Begin Where it Starts - With You

Question Cards:

• Question Cards:  Invite participants to write anonymous questions, collect and answer at the end

• Say names, any background that might be helpful for me, what brings them here

Todd’s Bio

• Myth of substrate neutrality

• Raised Jewish.

• Yes, I’m just some guy.  A human.  I will make mistakes.  Please forgive me in advance.

• Best news of all - You shouldn’t believe what I say!

Not Emphasizing History:

• Why?  Because we aren’t interested in studying Buddhism, we are interested in transforming our lives.  But context can help.

Preconceived Notions:

• What is Zen?  What do you think it is (if new), or what did you think it was before you learned something about it?

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!""Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

• This is your first lesson in Zen training:  Beginners mind.

The Human Condition:

• The First Noble Truth:  Duhkha.

• The opposite of Sukha, which is satisfaction.

• Wheel out of kilter

• Sense of lack

• Something is missing

• Something is not quite right

• We spend our time reliving the past or anticipating the future.  We don’t want the present

• We prefer distraction.  We live in a culture of distraction - afraid of stillness and silence

• Three personality types:

• Grasping/Greed type:  Sees what they want.

• Adverse/Avoident type:  Sees what they don’t like

• Deluded type:  Confused, uncertainty, clumsy

• The three poisons (Sanskrit: triviṣa; Tibetan: dug gsum) or the three unwholesome roots (Sanskrit: akuśala-mūla; Pāli: akusala-mūla), in Buddhism, refer to the three root kleshas of ignorance, attachment, and aversion. These three poisons are considered to be the cause of suffering (Sanskrit: dukkha).

• We don’t experience directly, we live through our stories of the world, our stories of life

• Categorizing mind

• Creating shortcuts

• Teaching doctors who cut off the rough edges and simplify.  Medical students love them, but it oversimplifies.

• Judging mind

• Tao Te Ching #2:  Seeing some things as beautiful, makes other things ugly

• BPS, p. 42 - Chinese farmer whose horse ran off… good or bad?

• Koan: A monk carries a woman across a river.  Example of holding onto things.

History:

• Siddartha Guatama.  India (present day Nepal).  Prince of a minor kingdom - sheltered

• Encounters sickness, old age and death.  Has an existential crisis.  What’s the point of human life?

• Haunted - he sets out to search for answers

• Times - Ascetic times.  Caste system

• Six years he wandered the ganges river valley, learning with various masters

• Ascetic spirituality was popular.  Body believed to be an obstactle - weaken it to attain liberation.  Mastered that.  Close to death.  Accepts rice milk from little girl

• Vows to steer a middle way

• Plants himself under the Bodhi tree, vows not to move until he figures this out

• All kinds of demons (Mara) comes to cast doubt

• Touches the earth

• Upon seeing the morning star, he has his insight.  He says he wakes up to the way things are.

• Then, he travelled the land teaching…. Who are you?  I am awake:

• God?  Sorcerer?  Magician?  Celestial angel?

• He never said he was a god.  Never said he was anything other than an ordinary human.  Never has any special powers,

• We call him Buddha (Tathagata), but there are many buddhas - just someone who has realized this way and is awake.

• Bodhidarma to China (Chan).  Dogen Zenji to Japan (Zen)

• Appropriated as a religion

• Enlightenment isn’t for you, it is for the Buddha

Zen is:  In This Life and With This Body

Living Life Fully:

• Negative example: Life of the shut in

• Erect barriers against pain (avoid heartbreak and loss, ridicule, shame)

• Opposite is someone with the courage to lower defenses and meet life fully

• Appamada:  Mindful, energetic, care.  Negation of pamada - drunken headlessness.

• Ikkyu’s “Attention, attention, attention.”

One day a man of the people said to the Zen master Ikkyu: “Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?” Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word “Attention.”

“Is that all?” asked the man. “Will you not add something more?”

Ikkyu then wrote twice running: “Attention. Attention.”

“Well,” remarked the man rather irritably, “I really don’t see much depth or subtlety in what you have just written.”

Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times running: “Attention. Attention. Attention.”

Half angered, the man declared: “What does that word attention mean anyway?”

And Ikkyu answered, gently: “Attention means attention.”

• Waking up and growing up

• What Does it Look Like?

• Four Brahma Viharas:

• Loving-kindness (Pāli: mettā, Sanskrit: maitrī) towards all: the hope that a person will be well; "the wish that all sentient beings, without any exception, be happy."[11]

• Compassion (Pāli and Sanskrit: karuṇā): the hope that a person's sufferings will diminish; "the wish for all sentient beings to be free from suffering."[11]

• Empathetic joy (Pāli and Sanskrit: muditā): joy in the accomplishments of a person—oneself or another; sympathetic joy; "the wholesome attitude of rejoicing in the happiness and virtues of all sentient beings."[11]

• Equanimity (Pāli: upekkhā, Sanskrit: upekṣā): learning to accept loss and gain, good-repute and ill-repute, praise and censure, sorrow and happiness (Attha Loka Dhamma),[12] all with detachment, equally, for oneself and for others. Equanimity is "not to distinguish between friend, enemy or stranger, but regard every sentient being as equal. It is a clear-minded tranquil state of mind—not being overpowered by delusions, mental dullness or agitation."[13]

• Tao Te Ching:

• Intro

• Things arrive and she lets them come, things disappear and she lets them go

Buddhism (Without Beliefs:)

BPS, Page 8

• Buddhism isn’t a system of beliefs.  Not about accepting dogma.  It is the opposite.

• The opposite isn’t disbelief - it is about examining everything carefully for yourself

• The point is to know - not to belief or hope or wish

• The buddha said don’t believe because you see me as a teacher.  Don’t believe me because others do.  .. or read it in a book.  .. don’t rely on hearsay, speculation.

• Never give up on your own authority

• We can’t approach this teaching, with any assumption or belief whatsoever

• Buddha’s teaching is likened to “a finger pointing at the moon.”

Non-Historical Teaching:

• Not interested in telling origin stories

• Why do we like origin stories?  They provide comfort.  It is more comfortable to know.  Not knowing is uncomfortable.  Uneasy.  Groundless state of being.  Not knowing is most intimate.  MYSTERY.

• Like a person shot with an arrow

• Painful, acute situation that needs attention

• But most people want to know about the arrow

Not Problem Solving:

• BPS, page 17.  You have 83 problems.

• Training for life.  Removing blocks to love.  Learning meet what is next.  Waking up to what you do.  Being your nature.  Becoming fully Todd.  Allowing Todd ness to express itself fully.  

So by practice-so what we acquire is ourselves. To become completely ourselves, we practice zazen. That is just sitting (shikantaza.) We have everything. We are fully satisfied with ourselves. And there is nothing to gain or nothing to attain. This is maybe very verbal [laughs] interpretation of-of true practice. Anyway, this kind of gratitude or joyful mind we sh- [partial word]-must have in our practice.

• So what is this nature we are talking about?

• Inyat khan - parable of fish asking about sea

A Practice:

• What is a practice?  Something you do.

• Not practice, as in practice makes perfect, but practice as in “she is a practicing lawyer, dentist, etc.”

• Not a belief system, not dogma, not religion

• I will not tell you what to believe.  In fact, we are going to ask you to doubt the ones you already have.

• Beginners mind.  Don’t know mind.

• A healthy way to live

• Verse of the Han:

Great is the matter of birth and death;

All is impermanent, quickly passing.

Awake! Awake!

Don't waste this life.

• What we practice is an experiential inquiry process, one done with the body

• To study the Buddha way is to study the self...

• Daily Practice:

• Like filling a leaky bucket

• Can feel like swimming upstream in our culture

• Need Support:  Flint’s story about monastic practice setup because we need to be loved enough

Meditation:

Not retreating, not turning away

• Joko hated when people called intensive practice periods retreats “What are you retreating from?” she would say

• No stopping thinking

• Dream of resting in some kind of untroubled blankness.  Free from distracting or annoying thoughts.

• We go to a “retreat” to retreat from all the ways we normally retreat from life.  - Flint Sparks.  In other words, we go to face what we normally avoid

• Barry’s example of blanking out the kids in carpool

• We are not here to get away from anything, we are here to face all the things we want to avoid.

• Norman Fischer says practice makes denial impossible (and compassion possible)

• A regular sitting practice should make all the things we want to push away, all the things we want to keep at arms length, increasing unavoidable. - Barry Magid

So how do we enact this?  How do we practice it?

• We take the one seat

• We open the front door and back door and let everything in

• We turn towards everything that arises

• The middle path does not go from here to there, it goes from there to here.

• We welcome it.

• Thank you very much, I have no complaints whatsoever

Turn Toward What Is

• “How simple can you let this be?” - Flint

• Two ways to approach meditation, seeing how we do it, seeing all the ways we don’t do it by adding things on top of it (avoid it)

Meditation:

• Not stopping thinking…

• Not a mental lobotomy

• The middle path does not go from here to there, it goes from there to here.

• Suzuki Roshi, 1967-01-12:

Don’t try to stop the thinking when you are practicing zazen.  Let it stop.  If something comes into your mind let it come and let it go out.  It will not stay long.  But if you try to stop it, it means you are bothered by it.  Don’t be bothered by anything. “ (.. waves of mind, not coming from outside, small mind vs big mind, no disturbances)

• Just Sitting (Shikantaza)

• One way to get students to sit, is to look at the ways we aren’t just sitting