Today is August 11, 2024 and first, I want to welcome everyone who attended yesterday's workshop at Chapin mill. This morning you got to experience sitting here at Arnold park or on Zoom, and it's it's so wonderful, isn't it, to be able to sit together as a group, when we combine our efforts this way, we all benefit from the mutual support, and you may notice that the quality of your sitting is better when you sit with others. It's easier to concentrate on your practice, even with the sound of a lawnmower,
it's just a passing condition that lawnmower and practice teaches us to be one with things as they are, not how we want them to be, just to hear that lawn mower without inserting a judgment. Just let it be. And we can get so much inspiration from those whom we're sitting with, shoulder to shoulder, or square to square, as it is in
sometimes it can feel like you're literally being supported by the person next to you, as if they're they're holding you up, helping you to stay the course, to remain still, to relax into the practice, even if you don't know who They are. Never seen them before, know their name
when. We practice together and receive all that there is to receive from it, it's hard not to feel gratitude,
gratitude for just this, not just gratitude, but joy, joy. And that's what I'm going to talk about this morning, the joy of Zen practice, not Surprisingly, gratitude and joy are interconnected. The Benedictine monk David Steindl Rast who explored the interconnection between Buddhism and Christie Christianity, and also trained in Zen practice, this is what he said about gratitude and joy. It is not joy that makes us grateful, it is not joy that makes us grateful, it is gratitude that makes us joyful. So joy arises out of gratitude. It's part of a chain reaction, and that chain reaction requires awareness, attention. Of
course, we can understand gratitude and joy as part of this wide array dozens of emotions that humans experience, and some of those emotions are low and. Positive like gratitude and joy, but also hope, excitement and so on, and then other emotions we label as negative, like anger, envy, guilt and some emotions are very difficult to separate from one another, not just gratitude and Joy, but anger and fear, for example. But it's important, it's important to recognize that the very notion, the very idea that some emotions are positive and other emotions are negative, as enjoy is good, anger is bad, that that's a product of our social conditioning. It's a mental construct. We can just consider the case of non human animals who don't make emotions into mental constructs the way we do. When a dog wags its tail, we tell ourselves she's happy, and when it growls or snarls. We say it's afraid, and humans interpret this as good behavior and bad behavior. But for the dog, the dog is just too busy just being a dog to categorize or analyze what what it's experiencing. And that's why dogs are really among the best Zen teachers. They don't complain about their conditions. They Don't wallow in self pity. They don't feel any shame when it comes to their cleaning habits. You know, they just are. They feel what they feel. They experience what they experience without, without the complications of good and bad and right and wrong. And they're totally in the moment when they're playing with a ball. They're just playing with the ball.
Unlike cats, whom I'm told plot are deaf, I
I know that from firsthand experience.
In taking a close look at joy, I'm going to turn to a piece from Charlotte johco Beck that appears in her book nothing special, living Zen, which was published in 1993 and if you're not familiar with Joh gobek, she's a highly verdict Zen teacher and author, And she was part of the first generation of American Zen teachers, along with our center's founder, Roshi Philip kapleau. And on top of that, as a woman, she was a real path breaker. Her style is simple, straight forward, very accessible. And the excerpt I'll be reading from is titled joy. She begins, I'm often accused of emphasizing the difficulties in practice, the accusation is true, believe me, the difficulties are there if you don't recognize them and why they arise, we tend to fool ourselves. Still. The ultimate reality, not only in our sitting, but also in our lives, is joy. By Joy, I don't mean happiness. They're not the same. Happiness has an opposite opposite. Joy does not as long as we seek happiness, we're going to have unhappiness, because we always swing from one pole to the other.
Well, I suppose you could say that joy does have an opposite, you know? And if we could think of it as misery, for example, but still to her point, can you even recognize what it is without knowing misery and vice versa? I And yet she says joy is the ultimate reality. And to say that it's the ultimate reality is to say that it's our nature, our true nature, our birthright. It encompasses all of us in everything. So her sense of joy goes beyond the ordinary sense of it, which is to base it on a mental construct. We do have this idea about what joy is, what it's supposed to look like and feel like, in contrast to what misery looks like and feels like. The same with other emotions. But that's just a bunch of thoughts. Doesn't capture the experience of it,
and it's our habitual thawing, which is a term that Roshi kapleau like to use our thoughting, that's one of the primary, if not the primary, difficulty of practice, and we all have to contend with it. Thinking is different from thoughting. Our our brain is hardwired to enable us to think, and we do need to think. It comes in handy, helps us survive, to navigate our lives, and it involves intention. When we think we're making a choice, it's an active verb. It's a doing. But thoughting is passive in that it happens when we're not paying attention, when we're not one with what we're doing. It's those random and not so random trails of thought that travel through the mind.
For example, when engaged in an activity like folding your laundry, do we need to think? Do we need to plan or rehearse some conversation or fantasize about something while we're folding the laundry.
The content of thoughting is endless, and part of the process of practice is noticing it, seeing it, noticing the patterns, even
We're on the path, when we see what's traveling through the mind, and then we make that choice to return to our practice as soon as we notice it. We.
The point that johco is trying to make here is that when we allow ourselves to get caught up in thoughts, our attention is split. Not only are we cutting ourselves off from life, but we're cutting ourselves off from joy. She says, from time to time, we do experience joy. It can arise accidently or in the course of our sitting or elsewhere in our lives for a while after seshin, we may experience joy over years of practice, our experience of joy deepens it that is we, If that is we understand practice and are willing to do it. Most people are not.
For the benefit of newcomers, the word seshin refers to a Zen meditation retreat, which can involve more than 10 hours of sitting a day. It's intensive practice, and it does require resolve, determination, effort. So does daily sitting, though, and everyone's willing to carve out time to sit every day might be due to life circumstances, schedule complications, balancing juggling roles, family and work,
We need to make that effort to work with our circumstances
and have faith that joy will arise. It'll arise on its own when we're fully present, not when we're expecting it or looking for it, she goes on. Joy isn't something we have to find. Joy is who we are if we're not preoccupied with something else, when we try to find joy, we are simply adding a thought and an unhelpful one at that, onto the basic fact of what we are. We don't need to go looking for joy, but we do need to do something. The question is, what our lives don't feel joyful and we keep trying to find a remedy.
For most of us, the Go To remedy is to chase after things on the outside, external, things that bring us some pleasure or joy while steering clear of anything that is uncomfortable or displeasing, like the sound of the lawn mower, we seek seek it out, also in material objects, possessions, and also in relationships, as in trying To find the perfect partner or land that dream job.
Fortunately, eventually, through practice, daily practice, and also Sen, we discover that there's another way that's more fundamental, more lasting, way, not looking outward, but looking inward. Joy happens from the inside. You. Gu continues, our lives are basically about perception. By perception I mean whatever the senses bring in, we see, we hear, we touch, we smell, and so on. That's what life really is most of the time. However, we substitute another activity for perception, we cover it over with something else, which I'll call evaluation. By evaluation, I don't mean an objective, dispassionate analysis. As for people, when we look over a messy room and consider or evaluate how to clean it up, the evaluation I have in mind is ego centered? Is this next episode in my life going to bring me something I like or not? Is it going to hurt or isn't it? Is it pleasant or unpleasant? Does it make me important or unimportant? Does it give me something material? In other words, what's in it for me? What's the payoff for me? She goes on. It's our nature to evaluate this way. It's part of our conditioning, to the extent that we give ourselves over to evaluation of this kind joy will be missing from our lives. It's amazing how quickly we can switch into evaluation. Perhaps we're functioning pretty well, and then suddenly somebody criticizes what we're doing. In a fraction of a second, we jump into our thoughts. We're quite willing to get into that interesting space of judging others or ourselves. There's a lot of drama in all of this, and we like it more than we realize. Unless the drama becomes lengthy and punishing, we enter willingly into it, because as human beings, we have a basic orientation toward drop from an ordinary point of view to be In a world of pure perception is pretty dull. You
the reason why we love drama so much is that it's exciting. It makes us feel active, engaged, involved and it, and it feeds our ego and makes us feel like we're at the center of the action
the starring role in a film titled all about me. But there's a biochemical basis for this human tendency towards drama, because being consumed by drama. You know, our blood gets pumping and it causes the secretion of endorphins. Endorphins suppress pain and induce pleasure, and that's why we can even get addicted to drama. I think that's where the term drama queen comes from.
But the thing is, we can experience that excitement boy without all the drama,
the experience of totally ordinary moments can also release endorphins.
But only, only if her mind is undivided.
Joh go then gives this example of joy in the context of working in an office. But what she says can apply to any, really, any kind of work setting. I
She says, suppose we've been away on vacation for a week and we come back. Perhaps we've enjoyed ourselves, or we think we have, when we return to work, the inbox is loaded with things to do and scattered all over the desk our little messages while you were out. That was That was back in the 90s. Nowadays, people just text you while you're on vacation, reminding you that your inbox is growing or your to do list is growing. When people call us at work, it usually means they want something. Perhaps the joy we left for someone else to take care of has been neglected. Oh, sorry. Perhaps the job we left for someone else to take care of has been neglected. Immediately, we're evaluating the situation. Who fouled up, who slacked off. Why is she calling me? I bet it's the same old problem. It's their responsibility anyway. Why are they calling me? And likewise, at the end of seshin, we may experience the flow of a joyful life, then we wonder where it goes, though it doesn't go anywhere. Something has happened. A cloud covers the clarity. And then anyone who's done a seven day seshin knows that you can feel incredibly light and buoyant coming out of it, and once you experience that, it's a major milestone in your practice. Even though it fades, we we feel, we experience in our body what it's like for thoughts to settle, for thoughts to not have a grip on us. And although it does fade as the period of intense practice ends, it it's actually always accessible. It's right here. This, this moment, right now. I
and even in situations when you don't expect to experience joy, like being on a crowded airplane or in a crowded airport terminal, you expect to find misery there, but what if you let go of those expectations, just Allow yourself to be there to experience what is without clinging to our preconceived ideas. She goes on until we know that joy is exactly what's happening minus our opinion of it, we're going to have only a small amount of joy when we stay with perception rather than getting lost in evaluation. However, joy can be the person who. Do the job while you were gone. It could be the interesting encounter on the phone with all of the people we have to call no matter what they want. Joy can be having a sore throat. It can be getting laid off. It can be unexpectedly having to work overtime. It can be having to take a math exam or dealing with one's former spouse who wants more money. Usually, we don't think that these things. Practice is about dealing with suffering. It's not that the suffering is important or valuable in itself, but that suffering is our teacher. It's the other side of life, and until we can see all of life, there's not going to be any joy?
Yeah, suffering is our teacher. When we're sick, tired, injured, in pain, when we lose a loved one, we're full of grief
when our car breaks down. When we're just restless or bored, it's all a teaching really each moment as conditions pass is calling upon us to pay attention, calling on us to be here. Wake up to this.
In Buddhism, there's there's actually a specific term that's used for the joy that arises out of awareness. It's called sympathetic joy, and it's typically defined as the experience of joy through the joy of others. So when somebody else is filled with joy, say, because they got a promotion at work or started a new relationship, or they're going to have a baby, we have the potential to experience that same joy alongside them when they tell you the news. It's like that big hug or high five, we do, and in that moment, it's selfless. It's not about you, it's not about them, it's just the pure joy. But if we're caught up in thoughts, what's going to happen instead is that our joy will be kind of half hearted. Our tendency is to compare ourselves to others, and when that kicks in, that leads us to feel jealous or envious. For our friend or co worker. Why do all the good things always happen to them, not to me? Shouldn't I be receiving the praise? Shouldn't I be the center of all the action? Shouldn't I get all the attention?
Recently, a sangha member shared a story with me that inspired me to zero in on this topic of joy, and she shared with me a story about the pure delight that she experienced in observing the behavior of one of her. Grandkids, who I think is three years old, if I remember correctly. So she said that one morning she saw him running in and out, in and out of a room, back and forth, back and forth, and although he didn't have the words for it or a concept for it, what he had accidentally discovered was a motion sensor light. So each time he ran into the room, the light went on, and then when he ran out, the light went off. It's incredible. Wow. You can just imagine how thrilling that was. So children are our Zen teachers as well. I and her story also reminded me of a poem by Issa who was one of the great haiku masters of Japan. Issa had experienced incredible loss pain in his life, his mother died when he was a child, and later in life, when he got married, his first son died within one month, one month of being born, and then a Second died the following year. And so did so did his daughter, reportedly due to smallpox. And if that wasn't enough, he lost his wife when she was giving birth to their last child. So much loss, and yet his poetry speaks of joy, joy in the smallest of things, like coming upon a mosquito or a fly or a bed bug, and he has this way of weaving together the human experience with that of the wider natural world. They're not two, after all. Okay, so this particular haiku is about cormorants, just as much as it's about children. And if you don't know what a cormorant is, it's a type of aquatic bird, and it's known to sit at the edge of a body of water and spread its wings wide to dry them out in the sun. We sometimes see them on the edge of of the pond at Chapin mill. Actually, really quite stunning to see. Here's the Haiku. Children imitating cormorants are even more wonderful than cormorants children imitating cormorants are even more wonderful than cormorants.
And before I close, I can't resist also sharing a classic story called The Joy of fishes by Chuang Su, who was a fourth century Taoist Master. And for this version that I have, there's a footnote here that says that the story was translated from Chinese by Thomas Merton. And incidentally, Merton was a Trappist monk who, like brother David, explored Zen practice. Okay, here's the story. Joan. Chuang Su and Hui su were crossing Hao river by the dam. Chuang said, see how free the fishes leap and Dart. That is their happiness. I. Hui replied, since you are not a fish, how do you know what makes fishes happy? Chuang said, since you are not I, how can you possibly know that I do not know what makes fishes happy? Hui argued, if I not being you cannot know what you know. It follows that you not being a fish cannot know what they know. Chuang said, Wait a minute. Let us get back to the original question. What you asked me was, how do you know what makes fishes happy from the terms of your question, you evidently know. I know what makes fishes happy. I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy as I go walking along the same river
