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, everybody. While the den show was ringing, I took the opportunity to Take a look around the virtual room, and it's really wonderful to see so many people I practiced with at Tessahar and Sidi Center, and also to see other people I know from that time, and a special shout out to Enis, who is following from Turkey. I can't even imagine what time it is in Turkey right now, but great to see you. Great to see Keith, my Dharma brother. A deep bow of gratitude to Ryushin Paul Haller, who's here, and Zachary Smith, my teacher, who hopefully is listening along. And thank you to Nancy, too, for inviting me to give this talk.

[01:01]

I know she's not in the room as usual, but I know she's listening along. It's great to have her here as well, and thank you for encouraging me to give the talk. And I want to dedicate the talk this week to everybody who's at Tassajara right now. And thanks to Kim for alerting me to the Willow Fire at the end of last week. I've been following along as best I can. And it obviously brought back a lot of memories for me. I was down at Tassajara in 2008 before the fire there. And I have very strong memories of running up the Tony Trail with Brian, who I think is here on call as well, running up Hawk Mountain to see where the fire had got to. And I was just actually looking at photos I took of that time of Willow Creek slowly burning. as Willow Creek is slowly burning now. And right now I'm able to follow, thanks to the amazing technology that we have, I'm able to follow the hotspots on topographic maps so I can picture exactly where the fire is.

[02:02]

And we wish well-being for everybody who's helping take care of Tassajara, this current generation of firefighters and fire monks who are helping keep us and everybody safe. And as a reminder, For those who have not read it, please go and read Fire Monks. It's a wonderful book. It's a wonderful account of the fire and how our practice was illuminated by the events of that time. And just remembering, you know, what it was like to be there before the fire came, it took a long time. You know, it was kind of very slow and we didn't know what was going to happen. In the same way, we don't know what's going to happen with this fire. And it was very slow until suddenly it was not very slow. And I remember thinking, and I think this is in the book, of how elemental things became. There was fire, there was earth, there was water, and there was air. And those are the important things in those days, and it's good to think about that.

[03:06]

And I know that the current study subject is the four foundations of mindfulness. So I'm just... I'm going to observe those for myself at the moment, feelings, mindful attention to the body, mindful sensation to feelings, seeing certain anxiety, energy level in my chest as I embark on this talk, noticing the contents of my mind or the emptiness of my mind, and thinking about the Dharma's realities. And just please, everybody, for a moment, pay attention to that for yourself. How are you meeting this moment? in body, mind and feelings. And the last time I gave a talk was right at the beginning of the year, right in the very first days of January. And with this strange, flexible

[04:09]

quality that time has, especially at the moment, it's almost hard to imagine how things were back then. Obviously, then we're at the darkest time of the year, and now we're right at the longest days, and we have a beautiful strawberry full moon coming today or tomorrow. And at the time then, we had a new president about to come in, but we had not yet lived through January the 6th. And with a sense of a new year and a new vaccine on the way, there was a sense of new hope. And now here we are six months on, having a little heat, I personally am vaccinated and feel a little safer. But we still don't know exactly how things are going to turn out with the pandemic. It was interesting when Nancy reached out to me last week to see if I could give the time a talk, pretty much right at the same time, one of the friends that I have hardly spoken to in the last year also reached out and said, hey, it would be great to get together in person again soon. And I've just started doing events in person.

[05:12]

So one of the things I do is offering mindful hikes. And we did the first one of those last weekend. And I've also been able to officiate a couple of weddings in person this month. But as Marcia was talking about last week, it's a time of transition. It's a time of... watching very carefully how we respond to unfolding circumstances with so much uncertainty. And if the last year has taught us anything, it's taught us that uncertainty is incredibly deep in everything that we do, even if we pretend otherwise. And I remember Leslie James at Tassahara also talking about how transitions were the most interesting time, because there was so much to pay attention to. And so again, thinking for myself, just a couple of barely, you know, a few weeks ago, I would kind of freak out if I walked past someone on the sidewalk and they weren't wearing a mask. And now I'm noticing that I'm going out without wearing a mask on the outside. And kind of how I've started to embody feeling okay about that on the outside, not going anywhere inside without a mask on yet.

[06:16]

But we know that, you know, we don't know what's going to happen. The new Delta variant could still turn everything around. And so I think one thing to notice in this particular transition is how we're moving towards presence again. So... One of the amazing benefits of being on Zoom is connection. And I've certainly benefited from that. And I think everyone in the Sangha has benefited, especially those who don't live close to San Francisco, being able to tune in to all these events, being able to feel connected with the Sangha, but also knowing that this connection is not the same as presence. So much as I'm looking at people on the screen that I can see in their little boxes, there is no, there's no eye contact. There's not that. that level of connection that presence offers us and i think our practice has a lot to do with presence and embodiment and face-to-face encounters and so as we start coming face to face again you know i think maybe a lot of us are a little nervous about that about how the energetic interaction is going to go like how much are we able to offer with that

[07:32]

And a couple of weeks ago, I was on a video call for a teaching group. It's a pan-Buddhist teaching group, which calls itself the Gen X Teachers, for teachers who have come after the initial Buddhist pioneers in the U.S. and Europe. And I've met in person with this group several times over the years. And again, on Zoom, it was wonderful to see everybody, and there was a kind of poignancy that we weren't connecting in person and able to kind of chat. you know, informally in little corners between meetings, although we had some amazingly rich conversations. And the topic was like, how do we teach in these times? What is it that we can offer? And for myself, I've known, I've been very clear since the pandemic started that what I wanted to offer was, you know, what is available in the Buddhist toolbox. There are a lot of things available. And, you know, the first turning of the wheel, the Four Noble Truths, are right at the very heart of that.

[08:38]

They're right at the very base of Buddhist teachings, is how to deal with suffering and liberation. And the pandemic has brought untold suffering to any number of people in ways that mostly, I think, a lot of us have felt insulated from in our lives up until now. And a possibility of liberation, which might not seem tangible now, but in the conversations that people have about what will the world be like when we get back into more in-person contact? How are we going to mold society going forward? There's a sense that things could be different and a liberatory possibility that seems to be offered, even if it may not be realized. I'm gonna say something else and it's gone now. And a lot of what I have been talking about is the Paramitas and the Brahma Viharas, which I don't want to go in and list,

[09:52]

If you are students, you will know of these things and the qualities that we can cultivate as ways of managing these difficult times. And in my student group recently, I was using a little bit of the Tenzo Kyokun Dogen seminal text on the instructions to the temple cook, the monastery cook, particularly the section of the three minds. nurturing mind the joyful mind and a magnanimous mind which again are kind of qualities that we can cultivate in different situations and again that offered me time to reflect because in 2008 right before i went to help with the fire at tassajara i was appointed tenzo in the kitchen and so those those two two times are kind of concurrent in my practice training and history and as i thought back to my time as tenzo running the kitchen at at San Francisco Zen Center, you know, the notion that felt most fully embedded was that everything you did was an offering.

[10:57]

As former Tenzos advised me when I took on the job, it's not about the food. It's about what you offer. And that sense of generosity came out of that. And generosity is also the first of the six parameters. And that's something about really what I want to talk about this evening. And what is it that we offer in these times? So in times of difficulty, how can we keep the teachings relevant? And another part of the conversation we had in the Gen X teachers group was to remember that... Buddha and all Buddhists since have used skillful means to teach according to the circumstances. So we talk about the first turning of the wheel, which is Buddha's first presentation of what he understood when he woke up. And then there were the second and third turning of the wheels, which developed the teaching and kind of seemed to undermine the first turning of the wheel, but actually expanded the possibilities.

[11:59]

And to remember that what we think of as, or what we understand as Zen now, came about largely in China about 1,500 years ago when Indian Buddhism met Taoism and Confucianism and that kind of arising that happened now. And part of the conversation in this teacher's group was, well, what is it that we're blending or how do we invigorate Buddhism in the West in the 21st century without losing the essence? And I want to talk about, you know... practice being a lay practice now, not a monastic practice, or even a secular practice. And so how is it that we can show the essence of the teaching without losing it and still being relevant? And so for me, these kind of qualities of the heart that we can cultivate and that our practice offers to cultivate have been a kind of a clue to that in my own teaching. This is what I've been drawn to. And generosity is what I'm

[13:00]

I'm kind of going to focus on tonight. So when we take vows as bodhisattvas, which many of us have done formally and maybe others have done less formally in this tradition, we're vowing to help others to reach awakening. Our whole... practice is based on the notion of generosity and not putting ourselves first, but bringing everybody into this practice of awakening and liberation, helping others. And there are many ways that we can think of doing that. And traditionally, some of the bodhisattvas gifts are the gift of the Dharma, just spreading the Dharma. And I hope that something I say this evening will be a Dharma gift to somebody. And we talk about the gift of... And this is kind of an interesting one to think about. And in the conversation that we were having in the teachers group, you know, the notion came up, and very strongly for me, that people who are...

[14:06]

expecting things to go back to the way they were. I think this is what I was wanting to say a few minutes ago. People who kind of cling to the notion that we can live in exactly the same way that we lived in 2019 are going to inevitably be disappointed. This kind of clinging to the sense that we can just recreate the past all over again is not going to happen. And what is going to happen is deeply uncertain. And so... My notion is that as bodhisattvas, we can't offer kind of fearlessness in a sense of certainty. We're not offering or modeling certainty. But what we can offer is a gift of courage in terms of facing what it is, facing the uncertain, facing the impossible complexity of reopening society and trying to find a different way for ourselves. So how is it that we can offer this gift of courage? And so for that, really, I always say this is what our practice of Zazen allows us to cultivate.

[15:15]

So everything we do in our practice comes through our Zazen practice. And if we're thinking about generosity, what I want to suggest is starting with generosity to ourselves. Being compassionate towards ourselves, which is something, you know, if we talk about loving kindness practice, I think for many people, and I'm going to include myself in this, compassion to ourselves is the hardest part of that. And the last year, I think, has shown us how much stronger or more resilient we may be than we give ourselves credit for. And I think a generous response to ourselves for that is a worthwhile starting point. that we have managed to survive this incredibly turbulent and traumatic time. And there have been a number of books written about the parameters, the perfections recently, and I'm going to offer some quotes from some of them, but there are books by Tension Reb Anderson, Norman Fisher, Daryl Wright, Diane Eshin-Roseto, and I'm going to start with a quote from Diane Eshin-Roseto.

[16:32]

And she says, it's a rare gift to simply meet with openness and clarity what life brings our way, to meet ourselves and others, to give and receive as we are at any given moment. We have the very mistaken belief that it's simply not enough. And so that resonates for me very strongly and maybe for others too. We have this internal voice that says, whatever you do is not enough. And so to start the generosity for ourselves is to say, yes, being able, however imperfectly, to meet the present moment as we learn to do in Zazen. And meeting the present moment internally, but also meeting ourselves and others, giving and receiving as we are in any moment, with openness and clarity. This is a great gift. And it's a great gift that we can all cultivate through our practice. I think the other element of that gift is how Zazen allows us to see the sacred in every moment.

[17:47]

And I'm going to go from that to being able to see the sacred in every moment to seeing the Buddha in everyone. So when we can cultivate this openness and clarity, and when we can not only just quiet the internal critic voices, but quiet the kind of self-concern that gets in the way, we're able to see more clearly the Buddha in everyone. And I even noticed when I start saying that, with the state of the country and the world as it is, I hear an internal voice saying, if you see the Buddha in everyone, what about the people who do this? Or what about the people who do that? And I think my understanding is that seeing the Buddha in everyone is a framework that allows for the possibility of seeing the sacred in everyone without denying the ugliness of reality as it sometimes shows up, without denying actions that are harmful and poisonous, but allows for a generous response, allows for the belief that everyone has the ability or that capacity and potential to be a Buddha.

[19:03]

And as bodhisattvas, we want to encourage that. And the way we encourage it, the only way we can encourage it is by modeling that kind of behavior ourselves, modeling the courage and fearlessness, modeling upright behavior. And that's something, again, that we can cultivate slowly from compassion for ourselves to allow that to expand outwards. And as I've heard any number of teachers saying, we can love everybody without liking them. It's not necessary to like everything they do, but we can make our effort to love them. And as Paul reminded us the other week in his talk, everyone wants to be loved. This is not a surprise. And how we allow everyone to be loved as bodhisattvas with our vows is just letting them be themselves. You know, people are going to be themselves and we can't always do very much to stop them.

[20:05]

so we can let them be themselves. And I want to offer a quote by Susan Paiva from an article which I found in Lion's Roar about the six perfections in relationship, where she says, one definition of generosity in relationships is this, turn the projector off. continuously set the intention and make the effort to separate the person you love from your projections about who they are and who you think they ought to be. Instead of holding them to your ideals, let Daniel God open to them as they are. Release your agenda over and over. This is an incredibly generous thing to do. And we all know how we do this. And she's talking particularly about romantic relationships and the people that you're most intimate with. But we can do that in any situation because we always have ideas about who other people are.

[21:07]

And that narrows our opportunity to meet with openness and clarity what is arising in the moment. So when we can turn off that projector, when we can drop our agenda, even if we believe that we're right in the situation, as we most often do, and the other person is behaving wrongly or badly, we can still allow for that possibility for them to be themselves. And the best I think we can do is to model how we want to appear. And there's another... generosity as well that Dale writes in his book on the Six Perfections, which I have spent most of the last couple of years really digging into and going back to, and it's a fantastic book. He notes that some gifts are so light and substantial that they can be given to others on a daily basis. One such gift is simple recognition, an affirmation in speech, gesture, or action that someone also exists and they matter.

[22:10]

And this is something I do try to practice. I don't hold a lot of very high opinion in my capacity for compassion, but I do have a great belief in being able to meet people in the moment. And that's, you know, going out into the street and just seeing who is in front of me, what arises. And if it feels tricky to do this with a lot of people, babies and dogs are great examples to do that, just to meet a baby or a dog in the moment. and to affirm to them your presence. And this is something that we can all offer. And there's a notion that Barbara Fredrickson offers of micro moments of positivity resonance. That's her definition of love. When you completely meet someone face to face, moment to moment, that is a complete connection. And so this again brings us back to how we're transitioning out from this virtual world. this world where we're seeing each other on screens to being back in presence.

[23:14]

How can we think about that difference? How can we be generous with our presence as we start coming towards it? I've got some other things in my notes up on screen. I don't think I'm going to talk about this yet. And so reflecting back to 2008, now I'm looking at dots on the map, and those dots on the map are the reality of the situation now. Where is the fire right now? We don't know what the outcome of this particular fire will be. But I'm reminded of Graham Ross, one of the five people who did stay. And I think a journalist asked him, well, what will happen? What will be left if Tassajara burns down?

[24:16]

And I can picture Graham's face as he replied, Tassajara. So our notion of how things might be or what we have lost or what we might gain does not supplant what will arise in reality in the future. So everything will have its place. Whether Tassajara burns down or not, there will be Tassajara. Whether we can fully connect and come back Together as the society, as the Sangha, differently there will be Sangha, there will be connection, and hopefully we can offer a generous presence. And because I can't get through a talk without quoting Dogen at some stage, Dogen talks about generosity in Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance, and I want to offer this quote just towards the end. To leave flowers to the wind, To leave birds to the season are also acts of giving.

[25:19]

To leave flowers to the wind, to leave birds to the season are also acts of giving. So this is allowing everything to arise as itself. I just want to finish by saying that we have some Zenathon events coming up this weekend. This is a very tangible way of giving. offering that we can give in whatever way to Zen Center in this way reminds me of all the generosity that have brought us to this place. All the donors and work and effort that has allowed Zen Center to arise and continue for more than 50 years. It has allowed Tassahara to continue for more than 50 years and allows us to practice here in this virtual room together. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive.

[26:23]

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.

[26:38]

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