The Gift of Attention

0:00 This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Report an error in the passage at 0:00 Highlight the passage at 0:00

0:16 Good evening. It's a great honor to be back here at City Center, Suzuki Roshi's home temple, this house of beginner's mind. Report an error in the passage at 0:16 Highlight the passage at 0:16

0:35 I serve the community here in a few ways. But tonight, I'm not here in any of those roles. I'm really just here as one student offering a few words to other students in the hope that we can sit together and maybe leave a little time at the end for questions, conversation. Report an error in the passage at 0:35 Highlight the passage at 0:35

1:06 I thought I'd begin with really the most ordinary thing in the world. Think of the last time you were speaking with someone you love and you felt their attention start to slide. Report an error in the passage at 1:06 Highlight the passage at 1:06

1:22 Perhaps in the middle of your sentence, perhaps to the phone in their hand. It's a very small thing. They can still hear you. They probably could repeat your last words back to you. But something had been withdrawn, and you feel it immediately, the same way you might feel a cloud pass across the sun. Report an error in the passage at 1:22 Highlight the passage at 1:22

1:53 And now think of the opposite, that rare, almost startling experience of being given another person's whole attention. Report an error in the passage at 1:53 Highlight the passage at 1:53

2:10 as though for a few minutes. you were the only thing in the world. Report an error in the passage at 2:10 Highlight the passage at 2:10

2:18 We sometimes remember those moments for years. we remember who gave them to us. It's one of the greatest gifts a human being can receive. Report an error in the passage at 2:18 Highlight the passage at 2:18

2:32 And I don't mean this as a figure of speech. Your attention is quite literally a gift. In the oldest... And most precise sense of that word. And learning to give it may turn out to be the whole of our path, disguised as the simplest thing in the world. Report an error in the passage at 2:32 Highlight the passage at 2:32

3:04 In the Buddha's teachings, the very first of the perfections, the first practice of bodhisattva is to take up, is dana. That's usually translated as generosity, giving. When the Buddha taught ordinary people like us, He did not begin with emptiness or with meditation. He began with dana. It is the ground floor of the whole building. Report an error in the passage at 3:04 Highlight the passage at 3:04

3:35 Before ethics, before concentration, before wisdom, there is simple giving. Report an error in the passage at 3:35 Highlight the passage at 3:35

3:44 And traditionally, dana is taught in very concrete terms. You give food to the one who is hungry. You give shelter to the one who is exposed, medicine to the sick, robes to the monastics, a coin to someone begging at the temple gate. Report an error in the passage at 3:44 Highlight the passage at 3:44

4:01 There is the gift of fearlessness, the sheltering of a frightened being, and there is what the tradition calls the highest gift of all, the gift of the dharma itself, which is why an evening like this, at least when it goes well, is also meant to be an act of giving. Report an error in the passage at 4:01 Highlight the passage at 4:01

4:24 Our own ancient teacher, Ehe Dogen, took up dana as the first of what he called the four methods a bodhisattva uses to guide beings. Report an error in the passage at 4:24 Highlight the passage at 4:24

4:35 In a small and beautiful text, The Bodhisattva Shishobo. And what he says about giving is not quite what you would expect. He says plainly, giving is non-greed. Report an error in the passage at 4:35 Highlight the passage at 4:35

4:53 To give is simply not to covet. To launch a boat and to build a bridge, he writes, are themselves the perfection of giving. Report an error in the passage at 4:53 Highlight the passage at 4:53

5:04 And he insists that the gift need not be grand. To offer a single line of the teaching, he says, To leave flowers to the wind and birds to the season. Even, he says, to give something to yourself. That too is dana, because the size of the gift is not the point. The point is the opening of the hand. Giving for Dogen is a form of non-attachment. Every genuine act of generosity is a small rehearsal of the one thing we most need to learn, which is how to let go. Report an error in the passage at 5:04 Highlight the passage at 5:04

5:47 There is one more thing Dogen says about giving that I like to remember. He says the gift need not even be yours to begin with. To carry someone across on a boat, to pass along a line of truth you did not invent, to leave flowers you did not grow, all of this is giving. Because what you are really offering was never the object in your hand, it was the turning toward. And he suggests that a true gift moves in both directions at once. Report an error in the passage at 5:47 Highlight the passage at 5:47

6:22 The one who receives is helped, but the one who gives is also quietly loosened, changed, carried a little further along the way. Report an error in the passage at 6:22 Highlight the passage at 6:22

6:33 Giver and receiver are joined for a moment by the very thing that passes between them. I always loved that he begins with a boat and a bridge, the plainest infrastructure of an ordinary life. Report an error in the passage at 6:33 Highlight the passage at 6:33

6:50 And there is a boat and a bridge we have very nearly stopped building. Report an error in the passage at 6:50 Highlight the passage at 6:50

6:57 Here is the strange thing about our particular moment in history. objects of generosity have not gone anywhere. There is still hunger. There is still cold. We should still give food and shelter and money, tonight and always. Report an error in the passage at 6:57 Highlight the passage at 6:57

7:13 But something new has happened underneath all of that. In the last 20 years or so, a number of companies, many not far from here, discovered that the scarcest and most valuable resource on Earth is no longer oil or gold. It is human attention. Your attention. Report an error in the passage at 7:13 Highlight the passage at 7:13

7:35 worth trillions of dollars built on a single activity, the capturing, holding, measuring, selling of the attention of human beings. Report an error in the passage at 7:35 Highlight the passage at 7:35

7:46 It is the most sophisticated machinery ever constructed for taking something from you that you did not even know you were giving. And here is what follows from that. Report an error in the passage at 7:46 Highlight the passage at 7:46

7:57 If attention has become the most valuable thing we possess, then attention has become the most precious thing we can possibly give. Report an error in the passage at 7:57 Highlight the passage at 7:57

8:06 In an age when a thousand brilliant machines are competing for your eyes and your mind every waking second, to turn toward one human being and give them your whole, undivided, unpurchased attention is an act of enormous generosity. Report an error in the passage at 8:06 Highlight the passage at 8:06

8:27 It may be the truest dharma we have. It costs you the one thing that the entire world is now trying to buy, but it is yours to give. Report an error in the passage at 8:27 Highlight the passage at 8:27

8:38 You can put the phone face down. You can close the laptop. Turn your body toward the person in front of you and give them that very thing everyone else is bidding for. And it's not merely a kind gesture. It is that first perfection. It is our practice. Our tradition already has a name for this and a face for this, and she is here with us, Kanzayan Avalokiteshvara Kannon Guan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion. Report an error in the passage at 8:38 Highlight the passage at 8:38

9:14 The Sanskrit name, Avalokiteshvara. It's usually rendered in English as the Lord who looks down, the one who observes the world and its suffering. But as the name traveled east into Chinese and Japanese, it was heard a little differently, Guan Yin, Kanzean, Kanan, the one who perceives the sounds of the world, who hears the cries of beings. Report an error in the passage at 9:14 Highlight the passage at 9:14

9:40 Looking or listening, seeing or hearing, either way, her compassion is not, first of all, A feeling or even an action, really. It is an attention. In some images, she is given a thousand arms with which to act, but in the open palm of each of those thousand hands, there is an eye. Report an error in the passage at 9:40 Highlight the passage at 9:40

10:03 A thousand hands to act with, and in every one of them, an eye to see with first. The image is itself the teaching. That true help begins in true seeing. That the hand cannot move rightly until the eye... In other images, she is simply listening, her head inclined a little to one side, the way your own head inclines toward someone you are truly hearing. Report an error in the passage at 10:03 Highlight the passage at 10:03

10:35 The whole of her awakening is depicted as perfect attention turned toward suffering. She does not repair the world from a safe distance. She hears it. She sees it. She attends to it completely. That attending is the compassion. Report an error in the passage at 10:35 Highlight the passage at 10:35

10:59 I learned what this is worth and what it costs long before I understood what I was learning. In fact, it is where my whole life as a Zen priest begins. Report an error in the passage at 10:59 Highlight the passage at 10:59

11:10 A few of you have heard this story. I told it once at Tassajara a few years ago, and I sometimes tell it at my retreats. When I was in college, my roommate got quite sick. His girlfriend and I tried to look after him and ourselves, but he only got worse, and finally we had to take him to the university hospital. Report an error in the passage at 11:10 Highlight the passage at 11:10

11:33 They admitted him at once, and I could tell from how quickly they moved that they were quite worried. They may even have said we should have brought him sooner. I think they did. But what did we know? We stayed with him late that first night until the nurses asked the two of us to go home and let them do their work. Report an error in the passage at 11:33 Highlight the passage at 11:33

11:53 And so we went back to the dorm and tried to sleep. When we came back in the morning, he was miserable. He had barely slept himself. They had put him on a respirator, and it was loud and uncomfortable. And he just felt awful. So that evening when the nurses came to tell us visiting hours were over, I asked whether I might stay through the night with him just to keep him company. Report an error in the passage at 11:53 Highlight the passage at 11:53

12:19 And they said no. And I asked again and promised I would be no trouble at all, I would not get in their way, that I would simply sit in a quiet corner with my friend. Report an error in the passage at 12:19 Highlight the passage at 12:19

12:32 And they said no again. No visitors after hours. I pressed a third time. In Zen, you're supposed to ask things three times. Report an error in the passage at 12:32 Highlight the passage at 12:32

12:43 Surely, I said, there must be some exception. And the nurse again said, no, there were absolutely no exceptions, except members of the clergy. Report an error in the passage at 12:43 Highlight the passage at 12:43

12:56 And something lit up in my head, except members of the clergy. Because as it happened, I knew a member of the clergy. I was taking a class at college that semester in Zen Buddhism, and the teaching assistant was a graduate student from Japan who had trained as a monk at Daitoku-ji. One of the great Rinzai monasteries in Kyoto before deciding he wanted to come to the West and earn his doctorate. And his phone number was printed right there on our syllabus. Report an error in the passage at 12:56 Highlight the passage at 12:56

13:29 So I called him. And it was, in retrospect, a strange thing to do. But somehow it didn't feel strange to a 19-year-old on a cold winter night with a friend in the hospital. Report an error in the passage at 13:29 Highlight the passage at 13:29

13:43 And so I asked him if I could borrow his robes. And for reasons I still don't understand, He said yes. So every night that week, I put on a monk's robes and went and sat through the night with my friend. In the morning, his girlfriend would come and take my place, and I would walk back to the dorm and go to sleep. Now, I had no medical training, of course. Report an error in the passage at 13:43 Highlight the passage at 13:43

14:10 I had no monastic training. I had no idea what I was doing. And I really didn't do anything at all except be there hour after hour so that he would not be alone. Report an error in the passage at 14:10 Highlight the passage at 14:10

14:27 In the end, he recovered. And I gave the robes back, and we're still friends. But I discovered that I liked myself in those robes. I liked who I was when I sat there quietly, paying attention. Report an error in the passage at 14:27 Highlight the passage at 14:27

14:43 And it took about 10 years, but eventually I was formally ordained and received robes of my own. And now, after all that time, I've come full circle. I've started serving as a volunteer chaplain at Stanford Children's Hospital, near where I live, where, among other things, I sometimes sit with Buddhist families. Report an error in the passage at 14:43 Highlight the passage at 14:43

15:05 I was just there earlier today. And again, what is it that I give them? Report an error in the passage at 15:05 Highlight the passage at 15:05

15:13 Almost nothing. I've still never studied medicine. I usually don't even ask what is wrong. But it's not actually nothing. Report an error in the passage at 15:13 Highlight the passage at 15:13

15:25 Because I come and I spend time and I give them my attention. Report an error in the passage at 15:25 Highlight the passage at 15:25

15:34 And that's not nothing at all. And you don't need a hospital for this. The same gift is waiting for you at your own dinner table, for your child, for your partner. for the friend who calls when you are tired and have nothing left. Report an error in the passage at 15:34 Highlight the passage at 15:34

15:53 You put your phone face down, or you do not. your attention is there with that person or it is not. The whole of it is that simple and that difficult. Report an error in the passage at 15:53 Highlight the passage at 15:53

16:16 The old texts say that giving is perfected, that it becomes truly the paramita of giving, only when three things fall away. The idea of the giver, the idea of the receiver, and the idea of the gift. As long as there is a me graciously bestowing something on you, then I am still standing in the middle of the transaction, quietly keeping score. Report an error in the passage at 16:16 Highlight the passage at 16:16

16:44 The perfection of giving only arises when the one who gives disappears into the giving, when there is just attention and no one left who is attending, just present without anyone being present. Report an error in the passage at 16:44 Highlight the passage at 16:44

17:03 This is why dharma is not, in the end, separate from emptiness, from the emptiness we so often discuss, from what the Heart Sūtra points us to. Report an error in the passage at 17:03 Highlight the passage at 17:03

17:14 Because when you give another person your complete attention, something remarkable happens to you as well. For that moment, you vanish. Report an error in the passage at 17:14 Highlight the passage at 17:14

17:25 There is no room inside, genuinely undivided attention for the self and its endless commentary, its worries, its rehearsals, its scorekeeping. Report an error in the passage at 17:25 Highlight the passage at 17:25

17:39 To attend completely to another is to forget yourself completely. Dogen's forgetting of the self and the Buddha's first perfection of giving turn out to be a single gesture seen from two sides. You give your attention away, and the very act of giving that Report an error in the passage at 17:39 Highlight the passage at 17:39

18:02 small, anxious, grasping self that had been hoarding for a moment, a blessed moment, is simply gone. Report an error in the passage at 18:02 Highlight the passage at 18:02

18:13 This is the secret that the attention economy can never afford to tell you. Because its whole existence depends on you not knowing it. The most valuable thing you own becomes fully yours only in the instant you give it away by choice. Report an error in the passage at 18:13 Highlight the passage at 18:13

18:32 There is a discourse, one of the most famous and perhaps one of the most important in the Pāli Canon, on the four foundations of mindfulness, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sūtra. Report an error in the passage at 18:32 Highlight the passage at 18:32

18:46 From beginning to end, it is a teaching about attention. Attention to the body and the breath. Attention to what we feel, attention to the mind itself, attention to the truth of things as they are. And at the very end of it, Buddha does something he almost never does, that no teacher almost ever does. Report an error in the passage at 18:46 Highlight the passage at 18:46

19:14 He makes a promise. He makes a guarantee. He says if anyone should practice these four foundations of mindfulness in this way for seven years, then one of two fruits may definitely be expected. Report an error in the passage at 19:14 Highlight the passage at 19:14

19:33 The highest awakening here and now in this very life, or if some small trace of clinging still remains, then at least the state of non-return. Report an error in the passage at 19:33 Highlight the passage at 19:33

19:49 You just need to practice it for seven years. And then as soon as he said it, as if he can feel some doubt in the room, he begins to take his own promise apart. Report an error in the passage at 19:49 Highlight the passage at 19:49

20:01 Maybe not seven years, he said. If anyone should practice this way for six years, that would be enough. And then he continues to bargain himself down. Five years, four years, three years, two, one, maybe not even one year, just seven months. And down he goes, this careful, measured, precise teacher, suddenly sounding almost reckless with generosity until he reaches the very bottom. Report an error in the passage at 20:01 Highlight the passage at 20:01

20:31 If anyone should practice these four foundations of mindfulness in this way for just seven days, seven days. One of those two fruits may be expected, awakening here and now or non-return. Seven days of real attention, that is the promise. Report an error in the passage at 20:31 Highlight the passage at 20:31

20:55 Now, I won't sit here and tell you that I've collected on that promise. Seven days of complete attention is hard. Seven minutes is hard. But I believe this promise because I have felt in small doses, on a cushion, at a bedside, Alone or with a friend, what even a few moments of undivided attention can actually do. How it changes the one who receives it and empties the one who gives it. Report an error in the passage at 20:55 Highlight the passage at 20:55

21:29 And if a few moments can do that, then I am not prepared to say what seven whole days could not. Report an error in the passage at 21:29 Highlight the passage at 21:29

21:41 The attention economy does not take our attention collectively. It takes it from each of us alone. That is the design. There is really no shared feed. There is your feed, built for you, measured on you, one solitary person, one solitary person at a time. Report an error in the passage at 21:41 Highlight the passage at 21:41

22:01 It finds us when we are by ourselves, a little bored, a little anxious, a little lonely, and it offers us something to reach for. And that reaching is the oldest gesture there is. The mind grasping toward a false refuge, only pointed now at a glowing screen. We are always taking refuge in something. Every time your hand moves to the phone before you've decided that it should, that is a refuge, a place you've learned to turn when the moment gets uncomfortable. Report an error in the passage at 22:01 Highlight the passage at 22:01

22:35 The trouble is not that we take refuge. The trouble is where. Our tradition offers three other refuges instead, three treasures we bow to at the start of every ceremony. Report an error in the passage at 22:35 Highlight the passage at 22:35

22:49 We take refuge in Buddha, not a god to worship, but the living proof of what is possible, the promise that a human mind can wake up. Report an error in the passage at 22:49 Highlight the passage at 22:49

22:59 We take refuge in dharma, the teaching, which is a simple but difficult method for seeing our own minds clearly. And we take refuge in saṅgha, in one another, in the people who have agreed to sit down and practice with us together. Report an error in the passage at 22:59 Highlight the passage at 22:59

23:20 This is what Dogen meant when he said a gift moves in both directions at once, that the giver and receiver are joined by the very thing that passes between them. Report an error in the passage at 23:20 Highlight the passage at 23:20

23:30 The saṅgha is that joining. Made into a life we share. I have come to believe that this third refuge is the one our distracted age has most forgotten and the one it most needs. Report an error in the passage at 23:30 Highlight the passage at 23:30

23:47 Because you cannot win your attention back alone. I have tried. You probably have too. The machine was built by thousands of brilliant people and it runs on every screen you own and it is very hard to out-sit it by yourself in your own kitchen or on your own couch at 11 o 'clock at night. Report an error in the passage at 23:47 Highlight the passage at 23:47

24:10 But the one thing it has no answer for is a few people who have quietly agreed to guard each other's attention together, to sit together, to look up together, to turn toward one another on purpose. Report an error in the passage at 24:10 Highlight the passage at 24:10

24:25 Which is why I can say something to you tonight that I could never say to a reader alone with a book, because you can look around this room. Report an error in the passage at 24:25 Highlight the passage at 24:25

24:38 You did not come here to be on your phones. You came to sit together. Report an error in the passage at 24:38 Highlight the passage at 24:38

24:48 and to give your attention to this moment. Report an error in the passage at 24:48 Highlight the passage at 24:48

24:55 This room is the answer to the machine. It always has been. Every Zendo, every Saṅgha is a small and stubborn refusal of a world that would rather keep us each alone. Report an error in the passage at 24:55 Highlight the passage at 24:55

25:09 you are already doing the very thing I am describing. Report an error in the passage at 25:09 Highlight the passage at 25:09

25:15 So this is what I have come to believe. Attention is not a lesser thing than love. Attention may be what love actually is up close when you take the word away and look at what remains. It is the first gift, dana, the ground beneath the entire path. It is kanan's compassion, which is nothing other than the perfect hearing and perfect vision, perfect attention. Report an error in the passage at 25:15 Highlight the passage at 25:15

25:52 And it is available to you at no cost. Except the single one that everyone is trying to charge you at your own table tonight. Report an error in the passage at 25:52 Highlight the passage at 25:52

26:05 In a few minutes, we will chant and then most of you will go home. If you're like me, at some point you'll reach for your phone and that's okay. This is not a talk against phones. It is a talk for the person in front of you. And so maybe before you pick up your phone, turn toward them instead. Turn toward your neighbor. Report an error in the passage at 26:05 Highlight the passage at 26:05

26:32 neighbor or your housemate or your partner or your friend. give them the thing the whole world is bidding for. Report an error in the passage at 26:32 Highlight the passage at 26:32

26:50 Thank you very much. We Report an error in the passage at 26:50 Highlight the passage at 26:50

26:59 have a little time for questions if anyone wanted to ask or talk about anything. There's a microphone for use. Report an error in the passage at 26:59 Highlight the passage at 26:59

27:11 Dan, thank you very much. It was a great talk. And I've tried. Over these years of practice to let go of the cynic in me, but it still lives deep inside. And about halfway through your talk, I realized, oh, at Zen Center, we're taking part in the attention economy. Report an error in the passage at 27:11 Highlight the passage at 27:11

27:34 Because we are, and you touched on it. But could you talk a little bit more about the difference between, you touched on it a little bit, and even equated the attention that we are trying to train with And we talk about as love, but so does advertising, selling us love and sex and sentimentality. Could you talk a little bit more about the different kind of attention that we are talking about here? I Report an error in the passage at 27:34 Highlight the passage at 27:34

28:16 don't know if it's exactly a different kind of attention. It may be the same kind of attention. I think the difference is that we Report an error in the passage at 28:16 Highlight the passage at 28:16

28:27 I tried to help ourselves and each other choose Report an error in the passage at 28:27 Highlight the passage at 28:27

28:34 where we give our attention. Report an error in the passage at 28:34 Highlight the passage at 28:34

28:39 You know, the precepts that we all agree to follow when we either take lei, jukai, or take ordination as a priest, one Report an error in the passage at 28:39 Highlight the passage at 28:39

29:00 of those precepts is against stealing. But we usually don't phrase it as just against stealing. We're a little more specific. The precept asks us to refrain. Report an error in the passage at 29:00 Highlight the passage at 29:00

29:15 From taking what is not given. Report an error in the passage at 29:15 Highlight the passage at 29:15

29:22 And so I think, you know, what maybe advertising for a long time and the attention economy now is Report an error in the passage at 29:22 Highlight the passage at 29:22

29:35 trying to take what is not given. It is trying to take our attention from us that we've not chosen Report an error in the passage at 29:35 Highlight the passage at 29:35

29:44 to give it. And that is the difference between stealing and dharma. In dharma, we make that choice of where to give, what to give. Report an error in the passage at 29:44 Highlight the passage at 29:44

30:03 And so I think... Our practice is helping people learn to give attention rather than to take it. And I do think that that makes all the difference. Report an error in the passage at 30:03 Highlight the passage at 30:03

30:43 Hello. Hello. That's better. I fear you may reject this question on the grounds that it might be contrived. So I want to state that. But I'm wondering what you think attention is. We're talking about this whole thing. Report an error in the passage at 30:43 Highlight the passage at 30:43

31:03 I'd love to hear if you have some kind of succinct definition for it. Report an error in the passage at 31:03 Highlight the passage at 31:03

31:12 Well, first, I didn't know you could reject questions. You always have the option. I didn't know I had that option. That's good to know. Report an error in the passage at 31:12 Highlight the passage at 31:12

31:29 You know, I'm not particularly precise in my language around these things, and I use terms like attention and mindfulness. Report an error in the passage at 31:29 Highlight the passage at 31:29

31:45 Somewhat interchangeably, mindfulness in English is this sort of, you know, fancy word. If you look, you know, in literature, hardly anyone used the word mindfulness until really a couple decades ago when it started to become popular. But in the ancient texts in Pāli, mindfulness is, it's this tiny little word, sati. It's just a... Report an error in the passage at 31:45 Highlight the passage at 31:45

32:17 Simple term that doesn't sound fancy, and it's the same term that basically means remembering. And so I think one way you might define attention and mindfulness is just very literally remembering right now, remembering the present. Report an error in the passage at 32:17 Highlight the passage at 32:17

32:46 How's that? That's pretty cool. I think the re in remembering is really interesting there. To me, remembering implies, I mean, sort of obviously implies like it was membered and then we re-membered it. And to me, it feels like there is somewhat of a, I don't know, a gap between what is membering and then re-membering it if that is the way we think about it. Report an error in the passage at 32:46 Highlight the passage at 32:46

33:22 But it's very fruitful to think about it like that. Yeah. And what would it mean to close that gap? to remember right now without Report an error in the passage at 33:22 Highlight the passage at 33:22

33:34 without that gap in between. Report an error in the passage at 33:34 Highlight the passage at 33:34

33:39 Good Report an error in the passage at 33:39 Highlight the passage at 33:39

34:02 evening. Thank you for your talk. Since you were focusing on Donna and the practice and spirit of generosity and offering those through the... Report an error in the passage at 34:02 Highlight the passage at 34:02

34:16 Through presence and attention, can you offer one or two exercises or meditations or practical tools that you suggest for cultivating that spirit? Report an error in the passage at 34:16 Highlight the passage at 34:16

34:34 Zazen might be one of them. Report an error in the passage at 34:34 Highlight the passage at 34:34

34:40 Yeah, so I think it's hard to give someone your attention. I don't know if it was always as hard as it is now, and maybe our minds have gotten more distracted, but I find it hard, and I do think it takes practice. A Report an error in the passage at 34:40 Highlight the passage at 34:40

35:10 couple very practical practices that I've sometimes tried. One, I mean, this is almost trivial, and I won't pretend that I always do this well, but trying not to interrupt people. Report an error in the passage at 35:10 Highlight the passage at 35:10

35:27 It's an interesting practice because it requires you to listen to them more carefully because you need to hear the pause. And so it forces you to pay a little more attention and to be more present in what they're saying instead of what you want to say. Report an error in the passage at 35:27 Highlight the passage at 35:27

35:46 The other thing, and this one sounds sort of silly, I'm almost a little embarrassed to share it, but I used to do this quite a bit, was when speaking to someone to try always to notice the color of their eyes. Report an error in the passage at 35:46 Highlight the passage at 35:46

36:03 And I used to do that just because it forced me to really look at them. Report an error in the passage at 36:03 Highlight the passage at 36:03

36:10 And I also have a bad memory, so I wouldn't just remember the color of their eyes, so I would have to actually look at them and see it. And so, you know, the first practice requires me to really hear them, and the second practice requires me to really see them. Report an error in the passage at 36:10 Highlight the passage at 36:10

36:27 And I found that helpful. Report an error in the passage at 36:27 Highlight the passage at 36:27

36:34 I also, though, agree with what you, I mean, you sort of answered your own question, that in a deeper way, Zazen, meditation, are opportunities to practice paying attention. Report an error in the passage at 36:34 Highlight the passage at 36:34

36:53 And I think about this very literally, that when you're learning to play the piano, you don't spend all your time playing songs. Sometimes you do these little finger exercises because you're just literally practicing to get your hands to work the way you want them to. And so similarly... You know, we have this attention. And yes, it's good to learn how to pay attention while you're talking to someone or while you're doing the dishes or while you're driving or while you're speaking. Report an error in the passage at 36:53 Highlight the passage at 36:53

37:28 But in Zazen, we get this chance to pay attention while we're not doing anything else, when we're just trying to pay attention. It is, in some sense, the purest form of attention because it's paying attention to nothing and everything at once. Report an error in the passage at 37:28 Highlight the passage at 37:28

37:51 So I do think that that's... Report an error in the passage at 37:51 Highlight the passage at 37:51

37:56 That's our most fundamental practice. We Report an error in the passage at 37:56 Highlight the passage at 37:56

38:07 have time for one more. Mo, if you could please unmute. Report an error in the passage at 38:07 Highlight the passage at 38:07

38:21 Hi. I have a quick question. You mentioned that Buddha said that if you practice for seven days, you can achieve, or I guess you might achieve awakening or non-return. Can you elaborate what non-return means? Report an error in the passage at 38:21 Highlight the passage at 38:21

38:43 You could get there by next Wednesday. Thank you, Mo. So, you know, I really like reading the old texts and reading the Pāli Canon, but it is very involved with this certain worldview, this whole cosmology in India, which we don't focus on as much in Zen. We try to focus, I think, a little more on the concrete and on the here and now. But the old canon does talk a lot about things like reincarnation. Report an error in the passage at 38:43 Highlight the passage at 38:43

39:29 And so the idea was that you would continue in this cycle of rebirth until you had experienced full awakening. And part of Part of that experience of becoming a Buddha, Buddha literally meaning one who is awake, so part of that experience of becoming one who is awake is that you are freed from this cycle of birth and death. Report an error in the passage at 39:29 Highlight the passage at 39:29

39:58 You won't be reborn. And so that's what non-return. Non-return means in this lifetime, you will be done. So even if you don't have that experience, Report an error in the passage at 39:58 Highlight the passage at 39:58

40:17 Right at the end of Seven Days, he's saying that you are sort of guaranteed awakening in this life. So it's a big promise. Report an error in the passage at 40:17 Highlight the passage at 40:17

40:32 And I think what I take from that is just how deeply Buddha believed in this practice of mindfulness, that not only was it all you needed, it was enough, there was nothing else that you needed to add to the practice. Not only was it all you needed, but if you could practice it wholeheartedly, even just for those few days, Report an error in the passage at 40:32 Highlight the passage at 40:32

41:10 then you were a Buddha. Report an error in the passage at 41:10 Highlight the passage at 41:10

41:15 Thank you all so much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Report an error in the passage at 41:15 Highlight the passage at 41:15

41:31 Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, Please visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the dharma. Report an error in the passage at 41:31 Highlight the passage at 41:31