METHOD Sesshin Teisho by John Tarrant Roshi September, 1991  Day Two Perth, Australia Usually, around this time of sesshin we become aware that we have bodies and the bodies start complaining somewhat.  I thought I'd talk a little bit about ways of working with the body.  It's easy to ignore when you are following a spiritual path, but it doesn't hurt to be a bit sophisticated about the way we do it.  So when you have a lot of pain, there are a number of ways to deal with it.  One way is to just sort of grit on through, and, you know, that works for some people pretty much all the time.  If that works for you, that's fine.  I like you to be at least aware of other ways, however, because there are some things in life that don't work when we just blunder through them and it is good to discover other ways of dealing with what comes up. When the heroic path begins to fail us and our knees keep hurting even though we have lots of courage and effort, then one of the most interesting ways is to go into the suffering, and this is whether the suffering is physical or of the other kind. I'll talk about physical suffering first.  I think that's the easiest to deal with.  When we deal with that, we can get a sense of how to deal with other kinds of suffering as well.  One ancient Buddhist way of dealing with the body is the method of sweeping which I'm sure some of you have studied.  It is more popular in the Tibetan and Theravadan traditions than in the zen tradition, but it's known in all Buddhist traditions.  For example, if you have a pain in your knee, one way you can deal with it is just to begin sweeping your attention into you body. Usually you start at the top at the crown chakra.  It doesn't really matter too much, but why not?  You sweep your attention through your body and suddenly everything will become alive, and what you are focussed on will not be so strong because it is not the only in the field.  It is no longer in the foreground.  If your knee was hurting, it is no longer in the foreground.  If you were obsessed with something, that is no longer in the foreground and in the sweeping way you sweep through.  If you are going to do the full thing, you sweep slowly through your whole body (and it usually takes me about an hour, I guess) right down to the toes, and you'll find the kind of liveliness and that interchange between the mind and the body is always going on.  The way physical sensation turns into thoughts which turn into feelings which turn into physical sensation and so on.  The usual talkative quality of the body.  I think this method just gets you friendly with the body so that you realize that it is not something to be overcome, really, as the Buddha's vehicle itself. Without being there is no Buddha.  Without this narrow limiting body that is either complaining or singing, then there is no Buddha; without the eucalypt tree there is no Buddha. To return to the idea of the pain in the knee always, one of my favorites.  If you have a strong pain in the knee, you can go to it; if you have a headache, you can go to it, which is counter to the usual style of the ego.  Usually we flee suffering.  In zen, instead of fleeing life and muting it and dulling it, we experience it more fully and then it starts to flower.  It is like that with the pain. If you go into the pain, it's quite interesting.  Some pains, when you go into them, you just go straight into it and it will start to transform if you just hold it in your awareness.  Other pains will start to amplify intolerably.  You can tell already that method is about differentiation.  The method is about, well, what kind of pain is this, or what kind of time an I in?  Is this the time to go into the pain or not?  It's a matter of try it and see.  You know that good old Buddhist empirical sense of try it and, well, that didn't work. Try something else.  You'll find if you go into the pain, sometimes it will start to shift, just like that.  If it doesn't, you can also try leaving it, try embracing it, welcoming it.  Sometimes that will change something.  You can't be tricky, though, and embrace it so that it will change.  You just have to embrace it.  Too much ego in thatthe strategic approach. Then another interesting thing that I think is perhaps the most powerful of these.  Let's say you have a pain in the knee start up. Put your awareness into the middle of the thigh.  Something else is happening there.  Then sweep down through the knee into your calf, and maybe, sweep back up and feel what it is like to cross the border into the pain.  Pain, too, has borders.  When we are in pain, we think it fills the universe.  Pain always comes with a message, "I fill the universe and don't think there is anything else. It is the same with emotional pain.  We notice that pain, too, has margins.  We can cross them and we can cross them back.  This way you are less likely to damage your body because your muscles will relax. Then you'll know when your body is really serious and you need to shift, or when your body is just sort of complaining because you are sad or bored or whatever.  Gradually we get to be more friendly with ourselves in this way. There are other more elaborate ways of dealing with pain.  For example, if you visualize a thousand armed elevenheaded Kwan Yin with each head a different color and each arm holding something, then that Kwan Yin sinks into the top of your head and you become that Kwan Yin and it fills your body with golden light.  That will probably deal with the pain, too.  This is a legitimate meditation, but takes a while to get the hang of it.  To fill yourself with light can also work.  Some people are very visual. If you are one of these people, try that and then the pain just floats up and bubbles of light harming no one, abiding nowhere, getting transformed into light and joy with the sorrows and joys and obsessions, memories and all the other things that you know come up.  The dull torpor that takes us over. The bovine sort of ignorance that will hold us in its thrall for an hour, then another hour.  The intense longing for sleep.  The obsession of whether or not you are doing things right.  The obsession of whether or not somebody else is doing things right.  The desire for revenge. Many things come up in people.  Don't be too snobbish about whatever your particular passion is when it comes up.  You might as well have something, and you might as well work with what you've got rather than wishing you had somebody else's. But also, don't be afraid of it. The clear way in zen is to focus on the subject of the meditation, focus on the koan, focus on the breath.  Let it fill the universe and if you can do that, that's good.  There will be times when that seems to run out, if you are anything like me. Then it is sometimes helpful to get interesteda little bit interestedin what the condition is.  In other words, to break all the rules, which is a good zen thing to do, of course. Sometimes we will spend hours fighting something when we could have just noticed it for a few minutes and transformed it.  So try that.  I am not saying to be seduced by every passing thought or fancy.  But if something strong is coming up in you, begin to notice a little.  Does it have a name?  Has it been with you a long time?  Is it always with you?  When is it with you?  But it is a kind of undertone to you life?  Maybe it is a way of seeing things that comes up where you arealways a little bit irritable, or a little bit despairing, or a little bit anxious, a little bit critical.  So don't be afraid to just experience. What is it like?  What is the body like if you are angry?  How does it speak?  What images come to you?  That way you get familiar.  You can say, "Oh hello, anger.  Come in and sit down. I am doing my koan.  Why don't you join me?"  Which is a very different attitude to life than trying to cut it off all the time. Perhaps, later in sesshin I should speak about the virtues of cutting off, too, which has its own power, but now I think I want to convey the important point that nothing that comes up is alien.  Terence, I think, said, "Nothing human is alien." Nothing that comes up will overwhelm you, so you can afford to look at it a little bit. Different things, again, have different qualities.  It's like physical pain.  Some kinds of anxieties come up and grab people, so sometimes we are afraid to look because we will get caught in the spell and panic.  We are afraid that it will overwhelm us. But remember that a strong emotion always comes with a message that it fills the universe, but it does not fill the universe. There are always the trees, the flowers, other emotions, other people, other things in the world, other things that you like or dislike or are ignorant about.  When you can just get the awareness that this does not fill the universe, that awareness is your treasure.  It doesn't mean that you have to push the emotion away or do something about it.  That's too much of the ego level heroic knowing.  When something comes up, it is enough to just witness it; enough to say:  Oh, now I am anxious; now I am desperate to get enlightened, then I won't have to pay my taxes; or then I won't have to deal with my boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, exhusband, boss, child, whatever.  As the zazen progresses, I shall be able to deal better with the world.  So don't be afraid to experience what comes up.  If you are working on a great koan such as "Mu" or "Who is hearing?" or any of the great koans, you will find that your koan is right there.  This is not doing something different from you koan than in the deep world of meditation.  Things that are contradictory are no longer contradictory. Sometimes I think cultures have their different styles of obsession. One of the Australian styles is the sort of battler image, I think, where everybody sort of minimizes everything. Somebody wraps a motorcycle around a tree and some guy is bleeding and in pieces and everybody says, "Oh, a bit of a physic and he'll be up and about in no time."  But it also goes for minimizing joy.  Let's not enjoy it too much because somebody might steal it.  Let's not pull together too much because somebody might disappoint me.  Let me not try too hard because I shall feel worthless and ignorant.  So some people are not subject to strong passion, but to this kind of inertia.  This kind of rather dull, placid kind of security where we don't risk anything.  If that is your condition, too, then notice it. Notice how it kills your body.  Notice how it changes all human interactions that you have. Despair, another good one.  Despair says that things do not have meaning and that all the effort I have done is completely wasted; moreover, somebody is probably deluding me.  That's when it goes over to paranoid as hell.  Another personal favorite, paranoia is a kind of inverse enlightenment where everything is connected, but it is pointed at you.  Despair is the submission to the Cartesian universe where there are all these separate objects in space.  They just ban about and bang off each other where there is no meaning and no love and no grace in the world.  Notice that, too, if that comes up; it, too, seems to fill the universe, but does not. What we develop by this kind of noticing is something I think of as integrity.  Integrity, as you know, refers to wholeness and is associated with self knowledge.  Gradually, through the years of zazen integrity builds.  Integrity is like love in the long run. It has a lot to do with duration.  Falling in love takes no time just like enlightenment, but integrity takes time just like loving does.  It is something that endures and goes on; it comes from many small choices; it is like the incense ash, piling up with the years of zazen. Integrity, then, gives us an inner guidance.  When we put our attention inside, we find out, "Oh yes, this is what I must do."  This is the way to go and it is very different from impulsive decisions. Other times we go inside and integrity tells us, "I don't have a clue which way to go here."   Then our integrity will hold us so that we are willing not to know and we know that not knowing is the best we can do right now and we are willing, then,to trust it; that it, too, comes out of the Tao, out of the magical source of all things.  So we are not always soaring about and thinking zen is the best thing in the world and then the worst thing in the world, or taking it up and giving it up, the way many of us do often when we begin zen. Integrity relates to the healing and opening quality of zazen. Enlightenment deals with doubt and we see the glowing, shining quality of the universe and know there is a path.  Integrity holds us steady so that we can get to walk that path.  It is part of the road itself. The integrity is just as important. I think of the distinction between false and true suffering in this context.  True suffering is what we have because we are human.  The Buddha pointed out that suffering is the underpinning of being human. There is an old zen saying that there is no satori without tears.  If you didn't suffer, you wouldn't want to do zen anyway, and if you are not willing to suffer, you don't get so far in zen.  But if you are willing to suffer, that is the true suffering.  The true suffering is when we have a loss and we are sad, and I guess the false suffering is all the stuff we do not want to be sad and make a nuisance of ourselves to ourselves and others.  The false suffering is, you know, we have a bad day at work and come home and yell at somebody, or somebody leaves us and then we yell at somebody else.  We get angry when we are sad. The false suffering is the kind of turmoil we make around things and we are always making it.  I think our integrity lets us pick this out.  It tells us when it is appropriate to weep and when it's not; when we need to cut through and keep going; when the timing is right and we've been grieving long enough.  It is time to let go now, to cut off and then it is time to go into something.  That distinction has a lot to do with false and true suffering. We attend to process in zen.  Zen and Buddhism, generally, are process paths.  They are not so much bodies of theory, of books, of belief, but practices like gardening or healing.  Practices can't really be taught that well in schools.  They are done through sweat and attention to process or having a mentor.  And eventually by osmosis. So we learn to attend to process.  We may have started out attending to our lives so that later on we might% 0*''live, but we come to see that attention itself is living. Awareness itself is full of grace and joy and beauty and then we come to the fullness of life.  When we are willing to have our true suffering and to cut off our false suffering, life is very rich.  The bread, the tea, love, the rain, sorrow, all are much stronger tasting and all have their own value and beauty. Even the hardest things have their value and beauty, even the occasion of suffering, even somebody dying, even somebody dying hard. (Not everyone dies gracefully as in the hospice.)  Pictures.  So everything becomes alive because we participate with it.  And then we realize that integrity is self knowledge.  The self is much wider than we thought.  The self is everybody in this room sweating away, all our dear companions of zazen, and how when I sweat away, in some way I hold up other people, and when I'm weak, they hold me up. One of the things about attention that I think is very important, that's a small thing but we often don't do well, is to appreciate the joy when it comes.  Life is full of joy and we can step past itfinding what does not fit; finding what there is to complain about.  It is as if there is a kind of resistance in us that snatches joys.  A critical voice that says, "You are not doing it right," or "Do it this way, always," commenting on everything from zazen to breakfast.  To how the leaders are doing; to how somebody you love is doing; to how somebody you can't stand is doing, and that's not useful.  That critical voice comes up over and over again.  I think you know what I mean by that. Most people have some experience of it and in zen that's where you need to wield the sword.  You need to notice that critical voice when it is coming in.  People often misidentify that with something; with virtue and zen because it's saying sit up straight, do this, do that, and they think that that is zen, but that's not zen.  That's just the critical voice being a pain. You can understand it has nothing to do with that deep inner enquiry, that deep inner reverence that is the true spirit of zen, which says, "Oh, what is this coming up?" rather than the critical voice which says, "I shouldn't be feeling, I should be doing `Mu'."  I shouldn't be experiencing this, not realizing that. That voice itself is what takes you farthest from your koan.  So wield your sword on that.  Then the joy rises naturally.  When the pain is there, you work with the pain, and you'll find the joy is within the pain. Joshu had a wonderful old koan called, "The Oak Tree in the Garden." Somebody asked him what is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West?  Bodhidharma, as you know, was the person who brought zazen from India to China, one of the many people who did that, the one who is now remembered.  So what is the meaning of all this work of the Way.  Joshu said, "The oak tree in the garden."  When he said that, he pointed out the great strangeness of the Way.  How the most familiar thing, when we really look at it, fills the universe and changes us, and it is not what we thought it was.  It is something magnificent, full of life, and each moment of zen is that way.  So when I say appreciate your joy, I just mean be open.  Do not fix too much around the thoughts that come up.  When we are aware of them, we have integrity.  They roll through eventually.  We don't fix on them so you have this scan roll in the mind.  Keizan said there is always something in the mind and that's true.  Even if it is only the idea that there is nothing in the mind, or that there shouldn't be something in the mind, or whatever it is.  But there is this slow, beautiful roll that is life itself.  The process itself.  The Tao talking to itself which is what we all are really.  Buddha nature conversing, playing, full of light and joy. Please keep up your zazen.