me i want to share it with you looking out at the audience i can see a number of you were there so please forgive me if you've heard all this before um but anyway um in this kind of conceptualization of our life we understand that a conscious awake mind is like the living room and then we also have a basement right our storage area of consciousness which we might also call unconscious or whatever but we have a kind of storage and in buddhism you know this is the storehouse consciousness or alaya vijnana and then awake consciousness is mind consciousness or mano vijnana okay and so most of what we have in the basement or a lot of what we have in the basement you know is this things that we haven't wanted to deal with

[24:47]

it's just like our house my house at least i don't have a basement i have closets and then sometimes my closet spills over into the room but you know it's kind of painful to sometimes there's things that are in the basement and so our tendency is and there's a lot of kind of unhappiness there and unresolved things things we haven't dealt with and so one of the one of the ways that we can avoid that is to keep our our living room consciousness our active consciousness we keep inviting guests in we keep busy you know so we work very hard or we watch television we read the newspaper and we invite things into our awareness into our consciousness to keep our consciousness occupied with something even if it's not particularly you know enjoyable

[25:49]

or you know but at least it's something that keeps us from our own pain you know our own unresolved seeds and plants and so on and you notice that as soon as you you know that when we sit down if we sit quietly for a while if we start to meditate and we pretty soon you know we won't have any guests anymore and you've noticed what happens then you know the unhappiness starts to come to the surface doesn't it and then people say meditation doesn't work for me you know i can't get calm i feel some kind of agitation see so that's what happens in meditation we actually quiet our minds enough and we stop entertaining one guest after another to keep ourself occupied and we actually and then these things come up and normally when these things come up from the storehouse mind that are painful our reaction will be you know to treat them unkindly

[26:55]

oh we'll say to our you know our mind our body i don't want you around go back to the basement i didn't invite you i'm trying to have a spiritual life and you're making it difficult i have spiritual practice to do and you're making it hard for me to follow my breath so go away and at that time we don't usually say it so kindly either you know it's with some anger or uh and then when it won't go away you know we may get sad or unhappy why do you have to keep bothering me so we have these kind of reactions like this and at some point though you know in meditation we have this kind of chance with mindfulness to see something with mindfulness and to acknowledge it

[28:03]

and not to and to let it be and to be able to live with it in some peace and harmony and not be trying to step it back into the basement this is what releases things uh and in and because we we view something or handle or meet something with mindfulness uh with some kindness or and we can live with it in some way in peace and harmony uh you know then we cultivate new seeds because in the storehouse conscience there's the seeds not only of unhappiness and hatred and pain and sadness and grief there's also the seeds of our love and compassion and generosity and when we act that way with the kindness and generosity and compassion uh then that nourishes those seeds and those plants in our storehouse so this is some ongoing kind of practice all these seeds and all this activity is we're already within

[29:10]

the way but actually we can work to cultivate this kind of you know the the field of our mind to be careful about how we treat things and to be careful about what kind of guests or what kind of things we take into our awareness so in this kind of understanding you can see that already we have plenty of pain and uh misunderstanding and uh unresolved kind of conflict or underlying uh things in our life that are painful or difficult and the in the world there's so much suffering how will it be possible to be with it you know this is a so it's a big kind of challenge in a way don't you think and uh on one hand when i was at this retreat i felt very kind of tawdry

[30:14]

and sordid after a while you know maybe i could watch less television and various things um and uh gosh i'm not much of a of a buddhist and i could see how i'm not very careful always about what kinds of things i let into my awareness to entertain myself rather than being present and meeting myself or someone else and on the other hand i felt this wonderful opportunity to kind of be more settled and to be more careful so uh and uh Thich Nhat Hanh's basic teaching of practicing you know to be it's not just for him

[32:04]

to be present but to be uh you know to to smile to practice smiling and breathing and to help us be present this is basic kind of buddhist practice to come back to the breath and especially when something painful uh is arising how can we be present with it it will you know tend to something painful and difficult will tend to put us off will be put off uh and to bring our awareness to it we'll have to have a kind of you know discipline that you know where we take our awareness and we can bring it back to the object of pain uh and not just to bring it back to the object of pain as in you know get away from me but bringing our awareness back to the object of pain in a way that can be with the pain uh and soothe the pain uh and understand the pain and we have uh in our life of course various kinds of hurts and pains

[33:11]

uh and we have people who upset us uh and we have our own body and mind which is out of control and perhaps about to sink uh so to be with something we practice you know very literally in this kind of understanding to practice being with something we practice breathing with it and we practice a slight smile some at least slight or warm regard sometimes i think people are put off by the idea of smiling and i know i've been at times put off and uh i was talking with a friend of mine who mentioned this practice to a group of yoga students and one of the students said that's ridiculous you can't just smile anger away i don't know that she got the point you know

[34:17]

and sometimes it's hard to appreciate this kind of point and it's not necessarily meaning you know exactly turning the other cheek or but at least in our own life and with our own being you know we have to start someplace to be willing to be where we are and to practice being where we are and with the difficulties that i have in my life and to acknowledge those and be with those things and the simplest way to do it it seems uh you know that i know of is to breathe to practice breathing and being with things inhaling and exhaling and letting your breath touch it in your own being and letting your breath touch your heart and then we did these wonderful things you know i've never done this before but we did lying down meditation you know at 4 30 in the afternoon when it's kind of late in the afternoon you might be

[35:21]

kind of tired by then we did lying down meditation oh boy we never did lying around down meditation around zen center we have to uh anyway a little change here a little different emphasis but then we practice inhaling you know bring your awareness to your heart exhaling smile at your heart inhaling you know bring your awareness to your lungs exhaling smile at your lungs and different parts of your body inhaling so we could do that a little bit later but you know inhaling bring your awareness to your arm your right arm and then exhaling smile at your arm and you let your breath you know go throughout your body and touch these parts of your body and your breath is very much associated with your awareness

[36:26]

and if the more we find out about how to be with you know the pain in my life the more we know something about being in with the pain in somebody else's life and the other is true too the more we can be with somebody else's pain with some calmness uh you know the more we can be with our own difficulty and so much of the suffering in the world is just that we're not willing to do this we don't want you know this kind of pain and so we'll do anything to avoid being with it and this doesn't mean you know i'm not encouraging you know we should we need to have obviously some kind of common sense you know it doesn't mean you need to allow yourself to get beaten or raped or you know because that's a good teaching for you and you know etc it's that's not what i'm trying to say but you know at some point there's the pain of being alive that is just the pain of being alive

[37:38]

and the fact that things aren't the way that we'd like them to be very basic and we have to breathe and be with it and there's nothing to be done about it there's nothing you can do about it you know our idea is uh well why are you unhappy as though you know we could do something about the cause of the unhappiness and we could fix it and then you won't have to be unhappy and it's the same with anger if you're angry then we could do something about it like we could yell at the right person and we have this idea that you know if you hurt the person that made you angry you might feel better right but you don't feel better usually the other person will hurt you back worse and besides that you don't feel good we don't feel good when we hurt somebody and we can you know not acknowledge the fact that we feel hurt um but when we hurt somebody we hurt

[38:45]

so anyway we think we can do something so we have this saying don't just stand there do something and Ty said we should turn this around you know don't just do something stand there or you know be there be there be present with yourself be present with your feelings be present with you know what comes what's coming up in your life when you know and and don't don't let in so many guests and don't entertain so many guests and visitors who don't who aren't interested or concerned about you in the slightest you know television and magazines and uh prepared foods lots of things you know and then let alone things like alcohol and drugs and none of these things have your interest at all you know my interest they don't have our interest when we take them in

[39:51]

we can be entertained or you know in some ways soothed but they're not really concerned about us and then we are we have missed another chance to be present you know because we are busy entertaining so in this kind of understanding we have already you know many kind of toxins or poisons in our life and many things we've done and said and you know we have enough already and we need to in some way calm ourself enough to be with those things and to resolve those and to instead of being so entertaining to touch things with kindness and compassion and the warmth of our heart and to nourish that in our activity instead of nourishing our you know our hard-heartedness or our cold-heartedness or you know being grown up and mature and so on

[40:57]

so this is ecology both of the you know things we take in literally like food and drink and substances and it's also in terms of our consciousness what kind of things do we take into our awareness we need to be careful or we even though we're inherently within the path we lose our way you know and we feel lost so to come back is just to be present to come back is to come back to the breath into our being and interesting enough when we do that and if we can calm down enough you know to calm down a little bit to be with our breath is to calm down and then to be able to be with something and to see how complicated things are and how much we have a part in it so we talked about many examples of this like if somebody makes you angry if my spouse makes me angry I must already have the seeds of

[42:14]

anger in me I may have to be you know I may not see that right away but if I can breathe for a little bit and be quiet I can acknowledge that I must already have the seeds of anger in me and the other person just watered them and we have to in that way acknowledge our own seeds and you know work at nurturing our our love and compassion and understanding those seeds and to acknowledge our anger and this that we have the seeds in us is to is to be doing that already we don't need to do anything about the anger but to be mindful and to be present with it and to breathe and to know it not that we get rid of it or that it isn't painful to be with it but the fact that we can do that is our peace in our life

[43:17]

so so I would say then to you know what makes it path is that we arrive and we practice arriving practice being present not just doing something but being there being here uh and we strengthen this kind of uh understanding or practice by you know our our sometimes by making a kind of vow or commitment uh you know in simple language it's just uh you know deciding I will come to I will try to be with things moment after moment I will try to be not abandon myself but to to know each moment uh what's happening what's going on and to

[44:31]

to I and I intend to practice uh finding out how to live with it how to be with it not how to get rid of it but how to acknowledge things and be with things in my own life in my friend the life of my friends uh and it turns out you know it's not all that easy obviously or we'd all be doing it don't you think and I think we need the help of friends we have this kind of idea in America that uh freedom is doing what you want and obviously to do what you want you need to isolate yourself because uh doing what you want is a problem for other people if you notice that and so the way we get to do what we want is to isolate ourselves and not have very many people around in our life because it would it would interfere with doing

[45:34]

what we want and then and then we wonder why do I feel so alone and isolated and I don't and then we don't have any support for nurturing the seeds of kindness in our heart and the seeds of understanding and being able to be calm with our pain and difficulty you know it doesn't take the pain away but it will make it easier to bear the pain and we have so few examples in our society of of anyone you know it's it's always so we have so few examples of of people who that we look at people and we see somebody who's willing to have pain just the pain of being alive and when we see people like that we feel encouraged you know and to and so it's a wonderful teaching to uh you know like at this meditation retreat

[46:36]

I go to the retreat and I look around and I see all these people and I go what a bunch of losers and then of course I go uh and so together and you know then you sort of then it's kind of like no that doesn't help me that doesn't encourage me or inspire me to see these people who are really together and competent and then I just feel bad you know where the people have the illusion of being competent and handling everything and you know isn't that great and they're really in charge in their life and I go like gee I don't think I could ever do that and so then I feel really discouraged and I think that's just an illusion anyway you know some some people get to be I think great you know sort of uh big teachers so to speak you know in our society because they can pass off this illusion that you too could be in charge of your life the way I'm in charge of mine and you see the way I'm in command and in control you too could

[47:42]

be in command and control like this and then you go oh really yeah oh great yeah well just tell me what to do and I'll do it and then they will those people will tell you what to do you know but the funny but not the funny thing but you know the painful thing of course is it never works you know you never get to be in charge and in command and in control the way they are you know you just get to do what they told you to see and you never realize your own heart and it doesn't help you be with your own pain so I think it's you know more appropriate teaching for us on the whole you know to to be able to to find someone who and to be with other people who are who are making this kind of effort to acknowledge and to be with the pain in their lives and to breathe with that and not to be

[48:43]

so capable and competent that they never have to feel anything like that see and when I come here I feel you know I feel this is this kind of spirit that's here even though you even though on one hand we may at times think you know I'd like to just not have anything to do with this it's so painful it's so difficult but on the other hand what we really want is to be able to be with things and to resolve things and touch the hurt you know with some kindness and compassion and it's our own breath that can do that too in our own body in our own being so

[49:57]

sound of airplane meditation so so uh I don't have so much more to talk about, in fact I don't have anything more to talk about. So why don't we sit quietly for another minute or two and just to be present, to practice.

[51:21]

Just in our own way, see if we can be present in our own body, in our being, in our breath. And if you want you can, as you inhale, be aware of some part of your body and as you exhale you can smile at your heart, at your lungs or your chest, your arms, your hands, abdomen and legs and so on. We can do the lying down meditation sitting up. With this kind of practice we can find the way, know the way, moment after moment and

[55:11]

we can actually realize the truth of Dogen saying each of us is already inherently within the way, inherently on the path. And when we come back to the present like this with some calmness and we center ourself and collect our being, we find the teaching of that moment. Thank you very much for this kind of effort.

[55:43]

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