The mind of faith, the body of faith. In particular, the trusting presence. Trusting being upright. And I would say the faith of being upright rather than faith in being upright. Not like you're here and you have faith in something over there called being upright. I'm talking about the faith of being upright.

[01:04]

Which means that you trust being upright and in trusting being upright you have the faith of being upright. You're upright and that is the faith. It's pure and simple. And also you trust purity and simplicity. There are innumerable practices in the Buddha Dharma but they're all one simple unity. Trusting that. I know a woman and she's been coming to Zen Center a long time and I don't know if she actually ever really had much trust for sitting upright, I'm not sure, but she recently started taking horseback riding lessons and in that world she seems to have gotten a feeling for our practice.

[02:43]

She said that when she's riding the horse the instructor says, sit the horse! Sit! So you're riding the horse, right? She's riding the horse and what's she doing? Is she sitting? No. What's she doing? She's trying to hold on to the horse. She's gripping it with her legs, she's holding on with her hands and she's wishing she would stay on the horse. That's not what the teacher wants her to do. The teacher says, sit! Let go of gripping the horse with your legs and hands. Let go of all attachments and sit. The sitting keeps you on the horse. There is a thing called the sitting of the body on the horse and that sitting sits right down on that horse and keeps you on that horse. There's a sitting that holds you there, not the gripping.

[03:47]

If the horse feels you gripping, the horse says, this turkey is out of here. We got a scared rider. Good. This is not a human. This is a wimp. This is a scaredy cat. Get this thing off my back. But when that horse feels a sitting person, that person drills into the back. The horse says, OK, let's go. You communicate with the horse with your legs and your hands and your butt. Your butt tells the horse, I'm here and I'm not going anyplace. Your hands say, let's go here, let's go there. Your legs say, I've got confidence. The horse knows what to do already. You don't teach the horse what to do. If the horse doesn't know what to do yet, it's not ready to be ridden. But at a certain time, horses know how to do everything that horses do. They know how to walk, stand, sit, lie down, trot, canter, gallop, and maybe a few other tricks.

[04:52]

They know that. All you got to do is tell them which one with your hands. But you have to sit the horse. And that sitting is your confidence. So now this woman knows about Zazen. She finally learned what sit means. We can be converted to the practice in many ways. This was hers. Give up holding on and trust the sitting. Someone mentioned yesterday how wonderful in a sense it is to be here in Tassajara and feel the support of the group. Then she said, well, I feel the support of the group.

[05:53]

It's so wonderful. But also, I feel this group is dragging me down, pulling me down. And I thought, hey, that sounds like something familiar. It sounds like the Earth. The Earth does that, too. It supports you. Your whole life, it supports you. And it pulls you down. doesn't necessarily pull you down, it pulls you, it's always pulling you, pull, pull, pull, it's big and it pulls, but it supports you at the same time, it does both and so does the Sangha. The Sangha pulls you and supports you. How does the earth pull you down? How does the ground pull you down? The group The earth, the world, the world also supports you. The world isn't the earth, isn't the Sangha.

[06:55]

The world is the world. The world is birth and death. It also supports you and pulls you, pulls you even stronger than the earth. Even if you're not on a planet, the world still pulls you. Even if you're in a spaceship with no Sangha there, the world pulls you. It pulls you and supports you. How can you be free of being pulled down by the earth, pulled down by the group, pulled down by the world? How? What's the answer? What? Let go. Yeah, let go, which is the same as be upright. Be upright is how you don't get pulled down by the earth. Be upright is your response to that pull. so that the pull doesn't pull you down. It's the response to the pull that makes you feel the support of the pull rather than the defeat of the pull.

[07:59]

By being upright in the face of the gravity of the planet and the gravity of the group and the gravity of the world, by being upright you give up all leaning. If you lean, then eventually the world will pull you down. If you lean, the group will pull you down, and the world will pull you down. You'll get tired from the pull. If you sit upright, the pull doesn't tire you, because sitting upright, it doesn't pull you straight up and down. And by being upright and not being pulled down, You pull the earth up. You pull the group up and you save the world. You lift the world up. The world supports you, the world pulls you, and your uprightness pulls the world up out of itself and sets it free.

[09:05]

The woman said, sounds like a Bodhisattva. If we lean, we'll get pulled down. The only thing that can pull us down is our leaning. My wife once gave me a compliment. She said, you're always like this. She held her hand vertically, but you're always ready to go like this. She put her hand horizontally. I'm always ready to go flat, take a nap, Both. I'm upright and I'm ready to go down. But going down is not being pulled down. I want to go down sometimes. It's good down there. It's relaxing. No problem. But it isn't because the world pulls me down. I want to go down. I'm ready. I can feel it right now.

[10:12]

It'd be nice. Anyway... Right now I'm sitting up and that's good too. For a while. When we die, it doesn't have to be a defeat. It can be a happy leap back onto the planet. Time to go flat, back into the earth, bye-bye, boom! Another joyous moment. But if we lean, then death will be a defeat and birth will be a defeat. We'll be pulled out of intermediate existence and dragged back into the world by our leaning. Oh no! Greed for birth has got me again. Faith in being upright is faith in having a mind like a wall.

[11:14]

It's faith in not getting excited about the objects of thought. It's faith in not getting excited about being excited. It's faith in not being depressed about being depressed. It's just letting excitation be excitation and depression be depression. Just like a wall would. I was talking to somebody about this and Talking about what's the mind like a wall, you know? Mind like a wall is, if you go up to a wall, you can write on the wall, right, you know, excitation on the wall. What will the wall do? It will receive the handwriting. Depression, write depression on the wall. Write turbulence, write confusion, write delusion. What does a wall do? It's written upon. Our mind, our body is written upon, constantly written

[12:19]

Delusion, arrogance, enlightenment. What is it? Does the wall sort of say, ooh, good, they wrote enlightenment on me today. Well, now they're wiping enlightenment off. The people are coming and cleaning the graffiti. Oh, now they wrote delusion. Oh, how terrible. No, the wall just takes it. Just like the earth. And then this person talked to me, he said, I forgot what he said exactly, but it was kind of like, la-di-di-bu-di-di-ba-ba-ba-ba-di-di-bu-bu-ba. And he said, would that be like a mind like a wall? And I said, no. He said, would that be like not activating the mind around objects? I said, no, that would be activating the mind around objects. Any technique you have for how to have a mind like a wall, Mind like a wall doesn't have any techniques, doesn't have any way to be a mind like a wall.

[13:25]

You gotta give up all ways of being that way. Then you got it. You also have to give up all ways of not being that way. Again, do you trust giving up all ways to be who you are? Do you have that kind of faith? This guy was talking to me, he's kind of like I was when I was a young person. He had a long list. But they were coming right up out of him, popping off him. He didn't drag them in the room. They oozed out of his enthusiastic mind. So I'm going to tell you a few other things he said. He started to quote to me letters from his friends. He said, a friend wrote to me, and there was a quote in there from Maharishi somebody or other. Maharishi said, meditation has no thought activity, or something like that, or in meditation there's no thought activity.

[14:34]

And I said, well, that's right, meditation is not thought activity, has no thought activity, however, we have to be clear. When people hear that they often misunderstand what that means, or I should say they often understand it in a way I don't agree with, let's put it that way. And here listen to the way Dogen Zenji talks, he says, well this part's okay, for practicing Zazen a quiet room is suitable. Most people understand what that means. That means the world, right, is suitable. This is a quiet room, this whole planet is a quiet room. You understand that, right? And that's not the problem. The problem is… this is a kind of tough one too, eat and drink moderately. That's a problem. Some various interpretations of what that means. You know, the Tenzo here has one interpretation, former Tenzos have other interpretations, the diners have other interpretations. Anyway, that's a tough one too, but this is the ones that are really tough.

[15:42]

Cast aside all involvement, cease all affairs, do not think good or bad, do not administer pros and cons. cease all movements of the conscious mind, the engaging of all thoughts and views. That's the part that people think that in meditation there's like going to be no… that you're going to be sitting there and there's not going to be any engaging of thoughts, there's not going to be any calculations, there's not going to be any pros and cons, there's not going to be thinking right and wrong, it's going to be like kind of like… I don't know what, what's that like? Antarctica or something like that, you know. but not even like wishing it was warm, just like frozen. And that's meditation. Well, that's right in a way, except that's not what it's like. It's like this. There is tremendous activity all around, all penetrating, interpenetrating, mutually creating each other. There's engaging of thoughts and views. There's tremendous delusion.

[16:42]

There's tremendous turbulence. There's tremendous activity. And right in the middle of that, is the meditation. It's not separate from it. It's not the same as it. It's not different from it. It is simply that there's no activity about all that activity. The meditation is that what leaves the whole world alone and is entirely, absolutely free of it. And nobody does that, leaving it alone. And it doesn't do anything to anybody else. It's just a meditation. There is no thought activity in that meditation, but that meditation is not the slightest bit, not a hair's breadth different from all that activity. If it's the slightest bit different from the activity, that's another activity. And there is that going on. There's all the activity in the world plus there are some people in the world who are always slightly different from all that activity. That's their thing.

[17:43]

That's not meditation. That's a very subtle form of mental activity. And there are some people who are, that's subtle, you know, they always keep a slight difference from, you know, the turbulence. So, it doesn't mean that you do anything to it, it doesn't mean the stuff's not happening, it is the non-activity part of all the activity, which is always, always there. It can't not be there. The activity depends on the non-activity. So trusting that non-activity. You don't have to trust the activity. It takes care of itself. But somehow, because that's where the habit energy lives and plays out itself. But there's almost no habit energy in the meditation because the meditation is not mental activity.

[18:49]

Zazen fundamentally has nothing to do with mind. You talk about the Zen mind. Zen mind is not mind. Zen mind is the mindless, non-thought activity of all mind and thought activity. And it's always there. Do you trust it? It's hard to trust it because the mental activity says, don't trust that, get to work, think. Just like riding a horse, see, you can't trust sitting. You gotta hold on with your legs and your hands, or strap yourself down there somehow. You can't trust sitting. So, people also many times ask, I love this question, keep asking it, how do you know when you're present? How do you know when you're being upright?

[19:52]

Well, you don't get to know. If you know that you're upright, you're leaning. You're leaning off. Uprightness is, you know, it's like light, you know, and when knowing comes and just passes right through it or just falls off the edge of it, there's no knowing in the uprightness. Uprightness is the uprightness of knowing. If you know that you're upright, you're leaning to the side and looking back at your uprightness and saying, hey, pretty good, I'm upright. You got to lean some way or another to get to some perspective, some distance on your uprightness. That's not being upright. You don't get to know about being upright. You just get to be upright. If you want to know that you're upright, then you get pulled down by the world. I shouldn't say if you want to. If you want to and indulge in that desire, then the world's going to get you. So you don't get to know. Being upright, as the Ancestor says, has nothing to do with knowing or not knowing.

[21:02]

It doesn't have to do with that. It has to do with confidence. It has to do with no doubt. Confidence that you can live in the present. Confidence that it's alright to give up past and future. Not push them away. They're there. Hi, here's the past. Hi, here's the future. They're there, but you give them up. Not banishing, not punishing, not destroying preferences, but giving them up. You trust that you can actually live in the present and forget about past and future. Just let them buzz around in the trees. Just let them strut up and down the stairs. They got their own life. You don't have to take care of them. You can just live in the present. Trusting the present means you trust the Genjo Koan.

[22:06]

And Genjo Koan means it's a name of a thing we read here. It's a scripture that we read. And it's also a reality. Genjo Koan is sometimes translated manifestation of ultimate reality, but the way it was originally used was in a Zen story. A monk came to some teacher and the monk presented something or other and the teacher said, Genjo Koan. In other words, the Koan is solved. It means already Koan. It means already you got the Koan. It's already solved. That's what Genjo Koan means in original use. The Koan is ready. It's cooked. Being upright means you trust. The Koan is already. This is already the Koan. This is the realization of the Koan.

[23:11]

This is the realization of the Koan. Like this. Want to know what it's like? Not like anything. This isn't like anything. It's just this. Trusting being present means you trust this. And in the Genjo Koan, it means you study the teaching in that scripture too. The teaching in that scripture says, what does it say? It says, here is the place. And it could have said there is the place, but it didn't. It could have said that is the place. It could have said heaven's the place. It could have said, contrary to popular opinion, hell is the place. Bodhisattvas don't say hell's the place or heaven's the place. That's not their trip. Bodhisattva's thing is here is the place. If they're in hell, guess where they say the place is? If they're in heaven, where's the place? If they're in the human world, what's the place?

[24:14]

The place is here. That's trusting Genjokan if you actually feel that way. You trust presence. I happen to be here. This is the place. And here here the way unfolds. The way unfolds here. It unfolds here. It doesn't like unfold from here. Like starts here and then actually unroll and over there it actually unfolds. And not that either. It unfolds right here. Do you trust that? That's trusting Genjo Koan. Do you have the faith of ready, get set, here it is. Do you have this faith? The faith is here is the place. Do you have that faith? That's a tough faith. Tough faith. Here is the place.

[25:15]

Do you have the faith? Here. Here. Here. The way unfold. Here the way is unfolding. Do you have that faith? That's the faith of Zazen. That's the faith of upright sitting. You got to get that one. No substitutes will be accepted by Buddha. And this kind of here is the place you can't even know that presence. You can't know the here. You can call here nicknames if you want to, but you can't actually know it. You can talk about it, but you can't know it. And again, it's the confidence of not knowing it.

[26:18]

You can realize it though, and you can be confident about it. And that confidence is, well, it's wonderful. It's marvelous. That you should care for me. It's awfully nice. It's paradise. That you should care for me. I'll learn the rest of the words later. In the meantime, it's awfully nice that you should care for me. What about doubt? Now, some people think doubt is not so good. Well, doubt is not, when you have doubt, doubt's doubt if you have, if doubt appears and you grab it, you got it, okay?

[27:22]

You got it, it's got you. If doubt arises and you grab it, You're not sitting the horse anymore. You're trying to hold on to something. Then you're off. You're caught. But that doesn't mean you don't have any faith. It just means at that moment you don't have faith. Just admit that moment you slipped, at that moment you said, I got to grab this doubt. It just wouldn't be right. It would be too arrogant for me not to have a little doubt. So I'll grab it. And sure enough, here I am. in doubt land. It doesn't mean you don't have any faith. It just means at that moment, you are grasping and caught by, it's a mutual thing, doubt. You grasp doubt, it grasps you. That's all. It doesn't mean it's all over. And even if you have perfect faith, doubt is always available.

[28:24]

Everything's available. To a person who has faith, the entire world is at your fingertips. Doubt's right there. And one of the ways you can test your faith is by going over to doubt and getting real close to it and not grabbing it. Get real cozy with it and just like, ooh, so close and not touch it. In that way, the doubt can like purify your faith. If you have to keep a few inches or a few miles between you and doubt, you're going to be insecure. The slightest distance from doubt is another way to grasp doubt. Distance from doubt, grasping doubt, pretty much the same thing. Being close to doubt and not doing anything about it, that's faith in being upright. Just like being close to all your preferences. but being upright, right in the face of your preferences.

[29:29]

Oh, I prefer this person. Yes, I have a preference for this person. Well, who wouldn't? So cute. And I have sort of a preference for this person in a negative direction. And everybody would. They're so cruel. There's the preferences. It's not that the preferences throw you into confusion. It's if you have the slightest preference. If you hold the slightest preference, if you grasp the slightest preference, your mind is lost in confusion. But preferences are just part of what prove the pudding of faith, whether the faith can stand up in the preferences. And if you don't grasp the preferences, your mind is not lost in confusion. If you do, you're immediately lost in confusion. Just a tiny, tiny little grip, tiny little holding to a preference, you're gone. I was thinking, well, I have a preference for, for example, my wife.

[30:35]

I kind of prefer my wife over not my wife. So then I think, well, geez, I better hold on to that preference, otherwise what will happen to my wife? But my wife can live even if I don't grab my preference for her. And letting go of my preference for my wife, I can enjoy my wife even more. I haven't told her about this. She might say, don't get tricky, just prefer me and hold on to it. But no, actually, I don't think so. I think letting go of my preference is the best relationship I have with her. Then if my preference goes away, which it might, if she starts acting certain ways, it isn't like then my relationship is destroyed because my relationship is not based on preference. If I am upright with her, I will never abandon her.

[31:39]

If I lean, there are certain situations where I will abandon her. If you lean into your preferences, with your favorite person and things change, you will abandon that person if they change in a certain way. But if you're upright with the people you prefer and they change into something else which you do not prefer, you won't run away from them. Your relationship with them when you're upright is not sentimental. It's not established. It's faithful. And then you will never abandon them, no matter what they turn into. And sometimes, these dear friends turn into great demons who are teaching us essential, intensely hot Dharma. We need to hear it and stay upright with it, not say, hey, you're not supposed to change into that, I'm God here.

[32:41]

No, you stay there and listen. So faith in being upright means that it's all right to let go of your leanings and preferences and it's all right that you have leanings and preferences. That's part of letting them go is it's all right to have them. It's okay that you prefer certain things. It's even okay that you prefer certain races or certain classes. It's okay if you like rich people better than poor people or poor people better than rich people. One of Buddhist disciples like poor people better than rich people. So he tended to go beg in the poor neighborhoods. Buddha said, no, they made a rule. Don't just beg from the poor. Of course, most people just beg from the rich. Don't just beg from the rich. Beg from everybody. It's okay to have preferences, though. Just don't indulge in them. being upright, having faith in being upright, you trust that you don't need to indulge in your preferences.

[33:49]

You won't lose your identity as a person who prefers this over that. You won't lose your exquisite appreciation of Japanese culture or whatever. You'll still think it's totally cool, but you don't hold to it. That's faith in being upright. Doubt is food for faith. Despair is nourishment for liberation. Everything is food for being upright. all likes and dislikes. So, you have a day ahead of you where all you're being asked to do is cook two more meals.

[35:08]

and sit upright during the whole process. Oh, you also have to do a Kuksh Chunda. Don't miss that. All you have to do today is be upright. That's all you're being asked to do, as far as I know. Is anybody else asking anybody to do anything else besides that? Here, in this little valley? You have the opportunity today to practice the greatest thing that a human being can possibly do. You have the opportunity here to do the highest possible thing. So, congratulations and enjoy the ride. You can actually realize this path. can actually enter the Buddha way, right here.

[36:13]

It unfolds Zen is so conveniently located. So conveniently located, one-stop shopping.

[37:03]

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