This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I'd like to thank Christina for inviting me to give the talk today. yesterday I thought maybe you were going to give the talk that I was going to give today. That was very funny that she was talking about that, and then she started saying something about ceremonies, and I'm like, oh, it's happening. But it didn't quite. So one of the things that Christina was saying yesterday about ceremonies is that you could actually look at the whole practice period as one continuous three-month-long ceremony.

[01:00]

And I really like that idea, and that fit in so much with what I wanted to talk about today. And I was thinking about our daily ceremonies, particularly during practice period, There's the Shuso wake-up bell. That's a ceremony, actually. There's a ceremony that happens in the Zendo before Shuso starts running the wake-up bell, and it's a procession, so we all bow to the procession if we're out at that time. The Doshi Jundo, when the Doshi, usually the abbess, goes around and offers incense at the altars and kind of wakes up the zendo. Oh, and the shisho actually wakes up the zendo even before that, ringing the bell in the four corners. And then we have the ceremony of zazen. I remember the first time I heard Reb refer to zazen as a ceremony, and I was really struck by that because I had never thought of it that way.

[02:15]

And I thought, well, what makes it a ceremony? So that was a koan for me for a long time. And at some point I did notice, oh yes, we have this form. It's a very formal container. And I was also thinking, well, when does it start? Does it start with the three bells? You say, at the start of zazen. But, oh, you could say it starts with the han. Or it starts when the tenken comes in and lights up the lamps. also say, of course, it never stops. And then there's morning service, of course, and the ceremony of Oryoki. And all of these ceremonies have particular forms. Soto Zen, in particular, is a very formal form.

[03:16]

practice. Formal means has a lot, has form, has a literal form, which is, I think, particularly interesting the way that Soto Zen has taken root in this culture, which is probably, at a guess, one of the most informal cultures that has ever existed and has the biggest charge around forms. particularly starting in the 60s. You know, I did it my way. Think outside the box. T-shirts and jeans, which have been exported all over the world, so clearly there's some resonance with this. But this relationship between form and no form is really a potent one. And with our... deeply acculturalized minds, we bring a lot of response to form, which can be a really fruitful field of practice, a really lively creative tension or creative dynamic between however we grew up, with ritual or without it, with form or without it.

[04:42]

I grew up Lutheran, which is about as unceremonialized as Christianity gets, not quite, but getting close. And I longed for ritual. I missed it. I felt like if I were going to be religious, I would be Jewish or Catholic because they know how to do ritual. There was some resonance there, even though I didn't have much experience of it. And I loved the part of... the church service where we do the Kyrie, and there's a little bit of Gregorian chant in Latin, and I really loved that, and certain of the yearly ceremonies, the Christmas Eve tenebrae service, I just really responded to, but didn't find much place for that and didn't resonate so much with the rest of Christianity, which made it more than a little problematic.

[05:46]

Because ceremony is not just the form. I mean, it's not just having a form. It's not just having a beautiful form. It's the embodiment of meaning. So I was really longing for some meaning that I resonated with or wanted to harmonize with to be embodied in form. And where and how I grew up, I was really missing that. And I have a number of Catholic friends who have kind of a very different experience. They had a lot of forms, they had a lot of structure, and it wasn't meeting the form and the structure wasn't meeting them. For me, it was the absence of form for them. It was the form itself. This is really not working. So coming at it from both sides, we can have different relationship, but it still... Whatever our relationship is, we're having a relationship.

[06:49]

We might like it, we might not like it, but we are in relationship with form, always. So be intimate in your relationship, however that relationship is manifesting, whether it's sweet intimacy or looks like enmity. So part of Zen practice in particular and Buddhism in general is ceremonializing or making sacred or ritualizing every moment of every day. It's to bring... meaning to every moment of every day.

[07:53]

And again, referring back to Western culture, you know, modernity and post-modernity has largely stripped away meaning. God was declared dead a long time ago and, you know, family, you know, here we are in California at the edge of the continent and for many of us our families are far away and So it's like, what is it that anchors us? But for the Buddha, for Dogen, for the history of the Dharma, and for a large part the history of human beings, has been to find meaning and to find the relationship between the human and what is beyond the human. Beyond the human. The sacred... however you want to put that. And one of the things so particular to Buddhism is to insist that they are not two.

[09:01]

So if they're not two, then it's not like we go about our business all week and we do whatever we want and we live however we want or, you know, in line with whatever. But then there is the sacred. Because so much of... creating a sacred space is about marking it out as sacred. When I was in college, part of my search for ritual and for meaning was to try to be a Wiccan, you know, to do pagan Wiccan rituals. I was very much involved in the women's movement at that time, and there were a fair number of people doing that. And there was a little store that sold herbs and things, and several of us were trying to do this. We felt some call to do that, and we had no clue how. There were little books that said little things about it. And we tried to be serious about it, but we were kind of embarrassed and giggled in our discomfort because we didn't know how to establish...

[10:18]

a space that was different from our everyday space. We couldn't let go of our everyday minds, our judging minds, our this looks silly, you know, whatever it was. We couldn't fully enter into that. But we actually made the effort to do that, to try to find a way in, and we didn't have We were just like four college girls trying to figure something out and didn't have anyone to show us. I hadn't thought about this, I think, since then, really. It just arose for me this morning. I said, yeah, that's part of why we need teachers. We need someone to model to be an example, to let us see what it is to embody the practice.

[11:22]

What is another way of being? So part of the ways that we bring awareness, mindfulness, and a sense of it's all practice here, especially during the practice period, also many of these are during the summer too, are the many forms that we have during the day. So we bow to each person that we meet on the path. We bow going into the toilet, we bow to the altar. So we bow to beings, we bow at the altar into the toilet. And I was thinking, you know, and I hadn't really noticed this before. You prepare for a talk, you start noticing all kinds of interesting things, like this whole other world arises.

[12:24]

And I noticed a Dogen fascicle I had never read before called Cleansing. And it's all about going to the toilet. Like practices about going to the toilet and washing the hands. Very particular how you wash the hands. You know, three times this and three times that, and you rub it this way. I was remembering being in India a long time ago. We have very nice, clean toilets. It all goes away. The toilets are no joke. They're stinky. And they're really intense. Dogen wrote a fascicle about relating with the toilet and relating with, you know, like purification. But it's not like the toilet is dirty. It's like we purify our body to purify our mind of the taint that thinks there's something dirty.

[13:33]

But still, we wash. So, you know, we wash our bodies, we wash our hands. So there's this continual, lively play in Dogen between form and no form. The chouseau honorably cleans the toilets for us and takes care of the compost and the benji. And this is no mistake. It wasn't like, Oh, we need someone to clean the toilets. Let's have the head student clean the toilet. No. The head monk cleans the toilets to embody that there is no separation. That even though, as it says in the Tenzo Kyokun, we put high things in high places and low things in low places, and that's our practice, there's also no high and no low.

[14:34]

Don't think that high is better and low is worse. Don't think it's better to sit in the clean Dharma seat and give a talk. Don't think it's better than being the Tenzo or being the Shuso and cleaning the toilets. Oh, and also we have the work. We bring mindfulness to work and have a work circle and bow in. We bow to the bath altar at bath exercise time. We have the refuges to close the day. Firewatch, the Jikido, sleeps in the Zendo. And one of the ways that traditionally practice and mindfulness, well, one of the ways is... through the use of gattas.

[15:37]

The little verse at the bathhouse is a gatta. With all beings I wash body and mind. So gattas are always in this kind of four-line form of usually a situation. I vow with all beings and how we practice with it. And traditional monastic practice has these four pretty much every moment of the day. So you can always be reciting agatha, not just when you go to the baths, but when you go to the bathroom, when you brush your teeth, when you wash your face. It's like it actually makes this continuous practice throughout the day so that we're always present, always mindful, and actually always manifesting the way. So the Buddha taught the three-fold training of shila, samadhi, and prajna.

[16:50]

You can divide the eight-fold path up into those three as well. Shila is conduct, samadhi is concentration, meditation, and prajna is wisdom. And again, in the West, We really like to focus on the meditation side and the wisdom side. And the conduct side seems so different from what we're used to that it's hard to even wrap our minds around it. Although we're willing to do it with emptiness, which is really interesting. It's like, emptiness, okay, that sounds really cool. It's like, okay. Transcendent states of consciousness. Great. Sign me up. I'll sit in meditation. Okay, if that's how you get there, I'll do it. But following the guidelines for conduct, the precepts, the shingi, the monastic rules, often seems just extreme and unreasonable.

[18:02]

stupid, deluded, like really evidence of clinging, like here's all these rules, they're impossible, you know, that's just really limited mind. And they have this very, you know, I was going to say dual relationship, but it's way more layered than two. The Buddha did not, the Buddha very early on included, you know, right as part of the path. But he didn't go on to enumerate the rules until particular need arose within the Sangha. It was more general. And then situations would arise and he'd say, okay, that sounds like we need a rule about that. Disciple of the Buddha shall not X. This is how a disciple of the Buddha shall behave. So that was how it came about, all these hundreds of rules. how should we comport ourselves to be in harmony within the Sangha and in harmony with people outside the Sangha, the lay people?

[19:16]

It's interesting reading to just even look through the Vinaya, and you can kind of see, oh, I can see where there was a situation. And I said, okay, we need to address this. And you can see in our own Shingi here, our own guidelines here, you can think, hmm, one of them is wear something under your robes. Did that have to be said? Apparently so. Also, I think we can say, oh, this is all so Japanese. This is so foreign. Why don't we make it more American? But actually, even though some of Japanese monastic practice is just Japanese, a lot of it is just monastic practice.

[20:29]

And it would be equally foreign and equally strange to young Japanese monks entering the monastery. We went to Eiheiji a couple years ago, and there was a young monk escorting us around. And I think he'd been in the monastery for like a year, year and a half. And it was very evident by our questions that he was so surprised that we knew things like, is this the Gaitan? It's like, you know what a Gaitan is? It's like, oh look, there's Manjushri. It was a personal day. So because there was no one in the Zendo, they rolled the blind up and let us look in and we could see the Manjushri banner. It's like, there's Manjushri. It's exactly like we do it. And he's like, how do you know the Manjushri banner? It's like, until a year and a half ago, he didn't know that. He wasn't doing all these forms.

[21:31]

So it really is to break up our usual habits and ways of doing things. It's not an accident. Dogen has a fascicle called Gyoji, and Kaz Tanahashi translates it as continuous practice. And it's really interesting because Nishijima Cross translates it much more concretely as conduct and observance. Gyo is conduct and Ji is observance. And it refers to pure conduct, monastic decorum, and observance of the precepts. And Cause translates it more in the meaning sense of it as continuous practice.

[22:37]

You know, that... that we are continuously, the practice is unbroken. And Dogen says, on the great road of Buddha ancestors, there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained. It forms the circle of the way and is never cut off. On the great road of Buddha ancestors, There is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained. It forms the circle of the way and is never cut off. Or there is always conduct and observance. How interesting. When I first read this, I was just reading Kaza's translation. I thought, oh, continuous practice, like being mindful. Yes, but a really particular form of being mindful, which is embodied action, right conduct.

[23:47]

It's very particular. It's not only watching what comes up. It's not only mindfulness. It's really doing this very particular thing with your body and watching what comes up. and being fully present with all of it. So, Christina recently talked about staying in the zendo, encouraging us to stay in the zendo during kinhin. And that kinhin is not a break. And how we can sort of manage or try to manage the intensity or whatever of practice by taking time out. Which is really an interesting notion.

[24:54]

There's like time out of practice, that there's breaks in practice. And the whole idea of right conduct is that there is not... time out of practice. There's no time out of ethical conduct. I suppose in a Christian sense it would be, God is always watching. Which would be kind of the negative side of it, but it's like we know. We know when we're pretending that it doesn't count. Nobody saw that, right? Nobody saw that little thing that I did. Whatever it is that we somehow know isn't right. And it's not that we don't do those things. And it's not to be perfect.

[25:58]

Really, really, really, I don't want any feeling at all that I'm saying Be perfect. Be, like, strive 24 hours a day. But this, it's like realization. Here's realization. Here's continuous practice. Here's following the forms and ceremonies. And now how do we meet that? Like, I love the Ehe Koso. It starts out, we vow with all beings from this life on throughout countless lives, it's like, yes, I will do this total impossible thing. Although our past evil karma has greatly accumulated, okay, here we are, here we actually are. And then goes on to say, by revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddhas, by doing this,

[27:02]

We melt away the root of transgression. This is the pure and simple color of true practice, of the true mind of faith, of the true body of faith. So we're always making mistakes. Dogen says, continuous mistake, one mistake after another. That is our life of practice. Always aiming at the target, always missing. 99 times out of 100, missing the mark. So it's not about being perfect. You can get really caught. If you're prone to getting caught in being perfect, this is a great place to really get caught. By which I mean that's a total hell realm. And it will be hard for you to see it. It will be hard for anyone else to point out to you. But it's just continuing the striving mind or the hard-on-yourself mind or the judging mind. So I want to be really clear about that. The rest of, or most of the rest of the Gyoji fascicle is actually instances of particularly remarkable practice from the Buddhists and ancestors, just kind of a laundry list of all these amazing things that are really intended to be inspirational, not something to measure ourselves against and fall short.

[28:35]

But to be inspiring, it's like, wow, it's possible to do more than I thought. Which is one of the great things about Tongario, right? I cannot sit for five days. Whoa, I did. I don't know how I did, but I did. So we tend to back off from what we think we can do. I'm gonna leave time for questions. Maybe that's good enough and we'll just have questions.

[29:53]

Great. Okay. I thought you had your hand up. If you don't, no worries. when you meet the Buddha there's the Buddha over there but there's another meeting which is intimate meeting so we don't talk about meeting the form we talk about harmonize harmonize with the schedule harmonize with the Sangha

[30:54]

harmonize with the forms. So just like two people dancing, maybe they're both great dancers, and that is just seamless from the beginning, but usually there's that negotiation. Who's leading? Who's following? You're a foot and a half taller than I am. You're a good dancer. I'm a lousy dancer, but we're going to dance together. So how are we going to find meeting, not something separate from, but how do we find our way into it? Brooks? So just to continue that, you said that you want to be clear that it's not about perfection. I kind of feel that you're not being clear enough, at least for me.

[31:57]

Because it sounds kind of dismal, the continuous practice. If I continue this practice, the unsurpassable practice, continuously, I'll die. You won't die if you do something else? Exactly. I have to do something else at some point. But I mean, that will stop you from dying? You'll die of Zazen. Death by Zazen. So I guess my real question is, how do you become intimate with an enemy? I heard you already are. Great, yeah. Yeah, we're already there. The enemy is within, and if there's an enemy, it's not out there. So how do we become deeply intimate with the enemy is a big question.

[33:04]

It's a big koan. The enemy is not other. And how can we truly accept, be present with, and love the parts of ourselves that we experience as enemies? so that's how it is right now. However that shows up, oh, that's how it is right now. I see that's how it is. That's what acceptance means. It's not a judgment, good or bad. It's just, I see how it is right now. The Buddha pursued ascetic practices, believing and hoping that that was the way to find the answers that he sought. And ultimately he realized that wasn't it. And he started eating again. So there has to be that continual staying in touch with what's true for us.

[34:15]

Do you have any advice about how to transition from secret space, civilian space, to something else? Yes. Well, advice, I don't know, but I have several thoughts. One was that when they first started doing retreats at Barry on the East Coast, three-month Vipassana retreats, they didn't have any transition. They just ended the retreat after three months of silence and no eye contact and sent people back out into the world. And someone from the local grocery store called and said, I think one of your people is here. They're wandering up and down the aisles, very slowly picking up jars and staring at them and putting them back. So they started very deliberately making a transitional process going up, which I think is great, because that tradition has actually brought mindfulness to those transitions in and out of that kind of space.

[35:53]

So internally, you could notice, when do I start letting go of ceremonial space. Is it when the bell rings at the end of zazen? Is it when you get out of your seat? Is it when you step on the ingawa? Is it when someone talks to you? The content is going to change. What arises does change, and the transition from the settled and calm and peaceful state more or less for whatever it happens to be at the end of Sashin, to more activity. It may feel really energetic and it may feel negative, but you can also bring awareness to that. And you can also be very gentle with yourself and stay out of areas where there's a lot of people talking, at least for the first hours of the day, or spend... Limited amounts of time there, kind of come and check in and then go away, go for a walk.

[36:57]

Find a transition that works for you, that has some more ease and allows you to actually bridge that gap. Maybe something like, hmm, I'm still, I still have sashim mind. I'm not quite ready to talk yet. Could we talk later? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe now that you've said this here, people may approach you differently.

[37:58]

Can I say something new? Grant. Maybe meaning wasn't the best choice of words, but think that it's well no we always make meaning whatever we do we're making meaning about unless we're completely in just the state of like just hearing just seeing when it's just perception and there's no meaning laid on but

[39:27]

We usually have an everyday meaning, which is, I want this or I don't want this. How does this fit in with the agenda of the I, the I, me, mine program? That's always in relation to that. So the meaning is more about the wisdom side. How are we relating that to Buddha nature, to practice? together with all beings realize the Buddha way so we're moving it into that realm rather than the dualistic realm so it doesn't have a particular meaning I wouldn't say it means that this is this in a linear way but it has the potential to open up a different relationship between person, form, environment, and transcendent.

[40:40]

I'm really having a hard time with my language right now. It's not the way we usually think of meaning. When we're completely present, everything has ultimate value and ultimate meaning. Just things as it is, is ultimate meaning, but it's not a particular meaning. It's meaningful. It's full of meaning. What is the meaning? I couldn't say. At least that's my experience, that things are meaningful as they are. And I give meaning to them, and meaning is given to me. But I couldn't say, oh, it means. And it's just something that is lived.

[41:43]

It's something that is experienced when you're just completely there in it, and everything comes alive. It's like the lights go on. Let me go to the other side. So the Gatha thing, I'm picturing like an Easter egg hunt of Gathas that stretches from like the horse pasture trail to the land caves and to the Tony trail and stuff. But there's also the option of being totally present without any form. Like if you're in a situation with no form, and you're completely aware as if Latakha was watching you. That's my question. That's my question, basically. You said something of no form?

[42:44]

Yeah, there's not forms everywhere. There's not a form. No, I mean... Yes, yes, yes. they're not assigned to everything. Right. In terms of gattas, yes. Yeah. So, I mean, but you can be as aware of yourself and your surroundings and your thoughts or something in any setting. Absolutely. All of this is intended to support our practice. That's the only purpose. It's both a support and an expression of practice.

[43:50]

It has both sides. Sometimes I think of it as little kids dressing up like mommy and daddy, they don't know what it means to be an adult, but they'll put on, well, it used to be mommy's high heels and daddy's necktie. I have no idea what kids do these days. So we move into what we see as where we're going. We're trying to embody that. But Dogen's point is that there's no separation. practice realization is one thing. It's not two things. It's not... Even with little kids and playing dress-up, it's not... Kids put on high heels and neckties in order to become adults. And it's not like, when do you become an adult? There's no... Yeah.

[44:55]

The kid and the adult are not two things and they're not one thing. So, yes, all the forms can be used as supports and as practice, as things to take up, in order to, you can use conventional language, have a different experience. Instead of experiencing the world in our everyday way, we aim to experience the world in a different way, that is, free from suffering. Because we eventually discover that the suffering is actually in the way we experience things. It's not out there. If suffering were out there, we'd be going about this really differently. We'd be having super nice cushy beds and making everything comfortable. But we find, oh, suffering's not out there. Suffering's in here. Suffering's how we relate to things. How do we practice with that? How do we get closer to that?

[45:57]

And eventually, it seems like it's over there, and then there's moments where it drops in. It's like, no, it's here. It's actually here. It wasn't anywhere else. It was never anywhere else. It's just exactly this now. And then it's an expression of it. So out of that... Just this, just now, arises compassionate action. Maybe one more. Or not. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge. and this is made possible by the donations we receive.

[46:57]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

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