The Mind of Zen, a weekend of teachings with Richard Baker Roshi. This is the first talk of the series, and the talk was given on the evening of September the 19th, 1997, at the Maytripa Retreat Center, Healesville, Australia. And I teach in Germany so much, if I pause for a long time, I'm waiting to be translated. But you're... Your English is enough similar that I think I can speak with you, though I've been learning words like breaky. Is that right? For breakfast? Okay. It's nice for me also to be in this new place.

[01:01]

I guess this is the biggest seminar you've done here so far. So it's, I guess, an experiment to see how, if you're all going to be comfortable and warm enough and fed and so forth. And I've, since I'm an old, I'm pretty old, I guess, I've started about 10, at least 10 centers here. All of them that were intended to continue are continuing. So I'm quite familiar with this situation of trying to get a place together and making work. In fact, we have a new place as of a year and a half or a year or so in Germany now. And we have some of the same problems of getting mattresses and rooms and getting things cleaned and so forth. Now, I'm not going to try to establish some kind of traditional monastic practice for these three days or Sashin-like atmosphere, because I feel that's a little coercive to create a monastic-type practice and then

[02:26]

You're not committed to that kind of practice. And then try to... Please come in. There's some seats up here in the front. So I think not everyone still, there's what, 10 people who haven't made it yet or so? Yeah, I think every question should have been one. Oh, okay. So I would let, I'll let you... individually and together establish some kind of atmosphere of practice here.

[03:35]

Although we'll have meditation practice again, but I don't want us to sit in straight lines and all that stuff. And in fact, tomorrow would be nice if you sat up closer, because I'd rather have some... the more contact I can have with you, the more... the more we can discover something about the mind together, I think. Now, not only is a place like this an experiment and for you to have a Zen guy in a Tibetan place, but although Mahamudra and Dzogchen are quite similar and may have similar origins, they certainly have similar origins in the teaching. But how to develop a practice for lay people that has been primarily developed for monastics?

[04:52]

I don't want, although Mahayana Buddhism is ostensibly for laypersons. That's one of the reasons the bodhisattvas have hair and jewelry and so forth. It emphasizes that the bodhisattvas are not monks. In fact, adept practice has been mostly developed for monastic life. so but i'm i i believe that it's got to be possible should be possible to have a lay practice for uh an adept practice for lay people can you hear me okay in the back all right because we're not amplifying right all right fine good i don't have a voice like my mother's my mother would be

[05:57]

we'd be in a movie theater and she'd whisper something to me and people way in the back would say, shut up! But usually I can be heard. Now, monastic practice is also taught very slowly. especially in Zen, and by indirection and presence. And we've only got till Sunday afternoon sometimes, so, you know, we can hang out together, but I don't think, and my experience is, that teaching by indirection, you know, there's famous statements like, why do you honor your teacher? Because he never, he showed me only half. or he never revealed the teachings to me, etc.

[07:05]

But I think my experience is that if I teach in that way, which I do more in our two more monastic centers, when I teach that way in a lay situation, mostly people don't get it. So what I will try to do this weekend, and it of course depends a lot on you, is find some way to speak about the practice so we have a shared understanding of what we're talking about. And that gives you some permission to explore the practice on your own. Because mostly you'll be practicing on your own. So you need some permission and some intuition and some idea of where you're going and some idea, some ability to have a face in the practice.

[08:08]

Now, we in the West like practice to be... In general in the West, we think of religion as... Something that's got through conversion or by grace or it's feeling emotion and so forth and it's we don't think of it as being intellectual and analytical, but Buddhism is profoundly analytical and Zen as well and Usually it's not taught that way to lay people One it's considered in Asia that lay people don't have the capacity for the analysis and But I think, particularly for us in the West, we need to know something about what we're doing. At least at the level of permission of how to bring attention to our views of practice.

[09:20]

The Eightfold Path, the first teaching of the Buddha, starts with right views. And it starts with right views for a reason, because there is no thinking that you do, there is no activity that you do, there's no perceptions that you have which aren't rooted in views. Views condition every perception you have before you perceive. So one of the basic things in practice is to develop what we could call an accurately assuming consciousness. a consciousness that, before thought arises, has accurate views, assumptions about how the world exists. But that means we have to develop some kind of antidotes to the views we have, because usually we have rather mixed-up and somewhat delusive views. Let me just give you a simple example.

[10:32]

It's generally assumed by us that... What is your name? Elizabeth? That's my daughter's name. I have a daughter who's taller than me named Elizabeth. Please come in and there's seats up here in various places. We generally assume that I'm here and Elizabeth's over there and space separates us. Now, that we take that for granted, that we are separated by space. But this is a cultural idea.

[11:36]

It's not a fact. On some level, it's true. But space also connects. And we know space connects. It's obvious. I mean, the moon is not up there on a string. The moon is somehow connected to us as we... and see in the tides and in our reproductive rhythms and so forth, obviously there's these connections, but we are not taught by our culture to observe these connections. So what I'm pointing out here is that a simple thing like space separates things that we take for granted is a view, it's not a fact. Space also connects things. Now, what mind knows, experiences space connecting?

[12:39]

Now, it would help me to know something about you and what you want to do and why you're here. I think this evening I won't try to discuss things with you, but we'll have to find out. I'm stopping for a moment, changing the subject, obviously. Or am I? And we have to work out some kind of schedule of what we want to do. Let me ask, how many of you are... Do any of you have no or very little experience with meditation? There's one, two, three, some. So some kind of meditation instruction would be useful probably for some of you. In any case, Zen is a very unprogrammed in a way, but physically precise form of meditation, which if you're not familiar with Zen practice, I should probably give you some

[13:55]

meditation instruction. And we have to decide how much we want to meditate. And I don't like forcing people to meditate. I mean, if you come to a sesshin and you know what you're getting into, or you have some vague idea, you will be expected to follow a schedule which, you know, is fairly rigorous. We start sesshin, which is seven days of meditation. from... We start at, you know, somewhere around 3.30 in the morning and go till 9.30 at night. And we eat our meals in meditation posture and so forth. So... So I'm willing to do that with people. But I'm not willing to ask you to sit. As soon as you start feeling uncomfortable, I'm going to ring the bell. Because I don't... I don't want to, I don't like to make you suffer. Unless you're willing to suffer.

[15:04]

So I'll probably start each period, each section of our day with a period of meditation that'll be 20 or 30 minutes, something like that. And maybe we'll have some meditations, which are two or three minutes or five minutes, interspersed with some discussion. But I'm seeing this weekend, and again, I don't know what, this is what I, you know, I've been doing this kind of thing for 30 years or so. So, I have some habits. But at the same time, I'm quite open to doing it. I mean, Australia is a new land. I went out for a walk in the forest here. I've never been in such a forest. One, it's all the same kind of trees, practically, and you have the noisiest birds I've ever... I mean, there's one big white bird called a yellow-breast, yellow-crested, silver-crested cockatoo.

[16:09]

I mean, my gosh, it was the noisiest thing I've ever heard, practically. And then some birds, it sounded like howling monkeys. And some bird that sounds like a chainsaw. The lyrebird. Anyway, so maybe I'll be studying the Aussie mind and you'll be studying the Zen mind. Because every situation is unique. So I'm quite open to finding out how you would like to do this. And I guess you don't have many Zen teachers or much coming to Australia. And so maybe you have some ideas of what you'd like to do. But my... and I've talked to the cook, so let's try to work out a schedule now, all right?

[17:11]

The cook likes to have breakfast around 8 or 8.30. So if we had breakfast at, say, 8 or 8.30 to 9, 9.30, we could start at 10 tomorrow morning, unless you think that's too late. And then we'd go till about 12.30 and we'd have lunch around 1 to 2, say. And then... I don't know, I have... This must be the first time for some of you to be here, isn't it? Yeah? So maybe you'd like to look around and not just be stuck in this room all the time. So maybe we'd start at 4 so you could take a walk or something like that. And... Then go till 6.30 or somewhere like that. And then have dinner from 7 to 8 and nothing in the evening unless you wanted specifically. We can decide tomorrow if you want to do something in the evening.

[18:18]

And Sunday, rather the same. It says on the schedule that Sunday goes till 5 in the evening. I'd call that late afternoon. I don't know. In Australia, maybe you'd call it evening. In Germany, they call it evening. But if you have to travel back to Melbourne, is that the right way to say it? Melbourne? Not Melbourne, right? Melbourne? Maybe it should end a little earlier than five, but we'll see. We can discuss that Sunday afternoon. Now, if any of you would like a specific period of meditation, say a 40-minute period of meditation, we could do that if you'd like at, say, 7.30 tomorrow to 8.10 or something like that. Would anybody like a specific period of meditation in the morning tomorrow? Okay. So for those of you who would like, let's see, if breakfast is at 8.30, we could start at...

[19:27]

seven forty-five and uh okay so let's start at seven forty-five we'll have a period of meditation for those of you who'd like but again it's voluntary it's a period of meditation and then we'll start at ten and that's in relatively involuntary of course i can't force any of you but i mean let's all try to start at ten Any comments or any ideas about anything? What's a great relief? Oh yeah, okay. What? A good time? Half past four? I usually get up at half past four or earlier. I did this morning. Uh-huh.

[20:31]

Well, you and I, we could meditate together here tomorrow morning if you want. But the room is open. If you want to come at half past four, you're welcome. But there may be nobody here to ring the bell. Okay. Anything else? Yeah. I don't know. Richard? Anything you'd like. I don't care. That's appropriate. Yeah. I mean, I'm often called Baker Roshi, but that's up to you. I don't mind one way or the other. That's what my teacher asked me to be called, but that's... Yeah. Yeah. Call me Dickie Bird, if you like. Yeah. I don't know.

[21:34]

Okay. I mean, if we're formally practicing together, there's certain rules about it. But, you know, we're just having something of a good time here for the weekend, I think. Now, is Zen mind... We have a good title here, Zen mind, the mind of Zen. Is Zen mind ordinary mind? Yes. Is ordinary mind Zen mind? No. So that's something maybe we could try to look at. What is that distinction? Now mind is not a thing in yogic culture. Buddhism is part of a larger yogic culture that seems to stem from India, some thousands of years, at least two or three, before Buddha even.

[22:45]

And yogic culture is part of the daily life of much of Asia. I'm speaking about yogic culture and I'm speaking about Zen Buddhism as a practice, a particular kind of practice within this larger sense of yogic culture. And within yogic culture, mind is a relationship, not a thing. The word in Japanese, similar word in Chinese for mind is shin, which means both heart and mind. So mind is already a relationship between something like thinking and something like caring.

[23:48]

And physically it's experienced as the area of the face and the senses. and the area of the heart and the solar plexus. So this area and this area physically in an established relationship is mind in yoga culture. So heart and mind are the same thing, but we can emphasize one more than the other. But there's no real thinking without caring And there's no real caring without certain mental activity. And one of the basics of yoga culture is that there's no mental activity without a physical component. And there's no physical, sentient physical activity without a mental component.

[24:53]

Now, if we're thinking off the top of our head, if you're just thinking thoughts, you know, sort of, that aren't grounded in feelings they're not grounded in the body, this in a yoga culture would not really be considered thinking. It's some kind of bizarre mental activity that's, you know, that enervates you. So how do, so we could have another question here, how do we ground our thinking, discover our thinking, inseparable from feeling? And how do we feel, physically feel our thinking? Because this idea of mind in Buddhism and in yoga culture is not separate from feeling and physicality. You know, when my teacher first came to America, someone asked him, what do you notice most about being in America?

[26:08]

And he said, everyone does things with one hand. And so I thought about that and I began to watch him. But for instance, if I pass this to you, what is your name? Lina. I pass this to Lina and I hand it to you like this. This is not typical of a yogic culture. What's more typical would be for me to pass it like this to her. And it's the reason, I mean, Japanese and Chinese people, you know, are smart enough to know how to make a handle. But they don't put handles on cups. And they don't put handles on cups for a very specific reason. Because in a yogic culture, you want to make things that require you to do things with your body. And until recently, Japanese houses, and China was that way for a long time, are designed so that you have to be in a meditation posture.

[27:18]

Seiza, it's called, where you sit with your legs back, is an ancient meditation posture going way back in China. And they designed their houses and buildings to make, so that it was a cultural decision to make the whole culture meditate, whether they wanted to or not. So the houses are basically a kind of furniture that you have to sit on the floor. You can't wear shoes inside a traditional house. And you don't heat the house. If you said to a Japanese person in a traditional time, well, geez, it's freezing cold in here. Why don't you heat your house? They'd say, the house isn't cold. Your body's cold. So they have many ways to heat the body. And if you notice, if you... at least in America, you can always see who are the... It seems to work up to about Nisei or Sansei, third generation, maybe second generation. Japanese, they will... We can always tell native Japanese because they'll hold a cup like this when they drink tea, and then they'll hold it here, and they drink tea, and then they hold it here.

[28:28]

What are these chakra points? And so when you start to do things with two hands, where you pick something up, you're activating the chakras as well. So this whole sense of the chakras as areas of the body where intelligence and consciousness and awareness can be present is taught through the culture, not just through Buddhism and through practice. So if I'm... Say that I pick this up and I hand it to Lina, is that right? and I hand it like this, I'm handing, passing myself to Lina, not just the cup. So when you have breakfast tomorrow, somebody asks you for the salt, you can pick it up and hand it to them, and you turn your body toward them, and there's almost a feeling of there's a light here, and you turn the light of your body to the person, and you pass them on. It's a very different feeling than just, here's the salt.

[29:31]

Or, you know, sliding it across. I mean, that's fun too, you know. But this whole sense of passing yourself, using the salt as an excuse to pass yourself. That's typical of yoga culture. Typical of particularly Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, which... What I'm teaching, what I'm practicing is really... Chinese Buddhism which was developed in the 6th to 10th or 11th centuries and I've been in China recently for a couple months and a couple years ago and in many ways I felt strangely closer to that culture than contemporary Chinese many of them are quite separated from it for a number of reasons But this is what my life has been, is to try and discover what this is.

[30:38]

And what's characteristic of Chinese and Japanese, Korean and so forth, Zen and Buddhism, is that it's a kind of, we could say, large population urban shamanism, if that makes sense. It's a body culture that Chinese is a particularly, we have a very particular mental culture, and Asia has a very particular body culture, and probably Japan has the most developed body culture. So Zen is particularly emphasized as this body culture. So I'm just trying to give you an introduction this evening to get us started with this sense of mind, the mind of Zen.

[31:53]

What we mean by mind, I'll try to give you some definition, a fuller definition of mind tomorrow. I also want to give you a sense of how to not only develop the sense of mind as a relationship, but let's... OK, let's... Right now we're in the... There's... You are not separate from mind right now. Mind is a relationship. It's this kind of relationship I talked about, a physicality of coming to know caring and thinking, physical and mental, as a spectrum in which you can find and feel an emphasis.

[33:09]

But mind is also a relationship in that mind arises through an object of consciousness. Or let's say consciousness arises. If you're asleep and you start to wake up, you hear an alarm clock, you hear the birds, you hear a silver-crested cockatoo, and this... It's okay. It's okay. This brings up, we could say, a silver cockatooed mind. So there is some... So mind is a relationship and the situation you're in is always changing. It's always something unique. If I close my eyes now and open them and I see you, a mind arises through the synergy of you all together and through the specificity of you individually.

[34:25]

And it's a very particular mind that I've never felt before. It's absolutely unique. And if I close my eyes and open them again, it will be different. The room is different, the weather is different, all those eucalyptus trees out there, etc. Each moment is unique. And if someone else comes into the room, there will be a subtle shifting that is outside our consciousness. But there will be a subtle shifting and another mind is established which includes this new person who came in. Now, in general, just as we don't, or in a similar way to, that we think that space separates and we don't experience space connecting, we tend to, we have a habit of trying to establish a continuity of mind through predictability.

[35:37]

that in a way our mental health is based to a significant degree on our mind being predictable. And if we start having unpredictable thoughts and unpredictable states of mind, generally we call a therapist or a psychiatrist or we get anxious or something like that. So we put a lot of energy into making our mind predictable, but in fact our mind is always unique. So you're putting a lot of energy into trying to find a sameness and a continuity that's predictable when in fact Mind, I think we can see, mind is always unique because mind is a relationship that arises through the particularity of each occasion.

[36:39]

Now, I would suspect that some of you find this hard to believe or hard to understand. get a feeling for because we have such a habit of feeling ourselves and our situation as the same. It doesn't make too much difference what happens tonight because I'm the same person and I'll go to bed and I'll get up tomorrow morning and I'll be the same person. But when you have that feeling, basically you're not in the present at all. You're living in some kind of karmic story and And our sense of continuity, our sense of self, is primarily based on maintaining our story. Now, this becomes quite important when you're practicing Zen and such things, because in yoga culture, your story is not very important. But psyche is story.

[37:45]

And so I think one of the cautions we have to look at when we're practicing Buddhism in the West is that we don't use Buddhism to... Well, there's two dangers. One is we use Buddhism to repress our story, or we don't create the conditions through which our story matures, or... we don't really see that there's an alternative to continuity established through our story and so we never really understand Buddhism. We actually use it as a kind of way to get a feeling of well-being, but we don't let it interrupt our sense of who we are through story. Am I making any sense? Yeah. So I think if Buddhism is well taught, we have to find a way to mature our story and also see that there are other possibilities of continuity other than just through your story.

[38:50]

And when you discover that, it's an immense freedom. So one of the things we should look at tomorrow as well is if each mind is unique, and instead of putting a lot of energy into maintaining a sameness of mind, I direct that same energy into the uniqueness of each state of mind,

[39:53]

Then how do I establish my continuity? How do I get a feel for mind or a sense of the presence of mind? How do I establish a continuity and presence that's independent of story? That would be another thing we could look at. And continuity in tape. You look great with your earphones on and everything. I want a pair too.

[40:33]

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