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 evening. Nice to see all of you here this evening. Thank you for coming, especially thanks to the people in the practice period. If you could all raise your hands for just a minute, everybody in the practice period. Yeah, great. Hey, thank you for coming. And I'd like to also thank the Abbas and the Tonto for the invitation to give this first talk of the fall 2012 practice period. So thank you. Thank you. So for those of you who are not familiar with this, what is a practice period? A practice period is these 40 or so people who have come here and committed themselves to about 10 weeks either living residentially or commuting in and dedicated themselves to 10 weeks of turning the light inward, so to speak.

[01:12]

So... Those of us who live here already, my name is Valerie and I am a resident here, but there are several people in the practice period who are not residents but who have made the commitment to come into the temple and to investigate. And the topic that the abbess has chosen for us to investigate for these 10 weeks is harmony, how to live in harmony with all beings. And I think that there's a myth out there that I just want to get rid of right away at the top of this talk that I actually shared when I lived out there. I lived monastically for 10 years. But before I did that, I had the corporate career and all that kind of stuff. And I think there's a myth out there that in temples and monasteries, there is harmony. And there is this sweetness in life. And everybody gets along. And it doesn't work like that. It actually doesn't. Every personality type that you have ever had trouble with is right here.

[02:18]

And darn it, you have made this commitment, though, for 10 weeks to live in harmony with these people. And actually, what we're doing is we're investigating where we can be in harmony, but also to investigate the discord. not necessarily to push it away or to wish people were different, but to investigate. So these 10 weeks, for some people it's 10 weeks, for some of it it's the rest of our lives, choose to investigate what is... in our lives and what causes the discord. Now, our very founder of San Francisco Zen Center actually gave us a reprieve on thinking that we have to find harmony in everything. Suzuki Roshi said, Buddha nature is everything losing its balance against a background of harmony. Well, that's kind of encouraging, right? That means we don't have to fix it all. We don't have to bring everything into harmony.

[03:19]

But to investigate that that balance that he calls it, losing its balance against a background of harmony. So I would say maybe that's what we're studying during this practice period is that background of harmony and how perhaps to bring it a little bit more into the foreground of our lives. I want to clarify a term right at the front of this talk before I go any farther, and that is the term harmony. When that term is used in Buddhism, I need to be very clear about this. Harmony, as Buddhism uses it, is not a metaphor. It's not a conceptualization. It's not celestial violins playing in harmony in some heaven that's over there. Harmony, as it's used in Buddhism, is a lived experience. a daily experience in the three fundamental places, if you will, locations that Buddhism deals with, and that is body, speech, and mind.

[04:32]

So when Buddhism talks about harmony, when we talk about that, we are talking about the lived experience of harmony in body, speech, and mind. So that's what we're investigating. in these 10 weeks is body, speech, and mind. That's a fundamental locator, if you will, in Buddhism, is these three things of body, speech, and mind. So we don't have to look somewhere else for the discord. We don't have to look somewhere else for the harmony. It's right here, right here in each of us and in the relationship that we have with each other in the interconnectedness. As you might imagine, there are all kinds of discords. Maybe some of you are feeling them right now. In your body, there's discord in the knee, right? In the back, there's sleepiness. There's all of this kind of thing going on. So there are myriad discords that we can investigate right within us and also investigate those times when it feels aligned and it feels harmonious.

[05:39]

So Buddhism, if nothing else, is a religion of lists. And so there's a list, actually, of stuff that shows up in body, speech, and mind that can be discordant. And so the list kind of goes like this. In the body, we are discordant if we use the body to cause harm, if we use the body to steal, if we use the body to misuse sexuality, if we use the body to intoxicate it. There is disharmony in speech when we lie, when we speak ill of others, when we praise self at the expense of others. There is disharmony in mind when we covet, when we get angry, and when we judge and disparage. This is sounding an awful lot like the precepts.

[06:43]

which is a really nice list of the ways that caution us about the ways that we cause disharmony within our own body, speech, and mind and within the body, speech, and mind of others. So that list is helpful, but a thorough investigation starts with what have our own experiences of disharmony been in some of these places. So I'm just going to relate a couple of mine to you. I actually confess that I did not live in my body for about 40 years of my life. I lived up here in my head, and I exercised somewhat, and I ate somewhat properly, but I really wasn't interested in my body particularly. It kind of got me from here to there, and it didn't really give me any trouble right up until the point shortly after my 42nd birthday when I ended up with an irregular heartbeat and ended up on a halter monitor, which is a device that measures your heartbeat for...

[07:48]

about a day, and you have to wear this thing, and it records. At that time, it recorded on a magnetic tape. It recorded my heartbeat, which was all over the place. So the drum right here in my chest was way out of whack because I ignored it. I ignored my body. there was a very huge disharmony going on in the middle of my chest that could have killed me. So this was a wake-up call to spend 24 hours on a device that's counting your every heartbeat. And I was going to Tassajara that summer, and one of the things that I loved about Tassajara was that I felt that I could... be myself there. In other words, I could be in harmony with who I thought I was. And that summer at Tassajara, which was right after I had worn the halter monitor, I made it out that I would work for several summers to make my life outside of Tassajara no different than how I felt inside of Tassajara.

[09:07]

And about two or three years later, when I felt like I had brought that into some harmony, my heartbeat returned to normal and has not skipped a beat since. So to me, to pay attention finally to the disharmonies in my body really brought about some very beneficial results. As I was going through my divorce, I decided not to go to talk therapy because I'm really verbal. I can talk myself into and out of anything. I'm really good at that. So I decided to go to physical therapy instead. And I went to everything you could imagine. I got rolfed. I got massaged. I got this. I got that. I got deep-tissued. I got all kinds of things. And what was amazing to me was how disharmonic my body was, where I was holding things, where I was straining, and I didn't even know it.

[10:10]

And as those things began to release and began to not be such disharmonic rocks, a flood of emotions showed up. And I actually ended up crying for about four years, not in sadness, but in relief at finally this release could happen. And that was just the first place. That was just the body. Then we have speech and mind that we need to deal with. But the first foundation of mindfulness is the body. The first place to start with looking at the disharmonies is the body. And as we begin in Zazen to settle, and there's a lot of sitting during the practice period, as we begin to settle, And as we begin to harmonize and line up with that environment, a very cool thing happens.

[11:17]

We not only begin to notice where we are in harmony and where we're not, but we begin to be able to notice the harmonies of other people and to allow them to resonate. Insisting on being a self-made person, insisting on going it alone, insisting on our note and our tune is actually a form of greed. One of the basic problems in Buddhism is a form of greed. And when we try to tune ourselves, That's one thing. But when we try to tune others and to rewrite their song so that we can sing it and so it will be more harmonious for us, we get in even more trouble and pile on even some more greed for wanting everyone else's song to be one we can sing, which isn't going to happen.

[12:37]

So as we settle our body and our speech and our mind and find the unexpected harmonies within ourselves, the places where we line up, one of the biggest indicators of being in harmony is the ability to give an unrestrained, wholehearted yes. What a nice thing to be able to say. And if you can give an unrestrained, wholehearted yes, you can also give an unrestrained, wholehearted no when the time is necessary. One of the problems with trying to tune ourselves to everybody that comes along is that we end up being a doormat and feeling resentful. but to be able to get to the place of deep harmony, which is what Suzuki Roshi was talking about, that harmony in the background, and to be able to bring it a little more forward, then we find our place to be able to sing our own song and also to allow others to join in.

[13:57]

How many of you have played a musical instrument in the room? Yeah, lots of people. Winds? Wind instruments? Strings? Yeah, okay. You might know this, but if you play an instrument, and even if you don't, you might know that if you tried to tune that instrument to every single note that you had to play as you were going along, you wouldn't get past the first measure. It'd drive you crazy, right? So to try to tune the instrument every time, to try to tune yourself... to everybody that comes along in every situation that comes along. It doesn't work. You don't get past the first measure. You don't get very far. So when we play a musical instrument, what we do to become in tune is we go to work on the structure of the instrument. We go to work, if it's a string, we go to work on the structure of the string and tune it. If it's a wind instrument, we go to work on the bore, lengthening or shortening it to...

[15:02]

bring it into tune. If it's a tympanic instrument, like a drum, or maybe like a heart, perhaps, we can tune that at a deep structural level. And those of you that have played in orchestras know that if you tune at a structural level of the instrument, being in tune lasts longer. You can keep that up through a whole piece. You can keep that up through hundreds of measures. You can keep that up through Rachmaninoff and Beethoven and, well, maybe Mahler, but that's a hard one. So too many notes. Anyway, but you can, by doing structural tuning, it allows us to stay in tune longer and with more instruments. So this is our practice. Our practice is not... to tune ourselves at each little instance because that will drive us crazy and that will drive the people we're trying to be in tune with or tune them crazy to do that, to try to adjust everything.

[16:13]

And then you give up because you're trying to adjust. You're not getting your own needs met. You're not being met harmoniously. But to go to work on the deep structure of our tuning, to tune ourselves at a deep level, allows us to find some harmonies both within and within our relationship to all beings. So there's another list that Buddhism has that I'd like to share with a little bit tonight that talks about some ways to tune at a deep level. And this is from a list called the paramitas or the perfections, except that I don't... Translation, I must admit, doesn't particularly resonate with me. Another translation of paramita is to cross over. So the things that can carry us from disharmony into this broader background of harmony where we can actually rest. So I'd like to mention four of them.

[17:15]

There are actually six, but I think that at this point in the practice period, at this point in our practice, the first four are really fundamental to broadening that background of harmony. that we can sink into with our body, speech, and mind. As I mentioned, insisting on our own note and our own song and insisting that others tune to us is a form of greed. So the first paramita is very helpful in this, and the first paramita is generosity. Generosity in tuning ourselves means a willingness to modulate our note. a willingness to listen to other notes, to give a strong note to someone who might be struggling. Or as Darlene Cohen put it in a quote that I really like from her book, The One Who Is Not Busy, harmony means no longer being at the mercy of a single point of view.

[18:22]

no longer being at the mercy of a single point of view. That is generosity. The willingness to not give up our note, not go silent. The opposite of harmony actually is not disharmony. The opposite of harmony is losing your voice. So can we be generous in being willing to shift our note? just a little bit, and I notice this, we do this every morning. We do this every morning as a samba. We start a chant, and the kokio gives us a pitch, and we kind of come in, and about by the end of the first line, pretty much, we're either all on the same note, or some very nice harmonies have been found. Despite our best wish to just be an individual who can make it alone, the fact that we don't make it alone by ten words into a chant, speaks to our deep desire to find this harmony within.

[19:30]

So the generosity, I think, is a very important one, to be able to be generous, to be willing to modify the note with which we come forward, and to create harmony, to allow others into our song. The second practice for harmony that is recommended in the Paramitas is ethical behavior. So I think of ethical behavior in terms of harmony as this, sort of lined up. That doesn't necessarily mean melody. It doesn't mean that everybody is conforming to the same set of rules, but it is a willingness to not deliberately cause discord in others and ourselves. that might be a definition of ethical behavior, is not deliberately causing disharmony, not intentionally bringing in discordant notes, not intentionally disrupting someone else's song.

[20:36]

The third practice that is helpful for harmony is the practice of patience. we don't always end up on the same note or in a harmonic tone. It sometimes takes a while to find how we might resonate with each other. But the patience to sit through that, to try different notes, to take a risk, to try a slightly different song, to have the patience to take the risk, to maybe learn someone else's song, means that this background comes forward. Always bringing this background of harmony forward takes time and patience, which is helped by the fourth practice, which is vigor. Some energy in bringing our voice forward, some energy not insisting on our note, but in finding our voice,

[21:48]

to bring it forward. Can we do that? Even if we don't know how to harmonize right away. Can we? Some energy to join in. Some energy to participate. That was pretty harmonious. Pretty good. I don't even think it took us a second to get to that. So can we settle in our body first because nothing else will be if the body won't settle? It's interesting that the last item in the list is the mind, body, speech, and mind. It is not recommended. to try to begin a discursive discussion in your mind about harmony.

[22:50]

That is probably one of the most disharmonizing things we can do is to sit there and intellectually debate it. Remember, harmony in Buddhism is not a metaphor. It's an actual lived experience. So where is that in our body? And as we settle, the discordances will show up, but so will... the undiscovered harmonies within us. When my heart finally settled down after being on this heart monitor, what I discovered was that there is a place within me that is always feeling like it's settled and in harmony, and it's always there, and it's right about here, right about my diaphragm. What a surprise, right at the bottom of the breath, the thing that supports the breath. And that, for me, is the source of where I can go to for harmony when I'm not feeling particularly steady.

[23:53]

And I want to acknowledge that there will be those times when we can't find our harmony, where the discordant notes are so much within us that we just can't do it. And I want to mention a couple of those. I want to acknowledge that one of our apprentices this afternoon lost her mother very suddenly. And she will go back to Massachusetts tomorrow to be with her three younger siblings. And to tell her to find harmony right now would be probably the worst thing. I could say to her. My mother passed away seven years ago this Saturday, and there was not harmony for the feeling of losing her, although it was a very peaceful, unpainful, rather quick death.

[25:05]

There are not times. There are times when there is not harmony to be found within us. And that's what we have each other for. That's what we have each other sung, perhaps very quietly sung, perhaps not able to even hear it at all. But the thing that sustained me when I was sitting with my mother as she was dying in Southern California was knowing that all of you were back here harmonizing with the schedule and sitting every day. To know that harmony is available even when we can't find it is helpful. To be able to acknowledge and say, I'm way out of tune here. That in itself helps bring that background of harmony just a little bit closer.

[26:13]

To be willing to know that we have those discordant notes within us. and that they're always there. But to engage in this practice, to bring some balance to the times that we do have disharmony, and to see if we can enfold within that harmony, even the discordant notes. It happens in nature. It's called overtones. If you hit that bell, that big bell over there, and you let it go on long enough, you can actually hear at some point all the notes of the scale. Try it sometime. If you have a bell at home or come in here sometime and hit one of the bells and you can actually hear all the notes of the scale, including the seventh, which is the most discordant, right? The leading tone into the octave. That note eventually shows up in the overtones of that bell. So those overtones are within us.

[27:14]

the harmonic ones, and the discordant ones. And to settle onto our cushion or wherever we settle all day. To acknowledge the harmonious and the disharmonious overtones is an important, and in my case, it was a life-saving practice to do that. So the focus for the practice period and perhaps for the rest of our lives is to see if we can find resonance with maybe not all beings. That may be a tall order. But maybe with some more beings. To see if we can find resonance with them. To see if we can find more notes for our song. and to see if we can bring our song and others together in some harmonious fashion that even includes the discordant overtones.

[28:23]

Yun-men said to the assembly, hearing sound awakened to the way, the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara was blown by the wind into a different tune. I invite you to put your comments. called reading in pairs. And when I learned about it, it really fed into various practices that, you know, meeting difficulty as a vehicle for two years.

[29:40]

And so in reading in pairs, to be interested by someone being able to wake up with my liking. And so there are these And that person, as the person wakes up, they have a very sense of, like, there was an airplane in the beginning. And the person is purposely told to ask a dumb-ass question. So was it something that will sort of elicit the person to say, no, it wasn't that kind of airplane. And they get a little annoyed because the person's session is a little off. But it sort of helps to browse the dream out because it hears sort of the wrong version of itself. But without that, it doesn't quite wake up. I mean, it doesn't quite . And so the idea is that it sort of is this kind of writing to help elicit more clarity and more sort of space and deeper.

[30:44]

And ever since hearing out, it's made like when someone sets anywhere, I just don't feel like, you know, sitting at the right hand, you know, trying towards not getting it or whatever, because I don't like getting it or whatever, and so there's just a way that it becomes really useful. So I just wanted to speak to that in the way that the way that Patience is served by... Well, I think that's actually what a practice period or a commitment to a temple or a monastic experience is all about, is that you're stuck with, you know, voluntarily stuck, right, with these people that, you know, bring their own songs, right? And what you do is with that hopefully... small amount of discord, but sometimes it's not, right?

[31:48]

And you commit to these 10 weeks or whatever to live with discord, in a sense, to live with somebody misinterpreting you, to live with somebody not quite getting your dream, in a sense. So to be able to learn that in a contained environment with a schedule, with sitting, I think develops the skills to be able to maybe... tune up with even more discord in your life. So thank you. I like that. That's a good story. Thank you. Jean. Conveniently, this one is called, it's Case 82 in the Book of Serenity. This is Yen Men's Sound and Form. The suggestion at the beginning of the koan is to not cut off sound and form.

[32:56]

That's kind of the start of it, is to not, you know, it's interesting, isn't it, that we can close our eyes, but we can't close our ears? It's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. So we can't cut off sound or vibration. And this case is saying that even the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, who allegedly kind of has it all together in terms of infinite compassion, right? I heard some sounds, which might or might not be the cries of the world, and I was blown into a different tune. In other words, even with all the cries of anxiety and suffering in the world, was able to take on a different tune to be able to hear that. It's just my interpretation of that poem. But it's one of my favorite ones. Yes, Marisha? Well, when you talk about ahalut, it's as far as, you know, one of my favorites.

[34:01]

Sorry. There we go. So when I think about that, I think of surrender. And so when you're talking about hearing the cries and suffering in the world, To me, that means there's a kind of surrender of my point of view or my own tune, which allows me to find actually a greater tune or a bigger tune that is sort of my tune too. Yeah. Yeah. That harmony in the background that Suzuki Roshi was talking about. And I'm glad you brought that up because I want to be really clear here that surrender is not submission. Submission is losing your voice or giving up and then getting resentment flu. It's not that. That's not what you're talking about. You're talking about just surrendering your grip on your song, darn it. And your song is going to be what's sung. And to be able to surrender the grip.

[35:01]

You're not surrendering the song. You're surrendering your insistence on that it's the only one in tune. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting, isn't it, that the person who leads an orchestra doesn't play an instrument, right? The conductor doesn't play the instrument, right? And yet we all surrender to him or her, you know, to guide us in finding the harmony of the larger piece. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. You want more? I was wondering if there's more to say Or if you can say more about the whole art yes and the whole art no. You know, sometimes it's also clear that... Most of the time it's more complicated than that.

[36:07]

Yeah, no. What does your heart say? What do you think? What's your experience? Yeah. It seems like it's wholehearted because there's a consideration. But I guess I'm just wondering about that. Is wholehearted sort of, is that clarity or is that willingness, or is it just saying yes to what's being asked of you? I agree with you right up until that point, okay? I'm not sure it's just saying yes to what's being asked of you. I think it is clarity, and it is, there's some peace in that.

[37:09]

There's some peace in a wholehearted yes, even if it's complicated. There is some, I don't know, the only way I can describe it is not words. There is a lined-up-edness about that wholehearted yes, which doesn't include resentment, doesn't include revenge for the person who asked you. So I think maybe in the wholehearted yes, there is a willingness to really investigate if there is a disharmony lingering in there and to see. that, wondering about that instead of holding on to it? Well, instead of holding on to it, instead of letting it sort of derail the whole piece, you know, necessarily, so the resentment is a disharmony, and what about that might be able to be resolved or not. A wholehearted yes is not particularly easy.

[38:10]

I don't want to make it sound like it's sweetness and light in the celestial violins, you know? It's not, but it is a tuning up, in a sense, somewhere, and it's sometimes that takes, you know, there are stringed instruments with like 88 strings or the piano. I think it's one of those. I think sometimes the whole idea is a piano, not a guitar. It's got a lot more to line up for that. How are we doing on time? And then Christina, we doing okay? Okay, thank you. Okay. Thank you. Yes? I wanted to say also something about the wholeheartedness. Yes. My experience is that there is more clarity and it's wholeheartedness and then as events unfold, so I don't completely, I want to do this, but the spirit I sign up, I do everything, it's all clear. And I arrive and I start wondering Why on earth did I ever say yes?

[39:15]

So as it becomes detailed, it becomes complicated. And I remember the place where the decision came from, where the intention comes from, because it will help me navigate. But all the conditioning comes into play, plus other people's conditions. So that's a part of that. Yes, thank you. And I think that one way to help us, in a sense, remember that wholehearted yes that we made before all this other crud showed up, right, is to remember the power of vow. And vow kind of, I don't want to say solidifies, that is really not the right image, but that really takes the wholehearted yes and puts it firmly in our heart.

[40:24]

So can that wholehearted yes be turned into a vow? And I think that that not only brings, a vow not only brings with it some harmony, it brings with it a greater tolerance for the disharmony that is going to show up every once in a while. So I might recommend that as a possibility, is seeing if there's a part of the wholehearted yes. It's not a promise. A vow is not a promise. It's different. A vow is different qualitatively than a promise. A vow is just a commitment to stick with the song, regardless of the disharmonies that might come in, but to stay with the effort, to stay with the effort to find that harmony and to see how the vow might... encourage that. I think that's what this encouragement from Suzuki Roshi was, that even though things are going off balance all the time, that background there is the encouragement and the vow to bring that harmonious background forward into more of our lives in the wholehearted yes and in the vow is important.

[41:34]

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.

[42:01]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.81