This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. I'm so happy to be here at Tazahara, happy in a very deep, and inconceivable way. This evening we did introductions on the lawn, and each of us was asked to mention what their treasured place is, a treasured place aside from Tassajara. And I did name another place, but really it's Tassajara. treasured place and this is a treasured place not just because it's beautiful mountains and fresh air and creek but the treasure is finding the treasure of studying the self settling the self finding

[01:30]

finding a way to live in this world. As I was driving over the road, I sighted Elephant Mountain, kind of the first sighting of it, far off, and this very familiar feeling of coming home, coming back. not in a sentimental way, not a kind of nostalgia, but an intimacy of return. And I know many, many, many people share this in all different ways and it's manifested in different ways. It was a little like, as I approached Tassajara, I can feel like I'm tasting my natal waters like a coho salmon, finding, coming from the ocean and tasting or smelling, actually with their very strong olfactory nerves, their own particular home creek.

[02:56]

they can distinguish. And it feels like that. So I've been thinking a lot about fish and interdependency and I wanted to try and speak about our practice and the practice of living on this earth with awareness and integrity and understanding. So I wanted to start with a koan. This is a koan from Zen's story from the collection called the Shouyou Roku or the Book of Serenity. This is number case number five, and I want to change it a little bit because it occurred to me in a different way.

[04:04]

So the case is called The Price of Rice in Luling, The Price of Rice in Luling. And a monk asked Jing Wan, what is the great meaning of Buddhism? And Jingguan said, what is the price of rice in Lu Ling? And like all koans, what are they talking about? He asked them, what is the great meaning of Buddhism? That's a perfectly reasonable question. What is the great meaning of Buddhism? And Jingguan, his master, says, what is the price of rice in Lu Ling? Lu Ling is a... town or city in China. Actually, in 2000, on a tour of China with Andy Ferguson and Reb Anderson, a number of people, Susan, we passed through Lu Ling and it was the time of year where the rice harvest was in and they were drying it on these bamboo mats.

[05:18]

They were raking it and there we were in Lu Ling and we said, what is the price of rice in Lu Ling? This is a burning question. And during this passage in Green Gulch, in somehow turning this koan, this question, what is the great meaning of Buddhism? And what came to me if a monk asked LRC, if a monk asked me, what is the great meaning of Buddhism? And what came to me was... What is the meaning of coho salmon in Green Gulch Creek? What is the meaning of coho salmon in Green Gulch Creek? So if we turn this and reflect on this, what is the price of rice in Lu Ling?

[06:20]

What is the great meaning of Buddhism? What is the price of rice in Lu Ling? You know, how would we answer that? How do we answer what the price is? What does it depend on? There isn't a price of rice. It's dependent on how was the crop that year? Was there enough rain? Was there flooding? Was there insect? Was there some war? And did someone, you know, hoard the rice and sell it on the black market. What is the price of rice in Lu Ling? If you begin to study what is the price of rice, everything comes up. The entire interdependent world will come up right there. What is the great meaning of Buddhism?

[07:21]

So Green Gulch Creek, which is a tributary of the Redwood Creek, which is the Redwood Creek watershed, and it flows through Muir Woods, and we're one of the tributaries, Green Gulch Creek. And how is it that there's coho salmon was sighted in Green Gulch Creek? What do we need to look at in order to understand this? And how can we take care of this? And this is how do we take care of our life? How do we take care of each moment? How do we take care of our earth and each other? This is the same question. This is the same point. What is the great meaning of Buddhism? So,

[08:29]

The coho salmon had been disappearing from northern California and many other places. And there used to be thousands and thousands that would come up the streams, different kind of salmon, too, through the Golden Gate. And... when we change the environment and when we are not taking care of things, there are consequences. And are we thinking in that way? Are we noticing the consequences of our actions and how everything is completely interconnected? Rebecca Solnit is here and some of you may have, I hope all of you have seen her book Infinite City, which is one of the most delightful books I've ever had the pleasure to look at.

[09:34]

And one of these is a series of maps of unusual juxtapositions of things like murders and cypress trees in San Francisco, for example. But there's also a map of salmon and Suzuki Roshi, Suzuki Roshi's branching streams, the groups and practice communities that have flowed out from Suzuki Roshi, migrating to Northern California, that along with salmon. So it's a wonderful map. I hope we have it in the bookstore here. We should order it for the summer. So our particular watershed, this Redwood Creek watershed, been named as one of the ecosystems of the world, one of 411 ecosystems named by UNESCO as one to be protected because of the variety of life there and also the nature conservancy and has called it a hot spot.

[10:48]

So this is where we live. This is where Green Gold Farm is located, Green Dragon Temple. And how are we taking care of? How are we living in such a way that life is nurtured and protected and that there's a giving and receiving born of awareness, the great meaning of Buddhism? So just to tell this story, Tessahara's student, Erin Merck, many of you know Erin, left Tessahara and came up to Green Gulch as a student to live at Green Gulch. And, you know, I think as many people feel when they leave Tessahara, it's very difficult to leave after being here for some years. And she was walking down to the ocean, down the farm road, and...

[11:52]

She saw some bobcats playing around and oh, I guess bobcats live at Gringouch, that's interesting. She saw some other wildlife and on the way back up from the farm, from the ocean coming up, she heard a kind of slapping sound and she didn't know what that was and followed the sound and went down to the left as she was coming up the farm road to the creek, to Green Gulch Creek. And there she saw two big red fish kind of slapping around one of them in the creek. And she just thought, I guess there's big red fish at Green Gulch, I guess. And didn't say a word to anybody. This was in the wintertime when the rains and the creek is higher. Long about April or so, many months later, she happened to mention this at the dinner table.

[12:56]

And someone said, you should tell Suki, our land steward, our watershed land steward, about this. And Suki immediately called Darren Fong, who's the aquatic naturalist for the watershed. And they all walked down to where Aaron had seen this. And he had measuring... sticks and dippers, and he dug down into this place that he thought would be the place because he thinks like a fish. Darren Fong, where would they be? And he dug down, and there it was, a little guy, a little fry. We named it Sammy the Salmon, and it was a coho salmon in Green Gulch Creek. And he did some other measurements, and it looked like there had been more, you know. So that slapping, slapping is making the nest, making the red, it's called, by moving with the tail the gravel and the silt and the sediment to make a proper spot for the eggs to be put down.

[14:05]

And then these coho salmon, which have come up out of the... ocean and have been with great effort and perseverance and diligence and the heart of giving have been traveling from the salty ocean to a place where the fresh water meets the ocean and they tasted, as I said before, their own natal waters. And coho salmon have many species and They each have their own stream, pretty much. And when one stream is not welcoming to them, that whole species dies out. They don't go to other streams. So coming from the salty water into the fresh water, and they stop eating. The coho salmon stop eating as they're making this journey. So in studying this and looking at this, reflecting on this, I couldn't help but think of our bodhisattva practice of the six perfections, the six perfections or wholenesses or completions of giving and you could say kind of upright action or morality and patience.

[15:37]

and virya or enthusiasm and eagerness and joyous effort and concentration and wisdom, all of these are, you know, you can take a bodhisattva or enlightenment being's practice and kind of study what the practice is and look at it in different ways and see these different areas of practice. And thinking about the Kohosana, this effort that's made, sometimes as long as 100 miles of swimming to get to that place. And sometimes when they get there, it's blocked. It's dammed up or the silt, the rains haven't been strong enough to break through. This happens at Muir Beach. And they have to wait patiently. They have to practice patience. So they've had all this joyous effort and vigor and And then patience. This is just like our practice.

[16:39]

This is patiently with tolerance, accepting our life, accepting all the situations of our life, whether we want it to be that way or don't want it to be that way. The practice of tolerating what is, tolerating our life. And the practice of patience takes enormous courage and patience It's called the austerity practice. So this joyous effort and eagerness to come to make one's nest, you know, and give birth. It's a very similar feeling to our practice, this effort to come and find our place. The causes and conditions have to be right. and slap our tails around and find our seat on our Bodhi mandala, on our awakening spot.

[17:43]

And with a giving heart and a generous heart, practice the way. So the coho salmon don't eat when they start off to spawn. And they use up their entire body, actually, all the viscera. Sometimes at the end there's just heart and kidneys left. They've used up for their own, you know, used the energy to spawn and to pass on their life. They give everything. They give their entire bodies without holding back. And when they swim up, they have to, you know, sometimes go vertically and up against the current. They have to make this effort. So this example or kind of manifestation of practice or, you know, one might say, well, that's not practice.

[19:03]

That's just instinct or that's just... kind of what they do. They're not practicing, you know. It's just natural or we may have some idea that we apply to this situation. But I think in the same way our practice of taking up our life with fullness and with generosity and with a giving spirit without stinting and joyous enthusiasm to practice that which is before us and patiently finding the right way to live our life, the right actions of body, speech and mind and concentrating our efforts and waking up to the interdependent life. This you could say, this is natural, too.

[20:06]

This is our birthright. This is not some foreign thing. This is how we were meant to live out our life. Because we are, we do partake of awakened, the awakened body of all life, just as the coho salmon. And, you know, all the causes and conditions. You can't say just coho salmon. When you say coho salmon, you say healthy creek. You say redwood trees. The salmon bring up nutrients out of the ocean and bring them, usually things flow down into the ocean, but they swim up and bring, they die in the water and leave water. nitrogen and phosphorus and all these elemental things that nourish the stream and the water plants take those up and the topsoil and the animals and the redwood trees and all of this is coho salmon.

[21:22]

Redwood trees and coho salmon inter are just like we and coho salmon are together in this interconnected web of life. And we can't step out of it. So Dogen Zenji, the founder of this school, was very aware of this teaching and lived this out. And in all the writings and all the things he left, there's many, many instances where he expresses this interconnectedness in very simple things, like when you use water in a dipper, let's say, and you don't use it all. You don't just toss it away.

[22:23]

You pour it back into the ocean or the river. You return it to the river. you give back with care and the way we take care of food and the way we take care of the physical space and each other and our bodies is all this one expression of each thing we see and touch and hear is myriad objects partaking of the Buddha body, of awakened life. There's nothing outside of that. So there's no place that's not worthy of our care and worthy of our attention. Dogen also says, only a fish can know a fish's heart. No one except a fish can know a fish's heart.

[23:25]

and this. And there's koan of fishes that swim up and go through the dragon's gate and turn into dragons. And this is, they're like kohu salmon, you know, they have to swim upstream to turn into dragons and go through the nine bends of the Yangtze River until they get to the dragon's gate. This is, this kind of effort to lead a life of awareness and Compassion takes every ounce of our life force, really. But not with a kind of tightness, but with a relaxed effort. There's effort there, but it's not tense and contracted and Rigid.

[24:27]

So no one except a fish knows a fish's heart. When we practice in this way, we understand. We understand Buddha's practice. We understand each other's practice. We understand a fish's practice. No one except a fish knows a fish's heart. And he says about this fish going up into the dragon's gate, this is Dogen, when the fish try to go up through the dragon's gate, they know one another's intention and have the same heart. This feeling of intimacy together with others, practicing, trying to live a life filled with great generosity, even to the last ounce of one's energies.

[25:40]

Generous heart. And understand each other's effort and the difficulties we all face and how equal, we're all equal in this wanting to be happy, wanting to be free from suffering. We're all equal in this way. This is understanding each other's hearts. All summer long, the students here, I think, make great effort to practice in this way to give of themselves and to practice their zazen practice and practice patience with each other and joyous effort with the guests as much as possible, taking good care of oneself.

[26:46]

And it's a long summer, you know? It goes on a long, feels like a pretty long time come August. to understand each other's hearts, take care of each other, and let the guests take care of you, too, through their appreciation and their joy at being here. Allow that to fill you. I wanted to end with this story from Native Americans, which I think illustrates Dogan's way, actually. Also, this is from the Squamish tribe. And this is, you know, in the years gone by, there were so many salmon that the streams would be red. You know, when they were spawning, they'd turn red.

[27:49]

And you could walk across their backs. You know, it was just... And this abundance, you know, fish... in China, in Japan, has this feeling of great abundance. And there's a wonderful statue of a guanyin, which on the guanyin pilgrimage to China we saw, which was, this is the infinite compassion, enlightenment being riding this giant, you know, way bigger than life size, this giant carp. And so this combination of abundance and compassion, this infinite compassion, practice figure riding a fish through the waves and abundantly spreading compassion. So this story from the Squamish tribe has, they had these fish nourishing their life and

[28:55]

their environment and the story from the Squamish is that there were people called salmon people who lived under the water, the salmon people, and they saw that the human beings on the earth were hungry and needed food and they decided that they would turn into fish and give themselves in this way, turn into salmon, and give themselves to the tribe. But there was one condition, and that was after the tribe's people had eaten of the fish, they had to save every single bone and then throw those back into the water at the end of the meal. So they did that very diligently, were very careful, and then returned all the bones to the water. And those bones would kind of reconstitute into salmon people again and they would live under the water and they'd be fine and then they'd give themselves again.

[30:02]

So this was the relationship with the tribe. Well, another tribe that didn't have one of these wonderful streams that flowed to the ocean in this way, they were hungry too and they asked, can we partake of this? Can we have this kind of help? the tribe asked the salmon people and they said, yes, it will help them as well. They have to be very careful and save every bone and then throw them back. So the salmon people turned into salmon and went up this creek to this new group of people and gave themselves to that group. And the people ate, but this one tribe's person wasn't so careful and they kept back a few bones and kind of weren't paying much attention and held them back.

[31:04]

And they threw all the bones back in, except for the ones that were held back. And when the salmon people were reconstituted, one of the salmon ladies didn't have a jaw and another one was missing another part of the body and they said, They went to the tribespeople and said, we asked you to throw back every bone, no matter how small, and this is what's happened. And they found the person who had not been careful, and they found those bones, and they threw them back in, and the salmon people became whole again. This story reminded me of... you know, returning even a half cup water to the river, you know. Even, you know, there's no place to just throw that water away or throw food away.

[32:09]

And in this case, I feel like this story illustrates, you know, what's missing, this care for every bone, no matter how small, to be that small. attentive to how our life is completely interwoven and our environmental degradation of our earth and water and air and that we're all equal in the consequences of these actions. we will all receive the consequences of these actions. So this teaching of care and attention and reciprocal giving, giving and receiving is really one act. It's giving, receiving, and the gift is one complete

[33:17]

without being able to separate out who gives and who receives. It can't be pulled apart. And the more we understand this, the more we live this out, the more we study this, the more our eyes are open to the consequences of every action, no matter how small, every word we speak. And taking this up with joy, not, you know, with a kind of grim, plodding sense of, gee, I have to pay so much attention to all this stuff, but the joy of it, the enthusiastic, because the gifts, the gift...

[34:20]

The gift of taking up this practice in that way is immediate. One tastes it right away. So, a monk asks Ching Wan, what is the great meaning of Buddhism? What is the great meaning of awake-ism Buddha means? or the root of Buddhism, bud means awake. So in English it would be awake-ism. What is the great meaning of awake-ism? What is the meaning of coho salmon in Green Gulch Creek? So thank you all very much.

[35:25]

I wanted to leave you with a poem. This is a poem by Dogen, again. And it's interesting. I had forgotten where I found this. I had memorized it. And then where did I find this? And I looked it up again. And this is a self-portrait. This poem is called Self-Portrait of Dogen. But I think it's really... It's a self-portrait of awakened life, really, which is our self-portrait, where there's nothing to gain and nothing to lose. For 10,000 fathoms, the cold lake is soaked. with sky color. In the quiet night, a golden scale fish swims along the bottom.

[36:33]

From center to edge, all the fishing poles are broken. On expansive water surface, bright moonlight. Thank you very much.

[37:17]

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