Kōdō Sawaki

And I think the best thing to do is just do your practice, results be damned.

It's like what Kodo Sawaki said.

People would say, what's zazen good for? And he would say, zazen is good for nothing.

Of course, you're going to do your practice for some reason.

And I'm not going to try to cover all of those today, but I'm going to just try to introduce the basic ideas here.

And her teaching goes back to this Japanese teacher of the past century named Kodo Sawaki.

or Homeless Kodo, as he was known, who actually was instrumental in bringing or reviving the practice of hand sewing in Japan, and from Japan it came to us.

So what she says is, I'm paraphrasing, we give shape or form to the formless dharma with our actions and the way we do and make things.

And so goalless practice, this idea like you're not meditating for anything, you're not trying to achieve anything.

And Kodo Sawaki, who is a very respected Zen teacher, who is a teacher of Nishijima Roshi, who taught Brad Warner, who was one of the teachers.

I will not go through the whole thing, but he said, what is Zazen good for? Nothing.

we should be made to hear this good-for-nothingness so often that we get callouses on our ears and practice good-for-nothing Zazen without expectation, otherwise our practice really is good-for-nothing.

It's deliberately provocative, I think it's fair to say, because if you come to spiritual practice almost uniformly because you want something and you're getting some benefits out of it, and then Zen just tells you, or at least Kodosawaki is telling you, no, don't try to get anything, and What I found most helpful for making sense of this, there's a passage in How to Cook Your Life, which is a book by a student of Kodo Sawaki's, and he makes this distinction between goal and direction.

And he talks about this contradiction between impermanence and cause and effect.

So impermanence, meaning whatever you do, it's not going to last forever.