Thank you, Dan. So one of the things that Suzuki Roshi brought was Zazen. And I think many of us, for many of us, Zazen was one of the central things that we associate our practice at Zen Center with. And so I thought it would be very important and useful to try to talk a little bit about what was Suzuki Roshi's teachings on zazen, on shikantaza, his practice of zazen, his practice of shikantaza. And in talking about this with Reb, who was quite willing to tackle this subject, he also seemed to indicate that if he talked about this subject, there'd be different points of view on this topic. And I thought that was quite nice, the idea. I like this idea that there's different views of Suzuki Roshi and that everyone, as I said earlier, has a particular piece of him, a particular angle on him.

[01:02]

And I think it's very useful to hear all the different angles. So what I have done then is to ask two people then to talk about this topic, Reb and Mel. And we'll see what happens. Thank you, Reb. Yes, please. So, shikantaza, it literally means just sitting, and for the last few hundred years, in Japanese Soto Zen, The understanding of many priests is that Shikantaza is actually Dogen Zenji's central practice. And Suzuki Roshi seemed to, in a sense, agree with that, that Shikantaza was our central practice.

[02:07]

But the way he talked about it, the unique aspect that I hear him presenting... which I haven't seen too much in other treatments of the practice of just sitting, is that he says, you know, shikantaza zazen is to just be yourself, just to be ourselves. And I don't know if people have seen other Zen teachers put it that way, but that was his particular contribution that first comes to mind. And if I might again address my name that he gave me, Tenshin Zenki. Tenshin means Reb is Reb, but Zenki means...

[03:09]

the whole works. And the whole works means everything, but also it means that the whole works. So it has what he called a standard English meaning and a colloquial meaning. Colloquial meaning is the entire universe. Standard English is that the entire universe works. And where does the entire universe work? It works through each person being who they are. So my name actually is a gloss for Shikantaza. And so again, Suzuki Roshi says that to just sit is to just be yourself. However, he points out that it's pretty difficult, and I would say that we cannot, I cannot, you cannot, I challenge you, I cannot, you cannot just be yourself by yourself.

[04:14]

It's something that we cannot do on our own. We can only be ourselves in a face-to-face meeting with another being. And also, we actually can only do it in a face-to-face meeting with another being who wants to fully be herself by meeting you. We may sit in zazen and do a good job of being still and upright and present and awake and that's good. And that's, in a sense, that's like the interpsychic aspect of it. But we can't actually fully be ourselves unless we go see the teacher and meet the teacher. Only when we meet another person can we fully be ourselves. And Suzuki Roshi was a teacher who said, you know, sometimes you need to argue with your teacher.

[05:26]

That's okay. Sometimes that's right. In other words, sometimes you have to go to your teacher and present yourself to your teacher and your teacher says maybe you're wrong and you need to say, I don't agree with you. Sometimes that's what you need to do. He also said that, however, that you also need to surrender to your teacher. I would say that to fully be yourself, you both have to assert yourself completely, sometimes disagree with your teacher at the same time that you surrender to your teacher. And your teacher, of course, needs to bring himself to meet you and needs to surrender to you. The only way that I can fully be myself is if my teacher comes and meets me. So in my story that I told you about going to meet Suzuki Roshi, I made a big effort to bring myself to him. But as soon as I made this strong effort to assert myself in his presence, I also felt very vulnerable.

[06:38]

and wanted to get away. Now, if people who didn't present themselves strongly to him didn't need to... When I didn't present myself strongly to him, I didn't try to get away. Because it's only when I present myself strongly to him that I feel vulnerable. So I think one of the ways I would talk about Shikantaza is you strongly express yourself. As Suzuki Roshi says, you fully express yourself. But not just by yourself, but in your teacher's face. And your teacher meets you by fully expressing herself to you. And in that meeting, your teacher is vulnerable to you, and you are vulnerable to your teacher, and you're both on the verge of running away from each other. And you're both strongly giving yourselves completely to each other. you're both surrendering. And in that vulnerability, you're open not just to this person there, but you're open to a lot of other things too.

[07:50]

When you really assert yourself, you're really vulnerable. And not just to what you'd like to be vulnerable to, but to everything. So Shikantasi is not something that I can do by myself. It's not something that Suzuki Roshi could do by himself. It's something that we do together. And we do it together when we both bring ourselves completely to the meeting and completely assert ourselves and completely recognize each other. And I recently saw a good example of that in the Olympics, particularly the women's figure skating.

[08:58]

I felt that I saw Shikantaza, or participated in Shikantaza, these young, these girls actually, 14, 15, 16-year-old girls, they strongly express themselves. They assert themselves with extraordinary power and strength and precision. After practicing for many years, for many hours, for many years, they can express themselves very, very strongly. And at the most powerful self-expression, when they're flying through the air, doing these incredible feats of turning through time and space, at that very moment, they are vulnerable to the whole world. They're vulnerable to falling on the ice. They're vulnerable to losing the Olympics. A billion people are watching them. 19 judges are watching them. But only that kind of effort draws that kind of attention.

[10:05]

People who make less effort like that don't draw the attention. So they were both expressing themselves with such power and also completely vulnerable. And we all that watched that shared in that we were making it happen by watching them. They couldn't have expressed themselves as fully as they did without us watching it. And we couldn't have watched them if they weren't expressing themselves that fully. And when they interview these girls and ask them what they were thinking about when they were dancing, when they were dancing on the ice, as they're approaching some of these moments of extreme expression, where they do these feats of total expression, as they're just sort of skating along the ice, which is very easy for them, before they fly,

[11:09]

they say what they're thinking about, almost like sometimes that they're planning what they're going to do. But when they actually take off, they have no report about what it was like. Nobody knows what's happening at that moment. When I was talking to Gil about this conference beforehand and his different points of view, he said that famous example of, what do you call it? Oh, the blind people? The blind people feeling for the elephant? He said, so maybe that's what we'll be doing with Suzuki Roshi. I thought about that some more, and I thought, well, aside from calling us blind people, I thought, you know, there really isn't a Suzuki Roshi there.

[12:12]

There really isn't an elephant. We touch it and say, oh, that's a trunk, or no, we say that there's a rope, or that's a big leaf, or that's a wall. But there isn't really, in this case, an elephant there. And that's really the case with Shikantaza. There's not actually something there that's Shikantaza. It's just that we enter it by giving ourselves entirely into a situation where the other comes and meets us entirely. But since the other meets us entirely, it can't be a thing. What we do is not Shikantaza. Shikantaza is the combination of what we give and what meets us. And that is not a thing. Nobody knows what that is. No Buddha knows what that is. But we can throw ourselves into it. But again, you don't just throw yourself into it by, okay, I'm going to throw myself into it.

[13:14]

You've got to have somebody there meeting you. And that's why, again, we don't want to throw ourselves into it because that thing that we want to meet us is something we really care about and we're afraid of. of what that thing will do when it comes. But we still have to make that jump into this, the unknown reality of Shikantaza. There's that story about Yaoshan sitting in Shikantaza and his teacher says, what are you doing? And his teacher is Shirtou. And Yaoshan says, I'm not doing anything at all. And Shirtos says, well, then you're just idly sitting. And Yashan says, if I were idly sitting, I would be doing something. Shirtos says, you say you're not doing anything at all.

[14:16]

What is it that you're not doing? And Yashan says, even the ten thousand sages don't know So the ten thousand sages don't know what Shikantaza is, I don't know what it is, but I have a feeling of what the door of it is. The door of it is that I give myself completely to every person I meet, and I need every person I meet to do the same. And I think that's one way to think about what Suzuki Roshi meant in that little thing we heard about when you understand what Shikantaza is, your daily life changes. Then every person you meet is somebody you're giving yourself entirely to and who you need to come and meet you that way. So when you understand Shikantaza, you're going to want to leave town fast.

[15:20]

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