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. Good morning, everybody here at Green Gulch and online everywhere. So this is where I have to look. My name is Anna Thorn, and I'm a tanto, the head of practice at City Center right now. And I lived here at Green Gulch from, I think, 2012 to 2017. That was my last stay here. And, of course, it's a different world. And her athlete said... No woman ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and she's not the same woman.

[01:09]

We cannot enter the stream twice in the same place. And also I'm very grateful to be here again. It is still this amazing Valley of Green Dragon Temple. in this beautiful zendo with Manjushi sitting on the altar, supporting the practice of Zazen, studying the self to forget the self. I feel deep gratitude for this place that holds us and gives us trust in the possibility of deep transformation. I would like to thank Abbas Fu, And Tantu Jirio for inviting me to speak here today. A monk asked Yunmen, what are the teachings of a whole lifetime?

[02:15]

Yunmen said, an appropriate response. A response from this place, from this moment, from this breath. A response not from me here in the world out there. A response from just being this, coming to be through everything else. An appropriate response to our individual life, to our relationship, to our sangha and cultural context, and to this world. And if we intend to give an appropriate response, it must include embracing the complexity of this life in this world and awakening to presence, which gives room to work with that complexity.

[03:23]

Awakening includes embracing and penetrating the mystery of this life as we and it changes all the time, to understand it as best we can for the purpose of a most appropriate response, moment by moment. Awakening to this life embraces contradictions of reality, which is always changing and unfolding. How can we know it and not know it at the same time? How can we experience the world in its complexity and chaos and not get stuck in fear or a fixed view of where we are? A few weeks ago, we had a training here at Green Gulch Farm to prepare us

[04:28]

to listen more carefully and wholeheartedly and with deeper understanding to Indigenous people who had been the caretakers of the land we live on now before we took over. In this context, it's important to understand our own preconceptions of our relationship to the land we live on and the environment that we are part of. To recognize that our connection to the earth is shaped by our scientific view and our ideas of ownership. By the end of the training, which was just the beginning of a series of trainings, we agreed to learn how to be a good guest and a good neighbor on There is no one answer, but there are many suggestions within our tradition of how to take care of the world we live in.

[05:40]

One suggestion of how to receive a wider understanding of our differences and our connections is all-inclusive study, hands-on. All-inclusive study is just single-minded, sitting, dropping away body and mind. At the moment of going there, you go there. At the moment of coming here, you come here. There is no gap. Just in this way, the entire body studies all-inclusively the great road's entire body. As Nishijima Cross pointed out, Hen means everywhere or widely, and san means to visit or to study through experience. So Henzan originally described the custom of Buddhist monks traveling around to meet an excellent teacher with whom they could be satisfied.

[06:46]

We are always practicing with this being right here. we are practicing to let all our ideas of what this might be or should be drop away. Dropping body and mind. This dropping does not happen by moving around, but rather by meeting exactly this moment right here. And this meeting is often facilitated through the face and the body of our teacher. In the training that I just mentioned before, we had the good fortune to be supported by a guest teacher who identifies as indigenous and who invited us into the healing teaching of mending the sacred hoop. I understand this teaching as an expression of our deep interconnectedness with all life on this planet.

[07:50]

For me, most of this teaching is not given in the language of analysis, but is conveyed in ritual and ceremony. And I think our care and respect for ritual in the Sotizen tradition connects us to the indigenous people, gives us an opening into understanding a culture that is not written, but taught through ritual. Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performance. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified. They are written into the body, incorporated, that is, physically internalized. Thus, rituals create a bodily knowledge and memory, an embodied identity. a bodily connection, says Byung-Chul Han in his book, The Disappearance of Rituals.

[09:00]

During the pandemic, we have been restricted to meeting on Zoom, as we are still now in many cases. And we have felt the elimination of many layers of presence with each other and the reduction to our visual senses. Being separated and safe behind screens has left an imprint. The dominance of the visual sense has been described as a characteristic of the process of civilization, the understanding of Western civilization, leading to the exclusion of the body in many areas of everyday life. through the development of technology. Experiencing our world more and more with our eyes and through our computing devices like phones and laptops has left us wondering about what this is and who we are.

[10:11]

I wonder if the primary delusion of me being here in the world out there has been even reinforced in this recent process of sheltering in place. As our ritual community disappeared, our communal body disappeared. Digital communication is disembodied communication. And I think here at Green Garge, you are really lucky that you have your hands in the earth. a lot of the time, and work with plants and living beings very directly. I think that's a good counterbalance to losing our body in the digital process. During our one-day sitting at City Center last Saturday, with a good number of brand-new participants coming in and with formal meals in the courtyard and dining room,

[11:22]

I noticed a young woman taking a picture with her cell phone of the beautiful bowl of her breakfast in front of her. I had to smile, as this felt like being on a holiday vacation and capturing the adventures by making photographs, like trying to hold on to the good moments. This is the world we live in now. We prove our experience by forwarding photos. But a photo is not an experience. It is just a testament of something that happened. I'm aware that there is no going back to the world that we think of as the world before COVID or even before that. I also think that this huge interruption of everything is an amazing opportunity to begin again and to explore again and to find out what we want to restore and what we want to leave behind.

[12:32]

I feel the need to explore the place where we are right now in relationship to being our bodies in this practice. Dogen makes a distinction. To study a hundred thousand myriad things only as a hundred thousand myriad things is not yet all inclusive study. To turn a hundred thousand myriad bodies even in half a statement is all inclusive study. For example, to just hit the earth when you hit the earth is all inclusive study. I will come back to this hitting the earth. But first I would like to mention that this alluding to studying a hundred thousand myriad things is of course very much like surfing the endless access of internet information.

[13:36]

For the pure accumulation of information, though the pure accumulation of information is not opening our mind and it is not enticing the mind to move freely. It can easily overload us and put us into a helpless state of burnout. Follower exploration is studying with our whole being completely, which cannot be done just mentally. Suzuki Roshi describes all-inclusive study in beginner's mind as doing what we do with our whole body and mind. He says, You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do.

[14:40]

I think there is a big difference between having a burnout through being fried by mental overload and feeling completely used up. because we have done something completely with our whole body and mind engaged. There is a difference in the kind of knowledge and information that we receive in the process. Jung-Chun Han says, the knowledge produced by big data escapes understanding. Human condition is not powerful enough. Processors are faster than a human being precisely because they neither think nor understand. They only calculate. Transparency, the imperative of dataism, is the source of the compulsion to transform everything into data and information, that is, to make it visible.

[15:44]

It is a compulsion of production. Transparency does not declare the human being to be free. It declares data and information free. It is an efficient form of domination in which total communication and total surveillance coincide. This form of domination presents itself as freedom. It is always helpful to come back into our body and and to recognize what is going on right now. Breathing in our feelings, in our thoughts, it is our particular gift that we can find our bearings right where we are. And pause. Coming back to the moment of hitting the earth, I would like to quote a passage from the physical Dogen

[16:47]

Dasnas, he says. For example, when you understand the moment of falling to the ground as Dasnas, you will not doubt the moment of falling to the ground at the moment of getting up. Since ancient times, these words have been spoken in both India and the Deva world. One who falls to the ground uses the ground to stand up. One who ignores the ground and tries to stand cannot. The meaning is that those who fall down on the earth stand up on the earth. It is impossible to get up without using the earth. Be where you are is a wonderfully clear response to our situation of having fallen down, having lost our orientation. having lost our balance and trust. And Dogen goes further in his articulation to make sure to not get stuck in the idea of locality, of a certain place.

[18:01]

And he says, Here is one vital path of getting up. One who falls to the ground uses the sky to stand up. One who falls to the sky uses the ground to stand up. Without being thus, you can never get up. This has always been the case with all Buddhas and ancestors. To get up where you have fallen down is something that little children who are in the process of learning how to work are really good at, if we let them be. It is important to be generous and awake and to let them fall down and get up and not interfere so they can learn to get up where they fall and trust the ground that holds them falling and getting up. During the last two years, I had a number of incidents of falling down.

[19:05]

I had two bicycle accidents in the last time falling. happened when I just came back from San Francisco to Frankfurt, Germany last December, using the moving stairs at the airport, holding two big suitcases, and one started sliding away, and I tried to keep holding on to it. And I was very lucky that the people behind me on the stairs immediately stopped the fall by putting their luggage in the way. But it was a real shock to my body that registered as a strong trembling and I just started to cry, which was very helpful in being able to readjust and find my bearings again. In the falling down and the getting up, there is usually a moment of coming to the end of falling down and to begin the getting up.

[20:13]

It is a tiny moment of closure and new beginning. And this is the same if you use the sky to get up. My impression is right now that we are stuck in the falling down and have difficulty in finding closure to be open to a new beginning. I see many reasons for this. One reason is that the pandemic imprinted us like a trauma, which means the experience of what happened was beyond our capacity of being present or digested. We closed the doors to be safe, which we never are, and we got a little stuck in this safe unsafeness. Other reasons are that the pandemic was just one layer of traumatic disruption of all our daily life and rituals.

[21:18]

The result of climate change and catastrophic weather situations and the inability to work together on a global scale to repair or counteract these situations is another layer of deep insecurity in our life. And I don't even try to mention the war in Ukraine and its huge repercussions all over Europe. I feel I cannot even find the language to talk about this and tell some kind of truth because I'm in delusion, throughout delusion. This delusional process of imputing selves on everything as an effort to permanently reconstruct our own selves can be released in deep stillness and presence. Zazen can be being one with everything, where our fear of existence or fear of birth and death falls away.

[22:32]

When we can trust in just being, being still, without any grasping of any outcome, when we develop an awareness of our process of perception through mindfulness, can we interrupt the patterns of communal reproduction of delusion? I talk as if there would be something that is United States, Ukraine, Europe, women, indigenous people, or else. But of course, this is only my story or our stories about our world and not the whole reality. Wisdom is seeing through delusion and being at ease with being not knowing. And it is not realized intellectually, but experienced and to some extent unspeakable. This experience is not an experience of a self, but rather a non-dual event.

[23:43]

Dogen describes it as, to carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion, that myriad things come forth and experience themselves as awakening. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. One of the essential Buddhist teachings is the teaching of the three Dharma seals, or Dharma mudras they are called. Thich Nhat Hanh names the three seals according to the Samyukta Agama, impermanence, non-self, and nirvana. Everything is changing all the time. Nothing is permanent. Things cannot remain themselves for two consecutive moments. From the perspective of impermanence, there can be no permanent independent self.

[24:51]

And when we look more deeply, we can see that everything exists only because of everything else. Understanding impermanence allows us to understand non-self. Impermanence and non-self allow transformation. Nirvana, the third seal, is the ground of being. It is a complete silencing of all concepts. While impermanence and non-self are instruments of practice, instruments to understand reality, Nirvana is the basis. It does not exist separate from impermanence or non-self. Thich Nhat Hanh says, If you know how to use the tools of impermanence and non-self to touch reality, you touch nirvana in the here and now.

[25:53]

Nirvana is the extinction of all notions. Birth is a notion. Death is a notion. Being is a notion. Non-being is a notion. In our daily lives, we have to deal with these relative realities. But if we touch life more deeply, reality will reveal itself in a different way. I think we are here to touch life more deeply, to touch the ground of our existence, where separations, and discriminations fall away. We practice to let go of our stories about ourselves, which is also to see how many different beings we are and everyone else is. We can bow to each other in the deep unknowing and the deepest respect at the same time.

[26:55]

When we bow to everything at the same time, When we don't pick and choose, we can find gentleness in this gesture, gentleness with everything and everyone around us, vulnerability and openness with what is. And this is the great potential of these forms and rituals. We repeat them, we lose them, we return to them. They are to connect us to communicate beyond words and definitions. They have lived longer than a few hundred years, and thus they carry wisdom like very, very old trees carry wisdom. They have been scripted and defined, and still again and again they come to life in their own way. We have a commonality with indigenous people in communicating through ritual.

[28:03]

Rituals bring about a community in which resonances occur, one that is capable of a common rhythm. Rituals produce socio-cultural axis of resonance along which may be experience three different kinds of resonant relationship. Vertical, to the gods, the cosmos, the time, to eternity. Horizontal, within one's social community. And diagonal, with respect to things. Rituals also include collective feelings. And the bearer, of these feelings is not an isolated individual. For example, in a ritual of mourning, the mourning is an objective feeling, a feeling held by the whole community.

[29:09]

Such collective feelings consolidate a community and release the individual. This is most important in working with transgenerational trauma like genocide, which cannot be held by an individual. The community is the subject that takes on the mourning that needs to happen to find forgiveness and closure. In the process of sheltering in place or closing the temple doors, we also had to give up a number of rituals that bring us together, and we are still discovering. how important these rituals are and the physical experience of being a community, of being a Sangha. Sitting together and listening to our story is one way of supporting each other to understand what is going on and feel that we are not alone, that we are together in this life.

[30:16]

And that this is a great gift. I'm glad to be here again with all of you. And I would like to hear your response to what I said. Thank you very much. May we fully enjoy the Dormer.

[30:56]

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