"Mindfulness is Not a Part-Time Job."

A Dharma talk given by Issan Dorsey Roshi

Originally posted on 1/13/2012

This transcript appeared in the newsletter of the Gay Buddhist Fellowship in January of 1995, four years and five months after his death.

From Allen Ginsberg's collection

The other day, somebody asked me: “Are you always working on something?” Yes, we're all always working on something, but hopefully not up here in our heads, where lots of words obscure it.

I was talking with a friend about how useful it is to me to work with the phrase “coming to reside in your breath-mind.” I’d been thinking a lot about it. It was so interesting that I thought I’d never really heard it before and was just beginning to use it, but then I realized that it has been with me since I first started practicing; I'd just actually heard it deeply.

It’s a whole way of working with your mind in your Zazen.

I hope you won’t have to wait 20 years to start hearing how to work with this thing we call the mind. People who come to practice today immediately sit much more easily than we did years ago when I first began to sit at Sokoji Temple. I remember everyone sitting with their legs bent up for five minutes, then we’d lie down and moan. Now people come, and it’s like we already did that part for them. It’s almost like we have a shared body that has already gone through that preliminary stuff; people can already experience some aspect of Zazen practice and how we do it together. But we still have to be willing to explore and experiment.

First, we need a sense of humor and a willingness to explore and experiment with our lives and our discomfort. Sometimes we can sit for a few minutes, or even a few days, but at some point it gets pretty uncomfortable. It’s also uncomfortable for us not to invite our thoughts to tea and reside in our breath-mind.

“Don’t invite your thoughts to tea” is Suzuki-roshi’s expression, which I’ve always found useful. They are just words, and we have to remember that every human concept is just delusion. Still, we use words and need them to talk about our experience at least provisionally.

Lately I have been exploring this way of thinking with a friend who has AIDS dementia; the virus is living in his brain. I’m thinking about it, working on it, and talking with him because the virus that is attacking so many of us now ends up in the brain. Is there some way for us to experience that? I don’t know yet. My question is: how to be with people who have dementia, and how to experience dementia? We all have it anyway. It’s called delusion. Mind is always creating confusion, joy and pain, "like" and "don’t like," depression. But there is also a “background mind.” That is what my friend and I have been discussing.

Sometimes when I’m talking about this uncomfortableness, I talk about the five fears. One of them is the fear of unusual states of mind. How can we come to appreciate and respect this fear, rather than resist it? Can we enter our fear and allow new areas of uncomfortableness? When we can enter each of these new spaces, we can begin to look at truthfulness.

Why do we have to sit? Really, there’s no reason to sit. If we’re completely sincere, then there’s no reason to sit. But I’m not completely sincere, so I have to keep sitting to check. Even if we’re involved with unskillful actions, the one quality we should strive for is truthfulness. Truthfulness takes a total commitment to see all aspects of ourselves and our unskillfulness. If we can embrace the totality of ourselves, we can embrace the totality of others and of the world. We tend to think about things before we do them. When we see a beautiful flower, we say, “Oh, what a beautiful flower,” but “beautiful flower” is extra. Just look at the flower “with no trace.”

Suzuki-roshi wrote, “When we practice Zazen, our mind is calm and quite simple. But usually our mind is very busy and complicated, and it is difficult to concentrate on what we are doing.” This is because when we act, we think, and this thinking leaves some trace. Our activity is shadowed by some preconceived idea. The traces and notions make our mind very complicated. When we do something with a simple, clear mind, we have no shadows, and our activity is strong and straightforward.

Even with Zazen practice, it gets so complicated. We’re dissecting every aspect of what’s going on, reviewing and comparing. How do we keep it simple and straightforward? How do we come to know this basic truth of practice and Buddhism? The teaching and the rules can and should change according to the situation and the people we’re practicing with, but the secret of practice cannot be changed. It’s always true.

We teach ourselves and encourage ourselves by creating this space, this meditation hall, so we can begin looking at our minds. “Don’t invite your thoughts to tea.” “Where is your breath-mind?” I used to say, allow this kind of mind to arise. But now I’m saying, create "background-mind."

This practice is simple: watch your breaths and don’t invite your thoughts to tea. But not inviting your thoughts to tea doesn’t mean getting rid of thinking. That is discrimination. There’s no reason to get rid of thoughts; rather, have some blank, non-interfering relationship with them. Don’t make your mind go blank; rather, have a blank relationship with your thoughts. Begin to see the space behind and around the thoughts, and shift the seat of your identity out of your thoughts and come to reside in your breath-mind. We develop our intention to reside in our breath-mind by first bringing our intention to “breath as mind,” and then by shifting the seat of our identity from our thoughts to our breath.

This all ties in with how we use this space, this laboratory. We should be willing to explore with our lives, and this is our laboratory right here—how we use the meditation hall and how we use what happens outside of it. Mindfulness is not a part-time job.


If you want to see more about the life and teaching of this remarkable man, please visit: "The Record of Issan."