Lost Coin – San Francisco Group
Meeting Notes
August 2, 2010
 
Story of the Red Pepper
 
Walking down the road one day, a man noticed another man sitting on the side of the road eating a piece of red fruit. When he got closer he saw that the man was crying.
“Why are you crying while you’re eating that fruit?” the man asked.
The crying man responded, “This isn’t a fruit. It’s a hot pepper.”
“Why are you eating a hot pepper?”
“I only had a few coins left, so I bought this and now I’m eating my money, not the pepper.”
 
Humans are often like machines – we play the same song over & over in our heads. Our practice is to forget the self which means we forget the conditioned self. We stop eating that red pepper – we stop doing the things that cause us suffering.
 
Lost Coin is about getting off red peppers.
 
As you look at yourself, you may move away from where you’re stuck or what you thought you liked.
 
Einstein used to say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.
 
The Samurai
 
Eisau – Japanese Zen Master – went to China to study Buddhism for many years. He returned to Japan to find the government had changed hands. It was now a military government ruled by the Samurai. The Samurai quickly grew to love Zen Buddhism for its practical, non-theoretical approach.

The Samurai believed life was violent by nature. There was no such thing as a life without war. They were interested in self-study, self-learning. They went into the monasteries where the Zen teachers taught them about compassion.
 

Koans and Our Practice

We tend to see our life as a story. Life doesn’t have a nice, worked-out ending. Our Zen practice is about cutting through into the depth at any point in the story.

Koans are questions that don’t have intellectual answers. They all ask one basic question: Who are you? The answer comes from your experience. The process is finding the experience. Koan practice teaches you to do things not by figuring it out, but by practicing discipline and commitment.

Our practice is to forget the self – to learn who you really are through self-observation and mindfulness. Through practice you gradually learn to look at yourself objectively.

When we practice we just see. There’s no need to explain. The more we see, the more the conditioned thoughts tend to weaken. When we look at ourselves over a period of time we see the mechanical mind and we start to see where we are unkind to each other. In Lost Coin, it is important that we work with each other as a group.

The Buddha said that he did not know the answers to anything other than one thing: Life is suffering and how to end that suffering.

Zen & Technology are very similar in that they are both about making connections.

We are used to living from a 1st person perspective. Through practice, we begin to develop a 3rd person perspective without analysis.

Our practice is more like dancing or sword fighting. We work on being; then we integrate the intellectual side.


The Heart of Practice

Have you ever had the feeling that you could be something, but you knew you would have to give it your all to achieve it?

Doen has a chess coach who teaches him that when you play chess you don’t want to win. You want to make your opponent sorry that he ever got up that morning.

If you want to win, put your whole heart into it. This is the energy (chi) that you want to have when you practice. Practice with this spirit. As Zen Master Dogen said, “Practice as if there is a fire on your head.” Practice as if sitting is the only way to put out the fire.
