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 to everyone in the room and everyone on the Zoom. You know, I mentioned this before, but it's a tradition, it seems, or pattern in our Dharma talks to thank the leadership, to thank you all for coming and the leadership for the invitation. And, you know, I basically have also taken that pattern as a way of saying thank you for this moment. We're being so supported. by the universe to be here, and by the leadership to help, and all of you to help support this great space.

[01:08]

So this thank you for coming. We need you. You need us. And together we're a team. So thank you, Senior Dharma Teacher Fu. Thank you, Absent Abbott. Thank you, Tonto. And thank you for the years of practice that have brought me to this moment. Ah, I see that was the problem. Is that it's too close? Should I move it further? Okay. All right. This is called working with causes and conditions. Learning things.

[02:17]

How's that? Does that work? Testing. That's what we do every day. We're testing. Well, I know what you're doing. That's what I'm doing every day, testing. So I would like to do... I'm so sorry. Do you want me to go to the headphone thing? I just don't know how to do this. I think down is better. You know, Foof, what have you done? You don't know. Let's just try it. You know, Kesa can hold it. So, at one point, I remember asking my teacher, Ten Chin Reb Anderson, like, what are we doing here?

[03:19]

What is the point of this? And he said, the core of our teaching is Zazen. We're here to encourage Zazen. So I'd like to say some things about that today. And the other thing, I wonder if it's not so loud, if the people can hear me anyway. Can you hear me in the back? So-so? Okay. Wait. Okay, we're going to go with this. Not my first choice, but guess what? Life is a comic. Okay.

[04:27]

So this talk or this moment, I would like to talk about Sazen. I would like to talk about or speak to the fact that I've been, I'm currently in a crossroads right now in my life and in Zen Center. But the place I would like to start, is for you to go in and see if you can identify or remember what it is that brought you here. How did you come to be here, whether in this room, as a Sunday guest, as a guest student, as a resident, someone who has come in through Zoom.

[05:51]

What is it? Can you articulate that for yourself? This is important. And it's not like There will be an answer. In fact, maybe what brought you here is a question. And I'm leaving space for you to register again. What brought you here? What keeps you here? And Rilke, this is a context for maybe support for Zazen.

[07:00]

Rilke says, I want to beg you as much as I can, dear ones, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart. And to try to love the questions themselves. To love what brought you here. To love what keeps you here. To appreciate and love the exploration and the discovery. who try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them.

[08:04]

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions. Live what brought you here. Live what keeps you here. Explore. Define. Redefine. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some live in some long distant day into the answer. That someday you will live in the long distant future to the answer or to a response. Be patient to all that is unsolved.

[09:12]

I've been... Now as I go back in, I want to say also, as I just noticed what's happening in me, is I don't really want to speak to your heads. If you made some connection with a heart or a gut feeling or something that supports your back, try to listen with that heart or that gut or that spine, that internal body. and see what comes up for you. You know, at the end, if we, I, leave some time, we can have some comments or some addition or some growing edge to this, what I'm starting the conversation with. I came to Zen Center in 1991, and I expected to stay here for three months. And here we are. And a number of people have that story as well.

[10:20]

I think I remember hearing Ed Brown saying he was going to be here for a year and then get on with his life. I'm just going to hold this. Does that work? Okay. So I came in 1991, and I was just going to stay for three months. And there was a lot of confusion. And then there was this moment. I can still feel it. Our senior Dharma teacher, Fu, was the director. And one day she tapped me on the shoulder. I can almost feel it. And she said, would you like to stay for a year as a provisional student? And I kind of froze. since this was not my plan. And then I came back to Fu and said, because I like to keep my commitments, I said, I think I can commit to six months and then we'll see.

[11:34]

And she just smiled and said, okay. And so six months turned into a year and many years here and also at Tassajara. So I'm asking you, I asked you, what is it that brought you here? What is it that keeps you here? And I would say over the years, my understanding, my feeling, the generation, the age that I grew up in, I saw how much suffering there was. I mean, it's not like it went away, and there's plenty of it now. But I wanted to find a way to change the world. And as I listened to the Buddhist teaching, I thought, ah, this is it. So I kind of thought I could kind of grasp a transformation of consciousness in maybe a short time.

[12:44]

But... Actually, what I want to say to you and all of you who are masters, have some kind of mastery in sports, in art, in music, in whatever your career is, in health care, this didn't happen in a year or two years. To learn to be a tabla master or a great dancer, a ballerina, It takes over and over and over again. So that's my experience here is not being able to get away fast. And so I invite you into being present for the long haul. So I'm going to try and put this back on my ear. I'm going to leave.

[13:45]

Green Gulch, in May sometime, and join the other seniors, some seniors that are already at Enzo Village, which is a senior living Zen-inspired community. And some of our seniors are already there. And some of us, three of us, will be leaving this year. Abbas Fu and her partner, Karina, and then myself later. And then next year, four more people will leave. So this is a crossroads. And all of us are in sometimes big crossroads. The other day, I was speaking to the abbot, and he said, what are you going to talk about?

[14:51]

And I said, well, I'm thinking crossroads. And he said, oh, you mean like the one right now? So crossroads are happening every moment. And what is it, how is it that that matters? That I'm reminding you that crossroads are every moment. So what is it that you're dedicated to? What is it that matters? What is it that you can identify? What is it that's at the heart, the heart of what you're doing, at the horror of what you're doing? And it takes time. And yet, you know, it's amazing. We're leaving our familiar, And I enjoy that word because some of you coming here and either in your lives not here or here in Zen Center, we're leaving.

[15:52]

When I think of the word familiar way, I think of family, familiarity. So we've all been conditioned in some way into our family ways. And the question, a question might be, is does that still serve me now? how is that serving me now? Did I learn the lessons? Can I let it go without forgetting it and then be open to wonder? To not know the answer, but be open to wonder and hear some of the teachings that have come before. So, I'm just putting that out on the desk, on the deck, in the space. And what I want to bring in is the importance of what we're doing here in this place, which is Zazen.

[17:02]

And you might wonder, what is Zazen? People do wonder, and then they have an idea of it. But Zazen, it's a word. It's a space. It's a pointer. It's really not a thing. It's creating, it's entering a field. And to understand the field that is separate from the objects that come up in your field of consciousness. I came across the word, or the referent, Japanese word called ma, which is a pause in time, an interval, an emptiness in space, time in space where life needs to breathe, to feel connected again.

[18:05]

And if we don't have that time in space, there's sort of a constriction, or maybe that familiarity. So what happens when I'm sitting in that space and we get quiet and we open up this mudra for our space is dreams and thoughts and pictures and maybe old things come through. And the question is how to let them be. And there's a way of concentrating on the breath, using the breath to come back or to counting. One to ten. Like I've said to some of you before, I tried counting one to ten in the early days. I could never get there. By the time I got to three, I was lost back in the story. And then realizing moment by moment, I could count to three. Three times in a row, and that's almost ten.

[19:07]

So that's what we're doing, is moment by moment practice. So don't get too... Tough on yourself. These days, what I'm noticing is the frogs. Those of us that are sitting here, and maybe where some of you live, the frogs. And you know, sitting there, and I'm trying to get spacious, and then I hear one frog. And then either the same one or a second one, I don't know. And then another, and then another, and pretty soon they're all doing this chorus thing. And then they stop. And there's the space. And I'm in that space with the space. It's a little bit like the wind and the storm that comes through here, making a lot of noise and a lot of rain.

[20:15]

It's quiet. There's the space. There's ways that we can start to register that outside ourselves, or seems to come from outside ourselves, inside. The space. And then I notice, so you can use whatever is around you. Right now I'm using frogs, but I'm sitting there and going, and then... I don't know where I'm at, but all of a sudden I missed the first one or two pivots. And there's just the cacophony happening. Where was I? And then I go back and listen to the orchestration of all the frogs. And then they stop and I stop. So there's a way of being able to use what's at hand. you find space.

[21:17]

And in that space, you can notice what's coming up. And in that space, you also have a moment to decide what one of our Zen ancestors, Yun Men, said about the whole of life. What is an appropriate response? What do I want to live into? What am I dedicated to? What do I want to support? And so I want to bring this in while I'm thinking of it. A friend and practitioner here has at the bottom of her email something that came in that really touched me. And I'd like to share it with you because I think it, in my mind, this is a bridge to what we're talking, what you're listening to, what I'm talking about.

[22:21]

And it's an excerpt from an author and historian, Howard Zinn. Maybe some of you know that name. And it touched me in a way, thinking about all of the fire, and distress and violence and fear that's going on now. So I bring Howard Zinn into this conversation today. There's a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment, we will continue to see. We forget how often in the century we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people, in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions, rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

[23:29]

And I'm inserting here, it might be the power of your stories that seemed invincible like you'd never get out. To be helpful, or to be hopeful, in bad times, is not just foolishly romantic. It's based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness. What we choose to emphasize is in this complex history, will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, say in yourself or outside yourself, if we choose only to see the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

[24:33]

If we remember those times and places, and there are many, where people behaved magnificently. This gives us the energy to act and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, present moments, presents. And to live now as we think human beings should live in defiance of all that is bad around us is itself a marvelous victory.

[25:39]

We don't have to change and wait for some grand event. So what do we call the world? It's not a world out there. It's this world. How will I relate to this world? In one of our columns, it says, what is the world? What do you call the world? I wanted to change the world. But actually... the world, the people I relate to. So this marvelous victory, so many times we fall down, get up, make a mistake, or is it a mistake? I recently was reminded of a target practice. Maybe someone in the community was telling me they went down to the Pelican Inn and they were doing dart practice.

[26:55]

I've tried the dart practice. I miss a lot. But the story they reminded was 99 misses and then the 100th time, bingo. I don't know if they said bingo, but you know what I mean. And in order to make that one hit, that one dead on, the other 99 were needed. So we sit in our moments, and all of a sudden I miss when the frogs start, and then I remember I can hold the space, I can be in the space. So this is an invitation. Zazen is an invitation into your life. into a way of being, into a way of opening to surprise, a way of being in wonder, in a way of possibly bringing in something fresh.

[28:03]

And when I think about fresh right now, one of the things I really love about the that's in the practice is the Zen koans. But I'm no koan master, and it happened early on in my career, even though we recite the Genjo koan, which is the koan of the self. But I love reading the koans and seeing what they bring up for me. And one of the koans that has recently captured my imagination, it's called... Let's see, the National Teacher Seamless Monument. There's an amazing teacher, and the disciple said, so when you die, what shall we do to remember you or honor you? And the National Teacher sat quiet for a pretty long time.

[29:10]

And then one, I'm making a little interval here, because we sit for a pretty long time in space until something can come through. And he said, build me a seamless monument. And then he died. So what was that? What is the seamless monument? And there's many comments and discussions about it, but I don't know if it's a but, and I just allowed that idea of a seamless monument. What was he saying to his disciple who didn't understand? And, you know, if I breathe in, make me a seamless monument. I feel that the invitation is for me, for you, to bring what's most important in your heart, in your life, into the next thing you say or do.

[30:34]

There's no self or other. When I'm cutting carrots, when I'm sweeping the ground, when I'm planting the kale, when I'm putting out the sandbags? Can I bring my act of generosity, my full self, not I am over here doing that? Can this engagement be a seamless, seamless monument? No here, no there. I don't know if that's what the national teacher meant. For sure. But what would it be to be so merged that you can bring, as I lift this right now, put it down, and take up this cup.

[31:45]

Thank you. You know, the universe that brought this fresh water, this cup that's holding it, before I mindlessly just take a sip. Mmm. A little chlorine, though. open and close a door and just be there for that without rushing into the next thing not always but like listening to the frogs I can sometimes catch it afterwards especially in closing doors unless I am using the sound as a communication

[32:51]

So, yeah. Can I live my life as a seamless monument? And our zazen, which I'm using as a word, as a pointer, to being devoted, to being present for a space, creating a space for something fresh. I want to read. poems that I think are emanations or invitations to being in this space. And one of them is called dedication. One of them is called fluent. I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.

[34:02]

I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. Can I be carried by wonder and surprise? And sometimes the surprise is frightening. But everyone in this room, I suspect, has had scary moments. And somehow, some part of you still brought you to this place. You survived it. and you can do it again. It can help guide you. So I'm going to read that one more time, and then I'm going to go into the next one, which is a little bit longer.

[35:07]

I would like, I would love, I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. Before the beginning. Unknown to us. There are moments. When crevices. We cannot see. Open. For time to come alive. With beginning. As in autumn. A field of corn knows. When enough green. Has been inhaled. From the clay. And under the skill. Of an artist breeze. Comes the gold. In a day. When the ocean, still as a mirror, of a sudden takes a sinister curve to rise in a mountain of a wave that could swallow a village.

[36:11]

How to a flock of starlings scattered at work on grass from somewhere a signal comes and suddenly as one, like the frogs, Suddenly, as one, they describe a geometric shape in the air. When the audience becomes still, and the soprano lets the silence deepen, in that slow holding, the whole aria hovers near, then alights on the wings of breath, poised to soar into song. These inklings were first prescribed the morning we met, and I was left with such a sweet time,

[37:28]

wondering in between, in between us, in between the moment, in between something was deciding to begin or not. Something is deciding to begin or not. When the wind blows, the grass moves. It takes a long... It takes many years. And somebody might say, well, Zen is kind of sudden. There's sudden and slow enlightenment, but suddenly, after a slow, long time, you see what it is to become seamless with what is it that's in you.

[38:44]

And it takes a devotion to being still. I find it takes a devotion to being still and quiet enough to hear a whisper. Sometimes it comes as a whisper to what matters. My teacher, Tension, Rev. Henderson, asks us, what is it that is the most important thing? What is your intention? What is your ultimate concern? What is the gift that you want to lead this life? not leave this life with, but leave. Let it go. And if we bridge back to Howard Zinn, when we could do this, what a marvelous victory.

[39:50]

Even though I've been practicing for a little more than 30 years. I very much still feel like I'm honing the craft. Meditation is a craft. And making peace with being a beginner. But in the beginning, if I'm open, if we're open, something can occur that can lead us into our next step, which we don't know what it'll be, but how, what is the quality of being? Maybe I'm asking you, what is the quality of being that you want to, that you might want to cultivate to meet? And know full well that it won't last.

[40:58]

I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about impermanence. Okay, yeah, yeah, everything changes. But sometimes big changes come and they kind of throw us, you know. But can you fall down and get up? So maybe I ask you, I think I'm going to stop there because I'd like to... that I'm interested to hear what you know I sit if I want to say I sit with a wonderful group on Friday mornings that I'm just so touched by some of their devotion it's mostly women now and they've sat together some of them for more than 30 years and they started with Yvonne Rand Some of you might know that name.

[42:01]

And it got handed on, handed on, handed on, and then was taken care of for some long time by Fu and other teachers. And now I rest in the position, not so much as a teacher, that's how I feel, because they're my teachers, but as a hub, right? so that we can have a conversation together. And I am always amazed by what they have learned and the teachings they give me. I'm one of the juniors there. Most of the ladies are like well into their 80s, maybe almost 90. And then our great, Great Zoe, who's 95.

[43:05]

Anyway, there's just a whole field of learning and experimenting with their lives, and it's amazing. And those people that have gone through so many teachers and so many books, right now we're reading Being Nobody, Going Nowhere. Without the book, you could just live that one. What would that be? Anyway, we open the conversation to what it is that has helped carry us. So mine was how to transform consciousness into being open and spacious, not have fixed views. And it's taking a long time because there's a lot of fixed views to discover. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[44:19]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[44:22]

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