Music. Today is Sunday, February 9, 2025 my congratulations to the people who made their way to the Zen do through the snow, walking or driving. Don't think anybody used cross country skis, but remember when I was working in the hospital, seeing a nurse come walking down the hall with her cross country skis, was impressed. My my title today, tentatively, is silence and Non doing.
Zen. Zen, Zen originated arose in China, probably gradually. There's no point where we can say this is just some form of Buddhism, and now this is Zen, but it really took shape with the six patriarch. A lot of writers say that's when Zen really took on its unique form. And we have the platform Sutra. That's basically one of the only two sutras I'm aware of that aren't the words of the Buddha, and that is the words of the six patriarch. It's another one, the vimalakirti Sutra, where it's the words of vivekurdi and his interaction with various Bodhisattvas.
But in the in that Sutra, this the platform Sutra, Wayne, that's the name of the six patriarch, said something really basic. He said, good friends. Since the past, this teaching of ours has first taken no thought as its principle, no form as its essence, and non abiding as its foundation. Then he explains a little bit, no thought means to be without thought in the midst of thinking, no form means to transcend form in the context of forms and appearances, not abiding is your fundamental nature. All worldly things are emptied, and this teaching is reflected down through the years. We just chanted Zen Master hakuins chant and praise of Zen says, our form now being no form in going returning. We never leave home, our thought now being no thought, our dancing and songs are the voice of the Dharma.
This can be understood intellectually, if you stretch your mind a bit, but to take it into your heart and to live world of no thought and no form, is our challenge. It's the direction of Zen practice, whether we know it or not.
In the Tao Te Ching, it said, in pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added, in the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things until finally you arrive at non action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. True mastery can be gained by letting things go their own way. It can't be gained by interfering.
This brings to mind the image of a pool of muddy water we want to clear it's only one way. Have to let it settle, just like the snow globe in the introductory workshop you
I came across a talk by Norman Fisher. Is one of the senior students and teachers at the San Francisco Zen Center. I'm sure he was an original student of Suzuki Roshi. He has a. His own sort of organization, which I think is called everyday Zen, something like that. And this particular talk is called practicing everyday Zen. And he says, If you study something objective, say biochemistry, you begin with facts, external facts. No one asks you to spend years working on your attitude, because your attitude isn't the issue. Isn't all that relevant. But if you are engaging in spiritual practice, your attitude is very important. It bleeds through all our practice. It may be the key conditioning factor in your study, so you need to pay attention to it and to cultivate it in a particular direction. Goes on to speak about three different attitudes, but we're just going to take the first one, and it's this quote, you can't do it. It's impossible. End quote, you say, says, I think it's really important to be clear on this point, because our whole problem is that we have been muscling our way through every day of our lives from the beginning to now. I'm going to do this. I'm going to make this happen. I can do it or another form of the same thing. I can't do it. I'm not good enough, strong enough, smart enough, beautiful enough. If you think in the first way, then your life can work to some extent. It works in worldly sense. You can learn biochemistry. You can do this. You can do that. If you think in the second way, then you can have a hard time of it. The truth is, all of us think both ways, in various proportions, depending on our conditioning, but either way, when it comes to freedom, real freedom, when it comes into seeing into the meaning and real purpose of our human life. Neither of these ways of thinking. Fill bill because you can't do it. You really can't do it. In recognition of this theistic tradition, speak of God because we can't do it. We have to call out to another to help us, another who isn't really elsewhere or other, and yet, who isn't exactly reducible to us either? For me, this brings to mind the first three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous came to realize what was it came to realize that our lives had become impossible. Is that right al unmanageable?
Came to realize that only a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. I think I've missed a step in there. I'm a little, I'm a little shaky on my AA doctrine after these many years. But this was, this was transformative for me to realize that I had to hand it over, that this, you know, working then with my, my drinking addiction, other addictions, there needs to be aa puts it a power greater than ourselves. And of course, that was a difficult one for me to come to terms with, because I don't think there's anything outside some guy in the sky going to swoop down and make John's life better. But what I came to find is it's just it's not me. It's not this little me with all my conditioning and all my little idiosyncrasies, idiosyncrasies, my little habits. My innate selfishness. There's something more, something truer, and we can get in touch with it. It's what spiritual practice is about. And it. And as everyone has been saying so far that we've read, we don't do it ourselves.
Norman Fisher says because it is exactly the notion that is our effort, that it is our effort to do and make happen and create our lives, that notion that defeats us, no matter how good I am, no matter how strong I am, how determined, how many periods of zazen I sit, and so on and so on, I'll never be able to do it. Because. It's not that kind of thing. This is why so many of us try the strategy, consciously or unconsciously, of avoiding the barrier you're working on. A koan not really taking in the question not being able to really take it to heart. He says, thinking about something else for 50 or 70 years, because we can't face the impossibility of our life as it really is. You can't blame anyone for that. It's a rational response. But the trouble, of course, is that it doesn't work, because the barrier isn't elsewhere, and it's not really avoidable. It's right in front of us, wherever we are. It's always catches up to us. In the end, in fact, we are it,
powerless over my drinking, powerless over my addiction to thinking,
powerless over my conditioning. Try all the techniques in the world, but until you really open your hands and let go, nothing really of value is going to happen. And Norman Fisher says so. This is the first thing that we need to recognize, to just let go and relax knowing that we really can't do it, none of our efforts will bear fruit. This tells us that practice is less about what we are going to do than about what we undo, what we try to let go of. Practice is shedding something rather than adding something extra. We have added already plenty of extra things, a lifetime of extras. That's the problem. We don't need any more extras. We need to let go of something so practice is not doing. Practice is undoing. Of course, practice involves many forms of cultivation and effort, but all the cultivation and effort is done with this attitude, with this spirit and recognition that it is really about undoing, falling off the mountain, not scaling the mountain. But when we cultivate with this attitude, the attitude of letting go and of trusting, we can have a lot of relaxation. Even when we are working hard on our practice. We make effort in various ways to work on ourselves. It's not that we don't, but the attitude behind that effort is to undo, not to do, to release and fall apart, not to hold on and build up.
We cultivate with that spirit and that attitude, we're relaxed. We're not under pressure. There can be a lot of joy in our effort, even though we may come to see that it is endless. Pressure doesn't come from I need something. I have to get it. Relaxation comes from I'm just doing this. There's no way to do it, but I'm just doing it and letting it go, not worrying about what happens. When I was first coming to the Zen Center, I was going to meet Philip Kapleau. I only knew him from reading three pillars, and from one brief phone call where called the center, and he happened to pick up the phone. And I imagined, when I got there that probably being a Zen Center, I would be engaged in some sort of Dharma combat, or dharma dialog. And I tried as hard as I could to think about, how could I prepare myself to give spontaneous answers? It's just, I'm so glad I remember this. There's so much, of course, I've forgotten. But it was, it was, it was just running up against something that you can't do. Of
course, when I got here, January, man in a sweater, very quiet. Something was different, but nothing that I had pictured or planned for. I
let me pull out one more guy. Sheng Yen. And the little section of his called being a good for nothing. And he says, this is at a seshin, I think at a session in Wales. He says, during the interviews, I have learned that some people are still very tense, still struggling with their meditation method. There are those who may have sat well for a few sessions, but the good feeling has not come back, and they search for it in vain. They feel pressed for time, and their mental states have become more harried, impatient and tense. I've used many metaphors to explain that if you want to arrive quickly, you'll never get there, but many of you are still making trouble for yourselves, looking for pain to suffer. Buddhist practice is polishing your patience, forging your determination. When you demand peace of mind, your mind is not at peace. To deal with these afflictions, you need to quote, move the firewood out from under the pot. This means not caring at all, acting as if nothing were happening, feeling that there is no harm in being a good for nothing. The very process of the meditation retreat is itself. The result. All you have to do is sit for seven days if you do it well, that is one result. Do it badly, that is also a result. It's all valuable experience. Don't have your heart set on doing well, just keep your mind on the meditation method. Don't get upset about Oblivion or scattered thoughts, pain, numbness, aches, itches. Let it all happen. The sky falls. Pay no attention. Get that voice out of the way, the one that says, Are we there yet? You
You are there exactly where you need to be. Watch yourself in your daily life, how often we feel this kind of pressure trying to get from this moment to the next, as if that tension makes it any faster. There really is something wonderful about that, letting go, doing nothing, leaving nothing undone, all sorts of things that we think instinctively, automatically, habitually, are difficult, are actually easy. They're fine. I noticed I used to sort of resist the interminable dental care routine I have to do at night for my my genetically inherited dental situation takes me about, I don't know, seven or eight minutes brushing and flossing and brushing again. I uh, it's delightful. It's easy. It's a dance. Why did I think it was hard? So many things are like that, because we're tensing up and closing down in order to accomplish what we're afraid of. It's courageous to let yourself be a good for nothing,
but the question for all of us is, how do you move from this constant doing to not doing? How do you move from stirring the water to letting it settle? That's where I want to talk a little bit about silence. And by silence, I don't always mean absolutely no sound. I just mean that openness to what sound is there. Say quietness. It's the mind that's quiet. Although there's a lot that can be learned when we go into a silent place, a quiet place, go into the wilderness, into the woods, get away from all the man made sounds, and I'll talk about that a little later, but I want to read a little something from Anthony Demello. This is from a book of his. I never read the book. It's called seek God everywhere, reflections on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.
Goes like this. If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight, will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. In the beginning, we have to force us to be silent. Everyone who's done Zazen is familiar with that. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. If only you practice this untold light will dawn upon you in consequence. Well, after a while, a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise, and the body is drawn almost by force, to remain in silence.
Of all the senses, sound is the most basic. It's a point that Roshi Kapleau used to make again and again. I
It's an interesting sense, because it's wide open. We hear in every direction with sight. We can pick one thing to fix on. Suppose you can try to listen to just one thing, but that interrupts the whole flow. You can close your eyes, but how do you close your ears? They're always open there. There are many creatures that have no eyes do perfectly well without them, but everybody's got ears. I
It's nothing to create, nothing we have to shape.
Don't have to go out and get the sound.
It's already here. It's what's real.
When you have a technique for settling the mind or getting into some mind state breaks down after a while, but the senses are always there. Joh kava Zen wrote a book called coming to our senses, which works not only for sound, of course, but for all the senses. Works very well for the body, so many things that if you feel them in the body, get out of your head. You're in tune with what's actually going on. You're not making anything up. They say, The Body Keeps the Score. You I'm
really going to focus on sound today, and I ran into my searches across the interwebs. I went ran across a guy named Gordon hempton, an acoustic ecologist, really interesting guy, and there was a episode on Christa Tippett speaking of faith. I don't know if people are familiar with that podcast, but she interviewed him, and she asked him a bit about how he got started and what he does. What he does is this. He goes around all over the earth, all over the United States, in the cities and into wildernesses. And he's got a really sophisticated recording devices. And he records the sounds, sends a surf, the sounds of insects, of birds, water rippling. Dear calling in the distance. He says he does it because it helps him to listen more carefully. And you can actually find his recordings, I guess, on the podcast which I read the transcript of didn't actually listen to use my eyes. They play a lot of the little selections from some of the stuff he's done. One of the most interesting places he's gone to is a volcano, the crater of a volcano on Maui, an extinct volcano. The only active ones are on the Big Island. On Hawaii, you go down into that crater. Walls are up around you, and it's the quietest place he's found anywhere on Earth.
Makes me want to go there
anyway, Christa Tippett asked him how he got started, and he said, I grew up thinking that I was a listener, except on my way to graduate school, one time I simply pulled over, making the long drive from Seattle, Washington to Madison, Wisconsin, pulled over in a field to get some rest, and a thunderstorm rolled over me, and while I lay there and the thunder echoed through the valley and I could hear the crickets, I just simply took it all in. And that's then I realized that I had the whole wrong impression of what it meant to actually listen. I thought that listening meant focusing my attention on what was important even before I had heard it, and screening out everything that was unimportant even before I had heard it. In other words, I had been paying a lot of attention to people, but I hadn't really been paying a lot of attention to what is all around me. It was on that day that I really discovered what it means to be alive as another animal in a natural place, and that changed my life. I had one question, and that was, how could I be 27 years old and have never truly listened before? I knew for me, I was living life incredibly wrong. So I abandoned all my plans. I dropped out of graduate school, I moved to Seattle, took my day job as a bike messenger, and only had one goal that was to become a better listener,
reading. Reading into it. Think we could say he was in a Samadhi. He let everything go, just hearing,
no self, no doing, no thought, no abiding
remember from my childhood, long afternoons of pleasant boredom, just the sound of the house, tone of a room.
I was young. There was no pressure to get things done. I
no feeling I needed to get to the next thing I
it's not it's simple, isn't it? It's simple and it's it's available, but we get in our way. We get in our own way. Anybody who's been to seshin has probably had the experience of just feeling like they're spinning their wheels. Keep getting bit by the same self consciousness, sense of separation. So I practice is hard. A Catholic saint, it's a good day for Catholics today. St Francis de Sales, lived in the 15 and 1600s said, If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently, and even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed. Our habits of looking outside ourselves, our habits of trying to hold on to things of grasping and pushing away those have built up over an entire lifetime. You can't just tell yourself, okay, now I'm going to fall off the mountain. You have to practice. You have to do it wrong and notice and unrelax. Your grasp. It's a book by a Japanese teacher named uchiyami Uchiyama Roshi, called opening the hand of thought. And that's the image he uses. You're doing Zazen. Just present thought comes into the mind when you notice, just open the hand of thought, let it go. Don't need to do anything with it.
Another thing that can be really helpful is to focus on just one breath, if you're doing a breath practice. Passage I love from Van ta guna wrote a book called mindfulness in plain English. He's a Vipassana teacher, among other things, he says, don't think about your problems during your practice. Push them aside very gently. Take a break from all that worrying and planning. Let your meditation be a complete vacation. Trust yourself. Trust your own ability to deal with these issues later, using the energy and freshness of the mind that you build up during your meditation. Trust yourself this way and it will actually occur. Don't set goals for yourself that are too high to reach. Be gentle with yourself. You're trying to follow your own breathing continuously and without a break. This sounds easy enough so you will have a tendency to try to push yourself to be scrupulous,
exacting This is unrealistic. Take time in small units instead, at the beginning of an inhalation, make the resolve to follow the breath just for the period of that one inhalation. Even this is not so easy, but at least it can be done then at the start of the exhalation, resolve to follow the breath, just for that one exhalation all the way through, you will fail repeatedly, but keep at it. We
always want to get ahead of ourselves,
figure out how we're going to do A Dharma combat with Roshi Kapleau,
John Taran wrote there's a gate in the mind. He's a Zen teacher, and stepping through this is like leaving the palace that has come to feel like a prison on the other side of that gate, silence fills the spaces. Nothing is happening, but what is happening? There's no urgency. Nothing more is needed than what's here. In that silence and plainness, things step forward and shine by themselves. Though I enjoy seeing this, I don't make it happen. It's not something that can be controlled. Help is unexpected. Christianity is called grace. The deeper room he wrote, be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought. Why do you stay in prison when the door is wide open? Move Outside the tangle of fear, thinking, live in silence, flow Down and down in always widening rings of being you.
It somewhere. Anthony de Mello also said, eat nutritious food. Of course, it's a metaphor. If. An Evening spent scrolling on a device,
sitting quietly, taking things in, whether it's people we're with just the silence of the room, good music. So many things we can do that sustain us, that are good food. There's so many things that we fall into habitually that aren't. And as we all know, there's an entire industry set up to grab our attention and give us bad food.
So many people are caught up in the disaster that they see happening in this country. Really, people are seeing disaster no matter, no matter what side of the aisle, the political aisle they're on. Can't criticize people for wanting to know what's going on. It's, it's, I find it alarming. But how much time are you going to spend thinking about the outrage? Who are you going to let live rent free in your head, is that saying the best revenge is living well,
saying everyone has enough ground under their feet to do Zazen and
I want to read one more poem. This is by Pablo Neruda a Chi Lin poet, it's called Ode to silence, says, now we will count to 12 and we'll all keep still for once on the face of the earth, Let's not speak in any language. Let's stop for one second. Not move our arms so much. It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines. We would all be together in a sudden strangeness. Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales. The man gathering salt would look in his hurt hands those who prepared green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire victories with no survivors would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing. What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about. I want no truck with death. If we were not so single minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing. Perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the Earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Now I'll count up to 12, and you keep quiet and I will go,
