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Not only in Buddhist traditions but in any spiritual tradition you can find good examples of selflessness in social action. Buddhist traditions tend to go into the meditation room to try to touch selflessness, you know sometimes they don't do much about it but in Christian traditions through social actions they offer their body, they dedicate their body, it doesn't matter what you believe in when that happens it's selflessness in action.

One of the Christian stories that impressed me very much was a novel based on a true story that I read when I was about 20. It was about a ferry boat that sank between the northern part of Japan and the main island. The trip between the islands is very long - 9 or 12 hours and the ferries were huge, they carried railway engines, trucks and so forth. It was typhoon time and a typhoon struck and the ferry began to sink. Of course the officers were helping people onto the lifeboats but the ship was sinking very fast and they couldn't get everybody. In the midst of that scene there was a Christian priest helping people get into the boats and he remained until the very last, helping, not trying to save himself.

This story had a powerful impact on me. It's the ultimate thing. "Wow! Could I do it?" A ship starts to sink or a plane begins to have problems, "Where's the parachute?" What would I do?

This selflessness manifests when you forget about your body and just act, those kind of things are just dropped and activity takes over. It's very difficult to be completely selfless but we can at least be near and if you become comfortable enough with nearness, if you practice nearness then your breath becomes naturally comfortable because you are not making a conscious effort do this or to do that then you become comfortable in nearness and there is the practice of no self. So put the emphasis on your body, throw your whole self into this posture.

Here, I'm talking about meditation but of course it's different when we go out in the market place or to work, in those situations there are actual relationships taking place but still the attitude is the same. We can't act selflessly if we are operating with calculative thinking, measuring, calculating what's good, what's bad, getting caught up in ideas of right and wrong instead of acting. The sequence in Buddhist practice is not the mind-consciousness breath or speech and then the body but always first the body, speech and then mind/consciousness. We need to understand this, if this is very clear and it is applied then selfless qualities are naturally developed.

This is difficult because we think this and that, we learn to think calculatively. To meet with a person that you had a big argument with yesterday is not easy, today you meet again and you don't feel good about it because you are thinking all those things that happened yesterday but learn to drop it, just be able to meet and shake hands. That simple action already overcomes the ego problem you have. What the mind is doing is not so important, the mind has its own functions, just allow it to have its own functions, sometimes the mind is upset, sometimes the mind is happy but we shouldn't take it too seriously. We can take it like saliva, you know, something the body produces naturally but we don't often see it like that.

Selflessness is an important topic and I hope that you are interested in how to practice it, how to deepen, how to deepen nearness. Ultimately, if a selfless action takes place you don't know what is happening, actually if you are acting selflessly you don't have the slightest idea about how selfless you are, what you did or anything like that, you just forget about it and life goes on. If you had a good sitting or the engagement in sitting was very good you forget about it as soon as the sitting period is over, you know you go from that space on to the next, you don't think, "Oh that sitting was so good I should bring that kind of samadhi or concentration into day to day life" that's not necessary. But our small minds try to fix those kind of ideas. Suzuki Roshi simply said "develop non-gaining ideas." Develop non-gaining ideas and in day to day life we learn to keep the same attitude to give our whole body in action and hopefully the practice of non-gaining, the body and action come together. This kind of body based practice, gives us experience through action and we slowly learn to express what that is and later on we realize "Oh I wasn't that bad."

Transcribed and edited by Leesa Davis.