Kaizan Doug Jacobson began practicing Zen in 1974 with Dainin Katagiri Roshi in Minneapolis; he had Jukai in 1977. A householder, father, contractor, and civil/tunnel engineer, following his retirement, he became a full-time resident at Jikoji Zen Center* near Los Gatos. He received priest ordination in 2010 and Dharma transmission from Shoho Michael Newhall in 2015. He has led many sesshins, monthly zazenkais, periodic seasonal nature sesshins, and weekly dharma discussion groups. He also helps to maintain and develop infrastructure at Jikoji, getting his hands dirty as a form of Zen practice. In addition, he assists prisoners with Buddhist practice.

Full Transcript

Thank you, Doug. Good morning, everyone. Catherine and Nancy, Pamela, Bill, Bob, Tim, Emmy, Susan and Susan. I think I got everybody here. Thank you for your piece this morning, Bob. She who fears suffering suffers from fear. Good morning.

I'm going to start with a story from the Hidden Lamp. It's called "Ling Zhao's Helping." One day, Layman Pang and his daughter Ling Zhao were out selling bamboo baskets. Coming down off a bridge, Layman Pang stumbled and fell. When Ling Zhao saw this, she ran to her father's side and threw herself to the ground. "What are you doing?" cried Layman Pang. "I saw you falling, so I'm helping," replied Ling Zhao. "Sadly, no one is looking," remarked her father, Layman Pang.

That's one kind of grounding. Joan Sutherland, the teacher, reflected on this and she writes, "The Pang family was the embodiment of enlightened householder life in China since the eighth century, living modestly, deeply committed to the way and to each other, full of humor and insight, unabashedly eccentric. During their lifetimes, a revolution in Chan was underway and awakening was now understood as something that happens in relationships, in encounters and conversations. The earliest koans or records of such encounters and the ones involving the Pangs show that deep realization is just as possible in domesticity as in monastic life, for women and for men."

So today I want to speak about grounding, as well as about diligence and empathy, persistence and heedfulness. All qualities that are essential in this path in walking the way. In this story, Ling Zhao threw herself to the ground as a way of empathizing with her father. That's one way to get grounded. There are other ways to be grounded in this body. Part of this working with other people, empathetically, really requires us to be grounded in this body.

One Vipassana teacher talks about there are four ways of doing that. One is grounding in gravity, the body in gravity and feeling gravity. How our whole body reacts to how we're sitting, how we're standing, how we're lying down, and just fully conscious of gravity. Continuously. Another way is through feeling the spine. Some people find that just being attentive to their spine and keeping a subtle sense of how the spine is with that kind of continuity helps keep them grounded. The other is just in the senses of our hands and how it feels like when we hold our hand in mudra. You can feel the light touch of the hands touching. You can feel the temperature. You can feel some breeze maybe coming across your hands. You can also feel moisture. And returning to that sense of groundedness helps us be stable. And a fourth way is through attention to breath.

So maintaining this continuity brings deeper connection to this moment, this presence. And this continuity does some magical things sometimes. For example, one time I took a winter trip across country and I needed to drive all through the night. And though visibility was not much because it's dark, one thing I could maintain my attention to, my concentration to, maintain a continuity of attention to was the white line on the side of the road along the freeway. And I found that just maintaining a slight attention to that line maintained my attention and abated any sleepiness. So this continuity of attention to gravity, to our spine, to our hands, to our breath, to something helps us maintain and bring our evenness, our serenity, our even our equanimity moment to moment. It stays and shows up as we need it.

Now, this last week we had a visitor here. A gentleman from New Mexico came to visit, stayed over a couple nights. And when I met him, he asked me, the first thing he asked me, he said, "Are you one of the caretakers?" And in a brief moment, you know, a caretaker, he's calling me a caretaker. And that puts a time stamp on his experience here at Jikoji because he was a former resident here 35 years ago. More recently, people were called residents. But at the beginning, we were called caretakers here. And to me, that's a really powerful word. My response to him was, yes, I am a caretaker. Well, I'm a lot of other things too. But it was sufficient to say I am a caretaker here.

And this term has been used a lot in this valley for nearly 40 years. But it's also been probably the mindset of this valley for a dozen millennia by the peoples who have occupied this valley before us. So we are caretakers of this land we occupy, and we need to honor the people who occupied this space and took care of it before us. We need to honor those who brought forward the knowledge and wisdom of the masters of all traditions and grateful for all the predecessors for taking care of things and seeing things as it is.

When we caretake because we are where what we do benefits others, we do it for not just ourselves, but for the many. And yet sometimes when we're involved in activity, we're doing it for someone else. We're doing it for the company. We're doing it for our boss. We're taking care of a client. To have some kind of spaciousness around this caretaking is really vital. Because we're not only caretaking for this space and place, but for the community, the village, the habitat, the wilderness, our caretaking can go very deep.

The Buddha talked about heedfulness, which is one of the aspects of the diligence necessary for caretaking. There's a conscientiousness and a concern. And it's in the Appamada Sutta. And it goes like this. At Savatthi, as he was sitting to one side of the Blessed One, King Kosala asked, "Is there, Lord, any one quality that keeps benefit secure, benefits in this life and benefits in lives to come?" And the Buddha replied, "There is one quality, great King, that keeps both kinds of benefits secure, benefits in this life and benefits in lives to come." "So, Lord, what is that one quality?" The King asked, and the Buddha replied, "Heedfulness, great King. Just as the footprints of all living beings with legs can be encompassed in the footprint of the elephant, and the elephant's footprint is declared to be supreme among them in terms of its great size. In this same way, heedfulness is the one quality that keeps both kinds of benefits secure, benefits in this life and benefits in lives to come."

"The Noble One is endowed with verified confidence, not content with that verified confidence. He puts himself further in solitude by day and seclusion by night. For him living thus heedfully, joy arises. In one who has joy, rapture arises. In one who has rapture, the body becomes serene. When the body is serene, one feels pleasure. When one feels pleasure, the mind becomes centered. When the mind is centered, phenomena become manifest. When phenomena are manifest, he is reckoned as one who dwells heedfully."

This heedfulness is described for the practitioner. Here at Jikoji, caretaking involves showing up for whatever comes down the road or up the road or off the trail. And hopefully it is a place where we can be heedful, diligent, joyful, and serene, though there are many times that's not the case.

So heedfulness in this Sutra is talked about in terms of performing deeds of merit. But merit for whom? And I see the merit as being for the general good. When we are absorbed in our work with concentration, we bring care and deliberation. We bring thoughtfulness and consideration to the process. When we persist, we persist with our concentration, with our intentness and industry. We persist with scrutiny of what's going on and further study. We persist in the immediate situation. And when we do, the broader scene opens in its fullness.

So maintaining this diligence, maintaining the continuity of heedfulness, helps us bring our serenity moment to moment, brings it forward. And it brings deep grounding to what shows up. These are all elements that help define the many factors of awakening. Part of awakening is first to restrain our senses. Second, it is to understand our four frames of reference, our body, our mind, our feelings, and the mental qualities we have.

The factors of awakening also encompass right conduct in three ways. Abandoning wrong conduct in deeds, wrong conduct in speech, wrong conduct in thought, and developing right conduct in doing deeds, right conduct in speech, and right conduct in thought. And this leads to the seven factors of awakening. These seven factors include mindfulness, analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture, serenity, concentration, and equanimity.

These factors of awakening are what we work with. And mindfulness, when we are steady and without lapse, we can pursue mindfulness to the culmination of its development. In the analysis of quality, of the qualities, we comprehend with discernment to the culmination of its development. Persistence, the unflagging in effort to comprehend with discernment and with a steady mind to the culmination of its full development. Serenity, when we're enraptured, the body grows calm and the mind grows calm to the culmination of its development. With concentration, one is at ease in body and mind and can concentrate to the culmination of its development. And with equanimity, we oversee the mind concentrated with equanimity to the culmination of its development. So these seven factors all help us to bring what's best to us and others to foster awakening.

Now, many of us are engaged in training for better communication and it really takes a lot of work, especially in development of language. But it also takes an understanding of questions and questioning. So in Buddhism, there are four kinds of questions. There are questions we need, questions that need categorical answers that are explicit and direct. There are questions that need analytical answers, needing further analysis and logical reasoning. There are questions that really only need a counter question to a confused thinking or a hidden agenda when we can see that. And then there are questions that are better left unanswered or to be put aside because answering these questions lead to more mental effluent.

So the first set of questions, questions needing categorical answers can act as a focal point for appropriate attention, wise reflection and the proper approach. And appropriate attention needs to be developed step by step through identifying the hindrances and factors present in what we experience. Appropriate attention is developed by inquiry into the causal functioning of the hindrances and the causal functioning of the factors of awakening. Appropriate attention feeds the factors of awakening and targets the hindrances and inappropriate attention starves the factors of awakening and enhances hindrances.

So the language of connection requires many things like a core connection to body mind through this continuous mindfulness. The selflessness of where and the awareness of vast interdependence. The language of connection also requires empathy, which is the silent presence with another. The language of connection also requires the ability to identify and see feelings and use language to express them. And connection is also involves the ability to see and identify needs and also the ability to see and identify hidden agendas. And these last three or four things are really difficult for me, having been brought up in the language of empiricism, of talking about things of matter and to actually identify feelings as very confusing for me sometimes, or identifying needs, or even getting a sense of hidden agendas. But all that just takes practice. And being a young guy, I've got lots of time left and I'll work hard at it.

So to broaden this scope a little bit to our world, there are communities around the world that have managed to live together and figured out how to live in peace both internally and externally with their neighbors. And there are many, many countries around the world today that are that way. In this time where authoritarianism and other hateful and mean approaches, nationalistic approaches happen, it's just important to remember that we do live on a planet that has many countries, communities that actually do live together in peace with within and with their neighbors. The European Union is one, considered one. The island of Mauritius, I think it's off of Africa, the east side of Africa, about 1200 kilometers off of Africa, is a multi-ethnic country that has maintained a deep commitment to taking care of being considerate to each other, of cooperation, sharing, and kindness in how they operate every day in their society.

So one question I have, a rhetorical question, is so in the long term, how do we cultivate this interpersonal and community-wide consideration that's needed for stability locally and more broadly in the world? So my answer to that question is through diligence, caretaking, and heedfulness that we are able to bring about a world where we can all live together.

So I'd like to end with a question or an example of a question, an appropriate response to a question. And this again comes from the Hidden Lamp. And this section is called "Dipa Ma and the Thief." A student of Dipa Ma had his radio stolen from his car, something that had happened to him several times before. When he told Dipa Ma, Dipa Ma burst out laughing. "Well, what's so funny," the student asked. Dipa Ma answered, "You must have been a thief in a former lifetime. How many more times do you think you will need to have your radio stolen? What did you do? What was your reaction when the car was broken into?" The student replied, "I was really angry because it happened so many times." Dipa Ma, she looked at him in amazement. "You mean you didn't even think about the man who took your radio, how sad his life must be?" She closed her eyes and started chanting quietly to herself, offering metta for the thief.

So that's where I'll end for the talk. Thank you for listening. And I welcome your thoughts, questions. And challenges.