Well, we don't want this on recording now. That's fine. Oh, all right. Pause. Here you are. I would be very happy to hear from you. Whatever you'd like to bring up this evening. see if I got my no hands no eyes no ears no hands how are you doing how is it out there there's a hand hey hi Melissa thank you she said there's the champ book is a bit good in the chat you can get uh

[01:01]

Oh, thank you, Melissa. That's really kind of you. Hi, Fu. It's Melissa. I just wanted to – I think I can only direct message you, so I think you need to broadcast that link out to the group. Oh, you're asking for tricks I don't yet know, but you can help me with that. How do I do that? I'll open the chat. Okay, how do I broadcast that out? Do I put it to everybody? There's a – yeah, maybe you can just copy and paste. Okay, I'm going to try that. Copying and pasting will be a lot easier. And then under two, you can select the drop-down menu and select everyone, I believe. Thank you, Guy, yes. Sort of a direct message, yeah. You guys are so good and you're so patient. Oh, well, you know what? I just clicked it and it went to the Zen Center website. you probably all went to to come online so there i'm i'm trying to drag it into everyone let's see copy right here here we go copy nice marina can you do that can you copy oh wait a minute i got it i got a copy okay these machines really are very smart

[02:21]

you do how do you paste i got a i got i copied it i right click do you have a mouse or a trackpad i have a trackpad okay if you double click yeah in the space that says type message here yeah click put both fingers down you should get a little menu paste should be in there does that work Can you come live with me? Yeah, no problem. Thanks. Thank you. That worked. Okay. Did you all get it? Can you do it now? In the chat? I don't see it yet, Fu. Oh, I said, oh, do I have to send it? Let me have to send it. Send it. There it is. Yay. Wow. Okay. Great. Marianne, great.

[03:32]

Let's see. Marianne, I'm going to add a spotlight. There you are. Hi. You're muted. I did. Okay. Thank you. Hello, Sangha. Good to see everybody. I wanted to kind of... let you know what I heard when you said this line, act without mind, respond with certainty. I'm just going to give, okay, I like that. And I'm going to give myself a test with these two truths, the G and the R. Okay. All right. So what I heard was act without mind, meaning let go of our narrow relative understanding of of whatever is before me and enter into the connection of all things so that I respond with certainty.

[04:34]

Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And there I saw, and that's because of my Catholic Christian upbringing, eternity. Well, Buddha said the moment is eternal. Okay. All right. The present is eternal. Right. And we're always in the presence. So I think you got it. All right. Anyway, I just, I just thought that's what I heard. And again, the way the mind just goes, you know, you're ready. You're always kind of, you're listening to that beautiful poem. And instead of listening to it, you're trying to figure it out. Right. Right. But I like, you didn't figure it out as much as open it out. I feel like. That's a nice one. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. No mind.

[05:36]

Just do it. With love. Okay. So three weeks from now, there's going to be the mountain seat ceremony. You all know about that? And I'm going to go on gallery. Jiryu will step up on the mountain on Sunday, the 12th. And on Friday, before that, Ed and I are going to step off the mountain. There's a step there, unfortunately. They put in some stairs. So we're going to come off the mountain. And then Mako Bokor, who's a wonderful teacher. I'm getting to know her. Been in Austin as the abbess in Austin.

[06:38]

And accepted our invitation to be an abbess at the city center. She'll step up. Or abbess. She prefers abbess. She will be the abbess at the city center on Saturday, the 11th. So this is kind of a big weekend coming up for... San Francisco Zen Center. And I think we're all feeling the generational, you know, it's kind of like grandpa's giving up the farm and we're all moving into a different relationship with the young students who we saw arrive. You know, we were all, Jiri was my, carried my incense when he first came. He was, I think, 20. I think he mentioned to you, he was like 20. And I was the Tato and he was my first Jiko. And he was very, very serious young man. And he went on to Japan to study and University of California to study and get his master's in Buddhist studies. He's really done a wonderful job of bringing these teachings alive inside of himself.

[07:42]

And so I'm very grateful. There's such a fine second, what do you call it, up to bat. The team, the new team is coming on. This is wonderful. So all of that's going to happen. And I think it's going to be online. If any of you, I don't know if any of you got messages about that, but pretty sure it's all going to be online so that you can watch us doing our ritual that we do. We just did a couple of beautiful ceremonies last week. Pari Nirvana, which is the Buddha's final passing. And that was an evening ceremony with the lights really low, and we did all kinds of wonderful sounds, a lot of silence, and then a reading of his last words, which was quite touching. These are my last teachings. Do not think that the teacher's gone. My teaching is your teacher now. All things are your teacher now.

[08:43]

Wonderful. Maybe I'll find that and share it with you. It's quite beautiful. Not too long. So we read that in candlelight. I got to be the reader. And the next day we did another ceremony, Reblet, for the funeral. It's kind of like a funeral for Shakyamuni Muna. And then we had a full moon ceremony. No, we had a new moon ceremony this morning that was also very nice, very beautifully chanted by one of our young priests. So these are things we love to do, and I hope all of you someday will be able to join. Doing ritual together is really very sweet. Chanting, offering incense, and all of that. So I'm going to say goodnight. And unless somebody has a thought, not yet, I will let you all... I'll let you all... I received this email about taking precepts.

[10:04]

Would you like to discuss a little bit here? Yeah, I'm happy to do that. Do you need to figure out the schedule or I, cause I saw the email. I wasn't. Yeah. Well, I'm going to get sent around a doodle poll. So I got your times. I mean, I looked up Singapore and I looked up Australia. I looked up Europe. Europe's out of luck. It's just the wrong time to try to get together. They're, they're, they're sleeping when we're, you know, when we're so, um, Yeah, I think I'll send out a doodle poll to those of you who are studying precepts and and then see if we can actually have another. Probably it'll be at five on whichever day works best for people. And so that's you'll probably hear from me soon and to pick to pick the best day. And then I'll let you all know about that.

[11:09]

That's great. Yeah, just very, very grateful for this. Yeah, I thought it'd be nice. Maybe every other week we could do a precept study. And yeah, any of you who are considering taking precepts or receiving precepts, you might want to let me know about that. And you're welcome to join. So right now I have about, I don't know, about maybe 12, 13 people that are different places. in the country. So that's kind of tricky, but we'll try to figure it out how to do that. Do you ever come out to California anymore? Is this... Yeah, I think we're planning a trip in the summer. It's like, yeah, Singapore, they have a, the school starts in August. So they start, the school starts in August. We might, yeah. So it's a little different from California, but we might be there. All right. Well, keep me posted because that would be nice to do them in person, of course.

[12:14]

And that would be my hope. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. All righty. I'm going to say goodnight. And you're all welcome to, you know, unmute and do that as well. Good night, everyone. Good night. Good night, everyone. Good night. Yes, thank you so much. I really appreciated the recap. It helps a lot, too. Good. Everything back in perspective, right, and see how it all flows together. It's very surprising, the time and seeing how Because it almost feels like it's all happening at once because there's such a unity in the way that it's expressed. But it's, yeah, so it's wonderful. I'm in awe in the way that these teachers are able to use words to speak of something that can't be spoken of, right?

[13:21]

Yeah, and over in the languages that they had to master and, you know, translating from Sanskrit into all these other and finding people who could translate. from Sanskrit to Chinese. And there were some really gifted translators who did amazing things. Their translations are holding up to modern scholarship. Like, whoa, that was really good. And they had a whole room full of translators working on these things and copy artists, like the monks did for the Bible and for the works of art that were being lost, the written works that were being lost during the Dark Ages. They were copying things. They didn't know how to read, but they could copy. So it's kind of an amazing thing that these things are able to be protected. And the mastery and the interpretation, right? Because the language is just so... I would imagine that there's a little bit less... I'm not familiar, but I would imagine going from Chinese to Japanese than from Chinese and Japanese to English, right?

[14:26]

Where it's... Oh, words are not even exist. Right. And it needs to be a level of mastery to even translate and choose the right interpretation. So it's just this is so much gratitude. Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's someone told me that one of the reasons the koans were very popular. Yeah. Like one word answers is because the Chinese and Japanese share the written characters. Like you can hold up Mu. Right. Yeah. Now, the Japanese wouldn't say that word. They wouldn't use that way. They wouldn't pronounce it right. They'd say it differently, but they know what it means. So they go, here's your answer, you know, and they could show them the Chinese character. So they had this really good connection in terms of their use of the kanji, of the Chinese letters. And what I love in some stories is the no use of words whatsoever. Here's a whisk. Here's a shout. That's right. That's right. And that translates into all languages. That's clear. Stop talking.

[15:27]

That one, easy to translate. Exactly. Hi, Alicia. Nice to see you. Good to see you, Phu. It's good to see you, Sangha. I just had two little comments. One, I'm so struck by how our ancestors build on each ancestor before and how they just played with what came and how they turned it around and added to it continuously, but they're speaking to the same thing in different ways. And it just gets, just opens it up and gets so rich. So it's fascinating to me. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. I was talking to Dale Wright, who's a scholar and has translated a lot of wonderful things. And, and I think I mentioned to you, I actually was in, when we were in college as 19 year olds, we happened to be together in Sweden on a school. study abroad year. And he said, are you the Nancy Schrader who was in Uppsala in, you know, whatever year it was, 1968? I said, I am. Well, I was there.

[16:28]

It's like, so he went off and became a Buddhist scholar and I went off and did this other thing. And so when we met, it was just delightful to see this old man and this old lady many years later, 50 years later, who had come to the same We love the Dharma. And anyway, I said to him, I have to apologize, Dale, because I steal all my material. And he said, well, everyone does that. That's the whole point. You know, it's like you get inspiration from other poets and other painters and so on. That's why there's movements. You know, everybody's kind of using the same sort of imagery and expressing it. And then somebody does something really wild. And then a new trend starts. But, yeah, most of these guys were holding the thread of the ultimate truth and the relative truth. It's like they're in dialogue, even through the generations. It's like a call and response, like a koan, but they're not meeting directly. Obviously, they're meeting to the generations. Yeah, and we get to put it together. We get to be the ones who learn it, you know, hear the echo.

[17:34]

coming from them it's that's one reason we offer you know our homages to the buddhas and ancestors they thank you so much for doing that we're traveling on a camel for you know and for thousands of miles to carry these books you know it's it's amazing what they did out of their devotion to these teachings yeah yeah on our computers and we're just kind of like okay You know, it's really, it's really, we're very lucky. And in some ways, maybe it's too easy. Yeah. Well, not really. Accessing it, right? Yeah, exactly. Integrating it, living it. Yeah. One last thing, Sue, I also really want to thank you for all the time you spent with the five ranks because Even though Dogen doesn't, you know, emphasize it, I find that it helps me in my practice so much. And so it's interesting to see we dealt with it and just how it interweaves with our practice, because it's still here, even though we don't emphasize that.

[18:45]

Yeah. Dogen honored them, but he said, don't make it into a system. He could see that. The monks kind of like, well, I'm on rank three. Where are you? You know, it's sort of like that human thing of competition. And so he said, no systems, you know, just free yourself of systems. But, you know, they all knew them anyway. It's sort of like, yeah, don't look over there. Oh, that's the first place I'm going to go. That's right where you told me not to look, you know, Playboy magazines, you know, the first thing I'm going to look at. So, yeah, they all knew. They still know. You know, I love studying the five ranks. And yeah, so. Yeah, it's very helpful. I find it very helpful. Very helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Great to see you all. Good to see you all. Good night, everyone. Yeah. Spring is on the way. Yes. Good night. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good night, everyone. Good night, everyone. Good night, everyone.

[19:45]

Bye. Bye. Be well. You too.

[19:48]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_86.54