This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Morning. Things and events happen all the time, at the same time, everywhere. Thank you, Blanche. So many things happen simultaneously all the time, everywhere.

[01:05]

So I just returned from having been away three months at the Zen Mountain Monastery in Tassajara. to lead a practice period. While here, a practice period was going on, led by Ryushin Paul Haller, senior Dharma teacher. And while everything else in the world was going on at the same time, which when you're at Tassajara, you don't hear so many things about what's going on in the world, which is kind of a reprieve for a while, but it's not forever. And so we do hear some things, but a lot of things we don't, and that's true always. We know so little, really know so incredibly little of what's going on, even in our own lives, in our own bodies, in who we are.

[02:14]

So on the Han up, which calls us to the Zendo and says, yes, the person is ready to be the officiant for a service or for a talk or whatever, it says, you know, great is the matter of birth and death. Wake up. Life is fleeting. Don't waste this life. Awake. Awake. And this morning we just celebrated the winter solstice. So darkness, the nights have grown and gotten longer and longer and longer, and now it's going to go in the other direction. So the days will slowly, slowly increase, the daylight will increase, and the darkness will shrink. And if we look in nature, there is...

[03:19]

summer and winter connected to where you live. If we live far in the north, you won't notice really that the light gets more. It's very hard to notice because it's just a tiny little bit and then it's dark. So they have some places 24-hour darkness and then in the summer 24-hour light. But it's everywhere. And it's in nature, and it needs darkness. Darkness is really a necessary part of life. Seeds grow in the dark, below the surface. And then when they're ready, they start poking up little tender leaves. And we have many darknesses in our lives. that some that we create ourselves.

[04:23]

For example, I would like to say today that the fixed view about something is a kind of darkness. It's a kind of no light gets in there where there's a fixed view, where there's a held fixed view. And so I think being also the holiday season, and we're busy buying gifts maybe, or busy not buying gifts, hoping to get gifts, or hoping to not get gifts, hoping to get the right gifts and not the wrong gifts, and being worried about giving the right gifts and not the wrong gifts. But... in some ways, really, it's the celebration of light coming back, of the deepest darkness having been reached and light being able to come back.

[05:34]

And so that's also, I think, for relationships. You know, we have, these whole last three months have been actually almost to the day, have been kind of being colored, I would say, by the sudden discovery of the central abbot's illness, terminal illness, which it's just taking its course in a quite rapid and you know, terminal way. So that's been kind of in the background or the underlying kind of information and suspension through the whole three months here in the city, at Green Gulch, at Tassajara.

[06:41]

And it's such a stark reminder that we don't know, we actually do not know what the next moment brings. And so it's so important to live in each moment as completely as you can and as wholeheartedly as you can so that if it happens to be your last moment, you're completely there. You're not half-heartedly or in whatever unhappy state. So the more complete we can be, the more we can appreciate life and the more we also can let it go when it's just either going on its own or when we want to set something down and let it go. You know, some things don't ask us.

[07:42]

Many things happen to us that we weren't asked before. Are you ready for this? You know? This is coming, are you okay? Or do you want to wait? They just happen. So it really matters how we are moment to moment. How we deal with things, how we relate to people, how we are with ourselves, with the bodies we have, with everything. So I feel winter solstice, holiday season, the life-ending process of the central abbot are wonderful reminders or kind of reminders and they're wonderful in terms of that they really are, they have a sharpness to it.

[08:49]

that penetrates our usual way of maybe just, well, I wait till tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. Or maybe in a while. Because we don't realize that there might not be a tomorrow. So if we keep remembering there might not be a... Tomorrow, we may shift our priorities of what's really important, or how do we spend this time? A lot of people now have vacation. How are we going to spend these days with the people around us? Are we really available to them? Is there time to be together, to meet each other, to share? what's important to share.

[09:51]

When people are dying and there's a little time and they're not dying too fast or too suddenly, and there is an environment that's supportive and kind of not only struggling against the fact that they are dying, it's really amazing to see how incredibly, incredibly alive those last weeks, months become, to the very last breath. And how much joy and sadness and happiness and everything has space in there and is there. It's being shared. People share memories. My parents laughed for hours together, remembering through their lives. They cried together, we were there, we laughed and cried and didn't know what to say and had lots of things to say.

[10:58]

So life is always complete. Life itself does not diminish, even if one particular life form is not going to continue. And that becomes so apparent if we... are able and willing to be present, to be present with kindness, generosity, patience, and the willingness to understand that what we see is only a little bit of what's actually going on. So Suki Roshi says it so beautifully. He says, everything is a tentative form. And I just love that word, tentative, because it makes it so clear.

[12:00]

It's coming together, and then it's kind of teetering, seeing if it continues to be supported in that way. And yes, it is, and yes, it is, and yes, it is, but... That is forever, and then no, it isn't anymore in the same way, and then things change, and then no, it isn't quite. So it's tentative. And that's also what it says on the Han, on that wooden block we strike. It says, life is fleeting. So, you know, that tentativeness means also we can't count on it being there the same way, and even if it looks the same way, it's already not the same way. I don't know from which age on, but we start aging, but it takes a while for the wrinkles to appear and everything starting to move south.

[13:03]

But that is what appears on the surface, but the process of that has happened long, long before that and wasn't noticed by us necessarily. We knew it was coming and then we see the gray hairs and go, what? So it's really absolutely the invitation is to be present and to appreciate the moment and to know that what we know and what we can know is only a small little part of what's there. Be it who this person is or who that person is or what anything is, actually. So we tend to so easily try to have a standpoint, an opinion about something

[14:14]

And in the Heart Sutra, it says a bodhisattva has no abode. A bodhisattva doesn't have opinions, doesn't have fixed views. And then, of course, also when Buddha woke up, he said, truly, truly, all living beings are awake. Shine, are shining with light. did it go? Shining with the last thing is virtue. Wisdom. Shining with wisdom and virtue. And that means each one of you in this room plus all the beings on this planet are truly awake or enlightened or free of delusion shining with wisdom and virtue.

[15:17]

Because their minds are turned towards self-centered notions, they don't understand it. We don't understand it. We can't see it. But it's there. It's always there. So you can put that underlying your everyday life. If you keep repeating that to yourself every day, that this being, not who I think I am, but including who I think I am, but not only reduced to what I think what I am, because what I think what I am, if I would ask the people that know me, they would say different things that I don't think I am. But they see that I have my little box, which I cherish. This is who I am, and I'm kind of clinging to it, you know, ferociously. and I fight when somebody wants to tell me that's not all you are, that's the self that wants to just maintain itself and feel so familiar that we love it, even if it's painful, because it's so safe and familiar.

[16:34]

So if we, each one of us, remember every morning that we are totally free, full of wisdom and virtue, and that the only thing is we don't quite understand it because we have those ideas about ourselves which we hold on to, it would slowly start eroding, I think, the hold we have on our fixed views. And so we also have fixed views about other people, our loved ones, the ones we don't like so much, the ones we don't like at all. And those fixed views, as I said before, I think, are the darknesses, that they, they hinder us.

[17:40]

They hinder everything. They hinder... the fullness of possibilities which is always there to be allowed to manifest, either within us or outside of us, in us or in others. And we don't know if there is a tomorrow and if we can change tomorrow. So that's why it says practice as if your head's on fire. Keep remembering that this is an opportunity and this is an opportunity and this is an opportunity and there might be no other opportunity.

[18:41]

So how do we, and I think Christmas time, holiday time, Hanukkah time, Solstice time is a time when we can kind of, helps us to remember that and maybe really take some time to see what are the people in my life that I have hurt and can I make amends. Can I mend rifts? Are there rifts that need mending? Can I tend to that? Because the rifts or the fights or the leaf residues, they are not happening just out there. They are also in here. Whatever is happening between two people happens also inside them. So how do we create harmony within ourselves and with everybody, which includes how do we harmonize with disharmony?

[20:01]

It's not like, oh, disharmonies then are bad, or there can be different views, but how do we harmonize with the diversity, with the incredible multitude of people perceptions and manifestations that are there. I mean, if we only had a monoculture of plants, we couldn't live. So, and some of them can live in the same place and some can't. You know, tropical plants thrive in the tropics and desert plants thrive in the desert and you can't just switch them and say, well, be harmonious. It doesn't work. But then what is harmony? Where do we land to become able to meet everything in a deeply respectful and not knowing way, not going, oh, I know what that is, and just trap it in that knowledge, and then there it is.

[21:15]

and whatever kind of doesn't fit that shape just gets chopped off, like the cookie cutter. So again, then that's the patience, the generosity, the practice of patience, generosity, appreciation, tolerance. And remaining open to... You know, when we have a fixed view, we look for what supports the view, and we discard and discount anything that doesn't fit that view.

[22:19]

And so a real practice is also always when you start noticing that you're starting to have a fixed view, about somebody, and you can feel it in your body, it actually stiffens, which every fixed view, there is a stiffening in the body. Because then you expect certain things, or you don't expect certain things, or you tend to look away when that person comes in the room, or try to avoid something, or try to get more of something, or there is a tension connected to that. And you can train yourself to start, when you notice that you start having fixed views, start really looking to what undermines that view, what doesn't fit the view, and highlight that. So to end for today, I would like to read you a poem by...

[23:29]

Mary Oliver, and it's called Bone, and it's from her selection of Why I Wake Early. Understand, I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape. And so last week, When I found on the beach the ear bone of a pilot whale that may have died hundreds of years ago, I thought maybe I was close. To discover something for the ear... something. For the ear bone is the portion that lasts longest in any of us, man or whale. Shaped like a squat spoon, with a pink scoop, where once, in the lively swimmer's head, it joined its two sisters in the house of hearing, it was only two inches long, and thought the soul might be like this, so hard, so necessary, yet almost nothing.

[24:54]

Beside me, the gray sea was opening and shutting its wave doors, unfolding over and over its time-ridiculing roar. I looked, but I couldn't see anything through its dark-knit glare. Yet, don't we all know the golden sand is there at the bottom? though our eyes have never seen it, nor can our hands ever catch it. Lest we would sift it down into fractions and facts, certainties, and what the soul is, also I believe I will never quite know. Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking and touching and loving, which is the way I walked on softly through the pale pink morning light.

[26:09]

I looked, but I couldn't see anything through its dark-knit glare. Yet we all know the golden sand is there at the bottom, though our eyes have never seen it, nor can our hands ever catch it. Lest we would sift it down into fractions and facts, certainties. And what the soul is, also I believe I will never quite know. Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing. but looking and touching and loving, which is the way I walked on softly through the pale pink morning light. So can we, in these coming days, keep looking and touching and loving

[27:25]

knowing that there's much more than we can see or what we can reach or what we can know as we walk softly through the days. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dorma.

[28:05]

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