Unsurpassed, penetrating, perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow TO TASTE THE TRUTH OF THE TATHAGATA'S WORDS. GOOD EVENING, EVERYONE. THANK YOU, PAUL AND THE ABBOTS AND SENIOR DHARMA TEACHERS FOR inviting me to be Shouseau and to give this talk.

[11:10]

Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive already. Please keep it coming. Thank you to my teacher, Rick Sloan, for everything. And thank you to all of you here and online as well for engaging with this practice. If anything that I say happens to be helpful for your own practice, please take it, investigate it, make it your own. And anything that's not helpful, please just let it go with a light heart. This first Shuso talk is usually a Why and how am I here? What are the causes and conditions that led me to this practice?

[12:12]

And in thinking about that, I realize how impossible it really is to talk about everything that goes into being able to be here in this moment. Really, I couldn't be here without all of the wonderful and difficult events and all of the amazing people who have been a part of my life. I've been deeply affected by all of you and by countless people who are not in this room. So you are all in this story, even if I don't have time to talk about it tonight. Really this whole talk is an extended version of the thanks that I started with. Thank you for Thank you for and to everything that brought me here, which is everything. Having done a few shorter way seeking mind talks over the years, I noticed in preparing this, I was sort of resisting a straight chronology format.

[13:28]

So what I'm going to try to do is take a few moments and parts of that story and connect it with other parts of my life, sort of see what the resonances are between earlier and later versions of this particular self. And I'd like to start with a quote from the Jukai ceremony, the ceremony of receiving Buddha's precepts and taking refuge in this practice community. From now on, awakening is your teacher. All beings are your teacher. Do not be fooled by other ways. This is the path of mercy for all existence and things. The kindness and care, first of my family and then of my friends, has been absolutely

[14:36]

essential to my experience of practice. I really recognize that I am deeply blessed in that way. The explicit teaching that I received many times from my parents and my brothers and my friends was do what makes you happy. We support whatever you do if that's what you really want. The implicit teaching I continue to receive is unhesitating acceptance, and love. So if you're looking for a cause for me being here, I point first to Bob and Kathy and Andy and Keith and Bill and dozens of friends along the way. The first time that I sat Zazen was with the Mountain Source Sangha. in Marin County in the children's playroom at St.

[15:41]

Paul's Episcopal Church in San Rafael, surrounded by toys and the smell of wax crayons. When I arrived, Tygen Dan Layton, who started Mountain Source, showed me the physical posture and then said something along the lines of, while you're sitting, your mind is going to keep doing things. Thoughts will come up. Don't try to stop them or control them. When you have a thought, just notice that you're having a thought. And then let it go. When another one comes up, let it go too. And then we'll ring a bell and that'll be the end. So we started sitting and he was right. I did keep thinking. But I also kept trying to let it go. And it was really wonderful, a really deeply transformative experience.

[16:48]

Up until that point, I had basically assumed that if I had a thought, I needed to do something with it. I needed to take some action or I needed to keep the good ones or push the bad ones away. So just... letting them go was really a revelation to me. So if you're looking for a cause for me being here, I can point to Ty again. Mountain Source, who I still sit with every week, is a community of mostly lay practitioners, people who are living their lives out in the world while also engaging in this practice. I call it parish church zen. And so the teachings arise from all over, from all of us. Once in a while, we accidentally start talking about Dogen.

[17:50]

But more often, we're connecting practice to what's going on right in our lives, in our families, in our communities, in our work. And to hear how other sincere practitioners are engaging practice in their lives, for me really is a fresh teaching every time. Again, I can't possibly express the scope of it, but Patty and Dale, Denise, Carol, Larry, Anbo, Anlor, all of you, and so many more, thank you. So if you're looking for a cause for me being here, I can point to Mountain Source Sangha. The letting go that I had in that first period of Zazen for me has echoes of a

[19:04]

choice that I made when I left the East Coast to move to the Bay Area. I was in my 20s and I thought that to be an adult, I had to have opinions and have everything figured out to know what I thought about the big topics and to be able to defend my opinions and positions. Religion, politics, what to do with my life. And that was exhausted, exhausting. I was totally worn out from this effort to pretend that I had any idea what was going on in my life or where it was going. So as I was leaving Baltimore to head west, I very explicitly And specifically decided, I'm just going to not know anything for a little while.

[20:10]

I'm going to let myself not be sure about anything. And that was an incredible opportunity for me. All of this space opened up. There was a relaxing of my mind and my body and this fear that I had of not knowing. And it was not something that I really think came from what I understood to be me at that time. I hadn't figured anything out or had some grand realization. This was before I really encountered practice at all. My mind-body complex were just exhausted by this performance. And I just couldn't hold it any longer. I just gave up, and that giving up was wonderful.

[21:12]

And I have never really felt the need since then to hold opinions as tightly as I once thought I had to. So in that mindset, I moved to the Bay Area in 2006, essentially following my college friends, Paul and Annie Gaffney. out to this Western paradise. Some of you may know Paul from Green Gulch and Marin Interfaith Gatherings. And if you don't know Paul, you should. And Paul, despite being a Christian minister, had been recommending Buddhist books to me for years and is a student of Taigan's. And it was Paul who brought me to that first sitting. Mountain Source Sangha almost as soon as I moved here. And I was willing to give it a try because this person, who is like a fourth brother to me, was telling me that it was worth checking out.

[22:21]

And as you can see, it sort of stuck. So if you're looking for a cause for me being here, I can point to Paul Gaffney. And I also had some other previous experience with the letting go that I met in that first period of Zazen. When I went to college, I majored in theater. And my advisor slash professor slash frequent director admonished us before rehearsals, drop your baggage at the door. You can pick it back up later if you really want it. And then we'd rehearse. We'd actually do things within that mindset of having dropped our baggage. And rehearsals became for me a really healing, calming place. Performance for me was never nearly as much fun.

[23:25]

But that experience of dropping my baggage every time I came to rehearsal was absolutely awesome. I had plenty to drop. So it was a real relief to let it go. And I think this not only connects to that first Zazen experience, but also for me connects to then taking the practice up off the cushion and into activity. So a year or two after I started sitting with Mountain Source, Taigen moved on to Chicago. And we were then blessed with a series of wonderful teachers. Christina Lenhair, Meg Levy, Kokyo Henkel. And I really, I didn't realize at the time how lucky we were to be a small sangha in the San Francisco area. I just thought, wow, Zen teachers are all amazing.

[24:28]

And I now realize that it's maybe not like that everywhere. My teacher, Rick Sloan, took over leading Mountain Source a few years later. And although practice was already a major part of my life, this was my first experience of really forming an intentional student-teacher relationship. Much of that time, Rick was living and working in Salinas, down in Monterey County. And he'd drive up every week to sit with us. and once a month also do a one-day sitting out in Bolinas on the Marin coast. And he would pick me up in San Francisco, and we'd have a long drive together, something like an hour and a half each way. And that ongoing presence was itself a great teaching for me, just to see for myself how someone who had

[25:36]

dedicated their life to this practice, actually lived and behaved and was still a real individual person who could be wise and vulnerable and kind and totally human. One of the things I took from that was just a simple admonition for myself. Spend as much time with your teacher as you can. So I was on one of those long drives when I decided to ask Rick about Jukai. That's sowing a rakasu and receiving the precepts to publicly embrace the role of this practice in my life. And Rick really made it no big deal and also helped me to take it really, really seriously. We studied the precepts together in great depth. And he sent me here to Zen Center to learn how to sew.

[26:40]

So if you're looking for a cause for me being here, I can point to Rick Sloan. Those sewing classes were really my first point of contact with this place, with Zen Center. And I'm sorry to say, I don't think I have time tonight to really talk about the place of Zen sewing in my practice. But Ren Shin and the sewing sangha, thank you. So as Rick was preparing to leave the Bay Area a few years later, first to go to Mexico and then to Wisconsin, where he is now, I was very eager for advice. And honestly a little nervous about not having my teacher nearby. And Rick said to me, learn from everyone. Get the teaching wherever you can.

[27:44]

Call me anytime. And talk to Layla. At Rick's recommendation, Mountain Source had invited Layla Bockhorst to take up leading our sangha. And we were incredibly lucky to have that opportunity. Her knowledge and dedication and commitment to practice in the everyday world were all deeply supportive and instructive. And everything that Layla did was imbued with this kindness and fierceness of practice. Whenever I talked to Layla, she was unendingly Encouraging, celebrating with me the things that happened in my practice and how it unfolded. And she also never hesitated to point out where I could push further.

[28:54]

So whenever I notice that I think I've realized something or I'm understanding something, I try to remember Layla telling me, as she often did, that's wonderful. Keep practicing with that. And what about this? And this was usually an entirely different way to engage with the experience that opened up directions and fields of practice that I had never noticed, and that totally demolished the solidity of anything that I thought I had understood. Layla pushed me to never stop questioning and never stop investigating. She'd often remind me that there is no one right way to do or be anything. And that's an ancient, it's a really ancient trap for me. To soothe my tendency towards anxiety, I want to find the right

[30:02]

There has to be a right way. I know there's one right way, and I want to find it, and I want to learn it. And then forever after, I'm going to do that thing that one right way. And Layla never let me get stuck there. And she never made me feel wrong for having that tendency. That was embraced as well at the same time that she would show me that there was another way. So kindness, fierceness, sympathetic joy, and constant effort. That was my experience of Layla Bockhorst. So if you're looking for a cause for me being here, I can point to Layla. One of my earliest Dharma Gates came to me from Reader's Digest, which my parents had a subscription to my whole childhood, and which I read pretty much cover to cover every month when I was a kid.

[31:25]

When I was 10 or 11 years old, I read an article that was probably called something like The Power of Positivity. And that encouraged focusing on positive experience and the things that were all right, rather than only on negatives and problems. And the article pointed out that, at the least, if I was more focused on good stuff, I might feel happier, even if the conditions didn't really change. that convinced me to give it a try. I tried it, and I did feel better. And from that experience, a, to some people, perhaps at times, maddeningly optimistic version of Dan was born. And I do think this sort of count your blessings, bright side of life attitude really does,

[32:36]

support me and positively affect my life. But now I think the bigger teaching for me was that I was not just at the mercy of what was going on inside my head. That I could actually think about my thinking, make some choices, and have some influence there. A sort of flexibility was recognized and cultivated from that. So if you're looking for a cause for me being here, I can point to Reader's Digest, circa 1987. So after a decade or so of practice, I started to feel called to priest ordination. I was out in the world, working with an apartment, living really quite a comfortable life here in San Francisco.

[33:43]

And I just knew deep down that it wasn't what I really needed to do. I was treading water, and I wanted to find the bottom of the ocean. I wanted to flip the priorities of my life and make practice really the guiding principle. And again, Rick agreed to help me. I had actually first asked about priest ordination not long after my Jukai in a probably unconvincingly hypothetical way. I asked whether maybe if I wanted to be ordained someday, he'd be willing to ordain me. And the immediacy of his yes, of course. totally freaked me out, and I didn't ask about it again for three or four years. But the seed was planted, and eventually I asked again, and he said yes again.

[34:52]

Rick asked that I do a practice period at Green Gulch and at least one at Tassajara as part of my journey as a priest, and I was... I think he thought maybe I would take a sabbatical from my work or something like that, but I was really delighted to just quit my job and dive into it. It was the best reason I had yet to quit that job, which was actually a lovely job, but still not the thing I knew I needed to be doing. So in addition to having regular video chats with Rick to prepare, I Rick also asked that I meet at least monthly with Layla to talk about practice and being a priest. And this had a wonderful effect of making me feel like I was being ordained by two of my teachers at the same time. I say half a dipper from Father Rick and half a dipper from Mother Layla.

[36:03]

Who knows what I'll do with that, maybe I'll spill it, but at least I know it really came from the best of sources. So I was ordained in 2019 in between my Green Gulch and Tassajara practice periods. So I moved to Tassajara and I lived there from January 2020 until about three weeks ago. And I count that experience of living at Tassajara as a whole as both teacher and teaching. Many people said to me beforehand, let the schedule be your teacher, which in this practice, it certainly can be if you let it, to just do the thing that was on the schedule and to let go of my Ideas of what I wanted to do and what I liked and what I didn't like just gradually worked something on me, loosened some things up.

[37:18]

Arriving there in January 2020, of course, you can imagine that things didn't really stay normal for very long. Some things started to happen in early 2020. started changing the practice period format a little bit and canceled the summer guest season, Paul Haller, who was leading that practice period, decided to stay on with us and stayed on at Tassajara for eight months until August when we all had to leave for a fire evacuation. And so that time for me really has the the flavor of an eight-month practice period. And I'll say, if you ever have the opportunity to do an eight-month practice period, particularly with Paul Haller, take that opportunity. It is that sustained practice with not much variation and everything else that was going on was really

[38:29]

transformative. So we continued residential practice at Tassajara. Being so isolated geographically, it was easy to form a safe bubble and continue practicing in a relatively, all things considered, relatively normal way. And that experience of maintaining community, having mostly the same people there for that whole time, and knowing that we were able to maintain community and in-person practice at a time when it was not possible so many other places, really highlighted the treasure of that practice. We had all of the milestones and markers pulled out of the ground.

[39:34]

There was no guest season. There was no fall practice period. There was just getting up each morning and doing what needed to be done that day. And that just doing what needs to be done that day was also a great, great teaching. I worked most of the time in the kitchen as a kitchen crew member and then Fukuten and then Tenzo. And that kitchen practice is itself such a rich practice that I don't think I can even really talk about it in this moment. I think that needs its own focus. But the joining of work and practice that we were able to do that I experienced in the Tassajara kitchen has really been fundamental to my understanding of how to activate this practice.

[40:41]

I think too, if I would encapsulate what I learned at Tassajara in its simplest form, it is pay attention and be kind. So if you're looking for a cause for me being here, I can point to Tassajara. So just so you don't feel cheated of the personal biography portion of this talk, I'll take a moment to just give a little capsule of where I come from. I'M THE YOUNGEST OF FOUR BOYS. MY PARENTS SURVIVED THE PROCESS OF RAISING FOUR BOYS AND ARE STILL MARRIED AFTER 56 YEARS. FOUR BOYS WERE EXACTLY AS LOUD AND DESTRUCTIVE AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE.

[41:48]

SORRY MOM FOR EVERYTHING. BUT LIVING IN A HOUSE the six of us, I also knew that there was always someone looking out for me. I grew up in Warren, Ohio, which is part of the industrial swath of Northern Ohio, steel mills and auto assembly, a landscape that was sometimes quite loud with trains and factories where the river would steam during the winter and the sky would glow red. And to me it was beautiful and wonderful. And that experience of living there in what is now called the Rust Belt really has left me with a deep appreciation for these people who are

[42:52]

deeply struggling with change and impermanence. People who I in some things might not agree with, but who I really deeply recognize are good people who are doing what they think is right and best. Compassion for those people. I was raised Catholic. and that experience of the incense and the standing up and kneeling and sitting down and reciting things together i think left a real impression on me that helped draw me into the formal aspects of this practice and eventually i realized i wasn't really in agreement with the theology but the community and the experience of worshiping in a group was really wonderful for me.

[43:58]

So the last teacher and teaching I want to raise up for you all is also the earliest. One of my earliest memories, perhaps the earliest, When I was in kindergarten, so I assume I must have been five years old, we were sent out onto the playground for morning recess one day. It was one of those absolutely clear, crisp, bright blue sky, cold winter mornings. And when I got outside, there was this enormous moon hanging up in the sky, three-quarters full. And I have since learned that that is a common experience, that the moon is actually out in the morning every month. But as a five-year-old, somehow that had escaped my notice.

[45:08]

And to me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. And I started running around the playground just screaming my head off. The moon! The moon is out in the daytime! Look at the moon! I was sure I was never going to see anything like it again. And nobody cared. Nobody noticed. I ran all around trying to get people to look, screaming about it, and nobody noticed. So for me, that, on one hand, is just a delightful story. It just... It makes me smile remembering that little kid doing that. So I tell that story every chance that I get. And probably many of you are familiar with how often the moon is used as an image and a metaphor in this practice. So for me, there has been a kind of comforting resonance in the fact that it was so fascinating to me back then.

[46:19]

little boy was actually right about a lot of things. For one, that was a once in a lifetime celestial event. That particular moon has never been back in that particular sky, and I have never seen that particular moon in that way ever again. And I think that little boy was also right that it's a wonderful impulse to try to help others see what's around them. Also, I think it's brave to keep trying when it seems like no one gets it. I think it's a kind and caring thing to allow ourselves to feel joy and to share that joy with others. And just the pure joy of that story reminds me that joy does not need to be justified.

[47:20]

It just can be. So if you're looking for a cause for me being here, maybe the best that I can do is to just point at the moon. From now on, awakening is your teacher. All beings. are your teacher. Do not be fooled by other ways. This is the path of mercy for all existence and things. Looks like I have not left enough time for question and answer. But if anyone ever wants to talk to me about any of this stuff, please. I welcome it. Thank you.

[48:25]

May our intention equally extend to every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless.

[49:05]

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