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. I'll try to finish the lecture part of this by about 11 o'clock. Then we'll have a 10-minute break. And then Sozan and I will do a... have a conversation this morning in the dining room. So please excuse me for not wearing a mask. Everybody else has to wear masks, okay? The custom here is that if you're giving the talk, you don't wear a mask. And if you're not giving a talk, you do. So thank you for tolerating a mask. And So today I would like to speak about something that's different about this place and this practice from some other Buddhist places and practices in town.

[01:14]

And that is the Zen forms. the U.S. and in the West are being taught in many different ways. And one of the tools that we have in Soto Zen practice is forms and formality. I mean, look around, right? Everybody is sitting properly and wearing robes or dark clothing and there's silence and upright sitting and bowing and chanting. So just at a very basic level, this is something that we notice when we come in the door here or another Soto Zen place or a Chan place or some of the other traditions. The traditions in Buddhism vary by the amount and formality of the forms.

[02:20]

So that's why I feel like let's talk about it because Culturally, not everyone is used to forms. And so what are they for? What do we use them for? And so our Zen practice has a tradition of deportment and using deportment and form as a teaching tool. And so it was really obvious when Suzuki Roshi was living here and when his wife, Mitsuzuki Sensei stayed here and taught for 22 years after Suzuki Roshi died. So Mrs. Suzuki was my teacher and one of my main female teachers for 18 years until she went back to Japan in October 1993. And so... She taught in very subtle ways, and what she was trying to do was to bring Suzuki Roshi's teaching to life as a lay woman, which was very, very interesting to see how she related to the forms and how she and other people taught how he related to the forms.

[03:45]

So he was a priest, so he exemplified vertical transmission. Vertical transmission means generation upon generation. So given the form that the Buddha taught and that's developed in our lineage, India, China, Japan, and U.S., how can I take on that form and manifest it in this generation so that it continues for the next generation? Whereas Mrs. Suzuki embodied lay practice. Given my relationships, my culture, my talents, my responsibilities, my own sense of who I am as a human being, how does the Dharma arise in this body and mind, hand in hand with all beings?

[04:50]

So this is really important that both Suzuki Roshi and Suzuki Sensei were teaching Soto Zen practice through form, except one was in the form of a priest and one was in the form of a lay person. It's really different because sometimes you can't tell that lay people have, you know, Zen forms because the Zen form is in lay practice is the form of our own job or our own family or our own ritual that we make up based on what we know. Whereas the priest form, it's pretty obvious. I mean, just even going to the bathroom when you're a priest, it's pretty obvious that you have to take off several layers of robes and hang them up respectfully. and then bow, and then use the facilities, and then come back, and then put them all back on again.

[05:57]

So, you know, just in very simple actions, there's a complete difference. So, Suzuki Roshi transmitted not just through his robes or clothes, but through how he saw people. He saw each person as Buddha. how he handled objects. So I can't do this the way he did, but, you know, if he were to drink water, he would somehow be grateful to the cop, the person who had placed it there, the water, and the entire story of our practice would be present in this simple act. Excuse me for drinking when you don't have water.

[06:59]

And even if he used one hand to do something, his whole body would be involved, his whole breath, and it would not be separate from his whole mind. So with fewer living examples of people who have been trained in our life, lineage teachings on form and who are living here we need to understand or study the forms in a different way so we need to look at other teachers we need to read about the forms we need to study our own direct experience of the forms and let's use our sitting practice as an example because everyone in this room and everyone who's online is sharing that form of sitting or standing, walking or lying down in a meditation pose for lecture.

[08:31]

So I want to just say a few more words about horizontal and vertical transmission just so that we understand how the forms come to us. And I want to use examples. that are culturally relevant to more of us than just going on about readings or something like that. So I want to say that an example from Western life of vertical transmission is like the Catholic Church, which is a person church in which there's a priest who mediates the relationship with God. You can see that when you're in a Catholic church or a cathedral, the ceiling is high. It's meant to draw our eyes upwards and to give a body sense of elevation of the relationship between heaven and earth.

[09:38]

An example of horizontal transmission is, for instance, a Jewish synagogue, which is just a room. And the rabbi is just someone who's been doing this longer. And the only sign that there's different levels of reality being expressed is the eternal flame. Do you see the difference? It's a different mode of expression or design that's meant to evoke something different inside of our bodies and minds. Another example of horizontal transmission is going to a baseball game. Roger wakes up. Roger's a Giants fan. So this is very important example to bring, not just for Roger, but there's several other fans, not just of the Giants, but other teams here too. So, you know, as soon as you go into a sports arena, you know that you're in a different world.

[10:45]

Everything is set up. And the people either know the rules of the game or they're kind of nudging each other and saying, what just happened? And someone's explaining to them. And so that's an example of horizontal transmission where we all share the rules of the game, the setting, and so on. And we act in ways that go with that. And so, like, something happens. You know, a lot of times in baseball, nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens. And then you go to the bathroom and someone hits a triple. You know what I mean? And so and then you hear this enormous roar. From, you know, the hot dog or French fry stand or whatever. And or while you're walking or something, you'll hear everybody. go, yay, you know, but much louder. And there'll be sounds and air horns and so on.

[11:48]

That's horizontal transmission. And a very simple example of it. And an example of vertical transmission from everyday life is ceremonies such as weddings and graduations, where if you were... going to go through one of those ceremonies as a teenager or as a young adult, you would ask your parents or someone who had been through it before. Does this make sense? Yeah. And there's a generational transmission. So example for our sitting posture, horizontal transmission is that there's a mood in the room that allows us to sit better. Example of vertical transmission is if I say, okay, everybody, readjust yourself on your support. Press your support down with your hands and adjust your buttock bones.

[12:50]

You're not doing it. Adjust your buttock bones so that they're the same touch, a balanced touch on the support. And I also want to add that if... it's not appropriate for you to sit, then stand, walk, or lie down. Okay? So that's an example of vertical transmission. There's someone sitting in front of you saying stuff, and you're doing it. And so how we use forms here in this temple and in this lineage is important to know. So I just want to go over that San Francisco Zen Center has three main temples. Okay. So this temple is the front gate temple. It's an urban temple. Paul, correct me if I'm wrong. Okay. So Paul's the urban Dharma teacher.

[13:50]

And so he's been doing this forever. So not quite forever, but decades. And so this is the front gate. of San Francisco Zen Center. So we do simplified forms here. So for instance, in our meal ceremony, which is called Orioki, just enough apparatus or machine or process, right? And so at City Center here at Beginners Vine Temple, many of the people who are doing that form, they're lucky if they just kind of come in, observe the person in front of them, open their bowls at the right time, get food, eat it, put the bowls away, and get out. So that's the level of form that many people are doing.

[14:52]

Whereas at a place like Tassajara, which is a monastery, it's so refined. You can... be a beginner at many different levels of experience. So like at my level of experience, did I use my index finger where I'm supposed to use my index finger? Did I use my little finger? Did I exhale at the right time? What about my robes? Are they spilling off the edge of the platform? And at Green Gulch, which is also an enclosed residential practice place, It's something in between. But all the three temples have a shared tradition, so all of our forms go with each other. It's not like some are right and some are wrong. Some are simplified and some are more complex. But all of them share the tradition that each person is a temple of one inside the temple of many people.

[15:57]

So if we were to put a Zen practitioner down on a desert island with no one in sight, we could still practice with all beings. That's what I mean by temple of one. But a lot of our teaching and study in this temple, as you can feel in your sin practice, it's not just about the person who's speaking, but there's a mood or a form of sitting together. That helps us to sit, to hear, we chant, and so on. But you might think, okay, what we do at San Francisco Zen Center or at another Zen temple is Buddhism. What we do here is Buddhism. And the teachings of the Buddha are Dharma. How does form relate to Dharma?

[17:01]

How does it help relieve suffering? Because it just seems like we're doing these things. What are we actually doing? So I want to say that for those of us who know the Heart Sutra and have chanted about form and emptiness, that's a really good teaching about the mind and about our experience. that there's form, like what we can see, the process of seeing, and the consciousness of seeing, and the same for hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, or the capacity to formulate thoughts. And there's the fact that not that our descriptions... And discriminations about what we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste, what we touch, and so on, are never the whole story of what it is that we're seeing or feeling or hearing or tasting or touching.

[18:09]

So, for instance, if you think you know someone and you try to describe them to someone else, it's never right. There's always more. And so that mismatch between our calculated or described or discriminated world and how things actually is or are is what we have. We use the word emptiness, but it's not really emptiness. It's more of a potential of fullness, a freedom of that. Things are not what they seem to be or what we think are habituated. And the form of practice, the form of sitting is a way to study this through the body. So I just want to say that how form relates to Dharma.

[19:13]

Let's just take one of the models of Dharma or practice that there is. And I want to call our attention to the Yogacara teachings. which aren't just about form and emptiness. They're about form, skill, and emptiness. So Yogacara is a discipline of thought and practice that developed in India and was really realized or expanded on and studied very vigorously in China. And so the contribution of Chinese culture to Zen practice, one of the big contributions was in the forms of the koans or public cases or records about Zen. But another one was about the attitude or understanding of work, effort, and somatic studies.

[20:18]

And... So, I hope this is making sense to you. Like, for instance, in India, monks aren't supposed to work. Buddhist monks aren't supposed to work. But in China, culturally, monks are supposed to work. And the monasteries are workplaces. That's a huge cultural difference. That our records and rules come through. And so there are three realities that are taught in Yogacara teaching. And the first one points out this level of imagined imagination as a big feature of our descriptive process. So I don't know. How many people here study math?

[21:22]

Or study pure math. Okay. So, you know, so a lot. So you know they're different maths for different purposes. So how you describe something in Euclidean geometry is really different from how you describe it in tensor algebra. Right? So you can do transformations in tensor algebra that you can't do in geometry. It's very useful when you're looking for, like, changes in... how something changes over time or with multiple variables. Or if you study not theory, it has to do with how things, not things exactly, but how forms intertwine or topology. What are the pure shapes that can arise and how are they built out of function? But in math, it's really easy to understand that each mathematical system is a model.

[22:29]

And so the relationship between real life and our description is like the relationship between recipes and food, right? The recipe can bring to mind food, but it's not food. Food is a lot more than the recipe. And you can follow a recipe to the letter, and it still doesn't taste nourishing. Or it could, depending on how you make that food. So the inability of the recipe to describe food is what we call the imagined nature of our experience. And then there's a perfected nature of our experience. Perfected means ultimately there isn't anything that is separate from anything else describable or basically there's just one reality.

[23:44]

That one reality allows us to substitute You know, arrowroot for cornstarch when we cook, right? Or to substitute staples for stitches. Don't do this if you're sewing a robe. So we can rely on the fact that our descriptions are imaginary, temporary, interdependent. There's nothing really real about them. We can rely on that, and that's called the perfected. nature of everything. And the way forms work, like our sitting form, is as part of our interconnected nature. So here's a description of Zazen from Suzuki Roshi, if I can find it. Excuse me. Yeah, so Suzuki Roshi said,

[24:48]

After you sit upright so that your buttock bones are even, you align yourself so that the containers of the body are stacked one over the other. Suzuki Roshi says, he's talking about when people align the body and then start counting the breaths. He says, you have to have the right posture. All parts of the body need to participate in the practice of counting breathing. Mind follows counting. Your arm, your mudra, your legs, your spine, your muscles join and participate in the breathing practice, in the counting practice. It's more than concentration. It's more than just being concentrated on sitting, on breathing, or on counting.

[25:55]

Concentration usually means a mental practice, but counting, breathing practice is not just a mental practice. It's a physical practice. Okay? So, and Suzuki Roshi's ancestor, Dogen Senji, said something similar. To study the way with the body means to study the way with your own body. It's the study of the way using this lump of red flesh. Our body comes forth from the study of the way. Everything which comes forth from the study of the way is the true human body. So it means that our forms, our Zazen form, Let's say here's some more of the form. Okay, we sit upright. The sides of the body are equally upright.

[26:58]

And we seal the posture with a mudra or hand position in which one hand comes over the other with two joints of the middle fingers overlapping. The thumbs lightly touch. And then there's an oval that's formed with the hands. And it goes someplace between the pubic bone and the navel. And the little fingers come in. We sit upright. And it's not just the hands that are the mudra. The whole posture is Buddha mudra. The whole posture is a form that we practice. The form is like a description, but the practice goes way beyond the description for all parts to participate. Just to sit with perfect attention on posture and breathing and great pure effort is Zazen.

[28:07]

Just to sit with perfect attention on posture and breathing and great pure effort. is Zazen. That's how Suzuki Roshi taught. So you see that this Zazen instructions, instructions for just sitting, go beyond instructions. They teach direct experience of the instructions, of the inadequacy of the instructions, and of the interconnection of each instructed part with every other instructed part and with all beings. They teach that from the body to the brain. It's incredibly concise. I'm going to shut up for just a minute so you can feel this, what I'm talking about.

[29:11]

If you need to switch legs or refresh your posture, please do. And when you do this mudra, just touch the tips of your thumbs very, very lightly to each other. Draw your little fingers to your lower abdomen. And then from the buttock bones all the way to your ears, uplift your spine. And allow your body also to open from the center to the sides. Support yourself. using the muscles of the back of the body, and feel your depth all the way from the back ribs to the top of the sternum. I'll be quiet to let you do this. I'll give another instruction.

[30:13]

From your forehead to your cheekbones, release the skin down. From the center of your nose to the edges of your cheekbones, release the skin to the sides. Let the skin all over the body breathe and feel. Let your eyes be quiet so that you can feel the organ of the eyes resting in the socket of the eyes. so you can hear sounds without reaching after sounds. So you can feel your whole body and mind begin to settle on itself. I'll be quiet for a few breaths. So you feel how it goes beyond.

[31:22]

The instructions go beyond the instructions. The instruction gets wiped out as you sit. You have to remember the instruction and return to the instruction. But you, sitting, is much more than the instruction. You know what I'm talking about? Okay. So forms are a tool for understanding. our three natures, but in particular, the interdependence of each part to the whole. They're kind of the content that fills the framework of form and emptiness and spiritually matures us through direct experience. Okay? So our forms are clearly made up. They clearly depend on each of us to sustain the others. They clearly depend on our own effort, but also on the effort and joining of everyone and everything.

[32:27]

So the instructions are sitting costs you're done right, which you feel it's not sitting yet. It's the beginning of sitting, but it isn't your sitting. Your sitting goes beyond right and wrong. And is supported by everyone who's sitting with you. So it gives a sense of depth to our experience and practice. So all of our different types of consciousness engage in that sitting practice. I'm just going to speak for another couple minutes. And then we'll take a break and have a conversation. Sozan. and I will speak about form in the dining room. So just to say that this practice of form is developmental. It matures us. We learn through a kind of iterative process in which our mistakes are what teaches us.

[33:37]

And we start by making big mistakes, and then over the years, course of time we begin to refine our mistakes okay but we never stop making mistakes that's beginner's mind i just want to list some of the wonderful arrays of form that are used in this temple and um i'll finish with a quote about mel so some of the forms that are used in this temple are mantra like chanting voice chanting like we did at the beginning and end of the lecture. Mudra, the four noble postures, our bows, our zazen, our standing, and so on. And then we also use mandala. So we often think that these are features of Tibetan practice. And you could just say that Zen is in black and white and Tibetan Buddhism is in color.

[34:43]

Okay. So how we use mandala is that, for instance, in Japan, the monastery buildings are placed in the form of the Buddha, which like the kitchen and the work areas are the arms and the legs, and that's ancient. The head and the heart have more to do with the formal practices and so on. The arrangement of people and positions, like I'm sitting in the front and there's a circle of people around me. If there were an abbot speaking, they would be sitting over there. The Buddha's in the middle. There's stuff on the altar. It's placed a certain way. Sound. You heard signals communicating through the temple. So the mandala isn't just a visual one. It's a sound one. It's a fragrance one. It engages all the senses. we said taste the truth of the Tathagata's word. So even taste, okay?

[35:45]

And then I just want to say that all of these aspects of form are nourishments. Nourishments of the senses, nourishment of our intention, nourishment of consciousness. They're food for our practice. Okay, so I think that's enough of a lecture. And I just want to read one thing about Mel. Sojin Mel Weitzman was my teacher. And he was a very interesting human being in that he allowed himself to be completely boring and ordinary. And he taught through his constancy and through his Just ordinary life. Like some of the things I really enjoyed doing with Sojin had very simple, ordinary forms.

[36:50]

Like he would make these for everyone he gave Dharma transmission to. These are called kotsu. You see it's the shape of the spine. And Sojin made this. And when he made one of these, Well, I can't do it now because I'm a little too nervous, but the kotsus that he made would balance. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm a little shaky and I'm making it fall, but they would balance. And he studied painting with Clifford Still. He was a jazz musician and he played... baroque music and renaissance music with friends for decades and he gardened and one of the things that he used to do was to take traumatized dogs and transform them into good dogs by being kind and so that was his attitude to form one of the things i loved doing with him was to sit next to him when i was chuseau or head monk

[38:03]

And we would eat meals in the Zendo, and I would get to experience how he handled objects like Suzuki Roshi and how he used the forms as an expression of our entire life and the meaning of our life beyond suffering. So this is what Mel said about Suzuki Roshi and his attitude, which was his attitude to form. So Mel Sojin said, he's talking about Suzuki Roshi and the rock crew at Tassahara. We'd work for hours on a rock to get it in place. Suzuki Roshi would say, it's not right. No matter how hard we worked, we might still have to do it over. He never left anything that he felt wasn't right. Suzuki Roshi was never in a hurry, although things had to be done.

[39:09]

He was in balance and on time. He never hurried to get to Zazen or to or from the bath. Suzuki Roshi had no anxiety. He always gave you the feeling of being completely within the activity of the moment. He'd always take the time to do everything thoroughly. That being in time. The way he sat down was in time. So this is from an oral history that Basia Petnick did. And thank you, Sojin, for discussing Suzuki Roshi's attitude towards the forms of our life. And thank you very much for your attention, for your Zazen practice. which matures you and everyone else in mysterious ways, in ways that connect, in ways that give meaning, in ways that support me and each of us here.

[40:20]

Thank you very much. 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 Dharma.

[40:47]

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