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. Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Saturday Morning Talk. Welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. And let me just very briefly introduce myself. My name is Jordan Thorne. I'm a student here at the Zen Center. I'm a priest here at the Zen Center. And also I'm the treasurer of the Zen Center. But I've done other things as well. I want to start by wondering aloud, what brings us here?

[01:06]

What brings this group of people here today in this actually quite lovely room in this beautiful building in the special city of San Francisco, but what brings us here today? And there, of course, there's many reasons, but I'm going to suggest one. I think what you and me and all of us are interested in is learning how to live a useful life, learning how to be helpful to ourselves and to others. And I think, well, maybe I can't know about the rest of you, but I can say that for myself, some time ago, I wondered how I might do that personally. And that's what brought me to the Zen Center years ago. Buddhism is a word.

[02:14]

Buddhism is a word that has numerous meanings. But one thing Buddhism means is waking up. Buddha is an awakened being. Maybe more complicatedly called an enlightened being, but let's just say an awakened being. And here at the Zen Center, and actually not just here, but at other Zen Centers and other Dharma Centers, what is taught is waking up. Actually, what we try to talk about, what we try to teach, He's waking up. Kategori Roshi was a very important Japanese Zen priest who was part of the early founding of Zen Center, then went to Minnesota. And he has a short poem about practice called Peaceful Life.

[03:20]

And in it, there's a few lines that are meaning a lot to me that I've actually resonated with. And I'm going to share them. He said, he wrote, Knowing how to live. Knowing how to walk with people. Demonstrating and teaching. This is the Buddha way. Knowing how to live. Knowing how to walk with people. This is the Buddha way. This is the kind of thing we try to work on at the Zen Center. Offering this as an instruction is also a little bit complicated because I feel like I want to say that nobody has to do this. You only should do it if it makes sense for you. And in some way Zen practice is sort of like selling water by the river.

[04:26]

It's just our confusion that makes us think we have to, that we're out of water. We're right by the river all the time. Anyway, I want to say it again. Welcome to the Zen Center. Welcome to this Buddhist temple. This special and not so special place that exists to help us meet our life, to help us understand our life, to help us wake up. A place like the Zen Center is a sanctuary. I felt that about it when I came in the doors. And I still feel that way when I walk through these doors and go down to the Zen Do and come into this Buddha Hall.

[05:29]

I feel it's a special space where I'm encouraged, where we're all encouraged to try to do our best. where we're encouraged to make a safe space. Because to do some of this work called waking up and knowing ourself, we need to feel that there's a container of support and safety around us. But, you know, it actually isn't entirely possible to make a safe space. Because that would be by putting ourselves in a cage or kind of with walls around us so that we weren't impinged on. It's necessary for our life to risk things a little bit, to risk being hurt, and even to sometimes hurt others and then notice it and then see it and then feel it and feel the pain, not just that we, well, the pain in our heart when we do something.

[06:42]

that maybe we regret. A couple years ago, I was on the front steps of this building. And a resident in the building, someone who doesn't live here right now, was all dressed up. He had a suit on. Unusual clothing for this individual. And he was going to a job interview. I... Many times I've walked by that person and hardly said anything except for maybe good morning or something, but the suit demanded some attention. So I was standing there asking him where he was going, what he was doing, when a person on a bicycle rode by, pedaled by, and called out, you look really stupid in that suit.

[07:53]

It was a three-piece suit and a vest. Anyway, it was... And this person called out, you look really stupid. And at that moment, you know, I thought, what a painful thing to say. What a mean-spirited thing to say. I kind of thought at that moment that I kind of had a wise perspective, you know, that that's not the way we behave. That's not how we get along. And then I remembered something that I had done. I could remember many things I've done, but I remembered one particular thing that I had done. I was in my car in the mission district, along with my daughter, who was in the car beside me, and we approached a light that turned red, stopped, and besides my car, there was one of those authentic military-grade full-scale Hummers,

[09:00]

you know, humongous thing. It was a day like this. It was kind of a warmish day. My windows were down. The Hummers windows were down. And from this behemoth of global warming, pop music, rock, kind of like, you know, music was playing. And I looked over, and there was kind of a handsome youngish man with nice sports clothes on, well-groomed. listening to the music, waiting for the light to change. And I leaned out of my car and I said, hey. And he looked over. And I said, you know, that's a really stupid car. I didn't say a stupid suit. And my daughter punched me. What are you doing? And the light changed. We drove off.

[10:02]

I went on to the day. And later on, I just felt so embarrassed for myself that I'd said that to him. Why did I, you know, I felt like, I felt this is how little seeds like this, you know, are how big things happen. How lives are set off on a journey that we don't even know where it will end. It's not like The only wars that happen are the ones that we read about in the newspaper. There's battles on Page and Laguna, a corner right there, that for those individuals in the midst of it are just as potent and strong and corrosive and awkward. And there I was, stepping into it myself. My words... And the bicyclist's words and other things that I've said on other occasions as well are part of how separation begins.

[11:06]

I think we all of us have a life that's contained in our daydreams. The story of how we think things should be. And sometimes in those daydreams that seem so important to us, we win over someone else. We say the thing that we didn't say at the moment, we had the conversation, we walk away and we say it then as a ha. And that's part of our problem. To do this thing that Zen centers try to do, not just Zen centers, but that actually grown-ups want to do, which is to wake up, to act with integrity, to act with warmth, kindness. It's not a certain state of mind. It's not something that we can figure out once and then we got it, and then we don't have to worry about it. It's flexible.

[12:23]

It requires a flexibility. It requires being responsive, being humble. actually being humble, calling yourself for your own compost. As I said earlier, we don't have to do this. Or maybe even if we don't think we're doing it, maybe it's happening even on some scale anyway. because the arc of our life tends this way. But at a place like the Zen Center, we are reminded to not waste this life because it's fleeting. There's a verse written on the Han, the wooden sounding board that calls people the Zazen that says this. Life is fleeting.

[13:26]

And we've all had, I'm sure, different experiences of it. It's not just our life that's fleeting, but also the lives of those around us. I mentioned my daughter in the Mission District car. When she was 15 months old, she had a well-baby checkup. We were living in Berkeley. And the pediatrician's office? Yes, the doctor's office. It was actually around the corner from my office, and this appointment was at four in the afternoon, and she and her mom were going to come by and visit me after the appointment, this well-baby appointment. Four o'clock passed. I wasn't surprised. With doctors these days, do you see them on time? Four-thirty came. They still hadn't shown up. You know, I had other things to do. Around five o'clock, I thought, what's going on? I called the doctor's office. I said, was Lizzie Thorne there?

[14:30]

Was she there at four? And they said, yes, yes, she was here at four. They left a while ago. I said, well, where did they go? And she said, well, I don't know, but let me see. Maybe somebody, you know. So she put me on a whole, this is before cell phones. You know, you have to understand. And then she got back on and she said... She's at Children's Hospital. She can be located in the cardiac care intensive unit. What? You know, cardiac care intensive unit? Children's Hospital in Oakland? This well-baby checkup had discovered a congenital heart defect that actually was very significant, and the real question was whether they operated that afternoon or waited until the next morning, because it was a high risk. You know, something could happen. Nothing had happened, but something could. And so, you know, this life of ours is so fragile. We take it as robust. You know, she's fun.

[15:33]

Operation successful. Later on, she could punch me in the car. Anyway. So we think we have a lot of time to figure things out. Because it mostly seems like we do. But... really the time to figure things out is right now, if you can. If you can. Sometimes Zen is, you know, there's various kind of nicknames for the Zen tradition. Sometimes it's called the sudden school. I think, you know, that might mean different things to different people and even at different times, different things to the same person. But right now I say it means right suddenly this is the moment to practice. This is the moment to make this effort to be to wake up so our lives might be short or long or medium we can't tell but after my life

[16:54]

which is so far kind of in medium length, I have some confidence that the direction of not just my life but our lives is towards awakening. And I also feel that my story and all of our stories is much more than just one individual's life experience. Getting to this moment here in this room together on this lovely corner of the beautiful day is something that has come into being, come into fruition through a long unbroken series of friendships. Stretching back through history and time. Friendships in the lineage and tradition of our culture.

[17:57]

The people who built this building in the 1920s, our connections to them then and now. It is a complex thread of friendship and connection, which is a line, I'm going to say it's a delicate line, but it's also robust, that joins the past with the future, with this moment, with right now. And it's our privilege our responsibility to sustain it, to continue it, to deepen it. This is what I think practice means. Practicing with a community, with a sangha, with all the diversity or even not enough diversity of a group like this. When we learn, well, if we can, for moments, or even just continuously, learn to trust our situation, our intention, then those things that we call problems in our life become opportunities, even though they're still problems.

[19:13]

This is, I think, important. It's also not so easy to remember because... Well, for various reasons. What's significant, I think? What's important? And as always, I feel a little caution when I say, well, this is what's important. But nonetheless, what's important about our Buddhist practice is that you don't have to believe it on faith. In fact, if you took practice as a sort of given truth, in the end, it would be wobbly. Your understanding would be kind of shaky when a hummer goes by or a bicyclist passes by and shout something out. That wouldn't fit into the truth that we thought Buddhism was. What is strong about when someone's intention to practice is that we, they, I, discover

[20:22]

maybe on the cushion in the zendo at first, but then later on in the events of a daily life, what we're really like. Nothing more humbling than to sit down in the zendo and not move and realize how much movement you have in your heart. And that is a way of becoming intimate with oneself, of knowing who we are, to face that. It's not so much that there's a single tremendous insight, a single moment of inspiration, though that might happen briefly for some folks. It's much more, I think, a process over time of loosening one's grip on old thinking and feeling and allowing

[21:27]

one's heart, one's thoughts, one's instincts to find their own true course, like a stream that flows out to the sea. Sometimes it's a fast-moving current, and sometimes it's a trickle, meandering slightly downhill. It's not just our task here at the Zen Center to wake ourselves up. We also need to help others wake up. We need to help others realize their provisionally speaking Buddha nature. And one step in this is to recognize that everyone around us is on the same path as we are.

[22:31]

And that more than we perhaps realize that our friends need our support in order for them to wake up. We need their support and they need our support. You know, the... In Buddhism, there's something called the Four Noble Truths. And the first truth is dukkha, impermanence. And sometimes this is translated as suffering. Well, why? It's not easy to change. Even when we know what our difficult habits are, even when we identify for ourselves those things we do which really aren't in our best interests, it's so tough sometimes to stop them, to let go of them, to change them.

[23:40]

Starting off in practice, starting off with a decision to do something like practice, meditation, mindfulness, Zen, whatever. That's not the toughest thing. Based on things we've seen in our life and experiences we've had, it might even make sense to start off. The toughest thing is to continue, to keep it up, to not get discouraged. That's what's hard. And even a moment ago I said, well, we have to wake other people up or help them wake up. That's part of our mission. It's part of our intention. But first we have to take care of ourself and not because we're being selfish.

[24:50]

You know, when you're... on an airplane and they demonstrate those things about the oxygen masks and the regrettable circumstance if the plane you'd have to sort of use them. They always say, if you've got children, don't put the mask on the kid first, put it on yourself. Because if the plane decompresses, you might... The reason is you might not be able to breathe well enough to even do it for the kid. You start with yourself. You take care of yourself. And that's something that's really true in practice as well. We don't take care of ourselves because we're being selfish, but we take care of ourselves because that's how we are going to be able to meet other people, to continue and meet other people. Sometimes it's possible to imagine that the reason we have problems is on account of other people, things they've done, ways they've acted on us.

[26:08]

But I think the place we have to start is with our own life. We have to heal our... What is the Hippocratic Oath or something? Physician, heal thyself? I'm not sure, really. I think I read that. Heal thyself. We start with our own life. Because this is a realistic place that we can actually know and control. Control maybe isn't the right word, but we can work with. And starting with our own life, then we can respond to the sirens of the world. Practice.

[27:13]

This thing we do here is a kind of It's straightforward, but actually at its heart it's a mystery. There's two things. There's two or three or ten million truths. And one truth is that practice is a mysterious gate that we go through and can't necessarily understand what's on the other side. The fundamental thing in Buddhism is the truth of cause and effect, actions, have consequences. But sometimes cause and effect explode in ways we don't even see, we can't understand. Well, how did this happen? What caused this to happen? When I was living at Green Gulch, Norman Fisher told me a story which even now I find sort of incredible and I don't even know if it's, you know, it's almost doubt.

[28:18]

Could it possibly be that he told me this? But yes, he did. In San Rafael, there's a, I don't even know the name of it any longer, there's a kind of like REI, but it wasn't REI. It was mountaineering equipment, sporting goods store. It was a big box place in an industrial part of San Rafael. that also had warehouses, and one thing that was near to this sporting goods store was the Marin County Waste Management Storage Yard, which means that when they picked up recycling from various places, it went through a processing and landed there. And then who knows, went other places, I'm sure. And Norman said he was walking down the street after he'd been in this sporting goods store, walking to his car, which was parked near this Waste management block.

[29:20]

And there was gusts of wind. It was a windy afternoon, and coming down the street, skittering and kind of flying through the air, were some pieces of paper. And one of them flew through the air and landed on his chest. And he took it off, and he looked at it, and it was a love letter from a student of his in Japan, written to a woman he knew in Marin. And he didn't know that they were affectionate with each other. I mean, you know, cause and effect, yes. Dusts of wind coming from Asia over this jet stream, you know, lifting pieces of paper out of bins and then landing on their teacher's chest, demanding attention. We don't really know what we got into when you stepped in the door, but also when we were born, we didn't know what we were getting into.

[30:27]

So, you know, I called it mysterious. I don't know if it's mysterious or not. What it is, it's just showing one example of how connected we all are. How could we think that we're not connected? So, what brings us here to this room? We're here because we... want to try to understand ourselves and understand how to live a useful life. That's what I say. That's my suggestion. We want to step aside from the daydream that we so actively involve ourselves with to stand on our own two feet present.

[31:44]

Fully present, that's The fully is actually just present. And when we are present, after all the kerfluffles that we take as important, kerfluffles that make us seem like we're alive, In the end, I think it's a simple thing. What it comes down to is being a bit more kinder, a bit more open, not saying that's a stupid suit. Maybe a way to say it is to be a bit more generous about how we move through

[32:45]

the day. Which this is not a profligate generosity, this is a kind of generosity of like when a farmer adds compost. I want to say thank you for all of you being here today. It gave me the chance to think about these things, to write this talk, to speak this talk. I wish for all of you that you continue. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[33:47]

Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge. And this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:10]

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