This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Thank you all for being here today. I have something on my ear. My name is Chiryu. I live at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, which some of you may be familiar with, a bit over the bridge. And there at Green Gulch, I serve as the tanto, or head of practice. And it's a great honor, very special to me to be invited to speak here with you at City Center.

[01:08]

So thank you, David and Mary, for the invitation to do so. It really is a great, I would say, awful, awesome, awful responsibility to to turn the Dharma with people who are open in heart and mind to hear the Dharma. A friend of mine who I sometimes co-teach with always acknowledges that we, in this case I, have been entrusted with your time. Wow, thank you. So what an honor and what a responsibility. So I'd like to share with you some of my thinking about that. My thinking was and has been and is still that given that great responsibility, given your entrusting of me, it would be good.

[02:20]

In fact, I should give a good talk. Wouldn't that be nice? It would be nice for me, you know, then I could really fully, fully give myself to this situation. And if this were a good talk, it would be nice for you, you know, then you could really, this talk would really be worthy of your full attention. If it were a good talk, you know, your whole body, your whole body might participate wholeheartedly, totally exerting itself in the listening. You know, your toes would be listening and the top of your head and your elbows, whole body totally engaged in this moment of life, present dharma. And our whole minds would be right here. Past and future would fall away. Our whole life, you know, would just collapse down into this one moment.

[03:26]

And then that total exertion in the way, that brightness would seep out from the windows and flow out from the doors and cover the whole suffering world with the merit of the true Dharma. So that's a possibility. Or it could be, you know, a so-so talk, and then none of that would happen. That, of course, is the rub. That, of course, is the trap. That is the thinking I want to share with you as I acknowledge that, in fact, despite my habit of thinking otherwise.

[04:27]

Your wholeheartedness is not in my hands and my wholeheartedness is not in your hands. Each of us is completely responsible for our own wholeheartedness. So to think as we all often think almost always often do to think that some things are worthy of my full life. I'll really show up for that. And then other things are not so worthy of our full life. Some things are unworthy of my full attention, full exertion of body and mind. So we assume this and we live in this way and then we feel kind of... alienated and ghost-like, like we're missing something.

[05:27]

So our usual way of thinking is that some things have great value and some things have little value. Some things are worthy and some things are unworthy. Some things are treasure and some things are trash. And of course, at any given moment, that might be true. You know, for Ed Green Gulch, we do study the difference between the harvest and the weeds. The one nourishes and gives life and the other does not. The distinction is not to be overlooked. It's a vital distinction. But it's hard to make these distinctions without... without falling into confusion, without coming to live actually as though that value were really out there and the valuable things really warrant our full self and the unvaluable things we can withhold ourselves from.

[06:44]

When I'm in a situation I don't think is so valuable, I don't think is, you know, maybe even I don't think should be happening, I can withdraw and withhold my full life energy. It doesn't feel so good. So how about now? How about today in this humble Buddha hall here? Some of you may be here for the first time, and some of you may be here for the 40,000th time. I did some quick math, and it's actually possible that somebody here is in this hall for the 40,000th time. So either way, it has its challenge, you know, whether your first time here to bring your full self, whether it's your 40,000th time here, okay. to bring our full self, our full life.

[07:55]

So how is it now? Are we fully exerted or are we still withholding? You know, I think in general, probably already this talk is either going in a good column or a not so good column or, you know, indeterminate, we say, let's wait and see, column. And if it's going in the good column, then maybe you are feeling yourself, feeling yourself fully here, your full life energy exerted in just this present situation. Full body, full heart, full mind, engaged, exerted. We might be giving 100% as we do for good things, if 100% letting this moment of life call forth and burn up all of our longing and our integrity and our whole body and heart and mind.

[09:08]

Or if we're already putting this event this morning in the not-so-good or not-sure-yet category, we can study and notice what we're withholding, what kinds of excuses we may be making as we sit here indulging and distraction and diffusion of our attention. This inner or outer wiggle, you know, as we kind of absent ourselves a bit from our life. Because let's be honest, how much energy do we actually need to bring to just be here? I've studied this closely. What is the minimum energy required? What is the minimum exertion required to be at a Dharma talk? You know, we say half heart. So definitely half heart, you can do it.

[10:13]

You can get in and be involved in a whole Dharma talk with half a heart. 10% a heart. We can bring, you know, I think I've gotten down to 5% of my life energy, 3% maybe. And, you know, tempted whenever I do to blame the talk for not calling forth my full life energy. So I realized this morning that the best illustration for me of this principle that I wanted to share with you in my own life is the game Candyland.

[11:22]

I don't know if some of you may be familiar with the game Candyland. Maybe some of you grew up playing it or saw it around. Maybe some of you aren't familiar with Candyland. So I wanted to just talk you through a little bit of Candyland and how it works. So this is the board for Candyland. Okay, so this is Candyland. You start here with a little plastic figurine. And then you see this path of various colored squares. So I didn't bring the cards, but going along with this, there's a deck of cards. And on each card, there's a square with a color. And you draw a card, and it has a color. So for instance, ooh, I drew blue. Then I can move my figurine to the blue. And sometimes there's two colors.

[12:25]

Sometimes it's a double color. which is extremely exciting, like, ooh, double blue. Now I get to move not only to the first blue, but I get to skip all the way to the second blue. So that is essentially the entirety of the game Candyland. There is nothing interesting about this game. You know, there's three or four little candies, which you can get a special candy card, and then you can skip ahead. Or, if you get a candy that you've already passed, you have to go all the way back. So say you're playing this game with a three-year-old, you know, and it's been like 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes of playing Candyland, and you think, we're almost done playing Candyland, and then you draw the gingerbread man, and you've got to go all the way back. And then you might say, well, you won, so maybe we don't have to play all the way through.

[13:32]

But you've got to play it through. So I find this illustrates, you know, we talk in this practice about letting our life burn up completely in each moment. At each moment calls forth our full life energy, totally exerted life energy, burning ourselves up in the fire of the present moment, no trace remaining, everything given. And I feel when I'm playing Candyland that Candyland does not have the heat necessary to burn up my whole life, you know. It's really hard to give yourself fully, you know, even though you know, and I know, you know, so I have two children who have passed the age of three. My littlest just turned five last week. And we know, you know, in our mind how precious it is. So precious, you know. Quality time. So we know that, but our body really has trouble being all the way there for half an hour of Candyland.

[14:34]

It's just not, it's not interesting enough. It's not calling our full energy forth. So we say, you know, maybe could we play another game? Could we play a different game that maybe would be more interesting to me that would help me? If we played like a more complicated game, then that would really help me bring my full self forward. Here. No. We can't play another game. We're playing Candyland. Which is a, you know, I remember as a young person being quite absorbed in the game. It was kind of amazing, fascinating. It really did call forth my full energy. But it no longer has that effect on me. And I want to live fully. So I think, well, can we play a different game so that I can live fully? Because I'm really having trouble living fully under these conditions. And sometimes that works and it's fine to ask, but sometimes it doesn't.

[15:36]

You know, the answer is no, actually, we're playing this game now. I also can try to convince myself there's something interesting, you know, try to spin it into something that I would value, which I would then bring forth my energy for. But it's just not a good game. It doesn't... A mental exercise is not sufficient for me to bring myself forward. And even, you know, I can try to encourage myself by thinking about the preciousness, the shortness of life, the preciousness of this time with this being. And that helps, you know. But it still, it takes a lot of energy and effort to fully take responsibility. for my own wholeheartedness to really show up fully in my life. It's hard. Sometimes. So I think of the Buddha after his enlightenment is said to have preached the Avatamsaka Sutra to confirm and convey the content of his enlightenment.

[16:47]

He spoke for days on end. He just uttered the Avatamsaka Sutra. And I had this question or this vision of the Buddha confirming and expressing his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree there by playing a full game of Candyland. I thought, I think that's the only one who could really do it, you know? Totally unconditioned, totally taking responsibility for the fullness of life, not relying on any external condition to totally be there for. I thought, what an amazing teaching that would be. the Buddha, right there for an hour. He totally burned up, even in that not-so-interesting occupation. So somebody recently was sharing with me that in a phase of their life, they came to feel that many of the people around, and something in their own heart too,

[17:51]

felt sort of ghost-like. Living around ghost-like people. And that was very resonant for me. I thought, yeah, I'm that ghost. I am the ghost-like person. So often, you know, we're kind of living without our full energy. We're living without our full body and mind and heart exerted and engaged. And it's not so nice to be around. ghost-like people, and it's not so nice to be a ghost-like person. Deep down, at our core, we all want to live fully. We all want to give ourselves totally to this life we have. We want to be fully present.

[19:01]

Even presence, I find, is a little passive, maybe. So we sometimes reflect on and use the teachings of mindfulness in our practice. Mindfulness as this awareness of how am I? What are the sensations? What are the mental formations inside and outside? This kind of careful attention to what is happening. That's certainly what we practice in Zazen. Presence. There's also in Zen this emphasis not just on presence, but on total exertion of the whole body and mind. It's not just like... be present and aware it's be totally exerted wholeheartedly living on and with and as each moment

[20:08]

To not be more enthusiastic for something valuable and less enthusiastic for something that's not valuable. To be totally exerted, totally wholehearted in any case. So each thing has a comparative value like harvest and weeds and treasure and trash. But its absolute value is we say thus. That it's thus. Togen Zenji, our founder in Japan, Soto Zen, is always speaking about this thusness, this way that our valuing misses the point of the absolute value of each thing as part of and totally participating in the whole. So we say, yeah, maybe something is valuable and something is less valuable. Ultimately, absolutely, it's all thus.

[21:29]

It is so. So there's a great story among many of Dogen sort of taking us to task. We're thinking that, in this case, having the marrow of Bodhidharma's teaching would be better than just having the skin of Bodhidharma's teaching. And Dogen says, to have the skin of Bodhidharma's teaching is... wholeheartedly, totally, to have the skin of Bodhidharma's teaching. That is it. And to have the marrow, you know, I have a very deep understanding. I have a very shallow understanding. That moment of having a shallow understanding totally is thus fulfilled the whole way beyond our comparison. And so each thing is worthy of our full life, our full attention, because it's here, you know. And to be here, it's involved with participating with everything. It is our life. It is all of life. Dogen reminds us the total experience of a single thing is one with that of all things.

[22:38]

And study a speck of dust, you study the entire universe without fail. So playing Candyland, you know, I feel that... I'm not studying the whole universe. I'd actually like to stop playing Candyland so I can go back to study the whole universe. But it's right there. The thusness of that little orange square is actually together with participating with the whole life of all beings, past, present, and future. It's the unfolding of the total dynamic activity of life itself in this one moment. It's not that something deserves our whole life, our whole attention, our whole participation. It's not that something deserves it because of how it is. It deserves it because it is, you know, just because it is. And actually, even to say that is maybe too much. The wholeheartedness itself deserves it.

[23:41]

It's worthwhile to be wholehearted for wholeheartedness's sake, you know, for our life's sake to totally exert ourselves. So when I say wholeheartedness, when I say totally exert our life in each moment, what comes up for you? I invite you sitting here to notice your wholeheartedness, your feeling of full engagement, full exertion. What is that like? not withhold anything from this moment, but to fully participate in this moment with our whole body and mind and heart and wisdom. I wonder if you have a feeling for that and how we might cultivate it.

[24:44]

Sometimes one aspect is concentration. So some of us like concentration. So the mind being totally, totally here, you know. Zen actually means concentration. So it's okay to be very concentrated in Zen. It's the mind, it's full engagement, full exertion of the mind. That kind of intensity of now, right at the edge, right at the edge of now. Staying caught up with now. You know, it's moving very fast if it's moving. It's either perfectly still or it's moving very fast. So we're right at that edge, you know. It commands our full attention, intensity of effort, of mind. And it's also, as I mentioned, our full body, our full embodied exertion.

[25:53]

So when we walk and sit and eat and talk, is our whole body involved? And our whole heart, our whole warm and broken heart, totally with us, totally engaged in each moment. do we do this? Do you want to do such a thing? You know, if it were a good talk, you would really be wanting to do such a thing. Given the talk we're in,

[27:04]

Still, can we touch that part of ourselves that wants to totally be here? Not because it's a good thing, but because it's where we are to be completely engaged here. So if we want to live that way, then how will we do that? So if you touch that, touching that place, I think, is maybe a good start. is half or more of that effort. Just remembering, as one might, when playing Candyland, you know, half asleep on one's floor, might remember, I actually have a vow to live wholeheartedly, live fully. And actually, just this morning, I made offerings at an altar that expresses joy wholehearted living, you know, and I bowed to this totally exerted life.

[28:05]

So just remembering that. How do you remember that? How do you engage that? How do you exert yourself fully in every moment? That's what Zen training is. You say, well, what is Zen training? Zen training is practicing and training in giving ourselves fully, exerting our full body and mind with each thing. And we have lots of techniques, and all of the techniques point basically just to that. We assess the techniques, are they working or not? If it's supporting you to be wholehearted, then yes, it's working. If it's not supporting you to be wholehearted, then no, it's not working. So some of the techniques in the Buddha Dharma include the recollection of impermanence, really touching how short this time together is. It's also encouraging in this practice of totally participating in our life to study and reflect on the stakes, the stakes of our life, the stakes of our practice, connecting with the suffering of the world and our own deep suffering and feeling, realizing that that's in our hands.

[29:35]

and that how we live on this moment relates to that, participates in that. I've been sharing with many people this image from teaching by the great ancestor Nagarjuna has this image of riding, of being on a precipitous mountain path, a very narrow mountain path, riding on a mountain goat. on this narrow path. He says, you're not negligent in that situation. When you're riding on a mountain goat, on a path that's, you know, half a mountain goat wide, you are not, you are totally exerting body and mind. Why? Because you are directly connected to the stakes of that exertion. That works on a wide road, you know.

[30:38]

But we're never on a wide road. This is not a wide road situation given the intensity of the suffering within and without. It's a narrow road. The stakes are high. And remembering that, like, whoa, I'm on a goat. There's the cliff. Coming back to our full life every moment. So that can help to remember what's at stake. Also, this wholehearted, total exertion. relates with our beginner's mind, our not knowing, our wonder at life. So any way that we can touch, tap into that, you know, kind of crack open our knowing with whatever tool is at hand, crack open our knowing and let the wonder of life, the wonder of this moment, like Candyland. What is, you know, there's light, there's light and there's matter and there's shape and there's color. Letting that wonder support our wholeheartedness and then our wholeheartedness engages with and deepens the wonder.

[31:46]

And we encourage each other, you know. So we come to City Center on a Saturday morning feeling like, wow, and this is honestly me this week, like kind of half-hearted. Let's go to a city center and talk to some people about how awful it feels to live in a half-hearted way. And then other people say, yeah, me too. That's like, it doesn't feel good, does it? Let's try this other thing. We say, okay, but how? It's going to be hard. And we say, well, we're not sure, but let's try together. Here's some teachings that can help us. How about the practice of Zazen? Zazen, which is just like pure wholeheartedness. Zazen is not about anything except, can you just be wholehearted? You don't even have Candyland. It's nothing. There is nothing to do. It's just pure life. Pure life. Can we be totally exerted on this moment of just pure life? So that's hard to practice in Zazen.

[32:52]

We often sit half-heartedly or less. And sometimes we take up practices to encourage our wholeheartedness in Zazen. One of the practices we sometimes take up is counting the breath. Am I doing it right? I've been counting the breath, which is a great question. And as I said, the answer is, if counting the breath is helping you be wholehearted in your practice, then yes, that's a good practice to do. if you're just counting with 3% of your mind, the counting is not really helping. So there's not some value in counting apart from its use as a tool for wholeheartedness. And Suzuki Roshi talks about that in a passage that I always come back to. I won't go on for much longer, but I want to share this teaching from Suzuki Roshi.

[33:59]

He says, in meditation, we sometimes practice counting our breath. You may think it is silly to count your breath from one to ten, losing track of the count and starting over. If you use a computer, there will not be any mistake. So it's like, yeah, you get the point. But the underlying spirit is quite important. While we are counting each number, we find that our life, is limitlessly deep. If we count our breath in the ordinary way, as we would count the distance from here to the moon, our practice doesn't mean anything. To count each breath is to breathe with our whole mind and body. To count each breath is to breathe with our whole mind and body. We count each number with the power of the whole universe. that teaching when we're counting our breath wholeheartedly totally exerting body and mind in the counting of the breath that's the power of the whole universe participating what it's all that's what that is is the whole power of the universe counting and that's what counting's for so he goes on says

[35:32]

To count each breath is to breathe with our whole mind and body. We count each number with the power of the whole universe. So when you really experience counting your breath, you will have deep gratitude more than if you arrived on the moon. He was giving this talk right around the time of the moon landing, amazingly, 50 years ago, and people were having... Not so much trouble being very wholehearted, some people at least, were being very wholehearted about the moon because it's so important and big, you know? Easy to be wholehearted about. He says, you will not be so interested in something just because it is great or uninterested in something usually considered to be small. When we're doing this practice of wholeheartedness that the breath counting is supporting, then we're not... withdrawing our life energy from something insignificant, like, yeah, breath number three, whatever.

[36:36]

But the moon, wow. Zen is not like that. We're like that. We're like that, which is why we practice this other thing, which is not like that, which is breath number three is at least as important as the moon. So... When we hear this language of total wholeheartedness, total exertion, you might feel energized or you might feel tired. Like that sounds tiring. Total exertion, moment after moment. Wow, so intense, you know, and there can be burning yourself up in each moment. There's a kind of intensity that can radiate from that. And that's confusing. So what is it to just be fully participating, fully here, fully with, fully engaged in our life? You know, sometimes it might be intense.

[37:37]

But it can also have a soft, open, whole quality of, we say, just this person. I don't need to, you know, all the time. It's just this person. but totally here, totally with the situation, totally engaged, not grasping at anything else. That it doesn't need to be narrow or sharp or intense. Our practice is open and soft and all-inclusive. Steady, full, dynamic, exerted life. In other words, you know, this wholeheartedness isn't something we have to fabricate. And when we fabricate or think we're going to create it, I'm going to do wholeheartedness. Then we start to kind of, I don't know, make some waves, you know, as our intensity pushes up against other people.

[38:46]

So wholeheartedness, total exertion in this teaching is not something we have to create. It's actually what we are. We need to get over our habit of withholding, our habit of withdrawing our life. And right there, what we are is totally participating with everything, totally fully engaged. This moment, exactly as it is, from exactly the place it is, exerting itself as the power of the whole universe. What does that feel like to be counting with the power of the whole universe? There's no other kind of counting. There's no other way to be. than to be the whole universe operating. So it's nothing special. It's just amazing. I don't know if it's... I've been part of my ghostliness this week, part of my half-heartedness, but it's been a heavy week.

[39:53]

We're here... This morning, in suffering and with suffering, you know, this week at our temples, we offered memorials for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was the middle of the week, you know, sandwiched into weekends of awful news and suffering here and elsewhere. All of this suffering, as I see it, all of these awful headlines are the deep and direct consequences of this habit of assigning relative value to things and to people. Some valuable, some disposable. To study in this practice, to let this practice be a full response to suffering, the full study of our own habit, collectively and individually,

[41:00]

of valuing one thing and devaluing another, giving our life and attention fully to one thing and withdrawing it from another. So this practice, you know, of wholehearted exertion in every moment of life is not a private matter and it's not about our own betterment only. It's actually the practice of compassion. It's the practice of being here fully with others and for and as one another. So this is the bodhisattva's path, the bodhisattva practice, based in compassion, an ending in compassion and compassion all the way through. Compassion for each moment as it is. So this is our practice to deeply honor and express life together with all life.

[42:06]

And pushing against, every moment we muster this practice, we're pushing against the demeaning and diminishment of life in ourselves and in the world. Thank you very much for your attention and exertion and effort this morning to be here. whether it was 100% or a little less or even much less, thank you for making the effort to be here today. Any good that comes of our being together, in fact, all of the good of all of the practices we participate in, we wholeheartedly offer, turn over, dedicate to the liberation from suffering of all sentient beings. Thank you very much. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[43:20]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:22]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.97