I vow to kiss the truth without a doubt or doubtless words. Good morning. Good morning. Well, it's a beautiful spring day, and we got to listen to the birds this morning as they woke up and sang to us and to the world, and there were so many different sounds, so many different birds this morning, so listening to most of these sounds, I wouldn't be able

[01:07]

to identify or say what kind of bird that was, but they have a very familiar Green Gulchian sound to them. And I was reminded of the story of the Buddha when he was a young boy and he heard a bird sing, and he had a joyful feeling hearing the bird, but he could feel or sense the terror that the insects and the worms were feeling when they heard that sound. That beautiful, trilling song of spring to another creature is, you know, like air-raid siren or some terror comes through. Now, this may be anthropomorphizing in a way, but actually there is no set reality

[02:10]

that is true for all beings. What's beautiful to human beings may be scary or dangerous or risky for another kind of being, and this is the truth of our life. But if we bear this in mind, compassion arises for all beings, and if we hold to our point of view or what's right for us, we forget, we forget. And so this springtime, it feels to me like a big transition time for a lot of people. Some people have talked with me about becoming parents.

[03:12]

They're about to become parents, which is a big transition, and other people, including myself, are about to lose children into the big wide world. Graduation is coming up. My daughter is a senior at TAM High School and will be most happily flouncing out the door to her next adventure. And some people have recently lost parents, in fact we'll be doing a memorial service for Thaygen Leighton's father who passed away a couple days ago, many of you know him. And some people, their parents have become like their children, due to illness and loss of faculties, they've become the parents of their parents, which is a big transition to

[04:15]

begin a new relationship, changing the diapers of your parents. And people have talked with me about starting relationships, beginning to feel commitment towards someone, that they may want to really put lots and lots of effort into a relationship, and other people are talking with me about the end of a relationship that they put lots and lots of effort in. And on Mother's Day there was wonderful news of a baby that was born to the Sangha, Indigo Basil is his name, born at home next to Zen Center, a wonderful birth, mother and everyone doing fine, and that very same day, Mother's Day, a baby was born and died in childbirth.

[05:21]

This baby's name is on our altar, Baby Hawthorne, whose parents were married here, and that baby girl died on Mother's Day in the effort of coming into this world. No one exactly knows why yet. So this is our human life, the joys and the sorrows and the sufferings, and our attempt to try and stop it, stop the bad things from happening and find the good things, is our suffering. So transitions, there's transitions going on, big transitions. Some people are leaving Zen Center after being here, and other people have just arrived and

[06:24]

are really taking on this practice and immersing themselves. The word transition means to cross over, to go from one state to another state. It's the process of crossing over. We often feel when we're in transition, very destabilized, and everything we look around is unfamiliar, our old ways of being in the world, getting along, feeling calm, don't work anymore, or that environment is dissolved, and the new is so unfamiliar and so difficult, even if there's joy or sadness there, the transition times can be destabilizing. And anything can happen during transition, it's a kind of dangerous time, I think. You hear about people in transition losing touch with their own vows, losing touch with

[07:34]

how they want to live in the world and what's most important, and begin grabbing for anything that will seem like a port in the storm. And places of transition, like airports and train stations and bus stations, have a kind of emotional valence or tone that's... anything can happen, you feel that. You can meet anyone or anything can happen. When a woman is giving birth and is in labor, there's a time during the birth called the transition, and I don't think everybody goes through this, but many women do, and it's at the beginning of the labor, this is if you're doing natural childbirth and are awake and aware of what's going on, the beginning of the labor, the contractions are coming,

[08:37]

they start out at a certain level and then they get stronger, and the pretty regular space, certain time apart, that might get closer and closer. Meanwhile, if you're paying attention, you can breathe with it and watch it and take care of yourself, get into the posture that works the best for you and stay with the pain, stay with the strength of the contractions, moving along, working hard, it's called labor, really making efforts, staying with it. And then there's this time called transition, that's what it's called, maybe there's another medical name for it, but anyway, and during transition, it's before the time when you want to push the baby out, this time called transition, and the contractions may be coming very fast or in an erratic way and very strong, and all the breathing and the way you've been working before, nothing works anymore, you tried that, that won't work, how about this,

[09:41]

that won't work, and it's at that point that if you're going to ask for drugs or something to dull the pain or get rid of the pain, right in transition is often when that happens, you kind of lose your way. So, in natural childbirth classes, they warn you, they tell you about transition to be ready for it and not to necessarily grab on to the first thing that you can think of, to just get me out of this, I can't do this anymore. So, our acknowledgement of transitions, in many ways, helps us to, reminds us, this too shall pass, encouraging us to find our way there, even with tumultuousness, big changes.

[10:44]

So, my son just went through a transition a couple weeks ago, his 13th birthday, actually which is next Saturday, but his 13th birthday in the lunar calendar, which is the Hebrew way of calculating dates, was on April 29th, and he had his Bar Mitzvah, and for those of you who are familiar with the Bar Mitzvah, it's an acknowledgement of a young person becoming an adult, a Bar or a Bat Mitzvah for girls, becoming an adult in terms of the religious life of Judaism, and 13th birthday is chosen. Now, it's interesting, many young people at 13, you would think maybe aren't adult, they're not really ready to take on the responsibilities of an adult, but it's right around that age

[11:55]

for many young people that it happens, and for girls, this is the time of their first menstruation, so they actually do become adults in the biological sense, and I think that age was chosen, perhaps, this is lost in ancient history, but I think it was chosen for biological reasons for girls, so you might as well have the boys do it at that time, too. This is my theory. Anyway, Devi had his Bar Mitzvah, and we wanted it to be a real ceremony, a real transition, something, when I say real, I mean meaningful, the way that I feel all the Buddhist ceremonies that I participate in have a truth to them, they're not just empty ritual where you go

[12:56]

through the motions and our ordinations and weddings and funerals, it always feels to me like something, there was a real gate that was crossed and passed through, there was a transition from one state to another state, and it was marked, and those of you who have participated either for yourself or witnessed Buddhist ceremonies may have felt that as well, maybe for the first time a ceremony really met you, that's what I feel about ceremonies, the importance of them for our lives, and so we wanted this ceremony to have depth and meaning and all that good stuff for him, but it wasn't necessarily happening quite in that way, and all the years, the couple of years that he spent studying Hebrew and

[14:01]

learning about Jewish ethics and the teachings, although they were very important, I could tell he was really engaging with this teacher that he had, an Israeli woman, this wonderful lady, still the Bar Mitzvah itself, he wasn't looking forward to it and didn't really want to do it, and why are you making me, you know, and we, my husband and I, we really had to look carefully, are we forcing him, is there coercion here, are we making him do something that will actually, which we've never done before in our life as a family, forced him to do something where he didn't really understand how come, so this was something we had to really look at carefully, and at a certain point we said to him, because I

[15:02]

couldn't take this anymore, this kind of forcing that was going on, that I felt, and it wasn't just that, it wasn't just forcing, because meanwhile there was a lot of interest in what was happening and surprise and delight in the fact that we were at a Passover service, the Seder, and his eyes got all wide and bright and he looked up at me and said, I can read this, he could read the Hebrew, and he was amazed, so it was a combination, there was a lot going on there, but at a certain point we actually said, if you really don't want to do this, you don't have to do this, and we really brought it to him and gave him some chance to say, no, I can't go through with this, and I think his knowing that he could actually say no, but he didn't, he actually said, I agree, there was agreement finally,

[16:07]

I want to do this, he actually didn't say I want to do this, but he said, I don't want to say no, so in some level he wanted to do it, and he didn't even know, I don't think, at what level, so that I think was a big transition right there, that maybe was the ceremony, the pre-ceremony, the pre-voice of the 10,000 ceremonies was his actually saying yes, or not saying no, so then we went from there, and the actual ceremony itself was wonderful, everybody in the room had a relationship with him, and lots of family came, his grandparents, and so there was a wide range of people in the room who were appreciating his effort and appreciating him, and who loved him, so I think it was a real ceremony, I think it was a real ceremony for the people in the room, and I just wanted to say something about,

[17:16]

he had to give a talk, he had to give kind of a Dharma talk for part of the ceremonies, you learn Hebrew and then you read it and chant it in front of everyone, and then you give a little Dharma talk about what you've just said, and his particular portion was, that he had to learn in English was about various rules about priests, what the priests could and couldn't do, and he didn't find it all that interesting, but the rabbi helped him in talking about some other things that were going on right at that time of year, which was a time between two holidays, the holiday symbolizing liberation, and the holiday symbolizing, I'm going to say renunciation, but it's not exactly that, it's liberation, and somebody remind me who was there, receiving, getting something, receiving the teachings,

[18:20]

so liberating yourself and receiving the teachings, so we were right in between there, in this transition between those two, and what he ended up talking about was, this time of life for him, as a young person, he had to, in order to receive something, he had to liberate himself from certain old ideas and ways of being, and he didn't use the word renounce, but to renounce or let go of an old way of thinking and being, in order to receive the new, which is transition, where you let go of your old way, which may have become habitual or a routine way of doing things and thinking and treating someone, you have to let go of that in order for this freshness to come into your life, so you liberate yourself from the old and you receive the new, so he named three things he had to liberate himself from, he

[19:24]

had to let go of, and one was, liberating myself from the idea that I can get everything I want, and I actually saw that as a kind of Buddhist, for us to liberate ourselves from the idea that we can have everything we want, which makes desires and grasping after things and looking for things a central, makes it a central focus of our life, which is samsaric life, looking for something, going after something, trying to get something, bring something into our life to make it better, to make it okay, or to change things, or to manipulate things in a way that we like. This is, desires are inexhaustible. The Bodhisattva vow is, desires are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. So he brought this up, if desires

[20:32]

are the focus of my life, there will be just unhappiness, because by definition, because we will always be searching for something more, there will never be any contentment. So letting go of this, and then he quoted a Jewish saying, the person who is happy, the person who is happy in this world is one who is content with their lot, content with that which comes to us, what our lot is. And he also quoted, I'm just quoting his Dharma talk, a Buddhist saying which is, just like a spider caught in its own web, is a person who is caught by desires. You're just tangled and caught. So this is a very important point for our practice and life. And in fact, renunciation of our, I'm calling it worldly way, it's often

[21:43]

called the worldly way, renunciation of the worldly way, is the beginning of our kind of the Dharma wheel turning in the other direction, where desires are not the focus of your life, but then what becomes the focus of your life? So in transition, sometimes at the heightened, these heightened times of transition, we can see what we need to let go of, we can taste it. And if we sit, or when we sit, and we have a whole day today together to sit, sitting upright, sitting, not leaning into our life, not leaning away from our life, sitting upright, we can study our lives. And in studying our lives, it's

[22:50]

not that we have to pull things away from ourselves and throw them down in a kind of harsh, mean, violent kind of way, but are actually seeing what we need to just let go of, seeing what's stale, what's too much, what's not necessary anymore, what's hindering us, what's getting in the way, we can let go. But we have to see it. We have to study our life in order to see it. So our sitting today is maybe the ceremony of studying that which is there, that which is already there and what is arising. And the best way to study that is with this uprightness, uprightness of mind and body. Now if you sit very, very

[23:54]

still and study in this way, study that which is arising in mind and body, and what one might say externally and internally, what you might notice as you're sitting calmly and very, very still is that all there is, is transition. During the first part of my talk, you might have thought, well, I'm not in transition now, I'm kind of pretty stable and nothing major is happening. But when you sit, you see that there's nothing there that's staying put. There's nothing there that you can kind of settle down on and get a hold of and say, yes, now I got it. If you look carefully enough and thoroughly enough, you see it's a process. There's nothing there to hold on to. It's just all transition.

[25:00]

And this is the truth of impermanence. There's nothing there to hold on to. And as the sutra says, grasping at things is basically delusion. Grasping at things is basically delusion. Now, it may seem ironic that the more still you get, the more quiet and the more settled and calm you get, the more you see that there's nothing that's static or still or staying put. I guess I'll say staying put. And that non-staying putness is completely still. That's kind of coming around full circle. So we start out with thinking that, well, we actually start out thinking that things are as they are

[26:08]

and pretty permanent, you know, tables and chairs and people and our friends and our life. But very soon we see that nothing is stable in that way. In birth and death, there are births, there are deaths, there are changes that we don't want, there are changes that we do want. There's constant flux like this. And certain transitions seem more than other. And in between those transitions we feel maybe things aren't moving very much. But the stiller we get, the more calm we get, and the more we study that which is arising, we see that there is nothing to hold on to. I'm kind of going over this. Nothing to grasp. And our delusive thinking is that there is something to grasp, and we try to grasp it, which is suffering. And this impermanence or constant flux,

[27:10]

this is kind of the completion, is completely still, all of it. The whole universe of movement and change is not moving, is completely still. Now, my words may seem kind of mixed up, and I think it sounds mixed up because I'm kind of putting together what we call the two truths. So there's the conventional truth and the ultimate truth. And the conventional truth is birth and death, gain and loss, likes and dislikes, censure and blame, responsibility and no responsibility, all that, that whole world, things that you like to taste and things you don't like to taste, that's the world of birth and death and conventional life that we all understand,

[28:15]

and we all have to pay pretty close attention to that or we get in big trouble. And the ultimate truth, which cannot be an object of our intellect, it cannot be an object of our perception, the ultimate truth, because our intellect or perception and awareness is dualistic awareness by definition. So with this dualistic awareness or intellect that we have, we can't perceive the ultimate by definition. So the ultimate is not an object of our awareness, not an object of our intellect. But people can say something about it, describe the ultimate, but let's not kid ourselves that we are actually perceiving the ultimate. These are the two truths. So the ultimate is that there are no separate objects.

[29:21]

There is no birth and death, coming and going, likes and dislikes. Within the ultimate, those dualisms drop off, drop away. In the Buddha world, there is no coming or going, no increase, no decrease. And out of this world, Buddhas appear to teach how to live and teach the way to end suffering. So... So our experience, the ultimate and the conventional are interpenetrating each other, so it's not like the ultimate is somewhere far away and then all we're stuck with is the conventional.

[30:25]

Right here, where the conventional is, is interpenetrated the ultimate. In fact, the way the conventional reality, the way birth and death arise, the way we understand self and other, or the way self and other arise, I should say, that very way that they are is the ultimate truth. Meaning, each entity, each Dharma, each object, does not have inherent existence. It is not an object that exists by itself. It is completely dependent, interdependent with all other, with everything else. So each of us, we tend to think of ourselves as separate selves that are separate from other beings,

[31:27]

which is our suffering, which is our anxiety and our fear, and the basis of our desires, the basis of breaking all of our vows and precepts is this belief in self and other. And the ultimate truth points to the insubstantiality of separate beings. We do exist in a way, it's not saying that we don't exist, but we don't exist as separate beings. So, when we look at transition, when we look at the change and how things change, what occurred to me today is that in the transition itself, in these transitions and process of change, is the kind of proof of our non-separateness. If we were separate entities somehow, if you can imagine a separate entity,

[32:29]

there would be no growth and no change and no bar mitzvahs and no birth and death and no development or maturity. We only mature and change because we are completely dependent on everything else. If we were somehow separate, we would just be what we were, unrelated to anything else. So in our own transition and in the truth of impermanence is this Dharma reality of our connectedness with everyone. Even our suffering, we only suffer because we're so connected with other beings that it matters to us when someone dies, when we lose someone, or when someone we know is hurt. That is, our connectedness with them is our suffering. So in our sitting, in our upright sitting,

[33:37]

we have a chance to study this. And I overheard somebody saying at lunch, they had been at the practice period with Red, with Tenchen Roshi at Tassajara, and they said something about, don't activate the mind externally. And I remembered his teaching around this, which was Bodhidharma's teaching to his disciple Huika. So Bodhidharma is our ancestor who brought Buddhism from India to China. And there's not that much that we have, there's not big long lectures and things that Bodhidharma gave, but we do have a few things that he said. And one of the teachings that he gave, meditation teachings that he gave to his disciple Huika was, when meeting external objects or objects outside,

[34:47]

do not activate the mind around external objects. And there should be no gasping or sighing, or sometimes gasping is translated as coughing, no coughing or sighing or no gasping and sighing internally when you meet mind objects. Just sit upright, your mind like a wall. Now when we hear this sometimes we think, what do you mean make my mind like a wall, like an unfeeling brick wall that has no emotions and no joys, and I don't want to do that. I've had enough of living like that. I want to live, I want to feel, I want to be a human being. So don't make a mistake about mind like a wall. Mind like a wall is a mind that doesn't go, lean forward.

[35:54]

This is why upright sitting is so important, both internally and externally, uprightness of body and mind, the attitude, leaning into our life, meaning trying to make it be how we wish it were and get those people over there and stop doing that and manipulating. Manipulating means, you know, hands, mani, manipulate, get our hands out there trying to push things around the way we want it. That's leaning in, that's activating the mind around objects. And then sighing and gasping internally is like, I always think of it as like, oh woe is me, oh poor me, I don't have the capacity to practice Zen and I'm just an old bump on a log. That kind of sighing and gasping, that internal, that kind of sinking mind around mind objects. So mind like a wall is, make your mind like a wall. Don't activate around externals,

[36:54]

and no sighing or gasping or coughing around internal mind objects, external objects when you meet them. No activation. So what kind of a mind is that? That's a mind that's, a mind-body that's upright, that's awake, that's clearly aware. And so Hueyka heard this, and it doesn't say how long between these conversations, but one might think that there was some time that passed where he said to Bodhidharma, I have no more involvements. Referring back to this involvement in the externals and activating or internally, I have no more involvements. So Bodhidharma said, isn't that, I never know how to pronounce this word, nihilistic? Like, I have no involvements, meaning cut off from, not engaged or interdependent with.

[37:58]

Isn't that nihilistic? And Hueyka said, no. And Bodhidharma said, prove it. And Hueyka said, I am always clearly aware. There are no words that can come near it. I am just clearly aware. And Bodhidharma said, all the Buddhists and ancestors were like this, have no more doubts. So these instructions or admonitions for sitting, I think are very helpful, very important for us. The having a mind like a wall means, well, I invite you to find out what does that mean to not get involved externally or internally and yet be completely clearly aware.

[39:01]

This is not nihilism, this is not cutting away and not feeling and not allowing our emotions or sensations or sounds or smells, tastes, touchables to arise, somehow keeping them down or cutting them off. This is clearly aware. And it's very hard to be clearly aware when we're leaning into our life and manipulating and trying to make it be how we want it. It's very hard to be clearly aware or leaning away and shrinking back and, no, no, I can't stand it. It's hard to be clearly aware there. So that's where upright, being upright, allows us to study mind and objects. So, Dogen says, the suchness of mind and objects is the entrance to enlightenment or Buddha way. So our studying of the suchness of mind and objects, not doing away with,

[40:03]

but studying how they arise in suchness. This word suchness is a name for the Buddha or the awakened ones. The Tathagata is the thus-come-one, the way things are in reality, just the way they are in suchness. So we get a chance all day today to study suchness, the way mind and objects come together, and to watch and notice. Are we leaning in? Are we trying to get away from, make it be different? Or are we cowering? Can we stay with this upright feeling like a wall, a beautiful wall? Can we stay with our own fears and anxiety, discomfort, boredom, and just be clearly aware?

[41:05]

Those very things, those very objects of mind, boredom, fear, anxiety, if you can study how they arise, how mind and objects arise in suchness, there's your entrance right there. So, none of those things need to be gotten rid of in order to wake up. You can wake up right in the middle of your fear, right in the middle of your anxiety. What did they say, that saying, before the donkey leaves, the horses come? Something like that. It's probably misquoted. Anyway, you don't have to get rid of anything. You just have to study what is coming up for you, what is arising, without manipulating it or trying to make it be anything other. So, clearly... I am always clearly aware, Sudhvika. Always clearly aware. So, this is letting go of our own ideas.

[42:15]

And this is beginner's mind, I think. So, let's all make effort today to take care of each other, to take care of ourselves, and allow the sitting to thus come. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. May our intention... May our intention...

[42:55]

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